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I was thinking about a system that combined these three properties: + Anonymous + Distributed + Encrypted For anonymous, I was thinking that the s
by dkersten 13y ago
I was thinking about a system that combined these three properties:
+ Anonymous
+ Distributed
+ Encrypted
For anonymous, I was thinking that the service would be accessible only through Tor or i2p, so that neither the sender nor the receiver can be found out by tracing the message.
For distributed, I was thinking that the mail system would essentially be a freesites-style distributed hash table where the mail address (or a hash thereof) would act as the key. The mail or parts of the mail would be stored multiple times across many clients to eliminate single points of failure. Perhaps a TTL system would prevent old mails from filling up everyone's space.
Finally, the encrypted would be achieved by having the mail address act as the public key (or at least, the mail address is a key to a distributed KV store that contains the public key). This way, before anonymously sending the message to the various distributed hash table buckets, it gets encrypted so only the desired recipient can read it.
It seems like it should be possible to build this from already existing technologies without thaaaat much trouble, though I haven't actually done anything about it.
Of course, getting people to use this would be another story ;-) and I guess people would want contacts lists, archives and so on.
- dhotson 13y agoI'd also add that you want to encrypt the metadata of the message. As we've seen, the from/to address metadata is often as revealing as the content. How can you build a messaging system where the delivery service doesn't know where to deliver something?
- ds9 13y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243936 - covered some of these issues, with pros and cons of various ideas.
- dkersten 13y agoI had some ideas about how to address this: The return address is contained inside the encrypted portion of the message so only the recipient can see which address sent the message. The message should also be cryptographically signed with the senders private key so that the sender can be verified. Next, the DHT key would likely be a hash of the recipients address so it would be difficult or impossible to determine who the messages in a specific bucket belongs to. Also since the service would only be accessed through tor or i2p, the actual sender and receiver would be hidden. Obviously the recipient address (or rather DHT key) must be known so that the message can go to the right place. Also obviously anyone can technically retrieve anyone else's messages but since they are encrypted this shouldn't matter.
- HerraBRE 13y agoOr, you could just do PGP/MIME + SMTP over Tor hidden services living on home computers, and not invent any new protocols at all. :-) This allows p2p delivery with strong encryption and anonymity of the transmission, while the message content can still be encrypted and signed for verification that you are talking to the right person. This is currently Mailpile's vaguely planned "maximum privacy" mode, with the backwards compatible fallback being normal PGP/MIME over the normal Internet. Anonymity from the POV of the sender/recipient is not characteristic of this sytem, and it doesn't give perfect forward secrecy/deniability like OTR. But most people consider anonymous e-mail to be spam. If you need PFS, just use OTR, it works. (Note: we have yet to do formal threat modeling and this plan may change.)