(Another) alternative to remailer shutdowns

Leonard Janke janke at unixg.ubc.ca
Wed May 22 21:14:54 PDT 1996



Instead of having the last remailer in the chain store the plaintext of
an encrypted anonymous message, it might be more convenient to have the 
sender split the message into two messages and send these. The first 
message would contain random characters,  and the second would contain 
the xor of these random characters with the anonymous message. By themselves, 
each piece would, of course, be harmless random text, so remailer operators
greatest crime would be spamming. If the two pieces were sent through 
chains with different last remailers, no one operator could be held
accountable, and, of course, it would be ridiculous to suggest that
one operator could be held responsible for that fact that another
sent some random text which happened to be the xor of the random text
another had sent with a harassing message. (For instance, the
other operator could be trying to frame the first, with the
help of the receiver.) It seems to me that the only way to deal with a 
remailing scheme of this kind would be outlaw anonymous remalining in 
general.

Leonard







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