Mixmaster On A $20 Floppy?

On Jan 05, 1996 19:06:21, 'Adam Shostack <adam@lighthouse.homeport.org>'
wrote: 
 
 
>	Towords the goal of making Mixmasters in a box, I've written 
>an installer script for mixmaster.  If you're running on one of the 
>supported platforms (alpha, bsdi, hpux, linux, sunos, solaris), the 
>script will walk you through everything from the make to setting up 
>cron jobs & /etc/aliases. 
> 
>	If you've been putting off setting up a remailer because its a 
>pain, give this a shot.  Lance will probably be including it in the 
>next release of mixmaster, but you can get it now by sending me a 
>message with the Subject: get mix-installer. 
> 
>	Comments, bugs, bug fixes are welcome.  Thanks to Rich $alz 
>for a extensive comments & suggestions for portability. 
> 
>Adam 
> 
 
I've reports that the latest version of SyQuest's external parallel port
EZ135 "floppy" drive is due on the shelves this month. Also reported is the
ability to effectively boot off the thing, and thus run whatever OS resides
on the SyQuest "floppy" rather than an OS that has to be on the host's hard
drive partition. 
 
Weight, under two pounds. Price ~$US250. Capacity 135 Mb formatted. Price
of spare disks: $US 20. 
Take it off a computer. Put it in a briefcase. Carry it with you nicely out
of public view. Hook it up to another machine and .... 
 
Question 1: Can you fit linux, pgp, mixmaster, etc. on the 135 Mb disk and
have enough useful space left over for a useful amount of data? 
 
Question 2: Anybody want to speculate on what traffic analysis is like when
encrypted data comes INTO one known Mixmaster site but goes OUT on one or
more "unknown" or (partially) random Mixmaster sites? 
 
Question 3: Anyone want to speculate on what data recovery is like when
encrypted data and the horse it rode in (and out) on has all been
physically destroyed at a replacement cost of only $US20? 
 
-- 
     -- tallpaul 
      
     -- "If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're
technical, go crude." 
                           William Gibson 
                           "Johnny Mnemonic"

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tallpaul writes:
> Weight, under two pounds. Price ~$US250. Capacity 135 Mb formatted. Price
> of spare disks: $US 20. 
> Take it off a computer. Put it in a briefcase. Carry it with you nicely out
> of public view. Hook it up to another machine and .... 
[...]
> Question 2: Anybody want to speculate on what traffic analysis is like when
> encrypted data comes INTO one known Mixmaster site but goes OUT on one or
> more "unknown" or (partially) random Mixmaster sites? 

The "ultimate" traffic analysis problem, as others have observed, is
the correlation between messages sent by A and received by B via the overall
network. Hence the utility of a Dining Cryptographers' Net, PipeNet, etc. in 
which the apparent bandwidth variation between any two points is eliminated. 
A and B are effectively folded into the network.

I suppose that a site that escapes detection as a Mixmaster will throw off
the correlation stats (i.e. because a message from that site to B won't be
identified as a remailed message). But such sites are elusive objects I
think. On the one hand, the site can't endure for long, or else its 
throughput traffic will likely give it away as an anonymizer (i.e. it gets
lots of mail from the Mix network, and sends out similar amounts of mail to
all sorts of people and the network). On the other hand, it had better last,
or else it will look suspicious as a transient account receiving mail from
the Mix network, sending a few messages, and quickly vanishing.  

Futplex <futplex@pseudonym.com>
"Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer!"

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On Fri, 5 Jan 1996, tallpaul wrote:

> I've reports that the latest version of SyQuest's external parallel port
> EZ135 "floppy" drive is due on the shelves this month. Also reported is the
> ability to effectively boot off the thing, and thus run whatever OS resides
> on the SyQuest "floppy" rather than an OS that has to be on the host's hard
> drive partition. 
>  
> Weight, under two pounds. Price ~$US250. Capacity 135 Mb formatted. Price
> of spare disks: $US 20. 
> Take it off a computer. Put it in a briefcase. Carry it with you nicely out
> of public view. Hook it up to another machine and .... 
>  
> Question 1: Can you fit linux, pgp, mixmaster, etc. on the 135 Mb disk and
> have enough useful space left over for a useful amount of data? 
>  

I have PGP, mixmaster, and several other crypto programs as well as X,
Netscape, the entire Linux kernel, and several other huge programs and files
that I never even use on my Linux system, and all of that takes up ~137 Mb.
A base Linux system takes up between 10 and 80 Mb, so Linux would fit quite
nicely on one of these disks.



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--
finger -l markm@voicenet.com for PGP key  http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/
Fingerprint: bd24d08e3cbb53472054fa56002258d5  Key-ID: 0xF9B22BA5
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Version: 3.1
GAT d- s:- a? C++++ U+++>$ P+++ L++(+++) E--- W++(--) N+++ o- K
w--- O- M- V-- PS+++>$ PE-(++) Y++ PGP+(++) t-@ 5? X++ R-- tv+
b+++ DI+ D++ G+++ e! h* r! y?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

In article <199601060155.UAA13574@pipe3.nyc.pipeline.com>,
tallpaul <tallpaul@pipeline.com> wrote:
>Question 1: Can you fit linux, pgp, mixmaster, etc. on the 135 Mb disk and
>have enough useful space left over for a useful amount of data? 

Yes.  I have a pair of standard 1.44 MB floppies, one of which has
a Linux kernel (boot disk), the other has a filesystem containing
just enough stuff to be able to stick the disk in an arbitrary
PC, use PPP to connect to the net, and use kerberos to log in.
I'm going to use the new ramdisk features in the 1.3 kernels to
put more useful stuff on the disk, too, like file utils, maybe... :-)

But if I can squeeze everything I need to turn an arbitrary PC
into a secure (modulo hardware) login session into 1.44 MB + boot image,
I don't think there's a problem putting all the stuff you want on a
135MB disk.  Hell, the _hard disk_ on my Linux box is only 80MB...

   - Ian

> >Question 1: Can you fit linux, pgp, mixmaster, etc. on the 135 Mb disk and
> >have enough useful space left over for a useful amount of data? 
>
> [snip snip snip]
> 
> But if I can squeeze everything I need to turn an arbitrary PC
> into a secure (modulo hardware) login session into 1.44 MB + boot image,
> I don't think there's a problem putting all the stuff you want on a
> 135MB disk.  Hell, the _hard disk_ on my Linux box is only 80MB...

Someone can get one of those tiny devices that slips on the end of a 
keyboard connector and captures all the scan codes - you're better off 
bringing the whole computer (laptop) along with your floppy.