Re: Broadcasts and the Rendezvous Problem

[Pierre Uszynski <pierre@shell.portal.com>]

L. Todd Masco said:
> [...]
> bringing a new remailer on line could be achieved by broadcasting a message
> through a newsgroup specifying the location and type of the remailer.  If
> necessary, one or more pseudonymous automatic testing agents could pick up
> the message and put the remailer through a barrage of tests, broadcasting
> a "remailer certification" with a certain duration.  "Premail++" and
> remailers could find their next hop by examining current certifications
> and choosing one with desired characteristics, scoring by trusted testing
> agents and other criteria (including the passage of time since the last
> certification).
> [...]
> My question is whether this strikes anybody else as a
> desirable design: we would end up with a net of remailers that is fairly
> resilient and not dependent upon any one list of remailers.  If a node
> goes down, the net adjusts in rather short order and service is not
> disrupted.  

Handling unreliable remailers is even more important if you want to
encourage the "every-one-a-remailer" view. Numerous, low traffic,
remailers will not be run professionally.

I'd like to complete such a view of a remailer plan with:

1) Acknowledgements, or Bounces, or broadcast drop-ids: When a mail is
sent through a chain of remailers, it should be dealt with reliably
from the user perspective. That means either the user gets an ack that
the message got there when they do, or the user gets a bounce when they
don't. Either way he should know what to expect. You could do that with
response blocks (but they themselves can fail), or you can do that by
broadcasting the ids of messages that are dropped because the next node
in a chain is down. An id is just a large random number. Again, here
you can use a broadcast medium. This could also be achieved if the
recipient's mailer filters out duplicate copies of messages: the
sender's mailer would monitor the reviews of the remailers used in
transit, and re-issue messages that came too close to a break in the
chain. Nobody ever needs to look at all this info, it would be handled
by your personal Premail++.

2) Amateur remailers need a flow control mechanism. You cannot expect
somebody (or his internet provider) to be happy when his personal
account remailer suddenly becomes the most popular in the current
premail++ rating and gets flooded by everybody and his brother
(randomizing premail++ or not). It does not need to be a very smooth or
precise flow control, but it should be enough to prevent catastrophic
events. Current systems tend to do that by refusing the mail, or
dropping the packets on the floor, but we do not have this luck: the
personal mail of the account holder must still go through. I do not
know a good way to do that. Posting the remailer as being down when a
flood occurs is too rash and too late. One way to do that would be for
these "small" remailers to issue tickets (say 700 message tickets a
week, each valid for the transport of one message).  The remailer agent
(premail++) of a remailer-net user who expects to use the net for
around 15 messages a week would try to reserve, say, 6 tickets each
from 20 "small" remailers (for chaining, and to account for "sold-out"
remailers). In the message, with the info for each successive remailer,
it would paste in a ticket (which is then spent.) But now some ticket
distribution system is needed: ticket distribution could be done by the
remailer itself, but then we would be back to a flooding problem. So
ticket distribution is better handled by "seriously" run "ticketing
agents", just like the review process is better done by "review
agents". A "small" remailer would hand out a provision of tickets to a
small set of "ticketing agents", and would post to the broadcast medium
that it is up and that tickets can be obtained from this set of
agents.  A ticket is simply a short string of random numbers.  They can
be re-used fairly quickly by the "small" remailer (say used one week
out of 4), as we are only trying to avoid fortuitous flooding, not
criminal mail-bombing.

Finally, I'd say that a well propagated Usenet News group is a
convenient medium to do this on, but needs not be the only one
considered.  A not-so-well propagated broadcast can be reached by
anybody's premail++ through yet a third set of robot mailers,
advertised in an ad-hoc fashion, just like the remailers themselves
now.

I know this is a lot of different entities, but I firmly believe that
(soon enough :-) nobody will use chained remailers manually, Premail
is only the beginning.

Pierre.
pierre@shell.portal.com