From: Jeremey Barrett <jeremey@bluemoney.com>
Date: Sat, 21 Jun 1997 06:14:21 +0800
To: "John Smith" <cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Anonymous browsing (was Re: Getting Back to our Radical Roots)
In-Reply-To: <199706202052.NAA05467@f16.hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.2.32.19970620150717.0082bab0@descartes.bluemoney.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 01:52 PM 6/20/97 PDT, John Smith wrote:
>>The resources used to break DES, if as many people hosted remailers and
>>anonymizers on their machines, would further Cypherpunks goals a lot 
>more
>>than breaking DES, which we all know was breakable (as we know what "56
>>bits" means).
>
>There were messages here some time back about systems like anonymizer
>but chainable and using cryptography.  Did anything come of that?
>Efficient anonymous web browsing could be a killer app for crypto.
>Use anonymous web access to get to hotmail accounts like this one
>and you have anonymous email, easy to use.
>

Anonymous web browsing is definitely being worked on. However, simply 
chaining proxies ala remailer chains is not sufficient because traffic 
analysis is fairly trivial.

The question is what's the threat model. If the goal is to prevent the
server from identifying the client given limited resources, then 
www.anonymizer.com or similar is sufficient. However, the real problem
is preventing an entity with unlimited resources and control over most
of the nodes in the anonymous network from conducting successful traffic
analysis. This is an entirely different and very difficult problem.

The cpunks are getting some help in this from the Naval Research Lab
(although actually I think we're helping them not vice versa)
because the military seems to want to be able to browse anonymously too.

Jeremey.


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--
Jeremey Barrett                                BlueMoney Software Corp.
Crypto, Ecash, Commerce Systems               http://www.bluemoney.com/
PGP key fingerprint =  3B 42 1E D4 4B 17 0D 80  DC 59 6F 59 04 C3 83 64