[Cryptography] Email and IM are ideal candidates for mix networks

[Perry E. Metzger]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 03:04:25 +0100 "Wendy M. Grossman"
<wendyg at pelicancrossing.net> wrote:
> On 08/28/2013 02:48, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> > Of course, as a reporter, you are probably getting email
> > addresses of people to talk to via referral, and that could be
> > used to get past the barrier. The problem of people spontaneously
> > contacting a published address is harder.
> 
> I do the latter a lot. I think all journalists do, except the very
> lazy ones. :)

Again, I don't have excellent answers at the moment.

I think SMTP is likely to survive for quite some time, and that is
probably the solution to the out-of-the-blue contact problem at the
moment, but it does not solve the out-of-the-blue traffic analysis
free contact problem.

(Rendering SMTP immune to traffic analysis results in infinite spam
-- the spam fighting we have sort of depends on reliable endpoint
identification.) Presumably, people in your position may have to live
with that until we come up with something better.

Meanwhile, I would like to see most other messaging move to something
more overall defensible in the near term. Unfortunately, that might
have the effect of eroding the urgency with which people treat their
SMTP mail.

Experimentation is probably the only way to figure all this out --
we're not going to hit on a perfect design a priori.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com