Remailer ideas

[hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)]

   multiplicative decreases in cutoff probability, and it is
   therefore easy to set a cutoff value for delay which will occur
   with sufficient infrequency as to be useless to the cryptanalyst.

They will be useless only as long as you have an assurance that these
cutoffs are not correlated with anything "too large" (left
deliberately hand-waving).

In particular, delivery times are related to the retry algorithms at
the higher level of the protocol.  These retry algorithms operate
between some two ends and therefore introduce correlations into the
message patterns.  It's not obvious (and may not be true) that
arbitrary latency limiting is a safe behavior.

   By "cryptanalysis," I mean traffic analysis.  Considering the
   remailers to be a cryptosystem was suggested recently on this list
   by someone (I forget whom).

That was me.  I'll have more to say on that subject later.

Eric