From: Jeff Gostin <jgostin@eternal.pha.pa.us>
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 94 01:03:01 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Anonymous Transport Agents (Was: Latency vs. Reordering)
Message-ID: <940808023733B6Mjgostin@eternal.pha.pa.us>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes) writes:

> Simulating any of the salient features of a link encryptor over the
> Internet is an interesting exercise, particularly in regard to price
> negotiation with your service provider.

     I'm about to branch into the limits of my knowledge on this
particular topic: I run a DOS site under a heavily modified version of
Waffle (1.65 base), so the Unix-ish transport mechanisms are a tad out of
my realm of knowledge. With that in mind...

     Suppose an encryption-savvy mail transport agent, say ESMTP, was
developed. Further suppose that part of handshaking protocol for this
transport protocol included an ENCRYPTED reverse lookup on IP identities
to check that the message is actually coming from where it claims it's
coming from.  Suppose again that the results of this lookup were only
checked for correctness (boolean), and then discarded WITHOUT LOGGING, or
at least with minimal logging. If the reverse lookup was TRUE (IE: the
sending machine was who it said it was), the message was accepted. If it
failed, the message would be accepted, and then sent to the bit bucket.

     In this model, one could provide anonymous transportation of
anonymous mail FOR EVERY MACHINE ON INTERNET providing that the original
message wasn't forged. All that would be required (beyond running ESMTP)
is an encrypted version of the return address (a la Soda remailer) to be
placed some predetermined place in the message.

     This seems too easy: What am I missing? Have I actually come up with
a way to do this?

                                             --Jeff
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