Re: Frothing remailers - an immodest proposal

[cactus@seabsd.hks.net (Todd Masco)]

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In article <9502020017.AA00895@toad.com>,  <kevin@elvis.wicat.com> wrote:
>>1.  Broadcasting every couple of minutes isn't necessary and is undesirable

>True, but this has two basic assumptions that I disagree with: first,
>that we can guarantee delivery of a broadcast message to all interested
>sites; 

I had the USENET model of propogation in mind when I wrote this.  Delivery
is considerably better assured with such a store-and-forward over

>and second, that remailers never go down for unexpected reasons.

True, if you append "for extended periods of time."  The key detail is the
boundary condition: IE, how long does it take a "downed" remailer to come
off the web.  Since each site has the best idea of their own stability,
they are in the best position to set the time-out period.  A very flaky
site might set a time-out to 6 hours.  I'd suggest that a site flakier
than that shouldn't be running a remailer.

>>2.  This is actually unnecessary for your situation: All you need to do is
>>advertise your location as a "real" remailer and then have a cron job that
>>kill sendmail at 5pm on your remailer machine

>But, if my understanding of remailer operation is correct, this has two
>potential problems: first, I will still receive mail during the day,
>causing a bandwidth concern (I know, it's probably not a problem right
>now, particularly since users will probably choose to avoid a remailer
>with a possible 16 hour delay);

No, not at all.  The attempted connections to your sendmail with fail and
the mail will attempt redilvery for some period of time (usually 3 days) 
at a certain interval (usually 30min. - 1 hour).

>And even if I try to be nice
>when the mailer goes down permanently and tell everyone not to route
>mail through it any more, that news still has to travel via word of
>mouth to all users of the web.

Sure.  It's important to note that you've got two seperable problems to
address here: 1) a recurring limited window of up-time, and 2) handling
permanent down-times.

My suggestion only covers the first.  The USENET model I'm pushing is
designed to cover the second.

>[PGP web-of-trust] strikes me as critical;...
>Given an extended web of trust between remailers, the user can
>choose to trust one remailer (I have no idea how to make this process
>more palatable) and immediately gain the security of a large web of
>remailers. 

Absolutely, that's what I was trying to express.

Best regards,
- - --
Todd Masco     | "Let me get this straight.  You're making a crypto toolkit,
cactus@hks.net |  and you're worried about it being _obscure_?" - Eric Hughes
<a href="http://www.hks.net/~cactus/cactus.html">Cactus' Homepage</a>

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