[Cryptography] A possibility of good anonymous communications?

mok-kong shen mok-kong.shen at t-online.de
Thu Mar 10 05:49:40 EST 2016


Suppose a governmental agency is powerful enough to be able to tap
one's connection to one's Internet provider and also knows the IP
addresses of entrance points of all nodes of a remailer network,
couldn't the fact that one utilizes the service of the remailer network
be easily determined by the agency from one's own IP address? Thus I
think a necessary condition of achieving sender anonymity is to employ
a neutral IP address, i.e. that of an Internet cafe or callshop. Now
suppose there is a webpage operating similar to those of a number of
Internet discussion communities where participants, after a free
registration procedure, can access it from anywhere and login with
their passwords and post their messages to the communities but in the
present context the users are limited to a small number of somehow
secretly registered ones, namely activists of non-democratic countries
(whose registration to the service may be arranged e.g. by their
friends in the free world). Wouldn't that constitute a practically
secure possibility for the activists to anonymously communicate with
one another as well as with persons of the free world? Note that, in
distinction to the webpages of the Internet discussion communities,
posts need not be stored for a long time and they may be encrypted
materials instead of plaintext. The owner of the webpage could also
introduce arbitrary dummy threads with dummy stuffs such that it is
much more difficult for an outsider to discern which are the real
traffic of secret communications in which the activists take part.

M. K. Shen


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