Re: Macintosh Mixmaster port... Who's doing it?

At 03:16 PM 9/22/96 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote:

>	A real Mac port of Mixmaster, that integrated with Claris
>EMailer and Eudora would be a huge boon to the millions of Mac users
>out there.  I have no doubt that Vinnie's mac crypto conference talked
>a lot about this sort of thing.

Actually, the Mac crypto conference didn't spend any time at all on
Mixmaster - which is not intended as a criticism of either the conference
or of Mixmaster, but it just didn't happen. 

I gave a very short talk and said that I thought the Mac needed three apps,
for people who wanted to jump in a write something useful to the cause of
privacy on the net and didn't want to reinvent any wheels: a remailer
client with a good user interface, a Mac-native remailer, and an
implementation of DC-nets. Mixmaster would, of course, address two of those
three. Lucky tells me that there is already a Mac implementation of
DC-nets, but it doesn't seem to be very well known.

My impression of the demographics of the conference was that it was folks
who are mostly working developers who aren't necessarily up-to-the minute
on crypto and ecommerce stuff, but are interested enough to at least think
about including it in their applications.

I'm pottering around with a Java-based remailer that acts like a POP client
so it can run on a client machine, not a Unix box; but other people should
take that as a challenge to see if they can finish one before/better than
me, not a reason to avoid writing one. Hal Finney has already done some
very nice work with Java and mailing; see his home page (the address of
which I don't have immediately at hand) for more details. 

For what it's worth, I think future remailer/Mixmaster development might do
well in Java. I'm not especially sold on or trusting of the alleged
security or trustability features of Java (sorry, no offense) but I *do*
think it's a neat tool for building non-machine specific network aware
applications. Ignore the fact that people use it to build silly animations
or that downloadaded applets may or may not be secure - it's still useful
as a development tool.

--
Greg Broiles                |  "We pretend to be their friends,
gbroiles@netbox.com         |   but they fuck with our heads."
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles |
                            |

Greg Broiles wrote:

| At 03:16 PM 9/22/96 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote:
| 
| >	A real Mac port of Mixmaster, that integrated with Claris
| >EMailer and Eudora would be a huge boon to the millions of Mac users
| >out there.  I have no doubt that Vinnie's mac crypto conference talked
| >a lot about this sort of thing.
| 
| Actually, the Mac crypto conference didn't spend any time at all on
| Mixmaster - which is not intended as a criticism of either the conference
| or of Mixmaster, but it just didn't happen. 

	(By this sort of thing, I was refering more to the privacy
apps 'integrated with Claris EMailer and Eudora,' which you go on to
discuss.  I think that a remailer client needs to be integrated with
the usual mail tools, not seperate.)

| I gave a very short talk and said that I thought the Mac needed three apps,
| for people who wanted to jump in a write something useful to the cause of
| privacy on the net and didn't want to reinvent any wheels: a remailer
| client with a good user interface, a Mac-native remailer, and an
| implementation of DC-nets. Mixmaster would, of course, address two of those
| three. Lucky tells me that there is already a Mac implementation of
| DC-nets, but it doesn't seem to be very well known.

	I don't know of any DC net implementation, and would be really
eager to hear Lucky expound on this.

| For what it's worth, I think future remailer/Mixmaster development might do
| well in Java. I'm not especially sold on or trusting of the alleged
| security or trustability features of Java (sorry, no offense) but I *do*
| think it's a neat tool for building non-machine specific network aware
| applications. Ignore the fact that people use it to build silly animations
| or that downloadaded applets may or may not be secure - it's still useful
| as a development tool.

	I agree, especially if we write a protocol that allows a user
to connect to a mixmaster, get a pool of messages, and remail them on
to their destanation, along with a message of his own.  (This is a
half baked idea; there are obvious denial of service issues, as well
as reliability issues in the well intentioned cases.)

Adam

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume

On Sun, 22 Sep 1996, Greg Broiles wrote:
> Lucky tells me that there is already a Mac implementation of
> DC-nets, but it doesn't seem to be very well known.

There is an Apple(Local?)Talk implementation of DC nets. Somebody please 
check the Eurocrypt proceedings of the late 80's.

--Lucky

> Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 16:26:11 -0700
> From: Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>

> At 03:16 PM 9/22/96 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote:
...
> I'm pottering around with a Java-based remailer that acts like a POP client
> so it can run on a client machine, not a Unix box; but other people should
> take that as a challenge to see if they can finish one before/better than
> me, not a reason to avoid writing one. Hal Finney has already done some
> very nice work with Java and mailing; see his home page (the address of
> which I don't have immediately at hand) for more details. 

Hal is at http://www.portal.com/~hfinney/ .

I have a prototype PGP-encryption implementation in Java, which I was
intending to build into a remailer _client_ (I think remailers
themselves will be better written in C for performance reasons, or at
least the crypto portions); at first, for 'type I' remailers, then
perhaps for mixmaster.

The prototype, which just encrypts to a public key, has been put at
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~geoffk/pke/ .  I'd appreciate people
looking over it, particularly the random number generation.

[The prototype is actually somewhat useful. It's about as secure as
downloading PGP in binary form... ]
-- 
-Geoff Keating (geoffk@ozemail.com.au, Geoff.Keating@anu.edu.au)