Messages from Nowhere
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LINUXKNOW-HOW USER SchlagwortAnonymous sollte Email hier stehen Anonymous Remail with Mixmaster MESSAGES FROM NOWHERE www.photocase.de Anonymous remail protects the sender’s identity against potential eavesdroppers. The Mixmaster protocol gives users a mature technology for anonymous remail, and the text-based Mixmaster client is an example of a free remailer application. BY JENS KUBIEZIEL hen Johan Helsingius started messages and installed the software on messages were not covered by the mail up an anonymization service his server. secrecy act and thus facilitated eaves- Wfor email back in 1993, he The address of this server anon.penet. dropping and the identification of the could hardly have anticipated the kind fi soon became known, and it is still spo- users. This, in turn, prompted of trouble he would be in for. Despite, or ken of with awe today. To use the ser- Helsingius, to switch off the server [1]. maybe because of, the hostile reactions, vice, users had to send an email message Johan is now renowned for his pioneer- with a special entry in the header to the Cypherpunk and Mixmaster ing work. address. The server replaced the sender By the time Johan Helsingius switched In the early 90s, mailing lists and address with an address in the form of off his anonymous mail server, develop- USENET discussion groups had left the [[email protected]] (where XXXX ment was progressing at lightning speed. phase in which they mainly concen- is a combination of numbers) and for- The Cypherpunks, a group that focused trated on scientific and computer-related warded the email to the address speci- on protecting privacy and the use of subjects. USENET also supported a num- fied in the additional header line. cryptography, developed a number of ber of highly controversial political and The service was easy to use, and that remailer models that did not rely on a religious discussions. Because these dis- attracted many users. By 1996, the soft- central server. Their work was based on cussions were of interest to secret ser- ware was handling around 10,000 mes- a paper published back in 1981 by David vices and employers, users were looking sages a day. This was the year that the Chaum [2], describing mix networks for a way of expressing themselves Scientology movement sued the opera- that had been implemented with the anonymously. Johan Helsingius devel- tor, demanding the release of email idea of protecting the anonymity of the oped software for depersonalizing email addresses. A Finnish court decided email parties in email exchanges. 60 ISSUE 54 MAY 2005 WWW.LINUX- MAGAZINE.COM Anonymous Email KNOW-HOW The principle is comparable with sen- ding a letter in a number of envelopes. If Ralf Penn wants to send an anony- mous letter, he originally addresses the letter to the recipient, but instead of sending the letter directly, he then adds a number of intermediate stations. He puts the letter in another envelope and writes the address of one of these stations on the envelope. The letter gets a new envelope for each of these stations. The letter is then sent to the first inter- mediate address, where the external envelope is opened. The envelope is destroyed and the letter is sent to the address on the next envelope until, finally, the last intermediate station sends the letter to the actual recipient. Figure 1: Mixmaster client start up screen. The recipient can only trace the letter back to the last intermediate station, tity of the sender and recipient. Also, an for a potential investigator to identify as all the other envelopes have been attacker could intercept a message and messages by their size, the remailer also destroyed. This process guarantees the repeatedly reinsert it into the remailer makes all messages a uniform size. If a anonymity of the sender. chain. message is too small, Mixmaster adds Because each message is handled in random fill characters; if a message is First Generation Remailers exactly the same way, it takes exactly the too big, Mixmaster splits that message The first remailer model to be based on same route. These were the weaknesses into blocks of the same size. This tech- this principle was the Cypherpunk that Lance Cottrell identified in 1995 in nique makes it impossible for attackers Remailer, also known as the Type I “Mixmaster & Remailer Attacks” [3]; he to associate incoming packets with out- remailer. In contrast to Helsingius’ also proposed a few changes, which led going packets. model, there are a number of servers to the Type II Remailer, the Mixmaster. Also, each message packet is assigned involved, all of which operate indepen- a packet ID. Mixmaster checks if the ID dently of one another. If one server is How Mixmaster Works is already registered, and drops the mes- not accessible, users can fall back on Mixmaster does not forward incoming sage if it is. Dropping registered message one of the others. As the servers are messages immediately. Instead Mixmas- packets protects the server against rein- located in different countries, with dif- ter waits until enough messages have sertion attacks. These steps remove ferent legal systems, attackers would been added to the queue. When the some of the weaknesses of the Cypher- find it difficult to do anything about this message pool is full, the server sends the punk remailer. Additionally, Mixmaster kind of remailer. messages to the next station in the chain remailers use symmetric encryption, Cryptographic techniques are used to in random order. To make it impossible which accelerates message processing. wrap the message, as described earlier. This process involves the sender encrypting the message with the public key of each remailer in the chain. Users can request the key via email (Listing 1) or via the website of the server. Each remailer in the chain can only decrypt the part of the message intended for its use. The decrypted part contains the address to which the server has to forward the message. The remailer setup removes some of the weaknesses of Helsingius’ service, but it still leaves a few problems. For example, each remailer forwards emails as soon as they arrive. This allows an attacker to deduce relationships between incoming and outgoing messages, and thus to draw conclusions about the iden- Figure 2: The Mixmaster client displaying an overview of available remailers. WWW.LINUX- MAGAZINE.COM ISSUE 54 MAY 2005 61 KNOW-HOW Anonymous Email In fact, the Mixmaster has a lot of out the RFC draft for the Mixmaster pro- volunteer programmers as an open advantages over the Cypherpunk tocol [4]. source project. Development work is remailer. hosted by Sourceforge [5]. Users can A detailed description of the way Daily Operations download the program sources from this works is far beyond the scope of Mixmaster is also the name of a client Sourceforge and build the program from this article. Readers might like to check software package that was developed by the sources. Debian also has precom- Listing 1: Retrieving a Remailer Key 01 From: Jens Kubieziel <[email protected]> 27 sub 1024g/B2547D80 2000-04-24 02 To: Dizum Remailer <[email protected]> 28 03 Subject: remailer-key 29 -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- 30 Version: Mixmaster 2.9.0 (OpenPGP module) Remailer Response: 31 01 From: Nomen Nescio <[email protected]> 32 mQGiBDkEMTMRBADqwatBmgC/yuOlyqrzFL1toAzDrSiH06 02 To: "Jens Kubieziel" <[email protected]> eZlo8eCRj+Uqw6lSu0 03 Subject: Remailer key for dizum 33 RxxhSZaBUIsuqogRHFiuxU+RqUia241vEjSN0x7ZV+LipT Zc282Vb0PuDv7fL2Ll 04 34 Ez8QEJMz+zpMjICRFVNgHGRvhHUGu18i9BTmzigpyuMpM 05 $remailer{"dizum"} = "<[email protected]> cpunk wwlB2HvTBO4CQCgwNPp mix pgp pgponly repgp remix latent hash cut test ek ekx esub inflt50 35 B/I45a4PZ2+zmZyVQUuAh+UD/je6OduoTwwq6176bUfcv rhop20 reord post klen64"; CtVH9DP4DwoCgrVwd3c 06 36 r9KoR9hO7TAGL5Ah7eJ1GvndRH7KPBfuE6h/kMCohNgKGl uPn4je6vJ6N0J/O3av 07 Here is the PGP key: 37 +jJ1mHN2TImOp0+VFXFPm1A7zqA/MWgOG7DWggfmguZ9E6 08 TuAbfOIvy/Ksqnjt70 09 Type Bits/KeyID Date User ID 38 JyelA/9YyKH56juAGYHdHbPQR/NAED3XLUuc8UzXNuL5VN 10 pub 1024R/31234B37 2000-04-24 Nomen Nescio AD40SfbxVpNwJJPYM3 <[email protected]> 39 fA2RY0IbsMefKvotlXRkKZHzFbj0KcnkvF0d0WhXzCgTEd 11 wYwhaQQJzWznvuVzqm 12 -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- 40 18GZoomfsbsgfYHwfD0CCTSqVj3GlMTXHO6ol7QOw69HGl 13 Version: Mixmaster 2.9.0 (OpenPGP module) NZYrQhTm9tZW4gTmVz 14 41 Y2lvIDxyZW1haWxlckBkaXp1bS5jb20+iQBNBBARAgANBQ 15 mQCNAzkEMTMAAAEEAOa7vR4GZCRUukaoBqlGZbru6c6UlA I5BDEzAwsDAgIeAQAK gLOs8Od2I+UF1KTY5Z 42 CRBos3tosWhf52NaAKCjS4nyqFvmq85a5HwGPHhTBhGPJw 16 XKClKK5UblHDiFgzJk+0NxVR3ePgJ56MJeK2iGPVZ/i8th CdHrYGFeIVOh8OJJUR C1gR6btrrSONzfK7rr 43 vQiaIRNRG/W5AQ0EOQQxMxAEAL5wXBX5gxZE4MDaUDE9TWR 17 bW2aKlDfihyjz6emPYkHqPj0hAwxGQiTMkEPF5jmEdWeZ wo6VnE6dUvu6Ia45O N4kph8q6DIxI0s3AAID 44 hyAVDp5AoquHpJv7PvhA/nLiDFJspm2eDdLglaUGcDIt6MJ 18 tCFOb21lbiBOZXNjaW8gPHJlbWFpbGVyQGRpenVtLmNvbT EbXV/I9v/qQ7qnjh/ 6JAJUDBRA5BDEzHyro 45 Cm84gsss+uKTWZjga2NRZ/Y4JGePImLWBlmapwPoHBhJEXs 19 MjEjSzcBAWqABAC+6voEDspSDQUn0RmLjy1zPsysx7Zdc7J dp1zl/0DiDGmHdV12 /c40l6rGS9n1tZQiw 46 xPHfAAMFBACB12J/HSJznAwpGsIB03NrBz2Iw7NqrhepSfc 20 CTpILinXiCLP3I9Pu9T4kl1gHVYyIu2pqeNOJL0Wz1w6Hk ExGiWrGMJnAjAd98I wQjGsGdxtFDyFCmfxe 47 C84j5AYwMhGWMPmzcNqdcqWEI9Z2cWd0nXndt8GJAUCpfEb 21 c0htDM5WQn1DqtIaG98mNcStkY2B5e7VNP2aVd66oTeDP 5T2snTnoqaiIB4nYq LYD4VCsrIT0Dw== 48 vyG1HwBM7OMXw9k13smo+5PgE3EHyQ2pvIuAMoOZz6o/zq6 22 =RJCD d0xH6XokAPwMFGDkE 23 -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- 49 MTNos3tosWhf5xECVY0AoJcXnCHayCkFAE17SXU33cc3R1q nAKCpVZkKbuQSphYg 24 50 M4wRXciYWpAoyw== 25 Type Bits/KeyID Date User