Re: chaffing and winnowing

Rickard Armiento:
>> any government [c]ould easily outlaw [winnowing and chaffing]

Aaron Swartz:
> Software to do winnowing and chaffing is easy to write. It might be
> as simple as:
>
> $ cat /dev/random | mconnect bob
>
> (assuming you had something like IPSEC to add a MAC to each packet
> and discard ones with bad MACs)
>
> I think it would be difficult to prevent people from sharing this
> command with each other.

This is right but irrelevant. Ordinary strong and not goverment
sanctioned encryption is equally easy to perform. The issue is the
claim that "it will legally work even in countries were encryption is
outlawed" (this was a quote summarizing chaffing and winnowing
made by Clemens Fisher).

> As the paper points out, outlawing execution of this command is
> also problematic:
>
> """
> Charles' computer, for whatever reason, then adds ``chaff'' packets to
> the packet sequence from Alice to Bob.  All of sudden, Charles'
> activities provide a very high degree of confidentiality for the
> communications between Alice and Bob!
> [...]
> One could imagine that Alice and Bob are merely authenticating their
> packets to each other, and that it is not Charles but instead a rogue
> law enforcement agent who is introducing the chaff, and then
> introducing the authenticated and chaffed message as potential
> justification to a judge [...]
> """

I did read these arguments, and I was trying to say that after a
government has made "chaffing on purpose of hiding a message"
illegal, it *is* still possible for a court to decide on whether it
beleives the chaff was put there on purpose by Alice and/or Bob, or
whether it was not (i.e., that it was introduced by misstake or by
someone else).

Putting any mechanism that produces "chaff" inside an email system is
obviously for the purpose of concealing communication and hence *not*
a legally working solution in governments who outlaws this.

//Rickard