Re: Anonymity: A Modest Proposal

[loki@obscura.com (Lance Cottrell)]

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If you simply do not want to be a final hop, it is trivial to distinguish
final hops from intermediate hops in the chain. With cypherpunk remailers
you can scan for the remailer headers. With Mixmaster there is a completely
different format to the encrypted header (inside the encryption) for final
hops as opposed to intermediate hops.

I think one solution to this problem is to encourage (require) the use of
pseudonym servers. Having a server like alpha as the entity on the from
line has several advantages.

1) Less Spam since it takes some effort to set up the nym and it will be taken
away as soon as the spam starts.

2) The operator can take firm action. When people complain they want you to
punish the abuser. Typically they want you to pull the offenders account.
With a remailer there is no account to pull, but with a nym server it is
easy to kill the account, making the complainer happy.

3) The nym server could have a policy of only accepting messages encrypted
to it, and logging the address the message came from. If confronted, the
nym server could point to the last remailer in the chain. But that remailer
could not have known the contents of the message since it was encrypted to
the nym server.

If all nym servers were standardized to run from the same account name
(nymserve for example) the remailers could be configured to only deliver
final hops to addresses with that username.

        -Lance

>At 12:59 PM 10/19/95 -0400, Thomas Grant Edwards wrote:
>>This would require the remailer to examine entropy of messages passing
>>through.  Anything not random enough gets tossed.
>
>
>A simple entropy measuring algorithm:
>
<SNIP>
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Lance Cottrell   loki@obscura.com
PGP 2.6 key available by finger or server.
Mixmaster, the next generation remailer, is now available!
http://obscura.com/~loki/Welcome.html or FTP to obscura.com

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra.  Suddenly
it flips over, pinning you underneath.  At night the ice
weasels come."
                        --Nietzsche
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