Traceable Infrastructure is as vulnerable as traceable messages.

[Tim May]

On Monday, August 6, 2001, at 02:01 PM, georgemw at speakeasy.net wrote:

>
> Just speculation, or course, but I suspect there are quite a few
> people out there who would be willing and able to run remailers but
> don't bother doing it because there's no perceived need
> and no real payoff.
>
> I believe in principle a mixmaster network really only needs
> two remailers to exist to function properly.


No, because then the collusion set is reduced to only two. If Alice and 
Bob run the only two mixes, a trivial matter for them to collude.

Even with three mixes, which many think to be the canonical Dining 
Cryptographers net size (perhaps because the menu example is given with 
three diners?), collusion is trivial.

In the DC-Net paper of '88, only the first two pages is devoted to 
outlining how mix-nets basically work: the rest of the paper dealt with 
dealing with collusion amongst subsets of the participants.

A mix-net of two mixes is not even worth discussing.


--Tim May