On Sat, 7 Jan 1995, Timothy C. May wrote:
The tradeoffs are best analyzed with an actual mathematical model of nodes, traffic rates, clumping of traffic, etc., rather than our hand-waving here (hand-waving is OK for broad conceptual points, but not in cases like this).
Are there any theoritical tools developed especially for this type of analysis? If so, can anyone provide some references?
I'll be interested in what others calculate, but I think "conversation mixes" are several years off, at best. The upcoming demo of Voice PGP by Phil Zimmermann (scheduled to appear at the Demo Day meeting next Saturday) may be a step in this direction.
Secrecy will of course have to come before anonymity. I am eagerly awaiting Voice PGP, but unfortuanately can't make the Demo Day meeting. Will someone please report the highlights?
In other words, there are economic as well as technologic reasons I doubt we'll see low-latency, high-bandwidth audio or video remailers anytime soon. (As we're seeing now: short messages can get through in tens of seconds,
So, the situation: high-latency, low-bandwidth e-mail remailers the goal: low-latency, high-bandwidth interactive A/V type anonymity, but this seems too far away Perhaps we can tackle the problems of latency and bandwidth seperately. That is, develop 2 sets of anonymity tools: 1. low-latency, low-bandwidth, for use in textual interactions such as MUD and IRC 2. high-latency, high-bandwidth, for non-interactive A/V use, perhaps anonymous TV broadcasting I'm not too familiar with DC-nets, but they can probably be used as tool set #1. (correct me if i'm wrong) How about tool set number 2?
My suspicion is that Alice and Bob cannot defeat traffic analysis while ~10K bits per second are flowing continuously between them (audio), at least not until _many_ subnetworks are _much_ faster. Also, the CPU loads would be great (= costly)). Video is even further off. Tricks to reduce bandwidth may help.
Indeed, Vinge makes use of such a trick in True Names. If I remember correctly, the technology in the story includes the ability to compress full virtualy reality type interactions down to a few hundred bytes per second! (maybe is was thousands, but either way it seems unlikely) Vinge seems to be a stronger believer of compression. There is a similar technology in A Fire Upon the Deep.