From: xpat%vm1.spcs.uma.thurman.edu@vm1.spcs.umn.edu
Date: Thu, 2 Feb 95 09:23:33 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Frothing remailers, the advertising and pinging problems
Message-ID: <9502021723.AA10432@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind) wrote:

>        ++Mail ping. Non-IP, simple, slow. ++
> A mail ping simply consists of sending a message to a remailer with a
> Request-Resending-To: yourself.  When you get it back, you know the
> remailer is alive.
> This has the advantage that it's hard for the remailer
> to trick you, even if it is an evil NSA remailer that wants you
> to believe it is alive, even though it really throws messages in
> in the trash. It can't differentuate between your "ping"
> (to be returned) and a normal message (to be thrown in the trash).

Sure it can.

   if (message_origin==request-resending-to)
     forward_message;

To get around this you would have to chain, thereby relying on
an additional remailer. Of course your origin and resend addresses
could become are different through net.sorcery, but to rely on
existing (and most likely transient) security loopholes are
unsound foundations to construct a persistent reliable remailer net.

Of course, clever Evil Remailer (tm) operatives might have their
machines work *most* of the time, and have more than one, so that
the entire network of remailers *seems* unreliable, or subtlely mangle
encrypted messages so that the ball drops somewhere else.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
P M Dierking | "Emptiness is consistent with everything" --Nagarjuna