[Cryptography] prism-proof email in the degenerate case

[rex]

Ben Laurie <ben at links.org> [2013-10-20 09:18]:
>On 10 October 2013 22:20, Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net> wrote:
>> On 10/10/2013 12:54 PM, John Kelsey wrote:
>>> Having a public bulletin board of posted emails, plus a protocol
>>> for anonymously finding the ones your key can decrypt, seems
>>> like a pretty decent architecture for prism-proof email.  The
>>> tricky bit of crypto is in making access to the bulletin board
>>> both efficient and private.
>>
>> Wrong on both counts, I think.  If you make access private, you
>> generate metadata because nobody can get at mail other than their
>> own.  If you make access efficient, you generate metadata because
>> you're avoiding the "wasted" bandwidth that would otherwise prevent
>> the generation of metadata. Encryption is sufficient privacy, and
>> efficiency actively works against the purpose of privacy.
>
>Precisely.
>
>Didn't there used to be a newsgroup for exactly this purpose? I can't
>find it now, but I distinctly remember it.

alt.anonymous.messages, already mentioned several times in this thread.

"d.nix" spent 4 years analyzing AAM messages using GPU crackers, etc.

http://ritter.vg/blog-deanonymizing_amm.html
http://ritter.vg/blog-deanonymizing_amm_followup1.html

[...]

"I wanted to follow up on a few comments I saw. I got a message via the
hoi-polloi.org mixmaster node that pointed me to another suite of
software I did not include in my slides. Most of these programs have
been updated in the past few months - so they are actively maintained.

The suite includes:

An AAM checker for checking AAM and checking if you have new messages
(hardcoded subjects or hsubs only, no esubs it appears).

An email-substitute for communicating with a specific person or
persons via nyms and AAM, including automatically setting up your nym

A program that seems to combine the previous two programs into a
generic AAM reader and poster

A cover traffic tool to send dummy Mixmaster messages and dummy AAM
messages from your connection, so someone watching ideally isn't quite
sure which messages you send are legit and which are not."

More at the site.

-rex
-- 
"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my 
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