From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Sat, 2 Apr 94 16:45:35 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: DEATH TO THE
Message-ID: <199404030057.QAA08313@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


One thing worth noting about the burst of remailer messages is how much
worse it could have been.  Each message was sent to many remailers, with
requests to send it on to many more.  Potentially the message could be
duplicated n-fold at each step, until horrendous numbers of messages were
circulating through the remailer network and being sent to the other
destinations.

Luckily, this didn't happen, apparently because most remailer software does
not support multiple recipients.  But the lesson is that as people deploy
new remailers and improve the software, "multiple recipients" should *not*
be added as a feature, IMO.  Doing that would make the network vulnerable
to these kinds of geometric-growth attacks.  It would be so easy to do it
that people would probably be tempted to try just for kicks.  So I think this
feature should definately be left out of future remailer plans.

Hal