Re: What about making re-mailers automatically chain?

["David E. Smith" <dsmith@prairienet.org>]

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To: gcg@pb.net, cypherpunks@toad.com
Date: Sun Sep 29 04:06:38 1996
> Would it be a good idea to have a re-mailer "randomly" decide whether
>  to
> send the mail to the destination or to another re-mailer.  If all
> re-mailers performed this way, not even the sender would know the path.
> The chain could be short sometimes and long others.  Granted, there is
>  a
> possibility that every mailer decides to chain instead of sending the
> message to the recip, but some clever counter tag could keep the number
>  of
> links to a certain maximum.  The "randomness" of this would aid in
>  traffic
> analysis, and of course each mailer that decides to chain the mail
>  would
> encrypt under the next mailer's pub key.  Any thoughts?

I dunno about that one.  Even if the message itself is encrypted,
every remailer has to have the address of the final recipient for
your plan to work.  And if you have cleartext for that message
(oops!) then any remailer operator could read it.  More traffic
is of course a good thing, but I'm just kinda iffy on the concept.

dave



- ----- David E. Smith, P O Box 324, Cape Girardeau MO USA 63702
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