Very interesting, grarpamp. On 01/10/2016 04:38 PM, grarpamp wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Bill Cox <waywardgeek@gmail.com> Date: Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 9:38 AM Subject: [Cryptography] A possible alternative to TOR and PrivaTegrity without backdoors To: "cryptography@metzdowd.com" <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
This is an old idea, but perhaps now there might be more reason to consider it. I currently call this idea Alias. Here's my dumb data-dump on it. Thoughts?
Alias is a concept for a TOR-like Internet protocol supporting free speech and user privacy, but without encouraging the worst evil behaviors. Exit Nodes are replaced with Public Gateways, which sponsor users. The definition of evil behavior is defined by the Public Gateways and operators of routing nodes. Users would be encouraged to use good behavior, as their public alias would develop a reputation over time. Anonymity would be protected, but a user's Public Gateway and any routing node could refuse to route data for aliases with poor reputations.
TOR was created with a lofty goal: to support free speech. Unfortunately, TOR has drawn attention from governments and law enforcement, as it could be used to protect some of the worst activities, such as contract killing, and the slave trade. TOR Exit Node operators generally follow a strict policy of never looking at traffic, because simply observing this traffic would require Exit Node operators in most countries to regularly contact law enforcement to report crimes. PrivaTegrity is an alternative protocol to TOR, which aims to find a balance between protecting free speech and protecting the world from the worst behavior. Unfortunately, the PrivaTegrity inserts encryption backdoors.
Alias Design:
This is very much a dumb idea in the half-baked stage. Feedback and ideas are welcome.
Alias would be a fork of TOR, and route Internet traffic from a user's machine through a couple of Routing Nodes, to a Public Gateway, which replaces the Exit Node. The Public Gateway would have an account for the user, under a pseudonym used on Alias network by the user, called his alias. The Public Gateway should keep an email contact address for the user, similar to regular accounts on various web sites.
In Alias, user aliases would have trackable reputations, and the reputations of user aliases would be combined into a reputation for a Public Gateway. At a minimum, incident reports would be used to compute user reputations. Exactly how this works is TBD, but the goal is to cause gateways with very poor reputations to be effectively blacklisted by routing nodes, and for users with poor reputations to be dropped by reputable gateways. Users could move their alias from one gateway to another when needed, but they could not erase what their previous gateway knows about there identity. The Gateway would not know a user's location, and in many cases will know nothing other than the user's reputation and email address. When requested by a government authority, at a minimum, a gateway can drop support for a user alias, causing that alias to try to find a new gateway that will agree to sponsor it.
[...] Just today, I read a Forbes story from late 2013 where an anonymous had set up a web-site featuring Bounties in bitcoins for assassination of named public figures, which goes with the Crypto Anarchy "credo" (sometimes). Source: Nov 18, 2013 @ 08:30 AM Meet The 'Assassination Market' Creator Who's Crowdfunding Murder With Bitcoins Link: < http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/18/meet-the-assassination-...
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David