From: Anonymous <anon@anon.efga.org>
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 15:10:23 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: Remailer Attack
Message-ID: <7e4f533938c10942e5d1ef49ca8e16da@anon.efga.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



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Tim May wrote:
>At 2:58 PM -0700 9/25/97, Anonymous (sic) wrote:
>>The remailers should all have about the same latency.  0 seconds seems
>>like a good Schelling point.  What would it take to reduce remailer
>>latency to under 60 seconds for most of the remailers?  Do people need
>>old 486s to dedicate to the task?  Do they need money?  Better
>>software?
>>
>>If you operate a remailer, please tell us what you need to make it
>>really work well.  Perhaps the rest of us can help make it happen.
>
>Think about a zero latency. How would mixing then occur? How would the
>mapping between incoming and outcoming messages be obscured?
>
>Latency, per se, is of course not the key issue. Mixing is. 

It depends on your application.  Right now, it's hard to get messages
through the remailer network in good time *and* the security isn't all
that high.

Increased traffic would give us more options as far as mixing and the
like.  But increased traffic won't happen until we have usable
remailer network.  Right now it's sort of usable, but only for the
dedicated, and there aren't many of us.  I seem to be the only
persistent authenticated nym who posts with any frequency.

Tools which are not used do not get improved.

>* throwaway accounts, and yet with some robustness or reputation capital
>backing them

One problem with operating a nym is that people almost always respond
to it with suspicion and hostility, even on this list.  It would be
nice to have an ordinary looking e-mail address that took in messages,
encrypted them for your public key, and then sent them out to
alt.anonymous.messages for pickup.  Going the other way it would be
nice if the account would accept signed messages and send them out as
normal e-mail or news articles.  This would allow nyms to participate
in NetWorld like everyone else.

Note that this does not require one to trust the operator of the
machine - all they have is a public key and no information of your
identity.  This should be easy to set up.

>* increased traffic at all levels
>
>* a profit motive for remailers, using "digital postage" (though this may
>work against the second point, having more traffic)

If digital postage results in remailer operators making money, this
should increase the quality of the remailer network.  A high quality
remailer network should increase traffic.

Once we have a high quality high traffic remailer network which is
profitable (!!!), well, things could really start to cook.  A quarter
per message per hop seems reasonable at this time.  The annual revenue
hits a million dollars if a little over 10,000 messages a day are
handled by the network.  This figure does not seem unattainable.

Those who find a quarter is too much should start remailers.

This is a little off the wall, but if there was a significant market
for remailers, some organizations might start affinity remailers.
That is, if you like the ACLU you can give them money by routing your
messages through their remailer.  We tend to like the people we trust.

Another feature that would be nice would be to be able to define the
message id in advance.  Were this available it would be possible to
send a message to all three cypherpunks nodes simultaneously to
maximize its propagation and to ensure reliability.  Were this
supported for Usenet gateways, it would be possible to gate the list
through the remailers such that the person doing the gating would be
hard to identify.

Also, BCC fields would be nice.  I don't know a way to post a message
to the cypherpunks list and bcc: it at the same time to the coderpunks
list, but it would be real useful.  (The idea is to let people on
coderpunks know about a relevant topic, but keep it on the main list.)

>* more chaining tools for average users (on Windows and Macintosh machines,
>using standard mailers)

It's probably better to take the tools as far they will go for
ourselves and not worry too much about evangelizing right now.  Once
the core technologies are in place and are working reliably, we will
be in a stronger position to take things to The People, if it doesn't
happen of its own accord.

Monty Cantsin
Editor in Chief
Smile Magazine
http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html
http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.html

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