Edited/Distributed by HURINet - The Human Rights Information Network --------------------------------------------------------------------- ## author : media@permafrost.com ## date : 13.03.99 --------------------------------------------------------------------- for more information http://www.zks.net also of interest.. http://www.zks.net/p3/ to test the serial number turn off fix of Pentium 3 chips ************************************************************* Your Secret's Safe ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >From New Scientist, 20 February 1999 Kurt Kleiner YOU can never be too paranoid on the Internet. That seems to be the philosophy behind a program called Freedom which promises to preserve the anonymity of Net users as they browse the Web, send e-mail and post messages to newsgroups. "We anticipate it will be used by people like political dissidents, or someone with an illness they don't want their employers to know about," says Dov Smith, a director of Zero Knowledge Systems, the Montreal company that created Freedom. It handles the problem by encrypting data, such as requests for Web pages, before the information leaves the computer. The program then shuttles it between a series of Web servers, each of which encrypts it again, hopelessly scrambling the electronic trail. Suppose a Chinese dissident wants to look at the Free Tibet website and doesn't want the government to catch him at it. The program starts by selecting at least three separate servers from the cooperative Freedom network. Then, before the computer sends out a data packet, it encrypts it three times--in effect wrapping the data in three secure "envelopes", each of which can only be unwrapped by a specific server. The packet goes to the first server, which unwraps the outermost envelope, revealing only the address of the next server in line. The first server then sends the packet to the second, which unwraps the second envelope, reads the address for the next server in line, and sends it along. The final server does the same to the last envelope before sending the packet to the Free Tibet website. Information coming back from the site is treated the same way but in reverse. What this complicated procedure means is that no single server in the system knows both where the packets are going and where they are coming from. This makes it very unlikely that the Beijing administration could work out that the dissident was looking at the Free Tibet site. The program provides similar anonymity for users posting to newsgroups or sending e-mail. Some of the ideas behind this software have already been used on the Net, says Sameer Parekh, president of C2Net Software and an authority on Net privacy issues. But no other package has brought them together. Related links Find out all about the Freedom software at the Zero Knowledge Systems website http://www.zks.net where you can download a paper in pdf format. ---------------------------------- Send mail for the 'huridocs-tech' list to 'huridocs-tech@hrea.org'. Mail administrative request to 'majordomo@hrea.org'. For additional assistance, send mail to: 'owner-huridocs-tech@hrea.org'. Archives of previous messages posted to the list can be found at: http://www.human-rights.net/huridocs-tech.
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