Crowds as an anonymous remailer

[Mark Hedges <hedges@sirius.infonex.com>]

Regarding your post to cypherpunks asking about a distributed remailer
network - this is very much what the Mixmaster remailers do now. Each
message is cut into uniformly sized encrypted chunks which are traded
in a stormy cloud of random traffic between the remailers, until they
reach an outlet point. See http://www.obscura.com/~loki for more info.

Mark Hedges
Infonex Internet Inc.


>On the subject of Crowds
>(<http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/7331.html>), a distributed
>system for anonymous Web browsing, I was wondering if anyone knew of any
>attempts or efforts to create a decentralized remailer network in the same
>manner -- can such a thing be done, and be useful?
> 
>Such a system might work quite like Crowds (or could even be a subset of
>Crowds itself, or based on it, as the source is available), with a small
>"jondo" program running on each host in the remailer network. To send an
>anonymous message you must be running a jondo, hence you are part of the
>network. The jondo takes your message, encrypts and randomly forwards it to
>any jondo in the network, which then either re-forwards it to another jondo
>or its final destination.
> 
>There is no way for the recipient to know who the original sender was other
>than that sender was part of the crowd running the jondos, and there is no
>central remailer machine to target since the "remailer" consists of a
>network of machines running these jondos. As members increase, the network
>performance as well as the degree of anonymity increases (imagine, for
>instance, if such a program came with Linux as a standard part of the OS).
> 
> 
>m
> 
>email stutz@dsl.org  Copyright (c) 1997 Michael Stutz; this information is
><http://dsl.org/m/>  free and may be reproduced under GNU GPL, and as long
>                     as this sentence remains; it comes with absolutely NO
>                     WARRANTY; for details see <http://dsl.org/copyleft/>.
> 
>