Long-Lived Remailers

[jim bell]

At 10:29 AM 5/21/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:
>At 3:00 PM 5/21/96, Rev. Mark Grant, ULC wrote:

>>Yeah, but the attack model I was assuming was lawyers rather than
>>intelligence agencies. The NSA could probably easily link the two
>>together, but the Church of Foobar(tm) probably couldn't. They'd only have
>>access to the logs on the ISP and the information you gave when you signed
>>up, not the raw packets on the Net.
>
>The traffic analysis on this fixed mapping system needs no access to
>packets and is childishly simple.
>
>Let's call the first site "Alice" and the emanation site "Bob."
>
>That is, all messages sent to the persistent site Alice appear to come from
>the site Bob.
>
>The Church of Clams can simply send messages addressed to themselves
>through the Alice remailer and see immediately that they appear to come
>from Bob.

Tim, I think you missed his (and my) point.  The purpose of such a split is 
not to disguise the link between Alice and Bob; the point is to prevent 
legal attacks on the remailer by putting the transmission part (Bob) in a 
country which is hard to reach.  Logically, an attacker could easily 
determine that sending a message to Alice would have it come back from Bob, 
but the converse would not be true:  A message which came from Bob would not 
necessarily have come from Alice.  Besides, any legal attack would require a 
substantial investment that would make harassment suits pointless.  Add to 
this the fact that "Bob" might only last a few weeks...

An organization like COS would be faced with no good target.



Jim Bell
jimbell at pacifier.com