From: Michael Stutz <stutz@dsl.org>
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 1997 23:04:00 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Crowds as an anonymous remailer
In-Reply-To: <v0311075ab05978fb0222@[139.167.130.248]>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.95.971003103858.27289E-100000@devel.nacs.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




On the subject of Crowds
(<http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/7331.html>), a distributed
system for anonymous Web browsing, I was wondering if anyone knew of any
attempts or efforts to create a decentralized remailer network in the same
manner -- can such a thing be done, and be useful?

Such a system might work quite like Crowds (or could even be a subset of
Crowds itself, or based on it, as the source is available), with a small
"jondo" program running on each host in the remailer network. To send an
anonymous message you must be running a jondo, hence you are part of the
network. The jondo takes your message, encrypts and randomly forwards it to
any jondo in the network, which then either re-forwards it to another jondo
or its final destination.

There is no way for the recipient to know who the original sender was other
than that sender was part of the crowd running the jondos, and there is no
central remailer machine to target since the "remailer" consists of a
network of machines running these jondos. As members increase, the network
performance as well as the degree of anonymity increases (imagine, for
instance, if such a program came with Linux as a standard part of the OS).


m

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