Re: [freehaven-dev] Draft: Tarzan protocol paper

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 02:04:04AM -0400, Michael J Freedman wrote:
> I wrote up the Tarzan protocol specification.  Please find a initial
> pre-alpha draft copy of the protocol description here:
> 
> 	http://freehaven.net/tarzan/doc/tarzan.ps

Thanks for getting this written up, Mike. I'd been stalling on writing
it up for way too long. :)

My main first comment is that I think we should present a forward-only
anonymous channel first, since it provides quite a bit of functionality
and it's way simpler. The pseudonymous-server functionality is really an
"extra feature" which we've layered onto the basic forward-anonymous
channel primitive. So we should describe the design for the primitive
first, before we get to the two-way anonymity. Otherwise we'll scare
people off. (I tried to provide that sort of outline in section 1.)

My second thought is that it looks like you're making the client
pseudonymous when anonymous might be enough; I think Alice can provide
Bob with the symmetric keys for decryption and nothing more (well, and
the nonce), and that will be enough. But I haven't compared the notes
from last Sunday against what you just committed yet; I will do that
and let you know.

Thanks,
--Roger