Anonymity: A Modest Proposal

[Tom Weinstein]

In article <DGoAr7.L5s at sgi.sgi.com>, kelso at netcom.com (kelso) writes:

> Hi,
> One method to take the heat off of the last remailer
> in a chain would be to call on our friend the "one
> time pad".  A message is split into two equal parts
> that only make sense when the two parts are 'xor'ed
> together.  The seperate parts are then sent through
> different paths to the final recepiant (or newsgroup).
> The reader would have to 'xor' the parts together in
> order to read the message.  The remailer could not be
> blamed (as the message was unreadable to him).

> The drawback is that the message would be unreadable
> until both pieces showed up.

No, the drawback is that then all the readers of the newsgroup would
complain that this remailer was cluttering up the newsgroup with
unreadable garbage.  Twice.

Here's another modest proposal.  I note that once you've sent a message,
there appears to be no way for a recipient to reply without knowing who
the originator is.  A simple addition to the remailer protocol would be
to encrypt the message and the control information seperately.  This
would allow the sender of a message to provide a pre-packaged method for
returning a reply.  The recipient of the original message could then
just blindly send his reply to the starting point remailer specified in
the original message by tacking the pre-packaged routing information on
to the front of his message.

-- 
Sure we spend a lot of money, but that doesn't mean    |  Tom Weinstein
we *do* anything.  --  Washington DC motto             |  tomw at engr.sgi.com