From: daleh@ix.netcom.com (Dale Harrison (AEGIS))
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 95 22:47:38 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: How do I know if its encrypted?
Message-ID: <199501120646.WAA28573@ix2.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


You wrote: 

>So people can write special software that gets their message rejected
>by an entropy filter.  This is a disadvantage?  It looks like an
>irrelevancy to me.
>
It's an artificial example, but one that points out that merely doing a 
frequency analysis on the datastream isn't enough to guantee the correct 
answer.  Reliable remailer software will have to worry about false postives 
as well as false negatives; especially if it's a fee-for-service operation.

This might also be a nice feature if you're trying to dodge an NSA filter.


>Seems to me that a quite reasonable condition of use of a remailer is
>that what is passed isn't human readable.
>
Of course the implicit assumption in that statement is that encrypted 
traffic hasn't been outlawed or regulated, or that the sender doesn't want 
to 'appear' to be sending encrypted traffic.