-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- An entity calling itself ABostick allegedly wrote:

Somebody, too clever for their own good by half, has come up with a novel way of using Usenet and anonymous remailers to perpetrate mailbombs. The M.O. is to post a message to the naked-lady newsgroups saying "get pics in your mailbox! send this message to this address!), giving the email address of a cypherpunk-style anonymous remailer and including a pgp-encrypted message block.

<snip>

Cypherpunks: is there any way to respond to, or prevent, this sort of attack short of actually shutting down the remailer?

What comes to my mind is the remailer operator grepping for a character string of ASCII-armored cyphertext from the known attack message and throwing messages containing it into the bit-bucket. It is highly unlikely that this would appear in any message except the attack message. The problem with this is that it works only for a known attack message -- it can shut down an ongoing attack, but it can't prevent new ones.

You could have remailers clamp down on multiple copies of the same message, but that is easily countered by convincing the UseNet stupes to insert their e-mail address or something. In general there is no way to prevent this kind of mail-bombing without compromising anonymity. By the way Alan--your message failed PGP verification. I received it by way of Bob Hettinga's "e$pam" list. While Hettinga gets double-plus good points for content, his technical performance as a list operator is lacking. Which is to say: the message might have gotten munged by the "e$pam" list processor. Regards, Bryce PGP sig follows  -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Auto-signed under Unix with 'BAP' Easy-PGP v1.01 iQCVAwUBMPb5w/WZSllhfG25AQGtPwQAgoxim084bbBkXIQyhePSY63HttrqFZg9 JGJjbKBMc6fHgI+gylEEAhl75wVUgq5jKPJcHVfY23XVS4wfPRu+CIx8uHhVm9xB limA3BUscRutWsSXXe+tkKtyA97xUjpAMHpaE729pGeRForHEdpkRFb5jC3DjofX lNpRuRQ9+VE= =CyXg -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----