2-way anonymous via SASE

[Jon 'Iain' Boone]

Hal <hfinney at shell.portal.com>  writes:
>
> From: "Jon 'Iain' Boone" <boone at psc.edu>
> 
> >   What if you have a remailer that only assigns you an id for that message
> >   so that your id is equivalent to (say) the Message-ID (or some portion
> >   thereof)?  How do you return-path without specifying?
> 
> Your syntax is a bit hard to follow here, but I'm guessing that you are
> proposing such a remailer as a way of providing for return paths.  The
> remailer would remember the message-id's of outgoing messages, and would
> remember where those messages came from.  Then if a reply came back for
> one of those message-id's it could send it to that remembered address.
> 
> There were some proposals along these lines made last year, or maybe back
> in 1992.  This scheme doesn't seem to generalize well to multi-remailer
> paths.  Also, I think people would be nervous about having remailers keep
> this kind of out-to-in mapping information.

  I think that I am confused.  Please bear with me.  

  Jim Miller <jim at bilbo.suite.com> writes:
  >
  > The general idea is that each anonymous messages will include a SASE that
  > can be used to reply to the sender, without revealing the identity of the
  > sender to the message recipient.  To reply, the recipient will copy the
  > SASE from the original message and past it into a special section of the
  > reply message.  Remailers will examine this section of the reply message
  > and use its contents to route the message back to the sender of the
  > original message.

  Now, what is this SASE?  Apparently it is either a) a fully-specified
  return-path (presumably a chain of anonymous ids at various remailers),
  b) a next-hop address (anonymousid at the next remailer that "knows"
  where to send the message), or c) some combination of the previous two.

  Is there another possibility that I have missed?

  Let's assume that the SASE is of type-a.
  
  Let's assume three remailers (and my accounts on them) named:

  anon1+ at foo.bar.edu
  anon2+ at biff.bam.com
  anon3+ at fred.barney.org
  
  Then, if I want to anonymously send mail to you ( <hfinney at shell.protal.com> )
  , I need to specifiy your address as normal, but specifiy some optional 
  header (X-Anonymous-Sender-Path) like this:

  <anon3+"anon2+"anon1+ at foo.bar.edu"@biff.bam.com"@fred.barney.org> 
  
  which says to my mailer that, while the ultimate destination is 
  <hfinney at shell.portal.com>, it should first mail it to the 
  X-Anonymous-Sender-Path address.

  HOST: fred.barney.org  Account: anon3+

  This anon3+ at fred.barney.org account will accept the mail (it accepts anything
  like anon3+*@fred.barney.org, so it doesn't matter about the stuff in quotes)
  It then strips off the anon3+ at fred.barney.org section, and re-writes the
  X-Anonymous-Sender-Path to read like this:

  <anon2+"anon1+ at foo.bar.edu"@biff.bam.com>

  It would then instantiate another optional header (X-Anonymous-Return-Path)
  like this:

  <anon3+ at fred.barney.org>

  It would change the Sender: header to say "Anonymous User 3" or whatever 
  it would normally say, and mail it to biff.bam.com.

  HOST: biff.bam.com  Account: anon2+

  This account accepts the mail and re-writes the headers like this:

  X-A-S-P: <anon1+ at foo.bar.edu>

  X-A-R-P: <anon2+"anon3+ at fred.barney.org"@biff.bam.com>

  Sender: "Anonymous User 2"@biff.bam.com

  and mails the mail to anon1+ at foo.bar.edu

  HOST: foo.bar.edu  Account: anon1+

  This account accepts the mail and re-writes the headers like this:

  X-A-R-P: <anon1+"anon2+"anon3+ at fred.barney.org"@biff.bam.com"@foo.bar.edu>

  Sender: "Anonymous User 1"@foo.bar.edu

  Notice that it leaves off the X-Anonymous-Sender-Path: header since it is
  empty.

  It then mails it to hfinney at shell.portal.com.

  You receive the mail and read the message.  Now, the sender indicates that
  it is from "Anonymous User 1"@foo.bar.edu, but the X-A-R-P: indicates that
  it is really from anon3+ at fred.barney.org!  So, as long as fred.barney.org
  can be trusted, no one can tell who I am, right?  And, except for anon3,
  none of the others needs to be my account!  This requires changing the
  mail agent on my end, though, and possibly yours.

  Replying follows the same sort of path, except in reverse.

  Of course, you could also allow for a Return-Path header which was not
  re-writeable, to force a seperate path to get back to me.  And, you can
  also change the software so that I initially send to 
  hfinney%shell.portal.com at fred.barney.org, which would *not* require any
  rewriting of mail-agent software.

  Is this at all coherent?

  If the return-path is type B, I don't see how you can avoid having the
  ID-mapping which makes the overall scheme weaker.  I don't have a good
  handle of the type c.


> I understand there is already at least one 24-bit collision on the
> public key servers, not unexpected given a few thousand keys.

  Hmm... I'm not sure I followed all of the math, but how's this for
  a signature?


 Jon Boone | PSC Networking | boone at psc.edu | (412) 268-6959
 PGP Public Key fingerprint =  23 59 EC 91 47 A6 E3 92  9E A8 96 6A D9 27 C9 6C