Re: Introduction- Telephone
Reply to: RE>>Introduction: Telephone traffic analysis
I stumbled upon this great explanation of telephone traffic analysis and thought I'd share it with the list:
It is to evade this sort of traffic analysis that complex routing, batching and clustering of anon remailer traffic is being evolved.
As long as 'someone else' controls the medium thru which the messages pass, traffic analysis will be possible. It may be a large problem, but it will still be doable with sufficient motivation. When you have an untappable wire between the sender and recipient, then traffic analysis is impossible (and crypto unnecessary). In order to get to the remailer chain you mention, I (for instance) can ONLY pass thru a couple a machines, which if properly monitored, reveal the traffic flow despite the remailers. You can still beat traffic analysis (and you still need crypto), but not in this medium.
When you have an untappable wire between the sender and recipient, then traffic analysis is impossible (and crypto unnecessary). Yet you can create an untappable wire with cryptography! The device in question is called a link encryptor. Take a stream cipher and run it continuously across the channel in question. Pad the asynchronous traffic when it's not flowing and add some synchronization to both the stream and the data insertion. You can tap the physical line still, but the interceptions reveal zero information (computationally--the stream cipher _is_ keyed, after all). A good project would be virtual link encryptors for the Internet. Eric
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hughes＠ah.com -
Ron Bardarson