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RE: a new way to do anonymity
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Johnathan Corgan wrote:
> Wei, your traffic analysis treatment of this sort of thing would go a long way
> toward uncovering weaknesses and determining operational requirements and
> limitations.
It seems to me that if a user maintains a 24-hour a day pipe to an
uncompromised server, then the method I described earlier against
remailers should not work against that user. Otherwise, some kind of
in-out statistical analysis may work.
> Tim, what massive social effects would it have if this type of network service
> were to become widely deployed? :)
See Verner Vinge's _True Names_ for a fictional description of a future
where real time anonymous interactions are possible.
> At first glance, this Pipe-Net idea doesn't seem to take a lot of rocket science;
> it seems that most of the components or algorithms are are already in use, just
> in a very different way.
This is certainly true. The system Vinge describes is almost a
pipe-net. But he didn't say anything about link encryption, without
which the system can be trivially broken.
> I can think of a number of problems already, however. Spamming. Bandwidth
> limitations. Complexity of client and switch software. Standards. Flow
> control.
>
> In other works, all the stuff the ATM forum is already dealing with :)
I haven't responded to the comments you made about the similarity between
pipe-net and ATM, mostly because I'm not very familiar with ATM. But
as I understand it, ATM is based on forwarding fixed length cells,
whereas pipe-net is based on fixed-bandwidth link encrypted streams.
Spamming, and flow control shouldn't be problems, since all users
of a server will connect to it with pipes of the same bandwidth, so it
can just accept a certain number and then stop.
Bandwidth limitations will depend on how fast the server CPU can do
the encryption and decryption. With LESM at 100 cps, each connection
took 2% of the CPU capacity of a Sun 4-CPU(90Hz) 4/670MP. Of course,
I made no consideration for efficiency when I hacked ESM, so this can
probably be decreased quite a bit.
Wei Dai
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E-mail: Wei Dai <[email protected]> URL: "http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai"
=================== Exponential Increase of Complexity ===================
--> singularity --> atoms --> macromolecules --> biological evolution
--> central nervous systems --> symbolic communication --> homo sapiens
--> digital computers --> internetworking --> close-coupled automation
--> broadband brain-to-net connections --> artificial intelligence
--> distributed consciousness --> group minds --> ? ? ?