Questions about Anonymity, and the FAQ

[Timothy C. May]

At 4:00 AM 2/1/96, Anonymous wrote:
>Are anon remailers the only way to send anon email without giving up the
>source eventhough an organization has a wealth of dough/technology and
>several class B addresses?  Couldn't they just trick their mail servers or
>would a nslookup/whois defeat that?

"Trick the mail servers" is not a cryptographically strong approach...it is
just a variant of "security through obscurity." In terms of "work factor"
(a measure of the number of bits of protection, and thus the amount of work
an opponent has to undertake), the various "Port 25" sorts of hacks are
ridiculously easy to break. Maybe not for everyone (for example, moi would
have no idea how to break it!), but for determined and knowledgeable
adversaries, easily breakable.

The Chaumian mix, semi-realized in Cypherpunks-style remailers, are the
best hope for cryptographic security.

>And are nym accounts the only way to receive email without giving up who
>the intended recipient of tha mail/news post actually is?

No, public message pools are an easy way to do this--it's what I used for
my BlackNet experiment. Tell your sender to encrypt to the public key you
provide--which isn't your key you usually associate with your true
name!--and to post the resulting cyphertext in, say,
alt.anonymous.messages. Since only you can read it, but no one knows who is
reading the messages in alt.anonymous.messages, the implications are clear.

I address many of these issues in my Cyphernomicon FAQ, available in
various ways, including the Web URL of
"http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/".


--Tim

Boycott espionage-enabled software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay at got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1  | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."