Distributed anonymous posting (was Re: Many Important Items...)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Tim May writes:
Phil Karn comments on my proposal:
(Cypherpunks remailers may want to change the "Nobody" and "Anonymous" tags to names that are less screenable, less susceptible to censorship by ARMM-type programs...
I'm not sure I like this idea. In my own discussions with people on this issue, I've found that "filterability" (for lack of a better term) overcomes *many* (if not all) of the standard objections to anonymous email.
A very good point. I was thinking more about the "ARMM"-style attacks and not so much about the normal filters people might write to keep from seeing anonymous posts.
I guess the solution is to discourage global, ARMM-style filters (and perhaps even look again, as a community, at digital sigs for postings, so
We may be getting ahead of ourselves here. Because of design decisions in
the cypherpunk remailers, I think they'd be a poor infrastructure for
anonymous Usenet posting. Anonymous posting has been around as long as
Usenet, in the form of forged messages. The most important service Julf's
remailer provided was a _return_path_ for replies, something cypherpunk
remailers take deliberate steps to destroy. If one of the cypherpunk
remailers suddenly decided to implement anonymous Usenet posting as-is, I
think ARMM II would be the least of its problems.
I have been working through a few ideas for the design of a _distributed_
anonymous posting service, in which the loss of one machine would not
destroy all return addresses at that machine, nor compromise the return-
path database. A handful of penet-style servers who share their return-
address databases (kept updated through an encrypted e-mail protocol,
perhaps) act as a Usenet "front-end" for posting. But their databases
contain encrypted SASE paths through several cypherpunk remailers, instead
of normal return addresses. Messages posted through any of the front
ends could be sent to the same user-name at any of the other front-end
machines, since they keep the same databases. In order to assure that SASE
return path is robust, despite an environment in which remailers may be
shut down at any time, secret sharing might be used for remailer private
keys. When a remailer went down, a quorum of the remaining remailer
operators would nominate a site to replace it, and send the "pieces" of the
lost remailer's secret key to the replacement site's administrator. The
remaining remailers would adjust their "routing tables" so mail whose next
hop should be to the lost remailer is sent to its replacement instead.
The best part is that all of this would be transparent to the Usenet user,
who would just see a penet-style return address, along with a note in the
automatically appended signature that said that "if mail to an1234@foo.com
bounces, just try an1234@bar.uk or baz.fi," or whatever.
No doubt there are some problems with this scheme (traffic analysis attacks
on the SASE paths if the front-end database is compromised, etc.) that need
to be addresssed, but I offer it as a preliminary idea for a replacement
service whose stability would not be subject to the whims of any one site
or network connection.
that only the author can cancel them).
Agreed. This could even be implemented into today's news structure. Old
servers would continue to blindly heed all cancel messages, while the new
software would verify PEM-style signatures, possibly as a header field.
And if a cabal of prudish newsadmins wanted to let each other cancel those
offensive anonymous articles at their sites, they could simply tell their
software to accept cancels signed by cabal-members' keys. I don't see how
anyone could oppose this.
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--
Joe Thomas
Anonymous posting has been around as long as Usenet, in the form of forged messages.
This is an excellent point of rhetoric. Perhaps we should teach mail and news forgery as a technique to the defense of privacy? 1/2 :-)
I have been working through a few ideas for the design of a _distributed_ anonymous posting service,
[...] secret sharing might be used for remailer private keys.
I have convinced myself that some form of secret sharing will be necessary for a distributed system that is robust against single point failure. You don't want single point manipulability, either, if you can get it. There are two basic ways to proceed: hard nodes, difficult to take down, or soft nodes, easy to reconfigure around. Both approaches should be looked at. Hard nodes are more difficult politically; soft nodes are more difficult technically. A soft node necessity: a directory lookup service, distributed, sharing data. Merely specifying the first point of contact and alternate paths doesn't cut it. You don't want to have to retry a bounced message so many times. Who here knows enough about sendmail to consider the eventual feasibility of integrating pseudonym lookup into mail transfer? Eric
...
A soft node necessity: a directory lookup service, distributed, sharing data. Merely specifying the first point of contact and alternate paths doesn't cut it. You don't want to have to retry a bounced message so many times.
Who here knows enough about sendmail to consider the eventual feasibility of integrating pseudonym lookup into mail transfer?
Eric
Hey, no problem! Just use the same escape call as the uucp pathalias. When integrating an Internet/DNS aware gateway with 1200 Unix workstations using /etc/hosts (no domain) and an X.400 connection to a VMS X.400 backbone, I hooked in a little C program that converted all the addressing to proper formats while also looking up userid's <-> fullnames in a B+tree database. I even did fuzzy matching on names on a best-unique or exact basis. Blew away X.500 functionality, which Dec and HP didn't even have integrated with X.400 at the time. Just need a program that takes an address on the command line and returns it possibly modified with a yey or ney return code. sdw
participants (3)
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Eric Hughes
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Joe Thomas
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sdw@sdwsys.lig.net