OpenBSD Journal

OpenBSD Remailers

Contributed by jose on from the extra-private-email dept.

Several years ago I heard a very good talk on anonymous remailers at Defcon. These provide significant enhancements over encrypted mail and other attempts at private communications by thwarting traffic analysis, for example. Since then, I have had an interest in anonymous communications, particularily anonymous remailers. When I was just starting on the net anon.penet.fi (if I recall correctly) was the big site devoted to this. Since then, a whole host of more robust systems have been brought up.

The Mixmaster tools are by far the most popular. One of the major problems t odeploying this on OpenBSD is the use of the IDEA cipher. A package for the IDEA library can be modified from the NetBSD libidea port . In the OpenBSD ports tree we have mail/mixmaster , but I recall it needing some help getting updated . If you want to get started, read Shinn's FAQ on remailers.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By RC () on

    I'd say, what we need is more work on encryption, not anonymity.

    Yes anonymity is good, but it works, and anyone can use it; GPG/PGP is something that doesn't work unless everyone uses it, and few do.

    What PGP/GPG needs for a boost, is a Netscape plugin that adds a toolbar to every text box, and has buttons to encrypt/sign text. That would make in easy to use PGP with Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. Decryption/Sig verification would be more complex, but could be done as well...

  2. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Wasn't it anon.penet.fi?

  3. By Anonymous Coward () on

    What are the odds that any given peice of mail from @hushmail.com is a troll? 99/100? 999/1000?

  4. By Nikolay () sturm@snafu.homeunix.net on mailto:sturm@snafu.homeunix.net

    mixmaster is pretty much up to date, I am
    waiting for b40 to come out, as this should be
    more stable than b39 (Len Sassaman told me).
    Regarding idea, this is just needed for the cypherpunk type I remailer, not the mixmaster remailer and maybe for the nym-support (which I don't use and therefore don't support).

    Having said that, if anyone is willing to port the idea library and make it work with mixmaster, send me patches.

  5. By Alex Kirk () alex@schnarff.com on mailto:alex@schnarff.com

    I actually ran a MixMaster (v2.9beta8) remailer on OBSD 2.9 for several months, before deciding that it was too big of a drain on my bandwidth. I had no trouble installing it -- really didn't need to do any mods to the system myself -- and it ran without a hitch.

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