IP: Pentagon Hides Behind Onion Wraps (fwd)
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBMTO : N48 10'07'' E011 33'53'' http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204 57F9CFD3: ED90 0433 EB74 E4A9 537F CFF5 86E7 629B 57F9 CFD3 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2001 06:25:51 -0400 From: David Farber <dave@farber.net> Reply-To: farber@cis.upenn.edu To: ip-sub-1@majordomo.pobox.com Subject: IP: Pentagon Hides Behind Onion Wraps Seems like the stuff we did at UCI in the 70's under a Darpa contract djf
Pentagon Hides Behind Onion Wraps By Declan McCullagh
2:00 a.m. Aug. 17, 2001 PDT
Onions may be the secret ingredient in protecting the Pentagon's classified information.
During an afternoon presentation at the Usenix Security conference on Thursday, a researcher at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory described a technology known as "Onion Routing," which preserves anonymity by wrapping the identity of users in onion-like layers.
"Public networks are vulnerable to traffic analysis. Packet headers identify recipients, and packet routes can be tracked," said Paul Syverson, who works at the NRL's Center for High Assurance Computer Systems. "Even encrypted data exposes the identity of the communicating parties."
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On Sat, Aug 18, 2001 at 12:31:05PM +0200, Eugene Leitl wrote:
The most cypherpunk-relevant bits of my article: Syverson said that the U.S. government was awarded patent number 6,266,704 for Onion Routing on July 24. That announcement prompted an angry reaction from Usenix attendees, many of whom are programmers, security consultants and system administrators who aren't big fans of software patents -- especially in the area of anonymous communications, where there's been so much prior work before the Navy ever got involved. Mathematician David Chaum, for instance, wrote an article titled "Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses and Digital Pseudonyms" for Communications of the ACM as far back as 1981. Lance Cottrell, who now runs anonymizer.com, wrote part of the mixmaster system in the early 1990s, and similar techniques were discussed on the cypherpunks mailing list even earlier. Syverson, who is listed on the patent with co-inventors Michael Reed and David Goldschlag, defended the government's move. "It is a necessary step for those of us working for the government to bring technology to the public," Syverson said. The patent describes Onion Routing, which has been the subject of analysis at previous security conferences, as providing "an electronic communication path between an initiator and a responder on a packet-switching network comprising an onion routing network that safeguards against traffic analysis and eavesdropping by other users of the packet switching network" such as the Internet. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='6,266,704'.WKU.&OS=PN/6,266,704&RS=PN/6,266,704 -Declan
participants (2)
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Declan McCullagh -
Eugene Leitl