I don't know what you're talking about. Who is "cypherpunks," and who are you? Please don't answer...I'm just trying to figure out how I started getting these wierd e-mails from people I never heard about discussing something I never cared about. I truly want you to have a great life...but please leave me out of it. ----------
From: Mark M. <markm@voicenet.com> To: cypherpunks@toad.com Subject: Re: anonymous remailers Date: Saturday, February 08, 1997 11:11 AM
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On Sat, 8 Feb 1997, Jeremiah A Blatz wrote:
Ummm, if you run your own remailer, and don't get lots of people to use it, then traffic analysis will reveal that you are the sender quite quickly. It will pretty much make everything in the chain before your remiler useless. If you send your message through remailers a, b, c, and d like this:
you -> a -> b -> c -> d -> alt.drugs.and-other-various-horsemen
and only you use c, then your effective chain is:
someone who could only be you -> d -> alt.drugs.and-other-various-horsemen
This is assuming that it is a reasonable assumption that all traffic going through remailer c originated from the owner. If there is one non-corrupt remailer in the chain before c, then this would not be a valid assumption because traffic from the owner would be indistinguishable from traffic sent by anyone else. If the remailer has low traffic, the solution is, of course, to make it higher traffic. Chain a bunch of messages that get sent to /dev/null through the remailers, being sure to include c somewhere in the middle of the chain. If Mixmaster is used, then it would be virtually impossible to differentiate between "real" messages and messages destined for /dev/null. It would be a little easier with Type I since the size of the ciphertext decreases after each hop. This all assumes that encryption is being used, of course.
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