From: Mikolaj Habryn <dichro@tartarus.uwa.edu.au>
Date: Fri, 13 May 94 11:59:00 PDT
To: scheida@earlham.edu (David Scheidt)
Subject: Re: Message Havens
In-Reply-To: <0097E5E6.B70F7014.977@earlham.edu>
Message-ID: <199405131858.CAA05191@lethe.uwa.edu.au>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


	As regards message havens...

	Seems to me that you should also have all of the messages to you 
collated into one block, have some random length padding added, and then 
encrypt the whole thing and send it back to you. If you have this all 
done automatically by the server at the haven, then you may not even need 
to call all of those random other messages down. That is, assuming you 
trust the sysadmin of that haven, which is probably not the best of ideas.

	Anyhow, you can do somwthing similar with anonymous remailers. 
Maybe someone should (or already has) written a client which will take 
your message, pad it with some extra gibberish, then construct all of the 
headers necessary (and encrypt several times along the way) to post it 
along a path of remailers which either the user inputs, or it randomly 
determines. Seems to me that if you leave the actual routing in the hands 
of the user, and not at the discretion of the first remailer you send it 
to, you gain a far more secure transmission. Of course i could be wrong...

	It would be nice if remailers supported padding from this end as 
well. ie, insert something like 

::
Padding: ***

	and this tells the remailer that, after decrypting the message 
(presumably it was sent to a remailer that supports encryption) it should 
discard whatever comes after the ***, or however it happens to be 
implemented. This gives yet another layer of obfuscation between me and 
whoever doesn't like me...

*       *       Mikolaj J. Habryn
                dichro@tartarus.uwa.edu.au
    *           "Information wants to be free!"
                PGP Public key available by finger
    *           #include <standard-disclaimer.h>