June 2001 - cypherpunks-legacy

Slashdot | Judge Sues ISP for Poor Service
by Jim Choate 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

http://slashdot.org/articles/01/06/22/237251.shtml -- -- ____________________________________________________________________ Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Ludwig Wittgenstein The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: Two Countries, One City (A civil libertarian/anarcho-capitalist challenge?)
by mmotyka＠lsil.com 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

> > http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101010611/fcities.html > > James Choate > Oddly enough, this topic came up at home this morning over coffee and pastries on the front porch with someone from a similarly troubled country. Even more oddly, we were in agreement. Want to begin improving the lives of poor people around the world? For starters it seems to me that everywhere the Spanish colonized is royally fucked-up. Family planning will do more to ease the suffering and improve the lot of the poor than a whole grand canyon full of pious, chanting padres. As for the "civil libertarian/anarcho-capitalist challenge" the poor in these areas ( Mexico, SA, Philippines ) barely have resources to feed their children and don't have the energy or the will to think about political philosophy and realization through technology. That is the domain of their masters, the well-off. Mike

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OPT: Re: crypto flaw in secure mail standards (fwd)
by Jim Choate 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: 22 Jun 2001 18:40:09 -0000 From: lcs Mixmaster Remailer <mix(a)anon.lcs.mit.edu> To: cryptography(a)wasabisystems.com Subject: Re: crypto flaw in secure mail standards Don Davis writes, > All current secure-mail standards have a > significant cryptographic flaw. There are several standard > ways to send and read secure e-mail. The most well-known > secure mail systems are PGP and S/MIME. All current public- > key-based secure-mail standards have this flaw. Here are some > examples of the flaw in action: > > Suppose Alice and Bob are business partners, and are setting > up a deal together. Suppose Alice decides to call off the > deal, so she sends Bob a secure-mail message: "The deal is off." The only thing protected in a signed message is that portion signed. Alice needs to say, "Bob, the deal is off." Actually this is not enough. Suppose Alice sends this, or equivalently suppose we use an encryption scheme similar to what David Hopwood describes where the inner signed portion includes the outer key. There can still be trouble. Suppose at some later time Alice and Bob negotiate a new contract, and Bob wants to get out of it. He pulls out this old message of Alice's and stamps a new date on it, claiming that it was with regard to their new contract negotiation. He says that Alice withdrew from the contract so he is not liable for any penalties. Again the problem is that only what is signed is protected. If the date is not signed, it is not protected. So the protocol has to include the date in the signature. (Actually I think most email encryption protocols do this, but the point is that the formal description of what is signed may not show that.) Only what is signed is protected. Even the date may not be enough. Suppose Alice and Bob are separately negotiating two different contracts, using a threaded mail reader which uses Reply-To: or some similar fields in the mail header so that exchanges with regard to one contract are shown separately from exchanges with regard to the other. Then Alice might send, "Bob, the deal is off," including a date in the signature, and expect it to apply just to the deal being negotiated in that thread, because that's how her mail software shows it. However Bob can take the message and claim that it applied to the other thread. In this case, other context that was in the minds of Alice and Bob is not being covered by the signature. This is really the general form of the issue being discussed. What is in the minds of the participants, what assumptions are they making that are not being written down? This is why we have lawyers and contracts and fine print. These institutions and practices are the result of centuries of people weaseling out of contracts in various ways. It is mistaken to think that we can solve this problem by a little cryptographic legerdemain involving copying a field from the outer encryption envelope into the inner signature. That does not begin to cover all of the things that can go wrong. The only real solution is to use the advice and experience of the legal system when negotiating a contract which will bind the parties. Make sure everything is written down and sign a document which is as clear, specific and free of ambiguity as possible. It's not a cryptographic issue, and failures of this kind are not cryptographic failures. Cryptography can't read the minds of the parties involved and know that all of their assumptions are included in the signed portion. The real solution is for the communicants to take the responsibility to put everything there that is needed. Only what is signed is protected. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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by info＠bhnutritionals.com 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

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Slashdot | @Home Cuts Newsgroups Due to DMCA Complaints
by Jim Choate 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

http://slashdot.org/yro/01/06/22/006203.shtml -- -- ____________________________________________________________________ Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Ludwig Wittgenstein The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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I WAS SICK OF BEING FAT!!
by tigger6000＠icytundra.com 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

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OPT: Re: crypto flaw in secure mail standards (fwd)
by Jim Choate 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 15:00:33 -0400 From: "Jeffrey I. Schiller" <jis(a)mit.edu> To: Derek Atkins <warlord(a)mit.edu> Cc: Don Davis <dtd(a)world.std.com>, cryptography(a)wasabisystems.com Subject: Re: crypto flaw in secure mail standards In fact there are many applications where the separation of the signing operation from the encryption operation are useful and important. Encryption provides a different service then the underlying signature. It protects the document from being read by unintended recipients. The signature can provide proof later that the sender did in fact sign the message. It is always the case that one must be careful what one writes in e-mail, for once delivered to the recipient, the sender looses control of the document. In fact this threat even exists in paper mail. If Alice sends Bob a "The deal is off" letter, but doesn't mark the letter with enough context, Bob can always physically forward the letter to a third party and claim it is from Alice. I believe it is important that message signatures outlive the message's encryption layer. If I receive a signed/encrypted message. I will loose the ability to decrypt it if I loose my private key (or intentionally destroy it to prevent its future compromise). However if I remove the encryption and store the message signed (perhaps protected by other mechanisms in my mail store), I can always verify the signature as long as I have access to the sender's certificate chain. No secrets have to be saved. Btw. I don't believe S/MIME has timestamps in its signature format. PGP does. PGP also implements a "for her eyes only" feature that only permits an encrypted message to be displayed, but not saved in a file. Now of course a sufficiently clever person can circumvent this protection. I am now wondering how hard it would be to circumvent this feature *and* keep the original message signature (of course if you have the PGP source code, you can do this). However, having said all this, Don has a point. There may be a class of message where you want to prove that you originated it *only to the original sender*. If he has a way to do that, it sounds like a good thing. But there isn't a flaw in secure e-mail, just a missing service. -Jeff --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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OPT: crypto flaw in secure mail standards (fwd)
by Jim Choate 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 10:15:57 -0500 From: Don Davis <dtd(a)world.std.com> To: cryptography(a)wasabisystems.com Subject: crypto flaw in secure mail standards All current secure-mail standards specify, as their "high- security" option, a weak use of the public-key sign and encrypt operations. On Thursday the 28th of this month, I'll present my findings and my proposed repairs of the protocols, at the Usenix Technical Conference here in Boston: http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix01/usenix01.pdf Citation: Don Davis, "Defective Sign & Encrypt in S/MIME, PKCS#7, MOSS, PEM, PGP, and XML." To appear in Proc. Usenix Tech. Conf. 2001, Boston. June 25-30, 2001. A short summary: All current secure-mail standards have a significant cryptographic flaw. There are several standard ways to send and read secure e-mail. The most well-known secure mail systems are PGP and S/MIME. All current public- key-based secure-mail standards have this flaw. Here are some examples of the flaw in action: Suppose Alice and Bob are business partners, and are setting up a deal together. Suppose Alice decides to call off the deal, so she sends Bob a secure-mail message: "The deal is off." Then Bob can get even with Alice: * Bob waits until Alice has a new deal in the works with Charlle; * Bob can abuse the secure e-mail protocol to re-encrypt and resend Alice's message to Charlie; * When Charlie receives Alice's message, he'll believe that the mail-security features guarantee that Alice sent the message to Charlie. * Charlie abandons his deal with Alice. Suppose instead that Alice & Bob are coworkers. Alice uses secure e-mail to send Bob her sensitive company-internal sales plan. Bob decides to get his rival Alice fired: * Bob abuses the secure e-mail protocol to re-encrypt and resend Alice's sales-plan, with her digital signature, to a rival company's salesman Charlie. * Charlie brags openly about getting the sales plan from Alice. When he's accused in court of stealing the plan, Charlie presents Alice's secure e-mail as evidence of his innocence. Surprisingly, standards-compliant secure-mail clients will not detect these attacks. ---------------------------------------------------------- Abstract Simple Sign & Encrypt, by itself, is not very secure. Cryptographers know this well, but application programmers and standards authors still tend to put too much trust in simple Sign-and-Encrypt. In fact, every secure e-mail protocol, old and new, has codified na�ve Sign & Encrypt as acceptable security practice. S/MIME, PKCS#7, PGP, OpenPGP, PEM, and MOSS all suffer from this flaw. Similarly, the secure document protocols PKCS#7, XML- Signature, and XML-Encryption suffer from the same flaw. Na�ve Sign & Encrypt appears only in file-security and mail-security applications, but this narrow scope is becoming more important to the rapidly-growing class of commercial users. With file- and mail-encryption seeing widespread use, and with flawed encryption in play, we can expect widespread exposures. In this paper, we analyze the na�ve Sign & Encrypt flaw, we review the defective sign/encrypt standards, and we describe a comprehensive set of simple repairs. The various repairs all have a common feature: when signing and encryption are combined, the inner crypto layer must somehow depend on the outer layer, so as to reveal any tampering with the outer layer. ---------------------------- Once I've presented the paper, I'll make this link live: http://world.std.com/~dtd/sign_encrypt/sign_encrypt7.ps - don davis, boston http://world.std.com/~dtd - --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com -- ____________________________________________________________________ Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Ludwig Wittgenstein The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Two Countries, One City (A civil libertarian/anarcho-capitalist challenge?)
by Jim Choate 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101010611/fcities.html James Choate Product Certification - Operating Systems Staff Engineer 512-436-1062 jchoate(a)tivoli.com

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RE: Louis Cypher <cypherl@hotmail.com>
by Trei, Peter 22 Jun '01

22 Jun '01

> From: Anonymous[SMTP:nobody@mix.winterorbit.com] > > Amusing. > The guy caling himself Louis Cypher is apparently connecting to the > Internet from within Mitre. > X-Originating-IP: [129.83.19.1] > Who have you pissed off, Sunder? > -MW- > Um, probably no one. I was on the cypherpunks list as ptrei(a)mitre.org for many years, as oldtimers on the list will remember. Peter Trei

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