From: Anonymous <anon@anon.efga.org>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 11:29:14 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: Remailers and ecash
Message-ID: <2e8e2dc2b1d38583b7f28b77d4ac847d@anon.efga.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



On Wed, 1 Oct 1997, Anonymous wrote:

> Bill Stewart wrote:
> >Latency is essential to security, though high volume reduces the
> >latency that's needed to get a given level of security.
> 
> Latency may be a means to get security in the current remailer design,
> but it is a means to the end and not the end itself.  This doesn't
> mean we shouldn't use latency to get security, but it is undesirable,
> like using cinderblocks for construction.  The reason I point this out
> is that it is important to separate design choices to achieve a goal
> from the goal itself.
> 
> If we had a remailer network in which each customer had a constant
> bandwidth connection to one or more remailers, you could have zero
> latency mail. (Actually, this would be nice to use with those Comsec
> phones.)

Or use something like anonymous broadcast.  Send (fixed sized, constant
rate) packets continuously around a fixed set of remailers.  Messages may
or may not be inserted into these packets, and with encryption it is
impossible to tell which node inserted a message (and only until the
packet completed the circuit could you tell - inside the machine
originating the broadcast).  Messages would be resent through the set of
remailers, and could be PK encrypted to one of the other nodes.  With the
broadcast being anonymous, the reciever within the set cannot know who it
came from (and theoretically because it is encrypted, no one could know
who it is to except the sender, and you can do something to create
anonymous target packets). 

You would still need some mixing for low usage times (or wait for N
messages and circulate a control "forward now" message, so that 10
messages come in sequentially and are held, and then at an even interval,
10 messages go out from random nodes.