NODE 330a306bforged mail
baumbach@atmel.com (Peter Baumbach)Thu, 22 Jul 93 14:50:10 PDT
I only have access to an email connection to the internet, so I cannot
test a method of forging mail that I learned.
Is this a taboo topic? It seems it would be useful for anonomous mailers.
Give me the go ahead, and I'll continue...tomorrow.
I'm done for the day.
Peter Baumbach
baumbach@atmel.com
NODE 52d40e97Re: forged mail
Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>Thu, 22 Jul 93 15:15:11 PDT
No, forging e-mail is not a taboo topic, but then again it doesn't buy
you anything if you're up against a smart person. If you just forge
mail to me, most likely I can track you down to at LEAST the machine
you forged it from!
If you go through a remailer, then it strips the headers off, so its
not a problem. But there is no reason to need to forge a message to a
remailer since it hides your identity in the first place. That's its
job.
-derek
NODE 96e808b7Re: forged mail
Peter Breton <pbreton@cs.umb.edu>Fri, 23 Jul 93 13:15:40 PDT
> you anything if you're up against a smart person. If you just forge
> mail to me, most likely I can track you down to at LEAST the machine
> you forged it from!
....but a smart person can ensure that you can't track him down FARTHER
than the machine he forged it from (without extraordinary aid, like
access to the site's sendmail logs).
> If you go through a remailer, then it strips the headers off, so its
> not a problem. But there is no reason to need to forge a message to a
> remailer since it hides your identity in the first place. That's its
> job.
Actually, forging mail at the machine you're on en route to the remailer
protects you against:
1) Anyone who can snoop the message headers on the way to the remailer
("Tra la la. Let's keep a little list of everyone using those remailers...")
2) A corrupt remailer operator.
I'm assuming you send from a fairly large organization. Then even though
they can find out which machine originated the message, one can't
determine which of the users (and there may be more than 100) originated the
message. Plausible deniability.
Peter
(NOT the one who allegedly forged mail from bass.sco.atmel.com ;-)