From: Georgi Guninski <guninski@guninski.com>
To: cypherpunks@cpunks.org
Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 1:44 AM
Subject: Instead of only bashing tor, why not discuss the alternatives?
>Instead of only bashing tor, why not discuss the alternatives and move
>to something allegedly better?
Tor reminds me a bit of the Clipper chip, that brief attempt to implement a DES (56 bit key),
key-escrowed chip for encrypted telephones that was tried in 1993.
If the USG had simply abandoned the plan for key escrow (giving the government the keys), the world would
arguably have been better off (compared to no encryption at all) for awhile if they'd implemented 56-bit DES.
But, that was distasteful, in large part because it would have been a shame to build a system that was less
secure than it could have been with then existing technology.
However, I think the main impediment to implementing secure phones in that time frame (1993) was that it would
have been necessary to transmit data rates over the POTS (Plaint Old Telephone System) that weren't really
practical: Modems had gotten to about 14.4kbps by then, as I recall.
Tor, likewise, should not be less secure than it could be. Multiple transfer hops (as opposed to the current one-hop),
decoy (a given packet 'explodes' into multiple packets, maybe only one is 'real') transfers, padded with adjustable filler traffic, etc, should have been added by now. Why the delay?
Jim