Re: anonymous mailing lists

[ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home)]

Ian Goldberg wrote:
> 
> Also, what are the issues for people who aren't on the network?  It will
> be very hard to prevent people from noticing that they're sending a
> message to the network, or receiving one from it, so it seems the best we can
> do is to avoid letting someone be able to link incoming messages to outgoing
> ones.  A way to help this is to have a (smaller) number of nodes be the
> only ones which send mail _out_ of the network.  One idea which I'd like to
> try is having that last remailer charge postage in order to send mail out.
> After all, he is the one who will take the "heat" for the anon message,
> probably.  By concentrating the outgoing messages, it should be easier
> to do the latency and reordering tricks.
> 

Hm, I wonder what would it take to incorporate encryption straight 
into sendmail (I am talking about actually encrypting not only message
bodies, but also MAIL FROM: and RCPT TO: data). The protocol extension
would for SMTP be something like this:

A server in the welcome message may say "PGP Enhanced". If the client sees 
this substring, client (after HELO) may send command

SENDKEY

If the server answers "503 Command unrecognized", the exchange goes in the
normal way. If instead a text with 214 preceding each line gets sent 
followed by a final ".", this text is considered a PGP key for exchange.

Then usual MAIL FROM: and RCPT TO: follow, following by DATA command.
The data sent by client will be PGP encrypted. Moreover, the data may
have MAIL FROM: and RCPT TO: fields preceding any header information 
and message body. These RCPT TO: and MAIL FROM: override anything that
was supplied in clear text prior to the DATA command.

This change in protocol is relatively simple to implement and does not
require the actual sendmail to have any cryptographic subroutines.
Instead, sendmail simply calls public-key encryption programs with right
command line parameters when an encrypted message is received.

It is also possible to incorporate Latent-Time: into such messages.

What it gives to us is that a great number of systems can participate
in the more secure mail exchange. It gives clear advantages to each
site running it because now they may be exchanging may securely for 
all users.

Users of remailer network may use such PGP enhanced hosts to conceal
their usage of remailer network. It is rather obvious that when the 
number of PGP-enhanced mailers becomes large, it will be hard to tell
who is and who is not using the remailer network.

	- Igor.