Re: Authentication vs encryption: CPs on the web

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

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Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu> writes:

>	With all due respect, I disagree with your assessment.
>Anonymity is a job, and we should build small tools to do jobs.  It is
>my feeling that building anonymity into the web will make the
>protocols more complex than they need to be.

I don't think this is necessarily the case.  Anonymity is often a matter
of _not_ stamping identification onto a packet.  Rather than complicating
protocols it will often just be a matter of having options not to include
certain fields.  For example, the current HTTP has an option to send a
user name when the client makes connections.  I have heard that the
Netscape client sends this and has no switch to turn it off.  You can put
in a fake name (or none) but then when you want to send email your reply
address is wrong.  This is an example where support for privacy should be
in the client and can't really be added on.

>	There is no anonymity in mail, but we have anonymous mail of
>varying privacy.  I suspect mixmaster will greatly enhance that.  To
>get privacy in the web, build a web remailer on top of the CERN or TIS
>HHTPd proxies.  Encrypt between you & the proxy, let the proxy go out.

I think this is a fine idea if this could work.  The way proxy support
works now, the client connects to the proxy and then sends it the URL.
This means that the proxy knows which clients are connecting to which web
pages and must be trusted to keep this private.  What you need is a way
of chaining proxies such that no one proxy sees both the client and
server addresses.  This is what we have with the remailers.  But again
this would appear to require changes to the clients and corresponding
protocols.

Perhaps it would work to have a local trusted proxy running right on your
machine which implements the connection to a chain of web remailers.  You
can run vanilla clients with their nice UI's and other hot features, and
all of your net accesses go through your local proxy which cleans them up
and uses chaining for access.  This sounds like a doable project which
would be worth exploring.

Hal

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