Mixminion to become type 3 remailer protocol?

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

George and I spoke at length with Len Sassaman (current mixmaster
maintainer) this past week, and it turns out he's been planning for a
while to come out with a new version of the protocol. He was wanting to
drop backwards compatibility to type 1 remailers, but couldn't afford to
because then he'd have no way to do reply blocks. Basically at this point
he wants to join with us -- we bring the protocol and he brings the user
base. He wants to have the mix nodes support both type 2 and type 3 for a
while, at least until we can phase over to 3. This may make implementation
significantly yuckier; perhaps we can take something that supports type
2 and just graft it on somewhere until he's willing to drop it.

I ran the reply design and message format by Len and Raph Levien in
detail, and they both liked it. I showed it in somewhat less detail
to Lance Cottrell and David Chaum, and they both thought it reasonable
(that is, they didn't find any problems with it from what I told them).

So the plan moving forward is for us to write up our design into something
clear and coherent (I'll be doing a first draft of that over the next
week or so, modulo discussions with David Hopwood), then we can get
comments on it and start figuring out how we want to go about building
a spec and eventual implementation. Len wants the protocol spec to
be standalone so he can build one in C. More power to him. :)

I'm going to invite Len and a few others to join the list and
listen/comment. Hopefully they'll have good things to say.

I'll be posting plenty more details about various things on here as I
get time. Comments/criticism/questions very much appreciated.

--Roger