Piercing network anonymity in real time

[Ivan Krstic]

StealthMonger wrote:
> No.  Ever hear of Chaum's "Dining Cryptographers" [1]?  Anonymity
> right there at the table.  Been around for almost twenty years.
> Strong anonymity is available today using chains of random-latency,
> mixing, anonymizing remailers based on mixmaster [2], of which there
> is a thriving worldwide network [3].

You're, er, missing the point entirely. The system Jerry posted about
relies on sniffing traffic of commonly used services to passively gather
layer 8 information. The vast majority of regular computer users had,
and largely still have, an expectation of privacy from their use of
these standard, non-encrypted services such as plain e-mail and IM; it's
*this* privacy that I said never existed, except in the minds of
uneducated users.

This is also why there's no "piercing of anonymity" going on -- there's
no anonymity to pierce! If Jerry's system had the ability to, say,
perform attacks on Tor and similar systems to gather data, then one
could argue for piercing anonymity as an accurate description.

-- 
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com