At 7:02 1/3/96, Fred Cohen wrote:

You seem to be missing an important point about foiling traffic analysis. It is essentially the same problem as the covert channel problem and its solution has the same challenges - it consumes a great in the way of resources. In order to eliminate traffic analysis, you essentially have to always use the full bandwidth available (although you can have pseudo-random burst behaviors). This in turn means that instead of gaining the low cost resulting from sharing bandwidth, you end up having far more utilization and (depending on what portion of the world does this) increasing the price of the resource. So it costs a lot more and uses a great deal of bandwidth.

You are correct. A network of encrypted links that allways move packets at full bandwidth is the basis of Wei Dai's Pipenet. If anyone ever codes this, I am willing to sponsor a node. Other nodes may be set up if some payment mechanism using Ecash is integrated with the system. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.