CDR: Disposable remailers

[Bill O'Hanlon]

I've started a small project, and I'm curious to know if others
think there's any long-term value to it.  Dallas Semiconductor
makes a small Java-based computer called the TINI.  (Check out
http://www.ibutton.com/TINI for details.)  The unit itself is the
size of a memory SIMM and costs $35.  The card isn't too useful
until you add their socket board which costs $30 or so and provides
an Ethernet port, a serial port, and a connector for power.  The
OS for the TINI has a complete TCP/IP stack, and has a nice Java
implementation.

My idea was to make a throwaway remailer.  For $80 worth of materials,
you can have a unit that can remail messages in the Cyperpunks
tradition.  It could be easily hidden.

Here's the pros and cons as I see them:  Pros:
	small (easily hidden in a large corporate or university
	environment -- the TINI can even pick up its IP address via
	DHCP)

	doesn't have a disk drive so there's no room for logs.

	Inexpensive, so it can be sacrificed if discovered.

Cons:
	It might not be able to have crypto.  I'm not sure if
	something PGPish can be ported to it and still leave room
	for the incoming message.  It comes with less than 300K of
	useable RAM.  However, the TINI does have a socket on it
	for an Ibutton, so one of Dallas' Crypto or Java buttons
	might be able to take on the crypto load.  That's more
	money per unit, however.

	Also, due to the small memory footprint, it doesn't look
	like a lot of messages can be stored locally, so there's
	not a lot of room for latency and message re-ordering.

	It would also be tough to harden these things against any
	kind of denial of service attack.  Bombing it with mail or
	strange packets will probably lock it up.

	Currently, the TINI also requires that SOME email server
	take email from it, since the code that comes with it really
	isn't a complete mail service, but I think it could probably
	do it's own delivery eventually.

I'm envisioning that the code would announce itself to some set of
web servers so that people can know where to find a few of these
transient remailers when they wanted to send some messages.

I've already got a small chunk of code that can do some crude
remailing, so the basic idea works.

Does this seem useful to anyone?  The TINI is fun to tinker with,
so I'm not out anything if someone points out a hugely glaring hole
in the idea, here.  One hole that I've already noticed is that the
code that runs on a TINI could just as easily run on a Windows
machine and do the same job, and there's been very little interest
in having a widespread network of little remailers for workstations.

-Bill

--
Bill O'Hanlon                                                   wmo at pro-ns.net
Professional Network Services, Inc.                             612-379-3958