Message Havens (research havens, remailer usage)

[Karl Lui Barrus <klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu>]

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> I saw it and thought it quite good. As to why nobody [...]
> commented.... I wrote an essay on how the "bad posts drive out the
> good," that is, the trivial chatter and net.repartee posts

Well, I am glad somebody read my post, admist the heavy and sometimes
irrelevant traffic...

>being flaky (the "Joe College remailers." one might call them), these

Ah, sorry about the mixup in nomenclature - I like "Joe College" as a
name actually, reminds me of Snoopy ;)

Funny, but I was going to describe something I've been kicking around
for a while, something in between a remailer and a data haven (a
different service I could try setting up after getting a slip
connection, or on an existing account, etc.).  But as I sifted through
list mail today I see you did it for me!

> 1. Investigate ways to create an "anonymous Web site," that is, a
> WWW site that can be reached only through a system of remailers.
> Actually, due to the slow response (else traffic analysis is a big
> danger), this would be more like a "CryptoGopher." (But gopher is
> being subsumed into the Mosaic/lynx model, I suspect, and will be
> obsolete soon.)

Actually, I based my idea on gopher and called it a "message haven".

Basically, write some scripts which accept incoming mail and file it
into a gopher accessible hierarchy.  Then, anybody could connect up
and browse for messages.

For example, if you wanted to contact Pr0duct Cypher, you could
encrypt a message with his key and send it to the message haven.
Leave your own public key in the message and he can respond the same
way.  People could use anonymous remailers to send in messages, and
use pseudonyms to protect their privacy.

(The service would allow you to specify the name you want your message
filed under, and both parties would have to agree on details such as
this, etc.  The haven could even accept digital cash - say by default
messages are only kept for a day but you can pay for extensions.)

An advantage would be no mail is sent out, so there (hopefully) won't
be anybody complaining about receiving harrassing mail, a common
objection to anonymous mail.  Bandwidth may be saved (as opposed to
sending to usenet or a mailing list to reach one person, all mail
would just go to the haven).

How is privacy preserved?  Well, it's kinda ugly but you borrow a
trick from Mr. Slippery ("True Names") and browse the entire message
database, buffering all messages and later extracting what's relevant
to you.  This way even if gopher logs are kept, exactly what message
interested you is undeterminable (since you read them all).  If your
net connection is monitored, no information can be derived since you
took it all.  (Note: this could be impractible, perhaps there is a
better way?)

The reason why I based this on gopher since I have some experience
with gopher from helping the run the cypherpunks gopher site.  Chael
tells me that eventually all the files will be moved out of my home
directory into the same directory used by anonymous ftp.  Which would
free up my disk space (running near quota ;) and allow people to
retreive files with ftp.  More important, I would have space to try
some other crypto experiment, like this message haven.

Why only messages?  Largely due to disk space restrictions, I would
hope that messages would tend to be short (shorter than 1000 graphic
or sound files, etc.)

Well, does this sound useful?

Karl Barrus
klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu

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