Re: Thoughts on the remailer network

[Len Sassaman <rabbi@quickie.net>]

On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Roger Dingledine wrote:

> Thanks for joining the list, Len. I think things are moving forward
> nicely.

As do I. I'm quite excited about all of this. :)

> On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 11:44:09PM -0700, Len Sassaman wrote:
> > That is certainly a possibility. At this point, I think we would want
> > three documents: a paper describing the message format and low-level wire
> > protocols, a paper describing proper behavior of a mix node, and a paper
> > describing the proper and possible behavior of a nym server.
>
> Gosh. That's a lot of documents. The one I'm working on right now is
> none of those -- but it will be the best format for peer review from
> the crypto researcher community.

Ah, yes. Your paper is what I was thinking about when I mentioned having
the protocol firmly decided upon and peer reviewed. The IETF documents
come later.

> So I'm going to keep my tunnel vision for a while and get this first
> step done, so we can move forward with a solid foundation.

Indeed, that is crucial.

> (Were you volunteering to work on those other papers, Len? :) I want to
> make sure we avoid mapping out our path without having anybody actually
> still wanting to do stuff.)

Actually, yes, I'll work on them. I'm going to want you or George in on it
as well, and preferably whoever is doing the bulk of the work on actually
writing MixMinion. IETF documents are supposed to be implementors
blueprints -- and when they are completed, anyone with a clue should be
able to pick the documents up and write a Type III compatible remailer
without ever talking to us. So getting input from the actual implementors
will be quite important.



--Len.