Traceable Infrastructure is as vulnerable as traceable messages.

[Tim May]

At 8:43 PM +0200 8/3/01, Eugene Leitl wrote:
>On Fri, 3 Aug 2001, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>
>>   (2) The remailers themselves are not anonymous.
>
>No, but to shut them down you have to know where they are, and to make
>your intent known to operators of such.
>
>The remailers could reside in a state with a weak mutual enforcibility
>(Eastern Block successor states, Israel, developing countries). The
>remailers could be physically hidden in a large facility (of course, you
>could always whip up a firewall filter blocking them), or be connecting
>via 802.11b and successors. The remailers could be packaged as part of a
>well-behaved worm, thus overwhelming detection and enforcement
>capabilites.

Just so. And some of the recent "remailers can't work" critics 
(Dillinger, Farr) are breathtakingly ignorant of what was common 
knowledge in 1992. Worse, they haven't heeded recommendations that 
they get themselves up to speed.

There is no sign that even the technologies described above 
(wireless, throwaways, worm-based, surreptitious, etc.) are needed to 
achieve excellent untraceability. A distributed set of remailers in N 
different jurisdictions is quite robust against prosecutorial fishing 
expeditions, though not as robust as we want against attacks by much 
more capable adversaries.

Ways to increase robustness have been discussed many times. (Increase 
N, increase pool sizes at each stage, adopt constant-bandwidth 
approaches like Pipenet, throw in wireless and "rooms full of 
remailers" approaches, even adopt DC-Net methods as cores for 
sub-nets.)

Dillinger and Farr have described only sophomoric attacks. Even the 
remailers of 1995-6 defeated the Scientologists.

Crap about IP addresses being traceable is just obfuscation to cover 
basic ignorance of how remailer networks work.


--Tim May



-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns