CDR: Re: Anonymous Remailers cpunk

[Sean Roach]

At 05:22 PM 10/3/2000, Steve Furlong wrote:
...
>I'm assuming there's a way to tell with minimal difficulty if a message
>is encrypted, without relying on an easily-spoofed X header line.
>Perhaps someone who knows more about all of the many message protocols
>can weigh in here.
...

Excuse me for butting in here, as my knowledge of crypto can be expressed 
on one page, double spaced, but.

I believe Robert Morris, father of the (in)famous RTM, wrote a 
"spellchecker" for UNIX back in the 70's that was based on character 
probability.
He's also, from my understanding, responsible for the one way hash that 
keeps UNIX passwords secure, and he later signed on with the NSA.

Couldn't something that A.  Watched for a limited list of known words, 
(including the header information for UUENCODED, and MIME encoded, GIF's, 
JPG's, BMP's, MP3's etc, along with a dictionary of very common 6+ letter 
words.  and B.  Back that up with some simple analysis, of the sort that 
can break single alphabet cyphers, (finding the e's, etc).

Correct me if I'm wrong, and I may very well be, but, wouldn't an ecrypted 
message using modern techniques have a near flat distribution of all 
characters used?

Good luck,

Sean Roach