CNN.com on Remailers

[Jim Choate]

On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Trei, Peter wrote:

> Typical Choate, missing the point.

Merry Christmas to you too.

> A remailer simply gets sent a message,
> applies it's decryption key,

The same key it shares with everyone else (all users to anon_1 use the
same key - bad!!! idea). Allows you to build up a big library of
plain-cypher pairs, and if you send it to yourself you can attack their
private key as well.

> and sends the contents on to the next address (yes, this type of remailer 
> does not include nice features such as cover traffic).

And it can't encrypt that outgoing traffic since it doesn't have the key
to the destination (I assume the user must nest these themselves). This
represents a lot of work for the initiator of a email, especially if
they're in a 'sensitive' situation. Too big a 'signature' (the traffic
analysis kind).
 
> It has no idea if the address it received the message from is a remailer.
> It has no idea if the address it forwarded the message to   is a remailer.
> It doesn't need to.
> Chaining is the sender's problem.

The sender having to know all the steps is a major threat to the standard
remailer model. In fact it's one of the major shorcomings with the current
approaches. The sender should at most be able to set the number of
remailers, not which ones. That way there's on evidence sitting around on
their machines (and you can posit throwing the keys away each time - but
then you have to go out and get them again...and around and around we go).

One of the primary points of any remailer technology should be to minimize
the threat to the user. This model doesn't.


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