A Peculiar Blog

In a previous entry I gave a brief introduction and installation guide to Jack B. Nymble, a client program for sending anonymous email.  Once the program is installed and it’s stats are refreshed.  It’s possible to send anonymous email.

However as it is so far, it’s limited to using Type I (Cypherpunk) remailers.  By adding Mixmaster, you get the ability to use Type II remailers as well.  Type II remailers are designed with higher security in mind and to be resistant to things like replay attacks (where messages are captured by an attacker and resent lots of times to create a large trail of traffic in an attempt to follow the message)

To add mixmaster capability to JBN.  First of course you need the mixmaster executable.  The most recent version that works with JBN is Mixmaster 2.04b6, and it’s detached signature file that you can use to verify that it hasn’t been messed with since it was signed.

Once you have verified the Mixmaster archive, extract the files into a directory of it’s own.  You MUST use a short directory name (8 characters or less.) I use “MIX” and put it in the root directory of the drive it’s installed on for example: C:\MIX

At this point people running win95 or win98 need to add the line:

set MIXPATH=C:\MIX

to their autoexec.bat file

Win XP users need to log into their admin account and right click on the “my computer” icon and choose “properties”, then click the “Advanced” Tab and click the “Environment Variables” button.  Then you click “new” and give the variable name MIXPATH and the value C:\MIX (or the directory you used to install mixmaster).  Then click “OK” on everything and log off of the Admin account.

Then start JBN.  on the Window menu, choose Remailer config and select the mixmaster tab.  Enter the mixmaster directory and set the version to 2.0.4 you can set MINREL to 95, MAXLAT to 6:00 and DISTANCE to 5 and click ‘OK’

Now when you’re composing a message you can use the Remailers menu item Mixmaster to use mixmaster remailers and JBN will handle setting things up for mixmaster and emailing the resulting file.

There’s a lot more to this of course and I just realized that I haven’t covered sending messages with JBN at all and while just spending some time reading the docs that come with the program and looking over menu choices really does tell you all you need, I’ll cover that in an upcoming entry.

Technorati Tags: anonymous+email, remailers, mixmaster, jbn, pgp, encryption, privacy