Re: Long-Lived Remailers

["David E. Smith" <dsmith@midwest.net>]

At 20:40 22 May 96 NSA operative Loren James Rittle <rittle@comm.mot.com> 
wrote...

  (This was originally me.  Wow.)

> >::
> >Remailers-To-Chain: 7
> >Remailers-To-Avoid: remailer@nsa.gov
> >Final-Destination: tcmay@got.net
> 
> This will not work.  The original sender must pick the path himself,
> if maximum encryption to hide the final destination is to be used.
> The properly used cypherpunks-style remailer network provides that as
> long as even one remailer in the chain is trustworthy, your secret is
> safe.  Under your scheme, if the first remailer is untrustworthy,
> everything is blown.  This is because unless the original sender
> pick's the path (or at least the last hop explicitly), the final
> destination and message must be available to each hop.

Well, I freely admit that it was just a notion that sort of came
to me whilst at the terminal, with a beer on the desk.  The sort
of thing that often impairs my already-limited judgment :)

Although... is this a possible way to lessen remailer-operator
liability?  If it is known that every remailer along the
way chooses another remailer at random, it might become
less likely to hold any given last-hop remailer liable
for the CO$ documents spewed forth from it.  It would
become necessary to keep track of the final destination and
to decrypt at every stage, unless there's a set Last-Hop:
header; but that would defeat the whole purpose.  Having
traffic going all over the place randomly might be useful
to defeat traffic analysis, though.

I think I've just argued myself out of the whole idea.
Never mind :)

dave

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----  David Smith  Box 324  Cape Girardeau MO USA  63702
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