From: greg@ideath.goldenbear.com (Greg Broiles)
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 94 12:04:18 PDT
To: jgostin@eternal.pha.pa.us
Subject: Re: Anonymous Transport Agents
Message-ID: <m0qXZcT-0005KkC@ideath.goldenbear.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


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>      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.

[. . .]

>      In this model, one could provide anonymous transportation of
> anonymous mail FOR EVERY MACHINE ON INTERNET providing that the original
> message wasn't forged.

It looks to me like you've "supposed" away the real obstacle to 
anonymous messages - the practice of logging traffic. Once you assume
that people won't keep logs, the rest of the protocol is unnecessary -
everyone's got anonymous messaging capability already. Forgery prevention
is more useful when it's user-to-user, not host-to-host; we can do this
already with PGP. 

The tricky part is finding a way to preserve anonymity where the
majority of sites on the Internet continue to log traffic carefully,
refuse to install new software (especially anon-positive software),
and are administrated by people with simplistic and outdated ideas
about identity and punishment.


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