December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

"E-Money" is trademarked
by jim＠bilbo.suite.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

FYI, I learned tonight that Electronic Funds Clearinghouse, Inc., holds the trademark "E-Money" which is licensed to E-Money, Inc. a Delaware Corporation. See the Web page http://www.efunds.com I guess I will have to rename my E-Money mini-FAQ. Jim_Miller(a)suite.com

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Re: REM_ote
by jf_avon＠citenet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Alex Strasheim <cp(a)proust.suba.com> wrote: >> Marianne Mueller, Java security engineer, also said the chances of such >> hacking occurring are "remote." > >This is the sort of bullshit that gets companies in trouble. Reminds me of this old saying: When you put your head in the sand, do realize what part of your anatomy is most visible to the rest of the world... :) JFA **** OLD KEY: DO NOT USE ANYMORE UNLESS FOR VERIFYING SIGNATURES **** 1024 bits Key ID:57214AED 1995/10/04 Jean-Francois Avon <jf_avon(a)citenet.net> Key fingerprint = 84 96 76 AE EB 7C AB 15 88 47 87 B0 18 31 74 9F

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"Internet Security: Your Worst Nightmare"
by an44880＠anon.penet.fi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Those were the words beaming on the cover of this week's _Information Week_. The totally worthless article on internet security contained this little gem: Federal Law enforcement agencies, alarmed by the growing threat of Net-related security breaches and crimes, are stepping up their investigations of online intrusions. "We're aware that this is a serious problem for any industry using the Internet," says Jim Freeman, special agent in charge of the FBI's San Francisco office. "The ultimate solution will be through better technology such as encryption, but we will investigate any crimes in which a computer is used as an instrument of intrusion or fraud. Complete with a picture of Freeman standing in front of an American flag. --****ATTENTION****--****ATTENTION****--****ATTENTION****--***ATTENTION*** Your e-mail reply to this message WILL be *automatically* ANONYMIZED. Please, report inappropriate use to abuse(a)anon.penet.fi For information (incl. non-anon reply) write to help(a)anon.penet.fi If you have any problems, address them to admin(a)anon.penet.fi

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Re: Internet Protest!
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:13 AM 2/23/96 -0600, m5(a)dev.tivoli.com (Mike McNally) wrote: > Is anybody so seriously delusional >that they imagine poor Bill Clinton having to work his way through all >the mail with elm? It's really not that tough - g/Bill Of Rights/d They're already about half done ..... #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com / billstewart(a)attmail.com +1-415-442-2215 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs Pager +1-408-787-1281

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Remember, RC4 is now PC1
by jamesd＠echeque.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:46 PM 2/24/96 GMT, aba(a)atlas.ex.ac.uk wrote: >I don't see any stigma attached with IPG admitting they have a PRNG >seeded with a key, and XORing the PRNG stream with the data - this is >exactly what RC4 does. >From now, instead of saying "RC4" let us say "PC1, (formerly known as RC4)" That will teach them to trademark names. We will forget their names. The net views intellectual property rights as damage and routes around them. Every time you say RC4 without saying "Trademark of some bunch of lawyer scum" you theoretically break the lawyer made law. So let us stop doing it. Serve them right. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Re: [Off topic] Re: Easy Nuclear Detonator
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:05 PM 2/22/96 -0500, Black Unicorn wrote: >Actually, your design still is vulnerable to my objection, as my >objection was specifically to your intermediary chamber concept. > >Your intermediary chamber, if surrounding the blasting cap, is likely to >detonate to one side first, at a right angle to the axis of the chamber >to the explosive assembly. What I anticipated, to tell you the truth, was a long intermediary thin tube (again, 1 mm diameter for concreteness, just as an example) BETWEEN a chamber surrounding the cap, and the secondary chamber. (the secondary chamber would be carefully designed to spread the shock front evenly) I fully intended to avoid all of the possible consequences of weird explosive modes in common blasting caps. What really mystifies me is that you would think somebody who was intelligent enough to be capable of building a bomb could possibly be unaware of the strange behavior of common blasting caps? Do you think we're all stupid out here?!? Last time I talked to Dr. Edgerton in his lab (You _do_ know about Dr. Edgerton, don't you?!? EG+G?), in about 1978 or so, he showed me some interesting pictures he had taken of blasting caps exploding, and the weird patterns they made. Believe me, from that moment onwards I had no illusions about the predictability of the common blasting cap. BTW, the reason Edgerton paid a bit of attention to ME, as opposed to every other lowly undergrad at MIT, was the fact that I did something he had tried many times and failed to do: For my strobe laboratory project, I decided that I was going to photograph a popcorn kernel opening up at 10,000 frames per second. He called it "impossible": I called it a challenge. That is why I did the project. I showed him 11 frames taken a few weeks later. Dr. Edgerton was suitably impressed. >> >1> Interference from the milling shape and accuracy o f the openings to >> >the tubes containing the liquid explosive. >> >> Quantify, quantify. How much of a problem? > >Clever question given that I am without any information as to the exact >shape of your tubes, if they are bowled down towards the explosive >assembly, or what their exact width (excepting your vague 1mm figure) >might be. You make some guesses as to material, but these two are fairly >flimsy even by your own admission. I don't expect you to be able to "use ESP" and anticipate all the exact mistakes somebody could make. Rather, you should be willing to accept the principle, and explain how much inaccuracy is "too much," and try to give an example of an error that would produce an inaccuracy of this magnitude. So far you've done none of this. I have to conclude you were simply trolling, or intentionally spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) without genuinely trying to get involved in an interesting hypthetical idea. BTW, while I do indeed consider this as purely hypothetical, on the offchance you're a FUDmeister from the government, you should be aware that _I'm_ fully aware that while the main form of radioactive emanation from Pu-239 is alphas which can be stopped by a piece of paper or a few inches of air, I am also fully aware that the decay produces a substantial quantity of gamma radiation (whose exact wavelengths and energies I can easily look up in my trusty CRC Handbook). So don't bother flying an airplane equipped with a gamma ray detector over my house; while I haven't the inclination to do the calculations, were it important to do so I'd calculate the minimum thickness of lead required to reduce the gamma intensity to below-background levels (using gamma-ray cross section tables and the appropriate equations), double or triple it, _and_ ensure that anything I did manage to acquire would be invisible to even a secretly-placed nearby detector at all times. And I'm also fully aware of ground-penetrating SAR (and the possibility of mobile variants) and JSTARS and terahertz radar, etc, so don't bother scanning. >All you need to realize to appreciate the problem is that if you do not >have a precisely milled end, with a precise depth into the compressing high >explosive outer face, you have differences in how and when the various >faces of the explosive assembly are going to initiate. If you make your >tubes narrow, it becomes very hard to mill the ends of your tubes, and if >you widen the tubes, it exagerates the distortive effect of >irregularities in the tube ends. But you should be able to estimate the magnitude of the errors. Given a certain detonation velocity, for example, and assuming some sort of localized slowdown/speedup to to this velocity, you should be able to estimate (even if only accurate to a factor of 2-3) the amount of error present at that particular junction. Again, the fact that you have never done even this rudimentary analysis is quite telling. You've revealed nothing that I wasn't aware of, and that was apparently quite intentional. >I'm not in the business of designing nuclear initiators. I expose poorly >thought out explosive engineering as a hobby. Your best solution is to >mill each tube exactly alike, right down the the degree of bend and slope >of arc as well as shape of either end. But you could have figured that >out without me spelling it our for you. More likely, I would have velocity-tested sample configurations down to 10 nsec accuracy, which would have revealed any unexpected error sources from temperature and/or pressure variation, as well as mechanical considerations such as bent tubing, etc... [stuff deleted] >But they don't. The timing problem is quite significant. Why do you >think high speed and superaccurate switches are so well guarded? There >isn't an easy grassroots substitute, if there were, the switches would be >fairly useless. Maybe that's the secret. I already anticipated this. If it's the government's motivation to keep "terrorists" from trying to build a bomb, then their first line of defense might be to make it appear more difficult than it really is. They also know that secrets which are actually turned into running, installed hardware eventually leak to the public, meaning that it might actually be better to keep THEIR bombs complicated, and to not use simplifying hardware. >> >Remember, kryonic switiches are necessary even when dealing with the >> >speeds of electric conductivity. The velocities of even hydrazine based >> >explosives are signigicantly lower. The margin for error is similarly lower. >> >> How low? Be specific. > >Again, I don't know what your dimentions are. Hydrazine explosives tend >to detonate around 8500-10000 m/s. The speed of transmission of electric >impulses through a given conductive medium is certainly much higher. Why do you keep mentioning "hydrazine explosives" when I didn't? Are you some sort of "one-trick pony"? > >> >Plutonium gun is still the easiest method for the home grown nuclear >> >device, even if it requires more fissile material. >> >> The "gun" design wasn't used with the plutonium, because IT WOULD NOT HAVE >> WORKED! "Fat Man," the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, used the implosion method. >> "Little Boy," the gun-method bomb, used U-235. Plutonium detonates far too >> rapidly to use the "gun" method. The >> scientists knew that in 1945. You seem to be at least 50 years behind the >> times. > >You are correct this time. My fault. Uranium should have been in there. >Typo on my part. Finally! He's able to admit a MISTAKE! >Hey, be my guest. If you had a critical mass worth of plutonium you're >playing around with the wrong list, and, I might add, wasting your time >with anything but the black market for the material. If I had some, or for that matter if I even wanted some, would I be advertising the fact on an "NSA-required-reading" list BEFORE I'd done all this work?

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Not So REM_ote
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Responding to msg by karlton(a)netscape.com (Phil Karlton) on Fri, 23 Feb 8:19 PM >Marianne Mueller is a Sun employee, not a Netscape >employee. The original quote did not make that clear. Here's the full article. My snipping fed Alex's take, still, he got the right stink of Netscape's and Sun's deodorizing the loss of pucker, which might be sniffed of Phil Karlton's distancing from Marianne Mueller, eh, even though Jeff Truehaft is the true fart-waver. ---------- Wall Street Journal, February 23, 1996, p. B3. Netscape Will Issue Fix for Flaw Found In Browser System Mountain View, Calif. - Netscape Communications Corp. confirmed that Princeton University researchers found a potential security flaw in Netscape's popular Internet browser technology, but said the flaw was minor and that the company will issue a software fix for it next week. Edward Felten, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton, posted a report on the Internet earlier this week describing the flaw in Netscape's Navigator 2.0, a product that enables the use of programs created with Java, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s hot programming language for the Internet. Java can be used to create "applets," small applications such as spreadsheets, that can be downloaded from the Internet's World Wide Web. Both Netscape's Navigator and Sun's Java have defenses designed to prevent Java applets from connecting with any computers except the ones they are summoned to by users and the ones they came from. But the Princeton team found a way to defeat those defenses, meaning that applets could theoretically be manuevered into other computers on a network. Applets aren't viruses, but in theory, they could be used to peruse confidential documents or other information. In trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market, Netscape fell $1.875 to $62, while Sun Microsystems jumped 7.8% to $51.875, up $3.75. Netscape product manager Jeff Treuhaft said exploiting the flaw would require extremely skilled hacking and many other unlikely advantages, such as intimate familiarity with the network being hacked. Marianne Mueller, a top Java security engineer, also said the chances of such hacking occurring are "remote," but said Sun also soon will issue a software fix that will plug the possible security leak. [End]

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SGI Nabs Crayfish
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

2-24-96. NYT: John Markoff reports that SGI will buy Cray Research. It notes Cray's last gasping, grasping at SGI's grab hand nabbing crawfish. An SGI/Cray super-gabfeast Monday.

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fwd: Federal Internet Enforcement Policy
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text X-Sender: oldbear(a)pop.tiac.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Sat, 24 Feb 1996 17:56:31 -0500 To: rah(a)shipwright.com From: The Old Bear <oldbear(a)arctos.com> Subject: fwd: Federal Internet Enforcement Policy --- Forwarded message follows --- The "Federal Internet Indecency Crawler" has determined your Newsgroup or Web Site posting to be in violation of the "Exxxon Communications Indecency Act of 1996". In an effort to comply with the "Federal Paperwork Reduction Act" you are hereby directed to complete the proper arrest warrant paperwork and submit same to the Federal Court in your district, then obtain a valid copy of the approved arrest warrant and serve said warrant upon yourself. To properly initiate this procedure, you are required to submit Form A-16844787033 -83259 (rev.02) in triplicate, which may be obtained from the US Government printing office. After completion, send the original to the Federal Courthouse by certified mail with one copy mailed to your local FBI office. Please make certain to include all pertinent information, including the specific word, words or phrases that constituted the violation, together with your name, address, telephone number, social security number, and the policy number of any health insurance contracts in which you are currently enrolled. Also, please be reminded that as a citizen of the United States and a lawfully appointed officer of the Federal Court "for the purpose of serving the above arrest warrant only", you are exempted from any prohibitions regarding carrying of handguns, rifles, shotguns or any other type of guns or assault weapons while in the act of serving said warrant. However, please be advised that this provision does not apply to you as the recipient of Federal arrest warrants, and as such your constitutionally protected right to bear arms is hereby waived in this instance. It is important that you obtain your signature, thus showing the warrant was properly executed. Kindly note any undue resistance encountered in the appropriate space provided. Because of the large amount of court resources which must be diverted from other judicial efforts in order to accommodate the new "Exxxon Communications Indecency Act", the Democratic and Republican National Parties have made the following kind offer to assist us in enforcement of these new policies. As an alternative to the above process, you may at your option, send a contribution of not less than $100 to the Clinton Presidential Campaign Committee or to the Republican Presidential Nomination Committee. If you should choose one of these alternatives, it will not be necessary to obtain and complete the paperwork outlined above, nor will it be necessary to contact the Federal Court or your local FBI office. Simply copy the Newsgroup post in question or the URL and header information from your web page, and mail to either party committee, with your cashier's check or money order for $100 or more in US funds. In addition to relieving you of the responsibility of filing legal paperwork with the court and undergoing a traumatic arrest procedure, you will have the comfort of knowing that you have contributed in a meaningful way to the political process of your country. In addition, we are authorized (by Senator Exxxon himself) to inform you that after receiving your contribution of $100 or more, we will send you a special alpha- numerical code which, when placed in your header information, will prevent the "Federal Internet Indecency Crawler" from recording your indecency violations until after the November election. Remember, because of the "Exxxon Communications Indecency Act" constitutionally protected free speech is now in limited quantity. So, don't pass up this golden opportunity to avail yourself of unlimited free expression for the next eight months. This may be your last opportunity to do so! 127-A/4 rev. --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/

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S/MIME outside the US?
by volley＠lls.se 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(I'm doing some research on different security standards, as I'm about to write an email/news program. Have been reading this list for quite a while, and it's time to delurk.) This is a quote from the S/MIME FAQ, as found on RSA's WWW server: "S/MIME recommends three symmetric encryption algorithms: DES, Triple-DES, and RC2. The adjustable keysize of the RC2 algorithm makes it especially useful for applications intended for export outside the U.S. RSA is the required public-key algorithm." If I got things right, DES is "exportable" as long as the keysize is kept under a certain size, which is too small to be really secure? If that's the case, I guess RC2 is the last resort? Is it good enough, or do I have to leave out S/MIME support, and just communicate with people outside the U.S or something? IMHO, these export restrictions on cryptography are completely insane. Is there *any* way to bypass them (except for breaking the law)? -- volley(a)lls.se

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Re: Internet Privacy Guaranteed ad (POTP Jr.)
by aba＠atlas.ex.ac.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Perry Metzger <perry(a)piermont.com> writes: > Dan Bailey writes: > > My suggestion > > is to post the OTP-expansion algorithm to sci.crypt. > > Call it what it is -- a pseudo-random number generator, at best. As I think this is the crux of the problem - they are simply misnaming their proprietry algorithm. I don't see any stigma attached with IPG admitting they have a PRNG seeded with a key, and XORing the PRNG stream with the data - this is exactly what RC4 does. But of course RC4 (now) has the advantage of open review, and before that it had the advantage of Ron Rivests reputation associated with it. Simply change all the literature to replace "OTP" with "PRNG", or "seed" in appropriate places. So, submitting your PRNG for open peer review would be a good start. But I don't think the fact that IPG generates the keys for their clients is good. I don't see this as a viable key distribution mechanism. But you *really* must stop equating your system with a one time pad, it absolutely is NOT a OTP. > you likely know (but the IPG folks don't seem to care) you can't > "expand" a one time pad. One time means ONE TIME. Look at how the NSA > broke the Venona intercepts of of even two-time use of keying material. exactly. I do hope IPG will take the trouble to consider comments such as this, and Perrys comments above, if they are at all serious about their system every gaining any reputation. Adam

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French regulations on crypto
by jf_avon＠citenet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Does anybody have a list of crypto software/algorithms that are forbidden for use without GKE in france? More specifically, I would like to know about the algorithms used in : - PGP (IDEA, RSA, etc.) - blowfish - 3DES What I am really after is *precise* information, with references to official govt documents if possible, about the restrictions on thoses algorithms and/or key size limits (if applicable). Thanks. JFA **** NEW PGP 2.6.2 KEY ********* This key is actually suspended, as of Feb, 16 1996, was never distributed, and might be subject to deletion. Sorry for the trouble my mis-management might have caused. 2048 bits Key ID:24201BA1 1996/02/13 Jean-Francois Avon <jf_avon(a)citenet.net> Key fingerprint = 23 B6 24 31 86 67 FB 35 C7 A7 AF 12 A1 61 E9 3D **** OLD KEY: DO NOT USE ANYMORE UNLESS FOR VERIFYING SIGNATURES **** 1024 bits Key ID:57214AED 1995/10/04 Jean-Francois Avon <jf_avon(a)citenet.net> Key fingerprint = 84 96 76 AE EB 7C AB 15 88 47 87 B0 18 31 74 9F

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Testing
by Chris Grantham 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, my name is Chris! casper(a)optima.mme.wsu.edu -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6.2 mQCNAzEvXtUAAAEEALtwrsq7zqQdTDRRpgJeCXYCuA6M49Yp93IE3ScaMwPPi297 EIEbpSyv3ZB9UBjTNHcsPADhfwDs8/yBS4SWW+NF1BwnRLUbNpZ5E6BGxGojQnF4 yC5MKNIuxDgY8FYYpsXWpxWIOJZOf5LY6E4BhZ9fGK/MfuhSvUFD9HN4zM2hAAUR tC1DaHJpcyBXLiBHcmFudGhhbSA8Y2FzcGVyQG9wdGltYS5tbWUud3N1LmVkdT4= =xznQ -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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Report from Fast Software Encryption Conference
by B. Schneier 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

************************************************************************* This is a temporary e-mail address; I am in Cambridge until 12 March. Continue to send mail to schneier(a)counterpane.com; it forwards by itself. ************************************************************************* Report on the Third International Workshop on FAST SOFTWARE ENCRYPTION, Cambridge University, UK, Feb 96 The conference was held at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathemtical Science, and was attended by about 45 people. What follows is a short description of some, but not all, of the talks. There were two papers analyzing safer: "Truncated Differentials of SAFER" by Knudsen and Berson, and "The PHT of SAFER" by Murphy. Unfortunately, only the first paper appears in the proceedings. The attacks work on SAFER with 5 rounds or less, and not on SAFER with the new key schedule suggested at Crypto '95. Vaudenay presented his attack on Blowfish, which expoloits weak keys that result in two S-box entries being identical. In a weak Blowfish variant where the S-boxes are known, his attack can break 8-round Blowfish efficiently but does not work against the full 16-round version. If the S-boxes are secret, as they are in Blowfish, his attack can detect these weak keys in the 8-round variant but not in the 16-round variant. Blaze presented a really clever protocol for encrypting with a low-bandwidth smartcard. The idea is that the host computer is trusted with the plaintext but not the key, and the secure smartcard is too slow to do bulk encryption. He presents a protocol where the host does all the work but does not learn the key. Dobbertin presented a beautiful paper where he cryptanalyzed MD4, extending the work he did cryptanalyzing RIPE-MD. Attendees took bets on when MD5 will fall to this sort of attack. There were several new algorithms presented. RIPEMD-160 is a strengthened version of RIPE-MD, designed by Dobbertin, Bosselaers, and Preneel. ISAAC is a steam cipher by Bob Jenkins. Tiger is a one-way hash function by Anderson and Biham designed to work efficently on 64-bit computers. Shark is a block cipher, similar in design to SAFER, by Rijmen, Daemen, Preneel, Bosselaers, and De Win. And there were two Luby-Rackoff-like constructions that make block ciphers of arbitrary block size out of stream ciphers and one-way hash functions by Anderson and Biham, called Bear and Lion. Another paper by Lucks showed how to spead up Luby-Rackoff's block cipher. Matsui presented some work on block cipher designs provably secure against differential and linear cryptanalysis, but not the specific construction that is the MISTY algorithm. Kelsey and Schneier presented a paper on unbalanced Feistel networks. Called UFNs, these are Feistel networks where the two sides are of unequal size. Examples of this construction includes MD4, RC2, MacGuffin, S1, and REDOC III. We gave some general analysis of different constructions. There were two papers on correlation attacks on stream ciphers, and one paper by Golic on nonlinear filter generators. The proceedings have been published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, #1039. The editor of the volume is Dieter Gollmann, and the ISBN is 3-540-60865-6.

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Thank you, MoJo Wire beta-testers
by Mother Jones Electronic Subscription 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks for being a MoJo Wire beta-tester. We appreciate all your comments and suggestions for our site. We've created a new mailing list to keep people up-to-date on the happenings at the MoJo Wire: http://www.motherjones.com/ Look for updates on: *Our Election 96 Area: Regular RealAudio and text field reports from our "smarty-pants political writers." *Mother Jones Magazine: We put every issue of Mother Jones magazine on-line. And we aren't just dumping in the text files either. Each issue is optimized for online viewing, with searchable databases, clickable imagemaps and more. *Special MoJo Wire Investigative features: Here's where we bring you what no print magazine can. We combine the flexibilty of the Internet with in-depth reporting to give you a whole new form of investigative journalism. To unsubscribe from our newsletter, please send an e-mail to majordomo(a)motherjones.com. In the body of the message (not the subject header) type: unsubscribe motherjones-list [your e-mail address] for example: unsubscribe motherjones-list umansky(a)motherjones.com Again, thanks for your help and we hope to see and chat with you on our web site and Live Wire (the interactive chat area of The MoJo Wire). Questions, comments? E-mail mailinglist(a)motherjones.com

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TED_hal
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

2-25-96. The Wash Post has a Page One lead about "atomic bomb spy" Theodore Alvin Hall, who, as a young physicist at Los Alamos provided the Soviets with Manhattan Project secrets. Hall's role was revealed by gradual code-cracking of cables under the Venona program. Though discovered, for unknown reasons Hall was never charged and went on to a distinguished career at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, England, where he now lives in retirement. Interviewed for the article he neither confirms nor denies he was the spy code-named "Mlad." He suggests it may be worth investigating why the US has kept silent about the case. The detailed story correlates Hall's role with the well- known atomic bomb spies; gives amazed responses of security officers then at Los Alamos; and lays out the long-term, never-give-up, FBI tracking and NSA cracking. For Unicorn and Bell: Hall was assigned to the Los Alamos "Gadgets" division and specialized in implosion devices. (With Hall, it's worth wondering if this ancient revelation and the recent 20-year-old NSA-spy have anything to do with the future of IC budgets -- teasing release of "if you knew what we know.") TED_hal

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Encryption Chips
by A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Faking crypto chips for public algorithims is theoretically >more difficult, because its simple to create a DES_verify routine to make >sure your DES chip is working right. a) chips do not need makeup b) t'were me, I would just fix the chip so that instead of 2^56 (DES) keys or whatever, the PRNG was "fixed" so that the total keyspace was only 2^32 for instance. Enough to be nearly impossible to check but small enough for a brute force engine to zip through in seconds *if you knew the algorithm*. The nice thing about am implimentation in software is that the code can be examined for just this sort of thing *on a randomly selected operating unit*. - hard to do with a chip. Warmly, Padgett

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WYZ_qak
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

2-25-96. TWP: "Scrambling for a Policy on Encryption Exports. As Technology Advances, U.S. and Industry Seek Compromise That Balances Public, Private Fears." A knowledgeable brief by Elizabeth Corcoran, with quotes by wisecracking Crypto-Wise-Quackers. WYZ_qak

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Extra
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The recent study by Blaze, Diffie, Shimomura, et al, of stunted cryptography is featured in the TWP story on crypto exports offered with WYZ_qak.

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White House Not Decent
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(Reprinted without permission from the Seattle Times Personal Technology section) White House Site Blocked Add the White House to the Internet's extensive list of dens of sin. Surfwatch, a widely used software program that prevents access to, and downloading of, sexually explicit material on the Internet, accidently blocked access to the White House home page recently - all because a "White House for Kids" Web site address contained the word "couples." That's a dirty word in the Surfwatch universe because many sexually explicit online sites use it as part of their come-on. In this case, "couples" merely referred to the Executive Branch tandems of President and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Al and Tipper Gore. Surfwatch fixed the problem within hours, although some might still find the site offensive. For political reasons, that is.

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Re: TED_hal
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:17 PM 2/25/96, Brad Dolan wrote: >Lipke's neighbors indicate his income didn't match his lifestyle. > >FINCEN at work? I'm skeptical. How would Lipka's neighbors know what his "income" is, unless he told them? (My neighbors don't have any idea what my income is, for example.) Sounds like typical bullshit by neigbors, saying they knew something was "suspicious" (always after the fact, it seems). Also, all indications so far revealed are that Lipka was only paid by the Sovs in the mid-to-late 60s. And then only, according to released information, something like $500 to $1000 per dead drop, about once a month. Hardly a huge sum, even back then. Even if he invested this, which is unlikely, how would his neighbors know if this was part of his "income" or not? Sounds more like, "Yeah, we knew there was something strange about him," which about half of all neigbors say about arrested fugitives in their midst. (The other half saying, "But he was a really nice guy.") --Tim Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Encryption Chips
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:47 PM 2/25/96, "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security" >The nice thing about am implimentation in software is that the code can be >examined for just this sort of thing *on a randomly selected operating unit*. >- hard to do with a chip. But of course one's compiler may have been subverted, as Ken Thompson showed some years back. Software implementations are sensitive to different sorts of attacks than hardware implementations are. Me. I don't have any hardware crypto chips at all, and think it unlikely I will in the next several years. So I use only software crypto implementations. And I admit to not having verified that my copy of MacPGP is the same one now at the various sites...I figure that if the NSA has pulled a blag bag job on me and replaced my MacPGP with a special version that I've got other problems to worry about! Your mileage may vary. If I were responsible for crypto for large financial transactions, I'd have a different set of worries. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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RE: White House Not Decent
by Chris Grantham 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Gee, Someone should forward this thing to Bill, Hmm I think I will... Chris ---------- From: Anonymous[SMTP:nobody@REPLAY.COM] Sent: Sunday, February 25, 1996 9:43 AM To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Subject: White House Not Decent (Reprinted without permission from the Seattle Times Personal Technology section) White House Site Blocked Add the White House to the Internet's extensive list of dens of sin. Surfwatch, a widely used software program that prevents access to, and downloading of, sexually explicit material on the Internet, accidently blocked access to the White House home page recently - all because a "White House for Kids" Web site address contained the word "couples." That's a dirty word in the Surfwatch universe because many sexually explicit online sites use it as part of their come-on. In this case, "couples" merely referred to the Executive Branch tandems of President and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Al and Tipper Gore. Surfwatch fixed the problem within hours, although some might still find the site offensive. For political reasons, that is.

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Hack attempt? "12 days" from anon.com
by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Regarding the mysterious mail from mailer-daemon(a)anon.com that many people have received: 1. The mail was apparently sent by a daemon bouncing an undeliverable mail. anon.com is a "virtual domain" hosted at io.com, so it's unlikely that the daemon would have an anon.com address. 2. Headers show it was routed through 38.10.221.81 and smtp1.interramp.com. That IP address showed up as ip81.la.ca.interramp.com the first time I tried a traceroute. The second time it showed up as ip81.syracuse.ny.interramp.com. In any case, traceroute went recursive between los-angeles.ca.isdn.psi.net (38.145.221.110) and lan.losangeles.ca.psi.net (38.145.221.1). This indicates the target could not be reached - perhaps it's a PPP address, or disconnected. 3. There is an X-Sender: (Unverified) header entry. So the mail was SMTP faked without the HELO protocol. 4. The error purpoting to originate from mailer-daemon(a)anon.com says the mail was addressed to PeppermintPty(a)loacst.org. loacst.org is not a registered domain. 5. PeppermintPty is obviously Peppermint Patty; the "original message" is signed Marcie. Peanut fans will recognise these characters. So - what was it all about? An elaborate prank? A convoluted NSA plot? I would lean towards the first, but perhaps we'll know on March 1st, the date to "gain access to target". Rishab ps. the copy I received follows: >From mailer-daemon(a)anon.com Fri Feb 23 20:08:00 1996 Received: from m-net148.arbornet.org (m-net.arbornet.org [148.59.250.2]) by shellx.best.com (8.6.12/8.6.5) with SMTP id UAA20969 for <rishab(a)best.com>; Fri, 23 Feb 1996 20:07:44 -0800 Received: from smtp1.interramp.com by m-net148.arbornet.org with smtp (Smail3.1.29.1 #4) id m0tqBGv-0009SHC; Fri, 23 Feb 96 23:07 WET Received: from [38.10.221.81] by smtp1.interramp.com (8.6.12/SMI-4.1.3-PSI-irsmtp) id XAA24970; Fri, 23 Feb 1996 23:06:42 -0500 X-Sender: (Unverified) Message-Id: <v01520db9ad53979e9858(a)[38.10.221.81]> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Fri, 23 Feb 1996 08:11:33 -0800 To: (Recipient list suppressed) From: mailer-daemon(a)anon.com (System Mail Manager) Subject: Twelve Days of Christmas Status: RO -- <System Report> -- UNDELIVERABLE MAIL: Unknown Host("PeppermintPty(a)loacst.org") UNDELIVERABLE MAIL: Bad Key -- <Original Message Follows> -- *** TOP LEVEL: DESTROY IMMEDIATELY UPON READING *** *** DO NOT PRINT OR SAVE. Code1.8 Table2Hex6 *** DAY 10: DR. BLACK located a promising entry point at the target site. DR. BLACK recovered four of the six password tokens before his position was compromised. DR. BLACK will be replaced by DR. ORANGE. Estimated time to recover the remaining two password tokens and gain access to target: EIGHT DAYS (03.01.96) Confidence is HIGH. My team has been working around the clock for a month now. Please tell your people to be more tolerant. Yelling doesn't help anything. Marcie

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WinSock Remailer
by Joey Grasty 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

C-punks: You can now check out the features of the WinSock Remailer at: http://www.c2.org/~winsock/ The remailer is now scheduled to be operational about March 21, 1996. After a one month alpha test, the executable will be available for download for beta testing by anyone who wants to run a remailer. Regards, -- Joey Grasty jgrasty(a)gate.net [home -- encryption, privacy, RKBA and other hopeless causes] jgrasty(a)pts.mot.com [work -- designing pagers] "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." -- John Von Neumann PGP = A7 CC 31 E4 7E A3 36 13 93 F4 C9 06 89 51 F5 A7

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