Email system hiding source and destination
I am a translator!
I remember reading, a long time (> 15 years perhaps) ago, an article in Scientific American or in Pour La Science (kind of French version of it) about an email enhancement to make the source and the destination of emails really hidden. In my recollection, the "email addresses" in this system were very long and clearly impossible for a human to remember and the emails were distributed to multiple nodes that could be the destination and only the destination node could know it was really the destination.
Does anyone remember about that? I wonder what happened with this idea, whether it is used in some system maintained today or not, and if not why it was abandoned. If anyone has a reference to this, I'd be highly interested.
> the emails were distributed to multiple nodes that could be the destination and only the destination node could know it was really the destination.
This part at least sounds like Freenet. There seem to be several email services running on Freenet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet#Communication.
I am a translator!
Thanks.
The goal of the email system I remember was to prevent surveillance of who is communicating with whom and when, which GPG does not address for email, but still the destination should be able to know who the source is.
Looking at the descriptions of Freenet on wikipedia, the intention is to make something censorship-resistant and anonymous. If "anonymous" means the source of the message would be anonymous, this is not all all the objective I was considering. So perhaps Freenet's objectives are completely different.
> If "anonymous" means the source of the message would be anonymous
It does, but only to the sense that the other nodes to which the message also gets sent have no idea who sent it, and to whom.
Anonymizing network layers like Freenet or I2P (or Tor) provide the basic conditions to deny the possibility for a third party to track who is sending data to whom. The services that use them can be anything: browsing, email, online gaming, groupchat, file sharing etc. and can involve strangers only, or non-strangers who want to be seen as interacting as strangers.
I was thinking about Freenet specifically because it does exactly what you mentioned: adding background traffic to make it impossible to distinguish between what is intended for you personally and what your node is simply relaying as part of the larger network. But maybe the service you have in mind was implemented on I2P or some other platform.
I guess the future is GNUnet, although there was no email service running on GNUnet 15 years ago: https://www.gnunet.org/en/about.html.
I am a translator!
Thanks for the additional explanations.
> I guess the future is GNUnet, although there was no email service running on GNUnet 15 years ago: https://www.gnunet.org/en/about.html.
I came across https://secushare.org that is considering GNUnet as the thing to use indeed.
https://secushare.org/comparison is really interesting.
The issues raised about PGP (at https://secushare.org/PGP) are also interesting. The title "15 reasons not to start using PGP" is slightly provocative but the text immediately says that using PGP is much better than no encryption or TLS only and really explains the issues, so I find it really useful, even to use PGP. I will look at the listed alternatives. Their design might have clear advantages over PGP but they may have issues not well described yet, due to lack of usage and scrutiny, while the flaws of PGP are rather well known.