Re: Remailer Abuse

[pstemari@erinet.com (Paul J. Ste. Marie)]

At 03:44 PM 1/6/95 -0500, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> ... Why?  Why wouldn't the FV remailers use settlements?  At the end of
>>the month, everyone settles accounts in re who gets what fraction of
>>what.  No logs are needed other than counters.
>
> ... 1) The initial remailer has no way of knowing how many subsequent links
>there are in the chain, and so doesn't know if I've paid him enough to
>reimburse everyone else.  I can easily cheat. He also doesn't know _who_
>the subsequent chains are. He can deduct one "stamp" from the amount, and
>forward the rest on to the next remailer, and trust them to do the same,
>but if I'm cheating there won't be enough to make it to the end of the
>chain.  Both of these facts (initial op doens't know how long the chain
>will be, or who will be on it) are essential to the security I get from
>using anon remailers, so even if they could be "fixed", it would be bad to.

No, basically the idea is that each stamp covers an average number of 
remailer hops.  The remailer ops get together, with counts of their ins and 
outs to each other, and split some fraction of the stamp prices accordingly. 
 They can even determine the average number of hops given the in/out counts. 
 Fairly simple, actually.

    --Paul J. Ste. Marie
      pstemari@well.sf.ca.us, pstemari@erinet.com