random remailers
Eric Hughes
hughes at soda.berkeley.edu
Thu Jan 21 08:38:55 PST 1993
>> Has anyone thought about the consequence of randomly picking a
>> remailing path instead of using the same one?
>what if the remailer flips a coin, choosing between final delivery
>and remailing through another of its ilk. "message delivery with
>probability one ..."
This is an excellent suggestion. I have to think about the
mathematical properties some more, but a few spring to mind. Assume,
for discussion, that there is constant probability of delivery at each
hop, say p.
First, the expected number of hops is 1/p. To see this just sum the
following series.
$ E(p) = \Sum_{n=1}^{\infinity} n p (p-1)^{n-1} $
Thus the syntax for routing can be extremely simple, just specifying
the expected number of hops wanted. If you want to have guaranteed
minimum delivery, you can manually route through a few hops, then
randomize.
Eric
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