[liberationtech] Jacob Appelbaum's Ultrasurf Report

[Jacob Appelbaum]

On 04/24/2012 12:19 PM, Meredith L. Patterson wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 4:29 PM, Jacob Appelbaum <jacob at appelbaum.net> wrote:
>> In the case of remailers, I view those as a different class of anonymity
>> - namely, I have long viewed that if you use such a system, you should
>> probably compose it with Tor - so few people use them that I'd want to
>> disguise that I was using them. Also, you cannot use those systems for a
>> lot of TCP communications that people regularly need to protect - has
>> anyone written an XMPP or AIM client that uses mixmaster? I suspect not...
> 
> Nobody would; they'd be unusable. Mixmaster and mixminion are
> extremely high-latency for a reason: a delay of 20 minutes to an hour
> is perfectly acceptable for most email use-cases, and makes it far
> more difficult to deanonymize the sender by timestamp correlation. But
> that sort of delay is right out for anything with any kind of
> real-time service expectations.

I'm not so sure - it's certainly possible to have an intermediate bot of
sorts that makes IM a lot less, well, instant. :)

> 
> Andrei Serjantov's paper "From a Trickle to a Flood", available at
> http://freehaven.net/doc/batching-taxonomy/taxonomy.pdf, describes
> remailer mixing and pooling strategies in far more detail, and is
> required reading for anyone interested in how high-latency anonymity
> systems work and why they work the way they do.
> 

I'd also encourage people to read through a lot of the papers on anonbib:
http://freehaven.net/anonbib/

All the best,
Jake