FBI Compromises Another Remailer

betterunixthanunix writes "Another remailer has been compromised by the FBI, who made a forensic image of the hard disk of a remailer located in Austria. The remailer operator has reissued the remailer keys, but warns that messages previously sent through the remailer could be decrypted. The operator also warns that law enforcement agents had an opportunity to install a back door, and that a complete rebuild of the system will take some time."

Why was the key not in secure crypto processors?

[realxmp]

If we're going to trust these remailers then we need to do things properly. Key goes into the crypto processor, never comes out. Means someone can't just seize your server and image it then use that image to decrypt all traffic that passed through. If they want to try and get it out, fine but they'll need a guy with an Electron microscope to do so and they'll likely trip the tamper measures and bye bye key. If you're particularly paranoid you can even destroy your copy of the key once you've loaded it, this might mean changing your key if you have to move servers but it means that the service you offer is truly tamper evident. Plus you also have the added bonus that a dedicated hardware security module is usually quicker than your processor at doing encryption/decryption.

Re:Crime

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they really store ALL email traffic, or just profile and store from selected accounts? The 3GB of mails from my GMail consisting of newsletters and college projects, and millions of other accounts like mine: arent they essentially useless and a waste of space for them?

Suppose you had a yottabyte of disk storage. 3GB isn't just a drop in the bucket, it's not even a grain of sand at the beach.

Car Analogy: Most of us break the odd traffic law every now and then. Very rarely, does anybody get caught. At the instant Officer Friendly pegs you on radar doing 35 in a 30 zone, he'd very much like to be able to check your driving history. If there were a giant database of everyone's GPS logs, he could tell whether you were just in a hurry that morning, the sort of driver who usually drives precisely 4 (or 9) miles an hour over the posted speed limit, or if you do 120 in a 60 zone whenever there aren't any cops around. If Officer Friendly had access to that data, he'd be better able to judge whether or not to pull you over.

For speeding, it's not worth logging the movements of every car and correlating them with local speed limits at the time the log was written.

For other things, it probably is.

From NSA's point of view, right now your gmail account is noise. But everyone's political views change over time as a natural part of the process of growing up. Sometimes things go wrong, and perfectly normal people who hold perfectly normal views turn into monsters. There's a 99.99999% probability that you're not one of them. But for the sake of 3 lousy gigs out of a yottabyte, there's a 100% chance that someone's 3GB of noise will contain signal.

Since they don't posess a time machine that can peer into the future, they don't, and can't, know whose 3GB-of-noise will eventually contain a signal 20 years from now. But 20 years from now, they will have a time machine that can peer back 20 years into the past.

It will be interesting to see if remailers work...

[cayenne8]

It is going to be very interesting to see if the FBI, can crack through the remailer system, and actually find the person that did this.

I mean, if the person they're after, used the remailer system as it is supposed to work...it "should" be uncrackable and untraceable.

It will be interesting to see the system go through what I have to guess is the first actual hard core test it has ever gone through.

Re:wtf fbi

[Anonymous Coward]

And through partisan gerrymandering and constant corruption, the USA isn't even a representative democracy any more, it's a corporate oligarchy.