Insecurity of anonymous remailers

> From owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Sat Feb  5 21:55:58 1994
> Date: Sat, 5 Feb 1994 15:21:18 -0500 (EST)
> From:  MatthewJ Ghio <mg5n+@andrew.cmu.edu>
> To: Cypherpunks Mailing List <cypherpunks@toad.com>
> Subject: Info on anonymous remailers
> Content-Length: 1429
> 

Matthew J Ghio wrote:

> I am pleased to report on the performance of our two newest remailers,
> qwerty@netcom.com and nate@vis.colostate.edu.  Both remailers had a very
> good response time.

Is it really a good idea to make anonymous remailers work so fast?
Everyone who can analyze the traffic of anonymous remailers and
can read the from/to header lines, the message size and the 
transfer dates immediately knows who sent mail to whom. 

The make the remailers more safe, I would suggest to modify the
software:

Every message must be sliced into pieces of standardized size
( e.g. 8K or 500 lines ). It should be possible to send the
pieces over different channels. Every server should collect 
pieces and keep them a random time. Perhaps they could be
collected until 10MByte of pieces are collected and then they
can be sent out all. Every piece could contain a time limit
which may not be exceeded by the servers. Higher limit means
more confusion for a spy trying to follow this packet. The
packets should be recyphered by every hop. They could have
a random tail who's length is changed by a hop. A traffic
spy could not find out which input and which output packets
correspond.

Hadmut

danisch@ira.uka.de (Hadmut Danisch) wrote:

> Matthew J Ghio wrote:
> 
> > I am pleased to report on the performance of our two newest remailers,
> > qwerty@netcom.com and nate@vis.colostate.edu.  Both remailers had
> > a very good response time.
> 
> Is it really a good idea to make anonymous remailers work so fast?
> Everyone who can analyze the traffic of anonymous remailers and
> can read the from/to header lines, the message size and the
> transfer dates immediately knows who sent mail to whom. 

True.  I think it depends on what your intended purpose is for using a
remailer.  If you just want to post an anonymous message, faster would
be better for sake of keeping with the conversation.  If you really want
to communicate securely, you can use remailers such as
elee9sf@menudo.uh.edu which batches messages out at midnite and adds
random padding, or remail@extropia.wimsey.com which offers encryption
and adds a random delay.