Re: Winsock & PGP Integration

[eric@remailer.net (Eric Hughes)]

   From: Johnathan Corgan <jcorgan@netcom.com>

The proposal is to spoof protocols under windows.  The idea seems
perfectly sensible to me.

   Except one.  What all of these agents have in common is that they
   interface with the Windows Sockets API to establish TCP streams
   that are used in the POP and SMTP protocols.  Since these are well
   known and standardized protocols, this gives us our toehold.

How might an interposed winsock DLL recognize what high level protocol
it was going to spoof?  Getting the port number will be a very good
approximation, but I'm not convinced of its reliability.

As to the general issue of MSWindows v. Unix, the Unix predominance
for remailer software involves the fact that Unix is on the bulk of
the machines connected to the Internet.  It's more reliable for
offering network services than MSWindows and it's got a cleaner
architecture for reconfiguration.  None of these explanations,
however, means that there won't be more MSWindows that Unix boxes for
a long time.

Eric