[SGVLUG] PRIVACY???

[Dustin]

On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, John E. Kreznar wrote:

> Almost all Web browsing from this site is via anonymizing remailers
> with hours of latency.

I've never heard of that kind of system.  Quite spiffy, and I agree it
must be harder to crack than Tor.  I'm not sure I'd call it entirely
interactive, though, since it really reflects the state of the web some
time ago.  Fine for most sites, not fine for frequently updated pages and
news sites.  I guess for my own use, I don't need a high enough level of
security to tolerate the delay in updating the archive.

Do you have it set up so the anonymizing system is optional or mandatory?
I could see having it set up so relatively static sites go through the
mail-based system you mention and news sites go through something like 
Tor.

> > Tor seems most vulnerable to attacks at both endpoints, where I
> > suppose latency is irrelevant.
> 
> ???

I was going based on the Tor faq discussion of why using more than three 
hops doesn't add any security.

I actually think I wasn't paying enough attention, though.  I think they
were talking about adding a *constant* number of hops.  That shouldn't
help because the added delay won't vary all that much, so you still see a
proper spike in the correlation function, just at a slightly different
time difference.  What you're talking about with the anonymous remailer
apparently adds a random time delay, which should smear out the peak and
make it harder to see in the noise.  They do say something about
randomizing the number of hops probably being useful, which does the same
thing, except the design constraint of being interactive wouldn't allow
nearly so effective a smearing function.

I'd be interested in knowing the details of your set-up, but I don't think
I would set it up now so I hate to have you go to the trouble of writing
it up for me.  There might be a wider interest, though.  I wonder if
"anonymity on-line" would be an interesting meeting topic sometime?  
Assuming we had a qualified presenter....

Dustin