This came in response to Cryptome's posting of Len Sassman's
comments on remailers.
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From: S
Subject: Re: remailers-tla.htm Compromised Remailers, December 15, 2003
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 16:16:17 -0700
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Message-Id: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Thank you for posting the Compromised Remailers article:
http://cryptome.org/remailers-tla.htm
Over the past year, many remailer users have noticed that the reliability of
the Mixmaster type II network has steadily degraded. Although it may well be
the result of TLA interference, the remailer community's statistical methods
of selecting a reliable remailer chain contribute significantly to the
network's degradation.
As a former employee of the United States Army Communications Command [USACC]
Headquarters, I was amazed to stumble upon the existence of a publicly
available communications medium permitting truly anonymous communication by
hampering the government's ability at traffic analysis, or tracking an
email message from its source to its destination. One would have to be
foolish to believe that TLAs are not hard at work trying to pierce the veil
of anonymity afforded by the Mixmaster type II, and, the yet to be released,
type III remailers.
I ran tests in September, October November, and provided the Mixmaster
developers remail operators with the same results I've included below. My
testing was extremely simple: send a bunch of messages, and note which
messages arrived. [The same procedure an accountant would use in tracking a
financial transaction from its origin to its destination.]
What I found was that a handful of remailers accounted for virtually all of
the un-delivered email messages. Yet, these same remailers, that never
delivered my email messages to the alt.anonymous.messages news group, where
also listed as among the most reliable remailers in mixmaster stats used to
select remailer chains.
I've included my recommendations to improve the network's reliability in the
test results below.
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Mixmaster II Reliability Issues Test Results
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The major issue currently plaguing the Mixmaster remailer network is the true
reliability of the LAST remailer in a chain. A considerable number of these
remailers habitually act like Black Holes for email messages destined for
alt.anonymous.messages and other news groups.
Unfortunately, most of these Black Hole remailers also happen to be listed
as among the most reliable remailers in mixmaster stats, with ratings ranging
from the upper 90's to 100; consequently, it's highly probable that messages
sent to newsgroups will frequently hit one of these demon remailers, never to
reach their intended recipient.
Over the past 2 months, I've sent tracked over 5,124 email messages
consisting of either 4 or 6 copies of 1,220 unique messages, each routed
through 11 Mixmaster type II remailers, to the alt.anonymous.messages news
group.
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Last Remailer Lost Msgs Delivered Msgs% Reliability
---
antani 63 0 0
cripto 65 0 0
hastio 41 0 0
george 31 718
paranoia 41 1020
futurew33 921
edo27 925
starwars 54 2935
itys7 956
italy 7 1059
bog 3 1482
freedom 3 4594
tonga 510695
liberty 2 5196
panta 3 6996
bigapple310497
metacolo3 9997
bogg1 5298
dizum 210698
jmbcv 1 5998
frell 0 34 100
randseed0 3 100
---
Sub-totals39582568
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Total 1,220
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Surprisingly - at first - I found that sending messages through chains of
remailers rated, in mixmaster stats, at 98% or greater was FAR LESS reliable
