On Wed, 6 Aug 1997, Mark Grant wrote:
That's not what I meant; I'm assuming that the mixmaster chain is pretty secure. The problem is that when the government find 'nuclear terrorist money-laundering kiddie drug porn' on the Eternity server they can trace it back to the original Usenet message and then go after the remailer operator who posted it. Making the remailers disposable or setting them up in free countries would work, but I'd prefer a technical solution.
I suggest using information dispersal to spread risk amongst remailer operators. Use Rabin's information dispersal technique to divide up a document into n shares such that k of them can reconstruct the original, and post each share via a seperate remailer. It would be hard for the government to single out an operator to go after since an individual share by itself is useless. If n>k this also increases reliability and resilience of the eternity service against technical attacks.