-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Johnathan Corgan wrote:

Wei, your traffic analysis treatment of this sort of thing would go a long way toward uncovering weaknesses and determining operational requirements and limitations.

It seems to me that if a user maintains a 24-hour a day pipe to an uncompromised server, then the method I described earlier against remailers should not work against that user. Otherwise, some kind of in-out statistical analysis may work.

Tim, what massive social effects would it have if this type of network service were to become widely deployed? :)

See Verner Vinge's _True Names_ for a fictional description of a future where real time anonymous interactions are possible.

At first glance, this Pipe-Net idea doesn't seem to take a lot of rocket science; it seems that most of the components or algorithms are are already in use, just in a very different way.

This is certainly true. The system Vinge describes is almost a pipe-net. But he didn't say anything about link encryption, without which the system can be trivially broken.

I can think of a number of problems already, however. Spamming. Bandwidth limitations. Complexity of client and switch software. Standards. Flow control.

In other works, all the stuff the ATM forum is already dealing with :)

I haven't responded to the comments you made about the similarity between pipe-net and ATM, mostly because I'm not very familiar with ATM. But as I understand it, ATM is based on forwarding fixed length cells, whereas pipe-net is based on fixed-bandwidth link encrypted streams. Spamming, and flow control shouldn't be problems, since all users of a server will connect to it with pipes of the same bandwidth, so it can just accept a certain number and then stop. Bandwidth limitations will depend on how fast the server CPU can do the encryption and decryption. With LESM at 100 cps, each connection took 2% of the CPU capacity of a Sun 4-CPU(90Hz) 4/670MP. Of course, I made no consideration for efficiency when I hacked ESM, so this can probably be decreased quite a bit. Wei Dai -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLzrGOzl0sXKgdnV5AQE1TQP/UR0xfaS/Nxk7ta/AfdRhzV+v+BmpxT4O UqiMkCpXRZbMFTuw/hnhlJ9fuOF2QS/50MUHXu+kiFSASH5wBFpLNSgWuFIHADny 76RYSjpA+A4IpWomihGT1/BPZkyIcooDXCKGUbgWjZhi50S0oCfAILjV/1ti2f02 AOyBxRYRYvM= =IhUw -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- E-mail: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com> URL: "http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai" =================== Exponential Increase of Complexity =================== --> singularity --> atoms --> macromolecules --> biological evolution --> central nervous systems --> symbolic communication --> homo sapiens --> digital computers --> internetworking --> close-coupled automation --> broadband brain-to-net connections --> artificial intelligence --> distributed consciousness --> group minds --> ? ? ?