Anonymous Remailers

[Kent Crispin]

	On Fri, May 16, 1997 at 10:27:19AM +0100, Adam Back wrote:
> 
> 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.

And of course, in some environments running a remailer would be highly 
suspicious -- even more so if it is a *public* remailer.

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent at songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html