
nym.thinhose.net
Introduction
Welcome to the homepage of the Thinhose Nymserver. The following pages
will walk you through how to create, use and maintain a pseudonym account on
this service.
Prerequisites
In order to create and use your Nym, you're going to need a reasonably good
understanding of either PGP or GnuPG. Good enough, that is, to create a key and
sign/encrypt messages. Some understanding of how email messages are formatted
would also be useful.
Nymserver PGP Key
First, download the public PGP key for the nymserver. It can be obtained
HERE,
The key can be verified against a detached signature from the nymserver
Operator SEC3.
The command to verify a detached signature is:
gpg --verify sig.asc key.asc
Creating a Nym
That's it! The Nymserver decrypts the message, extracts your Nym's email
address from the supplied Public Key and processes it. You will receive a
confirmation message from the Nymserver in alt.anonymous.messages, encrypted
to your key.
It's worth noting that your nym creation message above (pubkey.txt.asc) is the
only time when you will NOT be expected to sign your message with your new Nym
key. See section below "Sending Messages from your Nym" for a slightly different
GnuPG command that you will use on all future outgoing messages to prove ownership
of your Nym.
Receiving Messages for your Nym
Unlike a normal email account, messages for your Nym aren't delivered to you
personally. Instead they are delivered to a common mailbox that you share with
many other users of anonymity systems. This shared mailbox serves to delink
incoming messages with their actual recipient.
The shared mailbox comes in the shape of a Usenet group called
alt.anonymous.messages. In order to find your messages within this group,
you'll need to download the entire content of the group and then attempt to
decrypt all the messages in it. If the decryption succeeds, the message is
your own.
Need to explain how to download and attempt to decrypt
messages.
In addition to messages sent to your Nym by other users, you'll also receive
information messages from the Nymserver about your configuration requests.
Wherever possible the server will inform you about issues with your Nym or the
changes you attempt to make to it. Once your key has been received by the
server, it has the capability to send you encrypted messages.
Sending messages from your Nym
The most secure way to do this is to use the Remailer network.
NOTE: Messages received in plain text will be discarded.