Re: Novel use of Usenet and remailers to mailbomb from luzskru@cpcnet.com

[lull@acm.org (John Lull)]

On Fri, 12 Jan 1996 22:25:53 GMT, I wrote:

> The remailer could calculate a hash for the body of each encrypted
> message received (the same portion which will be decrypted by PGP),
> tabulate the last few thousand hashes, and simply discard any messages
> with a duplicate hash.  The target of the attack would receive only
> the first copy of the message.

To refine this a bit further, the hash need not cover the entire
message.  It could be sped up a bit by restricting it to the header
containing the encrypted session key.  Since the session key is
selected randomly, that header (and its hash) should be unique for
every message.

The hash values could also be retained for a fixed period of time --
perhaps 23 hours -- following the most recent receipt of a given hash.
Thus a message could be repeated by the legitimate sender after a
delay of 24 hours, and would be forwarded.  The original sender could
re-encrypt the message (thus changing its hash) earlier than that, and
it would be properly forwarded.  A canned message on the other hand,
being sent from multiple locations, would likely be received more
often than this and not forwarded after the first time, even if each
sender only sent it once a day.

You could even penalize messages for which you've received massive
dupes, by extending the hash retention time by, say, 12 hours for each
dupe received.  If you got a message 100 times in one day, you'd
refuse to forward any duplicates for nearly 2 months.  This would take
care of those on vacation at the time of the original attack, and
those with very slow news feeds.