Flutterby™! : Anonymity

Next unread comment / Catchup all unread comments User Account Info | Logout | XML/Pilot/etc versions | Long version (with comments) | Weblog archives | Site Map | | Browse Topics

Anonymity

2002-08-12 21:37:02+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

In response to some email communications, it occurred to me that I'd like to find a way to preserve some information about session tracking in the Flutterby logs, but make it so that even I can't find out what IP address posted what message. I've thought about an MD5 hash of the 4 byte number, but it seems like iterating through 32 bits to deconstruct the hash isn't out of the question. I'm not quite sure who I'm trying to protect, especially since if a poster is at all known in this community usually their syntax will give them away, but has anyone thought about this problem? Maybe I just need to figure out what sort of information I'd like to extract from the logs and purge them regularly.

[ related topics: Privacy Flutterby Meta Cryptography ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment made: 2002-08-13 03:34:54+00 by: TheSHAD0W

Have three people generate public keys. Encrypt the tracking information, along with some random padding, with all three keys iteratively. Then if you find the need to track down someone's IP, you'd need all three people to decrypt the information or it would be unrecoverable.

#Comment made: 2002-08-13 04:07:02+00 by: Dan Lyke

What I was really hoping for was some sort of non-reversible hash. I want something that if they come to me with a warrant I can honestly say "That information doesn't exist".

I think what I'll have to do is work towards a log analysis system which extracts the information I want and throws away everything else.