[13545] in Cypherpunks
Re: Message Havens
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (SINCLAIR DOUGLAS N)
Thu May 12 10:30:13 1994
From: SINCLAIR DOUGLAS N <sinclai@ecf.toronto.edu>
To: klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu (Karl Lui Barrus)
Date: Thu, 12 May 1994 10:24:45 -0400
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <9405120451.AA27627@flammulated.owlnet.rice.edu>; from "Karl Lui Barrus" at May 12, 94 12:51 am
Downloading the whole message base to scan for one's messages
will place a massive load on net.resources, and probably
a prohibitive load on most people's terminals. This scheme
should avoid this nescessity:
Alice wishes to write a message anonymously to Bob. They have
agreed in previous communications that their tag is the string "foo".
Alice writes her messages, and encrypts it with Bob's public key.
She then prepends the tag. It looks like this:
Tag: foo
--- Begin Pgp Message ---
zxcvm,/asdfjk;qup
....
iuerpw,d,fy
--- End Pgp Message ---
Next, she encrypts this with the gopherhole's public key. The
resulting message is posted to the gopherhole, where it is decrypted
and made available for all to download.
Now, Bob enters the gopherhole and instructs it to download all
messages with the tag of "foo". To thwart trafic volume analysis,
he also downloads messages with tags "bar", "baz" and "quux", which
he then discards.
Problems:
The gopherhole must be trusted not to divulge which posts
came from who, and it's key must not be compromized.
A tap on Bob's line shows that he /may/ have a connection with
the "foo" tag. However, the only person that knows anything
about that tag is Alice. Thus, the other party in the conversation
must colaborate in an attack, probably ruining her anonymity.
Comments?
