At 02:05 AM 10/4/00 -0400, Sean Roach wrote:
At 05:22 PM 10/3/2000, Steve Furlong wrote: ...
I'm assuming there's a way to tell with minimal difficulty if a message is encrypted, without relying on an easily-spoofed X header line. Perhaps someone who knows more about all of the many message protocols can weigh in here. ... .... Couldn't something that A. Watched for a limited list of known words, (including the header information for UUENCODED, and MIME encoded, GIF's, JPG's, BMP's, MP3's etc, along with a dictionary of very common 6+ letter words. and B. Back that up with some simple analysis, of the sort that can break single alphabet cyphers, (finding the e's, etc).
Interesting idea, but far more trouble and CPU than it's worth, especially if you handle all the cases of MIME-encoded and UUencoded stuff. Also, it'll probably decide GIFs, JPEGs, MP3s, and WAVs are encrypted data. It's not going to stop all the harassers either, just force them to be more clever, while slightly decreasing the reliability of your remailer. It's probably better to use simple detection of encryption (look for the headers) and put in your own Subject: and header lines advising the recipient that it's an anonymous message and how to block it, which will take care of most of the anklebiters and let you be really apologetic to the recipient about how the abuser is trying real hard to work around your protections. Subject: Anonymous Message - Info at http://foobar.remailer.cc/policy.html At some point, you might decide that Type I remailers aren't really secure enough, and just run Mixmaster anyway. Then most of this goes away. The place I found that remailers really get into trouble is Usenet. It's not the messages directly to the harasser, it's things like forged flamebait sent to gay newsgroups or rec.pets.cats. Limiting yourself to encrypted output makes it hard to post. If you're going to post directly to Usenet, it's safe to append and prepend a bunch of disclaimers to the message body (since nobody reads headers) about how this was an anonymous message, it's untraceable, there aren't any records, it's probably forged anyway, and the web page for complaints and instructions is http://foobar.remailer.cc/policy.html Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639