sameer writes:
I think that in order to get netscape to support the remailers the remailers will have to:
A) Support S/MIME B) Have a documented protocol, MIME-related
Did Ray Cromwell do some work towards MIMEifiying the remailers? My impression of his work back when he posted was that it trusted the remailers too much, but perhaps my memory is flawed-- in any case his work may be helpful towards developing a remailer standard, which could then help get support incorporated into MIME agents.
Yes, a while ago I was working on this, but I dropped it as people didn't seem interested. It was part of my whole "Remailer 2.0" proposal (before mixmaster was written) I was studying ways to make it easier for mail readers to interact with remailers, in particular, messages which were split, padded, packetized, and sent along separate chains. All this without some kind of special client. I wanted to use the multipart/partial part of MIME to have the pieces combined at the recipient end and decoded using an application/remailer or application/pgp type. (this was also before PEM was worked on) So I had a lot of work to do in standardizing stuff. I started working on a remailer which combined those facets, and also 1) a remailer network which had strong authentication between remailers so that untrusted remailers could not get in the network (web of trust for remailers) 2) my virtual handle idea 3) strict addressing for virtual handles on the remailer network (e.g. set up an explicit chain to anonymous bob by mailing to remailer1#remailer2#....#remailerN#anonymous_bob. Also, if you add a '*' in the path, it means for the remailer to choose a random remailer as the next in the chain) 4) padding, packetizing, delayed delivery, creating artificial traffic to thwart traffic analysis 5) a built in keyserver and "list of active remailers" server. The list of active remailers server would also contain flags for each remailer detailing what it supports and special flags like if the machine is multiuser, single, firewalled, offline (UUCP connection only), etc. I wanted as standard, that every remailer could serve keys or atleast tell you what other remailers were active 6) socket connection for commanding the remailer so that you can bypass sendmail logging and get error/status on the message 7) direct SMTP delivery bypassing local sendmail logging I wanted to use multipart MIME to allow remailers in a network to be run from user accounts in such a way that they wouldn't accidently get mail intended for the remailer and they wouldn't have to bear responsibility for the mail sent (only the whole machine would, as it would be delivered via SMTP direct, not sendmail, so no local logs) Nevertheless, like many things, I completed about 60% of it and it got put on the back burner never to emerge. Mixmaster came along and I figured there's no point continuing. -Ray