Compromising the first remailer

[rishab@dxm.ernet.in]

Nathan Zook wrote:
> >notion of not assigning trust is simply nonsense. When you send a piece
> >of mail to a remailer, encrypted or not, you are assigning complete
> >trust in that remailer to keep you anonymous and not to forward your
> >mail to the NSA immediately.
>  
> NOT TRUE.  With proper use of encryption, you are trusting your first
> remailer only to not reveal that you sent a message, and not to correlate
> that message to the one it sends out.  With rational use of garbage running
> two deep, you can even suffer this loss without significant harm.
 
Actually any remailer, with NSA-modified operating software, can correlate the
message it receives to the one it sends out, by keeping track of the message
past any decryption until it's posted out. With rational use of garbage and
chaining, all you do is stop the NSA from knowing your final destination from
the first remailer, but they _would_ know the identity of the second remailer
(assuming the first is compromised) and could try to attack the second, ad
nauseum. Of course this was always known to be the problem, to which chaining
and traffic analysis evasion are partial solutions.


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Rishab Aiyer Ghosh          rishab@dxm.ernet.in           rishab@arbornet.org
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