[Remops] Data on remailer traffic

Lance Cottrell loki at obscura.com
Tue Mar 18 20:42:17 GMT 2014


Good point. An attacker with a network backbone perspective could do a good job of measuring user->mixmaster,   mixmaster-> mixmaster,   mixmaster->destination
This would allow an easy calculation of the amount of bitbucket happening at the given remailer, and of the real traffic in and out of the mix.

	-Lance

--
Lance Cottrell
loki at obscura.com



On Mar 18, 2014, at 1:16 PM, Charles Teller <cteller at riseup.net> wrote:

>> Do we want attackers to have access to the content vs. cover traffic
>> ratio?
> 
> Completely valid question, and I'm open to discussion on it. I have two
> thoughts on it at this point.
> 
> First, I think the ratio is already known by certain parties. It has
> always seemed reasonable to assume that plaintext traffic out of remailers
> is tracked. I am not proposing examining anything else other than messages
> that have already gone through the entire remailer chain.
> 
> Second, I think research into this could prove useful. If not useful, at
> least interesting. Examining plaintext messages coming out to get an idea
> of how much real traffic is being sent could prove enlightening. And of
> course anything encrypted (via PGP or a Type-II hop) would not reveal
> anything and so would not (could not) be examined.
> 
> "Examined" is the wrong word there, I think.
> 
> Those are my thoughts. I could be wrong, and as I said in my first email,
> I am open to discussion on this. I do not run a remailer, so it is up to
> others to decide if this is useful and worth any possible risk.
> 
> 
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> Remops at lists.mixmin.net
> http://lists.mixmin.net/mailman/listinfo/remops

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