Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!aioe.org!news.swapon.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Mike Easter Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: alt.anonymous.messages Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2014 17:45:46 -0700 Lines: 32 Message-ID: References: <20140416111547.ba81b447.rsw@therandymon.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net KajoBddPA16MFMD2DzHZ1QRTi4sUX+MUwW+CEZt/NfxYcoO+OJ Cancel-Lock: sha1:FUPwtwQUDJfUv1b1pgdspQ6zPsE= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.4.0 In-Reply-To: Xref: csiph.com comp.misc:2420 RS Wood wrote: > Mike Easter wrote: >> RS Wood wrote: >>> Question: does anyone have any idea what is going on in that group? >>> Endless, PGP messages of the same format and length? >> >> It's a form of shared mailbox; mixing a bunch of different people's >> messages into the same pile. > That's a good explanation, thanks. A very clever system. Actually it has a number of flaws from a security viewpoint. There was a recent in-depth evaluation by Tom Ritter, called De-Anonymizing Alt.Anonymous.Messages and presented at the DefCon 21 conference. It is a 116 p. .pdf doc and there are discussions about the 'revelations' such as: // It seems there are issues with AAM, many of them related to the size of the mixmaster network, the poor tools available, and the sloppy operational practices of the people who use it... // Ritter did a lot of analysis of metadata as well as a little cracking by acquiring 1.1 million messages over the last 10 years and 'digesting' them. There are plenty of places to get the .pdf and here's Ritter's page intro'ing http://ritter.vg/blog-deanonymizing_amm.html -- Mike Easter