From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Wed, 29 May 1996 11:54:37 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re:  Remailer chain length?
Message-ID: <199605282223.PAA14079@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


From: Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>
> > From: "Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>
> > And besides, the more remailers there are, the
> > more difficult it is to do traffic analysis on remailer traffic.  Actually,
> > its the more remailers people chain messages through, but there are software
> > packages that can do this easily.  The more remailers there are, the longer
> > remailer chains have the possibility of becoming.
> 
> If this is strictly true, why not simply run several instances of a remailer
> on the same machine. Then randomly chain them prior to sending them off
> site.

Or better still, run one remailer on the machine, and use it multiple
times in the chain.  It seems to me that one remailer on a machine is
better than several because it will allow more mixing of messages.  If
two messages enter a machine and later leave, it may be possible to
distinguish them if they went to different remailers and left with
different From: addresses (or other header fields) as a result.  If they
had both gone to the same remailer it would be harder to tell them
apart.

I understand that there may be political reasons to have the machine
owner and remailer operator be separate (although AFAIK the reasoning
behind this is untested), but technically it seems better to have one
remailer per machine based on traffic analysis issues.

Hal