On Friday, December 20, 2002, at 04:48 PM, Michael Cardenas wrote:
Yes, which is why I also cited Web proxies. I gave the e-mail example in detail because it makes it crystal clear that "MACs attached to packets" are not a showstopper. The payload of a message, whether it is digital money, age credentials, e-mail, Web requests, Usenet posts, return receipts, etc. can easily be separated from outer wrappers. In fact, the whole approach we favor is that the payloads themselves do the authentication (such as may be needed), and so on. Thus end-to-end encryption is an example of this...none of the various tags and wrappers inserted along the way are important or essential to what's in the payload.Tim May wrote:
Remailers and Web proxies work in ways that skirt this "transparency" of MACs and routing that you are referring to. These are the types of technologies we are discussing. The fact that Disney or Lockheed may be using Carnivore- and Echelon-vulnerable technologies does not challenge the points about how better technologies will "turn everything upside down."
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There are other forms of traffic besides email that are significant.
You said that the cruft often added by various machines, such as MACs and other Internet barnacles, are a showstopper which breaks anonymity and untraceability. I demonstrated that for a working system, remailer and Web proxies, this is not so. It is true that I didn't make this argument in my essay in the Vinge book...it didn't seem necessary to point out that tags added to packets are trivially removed. (This is one reason Big Brother has been trying to get limits placed on crypto, with escrow of keys and signature tools, and with his own machines doing the encryption, sort of like saying "Sealed envelopes are terrorist tools. Bring your letters to the Post Office and we will handle your security needs.)
I've read your article there, and it was very interesting. That's why I'm here. I just didn't see the bridge from the technology to the revolution clearly articulated in your essay either.
--Tim May
"You don't expect governments to obey the law because of some higher moral development. You expect them to obey the law because they know that if they don't, those who aren't shot will be hanged." - -Michael Shirley
