From: Jim McCoy <mccoy@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 94 12:02:12 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Remailer Noise Traffic
In-Reply-To: <9401262019.AA14167@toad.com>
Message-ID: <199401271953.AA12329@flubber.cc.utexas.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Philippe Nave writes:
> W. Kinney writes :
> > 
> > Is there some reason why lots of 'punks _aren't_ running a simple script 
> > that will, say, fire a message to one's self through a chain of remailers 
> > every time you log on or at random intervals or something?

Something to consider for this is Safe-Tcl and the proposed Enabled-Mail
extension for MIME.  Enabled-Mail will allow you to create a multi-part
MIME message that contains a script to be executed in a safe interpreter at
delivery-time (to the user's mailbox) or at read-time; one proposed use
listed in the draft was to generate return-reciepts when mail had been
delivered to the recipient.  It would be quite trivial to adapt this system
to send off an encapsulated message back through the remailers that would
take a random path through the system and at the final remailer ask to be
delivered to /dev/null.  

[...]
> Things That Would Be Nice:
>    1) The script, incantation, or whatever should be easy for even Unix
>       novices (*blush*) to implement without assistance. [...]

If/when enabled-mail is accepted as a part of the MIME standard it will
become fairly transparent to the user and can be spread to more than just
Unix hosts.

>    2) The script may need to incorporate some random element that changes
>       the path through the remailers every now and then [...]

It would be trivial to have the remailer randomize the paths generated in
the scripts it attaches to messages going out.

>    3) Some assurance that this will be a *quiet* process;

Again, this could be done by the script-generation process so that all
error messages are pointed to the remailer.

jim