Re: Remailer traffic analysis foiling

[Jonathan Rochkind <jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu>]

> How workable is setting up remailers with psudo-cooperation
> so that when it recieves an anon mail it waits 20 or so min
> and then randomly sends copies of it to 5 other remailers of which
> the original reciever randomly decides which 1 of the 6 will post 
> and the rest simply discard. 
 
Part of the problem with any scheme that involves remailers automatically
sending traffic onward to other remailers (whether a plan like yours,
or just adding links to the remailer chain automagically), is that there
seem to be only a few stable and reliable remailers. The rest come and go
periodically. To get the best use of a plan like this, you've got to keep
track of which remailers are up right now, so as to have the most remailers
to use for this purpose. Or, really, you've got to have a way for your remailer
to do this automatically without your intervention.
 
Most people seem to think this problem will go away eventually, and remailers
will become more stable and reliable.  I dont' think this is neccesarily true.
It's true that remailers which charge money for the service will probably be
more secure and reliable (because they need to be to get business), but I think
we should work to develop a sort of "remailer net" that doesn't need reliability
to operate, that can operate in more dificult circumstances.
 
One idea I came up with to achieve this goal is a sort of remailer
control newsgroup, call it alt.anonremailer.net.  Every participating
remailer would periodically post an "I am here" message to the newsgroup.
Say, once every 24 hours. The message could include the anon remailers
address, and public key. A participating anon remailer would periodically
scan this newsgroup, and keep track of remailers which are verified
to have been working properly sometime in the last 24 hours. The remailers
could check signatures on the message to be sure that it's signed by the
real mccoy, and when a new remailer is encountered on alt.anonremailer.net, 
signatures on it's public key could be checked, and the remailer
wont' be used unless it's signed by trusted people. The old web
of trust. The more I think about this, the better an idea it seems to me.
It seems a way of creating a remailer net that is reliable even in unreliable
circumstances, and also makes using remailers more automized then it is now.
Every use who uses anon mailers could have a daemon running to keep
track of this newsgroup, and auto-generate remailer-chains that are composed
of guaranteed-working remailers. It seems like a spiffy idea. But last time
I posted it, no one responded. Maybe I'm overlooking something, and it's actually
a really stupid idea. If that's the case, can someone say so and explain why?