Anonymous Remailers - Disappearing Cryptography - page 187

Encryption The remailer has its own public-key pair and accepts the
requests in encrypted form. It decrypts them before sending
them out. This is an important defense against someone who
might be tapping the remailer's incoming and outgoing lines of
aremailer.
Latency The remailer will wait to send out the mail in order to con-
found anyone who is watching the traffic coming in and out.
This delay may either be specified by the incoming message or
assigned randomly.
Padding Someonewatching the traffic in and out of a remailer might
be able to trace encrypted messages by comparing the size.
Even if the incoming and outgoing messages are encrypted
with different keys, they're still the same size. Padding mes-
sages with random data can remove this problem.
Reordering The remailer may get the messages in one order, but it
doesn't process them in the same first-in-first-out order. This
adds an additional measure of secrecy.
Chaining Remailers If one anonymous remailer might cave in and
reveal your identity, it is possible to chain together several re-
mailers in order to add additional secrecy. This chain, unlike
the physical basis for the metaphor, is as strong as its strongest
link. Only one machine on the list has to keep a secret to stop
the trail.
Anonymous Posters This machine will post the contents to a news-
group anonymously instead of sending them out via e-mail.
Each of these features can be found in different remailers. Con-
sult the lists of remailers available on the net to determine which fea-
tures might be available to you.
10.2.2 Using Remailers
There are several different types of anonymous remailers on the net-
work and there are subtle differences between them. Each class was
written by different people and they approached the details in their
own way. The entire concept isn't too challenging, though, so every-
one should be able to figure out how to send information through an
anonymous remailer after reading the remailer's instructions.
One of the more popular remailers in history was run by Johan
Helsingius in Helsinki, Finland, at [e-mail] until legal
troubles exhausted his patience. Composing e-mail and sending it