[OT-ish] How big is the UK 'net?

[Adam Back]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 02:37:15PM +0100, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
> > I suspect that might be a tough sell, given the existence of anonymous
> > remailers that support similar functionality much more cheaply.
> > What's wrong with the existing anonymous remailer (Mixmaster) approach?
> 
> When they commence Pt3 of RIPA Plod will be able to demand all remailers's
> RSA keys, and Mixmaster will be b***xx*d, at least in the UK. I wouldn't
> like to bet much on GAK not spreading.

This is an argument for adding forward-secrecy into mixmaster.  This
has been discussed a number of times, and a few approaches discussed.

One method which is working right now amongst some mixmasters is
transparent SMTP over SSL using the forward-secret ciphersuites from
SSL.

In this case any traffic logs of email entering or leaving the
remailer are useless as they are SSL traffic with forward-secret keys.

The rest of the discussion seemed to be around cover-traffic, which
you can do a bit with mixmaster manually by sending dummy traffic
terminating in a request to a remailer to discard, but which it would
certainly be interesting to see advances in.

If there are any descriptions about the approach you're trying to use
perhaps you would get some more specific feedback and ideas also.

Adam