Transitive trust and MLM

Rich Graves llurch at networking.stanford.edu
Fri May 10 17:09:55 PDT 1996


On Thu, 9 May 1996, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote:

> From:	IN%"llurch at networking.stanford.edu"  "Rich Graves"  8-MAY-1996
> 04:33:21.44 
> 
> >The fact that you're sending postcards is only a problem if you don't want
> >them to be read. It's more the email I receive that I worry about, so all 
> >my friends use the address rich at alpha.c2.org now.
> 
> 	How would this help? Whoever's wanting to monitor you will just
> monitor rich at alpha.c2.org's incoming mail.

To do that they would need to crack one or more of the accounts with
access to the alpha server, which would probably leave evidence, or run a
packet sniffer nearby. Ironically, I am more confident of the security of
alpha.c2.org than I am of my own machine. The threat profile is people who
have forwarded mail with envelope and Received: headers indicating that
the source is my mail spool to a mailing list. Twice. I know that I'm
surrounded by insecure, non-firewalled UNIX boxes that could be running
packet sniffers, and that is something I cannot fix unless I want to trade
gloriously fast and reliable Ethernet connectivity for a modem. My
correspondents do not have PGP and are not likely to get it. So, a public
alpha nym helps in this (perhaps unique) case.

rich at alpha.c2.org also works as a permanent address (knock on wood).

-rich







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