[messaging] Zero knowledge proofs of passport

[Trevor Perrin]

On Sun, Jul 27, 2014 at 6:03 AM, David Leon Gil <coruus at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
>
> 2. Pond's low-bandwidth is an artificial constraint. It is easy enough to
> run Pond sans Tor, with arbitrarily high message rate. (I've played around
> with this a little, actually.)

No, Pond's low-bandwidth, periodic connections from the recipient to
their mailbox server provides important security against correlation
of sender and recipient traffic flows.

Tor also provides important security.


> Introductions are easy, while still avoiding spam: Just require a really
> expensive non-parallelizable proof-of-work/puzzle (e.g., 4 core-hours).

Compute time costs pennies per core-hour, these days.  And the threat
model in Pond includes not just random spam but targeted DoS against a
recipient.  Your proposal would make this possible at low cost.

Pond's design is well-documented [1] and has been extensively
discussed on this list, so let's try to be accurate about it.

Trevor

[1] https://pond.imperialviolet.org/