Remailers next generation?
It has been several years since any significant changes in anonymous remailer technology were proposed. Much of the latter day thinking has been directed more to Democracy Walls such as MN, freehaven, freenet as possible improvement on good ole Usenet alt.anonymous.messages. While it is still a bit premature, there are some intriguing possibilities in the evolution of Sun's new offspring, JXTA. In particular, the peergroup concept which allows for the dynamic formation of a routing graph amongst anonymous but authenticated nodes. There is a core JXTA security project which is supposedly finishing off an implementation of the basic crypto components including some version of key exchange and encrypted messaging (also toying with some reputation extensions which _might_ be useful). The basic JXTA node protocols use random id's, not IP addresses, domain names, or other universal namespaces.. Off the top of my head it might easily be possible for a remailers to participate in a JXTA peergroup, mixing messages with peer-2-peer xfers before a message was emitted through SMTP at the exit point. Intermediate nodes would not need to even have ICANN/IANA registered public SMTP addresses, simply persistent peergroup nyms and public keys. The JXTA protocols allow for non-tcp/ip transports as well, so an intermediate point might communicate using bluetooth, or infrared. Furthermore, by executing the transfers using a more general purpose protocol than email it would be possible to extend the remailer model to other communications channels and exit via IM, IRC, Usenet or cellular SMS. With a peergroup infrastructure it would even be possible to devise some group advertisement protocol where a remailer node or eavesdropper _never_ knew to which specific address a message was forwarded, only to what group of addresses. As I said, JXTA is a pretty raw beast right at the moment, but some of the groundwork is being set out which might make cooperative anonymous communication possible with an even lower public profile than SMTP and with a mixed mode of transport which could further frustrate analysis. There is even an incipient (although deeply flawed from a 'punk perspective) proposal to add a micropayment service into the mix. <http://www.jxta.org> A peergroup based mail services does raise some interesting trust metric challenges, though. And -- until there is a broad population of JXTA users and traffic -- the cover is mighty thin compared with smtp.
On Tuesday, August 7, 2001, at 03:54 PM, Paul Harrison wrote:
It has been several years since any significant changes in anonymous remailer technology were proposed. Much of the latter day thinking has been directed more to Democracy Walls such as MN, freehaven, freenet as possible improvement on good ole Usenet alt.anonymous.messages.
I disagree, slightly. The same old "improvements" are still not implemented. Notably, pay-for-use remailers. What _has_ changed is that interest in running remailers is waning. I attribute this mainly to a decline in interest in the _politics_ of remailers and Cypherpunks technologies in general. Despite the controversy about recent developments like the Adobe arrest of Dmitry (er, the FBI arrest...same difference), the nonsense about "globalization," and the usual paranoia about traffic cameras, the fact is that WE HAVE NO CLIPPER TO RALLY AROUND. The heyday of remailers, this list, and "crypto activism" was when two critical things were happening: 1. Clipper. 2. The threatened prosecution of Phil Zimmermann. Neither is happening now. Cracking down on Napster, or proposing traffic cameras at intersections, or "allowing" multinational companies to prosper, is HARDLY the stuff of activism. Also, the "Cypherpunks write code" mantra has been interpreted by some to mean that only discussion of S-boxes in DES and the strength of Rijndael are appropriate Cypherpunks topics. Thus we see a lot of "crypto only" mailing lists, siphoning off technical contributors from here on Cypherpunks. The problem is, in my strongly held view, that "code without politics" means mundanity about S-boxes and Rijndael! Without a political focus, there is no longer any sexiness to crypto. It will take a new crackdown to stimulate a new round of interest in Cypherpunks technologies. (Were I a Brit, I'd certainly consider the RIP types of crackdowns to be reason enough to code politically. Alas, we have few Brit members.) --Tim May
Tim May wrote:
The same old "improvements" are still not implemented. Notably, pay-for-use remailers.
Yup, same old sticky wicket. And you get the service you pay for.
What _has_ changed is that interest in running remailers is waning. I attribute this mainly to a decline in interest in the _politics_ of remailers and Cypherpunks technologies in general.
Whine level remains high. Actions in decline. E.g. "I'd rather be out shooting than remopping"
Without a political focus, there is no longer any sexiness to crypto.
There are many paths to enlightenment. Not all are politically focused.
It will take a new crackdown to stimulate a new round of interest in Cypherpunks technologies.
We're being slowly frog-boiled. And the sad thing is that the persecution, er prosecution, of Bell, the Waco obscenity, the Russian crypto hacker arrest(s)...these are viewed by most of our fellow citizen units as good things which show that God is in His Heaven, there is Rule of Law and all is right with the world. "Why would anyone carry cash on a airplane?" they ask. And the public bumbles of our elite LEAs leave people much less paranoid about them.
Were I a Brit, I'd certainly consider the RIP types of crackdowns to be reason enough to code politically.
Here is where I believe that those silly anti-globalists may actually have a point. the U.S. federal statute DMCA is a WIPO-compliant act. RIP in the U.K. was at least partly inspired by years of U.S. evangalism about gak and the horror of crypto in the public's hands. The demise of "offshore banking" has been by the strong-arming of various sovereign nations by the E.U. and the U.S. What we are witnessing is a new kind of gunboat diplomacy, as nations are coming face to face with the ebbing relevance of geography. They are reaching out to find ways to protect their power. It is important that our main trading partners are increasingly implementing national legislation which reduces opportunities for jurisdictional arbitrage. And for the political cryptographer or the (cryptic political animal?) this is as significant as a tangible piece of silicon such as CLIPPER. It was a positive that Bush recently stood up to EU gun control pressure, in the name of the 2nd Ammendment. Would Ashcroft do the same if the assault were on Search & Siezure or Freedom of Speech, through some multi-national mandating of ISP compliance with Carnivore or RIP-like logging, decryption and tapping? I sincerely doubt it. How can you conduct a war on drugs and cybercrime and their fellow traveller money laundering if we don't "harmonize" the international standards for lawful breaking, entering, confiscation? When they come for the remops there will already be licenses to run SMTP servers, and like the Chicago police, "they" can just pick up those silly little mixie masters for expired tags or failure to stop (after explicit court order) death threats for happy-fun court judges, or ponzi schemes which defrauded little old ladies, or porn pictures sent to 9 year old girls, whatever. The citizen units will applaud. And crypto will be sexy again.
At 04:40 PM 8/7/01 -0700, Tim May wrote:
I disagree, slightly. The same old "improvements" are still not implemented. Notably, pay-for-use remailers.
Let me play devil's advocate here and say I'm not sure that the existence of PPU remailers would change much. First, the current state of remailers may be enough for many cypherpunks-interesting projects that do not quite reach the national-security-threat level. Second, it's not clear that even if the improvement existed, there would be sufficient market demand for the service to keep the operators interested in providing continued for-fee operation. (There's overhead involved in just setting up such a service that the activists currently running no-charge remailers don't have.) Other improvements such as better user interface may be necessary. Third, there already is a cousin of a pay-per-use remailer, albeit not with the same utility as mixmaster, in the form of ZKS' Freedom application. You'd think that if there were sufficient market demand, someone would try to set up such a PPU service. It hasn't happened yet. Explanations might include market inefficiencies in the communication of user preferences to prospective remailer ops, government regulation (spoilation alert!), lack of reasonable payment structure. Yet some form of PPU remailer could exist today: A remailer would find a cookie and an encrypted-to-PPU-public-key credit card in the body of the message it receives. It would then debit a credit card for, say, $3 and award a credit to that cookie for $2.95 (5 cent per email message charge). Next time another message appeared with that cookie, that same "account" would be debited five cents. The remailer would, unless it's the entry point in the chain, not be able to contact the "account" holder for a recharge, so a client application should handle the balance accounting. The honesty of the remailer could be verified and published via the usual reputational mechanisms. Though I admit I'd be a bit hesitant to give today's remailers my credit card number. The usual objection to such a system would be that the feds would impose pressure on the banking system (or credit card companies would do it themselves) and prevent remailer ops from securing merchant accounts. That may be true, but remailers at least today aren't seen as a serious threat. They could get away with it for a while. Besides, other payment mechanisms, while not quite Chaumian, would work. I presume a similar, and perhaps less complicated, system could be crafted using egold or paypal. Peter Wayner's already using paypal, per his post this week, to sell lightly-protected content. There's always the option of sending physical dollars or 7-11 money orders to open "accounts" with remailers too. Tim says that "interest in running remailers is waning" and says it's the lack of a Clipper threat. I'm not sure that interest, as a factual point, is actually waning. The remailer-ops mailing list has received 1730 messages since February. There seem to be over a dozen to a score of well-known remailers (perhaps many more lightly-advertised ones), which I recall is about where matters were five years ago. I do of course agree interest in cypherpunks is due in part to a lack of a big, nasty threat. Any political interest group picks up in activism when its enemies are in power or actively threatening them; NOW gains members when Ashcroft is in office; the NRA got a boost under Clinton. I did note in May 2000 -- and was the first reporter to do so -- that the Council of Europe treaty requires "websites and Internet providers to collect information about their users, a rule that would potentially limit anonymous remailers" (http://www.politechbot.com/p-01136.html). But that's theoretical since the COE is still a far-off threat and doesn't have the same urgency as a House committee voting to make it a felony to manufacture or distribute unescrowed crypto (this actually happened). Tim says "the heyday" of cypherpunks was during Clipper and Zimmermann. True. But much has changed since then. People have gone off to start companies; cypherpunkly ideas are no longer new; early cypherpunkish predictions turned out not to be true, at least not yet; there are other interesting areas such as Freenet and P2P to work on; crypto is more-or-less mainstream and certainly corporate; people have peeled off from cypherpunks to join other communities that don't have the same volume of traffic; more sub-par humans seem to infest the cypherpunks list than before; prosecutions of cypherpunks subscribers may have scared off others. Right now the "crypto activism" equivalent is over in the DMCA camp, trying to "Free Dmitry." -Declan
On Wed, Aug 08, 2001 at 10:01:57PM -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
Yet some form of PPU remailer could exist today: A remailer would find a cookie and an encrypted-to-PPU-public-key credit card in the body of the message it receives. It would then debit a credit card for, say, $3 and [...] The usual objection to such a system would be that the feds would impose pressure on the banking system (or credit card companies would do it themselves) and prevent remailer ops from securing merchant accounts. That may be true, but remailers at least today aren't seen as a serious threat. They could get away with it for a while.
Thinking through this a little bit more, such a system wouldn't work well given today's technology. It would allow an attacker to know with a high degree of certainty the truename (cardname) of someone and link that with an encrypted message. By unwrapping it down the chain with subpoenas and court orders, it would be possible to get at least the last To: line if not the final text. Such a situation could be avoided by remailers that use temporary (changing by the minute, say) keys so that a court order wouldn't be able to succeed in the same way as above. But then that has the problem of getting the keys to the users of the remailer -- not a terribly difficult thing; given a small # of remailers, all could be queried in a second or two. A website that collated the temporary keys (signed by a permanent one) would be a nice service. Naturally you'd have to trust that at least one remailer was honest -- but you already do that, right? -Declan
On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Declan McCullagh wrote:
Naturally you'd have to trust that at least one remailer was honest -- but you already do that, right?
Just a curiosity note (yes, I *should* RTFM, but it's about 6am, and I'm late for work, not to mention lazy today :-) While one remailer is considered "sufficient" for the mimaster purpose, does it's position in the chain materially affect it's value? I.e., would there be a "preference" for chaining through the most trusted mix first, last, or "in the middle"? Same question for using the least trusted remailer [frog comes to mind :-(]. Either a discussion or a concise link would be greatly appreciated! Thanks. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org If Governments really want us to behave like civilized human beings, they should give serious consideration towards setting a better example: Ruling by force, rather than consensus; the unrestrained application of unjust laws (which the victim-populations were never allowed input on in the first place); the State policy of justice only for the rich and elected; the intentional abuse and occassionally destruction of entire populations merely to distract an already apathetic and numb electorate... This type of demogoguery must surely wipe out the fascist United States as surely as it wiped out the fascist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The views expressed here are mine, and NOT those of my employers, associates, or others. Besides, if it *were* the opinion of all of those people, I doubt there would be a problem to bitch about in the first place... --------------------------------------------------------------------
participants (4)
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Declan McCullagh -
measl＠mfn.org -
Paul Harrison -
Tim May