Jim Miller writes:
only one to leave the network. If the Opponent has the ability to monitor all traffic into and out of all nodes of the network (as he would have to do anyway to defeat remailers even without this cover traffic) then he will easily be able to find the messages which are not aimed at other remailers.
How about extending the "send bogus messages" idea all the way out to the users of the remailer system? Part of the price of using the remailer system is that you will occasionally receive a bogus message.
I was thinking about digital mix and defeating traffic analysis and realized that the perfect cover for private messages exchanged among remailers -- at least on the Internet -- is to multiplex them into a netnews feed. You would need a new transport protocol that basically handles an encrypted news feed and turns it back into normal NNTP/RFC1036 on the far end, while diverting private mail messages to the appropriate remailing software. If remailers were on large site servers that were set up as news hubs, there would already be a large amount of traffic between any pair of them; insert the private traffic and encrypt/slice/dice the result. This is a low-cost solution since the news has to flow somehow anyway and it is better than just sending around random garbage. -- Michael C. Berch mcb@net.bio.net / mcb@postmodern.com