PGP Anonymous Board Idea

[Farhan Khan]

Hi all,

I had an idea for an anonymous PGP messaging board system and wanted to get
feedback on it or know if this idea has already been done.

In short, this would be an anonymous messaging system where you can post
encrypted messages. Anyone can access the encrypted message but obviously only
the one with the private key can decrypt it. Receiving users can filter for
messages by their key ID to see if they have received anything. The system also
replicates data across multiple servers so you can post a message on server A
and a user can view the message on server B.

Problems this solves:
* Increase anonyminity of the *sender*. No attributable data is stored for the
sender, such as email headers or IP addresses. The receiver can take steps to
be anonymous, such as using a different key than a primary, but ultimately the
receiver will require some form of a unique identifier.
* While you can already do this on a message board or Usenet, those systems are
not designed for this. They are not easily searchable or centralized. For
example, I cannot filter for all messages sent to 0x0123456789ABCDEF on an
online forum without a manual effort.

The general process of the server would be to receive a message via HTTPS,
determine its key ID, store it in a binary format to reduce the size and make
it searchable by the limited metadata in all encrypted messages. Finally, two or
more servers can replicate data on a periodic or in-real-time basis.

And there are obviously standard problems, such as spam, the size of the
database or a rogue server storing sender IP address data. But these are
standard problems in all such systems.

Obviously this would not be the next big method of communication, but an
interesting niche idea and it seems easy to produce a proof-of-concept.

Thoughts? I full anticipate being torn down :)

---
Farhan Khan
PGP Fingerprint: 1312 89CE 663E 1EB2 179C 1C83 C41D 2281 F8DA C0DE
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