Remailer Noise Traffic

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Is there some reason why lots of 'punks _aren't_ running a simple script 
that will, say, fire a message to one's self through a chain of remailers 
every time you log on or at random intervals or something?

This may be an imerfect solution to the problem of traffic analysis, but 
it's so uncomplicated that there seems no reason not to do it. And if there 
were fifty or a hundred people or so making a practice of this, it seems to 
be agreed that the remailers would be a great deal more secure than they 
are now.

This is a nice little opportunity for everybody to help out the remailer 
operators. God knows, this list seems to be capable of generating 
sufficient noise -- all we have to do is harness it :-). The question is, 
how much traffic is _too_ much? Recommendations from remailer people?

                               -- Will


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In message <9401261719.AA27870@bogart.Colorado.EDU>, "W. Kinney" writes:
>Is there some reason why lots of 'punks _aren't_ running a simple script 
>that will, say, fire a message to one's self through a chain of remailers 
>every time you log on or at random intervals or something?
>
>This is a nice little opportunity for everybody to help out the remailer 
>operators. God knows, this list seems to be capable of generating 
>sufficient noise -- all we have to d
 is harness it :-). The question is, 
>how much traffic is _too_ much? Recommendations from remailer people?

Greetings!  We are the remailer people!  We mean no harm to your net and its
users.

I have been toying with similar ideas for a while, and would like to start
implementing this feature.  My remailer can certainly afford to sendmail
about 2000 times a day, which is at least 10 to 100 times the actual
traffic.  Actual traffic would be completely lost in a stream of noise.

However, for this to be effective at all, it has to be all encrypted, so
noise will be indistinguishible from signal.

I am currently working on an alias remailer with lots of encryption.
Because users are going to be required to run pgp, I might as well also
require them to accept about 10 messages a day of noise, and run slocal or
something like it to filter it out.  They should also send me about 10
messages a day of noise, and I will certainly be implementing stuff to
filter that out.

I certanily wouldn't mind if people sent me a bunch of mail with

	Anon-Send-To: nobody@soda

which will just go to /dev/null.  If someone writes some scripts to send
this mail automatically several times a day, go ahead and post it and run
it, because that would be great.  I might actually post such a script later
on tonight.  My soda remailer does not yet support encryption, so that will
have to wait.  Since this isn't going to be encrypted, I would recomend that
you send mail that's slightly different each time, and includes lots of good
keywords (cocaine, machine guns, environmentalism, bomb, allah, etc).

e

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W. Kinney writes :
> 
> Is there some reason why lots of 'punks _aren't_ running a simple script 
> that will, say, fire a message to one's self through a chain of remailers 
> every time you log on or at random intervals or something?
> 

This approach hadn't occurred to me; I've been following the discussion on
bogus remailer traffic from the perspective of 'How do we get the remailers
to generate/manage their own 'noise' messages'. Give me some sort of script
to run, and I'll run it on some oddball schedule if it will help. 

Things That Would Be Nice:
   1) The script, incantation, or whatever should be easy for even Unix
      novices (*blush*) to implement without assistance. (Damned if I'm
      going to call System Administration and ask for help on something
      like this! :)  )
   2) The script may need to incorporate some random element that changes
      the path through the remailers every now and then (If I *always* send
      a noise message from A to Q to X to Z, does this really help foil 
      message analysis? Serious question- I have no idea.)
   3) Some assurance that this will be a *quiet* process; that is, if one
      of the remailers barfs I don't care to have a bunch of wierd error
      messages routed to my postmaster. This may not be an issue; what I
      _don't_ know about e-mail would fill an encyclopedia.
 
In short, if you can come up with a black box for me to run that helps your
remailer traffic situation without (a) undue effort on my part and (b) undue
risk to my account id, then I'll help you out. Strike a blow for blah, blah,
and all that.

- -- 
........................................................................
Philippe D. Nave, Jr.   | The person who does not use message encryption
pdn@dwroll.dw.att.com   | will soon be at the mercy of those who DO...
Denver, Colorado USA    | PGP public key: by arrangement.

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Philippe Nave writes:
> W. Kinney writes :
> > 
> > Is there some reason why lots of 'punks _aren't_ running a simple script 
> > that will, say, fire a message to one's self through a chain of remailers 
> > every time you log on or at random intervals or something?

Something to consider for this is Safe-Tcl and the proposed Enabled-Mail
extension for MIME.  Enabled-Mail will allow you to create a multi-part
MIME message that contains a script to be executed in a safe interpreter at
delivery-time (to the user's mailbox) or at read-time; one proposed use
listed in the draft was to generate return-reciepts when mail had been
delivered to the recipient.  It would be quite trivial to adapt this system
to send off an encapsulated message back through the remailers that would
take a random path through the system and at the final remailer ask to be
delivered to /dev/null.  

[...]
> Things That Would Be Nice:
>    1) The script, incantation, or whatever should be easy for even Unix
>       novices (*blush*) to implement without assistance. [...]

If/when enabled-mail is accepted as a part of the MIME standard it will
become fairly transparent to the user and can be spread to more than just
Unix hosts.

>    2) The script may need to incorporate some random element that changes
>       the path through the remailers every now and then [...]

It would be trivial to have the remailer randomize the paths generated in
the scripts it attaches to messages going out.

>    3) Some assurance that this will be a *quiet* process;

Again, this could be done by the script-generation process so that all
error messages are pointed to the remailer.

jim