A pseudonymous remailer or nym server, as opposed to an

anonymous remailer An anonymous remailer is a server that receives messages with embedded instructions on where to send them next, and that forwards them without revealing where they originally came from. There are cypherpunk anonymous remailers, mixmaster anonym ...

, is an

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

software program designed to allow people to write

pseudonym A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individua ...

ous messages on

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

newsgroups and send pseudonymous

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

. Unlike purely anonymous remailers, it assigns its users a user name, and it keeps a database of instructions on how to return messages to the real user. These instructions usually involve the anonymous remailer network itself, thus protecting the true identity of the user. Primordial pseudonymous remailers once recorded enough information to trace the identity of the real user, making it possible for someone to obtain the identity of the real user through legal or illegal means. This form of pseudonymous remailer is no longer common.

David Chaum David Lee Chaum (born 1955) is an American computer scientist, cryptographer, and inventor. He is known as a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies, and widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash. His 1982 dissertatio ...

wrote an article in 1981 that described many of the features present in modern pseudonymous remailers. The

Penet remailer The Penet remailer () was a pseudonymous remailer operated by Johan "Julf" Helsingius of Finland from 1993 to 1996. Its initial creation stemmed from an argument in a Finnish newsgroup over whether people should be required to tie their real na ...

, which lasted from 1993 to 1996, was a popular pseudonymous remailer.

Contemporary nym servers

A nym server (short for "

server") is a

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

that provides an untraceable e-mail address, such that neither the nym server operator nor the operators of the remailers involved can discover which nym corresponds to which real identity. To set up a nym, you create a PGP keypair and submit it to the nym server, along with instructions (called a ''reply block'') to

s (such as

Cypherpunk A cypherpunk is any individual advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Originally communicating through the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, informal gr ...

or Mixmaster) on how to send a message to your real address. The nym server returns a confirmation through this reply block. You then send a message to the address in the confirmation. To send a message through the nym server so that the From address is the nym, you add a few headers, sign the message with your nym key, encrypt it with the nym server key, and send the message to the nym server, probably routed through some anonymous remailers. When the nym server gets the message, it decrypts the message and sends it on to the intended recipient, with the From: address being your nym. When the nym server gets a message addressed ''to'' the nym, it appends it to the nym's reply block and sends it to the first remailer in the chain, which sends it to the next and so on until it reaches your real address. It is considered good practice to include instructions to encrypt it on the way, so that someone (or some organization) doing in/out

traffic analysis Traffic analysis is the process of intercepting and examining messages in order to deduce information from patterns in communication, it can be performed even when the messages are encrypted. In general, the greater the number of messages observed ...

on the nym server cannot easily match the message received by you to the one sent by the nym server. Existing "multi-use reply block" nym servers were shown to be susceptible to passive traffic analysis with one month's worth of incoming spam (based on 2005 figures) in a paper by

Bram Cohen Bram Cohen is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol in 2001, as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent. He is also the co-founder of ...

, Len Sassaman, and Nick Mathewson.Se
The Pynchon Gate: A Secure Method of Pseudonymous Mail Retrieval

References

External links

Anonymous Remailer FAQ

Mixmaster FAQ

Official I2P-Bote eepsite
{dead link, date=April 2018 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes (I2P-internal) Anonymity networks Internet Protocol based network software Routing Network architecture

Contemporary nym servers

See also

References

Further reading

External links