SUMMARY This post is about "lumping" of mix nodes to get a lot more mixing bandwidth while also protecting against court-ordered seizures and subpoenas. The idea is to have a dozen or more fairly cheap mix machines in several apartments or offices connected with high-speed links, running protocols not feasible over more expensive T1 and T3 sorts of links between physically distant locations. Think of these concentrations as Local Areas Mixes, or LAMs. BACKGROUND Early in the history of Cypherpunks, one of our schemes was to drastically increase the number of nodes in the mix network by having many machines at one physical site talking to each other at high speed over local networks. A message would enter the physical site, bounce around to N machines, and exit, perhaps going to other machines and sites, and back again, etc. (The image was of perhaps 20 or 30 cheap PCs linked with Ethernet in a set of apartments in Berkeley--obtaining search warrants or court orders to allow monitoring of all 20 or 30 machines, scattered across several physical addresses, would be "problematic.") (This is still not a bad idea....lots of additional mixing entropy can be gained this way, plus increased resistance against compromise of a single remailer. Plus lots of headaches for any Scientologists or Christian Crusaders or B'nai Brithers trying to shut down speech they don't like.) Obviously, a list of machine names and public keys would have to be kept current (modulo the frequency with which machines go down). (BTW, how do Mixmaster users actually decide which remaielers are reliable enough to use? Or have the delays they wish? Do they use R. Levien's regular report, or hit his URL?) REMAILER MATH MODEL IS STILL LACKING I don't believe anyone has publically analyzed "remailer math" in the detail we would've expected by now. That is, analyzed the security (against traceability) of having N nodes for M users communicating with remailers having some operational model (number of messages in mix, "latency" (!), etc.). We have commented for at least several years that this would make a nice thesis for someone. I would've expected that this would by now be a respectable research topic for "Crypto" papers. (Much of the "analysis" of remailers has been of the seat-of-the-pants type, with K mesages in a mix and X bounces allgegedly leading to K ^ X messages to be followed. But this analysis neglects correlation analysis of sent/received messages, the pitiful number of messages flowing in the overall network at any given time, and a bunch of other more subtle effects. If Alice and Bob are using a remailer network to communicate, and if an adversary has access to the packets flowing through the remailer network--a big if--then statisical and probabalistic analysis can perhaps reduce the entropies greatly. A better model is needed.) Eric Hughes has expressed similar concerns, and presented a few tantalizing details of how traceability can be extracted from mix networks using Bayesian types of correlation analyses. (Alice and Bob being identified as communicants through the patterns of sent and received packets, regardless of the mixing between them.) My reason for mentioning this here is that I think a more detailed analysis of mix networks and the entropy and decorrelation seen would show the advantages of having drastically more nodes, with various PipeNet and BlackNet sorts of protocols running. MAKING THE BEST USE OF BANDWIDTH One of the motivations for the idea of having a lot of small machines at some site is this: to reduce the network bandwidths needed for PipeNet sorts of approaches. Imagine this scenario. Concrete numbers are picked for easier visualization. A set of offices in Berkeley has 20 low-cost machines running in 5 offices, the offices being owned or leased by several organizations or individuals, all legally separated. The 20 machines are all running either fixed bandwidth (a la PipeNet) connections, or connections which never physically leave the building and which can be inspected for taps. Additional shielding of the cables might be a nice touch....optical fibers an even nicer touch, as the tapping methods I know of require physical access to the fiber, to do a tunnelling tap, or an actual break-and-splice. Ideally, all or some of the boxes should be TEMPEST-protected, and/or tamper-resistant. I believe a sub-$500 cheap PC--with a 150 MHz Pentium--could be "hardened" with $200 worth of additional copper or mu metal sheeting, placement inside larger metal boxes, whatever. Or 10 such machines could cheaply be placed in a locked Faraday cage, with a good lock on the door and video cameras and such used for surveillance against black bag jobs. (*) In other words, this network of mixes could be made very secure against nearly all attackers. "All attackers" is a dangerous description, but I think the costs of attacking the network undetectably could be made to cost a prohibitive amount.... (* Though I tend to dislike PR stunts, imagine a "WebCam" aimed continuously at this physical site, this Faraday cage, with a clock inside ticking away, and maybe even a mechanical clock with clearly moving parts, all so that an attacker could not easily spoof the image by replacing the camera scene. This could generate interesting PR, as people "check the security" of the site, and also get some education.) MORE SUCH SUB-NETWORKS IN OTHER COUNTRIES Now imagine the same sort of network of low-cost machines running in, say, Amsterdam. With a fairly low bandwith connection to the Berkeley network. (That is, not a leased line, just _regular_ usage of a normal link. For example, a 100K packet attempted to be sent every 30 seconds or so, round the clock. Exact details are not import...the idea being that external watchers cannot detect patterns in the packet usage, a la PipeNet.) There is, of course, no reason packets cannot also be bounced out to other mixes, as selected by the user. And the sites in Berkeley and Amsterdam, and elsewhere, may of course add their own bounces (as we all know, this is always acceptable (*), and does not require the original sender to be involved). (* modulo reliability issues--if additional links are added, they must not degrade overall realiability) The original sender, Alice, of course will have complete say over the basic routing, as it is she who selects the routing and constructs the chain of encryptions. The idea of conglomerating mix nodes into physically close spaces is not to take away any of her freedom to choose, but only to solve the bandwidth and surveillance problems, by allowing her to bounce her message amongst 20 machines in one site, bounce it to some remailers she chooses, bounce it around to some sites she likes, and so on. CHALLENGES FOR ATTACKERS An attacker seeking to shut down the remailer sites will have a formidable challenge: -- court orders applicable to one apartment or office presumably will not apply to other offices or addresses. (Drug dealers often have stored drugs in one apartment while dealing them from another, using a "rat line" to move the drugs between apartments. Last I heard, search warrants cannot cover whatever sites raiders decide to pick....this may've changed with the recent Supreme Court. In any case, a "cyberspace rat line" can include wires snaking all throughout a large building, making any search warrant focussed on a specific address or person not applicable to sites in other parts of the building. Or in other buildings completely (but still connected with high-bandwidth lines). -- the machines in various locations should not have their locations noted. (For example, the "Medusa mix" should not be identified, at least not in general, as being upstairs in the Citizens for a Constitutional Process offices. There is no "need to know" such things, and this makes "propagation of search warrants" all the more problematic. ) -- the routing topology of the site may be an interesting area to look at. Ideally, a "Linda"-like broadcast topology (all machines see all packets, like messages in a bottle thrown into the "sea") could have certain advantages, analogous completely to a message pool or Blacknet topology. (This would make propagation of subpoenas vastly more difficult.) -- again, in a physically close space, such high-bandwith methods are easier to implement than in a physically spread out space (where bandwidth costs a lot more). RICO? On the other hand, while ordinary subpoenas might be difficult to spread across all of the machines, the clustering of many machines in one region might be seen as a "conspiracy" to do something the Authorities don't like, and thus be a RICO (Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, of course) violation. It might be the Mother of all Steve Jackson Games Raids, but one could imagine Unhappy Authorities seizing _all_ machines. (There are aspects of the ECPA which may mitigate against this, though. A la the Alcor case in Riverside, CA, 10 years ago.) NEW TOPOLOGIES AND BETTER USE OF BANDWIDTH Purists will point out that there is nothing that a network of N machines in some physically close location cannot do that those same N machines scattered in multiple legal and national jurisdictions cannot do just as well. Well, except for a few things: A. Bandwidth. Local machines can be connected with PipeNet sorts of connections, with vast amounts of cheap bandwidth. B. Security against Tampering or Surveillance. While it may be possible for NSA packet sniffers at major routing points to sniff mix traffic (recall the work of Shimomura on sniffers, and the increasing concentration of packets at the half dozen biggest network routing nodes, like MAE West), local LANs are resistant to such sniffings. And to physical taps. (These dangers will be lessened if we ever get to where all machine to machine traffic is routinely encrypted, a la SWAN, but we're not there yet by any strech.) C. New Topologies. Message pools, Linda-like "seas," and PipeNet are all more feasible on such LAMs. As with the brain, which as multiple levels of organization, an overall mix network consisting of subnetworks and clusterings probably offers a richer set of behaviors than just one overall loosely-couple set of mix nodes. (I haven't mentioned this, but a LAM could be used for some very high-bandwith mixing, like audio telephony and even video....modulo the Alice-Bob correlation attacks I mentioned earlier.) Anyway, I ought to stop for now. There are a lot more things to mention, and issues to resolve. But I think we need to once again consider such strategies. Having some very high bandwidth "local mix networks" opens up some interesting possibilities. Running PipeNet and BlackNet sorts of systems locally, for example. Making issuance and serving of subpoenas very problematic, for another example. Your thoughts are welcome. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."