From: "Jon 'Iain' Boone" <boone@psc.edu>
How secure do you think this is?
Three remailers:
anon1+@a.edu anon2+@b.com anon3+@c.org
Originator: boone@psc.edu (really igi.psc.edu, as Message-ID: shows) Receiver: wcs@anchor.ho.att.com
()Ka == contents inside () are encrypted with Public Key of A
mail addressed to random+*@foo.edu == mail to user random@foo.edu, random's mail processor will deal with the +* ...
To: anon3+"(anon2+"(anon1+"(boone@psc.edu)Ka"@a.edu)Kb"@b.com)Kc"@c.org From: wcs@anchor.ho.att.com Message-Id: <99234.AA23492383@anchor.ho.att.com>
C.ORG:
To: anon2+"(anon1+"(boone@psc.edu)Ka"@a.edu)Kb"@b.com From: wcs@anchor.ho.att.com Message-Id: <2342349324.AA2343242@c.org> ...
Well, I guess great minds think alike. I'm already working on this. I've been hacking on in my spare time for about a month now. My program is about 75-80% done. Here's how it will work: You send mail to remail+getid@x.edu. The remailer takes your address and encrypts it with its private key, adds some random padding (to disguise the legnth), a checksum, and then puts it in "ascii-armor" format. Then it mails it back to you. You get an address of the format: remail+to+8k3dsa5gzctoy6ahz433mwqqe1v4oo1fr@x.edu Then when you post anonymously, you can use that address as a reply-to address (a few of the cypherpunk remailers allow you to insert your own reply-to fields, i think the BSU ones do.) All of the encryption/decryption routines are completely finished. The only things left to do are to add the actual mail handler that will take an incoming message, decrypt the address and forward the mail. The auto-reply program to send the encrypted addresses is finished also; it works basically like my automatic faq-sender which you can email at mg5n+remailers@andrew.cmu.edu . The above is acutal output from my cipher and will decrypt to mg5n+@andrew.cmu.edu (if you have the secret key!) I chose to use a private key cipher instead of p-k because of the enourmous overhead that you get with PGP, and I was afraid that it would be too big for the mail headers. The cipher used employs transpositions, substitution tables and cipher feedback, in multiple layers of encryption. Perhaps in the future, PGP encryption of the message could be added, and better methods for chaining remailers, and compression of the mail address before encryption (I have experimented with this). I've been a bit busy with other things this past week so I haven't worked on the program lately. If you're serious about this, and you or someone you know is willing to finish the program and actually run a remailer using it, I'll let you have my source code so far. Program is written in C.