From: Raph Levien <raph@cs.berkeley.edu>
Date: Sun, 19 May 1996 16:50:37 +0800
To: Bruce Baugh <bruce@aracnet.com>
Subject: Re: Remailers vs Nyms - conflicting assumptions?
In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960518184824.006cded8@mail.aracnet.com>
Message-ID: <319E9122.287B3BEF@cs.berkeley.edu>
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Bruce Baugh wrote:
> 
> I've been enjoying the discussion of "disposable" remailers, but I note a
> problem. If this has been addressed before, well, now it's being noted again.
> 
> In my (admittedly limited) experience with nym servers, the reply path is
> fixed - it goes through specified hops. This creates A Problem when any one
> of the remailers involved goes down. There's no way for the mail to get
> through. There's not even a way for the nym holder to verify that there is a
> site down, as opposed to some more transitory problem, without information
> from an external source.
> 
> This seems to me a fairly serious weakness, given prevailing governmental
> attitudes.
> 
> What would it take to create a nym server that could route around the death
> or disability of any given mailer?

Well, that would be a serious problem. The big question is: who decides
the routing? With the existing nym setup, the client decides the entire
route. The nymserver knows only the first hop. For the nymserver to be
able to route around damage, it would have to know that there is damage,
and that implies knowing the route.

One fix for the problem is just to refresh your nym regularly. If you
are lucky enough to be using premail, then just run "premail -makenym
nym@alpha". I'm considering adding code that automatically figures out
which nyms need to be refreshed when a remailer drops in the reliability
ratings and automatically does it, but that probably won't make it into
the next release of premail.

The fact that you can refresh nyms makes the problem you bring up much
less severe.

Raph