anonymous mailing lists

[Alex de Joode]

Hal sez:
: Wei Dai did some nice statistical analysis of this type of attack
: sometime a year or two ago.  Even with countermeasures such as you
: suggest, if they are not perfect, so some information leaks correlating
: incoming and outgoing messages, Wei showed that it was possible to
: deduce the owners of the nyms surprisingly quickly.

: The countermeasures do work - if you get and send exactly 50 pieces of
: 4K byte email every day, no matter what, then correlations don't exist
: - but they are expensive to do perfectly.  For now we have much worse
: weaknesses; none of the current return-address systems are really safe,
: other than posting encrypted mail to newsgroups (and even that may be a
: problem if they suspect who you are and are monitoring your computer
: link to see if you download certain messages).

Use ssh or any other link encryptor, or fetch the whole newsgroup using
uucp.

--

	-AJ-