doug@OpenMind.com (Doug Cutrell)
One possible way around this societal control of anonymous remailers might be the existence of very large DC-nets (or related technologies). The idea
I've been arguing that DC-Nets are among the crypto protocols that we've not exploited much so far. I was working on an implementation, till I got stuck with the 'net' part of it. The basic protocol is very simple, with hooks to the bit-flipping crypto routines. The problem is integrating the DC into an existing net protocol in a manner that makes it transparent and practical to use. Ideally a layer over IP or Ethernet, as DC-Nets share many of the basic problems of net protocols - conflict resolution, random wait-before-resend etc. Ideas? (Read section 13.4.8 of Tim's Cyphernomicon for an explanation of DC-Nets) Note that the major problems lie in the _practical_ implementation, which is not necessarily the speed - despite conflict resolution and anti-collusion techniques, the basic operation in a DC-Net, assuming the presence of a stream of random numbers, is the fast XOR. DC-Net implementation problems are more severe than those in secure-IP (swIPe etc) as they have to handle lots of things at a lower level in the network protocol. Doug goes on to suggest that to be immune from the "sheep^H^H^H^H^Hpeople" DC-Nets will have to have millions of members. But if anon remailers were used by millions, than they'd be immune too. All crypto is vulnerable to mob action until it's widespread. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "Clean the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! rishab@dxm.ernet.in take stone from stone and wash them..." Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA