Re: Remailers: The Next Generation

Phil Karn suggests we look at anonymous forwarders for IP as well as mail.
It's an interesting idea - Eric Hughes and Matt Blaze have recently
talked about "packet laundering" at Bay Area Cypherpunks meetings,
and there's been some work done on multi-stage laundering with
cutouts in the middle so it really stays anonymous.
Some issues include how to pay for it (digicash is one obvious approach),
how to set up rendevous, and the usual datagram-vs-circuit problems
of how long to maintain an association between addresses at the forwarder.

On the other hand, while the Internet is rapidly absorbing email,
there are lots of email systems that are *not* IP-based, such as
uucp-over-dialup, Fidonet, X.400-over-OSI, and commercial mail systems
that may forward to and from the internet but run their own backbones,
which help make remailers harder to trace.

There's also the hybrid issue, where you tunnel IP across whatever
transport medium is available - there are some people doing this over telnet,
and it would be a convenient way to do things like get IP service
from a flat-rate dialup access provider without paying $2/hour for SLIP, etc.

		Bill
# Bill Stewart  NCR Corp, 6870 Koll Center Parkway, Pleasanton CA, 94566
# Voice/Beeper 510-224-7043, Phone 510-484-6204
# email bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com billstewart@attmail.com
# ViaCrypt PGP Key IDs 384/C2AFCD 1024/9D6465

>There's also the hybrid issue, where you tunnel IP across whatever
>transport medium is available - there are some people doing this over telnet,
>and it would be a convenient way to do things like get IP service
>from a flat-rate dialup access provider without paying $2/hour for SLIP, etc.

Indeed. I've been threatening to do this for some time. Define a
SLIP-over-Telnet protocol that encodes packets as lines of ascii
characters (one packet per line). Then login to your local public UNIX
system and telnet from there to a cooperative server somewhere on the
net that will turn your asciified packets back into real packets and
put them on the net. You'd have an IP address that belongs to the
server's net. One such server, well connected to the backbone, could
support quite a few users all over the world.

As far as the local UNIX host is concerned, you just spend all your
time telnetted to some random host on the net.

Although this could easily be done in my NOS code, I haven't actually
written it because a) it's an inelegant kludge, b) I have lots of
other active projects, and c) I had hoped that merely the threat of
doing so would shame the dialup SLIP/PPP service providers into
dropping their prices more into line with what they now charge for
UNIX-with-Internet-connectivity service. SLIP/PPP service should
actually cost *less* than interactive service to a public UNIX system
on the Internet because it uses fewer resources per unit of connect
time.

Phil