At 11:22 PM -0400 4/28/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>On Sat, Apr 28, 2001 at 06:32:08PM -0700, Tim May wrote:
>> None of the non-cryptographic methods are very resistant to legal,
>> technical, sniffing, and black bag attacks. And only multiply-chained
>> encrypted-at-each-stage messages, a la remailers, are adequate for
>> high-value messages.
>
>If only they worked. There was an interesting paper presented here
>in Pittsburgh at the info hiding workshop this week that suggested
>a way to strengthen the somewhat-suckful mixmaster network. (Of
>course, the network will never be even somewhat reliable until
>sufficient incentive -- ie digital cash or somesuch -- exists for
>running one.) At least one active cypherpunk was involved in writing
>that paper, and I cited it in my Wired article this week.
Well, better than nothing. (Like I said in another article tonight,
"the best is often the enemy of the good.") We knew even in 1992 that
"remailers" were a pale imitation of the DC Nets discussed a few
years earlier by Chaum and analyzed by others as well. But there were
no DC Nets in 1992, and so remailers were nonetheless a step above
what existed then (basically, the Kremvax/Kleinpaste/Julf approach).
I also saw at least two list members cited in your article (or
perhaps in other articles dealing with the same conference): Ulf
Moeller and David Molnar.
I didn't check out the program for the conference, but it seems to me
beyond any doubt that a lot of the current work at IBM and NRL and
whatever on "information hiding" was outlined by our own posts in
1992-94, the period of major ferment.
(My own first article on Usenet on using the LSBs of sound files and
images for steganography was in around 1990-91. Someday the Usenet
archives for sci.crypt will go back that far and I'll be able to
prove it. There may have been ideas prior to mine, of course, but
mine was pretty early in the game.)
--Tim May
--
Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
