Re: Free Email as Anonymous Remailer Re: NPR is at it again...

[Lucky Green <shamrock@cypherpunks.to>]

Sorry for the slow reply. Any http anonymizer not using link padding is
subject to trivial traffic analysis. See the "Pipe-net" thread in the
archive. Also see the graphs at http://www.onion-router.net/Vis.html

What makes the graphs all the more impressive is that the OR people used
to argue against my claim that you need link padding. They don't argue any
more. ;-)

--Lucky

On Sat, 14 Nov 1998, Bill Stewart wrote:

> At 11:47 PM 11/11/98 +0100, Lucky Green wrote:
> >On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Bill Stewart wrote:
> >> An interesting project would be a free low-volume anonymizer cgi for Apache,
> >> given the large number of current users and the much larger number
> >> of people who will run web servers once they have cable modems.
> >How do you do chaining with a cgi?
> 
> Looks easy enough to do, if a bit ugly, where "ugly" is somewhat equivalent to
> "build yet another local proxy widget to hide the gory details",
> though it's not really much uglier than doing a good anonymizer,
> and getting details like cookies and Java/script right are harder.
> 
> Define "encrypted" as "PGP or something like it".  It may be possible
> to gain some efficiencies by using SSL, but not critical.
> Take a cgi script and use POST to hand it an encrypted block containing:
> 	Response-Key:  
> 	HTTP Request, either vanilla URL or cgi URL with GET or POST data.
> 	Maybe some digicash
> 	Maybe some additional data
> The script fetches the URL, handing along any data,
> packages the response in HTTP reply format, and encrypts it with the 
> response key for the client proxy to unpack.
> 
> To chain these, have the client nest the requests, doing a
> URL that points to another anonymizer script and POSTs an encrypted block.
> Eventually you'll get to a non-anonymizing URL;
> it may be interesting to include any expected cookies in the block,
> so the client can hand them to the destination web server,
> or to gain some efficiencies by having the cgi script fetch
> any IMG requests, and sending a bundle of HTTP reply packets
> instead of just a single one.
> 
> The problems - 
> - How can easily can you break the system?  
> --- Does it leave too many open connections that can be followed?
> --- Does the decreasing size of the requests and
> 	increasing size of responses make it too easy to trace?
> --- What other obvious security holes are there?
> - Timeouts or other problems?
> - Denial of service attacks?
> 
> 				Thanks! 
> 					Bill
> Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
> PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
> 


-- Lucky Green <shamrock@cypherpunks.to> PGP v5 encrypted email preferred.