From: "David E. Smith" <dsmith@midwest.net>
Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 13:53:40 +0800
To: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Subject: Re: Long-Lived Remailers
Message-ID: <199605212215.RAA13102@cdale1.midwest.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



An NSA operative with the code name 'tcmay@got.net' wrote...
> Let's call the first site "Alice" and the emanation site "Bob."
> 
> That is, all messages sent to the persistent site Alice appear to come from
> the site Bob.
> 
> The Church of Clams can simply send messages addressed to themselves
> through the Alice remailer and see immediately that they appear to come
> from Bob.

Unless Alice will automatically rotate between some random set
of Bob1, Bob2, Bob3... It also wouldn't be too difficult
to set up a message that goes through several points before
emerging at a randomly-chosen exitpoint, including a
completely independent remailer.

Actually, there's an Idea.  Set up a single address; use added
headers in the style of:

::
Remailers-To-Chain: 7
Remailers-To-Avoid: remailer@nsa.gov
Final-Destination: tcmay@got.net

Each remailer could construct a message that decrements the
remailers counter, preserving the other headers.  The
usual caveat on encrypting at each step would apply; but since
remailers' pubkeys are available, that's a trivial concern.

A lot more could be done with this general concept.  One immediate
problem is that the frontend address is a target, even though
it can't be obviously connected to any objectionable messages.
Packet sniffing is always a concern, etc etc...

Flame away.

dave

----  David Smith  Box 324  Cape Girardeau MO USA  63702
http://www.prairienet.org/~dsmith  dsmith@prairienet.org
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