April 1993 - cypherpunks-legacy

No Subject
by nobody＠pmantis.berkeley.edu 17 Apr '93

17 Apr '93

With regard to the White House's attempt to force the "Clipper" on you: I guess the time has come for the Cypherpunks to break their 'political teeth'. This issue is squarely on point with the purpose of the cpunks and needs to be addressed. The best thinkers on these topics are on this list (as are many libertarian thinkers). The Cypherpunks have gotten a fair amount of media play as of late and I think those interested in privacy and security are frothing at the mouth. I know in general cpunks dont believe in the necessity for leaders, but leader'ship' is a different matter. I believe that there are people here with the knowledge to fight against this proposal. So, Cypherpunks, step to the political plate. > In the past, it has >been possible to preserve a government capability to conduct >electronic surveillance in furtherance of legitimate law >enforcement and national security interests, while at the same time >protecting the privacy and civil liberties of all citizens. Just some levity to start off with :-) >The Attorney General of the United States, or her representative, >shall request manufacturers ... I read this differently than does Tim. "shall" coupled with "request" actually equals ambiguity and seems not to compel anyone. Im sure that the language was meant to confuse though. >In making this decision, I do >not intend to prevent the private sector from developing, or the >government from approving, other microcircuits or algorithms that >are equally effective in assuring both privacy and a secure key- >escrow system. Well, the door does still appear to be open for private circuit development and a better escrow system (better?). This does lend credence to the opinion that this may just be a very forceful suggestion and not an order per se. >The Attorney General shall make all arrangements with appropriate >entities to hold the keys for the key-escrow microcircuits >installed in communications equipment. Gotta agree with Tim that this appears to be an incredibly obvious backdoor to all telecommunications equipment. This should be made clear in any public statements about this document. > The Attorney >General shall review for legal sufficiency the procedures by which >an agency establishes its authority to acquire the content of such >communications. OK. This might be the key to the downfall of this proposal. The Govt appears to be showing its weak hand here. They have either not thouroughly addressed the legal concerns or they are standing on shaky legal ground. I believe there could be a number of problems (legally speaking) with the proposal. Seperation of Powers, Commerce concerns, penumbra Right to Privacy, etc just to name a few. Well, I guess Im off to the library to research another interesting, yet inapplicable directly to my legal studies, topic. (As if I dont spend enough time in the library) I guess if she's gonna review the legal sufficiency there should be no problem with me 'parallel processing' that same information. > Further, the Attorney General >shall utilize funds from the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture >Super Surplus Fund to effect this purchase. Surplus...what happened to the defecit? :^) In general I believe that this event calls for a public expression of intellectual disagreement. An assertion of the power of the ideas expressed on this list will put the Cypherpunks in the discourse of public policy. Obviously, it should be well thought out and expressed in the most positive way. Calm, cool, calculated response will gain the cpunks respect, a knee jerk, emotional response will only get our ideas ignored. If politics doesn't work there also appears to be an economic out. Creating REAL encryptive circuits whose keys are not held by the government but rather by the owner. Private enterprise and a result to our concerns for liberty appear amenable. So any hardware cypherpunk hacks, get out your tools. Finally, a simple analogy. The current state of the law does not require me to register the key to my home with a government agency so that they can gain access to my home in a more efficient way if they feel the need. I keep the key and the control (until they break down my door). In that case, the value is placed on my freedom, not the efficiency with which the police could access my private communications. There are reasons that search warrents were 'initially' difficult to acquire and reasons why it should be difficult to access my home (i.e. they must break down my door.) Those reasons dealt with the severity of encroachment upon my privacy and rights thereto. In fact, that is the reason given for the remaining formalistic requirements of the necessity of prior judicial consent for warrents. No, the judge does not ponder long and hard about whether to give the warrent. Rather, the purpose is to give the officers pause. The ritual is designed to make the parties involved at least ponder the severity of their actions. This proposal would only make invasions of our privacy easier to achieve and eliminate obstacles in the way of officers, giving them even less time to ponder the severity of their encroachment. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// VOLTAIRE Studying the law, Finding the flaws, Creating a light, Out of the night! //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Tim- Aren't we closer than 10 mins. to midnight???????

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a cypherpunk's clipper reaction
by Eric Hughes 17 Apr '93

17 Apr '93

Fellows: I will, in the coming weeks have much more to say on the matter of this Clipper chip proposal. For now, however, I have only one thing to say. No compromises. Eric

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white house blunder
by Timothy Newsham 17 Apr '93

17 Apr '93

Even though the white house proposal may seem bad it could be used to your advantage in some ways: swap keys with someone else... if serial number isnt sent in transmission this takes gives a big headache when they try to decrypt your stream. use another encryption before sending to clipper chip... this way everything looks normal, and if they are playing according to the rules (cross fingers) they dont know anything is fishy until they try to get a warrant and decrypt. First keys wont match. When they do find the correct key they'll decrypt and get a file encrypted in another system. This might be great for averting suspicion of using another crypto- system. Everyone will be using clipper, and your message will look like its from the clipper chip. It wont look like an RSA file or DES'ed voice or whatever. The chip gives you a opaque (hopefully) envelope to put things into.

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White House Encryption idea
by treason＠gnu.ai.mit.edu 17 Apr '93

17 Apr '93

Well, this all sounds fine and dandy, but... 1) They are not passing out the algorithym, and I dont trust ANYONE to tell me its secure. I am not a cryptographer, so it wouldn't help any if they gave the code to me, but it just being out there for public perusal helps me to think it IS secure. I trust no payola. 2) It is very possible that the 'criminal' effort may be able to modify these devices so that there is no possiblility for the agencies to decrypt their trasmissions (If it IS truly secure with no backdoors or decyphering possibilities) in which case, it can only harm the law abiding. 3) It allows the government the ability to determine WHAT encryption method industry uses, and they should be able to have a choice. Those who understand this very misleading comment will understand, those who do not, will prolly never be able to. 4) No explanation of what the 'key' contents are composed of (numbers, letters, alphanum, characters, some odd cyphercode???) is even implied. 5) No explanation of how the key is propegated or if it will even be needed for the remote site is mentioned. How are the remote sites going to decypher your cyphersounds(text)? There was no mention of further releases in information...is this all we get? treason@gnu

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Re: Key Registration and Big Brother--Time to Fight!
by George A. Gleason 17 Apr '93

17 Apr '93

Instead of a conference call in clear voice, how about doing it online from the various meetings, and encrypted? What would it take to set up a broadcast encryption system that will work in chat mode...? A conference call in clear voice is almost certain to be monitored, and I would bet that it would yield a whole lot more high-grade intelligence than we would usually expect: first of all, voices of all participants (for later use in voiceprint recognition surveillance), second, all the background discussions, and third, a lot of the kind of deliberation and working-through-things that ordinarily gets filtered out by the process of posting things to this list. Yes, they can theoretically send visitors to our meetings. But realistically this is more labor intensive and potentially risky than recording a conference call which has all the meetings on line. Let's not go leaving any huge holes, please...! -gg

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Re: (fwd) White House Public Encryption Management Fact Sheet
by peb＠PROCASE.COM 17 Apr '93

17 Apr '93

>From: Peter Wayner <pcw(a)access.digex.com> >2) The system is vulnerable to simple phone swapping attacks Yes, that's when the it becomes necessary to register your phone and phone license with the government every year. Remember, "using a telephone is a privilage, not a right!" 8^) Nice way to charge license fees too! >From: gnu(a)toad.com (John Gilmore) >Subject: EFF crypto statement and press release > Does disclosure of keys to a third party waive an individual's Fifth Amendment > rights in subsequent criminal inquiries? This is a very important question and it gets to the heart of the matter. Paul E. Baclace peb(a)procase.com

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The New Mykotronix phones...
by Peter Wayner 17 Apr '93

17 Apr '93

Okay, let's suppose that the NSA/NIST/Mykotronix Registered Key system becomes standard and I'm able to buy such a system from my local radio shack. Every phone comes with a built in chip and the government has the key to every phone call. I go and buy a phone and dutifully register the key. What's to prevent me from swapping phones with a friend or buying a used phone at a garage sale? Whooa. The secret registered keys just became unsynchronized. When the government comes to listen in, they only receive gobbledly-gook because the secret key registered under my name isn't the right one. That leads me to conjecture that: 1) The system isn't that secure. There are just two master keys that work for all the phones in the country. The part about registering your keys is just bogus. or 2) The system is vulnerable to simple phone swapping attacks like this. Criminals will quickly figure this out and go to town. In either case, I think we need to look at this a bit deeper. -Peter Wayner

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Re: (fwd) White House Public Encryption Management Fact Sheet
by George A. Gleason 17 Apr '93

17 Apr '93

Re Big Brother proposal. The "asset forfeiture" mention isn't quite so ominous as suggested: what it seems to say is that the Atty General will procure (i.e. buy) encryption devices for use by law enforcement in their own secure communications (i.e. police radio and computer links), and "the funding to effect this purchase" will come from the "superfund" of money derived from existing asset forfeitures. In other words, smoke a joint, lose your house, and Uncle Sam sells the house to get money to buy more crypto gear for cops. I don't see an implication that crypto gear makers will be facing forfeiture for failing to comply with the "request" to incorporate key escrow. It appears that this is directed at first to establish the use of key escrow in government-related communications: "federal communications systems that process sensitive but unclassified information." So for instance, Ollie North's memos would be recoverable, and so on. But the real risk is that it will spread out to encompass any facility receiving government funding or contracts, i.e. the universities; and from there, widen so as to restrict other types of crypto from being used at those sites. So far it doesn't seem to restrict crypto on private microcomputers, though a widely accepted standard could eventually be written into law. The proposal specifically says it will allow other manufacturers to develop other approaches to key escrow systems. I think what the long-term plan might be, is to win acceptance for the idea of key escrow, and then require it. This isn't exactly a backdoor into your hardware; what it would allow would be for instance NSA to get your key and then read your communications as they occur. So your local hardware isn't storing anything in a different way or being remotely accessed or triggered, but your key is available elsewhere, at some approved facility. Now I'm guessing here, but what I think the way the crypto part of this has to work, is with a "device-specific" key and a "session"-type of key; where the first is what is escrowed, and the second is user-variable. Both are required to decrypt messages, and recovery of the second key would be relatively straightforward. Now you buy a modem or whatever, and it has a crypto chip in it, with a device-specific key that is registered along with the serial number of the device. So your purchase record has that serial number on it, and that's used to track the device key, which of course has been escrowed by the manufacturer before shipping the modem out. This would suggest that device keys would be relatively hard to crack, and therefore that some improvement in privacy would be possible by simply swapping the key chip in the device; and this would be easy enough with a black market in key escrow chips. In the mean time, from our end of it, someone oughta start working on steganography FAST. Spread spectrum designs are feasible. Slow is okay; the goal being to do anything that will render key escrow obsolete by making it impossible to tell when ciphertext (or for that matter any kind of data) is being sent. -gg

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ietf-telnet-encryption.01.txt
by rclark＠nyx.cs.du.edu 17 Apr '93

17 Apr '93

Does anyone know why this Internet draft was deleted? I've sent a quick message to Internet-drafts(a)nri.reston.va.us to determine the reason. Will report. It sounds a little suspicious to me, though. Snag those copies of PGP while you can. Expect trouble in coming months. ---- Robert W. Clark rclark(a)nyx.cs.du.edu PGP signature available by mail or finger

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[fwd] Initial EFF analysis of Clinton Privacy and Security Proposal
by Joseph Truitt 17 Apr '93

17 Apr '93

I don't recall having posted to this list before, but I am a truly supportive lurker as it were, doing my bit to sow seeds of crypto-anarchy at the layperson level to many friends. Anyway, in light of today's foreboding announcement from the White House, I thought you might be interested in this blurb from the EFF. ------- Forwarded Message Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1993 15:17:02 -0400 From: Cliff Figallo <fig(a)eff.org> Subject: EFFector Online 5.06 To: eff-news(a)eff.org (eff-news mailing list) ****************************************************************** ////////////// ////////////// ////////////// /// /// /// /////// /////// /////// /// /// /// ////////////// /// /// ****************************************************************** EFFector Online Volume 5 No. 6 4/16/1993 editors(a)eff.org A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424 ... April 16, 1993 INITIAL EFF ANALYSIS OF CLINTON PRIVACY AND SECURITY PROPOSAL The Clinton Administration today made a major announcement on cryptography policy which will effect the privacy and security of millions of Americans. The first part of the plan is to begin a comprehensive inquiry into major communications privacy issues such as export controls which have effectively denied most people easy access to robust encryption as well as law enforcement issues posed by new technology. However, EFF is very concerned that the Administration has already reached a conclusion on one critical part of the inquiry, before any public comment or discussion has been allowed. Apparently, the Administration is going to use its leverage to get all telephone equipment vendors to adopt a voice encryption standard developed by the National Security Agency. The so-called "Clipper Chip" is an 80-bit, split key escrowed encryption scheme which will be built into chips manufactured by a military contractor. Two separate escrow agents would store users' keys, and be required to turn them over law enforcement upon presentation of a valid warrant. The encryption scheme used is to be classified, but they chips will be available to any manufacturer for incorporation into their communications products. This proposal raises a number of serious concerns . First, the Administration appears to be adopting a solution before conducting an inquiry. The NSA-developed Clipper chip may not be the most secure product. Other vendors or developers may have better schemes. Furthermore, we should not rely on the government as the sole source for Clipper or any other chips. Rather, independent chip manufacturers should be able to produce chipsets based on open standards. Second, an algorithm can not be trusted unless it can be tested. Yet the Administration proposes to keep the chip algorithm classified. EFF believes that any standard adopted ought to be public and open. The public will only have confidence in the security of a standard that is open to independent, expert scrutiny. Third, while the use of the split-key, dual-escrowed system may prove to be a reasonable balance between privacy and law enforcement needs, the details of this scheme must be explored publicly before it is adopted. What will give people confidence in the safety of their keys? Does disclosure of keys to a third party waive individual's fifth amendment rights in subsequent criminal inquiries? In sum, the Administration has shown great sensitivity to the importance of these issues by planning a comprehensive inquiry into digital privacy and security. However, the "Clipper chip" solution ought to be considered as part of the inquiry, not be adopted before the discussion even begins. DETAILS OF THE PROPOSAL: ESCROW The 80-bit key will be divided between two escrow agents, each of whom hold 40 bits of each key. Upon presentation of a valid warrant, the two escrow agents would have to turn the key parts over to law enforcement agents. Most likely the Attorney General will be asked to identify appropriate escrow agents. Some in the Administration have suggested one non-law enforcement federal agency, perhaps the Federal Reserve, and one non-governmental organization. But, there is no agreement on the identity of the agents yet. Key registration would be done by the manufacturer of the communications device. A key is tied to the device, not to the person using it. CLASSIFIED ALGORITHM AND THE POSSIBILITY OF BACK DOORS The Administration claims that there are no back door means by which the government or others could break the code without securing keys from the escrow agents and that the President will be told there are no back doors to this classified algorithm. In order to prove this, Administration sources are interested in arranging for an all-star crypto cracker team to come in, under a security arrangement, and examine the algorithm for trap doors. The results of the investigation would then be made public. GOVERNMENT AS MARKET DRIVER In order to get a market moving, and to show that the government believes in the security of this system, the feds will be the first big customers for this product. Users will include the FBI, Secret Service, VP Al Gore, and maybe even the President. FROM MORE INFORMATION CONTACT: Jerry Berman, Executive Director Daniel J. Weitzner, Senior Staff Counsel ... ============================================================= EFFector Online is published by The Electronic Frontier Foundation 666 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, DC 20003 Phone: +1 202 544-9237 FAX: +1 202 547 5481 Internet Address: eff(a)eff.org Coordination, production and shipping by Cliff Figallo, EFF Online Communications Coordinator (fig(a)eff.org) Reproduction of this publication in electronic media is encouraged. Signed articles do not necessarily represent the view of the EFF. To reproduce signed articles individually, please contact the authors for their express permission. *This newsletter is printed on 100% recycled electrons* ------- End of Forwarded Message -- Joseph Truitt * BioCAD Corporation * joseph(a)biocad.com * voice 415/903-3923 fax 415/961-0584 * "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax." --Albert Einstein

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