Archive: SoyMail, v0.0.1

This is a post I wrote long ago on another site. In this case, it’s from Rusty Foster’s Kuro5hin.Org which has long since disappeared from the Internet.

I don’t even know if I still have a copy of that first SoyMail implementation, but I still like the name: its aim was to be a secure email transport by hiding legitimate email in a stream of fake meat for Carnivore, hence Soy.

An old post of mine from Kuro5hin.Org, dated “Sun Sep 23rd, 2001 at 02:55:52 PM EST”.

I needed a break from real work yesterday, and to do something neat before I got bored with geeking. I’d been planning to write a mailbot that could talk to other installations of itself for a while, so I wrote SoyMail, which does that but also includes a PGP-encrypted attachment on each message as well and allows you to use that attachment as a communications channel.

(This is a 100% WTC-free article, and is directly relevant to both Technology and Culture. Now isn’t that nice? 😉

To quote from the README file:

SoyMail is a small kit of Perl utilities which implements a stream of email between two (or more) hosts simulating a conversation between humans. It does this with a quite minimal text conversation and PGP-encrypted attachements. SoyMail also allows a user to inject their own messages into the stream as an encrypted attachment, which will be recognized as such by the receiving SoyMail, decrypted and placed in the recipient’s real email box. This is intended, in general, to confuse packet sniffing systems and to use this confusion to protect private emails from identification by traffic analysis systems in these sniffers. By using SoyMail, you make it much more difficult for an eavesdropper to identify when and with whom you are actually communicating as well as make it much more difficult for an eavesdropper to read your private communications.

This is seriously test software, since I just wrote it yesterday, but if you’d like to check it out there’s a compressed tar file at http://www.devnull.net/~krystal/software/releases/soymail.0.0.1.tgz. This file needs to be expanded in your home directory on the account with which you want to use it. As I’ve only had an evening’s testing on this, you should probably set up a newaccount to try it on, rather than putting it into your main email account. 😉