Cooper/Birman message service / IBM's anonymous remailer

[ulf@fitug.de (Ulf M�ller)]

I have been pointed to a paper that addresses the problem of receiving
messages anonymously without using a return path:

 David A. Cooper, Kenneth P. Birman: Preserving Privacy in a Network of
 Mobile Computers. IEEE symposium on Security and Privacy, May 1995.
 http://cs-tr.cs.cornell.edu/TR/CORNELLCS:TR95-1490

Their solution is similar to the one recently described by Matt Ghio
on cypherpunks.


Many of you sure are aware of the BABEL anonymous remailer developed
by Ceki G�lc� and Gene Tsudik of IBM Zurich, but I have not seen it
mentioned here.

Their proposal for return paths is a significant improvement over
cypherpunk-style reply blocks, but I still think that return addresses
should be provided via message pools or similar means, while the mix
net is used only to send messages anonymously.

The paper, which is cited in the papers on Crowds and Onion Routing,
contains a well thought-out section motivatiting the use of anonymous
e-mail.

 Ceki G�lc�, Gene Tsudik: Mixing Email with BABEL. Proceedings of the
 Symposium on Network and Distributed Systems Security (SNDSS '96).
 http://http://www.isi.edu/~gts/paps/gt95.ps.gz