Re: Anonymity: A Modest Proposal

At 9:42 AM 10/18/95, Hal wrote:

>I think a remailer which forged headers would get people even angrier
>than one which was up front about what it was doing.  Forging headers is
>really considered antisocial by a lot of people on the net.  If you could
>do it safely, you wouldn't need remailers.  Since you need them, it's not
>safe, hence the message will probably get traced back to the remailer.
>This is prima facie evidence to get an account yanked at a lot of places.

        Of course. The problem is that protocols as implemented permit
header-forging: it's a practical fact of the net, and one that maybe
shouldn't be overlooked on (basically vague) 'moral' grounds, any more than
Netscape should say, "Well, you just _shouldn't_ screw someone with a
foo.foo.foo.foo... URL." Of course people shouldn't overflow your stack
intentionally--but they _can_, and the implications of that fact are
shaping the net as we speak. If the headers were forged in such a way as to
falsely and _credibly_ attribute a transmission to an actual uninvolved
third-party, that's one thing; but the existence of headers that are forged
so incompetently as to be traceable to their actual origin suggests that
forged headers might be worth meditating on. For example, what if two or
three dozen independently maintained Mixmasters in three or four countries
randomly forged headers (maybe even actually badly, or maybe craftily
"badly") so as to make the last link in a chain look like one (or "one") of
the other remailers; how would the Co$ cope with that?
        Anyway, you get the drift.


Ted

On Wed, 18 Oct 1995, t byfield wrote:

> At 9:42 AM 10/18/95, Hal wrote:
> 
>         Of course. The problem is that protocols as implemented permit
> header-forging: it's a practical fact of the net, and one that maybe
> shouldn't be overlooked on (basically vague) 'moral' grounds, any more than

The courts can't overlook it either. There goes liability. If I posted 
pirated software from this account, according to what you're saying, I could 
claim a forgery and show reasonable doubt.

On Oct 18,  4:15pm, s1018954@aix2.uottawa.ca wrote:
> If I posted
> pirated software from this account, according to what you're saying, I could
> claim a forgery and show reasonable doubt.

Without an author-certification mechanism in place, you can always
claim forgery. In this case, to show reasonable doubt you would probably
have to prove that some one else would have a motive for forging it in
the first place.

This is one place where importance of digital signatures can be very
strong. *If* we were all wonderful little cypher-junkies and signed
everything, then we might plausibly be able to deny forged mail: "I
sign everything I ever send, it's hardcoded into my mailer, that
didn't come from me..."

As it is, in most cases we run on trust, except where we're deliberately
trying to make certain that matters are not modified or we're trying to
make things a matter of record. [Checksums of binaries, for example,
or press releases on controversial topics.]

I'm looking forward to the point where my mail reader will sort things
according to reputations I give correspondents, and perhaps flag mail
which deviates from the norm for each correspondent. [e.g., if Tim May
signs something, it's probably pretty severe. If a pgp-fanatic doesn't,
something might be up...]

I'm also looking forward to the point where I can be on a mailing list
where folks look at the first line of my .sig and say, "this is being
written by an individual" and I don't have to worry about them thinking
I speak for organisations. [Which one would I be speaking for? Shad
Valley 1992?]

richard

--
Richard Martin
Alias|Wavefront - Toronto Office [Co-op Software Developer, Games Team]
rmartin@aw.sgi.com/g4frodo@cdf.toronto.edu      http://www.io.org/~samwise
Trinity College UofT ChemPhysCompSci 9T7+PEY=9T8 Shad Valley Waterloo 1992