From: 3umoelle@informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Ulf =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=F6ller?=)
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 1997 08:30:14 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: degree of anonymity
In-Reply-To: <65a00aae0e204b2dbf6415a44da035dd@anon.efga.org>
Message-ID: <m0xWVrY-0003bcC@ulf.mali.sub.org>
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> Have there been any studies done as to the degree
> of anonymity obtained from using these remailers?
> (I haven't been able to find any.)

Have a look at:

David Chaum: Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital
Pseudonyms, Communications of the ACM 24 (1981) 2, pp 84--88,
http://world.std.com/~franl/crypto/chaum-acm-1981.html

Wei Dai: Traffic analyzing Chaum's digital mix, 1995,
http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai/traffic.txt

Lance Cottrell: Mixmaster and remailer attacks, 1995,
http://www.obscura.com/~loki/remailer/remailer-essay.html


> And does anyone know of any studies being done
> in determining whether or not content-based
> analysis - diction and language - is a reliable
> way to determine identity?

Thomas Horton: Stylometry. In: R. Asher (ed.): The Encyclopedia of
Language and Linguistics, Pergamon Press, 1994, pp 4383--4385.

Joseph Rudman, David I Holmes, Fiona J. Tweedie, R. Harald Baayen: The
State of Authorship Attribution Studies, 1997,
http://www.qucis.queensu.ca/achallc97/papers/s004.html

A somewhat related area:

Ivan Krsul, Eugene Spafford: Authorship Analysis: Identifying The
Author of a Program, 1997,
ftp://coast.cs.purdue.edu/pub/COAST/papers/krsul-authorship_analysis_NISSC.ps.Z