[Mixminion-it] Welcome to our first international colleague

[daif9Opi]

El 03/03/11 23:47, dirtydog a autistici.org escribió:
> daif9Opi wrote:
>> Hi to all and thanks again Marco :),
> 
> Hi Antonio,
> 
> welcome to the list!
> 
> 
>> I'm a PhD student in low power crypto hardware design (or something like
>> that, I believe) that is a bit tired of not contributing enough to alter
>> a reality that doesn't satisfy me in terms of civil liberties and openness.
> 
>> After set a Tor relay and maintained it for some time I decided to take
>> a look into which projects I could do something useful and realized that
>> mixminion, which I had been using for a long time, didn't have any
>> substantial changes during the past years nor the number of servers were
>> considerable. I thought, maybe a Thunderbird extension could put more
>> ppl into remailers again and make some pay attention to the current
>> status of mixminion.
> 
> I work as software engineer for a small software house developing
> various kinds of software. I know a bit of cryptography because of my
> PhD side activities, while my main research area was software
> verification. I know Tor as a user, not really much more than that.
> 
> 
>> And well, I love this synchronicities...
> 
>> As far as I understood form the last thread (my spanish helps a little
>> bit!)  are you working in functional extension to Thunderbird, right ?
>> Could you translate for me some of the features from the last thread ?
> 
> Yes, it is a Thunderbird extension. At the moment it consist of a bunch
> of xul overlays and dialog windows with their javascript code. No XPCOM
> components for the moment, but it may be worth to build one in the
> future. Mixminion is invoked using the IPC library. I basically make an
> array with the proper options, give Mixminion some inputs like user
> password and get its output. I tried to work without IPC but it seemed
> impossible to access its std-in,out,err, making things quite hard.
> 
> At moment the extension allows you to (among brackets there is where you
> can find the functionality):
> 
> - send/enqueue a message through mixminion (overlay for
> messageCompose.xul).
> 
> - Reply to a SURB taken from a file  (overlay for messageCompose.xul).
> 
> - Build and attach a SURB to your forward and reply messages (send
> option dialog box).
> 
> - Set Mixminion path in a preference window (item in "MixGui" menu).
> 
> - Get a list of servers infos (item in "MixGui" menu).
> 
> - List, flush and clean message queue (item in "MixGui" menu).
> 
> - Create and inspect a SURB file (item in "MixGui" menu).
> 
> - See and clean the output of Mixminon calls from the extension.
> 

Wow, that's really impressive !

> For the next future the idea was to implement:
> 
> - decode received messages like enigmail decodes crypted messages (when
> message is loaded or on demand maybe according to user options).
> 
> - Allow the user to select the path on which its message will be sent.
> 
> - Integration with Enigmail.
> 
> - Allow the user to save sent and decoded messages.
> 
> - Add other user options like about saving messages, path features and
> automatic behavior settings.
> 
> - File attachments.
> 
> - Localization.
> 
> - Help.
> 
> - Improvement of some existing features. Especially in the beginning I
> mainly tried to find a way to make it work and likely there are smarter
> ways to perform some of the tasks.
> 
> 
>> As Marco wrote in the last thread, I have been playing a little with the
>> mozilla extension system to make something but not really seriously yet.
> 
>> Also, I'd like to remark that maybe connecting first to the Tor network
>> (optionally) until the number of mixers grows and maybe sending a good
>> number of e-mail copies should be ok to avoid comments like "is the
>> current mixminion network really "anonymous" ?" or "my mail doesn't
>> arrive!" giving a little sense of "trust" to the extension.
> 
> Sounds interesting.
> 
> About sending more copies of a message, though, it may be a problem with
> replies, as Mixminion keeps a list of used reply blocks, preventing you
> using it again. Obviously we can change this behavior but I would go
> careful on that for the moment. By the way, the same SURB can still be
> used more times, for example by different users or from different
> clients. I do not know if this is a real problem as the SURB contains
> just half of the path. Am I wrong?
> 
> Do you have any idea about how to connect to TOR? Could it be something
> like the TorButton for Firefox?
> 

An idea about a torbutton for Thunderbird has been proposed for the
Google Summer Of Code but I don't know if there were improvements during
the past summer :?

Maybe calling usewithtor or torsocks through the IPC too with mixminion
(at least usewithtor seems to rewrite the server's domain name
resolution properly).