Freedom's just another word for . . .

[Greg Broiles]

I'm assembling a collection of known attacks on anonymity systems, and went 
to Zero Knowledge's website to look at their materials, and noticed a few 
changes that might be of interest to people following the anonymity business -

They recently released Freedom 2.2. Their product/service offering now 
seems to be split into two categories - one "standard service" and one 
"premium service", where the "premium service" apparently uses crypto (and 
nesting? hard to tell from the marketing stuff) to provide stronger 
anonymity, while the standard doesn't, sounding more like a cross between 
the Anonymizer and Norton Internet Security (at a lower price).

With the release of 2.2, Linux and Macintosh versions are no longer 
supported due to lack of demand.

Adam Back, Ian Goldberg, and Adam Shostack put together a really helpful 
paper ("Freedom 2.1 Security Issues and Analysis") describing known 
difficulties and holes in their system. It's worth reading and thinking 
about even if you're not using Freedom, because most of the issues are 
present for ordinary web users, or users of other privacy-protecting 
systems. ZKS' willingness and ability to release this sort of information 
about their product and their field indicates that they've still got people 
of integrity working there, which is really good to see. The paper is 
beneath the "white papers" link - they've moved to a dynamic 
page-generating system which makes me reluctant to post a long (and 
probably short-lived) URL, but it's not hard to find.


--
Greg Broiles
gbroiles at well.com
"Organized crime is the price we pay for organization." -- Raymond Chandler