From: Eli Brandt <ebrandt@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 94 12:37:42 PST
To: cypherpunks list <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: Re: remailer multiple paths?
In-Reply-To: <9401271557.AA08940@paycheck.cygnus.com>
Message-ID: <9401272036.AA25208@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> From: "Mark W. Eichin" <eichin@paycheck.cygnus.com>
> You'd need a good way of breaking up the message; if you were
> encrypting already, it'd probably do well enough to put byte x into
> message (x mod n) where you're sending n messages. (You could even
> slice it at the bit level, but that's a little harder to do in a
> trivial script...) 

It would be easy enough to split the message by XOR into as many
pieces as you wish.  This would be much more secure than an
every-nth-byte division, though it would increase total traffic
correspondingly.  Taking into account the non-ideality of the
remailer net, using m-of-n secret sharing would be more reliable.

It's not clear to me that this buys you much, though.  Encrypting
the message end-to-end will suffice to keep it private.  What
remailers do for you is impede traffic analysis.  Sending your
message in n pieces gives a traffic watcher n chances.

   Eli   ebrandt@jarthur.claremont.edu