From: pstemari@erinet.com (Paul J. Ste. Marie)
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 95 17:46:19 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: How do I know if its encrypted?
Message-ID: <9501130137.AA03281@eri.erinet.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 10:08 PM 1/11/95 -0800, Eric Hughes wrote:
> ... Seems to me that a quite reasonable condition of use of a remailer is
>that what is passed isn't human readable.

Perhaps I missed this, but why?  If someone is going to plant kiddie porn or 
whatever on you, does it really matter if they encrypt it first or not?

If the purpose is simply to generate additional encrypted traffic to obscure 
stuff that needs encryption, that goal might be better served by simply 
encrypting files for their recipient as they pass through, in those cases 
where a public key is available and the msg isn't already encrypted.

I forget the name of the cypher (Vigere, perhaps--the one that uses a series 
of Caesar-like cyphers keyed by a password), but you could just run it 
through that with a password of abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz and you'd flatten 
out the distribution enough to get it by casual inspection.

    --Paul J. Ste. Marie
      pstemari@well.sf.ca.us, pstemari@erinet.com