$Id: README,v 1.81 2005/12/02 20:34:36 nickm Exp $ ====================================================================== This is Mixminion version 0.0.8alpha2. CONTENTS: I. Overview II. What's new in this version III. How to upgrade IV. How to install V. How to send messages VI. How to run a server VII. How to report bugs and suggestions VIII. Future interoperability IX. How to contribute I. OVERVIEW =========== Mixminion is the standard implementation of the Type III anonymous remailer protocol, which lets you send very anonymous email. This best-of-breed remailer uses conservative design approaches to provide security against most known attacks. We chose a simple, extensible design so that we can provide a robust core system and then experiment with new research features such as dummy policies, directory servers, and reputation systems. You can find the latest information at http://mixminion.net/, or on the mailing list, archived at http://archives.seul.org/mixminion/dev/. Please consider subscribing, especially if you're going to run a node. This is a testing alpha release. You will probably only want to use it if you are technically inclined, curious, and interested in helping the Mixminion development effort. WARNING! Do NOT use this release if you require strong anonymity. It has known deficiencies, including some that make it possible for an adversary to trace your message through the system. II. WHAT'S NEW IN THIS VERSION? =============================== NEW SINCE MIXMINION 0.0.7.1: - License changed from LGPL to the so-called "MIT" license. This has been planned for ages; see http://archives.seul.org/mixminion/dev/May-2004/msg00000.html - Numerous bugfixes: - Implement DESTDIR correctly. - Do not crash when run with python 2.4 - Bump preferred openssl version to 0.9.8a - Work when umask setting is bizarre (0077, 0000, etc.) - Make -P and mbox work correctly together. - Catch over-long paths. - Tolerate missing /dev/null - Solve crash on mixminion clean-queue - Do not exit on a spurious protocol string from another MMTP host. - Do not use stdio to read /dev/urandom: This wastes entropy. - Don't freak out when - Security improvements - Regenerate SSL certificates more frequently. - Servers schedule and retry delivery on a per-address basis, not a per-message basis. - Drop support for pre-0.0.6 servers: Servers are now located by hostname. - Add a "count-packets" command to tell how many packets will be needed to send a message. Some integrators need this. - Add a "SendmailCommand" option for invoking an external program to send email rather than simply connecting to an SMTP server. - Write much of ClientAPI, so Mixminion is easier to embed -- having this in a real release should make the Nymbaron team happy. - Experimental pinger code, using pysqlite as a data store and implementing the "Echolot" remailer reliability algorithm. More work is needed. - Partially implemented code for distributed coordinated voting directory servers. Client side and data formats are done; glue remains. - Recommended versions are no longer hard-coded. - Refactor how we learn about servers and generate paths. - Split out option-parsing logic to make option lists more consistent. - Suppress prompt when reading messages from non-TTY fds. - Implement --status-fd option to dump info to would-be integrators. - Better errors on expired certs STILL NOT IN THIS VERSION: - IP-based restrictions don't work. - No support for distributed directories. - Other stuff too numerous to mention; see TODO. III. HOW TO UPGRADE FROM MIXMINION 0.0.7 ======================================== First, follow the installation instructions from section IV to install the new version of the software. If you aren't running a server, you are done. IV. HOW TO INSTALL MIXMINION ============================ The quick version: For Unix-clones, Mac OS X, or Windows with Cygwin --------------------------------------------------------------------- % cd Mixminion-0.0.8alpha2 % make download-openssl % make build-openssl % make % make test EITHER: % su Password: # make install OR: % make install PREFIX=~ The verbose version: For Unix-clones, Max OS X, or Windows with Cygwin ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1) You must have Python version 2.0 or later installed on your system. The binary may be called "python", "python2", "python2.X", or something else. If you don't have Python >=v2.0, go install it. You can find source and binary distributions at http://www.python.org/. 2) If you have OpenSSL version 0.9.7beta3 or later, go to step 5. Otherwise, continue. 3) Run "make download-openssl". 4) Run "make build-openssl". If this step fails, OpenSSL didn't build correctly on your system. Go read contrib/openssl/INSTALL, and make OpenSSL build. 5) Run "make". If you don't get any error messages, go to step 6. If you have OpenSSL 0.9.7 installed, but the build script doesn't find it, you can force it to look in a particular location (say, "/home/ssl") with: make OPENSSL_PREFIX=/home/ssl This will make the scripts look for headers in $OPENSSL_PREFIX/include and libraries in $OPENSSL_PREFIX/lib. If the scripts *still* can't find OpenSSL 0.9.7, you can override the compile and link options directly, like this: make OPENSSL_CFLAGS='-I/home/ssl/include' \ OPENSSL_LDFLAGS='-L/home/ssl/libraries -lssl097 -lcrypto097' If your C compiler knows where to find OpenSSL on its own, but the build script doesn't trust it, you can disable searching like this: make SKIP_OPENSSL_SEARCH=y If you get any other errors, please report them to . 6) Run "make test" to run Mixminion's unit tests. If you get any errors, please report them to . 7) Run "make install" to install Mixminion. You may need to be root to execute this command. By default, Mixminion will install itself relative to your python distribution. If you want to install somewhere else (e.g. /home/miniond/), run "make install PREFIX=/home/miniond". A script called "mixminion" will be created in the 'bin' directory relative to your prefix, or in the same directory as the python executable if no prefix is provided. To make sure that everything was installed correctly, you can run "mixminion unittests". The very easy version: For Windows ---------------------------------- First, make sure that you're running Win98 or later. Download 'Mixminion-0.0.8alpha2.win32.zip", and unpack it anywhere you like. It will create a directory named 'mixminion'. Use mixminion.exe from that directory as your command-line client. The slightly harder version: For Windows with Python 2.3 -------------------------------------------------------- First, make sure that you have the latest official release of Python 2.3 installed. As of 5 Dec 2003, this is 2.3.2. Download and run "Mixminion-0.0.8alpha2.win32-py2.3.exe". It will unpack its files into your Python directory. The script to invoke Mixminion will be stored in the 'Scripts' subdirectory of your Python directory. Whenever the instructions below tell you to run 'mixminion', run "python Scripts\mixminion.py' instead, from the python directory. (Future releases may include a batch file to make this easier, especially if somebody else contributes one.) Be sure to read the "NOTE TO ALL WINDOWS USERS" above. The verbose version: How to build on Windows -------------------------------------------- (I have only tried this with Visual Studio 6 and Python 2.3. Let me know if you succeed with any other compilers. Also, let me know if these instructions don't work.) First, install Python version 2.0 or later, either from the official binary or by building it yourself. When you build Mixminion, you will need to use the same compiler as was used to build Python: the standard distribution uses Visual Studio 6. Second, download an unpack the Mixminion source distribution. Third, get a compiled copy of OpenSSL version 0.9.7 or later (as of 2 Dec 2005, the latest stable version is 0.9.8a). You can either compile it yourself, or use a set of precompiled binaries (such as are available from XXXX). Place the compiled libraries under the "contrib" directory in the Mixminion source directory, so that the include files are in "contrib\OpenSSL\include" and the libraries are in "contrib\OpenSSL\lib\VC". Now you are ready to build Mixminion! Make sure that python.exe is on your path, then run: python setup.py build python setup.py run --subcommand=unittests If all the unit tests pass, you can either install the software locally and use it as described in 'the slightly harder version' above: python setup.py install Or you can make a windows installer for users with Python: python setup.py bdist_wininst Or, if you have the py2exe package installed, you can make a standalone binary that people can run without installing Python: python setup.py py2exe Finally, be sure to read the "NOTE TO ALL WINDOWS USERS" above. V. HOW TO SEND MESSAGES VIA MIXMINION ===================================== Just run one of the following command lines: mixminion send -t -i OR mixminion send -t (to read from stdin) OR mixminion send -t -i - (also reads from stdin) For more options, see the manual page. (Type "man mixminion" on any Unix-like computer, or see the latest version at http://mixminion.net/.) VI. HOW TO RUN YOUR OWN MIXMINION SERVER ======================================== 1) Create a copy of the "etc/mixminiond.conf" file from the mixminion distribution and place it where you like. Mixminion will automatically look in ~/.mixminiond.conf, ~/etc/mixminiond.conf, and /etc/mixminiond.conf. However, you can store it anywhere. 2) Edit mixminiond.conf to reflect your own system settings. 3) Run your server for the first time: "mixminiond start -f " (The -f flag and path are only necessary if you placed the configuration file somewhere other than ~/.mixminiond.conf, ~/etc/mixminiond.conf, or /etc/mixminiond.conf.) 5) To try out your server, clients will need a copy of your server descriptor, whose location is stored $SERVER_HOME/current-desc. For example, if your mixminiond.conf contains the following line: Homedir: /home/mixminion/spool Then if you read the contents of /home/mixminion/spool/current-desc, you will find a filename like: "/home/mixminion/spool/keys/key_0001/ServerDesc". This file is your current server descriptor. Mixminion supports a global directory of server descriptors. Until you are listed in that directory, clients can import your ServerDesc file (if they have a copy) by hand by running: mixminion import-server They can also use your ServerDesc without importing it by using the filename as a part of their path: mixminion send -t
-P ',?,?' 6) When you're ready to advertise your server, edit 'mixminiond.conf' and set the 'Publish' option to 'yes'. When you restart your server, it will advertise itself to the central directory. The first time you do this, your server will not be inserted automatically; the directory server holds your server's information separately until I confirm it (to prevent pseudospoofing). Once your server is listed, future updates will be get into the directory automatically. WARNING: We don't have statistics yet, so the system isn't robust in the presence of unreliable servers in the directory. Please don't publish a server if you don't think you can keep it up for a good while. {This step will be more automated in later versions.} To shut down a server: mixminiond stop [-f configfile] To make a server reload its configuration: mixminiond reload [-f configfile] (Right now, this just closes and re-opens the log files.) Your server can be configured to keep track of the number of packets it receives and other interesting statistics. Ordinarily, it aggregates these totals and flushes a report to disk at a configurable interval. If you want to see statistics in the _current_ interval, run: mixminiond stats [-f configfile] VII. HOW TO REPORT BUGS AND SUGGEST NEW FEATURES ================================================ To report bugs, please use the Bugzilla pages at http://bugs.noreply.org. For other correspondence, please email . For help in debugging, please try to send a copy of: * What command you were running * The complete error you got, including stack trace (if any) If your error occurred on a running server, please make a copy of your log--it might be helpful. VIII. FUTURE INTEROPERABILITY ============================= Mixminion is not yet feature complete. As the software moves closer to official release, backwards-incompatible changes *WILL* be introduced. Future versions of Mixminion, including future versions in the 0.x track, may reject messages from older versions as additional security features are added. Furthermore, the present preview versions include necessary diagnostic features that potentially compromise anonymity and would be inappropriate in a production system; these features will be removed or disabled by 1.0. IX. HOW TO CONTRIBUTE ===================== Send patches to . If you can, please submit unified diffs against the latest version of the code in CVS. Make sure to run 'make test' before you send in any patches, so you can see whether your patch broke existing code. (It's okay if you're not sure how to fix the test, but please let me know when you send your patch.) ------------------ (for emacs) Local Variables: mode:text indent-tabs-mode:nil fill-column:77 End: