From: Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 1997 22:56:36 +0800
To: cypherpunks@Algebra.COM
Subject: Re: Jeff's Side of the Story.
In-Reply-To: <199707020337.UAA17514@you.got.net>
Message-ID: <19970702074006.19127@bywater.songbird.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



On Tue, Jul 01, 1997 at 08:46:53PM -0700, Tim May wrote:
> 
> There's been an ongoing discussion of the Huge Cojones remailer situation
> on the related newsgroups.
> 
> This has a lot of relevance to our issues, and this is one of the more
> illuminating articles.
> 
> --Tim

This probably has been suggested 20 years ago, but wouldn't Jeff's
problem have been solved if the following slight modification were
made to the algorithm: If you are the last remailer in a chain, then
with probability p you pick another randomly choosen remailer to send
through.  If p is 1 end user mail would never come from you; if p is
0.5 then half the time you send the mail on one more step.  The end 
user, then, can never be sure of which remailer will ultimately 
deliver the message.

If all remailers used this algorithm it has the disadvantage that mail
could float for a very long, non-deterministic time in the network --
if p were globally 1/2, for example, then with probality 1/1024, a
message would float on for 10 more hops. 

But it has the advantage that the end user cannot pick which remailer
will ultimately deliver the message, thus making it much more
difficult to pick on a single remailer.  It makes annonymous mailing 
a less attractive service, since you introduce significant delays, 
and an increased probability of loss.  But maybe making anon 
remailing less attractive would be a good thing.

The non-deterministic retention time in the network could probably be
solved, but at the expense of some significant complexity.  I have 
not been able to think of a secure way to do it, however.  [If the 
remailers know and trust each other, the problem is easy.]

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html