[Remops] Proposal for change of "official" Mixmaster

[Steve Crook]

Hi all,

As many of you are probably aware, Mixmaster was forked in 2013 and
modified to support 4096 bit keys at the cost of reducing the potential
maximum hops from 20 to (worst case) 10.  Other improvements were made,
either at the time or through ongoing development and Mixmaster now
supports AES_CTR encryption and HMAC authentication.  The current packet
format is documented within the repository.

Currently there are 27 publicly advertised Remailers, of which 10 are
running the forked code.  Of these, 9 are advertising 4096 bit RSA keys.
I speculate that there are a number of reasons why more have not
migrated.  These include:

1) The fork isn't recognised as the "official" version.
2) The forked version isn't packaged for any major Linux distros.
3) The Remailer is running on auto-pilot.

I'd like to propose that the community addresses the first two on this
list by recognising the fork as the current, official Mixmaster version.
The repository resides on Github[1] and is publicly accessible.  The
Debian package, currently maintained by Colin Tuckley can be migrated to
the forked code if this proposal is greeted favourably.  Package
maintainers for other distros will probably follow in their own
timescales.

In terms of client compatibility, along with Mixmaster itself,
Quicksilver and Omnimix are known to work with the forked Mixmaster.
Indeed, their current versions are compiled against it.  Very old
clients, such as Jack B. Nymble and Private Idaho will not work but this
is nothing new, they still rely on Mixmaster versions that haven't been
revised in well over a decade.

I'm posting this to:-
The Mixmaster Developers List (Sourceforge)
Remops Mailing List (http://lists.mixmin.net)
alt.privacy.anon-server (Usenet)

If discussions are favourable, I propose that we adopt the forked Github
repository as the official Mixmaster version.

Best wishes,
Steve Crook

[1] https://github.com/merkinmuffley/mixmaster4096
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