Re: 2-way anonymous via SASE

[Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>]

Jim's idea looks good for anonymous communication.  It is basically
the same as the one Chaum describes in his 1981 Communications of the
ACM paper.  CACM is one of the most widely available computer science
journals so I would encourage people interested in this topic to go
to the local university or junior college library and xerox it (CACM,
vol 24, p. 84, February, 1981).

The one difference is that Jim's B, C, and D are conventional rather
than public keys in Chaum's system.  This could be slightly more
efficient.

We have had a primitive SASE capability available and documented on the
cypherpunks remailers for over a year.  Karl Barrus and I have written
scripts and programs to facilitate creating SASE's - you just type in
your address and a list of remailers to use and out comes the SASE block
which goes at the top of the reply message.

The weakness of the present system is that it lacks the B's etc. for
extra encryption at each stage.  That means that someone who can observe
net traffic can match up incoming and outgoing messages because the body
does not change, only the address portion changes.  (Of course, such
matching is already possible for the non-batching remailers based on
simple timing, which includes almost all of them.)

One other caution Chaum raises re the SASE's is that they should not be
used more than once.  If they could be it would be possible to send in
multiple messages using the same SASE and notice which output address
was similarly duplicated.  This non-reuse actually has to be enforced by
the remailer, else the Opponent can eavesdrop on an SASE-based message
and replay the address portion.

Hal