From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Sat, 6 Aug 94 19:15:45 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Latency vs. Reordering (Was: Remailer ideas (Was: Re: Latency vs. Reordering))
In-Reply-To: <9408070005.AA17290@ah.com>
Message-ID: <199408070216.TAA09025@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


I had an interesting thought.  Remailer networks are hard to analyze,
with messages whizzing this way and that.  But Tim pointed out that if
you have N messages coming in to the network as a whole and N going
out, all that zigging and zagging really can't do much better than
N-fold confusion.

This suggests, that IF YOU COULD TRUST IT, a single remailer would be just
as good as a whole net.  Imagine that God offers to run a remailer.  It
batches messages up and every few hours it shuffles all the outstanding
messages and sends them out.  It seems to me that this remailer provides
all the security that a whole network of remailers would.

If this idea seems valid, it suggests that the real worth of a network of
remailers is to try to assure that there are at least some honest ones
in your path.  It's not to add security in terms of message mixing; a
single remailer seems to really provide all that you need.

Hal