• antonym delete foo
  Generates a nym deletion request for the nym called 'foo' in the config file

• Supports reply blocks that terminate in mail2news gateways.
• Support GPG in anticipation of more remailers accepting it.

• Doesn't have as many users.
• May never be more than a niche item for a few people.

Contributors

Thanks to Todd Vierling for his large code contributions. Version 1.9 was released largely because of his interest and his modifications to the current codebase.

• 2004-05-05 - 1.9
  • Make sure a HTTP fetched .remailers file is "touch"ed so that it isn't considered out of date all the time.
  • Use the now very standard Data::Dumper for "makenym" pretty-printing (not required unless "makenym" command is used).
  • Add a new "delete" command to create a nym deletion request.
  • Use the "create?" syntax for both creation and modification requests, allowing an extant nym to be used but otherwise "re-initialized" when performing the "modify" command.
  • Allow an e-mail address (or even a remailer) to be the final hop, rather than only a newsgate-via-remailer.
  • Allow the Subject: to be set independently of Newsgroups: (in support of an e-mail address as the final hop). Only add the hashmarks if there are actually headers to add.
  • Make error exit conditions retun nonzero to the shell.
  • Make --ctype=gpg work properly. Supports GnuPG^? 1.3.4 and higher, only if compiled with IDEA support; also requires that the chosen nymserver support OpenPGP^? (nearly all except nym.alias.net do).
  • Exit with error if gpg or pgp exited with an error.
  • Add two more public newsgates, and rename the newsgates to _news (so as not to collide with remailer names in "makenym").

Antonym - a Perl pseudonym tool

Many people use anonymous pseudonyms to send and receive mail that cannot be traced to them. This program is for people who know what the pseudonyms (shortened to 'nyms' from here on) are, understand how they work, and wish to make their use a little easier. Antonym supports the following functions:

• Generating a create or modify block for a given reply path
• Decrypting a message sent to a particular nym
• Generating random passwords or text phrases
• Encrypting mails to be sent to nymservers
• Encrypting mails to be sent to anonymous remailers
• Calculating statistics about a given remailer chain

In comparison to another Unix nym tool, Premail, some of Antonym's advantages and disadvantages are:

Pros:

• Still being actively developed.
• Supports reply blocks that terminate in mail2news gateways
• Will be made to support GPG when more remailers move that way

Cons:

• Has no support for working as an MUA or MTA
• Doesn't have as many users
• May never be more than a niche item for a few people

It is freely downloadable, copyable, and modifiable under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL).

Downloads

You can download the latest version of Antonym from http://www.honeypot.net/~kirk/projects/antonym-1.8.tar.gz.

Configuration

IMPORTANT! The formation for replyblocks.dat changed significantly between releases 1.4 and 1.6. You old configuration file will not work without some modification, but the updates should be very easy.

Antonym is configured by editing a text file that describes one or more pseudonyms and the reply path for each. The file is actually a block of Perl code that is eval()'ed, so it could contain pretty much any content imaginable, including other programs that could be executed at runtime.

The included sample configuration file, replyblocks.dat.example, is pretty heavily documented. If you know Perl, the syntax should be fairly simple. If you don't, I strongly suggest that you stick very closely to the sample configuration format.

Usage

The command line syntax is pretty straightforward:

• antonym create foo
  Generates a create request for the nym called 'foo' in the config file
• antonym modify foo
  Generates a reply block for the nym called 'foo' in the config file
• antonym decrypt incoming.txt
  Decrypts the file 'incoming.txt' according to the defined reply path
• antonym decrypt < incoming.txt | less
  Decrypts the file 'incoming.txt' and passes the output to 'less'
• antonym nymcrypt < email-in.txt > email-out.txt
  Encrypts an email-formatted file for sending to a nymserver.
• antonym password
  Takes an MD5 hash of some random numbers to create a fairly random password. Example:

#> antonym password
ba21cbfb1c069f6474737d470d600828
#> antonym password
4723719de5b3bc0f571e57f67d393b05

• antonym phrase
  Pulls a few random lines from a file and strings them together to form a phrase. Specify a dictionary for nicely random subject lines for Usenet groups. For example:

#> antonym phrase
behemoth replays gracefulness flue improvisation

• antonym chainstat hop1 hop2 ...
  Calculates the likelihood of success and expected latency of a given chain of remailers:

#> antonym chainstat cracker dizum citrus
                    this hop           cumulative
##  remailer    latency     prob    latency     prob
--  --------   --------  -------   --------  -------
 1  cracker     1:02:13   95.11%    1:02:13   95.11%
 2  dizum       0:04:37  100.00%    1:06:50   95.11%
 3  citrus      2:35:00   99.85%    3:41:50   94.97%

Probability of success: 94.97%
Expected latency      : 3:41:50

• antonym list
  Displays a listing of known remailers, mail2news gateways, and nymservers.
• antonym remcrypt hop1 hop2 ...
  Encrypt a message for delivery through a set of remailers:

#> antonym create mynewalias | antonym remcrypt xganon2 austria havenco | sendmail -t

• antonym validate
  Check one (or all) of your replyblocks for common mistakes:

#> antonym validate all

Alias: mynewalias
----------------------------------------
Hop: havenco
    Address: mix@remailer.havenco.com
    A password is set.

Hop: aarg
    Address: remailer@aarg.net
    A password is set.

Hop: austria
    Address: mixmaster@remailer.privacy.at
    A password is set.

Hop: freedom
    Address: remailer@freedom.gmsociety.org
    A password is set.

Hop: xganon2
    Address: remailer@remailer.xganon.com
    A password is set.

Hop: lcs
    Address: mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu
    A password is set.

This replyblock seems valid.

History

• 2002-08-06 - 1.8
  • Antonym can now encrypt emails to a chain of remailers
    • It's now possible to generate create and modify messages, encrypt them for anonymous remailing, and send them - all on a single command line.
  • Added support for cursory validation of reply blocks
• 2002-07-29 - 1.7
  • CRITICAL UPDATE! Older versions of Antonym mistakenly left out the '**' line in the intermediate stages of reply block creation, possibly causing some information to not be encrypted! Do not trust reply blocks created with versions of Antonym older than 1.7! You have been warned!
  • Added support for automatically fetching remailer information from a remote data source.
  • Moved much closer to consolidating all PGP calls into one abstraction function.
  • Accidently addressed create requests to a nymserver's 'send' address instead of the 'config' address.
  • 'nymcrypt' can now correctly encrypt newsgroup postings as well as email messages.
• 2002-07-25 - 1.6
  • Important new security features:
    • Temporary files are no longer used at all when interacting with PGP. All communication is through pipes, so no data will be written to your hard drive.
    • antonym can now use STDIN and STDOUT in addition to named files for I/O. This is good for two reasons:
      1. It is now much easier to use antonym as a "filter"
      2. Coupled with the first update, you can now decrypt and read incoming messages to your nym without ever writing a single byte of data to your hard drive!
  • The 'create' and 'modify' commands now write to a file or STDOUT just like everything else. The '--blockfile' option no longer exists.
  • Massive changes. Refactored much of the frame work and added quite a few new features:
    • New Getopt options: remailers, mailinformat, mailoutformat, debug.
    • Antonym now parses a .remailers file in the standard format to get information about hops, services, etc.
    • 'addr' keys in a reply block can now be an email address (as before), the name of a remailer (from .remailers), or the name of a mail2news gateway.
    • New 'nymcrypt' command Can a file that looks like an email. An example usage would be to write an email in gnus, pipe that buffer through antonym, and paste the results back into the buffer.
    • New 'list' command prints a list of remailers, mail2news gateways, and nymservers that antonym knows about.
    • New command 'chainstat' calculates the expected latency and probability of success of a chain of remailers.
    • New functions readMailFile() and writeMailFile() make it easy to parse a mail file, operate on its contents, then generate a new one. It should be a very small step to support encrypting a file for resending through a specified remailer.
  • Started work to unclutter command output. Errors and warnings now go to STDERR when possible, and debugging messages may now be turned off altogether.
  • Added a proper GPL notice.
• 2002-07-17 - 1.4: First public release.

-- KirkStrauser - 03 May 2004

• Set ALLOWTOPICCHANGE = KirkStrauser, ToddVierling