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Those guys know how Internet is a dangerous place incompatible with privacy. They require quick, fast dropping and picking of data. No possibility of many round-trips – just drop the data, fire-and-forget. It could be either removable media again and/or USB dead drops, PirateBoxes, SRAC. Short lived short range networks like Bluetooth and WiFi can also be pretty fast, allowing to quickly fire chunks of queued packets.
Very important property is that compromising of those dead drops and storages must be neither fatal nor even dangerous. Packets sent through the network and exchanged via those devices are end-to-end encrypted (but unfortunately lacking forward secrecy). No filenames, mail recipients are seen.
All node communications are done with so-called spool area:
directory containing only those unprocessed encrypted packets. After
packet transfer you still can not read any of them: you have to run
another stage: tossing, that involves your private
cryptographic keys. So even if your loose your computer, storage devices
and so on – it is not so bad, because you are not carrying private keys
with it (don’t you?), you do not "toss" those packets immediately on the
same device. Tossing (reading those encrypted packets and extracting
transferred files and mail messages) could and should be done on a
separate computer (nncp-cfgmin command could help creating
configuration file without private keys for that purpose).
If you really want to carry your private keys, then nncp-cfgenc
command will be able to encrypt your configuration file. Passphrase you
enter is strengthened with both CPU and memory hard function.
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