From: David Merriman <merriman@metronet.com>
Date: Sat, 23 Apr 94 16:05:43 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com (cypherpunks)
Subject: Remailers
Message-ID: <199404232305.AA28387@metronet.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


I 'know' that a decent remailer will time-delay forwarding messages so as
to throw sand in the gears of traffic analysis.  I wonder if it wouldn't
help more if the remailer(s) were set up so that people could send 'dummy'
messages to them.
That is, say I wanted to ensure that traffic analysis on myself were made
as difficult as possible.  I could Email something to a remailer with an
embedded 'flag' or code (ex: blackhole, disposal, trash, etc) telling it
to forward the message to the Bitbucket.  Alternatively, I could include
some other code or flag (ex: rubber, bounce, ricochet, etc) telling it to
take the included (dummy) data, scramble it some, and return it some
random time later.
Alternatively, the remailer could take a so-tagged message, generate some
random data of similar size, and send it (along with my address) to
another remailer that it knew about, which would generate *different*
random data, and sent that back to me.

Wouldn't something like this further complicate traffic analysis, or would
it just constipate the net?

Dave Merriman
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Politics: fr. Latin 'poly' meaning 'many';
'ticks' small blood-sucking parasites.