[tor-talk] Mailpile SMTorP [ref: nexgen P2P email]

[Mike Ingle]

I'm not trying to offend anyone. I was talking about broadcast 
everything systems in general.
Bitmessage is a fine implementation of the broadcast everything 
paradigm. I'm looking for an
intermediate between broadcast everything and SMTP-over-Tor.

My proposal is essentially: servers form a DHT. Users store their keys 
in the DHT by key id.
The key record also has some additional metadata including where the 
user wants to receive
messages. For short messages, the message is stored in the DHT by its 
hash. Each user also
has a few hash values they check to get message announcements. Senders 
post an announcement
to one of those values at random. Message announcements point to message 
data.

People who want to be anonymous can connect to any server over Tor, and 
post or request
hash values to/from the DHT. An attacker would have to have Tor 
compromised and also have
that particular server compromised to break someone's anonymity. It's 
not as anonymous as
broadcast everything, but it's better than SMTP over Tor or webmail over 
Tor.

Using the DHT it is also possible to look up a user knowing only his 
email address, and then
verify the key id. And people who want to exchange big files can get an 
account on a server,
in which case the data is stored in 8MB blocks with no maximum size. 
People who need to
distribute big files pay for the server capacity, and small anonymous 
messages free-ride, with
a proof of work to prevent spamming.

Mike

> >This is pretty similar to receiving a Usenet feed in the old days, and
> >downloading all the messages so as to receive a few encrypted ones. That
> >makes for the best recipient privacy, at the cost of bandwidth. From
> >what I can tell, Bitmessage basically automates that process.
>
> No, not "Bitmessage", but "the specific use-case for a feature that I
> happen to understand and mentioned on this list."
>
> > If it
> >moved beyond the Darknet Markets crowd, success would kill it or at
> >least require compromising the broadcast-everything rule.
>
> I'll just ask you straight up-- are you talking about 
> broadcast-everything
> systems in general, or are you giving an assessment of Bitmessage's 
> design and
> implementation based on (at least) a thorough reading of the 5 page 
> whitepaper?
>
> (Confidential to cryptography list lurkers: IMO we have plenty of Ben 
> Lauries
> at this point, and could use a lot more Hal Finneys. :)
>
> -Jonathan