October 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

RE: Inferno: Cold War encryption laws stand, but not as firmly | CNET News.com (fwd)
by Trei, Peter 17 Oct '03

17 Oct '03

> Jim Choate[SMTP:ravage@einstein.ssz.com] > > Subject: Inferno: Cold War encryption laws stand, but not as firmly | > CNET News.com (fwd) > > This is great news for crypto... > > http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5092154.html?tag=nefd_top > > [Judge Patel throws out Bernstein case after USG 'promises' not to enforce the laws requiring notification of publication of crypto source code] No, this is NOT great news. The law stands, and promises from a government agent are of questionable sincerity. If a researcher publishes crypto source, the law is still a sword of Damocles hanging over his head, ready to fall if he displeases the powers that be. Great news would have been Judge Patel declaring the law unconstitutional, or (better) the USG repealing the law. Ayn Rand, wrong about so many things, had it right: "There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." Peter Trei Disclaimer: My opinions only.

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Inferno: Cold War encryption laws stand, but not as firmly | CNET News.com (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Oct '03

17 Oct '03

This is great news for crypto... http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5092154.html?tag=nefd_top -- -- Lo! Men have become the tools of their tools - H.D. Thoreau ravage(a)ssz.com jchoate(a)open-forge.com www.ssz.com www.open-forge.com

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Re: C3 Nehemia C5P with better hardware RNG and AES support
by Major Variola (ret) 16 Oct '03

16 Oct '03

At 11:06 PM 10/15/03 +0200, Ralf-P. Weinmann wrote: >On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 05:14:17PM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: >> latest VIA C3 C5P does 1 GHz at 7 W power dissipation, >> has now two hardware RNG engines (and two x86 opcodes to >> read them), and an Advanced Cryptography Engine >> which can do AES (Rijndael128? doesn't say) at >> 12.5 GBit/s rate. > >Look at the PadLock ACE programming guide [1]. Only seems to support Rijndael >with a block size of 128 bits (= AES); it allows both key scheduling in >hardware and in software, the latter allowing you to have your own custom >key schedule. It also allows you to increase the number of rounds if you >think Rijndael-128's security margins are too low. Props to the VIA engineers >for both the customizability. Which is unlikely to be used, at it would be incompatible with everything else. The "customizability" is likely a flexibility they built for their own (debug, architectural) reasons and decided to expose to users. What they need is a USB or Ethernet interface to catch up to others. However the attraction of a relatively fast x86 (vs say a 100 Mhz MIPS or ARM) might offset this lack of integration for some designs. Am surprised not to see a little DES core stuffed into the spare space on the die, but kinda nostalgically pleased to see DES's EOL. RIP. >The errate are funny as well. Looks like the I found the following lexical rule mildly amusing, because I have seen the same thing added to military docs to make them politically correct (he -> he or she) without editing the whole damn thing. "NOTE: Throughout this document, a reference to encryption generally means both encryption and decryption."

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VIA wows with nano-sized x86, entropy-based security, tiny PCs
by R. A. Hettinga 16 Oct '03

16 Oct '03

A few years ago, I remember being called into at least two chip companies and telling them they really should build something like this. They paid me anyway, but it's too bad they didn't actually build it. Glad *someone* did, though. :-). Here's hoping it works... Cheers, RAH ------ <http://www.linuxdevices.com/cgi-bin/printerfriendly.cgi?id=NS7542683131> LinuxDevices.com VIA wows with nano-sized x86, entropy-based security, tiny PCs Oct. 15, 2003 At the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, Calif. this week, VIA Technologies unveiled the VIA Eden-N processor, a tiny x86 processor in a nanoBGA package measuring just 15 x 15mm -- roughly the size of a U.S. penny. VIA says the new chip, which is based on a streamlined version of its Nehemiah processor core, is less than half the size of Intel's Pentium M processor. According to VIA, the Eden-N achieves a Thermal Design Power of just 7 Watts at 1GHz. Of note, 7 Watts happens to be considered the magic number for maximum processor power consumption for "typical fanless notebook designs," according to Transmeta, which also unveiled its latest low-power x86 compatible processor , the Efficeon, at this week's Microprocessor Forum. Entropy-based security VIA says it added a significant enhancement to the security features of the on-chip PadLock Security Suite contain within the Eden-N's Nehemiah processor core. A new PadLock Advanced Cryptography Engine (PadLock ACE) and two hardware based random number generators (RNGs) can support the US government approved Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and can supply cryptographic functions for securing email, personal files, online transactions, and networks (including the latest high-bandwidth 802.11g wireless networks). According to VIA, PadLock ACE encrypts at rates up to 12.5 Gbps on a 1GHz VIA Eden-N processor, which is "more than eight times faster than the best software AES implementation from a power hungry 3GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor based system that encrypts at a rate of a mere 1.5 Gbps." In contrast to software RNGs or multi-chip hardware solutions, the VIA's PadLock technology generates entropy-based RNGs for security keys by deriving entropy from electrical noise on the CPU itself. The entropy value is stored in a collection buffer where it can be accessed directly via a dedicated x86 instruction set without the use of vulnerable software drivers. According to VIA, security applications that leverage the capabilities of the PadLock Security Suite can be deployed quickly and easily across a broad range of devices including PCs, thin clients, set top boxes, home digital entertainment centers, point of sale terminals, and intelligent network routers in a wide variety of wired and wireless networking environments. VIA expects the security support to be useful in applications such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), corporate peer-to-peer LANs with restricted access for sensitive projects, and home wireless networks. "With the PadLock Security Suite, VIA is providing the essential security building blocks for free," noted Richard Brown, VIA associate vice president of marketing. "The PadLock Security Suite enables developers to create stronger, more powerful security systems that are independent of the operating system and can be tailored to meet the real security needs of corporate, government and individual customers." "Our developers have written device drivers for numerous PCI cryptographic devices, which were expensive, slow, buggy, and over-complicated," commented Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD Project Leader. "There's just no way to describe how happy we were to find such an inexpensive, blazingly fast, and correctly operating device as the VIA Eden-N processor's PadLock ACE . . . and best of all, it was almost trivial to add support. We hope this new functionality becomes very widespread in the near future." Demos at Microprocessor Forum 2003 VIA showcased several small form-factor motherboards and PCs based on its Eden processors, including its recently unveiled Nano-ITX motherboard form-factor and several tiny fan-less PCs. These especially caught our eye . . . (Note: click each image for a larger view; click each title for further info) VIA Nano-ITX motherboard -- VIA's Nano-ITX form-factor measures just 4.7 x 4.7 in. and represents the "smallest standard platform with full PC functionality," according to VIA CEO Wenchi Chen. Nimble V5 -- this tiny format PC is currently based on a 733 MHz VIA Eden processor with up to 512MB DDR SDRAM and a built-in hard drive. It includes four USB 2.0 ports, two Ethernet ports, four PS/2 ports, two VGA outputs, and provides a PCMCIA Type II slot for wireless or other expansion -- all within a mere 2 x 7.7 x 7.7 inch form-factor. Mini-Box M100 -- a tiny PC which resembles an in-dash car stereo. It's based on VIA's Mini-ITX motherboards and powered by 12VDC, and has a built-in LCD display and customizable 14-key keypad, eliminating the need for a keyboard or mouse. Supports Windows and Windows CE. Currently based an 800MHz Eden processor two 168-pin DIMM memory sockets and includes interfaces for Ethernet, VGA and TV graphics, audio in/out, IDE hard drive, USB, printer port, serial ports, PS/2 ports, 4 GPIO bits, PCI card expansion, and front-panel accessible CompactFlash. Wow! -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com

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[p2p-hackers] P2P in NS-2 (fwd from izzy@lina.es.ncku.edu.tw)
by Eugen Leitl 16 Oct '03

16 Oct '03

----- Forwarded message from izzy <izzy(a)lina.es.ncku.edu.tw> -----

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Re: C3 Nehemia C5P with better hardware RNG and AES support
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 15 Oct '03

15 Oct '03

"Ralf-P. Weinmann" <rpw(a)uni.de> writes: >Look at the PadLock ACE programming guide The security app note is also entertaining reading. For example it lists one of the motivations for getting security right as "your husband may find out ...". On why they didn't save a copy of the test data for the NIST suite: "(Hey, do you have 10TB of disk drives lying around? We can fill a 30 GB drive with raw bits in a little more than 30 minutes - if the drive controller can keep up with us.)". And a little further on it refers readers to "Marketing quote from CRI" (which was a slip-up this time). The app note was actually written by humans. Cool. Peter.

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C3 Nehemia C5P with better hardware RNG and AES support
by Eugen Leitl 15 Oct '03

15 Oct '03

News in from San Jose microprocessor forum: latest VIA C3 C5P does 1 GHz at 7 W power dissipation, has now two hardware RNG engines (and two x86 opcodes to read them), and an Advanced Cryptography Engine which can do AES (Rijndael128? doesn't say) at 12.5 GBit/s rate. Next-generation (Esther, early 2004) will add SHA-1 support in hardware. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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[Fwd: [Msgs] Reminder--Computer Science Colloquium, 2:45-4:00, October 15]
by Howie Goodell 15 Oct '03

15 Oct '03

A talk at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, MA tomorrow (Wednesday): -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Msgs] Reminder--Computer Science Colloquium, 2:45-4:00, October 15 Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 17:07:18 -0400 From: Gary Livingston <gary(a)cs.uml.edu> To: cypherpunks(a)lne.com X-Orig-To: <msgs(a)cs.uml.edu> CC: Gary Livingston <gary(a)cs.uml.edu> Colloquium Announcement Department of Computer Science UMass Lowell Title: Anonymous and Untraceable Communication in Mobile Wireless Networks Speaker: Jiejun Kong Time & Place: October 15th (Wednesday), 3:00-4:00, 311 Olsen Hall; snacks from 2:45-3:00 Abstract: Privacy in mobile wireless networks has different semantics from the traditional notion for banking systems and the wired Internet. In addition to traditional content privacy, mobile privacy also addresses security concerns for mobile node's identity and location, namely anonymity and location privacy. In this talk I will discuss anonymity and location privacy attacks as well as their countermeasures in mobile ad hoc networks, which can instantly establish a communication structure for civilian and military applications. We focus on passive routing attacks in hostile environments like battlefront. Anonymity and location privacy issues are critical for such scenarios, as allowing adversaries to trace network routes and infer the motion pattern of nodes at the end of those routes may pose serious threats to covert operations. The highly raised privacy demand poses challenging constraints on routing and data forwarding. ANonymous On Demand Routing (ANODR) is a multi-hop on demand routing scheme that can prevent wireless adversaries from compromising a mobile ad hoc network's anonymity and location privacy. ANODR provides anonymity service by dissociating the routing scheme from any naming scheme of network member's identity/address. This approach immediately achieves location privacy, and differentiates ANODR from other ad hoc routing schemes that mainly rely on nodes' address in data forwarding. It is verified by our simulation that the performance of (anonymous-only) ANODR is comparable to common on demand routing schemes currently in use (e.g., AODV). In addition, ANODR also implements untraceable routes so that passive adversaries cannot trace a packet flow to its source and sink. ANODR pays reasonable cost, such as neighborhood traffic mixing, to meet this privacy demand. It is verified by our simulation that the performance of (anonymous+untraceable) ANODR is more efficient than its peers designed for wired networks (e.g., MIX-Net). The underlying anonymity model of ANODR is a new one based on wireless broadcast, a ready-made mechanism in wireless networks and on-demand routing discovery processes. Though related research (Shields & Levin, CCS'00) has shown wired IP multicast can help anonymity, wireless broadcast is never used to achieve anonymity before ANODR's proposal "broadcast with anonymous trapdoor assignment". It is expected that our future work along this direction will lead to new means to provide anonymity and untraceability services to mobile wireless networks. Biographical Sketch of the Author: Jiejun Kong (jkong(a)cs.ucla.edu) is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science Department, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He is interested in designing efficient, scalable, and robust security solutions for mobile wireless networks. His research topics include providing authentication/authorization/access control (AAA), secure routing, intrusion detection, and mobile privacy services to mobile ad hoc networks, in particular those with challenging network constraints and with very high security demands. Recently he focuses on anonymous and untraceable routing schemes. He has contributed to the design, implementation, and testing of network security protocols within ONR MINUTEMAN project, STTR project, and NSF iMASH project. _______________________________________________ msgs mailing list msgs(a)weblab.cs.uml.edu http://weblab.cs.uml.edu/mailman/listinfo/msgs -- Howie Goodell Howie(a)GoodL.org http://goodl.org Hardware control Visualization User interface UMassLowell Computer Science Doctoral Candidate

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Judge Orders Reporters (TM) to Reveal Sources
by Major Variola (ret.) 15 Oct '03

15 Oct '03

Judge Orders Reporters to Reveal Sources 4 News Organizations Told to Identify Officials Interviewed in Wen Ho Lee Reports ... His lawyers have encountered what the judge described as "a pattern of denials, vague or evasive answers, and stonewalling" on the part of the government officials they questioned. That gives Lee's attorneys the right, Jackson said, to demand that certain journalists who wrote about the case say which officials might have provided the information. "This is kind of bad news," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Washington-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She said it is highly unusual for a judge to order so many reporters at once to divulge their sources and almost unprecedented in a case in which no criminal actions are alleged. ... http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26919-2003Oct14?language=printer

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Re: Software protection scheme may boost new game sales
by Major Variola (ret) 15 Oct '03

15 Oct '03

At 04:22 PM 10/13/03 -0400, Sunder wrote: >The luser will think it's worth buying their own copy after getting >addicted to the game. ... >So the rub, is that copies are allowed to be made, but unless cracked, the >copies are nothing more than time limited demos. What's wrong with these things? They're not fraud. >The only way that this could work is if they put up some sort of splash >screen at some point to let the luser know that the program isn't buggy, >but that the copy protection noticed it's a backup. Which trivially eliminates your objections to the user thinking something is wrong. >As usual, the real loser is the original purchaser, because if he >scratches his CD, he's out $50-$70 or whatever games cost today, and he >can't make backups. Yes. The company *should* swap scratched originals to preserve this backup right, but I don't think they're legally required to. And the company won't be around forever, whereas backups can, so the swapping plan is inferior. *However*, as incrementally clever as this scheme is, it is succeptible to a CD dupe program that is bit for bit correct, no? And since the protected software *checks* the CD for the errors, than a CD bit-for-bit copier *must* be able to be written, no? Or is there a problem writing intentional-errors on consumer-grade CD burners? (If so, this is a good marketing tool; if not, this is going to be cracked.)

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