Re: Anonymity: A Modest Proposal

Hi,

One method to take the heat off of the last remailer
in a chain would be to call on our friend the "one
time pad".  A message is split into two equal parts
that only make sense when the two parts are 'xor'ed
together.  The seperate parts are then sent through
different paths to the final recepiant (or newsgroup).
The reader would have to 'xor' the parts together in
order to read the message.  The remailer could not be
blamed (as the message was unreadable to him).

The drawback is that the message would be unreadable
until both pieces showed up.

This method could also be expanded with two more equal
parts that transform the origional two parts into
two different messages unrelated to the origional
message.

On Wed, 18 Oct 1995, kelso wrote:

> One method to take the heat off of the last remailer
> in a chain would be to call on our friend the "one
> time pad".  A message is split into two equal parts
> that only make sense when the two parts are 'xor'ed
> together. 

Hmmm...this leads to the "unobnoxious anonymous remailer" concept.  I am 
under the impression that most cases of people getting upset about anon 
remailers is when they get threatening email from them.  

One could require that all email going through a remailer must be 
encrypted (perhaps with a universally known key).  That way when Joe 
clueless users gets encrypted mail he doesn't expect, he probably is too 
clueless to go find the key and decrypt it...

This would require the remailer to examine entropy of messages passing 
through.  Anything not random enough gets tossed.

-Thomas