Anonymous Remailers

Adam Back aba at dcs.ex.ac.uk
Fri May 16 07:47:17 PDT 1997



Kent Crispin <kent at songbird.com> writes:
> [about remailers]
> Hmm.  I did read, and I thought I understood this.  I claim that if
> the remailers collude, then there in no anonymity.  Correct? Even if I
> insert my own remailer in the list it doesn't help, if the others are
> all in cahoots.  This seems pretty obvious.  They all compare logs, 
> and saved copies of the messages, and my message can be tracked from 
> beginning to end.  Right?

Not entirely.

If other people use your remailer also, and you have latency, they'll
see n messages going into your remailer, and n come out.  There will
be log2(n) entropy added, they won't know which of those are from you
and which from the other users.

Flooding attacks might make the situation worse, say you wonder if all
of the messages apart from your own are from the attackers, and that
the purpose of these messages is to flush your message out of the
mixing pool.

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`







More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list