Re: Multiple Remailers at a site?

[Scott Brickner <sjb@universe.digex.net>]

Bill Stewart writes:
>>I don't think multiple remailers at the same site help anything.
>
>Assume Alice, Bob, and Carol are on abc.com and Xenu, Yak, and Zut
>are on xyz.com.  Remailing between Alice, Bob, and Carol doesn't
>make appear to make much difference, but it does reduce the damage
>if one of the remailer's keys is compromised.  On the other hand,
>mail from Alice -> Xenu -> Bob -> Yak -> Carol -> Zut adds traffic
>to the system, and makes traffic analysis more difficult,
>even if the Bad Guys are watching site abc.com and have stolen
>Alice, Bob, and Carol's keys.

Wait a minute.  More traffic should make analysis easier, since traffic
analysis is mostly statistical work on the source and destination (not
necessarily "from" and "to").  A bigger sample makes more reliable
results.

For traffic analysis, I don't know *who* sent the message (it was,
after all, anonymized), but I do know a site which transmitted it and
one which received it, the time it was transmitted, and maybe its
size.  Multiply this times a whole bunch of messages, and I can infer
information about "common interests" between those sources and
destinations.

The delays and mixing done by remailers make it harder by
disassociating the true sender from the true receiver.  If a remailer
were to ignore this step, the analyst can deduce from the two data
points

    "message a, source A, destination RemailerX, time t, size s"
    "message b, source RemailerX, destination B, time t+0.001s, size s"

that there's some connection between A and B.  The more such evidence,
the stronger the connection.  If the remailer does a good job with
the delays and shuffling, then it becomes difficult for the analyst
to match message a with message b, leaving him with what he already
knew (that A and RemailerX have a common interest, as to B and RemailerX,
but the interests may be wholly unrelated).

Multiple remailers on the same machine increases the resolution of
the address information, at best, improving the analysts ability to
make connections.  The same traffic load going to a single remailer
at the site makes the analyst's job harder.

>The other threat it helps with is that if XYZ.COM gets complaints
>about that evil user Zut, she can kick her off (Bad Zut!)
>and still leave Xenu and Yak alone; if the remailer service
>were provided by the machine owner herself she might be directly liable.

Hmm.  Nothing really stops the machine owner from creating a personal
anonymous account to run the remailer.  When someone complains, shut it
down and create a new one.  There isn't yet a law which requires that
the owner be able to identify the user.  This affords the same
protection that multiple users does.