Worms and wireless remailers

[Tim May]

At 3:29 PM -0700 8/3/01, mmotyka at lsil.com wrote:
>Ray Dillinger wrote:
>>
>>  On Fri, 3 Aug 2001 mmotyka at lsil.com wrote:
>>
>>  >I like the idea of making a remailer part of a worm but it might be just
>>  >as well to make it an inherent part of a product since people will
>>  >attempt to eradicate a worm.
>>
>>  And succeed.  How many copies of "melissa" have you seen lately?
>>
>>  Coding a remailer, *and* coding a worm, for just one week's worth
>>  of play before they stomp it, is not worthwhile.
>>
>>                                  Bear
>>
>I think the "well behaved worm" prescribed by Tim might live longer
>since I read that as unobtrusive and generally benign but for some
>tolerable amount of bandwidth. Still, it would fall short of the effect
>you'd get if it were in a product that every teenager on the planet
>wanted to run.

I wasn't the one to suggest a worm in this recent debate. Someone else did.

I included worms in the general list of ways remailers and mixes may 
be more ubiquitously spread: wireless, piggbacked on corporate 
networks, throwaway boxes, etc.

(I'm steering clear of the weirder approaches: boxes hidden on the 
roofs of corporations and communicating with 802.11b, cards added to 
multiprocessor racks, etc. One weird approach that I discussed many 
years ago for a data haven approach some friends of mine were trying 
to get rolling, pre-Cypherpunks, is now much more feasible: imagine a 
simple Apple Airport (802.11 and variants) set up in San Diego, near 
the border with Tijuana. In fact, the cities run together, separated 
by a fence. An Airport- or Wavelan-equipped computer in San Diego is 
on the same local area network as one in an apartment building a few 
hundred feet away in TJ. Bounce packets back and forth, confusing 
jurisdictional issues with each hop EVEN IF LOGS are kept and court 
orders are issued. Of course, can do the same thing at the Canadian 
border, at other borders. I don't advocate that wireless methods be 
the backbone, as ordinary bouncing of packets around the world to 
many jurisdictions already does this, but it sure does make the point 
graphically about how hard it is to control the flow of bits.)

Other wireless technologies include Bluetooth, packet radio, 
cellphone dial-ups, FRS radio, Ricochet (now defunct, alas), and of 
course various satellite links. (Most of these wireless links look a 
lot like ordinary machine to machine links...but the wireless 
transmission adds a bit to understanding how a "broadcast" mechanism 
doesn't have to know who is receiving. An important issue for alleged 
traceability issues.)

By the way, broadcast mechanisms are much more than just physical RF 
or photon broadcasts. Usenet is a broadcast system. I called this the 
"Democracy Wall" approach in my 1990 presentation at the Hackers 
Conference.

All of these things are easy to imagine (see my 1988 Crypto Anarchist 
Manifesto, for example) once the fundamental operation of remailer 
networks is grokked.


--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