Feds patent onion routing (Was: Pentagon Hides Behind Onion Wraps)

Declan McCullagh declan at well.com
Sat Aug 18 07:28:50 PDT 2001


On Sat, Aug 18, 2001 at 12:31:05PM +0200, Eugene Leitl wrote:
> >http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46126,00.html

The most cypherpunk-relevant bits of my article:

Syverson said that the U.S. government was awarded patent number
6,266,704 for Onion Routing on July 24.

That announcement prompted an angry reaction from Usenix attendees,
many of whom are programmers, security consultants and system
administrators who aren't big fans of software patents -- especially
in the area of anonymous communications, where there's been so much
prior work before the Navy ever got involved.

Mathematician David Chaum, for instance, wrote an article titled
"Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses and Digital Pseudonyms"
for Communications of the ACM as far back as 1981. Lance Cottrell, who
now runs anonymizer.com, wrote part of the mixmaster system in the
early 1990s, and similar techniques were discussed on the cypherpunks
mailing list even earlier.

Syverson, who is listed on the patent with co-inventors Michael Reed
and David Goldschlag, defended the government's move. "It is a
necessary step for those of us working for the government to bring
technology to the public," Syverson said.

The patent describes Onion Routing, which has been the subject of
analysis at previous security conferences, as providing "an electronic
communication path between an initiator and a responder on a
packet-switching network comprising an onion routing network that
safeguards against traffic analysis and eavesdropping by other users
of the packet switching network" such as the Internet.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='6,266,704'.WKU.&OS=PN/6,266,704&RS=PN/6,266,704

-Declan





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