OmniMix - Pathway to Privacy

Principles

The Internet has become the most important medium for research and exchange of views on nearly all imaginable topics. By breaking former information monopolies its common availability empowers people in a way never experienced before. But its simplicity of use also seduces to an uncritical spontaneous interaction, deflecting from the fact, that every step taken on the Internet leaves traces, which are resolutely tracked and analyzed by those interested in uncovering personal data, is it for gathering preferences and email adresses for marketing purposes, for scanning the personal background in the course of an application, or even for more obscure private, political or business reasons.

Relating the ease of collecting unprotected digital communication with the immense data storage capability of governmental authorities and corporate vendors of Internet services like access providers, search engines or mail hosts, it becomes obvious, that data analysis is easy to achieve and doesn't at all have to take place instantaneously, but may even happen years in the future, when unforeseen reasons to do so become evident - to the examiner and you.

The solution to that threat of pervasive observation can't be to accept it in meek compliance or to retreat completely from the Internet, but to deal with it in a prudent way and use adequate tools to counter invasion of privacy aiming at a free civil society without surveillance and harassment.

That's what's also expressed in a U.N. Report on Encryption and Internet Anonymity:

Encryption and anonymity, and the security concepts behind them, provide the privacy and security necessary for the exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression in the digital age. Such security may be essential for the exercise of other rights, including economic rights, privacy, due process, freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and the right to life and bodily integrity. States should promote strong encryption and anonymity. National laws should recognize that individuals are free to protect the privacy of their digital communications by using encryption technology and tools that allow anonymity online.

But how to follow these U.N. recommendations and prevent traces, which might be regretted later on? Dependent on the service you intend to use - and the severity of your paranoia - different strategies have to be put into action.

Concerning electronic mail, the most obvious procedure would be to become firm in the usage of encryption software like GnuPG to convert your postal card into a letter, so that really no one apart from the sender and the intended recipient/s will be able to read data that are exchanged. 'Really no one' means, that tools like GnuPG, where the source code is freely available and can be reviewed by everyone, provide established mathematical algorithms unlikely to be broken in the forseeable future, regardless of all the rumors that are spread to discourage uninformed people and prevent them from realizing their civil rights concerning privacy.

But not only gaining insight into transferred data is relevant. Irrespective of that information revealing interlocutors may by itself already be of great importance to generate a sociogram of observed persons or groups, thinking e.g. of secret negotiations or cooperations between companies. That's where networks of anonymous remailers like Mixmaster or Yamn come into play.

The principle of those 'onion routers' is to anonymize the protocol dependent 'envelope' of your message by suppressing personal data or replacing them with unspecific ones, and then to send it multilayer encrypted through a chain of 'post offices' within its net, so that even the post offices resp. remailers themselves aren't able to trace it back to the origin. For them it's absolutely impossible to figure out the route of the message beyond the remailers it directly communicates with. The last remailer in the chain finally delivers the mail to the recipient.

To make this process somewhat clearer, here's a short example with a real world analogon: Imagine you've got some transport cases, which are graduated in size and fit into each other like those well-known little wooden Russian dolls called 'Matryoshkas'. But that's not all what makes those cases special, as they originate from various post offices, already have enough stamps on them to pay the bill, and a recipient sticker with the address of the post office they belong to already filled in. Furthermore they are equipped with a catch, which, once closed, can only be reopened with a key no one else than the single issuing post office owns. Now, if you intend to make Marilyn, who - as everybody knows - prefers diamonds, anonymously happy, put the concerning jewellery box with her address on it into the smallest case. Then stick that case into a bigger one from a different post office and so on. Finally bring the resulting package to a post office of your choice. That's all you have to do! Delivering the present, each post office removes its own case and forwards the one uncovered by that to the address written on it. The employees won't be able to find out more than the mail service they got the parcel from, and the one that is next in the delivery chain. On the other hand someone waiting outside trying to trace the parcel must fail, as she won't be able to assign out- to ingoing cases correctly. They look different and beyond that are randomly mixed with boxes from other customers before being forwarded. Therefore, once the parcel passes the entry post office, you yourself are out of the game. But bear in mind: If you wrapped it up carelessly, the last postman might discover how precious your parcel is. So, whenever possible, take additional precautions against that risk, at best by trying to get a lockable case belonging to the girl you admire.

The mentioned strategy applies to email as well as newsgroup contributions with the latter being even more problematic due to their extended storage by search engines. For routing a news message correctly you only have to tell the exit remailer to send it to a mail2news gateway, which then 'injects' it into the Usenet.

Features

Now, if you're searching for

·	a cost-free e-mail service without the necessity of registration
·	ensuring completely hidden, untraceable communication resisting even potent institutional adversaries
·	based on software that provides maximum source code and build process transparency

the OmniMix anonymous remailing system is the way to go.

OmniMix offers you as a Windows user a convenient way to benefit from well-established anonymous remailer networks. It works as a switchbox between your mail resp. news client and the outer world and either sends your messages directly to the destination or routes them through the Mixmaster or Yamn remailer network in order to deliver them anonymously. If you need replyable mail addresses, OmniMix assists you in setting up accounts at nym servers and then automatically transforms outgoing and incoming messages accordingly.

If there's no necessity of anonymous communication, simply use OmniMix to add features your client software itself is lacking:

·	Send and receive messages from external servers through secured connections (with SSL / TLS / Tor).
·	Use the most advanced SASL authentication mechanism offered by the server to securely transfer your login credentials.
·	Add recipient related Hashcash tokens to your messages to increase their chance to pass spam filters.
·	Protect your mail with automatic Whole Message Encryption (WME) including the header section and all attachments, and by doing so reduce the amount of information you reveal and your efforts for PGP en- resp. decryption to a minimum.

To the side of your mail / news client OmniMix offers three kinds of servers:

·	Outgoing mail (SMTP = Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
·	Incoming mail (POP3 = Post Office Protocol - Version 3)
·	News messages (NNTP = Network News Transfer Protocol)

Client communication bases on a multithreading model, so there's no harm in accessing the proxy server by several clients at the same time.

Message routing is defined by parameter settings within OmniMix or, in order to deviate from those general rules, instructions transmitted through specific headers added individually to the single message.

OmniMix doesn't store any messages for a longer period of time. The messages it receives are immediately passed on, either 'normally' or as anonymous mail encrypted to the Mixmaster resp. Yamn format. News articles to be posted anonymously are also transformed into mail, ready for injection into the Usenet by a mail2news service. After local processing the resulting mail is transmitted by the integrated SMTP client (via a secure SSL/TLS connection - if supported by the external server). If any errors occur in the course of one of these steps, they are reported to the waiting mail / news client, which then retains the respective message for further retries. Only if OmniMix succeeds in sending the message to the Internet, it returns a 'mission completed' note to your client, which one therefore keeps full control of the data until they are delivered to the service provider. So there's no longer-term caching within the Mixmaster, Yamn or OmniMix system!

OmniMix supports nym servers, making creation and usage of such anonymous mailboxes for bidirectional communication a breeze.

Set up a Hidden Service with the built-in Tor instance and access your OmniMix system from everywhere without the need for a static IP address. There's also a web server, which, if activated, grants you access to your system's IP address through that Tor Hidden Service replacing a DynDNS service. Run OmniMix also at a distant client location and let its integrated name server retrieve that host IP information on demand and propagate it there throughout the network. Or offer files through a Tor Hidden Service, which can easily be downloaded by means of a Tor Browser without revealing your identity, important e.g. for whistle blowers.

OmniMix doesn't alter your system. As a portable application it may even be executed from a removable device such as a USB stick without leaving traces.

Apart from the setup program to install the OmniMix package itself there's also its complete development environment (Lazarus IDE) available, which allows you to build the application from its source code in case you're interested in checking the binary's authenticity and examining how it works. The download packages include detailed information on setting up and running your OmniMix tool.

Downloads

Latest versions of OmniMix (installer with all necessary binaries or IDE to build system from sources) Version History  ·  Online User Manual

OmniMix 2.7.3 (sig)  ·  OmniMix IDE 2.7.3 (sig) OmniMix 2.7.2 (sig)  ·  OmniMix IDE 2.7.2 (sig) OmniMix 2.7.0 (sig)  ·  OmniMix IDE 2.7.0 (sig) OmniMix 2.6.9 (sig)  ·  OmniMix IDE 2.6.9 (sig) OmniMix 2.6.0 (sig)  ·  OmniMix IDE 2.6.0 (sig) OmniMix 2.5.0 (sig)  ·  OmniMix IDE 2.5.0 (sig) OmniMix 2.4.0 (sig)  ·  OmniMix IDE 2.4.0 (sig) OmniMix 2.3.9 (sig)  ·  OmniMix IDE 2.3.9 (sig) OmniMix 2.2.0 (sig)  ·  OmniMix IDE 2.2.0 (sig)

3rd party contributions:

·

Tutorial about setting up QuickSilver, MesNews and Gravity with Stunnel, GnuPG and OmniMix, kindly contributed by an anonymous author (outdated).

QSMNOM_Help_1_2_4.rar

Support

You're welcome to contact me directly by mail, preferably PGP encrypted. If your questions resp. suggestions are of common interest, you may use the alternative of posting to the corresponding newsgroup alt.privacy.anon-server. There you will also find competent advice on other topics of anonymous Internet communication.

Anon Links

As privacy is an important topic, as well as preserving it on the Internet, there are a lot of websites dealing with it. So regard this list only as an entry point.

Anon Topics in General
·	Electronic Frontier Foundation		https://www.eff.org
·	Die Raven Homepage (Deutsch)		https://wiki.kairaven.de/open/index
Data Encryption
·	The GNU Privacy Guard - GnuPG		http://www.gnupg.org
·	OpenSSL - Cryptography Library		https://www.openssl.org
·	VeraCrypt - Drive Encryption Software		https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/
Anon Internet Communication
·	Remailer WiKi at Panta Rhei (Wayback Machine)		http://www.panta-rhei.eu.org/pantawiki
·	Remailer Introduction at Dizum		https://dizum.com/help/remailer.html
·	Mail2News Introduction at Dizum		https://dizum.com/help/mail2news.html
·	Tor Website		https://www.torproject.org
·	Richard Christman's Quicksilver (Windows Client)		https://sec3.net/www.quicksilvermail.net/
·	Hashcash		http://www.hashcash.org
Mixmaster / Yamn
·	Mixmaster Remailer Project at SourceForge (deprecated)		https://sourceforge.net/projects/mixmaster
·	Mixmaster 4096 Remailer Project at GitHub		https://github.com/merkinmuffley/mixmaster4096
·	Mixmaster Remailer Debian Installation Instructions at GitHub		https://github.com/inwtx/mixmaster
·	Yamn Remailer Project at GitHub		https://github.com/crooks/yamn
·	Yamn Remailer Documentation at Mixmin		https://mixmin.net/yamn.html
·	Yamn Remailer Packet Specification at Mixmin		https://mixmin.net/yamn_packet.html
·	Yamn Remailer Tutorials, Binaries e.a. at Sec3		https://sec3.net/misc/
·	Yamn Remailer Debian Installation Package at GitHub		https://github.com/inwtx/yamn
·	All Pinger's Index at GitHub		https://raw.githubusercontent.com/remops/allpingers/master/allpingers.txt
·	All Pinger's Index at Sec3		https://www.sec3.net/misc/allpingers.txt
·	Remailers' Mail Host Info at Sec3		https://sec3.net/misc/TLS-info.html
·	Cypherpunk / Mixmaster Remailer Statistics at Frell		http://echolot.theremailer.net
·	List of 'From' Header Modifications at Frell		http://echolot.theremailer.net/from.html
Newsgroups
·	General Privacy Topics		news://alt.privacy
·	PGP Encryption and Related		news://alt.privacy.pgp
·	Anonymous Internet Communication		news://alt.privacy.anon-server
·	Anonymous Internet Communication - Server Availability		news://alt.privacy.anon-server.stats
Diverse
·	Gerald E. Boyd's 'Accessing the Internet by E-mail' FAQ		http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email
·	DNS Tools - DNSWatch		https://www.dnswatch.info
·	IP Lookup - Your own IP Address		https://www.showmyip.com/ https://ip6.me/ https://myip.wtf/ https://ipinfo.io/ip https://myexternalip.com/raw

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