From: Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 23:02:12 +0800
To: cypherpunks@ssz.com (Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer)
Subject: Re: remailer resistancs to attack (fwd)
Message-ID: <199801161527.JAA10183@einstein.ssz.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text



Forwarded message:

> Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 04:50:37 -0500
> From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org>
> Subject: Re: remailer resistancs to attack

> An obvious thing to try is to add some more remailers.  300 remailers would
> not be immune to simultaneous shutdown by the authorities, but it would
> make it more difficult.  A dozen of so remailers makes shutdown fairly simple.

Considering that the federal law enforcement agencies have had decades to
deal with organized crime and such over a national and even international
level, 100' level warrants is not even a resource strain if the pay off is
large enough. Now if we had 10,000 or 100,000 the picture begins to change
radicaly.

> Threats to the remailer network come from a few basic places.
> 
>   1.  Traditional law enforcement
>   2.  Unauthorized law enforcement
>   3.  "friends" of message recipients or "friends" of the remailer
>   4.  unreliability of the machines that form the network
>   5.  Hacking attacks
>   6.  Design
>   7.  User incompetence
    8.  Operator incompetence
    9.  initial startup difficulties
   10.  lack of an effective financial model

> Traditional law enforcement takes so long to investigate, the keys could be
> canceled and replaced several times.

This is another problem with the entire crypto process as now implimented.
Users of keys, either for encryption or signing, tend to think of the keys
as long term entities. Considering the increase in computing power, the
coming ubiquity of law enforcement monitoring on the network, increased
payoff for hackers as the traffic of personal info increases, and general
human failure keys should in fact be changed often (say a couple of times a
year, annualy at least)

> A significant problem is in design.  The remailer network is not designed
> to be robust or fault tolerant.  There is no error notification to the
> user.  If your message gets dropped along the way, there is no recovery
> system that gets it through another route.  If you misspell your
> destination address, or other problem exists, you don't get notified of the
> event.

These are all criticisms of the TCP/IP and associated network mechanisms and
not specific faults in the remailer model. It has to work with what it has.


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