SCHEME for FULL-SPEC RETURN PATH

[Matthew J Ghio]

> From: "Jon 'Iain' Boone" <boone at psc.edu>
> 
> 
>  How secure do you think this is?
>
>  Three remailers:
>
>  anon1+ at a.edu
>  anon2+ at b.com
>  anon3+ at c.org
>
>  Originator: boone at psc.edu (really igi.psc.edu, as Message-ID: shows)
>  Receiver: wcs at anchor.ho.att.com
>
>  ()Ka == contents inside () are encrypted with Public Key of A
>
>  mail addressed to random+*@foo.edu == mail to user random at foo.edu,
>					random's mail processor will
>					deal with the +*
...

>  To: anon3+"(anon2+"(anon1+"(boone at psc.edu)Ka"@a.edu)Kb"@b.com)Kc"@c.org
>  From: wcs at anchor.ho.att.com
>  Message-Id: <99234.AA23492383 at anchor.ho.att.com>
>
>  C.ORG:
>
>  To: anon2+"(anon1+"(boone at psc.edu)Ka"@a.edu)Kb"@b.com
>  From: wcs at anchor.ho.att.com
>  Message-Id: <2342349324.AA2343242 at c.org>
...

Well, I guess great minds think alike.  I'm already working on this. 
I've been hacking on in my spare time for about a month now.  My program
is about 75-80% done.  Here's how it will work:

You send mail to remail+getid at x.edu.  The remailer takes your address
and encrypts it with its private key, adds some random padding (to
disguise the legnth), a checksum, and then puts it in "ascii-armor"
format.  Then it mails it back to you.  You get an address of the format:

remail+to+8k3dsa5gzctoy6ahz433mwqqe1v4oo1fr at x.edu

Then when you post anonymously, you can use that address as a reply-to
address (a few of the cypherpunk remailers allow you to insert your own
reply-to fields, i think the BSU ones do.)

All of the encryption/decryption routines are completely finished.  The
only things left to do are to add the actual mail handler that will take
an incoming message, decrypt the address and forward the mail.  The
auto-reply program to send the encrypted addresses is finished also; it
works basically like my automatic faq-sender which you can email at
mg5n+remailers at andrew.cmu.edu .
The above is acutal output from my cipher and will decrypt to
mg5n+ at andrew.cmu.edu (if you have the secret key!)  I chose to use a
private key cipher instead of p-k because of the enourmous overhead that
you get with PGP, and I was afraid that it would be too big for the mail
headers.
The cipher used employs transpositions, substitution tables and cipher
feedback, in multiple layers of encryption.

Perhaps in the future, PGP encryption of the message could be added, and
better methods for chaining remailers, and compression of the mail
address before encryption (I have experimented with this).

I've been a bit busy with other things this past week so I haven't
worked on the program lately.  If you're serious about this, and you or
someone you know is willing to finish the program and actually run a
remailer using it, I'll let you have my source code so far.  Program is
written in C.