May 1993 - cypherpunks-legacy

PGP: Re: Tough Choices: PGP vs. RSA Data Security
by edgar＠spectrx.Saigon.COM 04 May '93

04 May '93

The conflict between RSA and PGP -may- be about to be solved. You all may recall my "announcement" of an effort to create a USA-Legal version of PGP by incorporating RSAREF code. Among several offers to help, I received the following messages: ======================================================================== To: spectrx!edgar (Edgar W. Swank) Subject: Re: PGP: USA-Legal PGP Project In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 28 Apr 93 01:02:23 PDT." <ouiP3B12w165w(a)spectrx.saigon.com> Date: Wed, 28 Apr 93 12:37:30 -0600 From: "L. Detweiler" <szebra!longs.lance.colostate.edu!ld231782> >I confirmed with Jim Bidzos, President of RSA, who was >present at the meeting, that a USA Legal version of PGP could be >constructed by just replacing certain sections of code with free code >from RSAREF. Since source for both PGP and RSAREF are available, this >sounds like an easy job. Since no-one's actually done it yet, perhaps >it's not, but I will try. I hope I haven't bitten off more than I can >chew. At best, I can compile and test only the MSDOS version of PGP. I >will certainly need help if USA-Legal MAC, AMIGA, UNIX, etc. versions >are to be available. I'm sorry Mr. Bidzos didn't tell you, but the PGP development group is already looking very seriously into integrating RSAREF, and one person phr(a)america.Telebit.COM (Paul Rubin) has already done it. If you would like to join the list send mail to prz(a)sage.cgd.ucar.EDU (Philip Zimmermann). ========================================================================== Date: Wed, 28 Apr 93 19:32:55 PDT From: szebra!america.Telebit.COM!phr (Paul Rubin) Message-Id: <9304290232.AA10138(a)america.TELEBIT.COM> To: spectrx!edgar Subject: PGP: USA-Legal PGP Project >I confirmed with Jim Bidzos, President of RSA, who was >present at the meeting, that a USA Legal version of PGP could be >constructed by just replacing certain sections of code with free code >from RSAREF. Not quite true. RSAREF's license requires that the RSAREF routines be called only in certain ways unless special permission is obtained. Calling the RSAREF routines in the generally permitted manner won't work with PGP because PGP's file format is different than what RSAREF expects. PGP needs to call RSAREF in a non-standard way which is easy technically, but needs special permission from Bidzos. Attempts to get such permission have thus far been inconclusive. ====================================================================== I am msging Phil Z. to ask to be placed on "the list". I'm also trying to get more details from Paul Rubin, offering my assistance, and forwarding to him the other offers of assistance I received. It remains to be seen whether RSA's witholding of permission to use non-standard interfaces to RSAREF is reasonable or designed to be obstructive. When we find out, I think we should choose sides (if we -need- to choose sides) accordingly. It looks like the PGPers have made a good faith effort to at least meet RSA halfway. A "PGP-like" "consumer" crypto product which does not exchange keys and messages with PGP will -not- be acceptable. Any such product produced here will almost certainly be export restricted. I am -not- willing to give up my present ability to exchange keys and encrypted data with PGP users outside the USA. (I'm currently exchanging encrypted e-mail with persons in Poland(!!), Germany, and Taiwan). PGP is currently an -international- standard, and, because of ITAR, it's likely to be the -only- international standard for a long time to come. Note that current PGP is legal outside the USA -only- for non-commercial purposes (Phil Zimmerman's "copyleft"). If a USA version is approved by RSA, it will be legal only for non-commercial use inside the USA (RSA's patents & copyrights on RSAREF). If PGP becomes popular (even more so than at present, it's already the leader) worldwide for individual non-commercial use, businesses are going to want a PGP-compatible product they can use for exchanging encrypted data with their (non-business) -customers-. For example, encryption is a good idea if you're ordering merchandise with your credit-card number. Jim Bidzos has told me that Phil Z. or anyone else can get a license from RSA for $20,000 plus minimum $10,000/yr. royalties. If we say we don't want to spend more than 50% of our revenues on licensing, then if Phil can get $60,000 of firm orders for a -commercial- USA version of PGP, he's in (a very profitable) business. $60,000 might be 600 copies at $100 or six site licenses at $10,000. Also, if a -foreign- software producer wants to license a commercial version of PGP useable only overseas, he only needs to deal with Phil (& maybe the other PGP co-authors). But the effect of this would just be to increase the market for a USA commercial version (for businesses who wanted to exchange encrypted data with other businesses, or their own subsidiaries, overseas). I guess anyone who wants to can get onto Phil's list. I'd prefer if you all didn't bombard Paul Rubin with E-mail. I'll post more details of this project here as I get them (unless I'm asked not to). -- edgar(a)spectrx.saigon.com (Edgar W. Swank) SPECTROX SYSTEMS +1.408.252.1005 Silicon Valley, Ca

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Re: RSA patent!
by Peter Honeyman 04 May '93

04 May '93

> Don't patent holders *have* to license patents to all comers? no. peter

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Re: Tough Choices: PGP vs. RSA Data Security
by Peter Honeyman 04 May '93

04 May '93

> re paying a reasonable license fee, I wonder if RSA would cash my check > for (say) $10 if I wrote on the check that it was for a license for > whatever they might claim on PGP. writing conditions on the back of a check don't mean shit. > One wonders what they would do with several hundred checks. discard them, would be my guess. peter

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ANON: Stepping up the pace...
by Stop the Big Brother CHip 04 May '93

04 May '93

Hi All, With all this excitement about clipper, I am questions about a number of points: * are we losing momentum on the anon-server front * we have just 13 remailers deployed... and from what I am given to understand insufficient traffic on all. * did penet II (with PGP inbound encryption similar to PAX) ever materialize?.(how about it Julf??) * what about John Gilmores suggestion for defensible U.S. Anon-sites. * 2 stage usage of anon-servers. * anonymous cash protocols and digital banks? * support of cypherpunks encrypted remailer blocks by aservers. * is anyone besides me working on supporting aliases for MH, the pgpedit script, and pgp 2.2's multiple recipient feature? * is anyone working on converting MajorDomo to support PGP encryption and PGP 2.2 multiple recipient feature and cypherpunk anonymous encrypted return address blocks. (I have already taken a pass at it and it didnt meet my design goals..i.e. runnable from a shell users .forward file, it requires sendmail.cf mods.) * anonymous posting/mail via open NNTP/SMTP servers and header social engineering. Email or reply to the list... cheers kelly -- Parts of this .sig borrowed with permission from T.C.May. Perhaps it will indeed get me busted also. .......................................................................... Kelly Goen | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, kelly(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Intelligence Systems | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Specialists Inc. | black markets, face banks, data havens, dark | tech, covert channels, shared secrets, | alt.whistleblowers, collapse of governments. Technical Monkeywrench | Public Key: PGP 2.2. | .......................................................................... PGP 2.2 Key available from PGP Keyservers on the Internet. pub 1024/1BA573 1992/09/09 kelly <kelly(a)netcom.com> Key fingerprint = EF 7A 38 99 22 84 E3 3B 90 2A DB 80 DC 65 DA 31 STOP THE WIRETAP CHIP(Clipper Chip)!!

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Re: RSA patent!
by Sy Verpunc 04 May '93

04 May '93

5) (Misuse) Does RSA telling Phil Zimmermann that they will "never" license PGP to use RSA constitute monopolistic abuse? Could you tell us more about this? 6) (Misuse) The underlying purpose of the patent system was to encourage the creative genius for the benefit of the public. Has the public benefited in this case? Don't patent holders *have* to license patents to all comers? If say a rich sugar-daddy could be found who would put up the same scale of money as Lotus and Microsoft have, to use these patents - on behalf of Phil and PGP users - would they be obliged to license it? (I'm assuming if they did they would have to offer roughly similar conditions, and not charge punitively to force us out the market) If yes - then who do we know that's rich? :-) If no - are they doing anything wrong that we could get them in court over? G

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comments solicited (fwd)
by Mike Godwin 04 May '93

04 May '93

Forwarded message:

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RSA patent!
by William Oldacre 04 May '93

04 May '93

To: >Internet:cypherpunks@toad.com Enclosed is the essential text of the "RSA" patent. Now it's time to go to work. 1) (Interference) Is there anything in history wherein someone created a cypher consisting of two parts which could only be broken when they were combined mathematically? Or how about a wax seal created by impressing two images, one after the other-----verifying authenticity? 2) (Interference) Stripped of it's turgid language, does the basic equation fit any other ordinary operation such as factoring some type of equation. Is there some routine mathematical operation in number theory which resembles it? 3) (Invalidity) is there any part of the description language that could be interpreted two different ways? 4) (Misuse) a) Were any federal funds used in this project? Somebody at MIT needs to dig into the public documents there. b) If so, was the government irresponsible in licensing something so useful to the public to a company (in which they are a partner) which makes it's use by the public difficult? Can any evidence be found that this was deliberate? 5) (Misuse) Does RSA telling Phil Zimmermann that they will "never" license PGP to use RSA constitute monopolistic abuse? 6) (Misuse) The underlying purpose of the patent system was to encourage the creative genius for the benefit of the public. Has the public benefited in this case? 7) Keep thinking, and volunteer to take on some aspect of this and research it. Most research is not done by attorneys but, rather, by assitants who simply assemble the case histories for them to work from. By doing this work ourselves, any attorney or company wishing to challenge this patent in court is halfway there. 1475889 2329848 E/ CRYPTOGRAPHIC COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM AND METHOD -------------------------------------------------------------------- Inventors: Adleman Leonard M (US); Rivest Ronald L (US); Shamir Adi (US) Assigned to: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Code: 52912 Patent Number: 4405829 Application Number: US 860586 Application Date: 12/14/77 Issue Date: 9/20/83 Patent Type: Utility Citations: Cited by 29 later patents Abstract: --------- A cryptographic communications system and method. The system includes a communications channel coupled to at least one terminal having an encoding device and to at least one terminal having a decoding device. A message-to-be-transferred is enciphered to ciphertext at the encoding terminal by first encoding the message as a number M in a predetermined set, and then raising that number to a first predetermined power (associated with the intended receiver) and finally computing the remainder, or residue, C, when the exponentiated number is divided by the original message at the decoding terminal in a similar manner by raising the ciphertext to a second predetermined power (associated with the intended receiver), and then computing the residue, M', when the exponentiated ciphertext is divided by the product of the two predetermined prime numbers associated with the intended receiver. The residue M' corresponds to the original encoded message M. Exemplary Claim: ---------------- A communications system for transferring a message signal Mi comprising k terminals, wherein each terminal is characterized by an encoding key Ei (ei, ni) and decoding key Di (ei, ni), where i 1,2, . . . ,k, and wherein Mi corresponds to a number representative of a message signal to be transmitted from the ith terminal, ni is a composite number of the form ni pi X qi Pi and qi are prime numbers, ei is relatively prime to 1 cm(pi-1,qi-1), di is a multiplicative inverse of ei(mod(1 cm((pi-1),(qi-1)))) wherein a first terminal includes means for encoding a digital message word signal MA for transmission from said first terminal (i A) to a second terminal (i B), said first terminal including: means for transforming said message word signal MA to one or more message block word signals MA', each block word signal MA being a number representative of a portion of said message word signal MA in the range 0 < OR = MA < OR = nB-1, means for transforming each of said message block word signals MA'' to a ciphertext word signal CA, CA corresponding to a number representative of an encoded form of said message block word signal MA'', whereby: CA identical MA''eB(mod nB).

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Re: Tough Choices: PGP vs. RSA Data Security
by hkhenson＠cup.portal.com 04 May '93

04 May '93

re paying a reasonable license fee, I wonder if RSA would cash my check for (say) $10 if I wrote on the check that it was for a license for whatever they might claim on PGP. One wonders what they would do with several hundred checks. :) Keith

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Re: Tough Choices: PGP vs. RSA Data Security
by hfinney＠shell.portal.com 04 May '93

04 May '93

(I sent a copy of this message this morning from my Compuserve account, but it never appeared. Fighting to control my surging paranoia, I am re-sending it from this account. I apologize if a duplicate eventually shows up.) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Tim May writes: > I suggest that we as a community seriously reconsider our basic support for > PGP. Not because of any flaws in the program, but because of issues related > to Clipper and the potential limits on crypto. I see several problems with this proposal. 1. It's not clear what it means to "reconsider our basic support for PGP." What exactly is Tim proposing? That people stop using PGP? That they phase out their use of it as legal products become available? I'd like to see some clarification. 2. More generally, what about the issue of our advocating and supporting other possibly infringing actions? Which ones do we stop? Just those that upset Jim Bidzos? He claims to have patents that cover many more activities than RSA, including patents which cover the very idea of public key encryption, and patents on Diffie-Hellman key exchange and virtually any conceivable variation. Should we respect all of these now? 3. David Chaum apparently has U.S. patents on many key features of digital cash. It looks like we would have to stop working on that, too, by this reasoning. 4. What reasonable alternatives to PGP exist? Is RSAREF really usable on a PC? I tried an early version and it was terribly, terribly slow. PGP is just barely fast enough. A "legal" version of PGP which uses RSAREF will presumably be considerably slower. 5. I am not as convinced as Tim that RSADSI is truly, positively, certainly on our side. Why is it that RSAREF has such a weak conventional encryption algorithm (DES, with 56-bit keys)? RIPEM has been out for many months, and people have been asking for IDEA or triple DES all that time. Bidzos has supposedly said he'll give permission for improvements. Yet as far as I know RIPEM still only has this small key size, a key size which persistent rumors say can be broken by government computers. When Bidzos permits RSAREF to run a conventional encryption algorithm with a secure key size I will give more credence to the view that he wants people to have strong encryption. 6. How is it that one company has collected virtually all of the patents on cryptographic technology in this country? Jim Bidzos controls patents on public-key encryption in general, RSA, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, ElGamal signatures and encryption, and several others. I can't help noticing that it would be an extraordinarily convenient arrangement for the government if such a company existed and were secretly working against public use of cryptography while publically pretending to be doing all they can to bring this technology to a reluctant market. I still have not seen any specific public action by Bidzos which would invalidate this possibility. Yes, he has engaged in this widely publicized tiff with NIST over the Digital Signature Standard, and he's made some statements against Clipper. But where are the lawsuits? Is AT&T receiving the same threatening letters that Stanton McCandlish received when he said he was distributing PGP from his BBS? 7. Extrapolating from the widespread acceptance of PGP, which is free, to conclude that there is a market for a commercial encryption product which costs money is pointless. Granted, some of us may spend a lot of time talking about PGP and thinking about these issues, but most PGP users just downloaded it from a BBS or the net. There are a lot of things they'd spend $100 on before they would buy an encryption program. One of the things that attracted me to Cypherpunks is that they take steps to make these tools available without worrying about upsetting the power structure. David Chaum may object to our implementing digital cash. Jim Bidzos may object to our using RSA, or Diffie-Hellman, or almost anything else having to do with cryptography. If we're going to start looking over our shoulder and not doing anything which powerful people object to then we might as well pack up and go home. Almost everything we have talked about over the last six months infringes somebody's patents in this country. I really don't see what role a group like ours has if we have to tiptoe through the minefield of intellectual property protection which permeates the field of cryptography. Are we to become a bunch of unpaid consultants for RSADSI, writing code which they will then make profits on? Phil Zimmermann has done more to put strong cryptography into the hands of people all over the world in two years than Bidzos has managed in ten. He has faced lawsuits by Bidzos and has undergone considerable personal sacrifice in getting this software out. People talk about this "feud" as though the two are equally guilty, and ask (like Rodney King) "can't we all just get along?" But this is a cop-out. To me there is clear asymmetry in their dispute in terms of who asserts their power and who is trying to empower individuals. Look at what Tim is suggesting. We abandon PGP, not because it is a bad program; not because its author has behaved unethically; not because it has failed in its goals; but because Jim Bidzos is throwing his weight around and we don't want Jim to be unhappy. If Jim were to accept that PGP was no more threatening to his patents than RSAREF then the problem would be solved. I presume that Tim has decided that this won't happen, so now he suggests Plan B, that we abandon PGP. I have to suggest that the real obstacle to the wide deployment of strong cryptography remains Jim Bidzos. He has the power, by a single stroke of a pen, to do more to encourage the spread of cryptography in this country than any other single person (including Bill Clinton). All he has to do is to issue a policy statement that since PGP is freeware it falls under the PKP policy allowing use of the patents for noncommercial use. Presto - PGP is legal, and one of the main obstacles to its spread is eliminated. I agree with Tim that we need to look closely to see who our real enemies are. Perhaps Bidzos is a charming person. I've never met him. Certainly the bay area Cypherpunks seem to be falling under his influence. From my perspective I find this cozying up to the PKP/RSADSI power structure to be rather alarming. I don't think it is a good direction for the group. Hal Finney 74076.1041(a)compuserve.com hal(a)alumni.caltech.edu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.2 iQCVAgUBK9/UvKgTA69YIUw3AQGCrgQAi2980bgg4eHAoIbRUtEtT05V7+50UH16 erkzERI8ot+uk0soXPsM53YlVVAvSYVmLY5Ine862RWG0TUldq1O99CbnCet6Da9 /NWVUQCAoKrUuwj7Cetyf84wE4Fof6tbugOtXhke26WXZXhEIIsSdgKBzaDdc/LD y0zU/abZ9Es= =IKKf -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: RISKS DIGEST 14.54
by hkhenson＠cup.portal.com 04 May '93

04 May '93

This issue of comp.risks has a rather lengthy posting by DD. The moderator commented (re the wiretap chip) "there has been essentially no other topic of concern for the past week . . . ." Considering the wide range of topics covered here, that is quite a statement! Keith

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