December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Anonymous Auth Certificates [was: Re: Blinded Identities]
by hal＠rain.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Carl Ellison <cme(a)acm.org> > >> >Steve Shear <azur(a)netcom.com> writes: > > > >[much cut] > >> > >> I've been charged with developing an Internet service which needs to assure > >> its clients of anonymity. However, we fear some clients may abuse the > >> service and we wish to prevent the abusers from re-enrollment if > >> terminated for misbehavior. (In your example, it would be the person(s) > >> trying to discover the service host via flood). > >> > >> My thought was to base enrollment on some sort of 'blinding' of their > >> certified signature (e.g., from Verisign) which produces a unique result > >> for each signature but prevents the service from reconstructing the > >> signature itself (and thereby reveal the client's identity). I'm calling > >> this negative authentication. > > The mistake is to think of using ID certificates (like those from Verisign) > in the first place. They don't mean anything. > > You want an authorization certificate, such as produced by SPKI. You need > to know what a key is authorized to do, not what name is associated with > the key. (Sorry about quoting so much, but I liked Steve Shear's succinct problem statement.) I don't see how authorization certificates solve this problem. How would you determine if someone was qualified to receive an authorization certificate? And what would you do to make them stop using the service if they abuse it, and to stop them from getting new authorization certificates? Thanks, Hal

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European Commission on "Illegal and harmful content on the Internet"
by wfgodot＠iquest.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- A recently released European Commission Communication on "Illegal and harmful content on the Internet" may prefigure the nature of coming European Union regulatory initiatives concerning the net. This Communication was in response to a 27 September resolution by the Telecommunication Council on "preventing the dissemination of illegal content on the Internet, in particular child pornography." The document reportedly reflects what will be ongoing work to "present practical measures in time for the next Telecommunications Council on 28 November 1996." The Communication describes its aims as: firstly to describe briefly the different types of illegal and harmful content, secondly to examine the technical context in which action can be taken to deal with illegal and harmful content, and finally to suggest a number of practical measures designed to be rapidly implemented Among the points of interest, it states with emphasis that "additional international cooperation is required to avoid 'safe havens' for documents contrary to general rules of criminal law." With respect to anonymous communications it discusses proposed "measures to close known loopholes and improve traceability and that anonymous remailers record details of identity." As is typical of these agendas, the devil will be in the evolving details of enforcement. It looks like 1997 will be a busy year for proponents of greater state control over internet content both here and abroad. If they can conjure up enough sufficiently compelling bogeymen, it could be a very successful one for them as well. The HTML version of this document can be found at: <http://www2.echo.lu/legal/en/internet/content/communic.html> Links to RTF and Word versions along with the accompanying press release and related documents can be found at: <http://www2.echo.lu/legal/internet/html> - -Michael -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a Charset: cp850 iQCVAwUBMmaw0tGJlWF+GPx9AQGMLgP+JC5Lyd0NZDukq8AWipUNcDUgb6m16iUN 3smYcPdPYvsUDSWznx7ZQsklQV0oz9u5Ru7s8VoOQfA2wqSoiai3LiUiJg5WkfOg HTAbvVQCeoUaRmkmmbFJSzfqVzGB4VkJRCE4htPmmqYhCwwmMjooTi3bAClySGTD 7YcLjv0pC5w= =4EZY -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Washington Post editorial on global Net-censorship (10/21/96)
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 07:35:27 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> To: fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu Subject: Washington Post editorial on global Net-censorship (10/21/96) While the Washington Post may be in thrall to the national security establishment on encryption policy, it has done more to highlight the dangers of Net-censorship than any other newspaper. Check out today's editorial, attached below. Also, the In the Loop column in today's Post reports that the poorly-named "Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom" is hosting a $10,000-a-table banquet called the "1996 Architect of the New Century Award Gala" on November 11. This year's architect? "None other than that champion of democracy and human rights the inimitable Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore." The same fellow I wrote about in a HotWired column recently: http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/96/36/index4a.html The unknown user, who has the email address an511172(a)anon.penet.fi, posted hundreds of messages to the soc.culture.singapore newsgroup under the name of "Lee Kwan Yew," the retired prime minister of Singapore. The messages are short and unimaginative, yet apparently are just enough to piss off the thin-skinned Singaporean officials. One post reads: "We are small and vulnerable. Without regulations, we will be like Hong Kong, oops, fuck, bad example, they are actually doing quite all right. - SM Lee Kwan Yew, Republic of Singapore." I just called the Nixon Center and spoke to Tricia Williams, the assistant to the president. She told me: "You would need to speak to Mr. Sines, the president. I'm not involved in planning that." More later, if he returns my phone call. -Declan **************** CENSORSHIP IN CYBERSPACE Monday, October 21 1996; Page A18 The Washington Post WHEN IT COMES to communication and censorship, the issues don't change much from one medium to the next. The latest reminder comes with a mini-gust of consternation that hit the World Wide Web a few days ago when, after prolonged outcry, the proprietor of a Sweden-based web site called the Gallery Grotesque closed it down. The site had been displaying gruesome images for two years and had attracted alarm most recently by posting several grisly photographs of a murder scene. Those who attempted to visit the web site after it was closed were greeted with a message from the owner that included all the classic reasons for allowing speech even when it's violent or disturbing. The "gallery," the message explained, had been designed to display true images of "a debauched, self-indulgent society"; it had gotten several million "hits," or visitors, over its life; "myriad external pressures" had been brought to bear, and it was now closing "at a time of my own choosing" because "the concept has been fully explored." Finally, to those "repulsed or angered" by the images, it added, "Consider this: The insanity still continues; only the messenger has been quelled." Whatever you make of the issues of judgment or perhaps self-dramatization involved here, the arguments closely resemble the familiar ones about information and its responsible use that have been going on for centuries. Meanwhile, the Internet experiences of such countries as China and Singapore offer a more sobering demonstration that the new technology may not change the landscape of freedom of speech vs. censorship as much as many had hoped. When the Internet with its global reach first became accessible in countries with otherwise tight information control, human rights and pro-democracy activists foresaw a virtual end to isolation for their colleagues in closed societies, just as fax machines had buoyed Chinese student protesters a decade ago. Some talked of a global "archive of banned books" that could be accessed from any point in the world, thus rendering book-banning by individual nations pointless. Unfortunately, governments interested in maintaining censorship quickly have found ways to use the technology to their benefit. Though decentralized and ungovernable, the Internet is also highly transparent: No one can be sure who is watching, and most messages leave tracks. The governments of China, Burma and Singapore have been cited as making use of this characteristic of the medium, announcing heavy penalties on those who access unauthorized sites, and, in Iran particularly, constructing elaborate technological fire walls to allow their citizens to tap some but not all of the Web's information. The fire walls may prove rickety, and, even with the restrictions, activists may discover over time that access to e-mail and the Web brings more advantage than danger. Even so, the lesson remains: Technology may alter the dimensions of the problem of censorship, but it doesn't take the problems away. ###

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Re: OTP
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Can you explain to me how your one time pad algorithm is any better than > encryption something with, say, RC4 or any other cipher using a key that > is the same length as the seed for your PRNG? Well for a start there is no possible cryptanalytic (rather than brute force) attack on a one time pad, the system can be mathematically proven to be secure with a very simple bit of statistics. Soemthing like RC4, even if the key were totally random and unpredictable, and had as much, or more state than the message can still be cryptanalysed possibly, although it is unlikely... Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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Re: [crypto-philo]OTP or DES?
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> It is quite easy to take the bits of the des-encrypted message, and > calculate the OTP key nessasary to decrypt the message into your real plan. > It would seem you could build a key to have your message say anything of > equal length. Why then must a true OTP be based on a true RNG? Because one > of the actual possible keys of a real OTP is indeed the encrypted des > message, you can claim that it is an otp and no-one can prove otherwise. > They can say "But we cracked your des key and can decypher this message!" > and you say "nope i used an OTP, that is a false message, here is what it > really says! The fact that by PURE coincidence that OTP could be decrypted > using that particular key means nothing, because a true OTP can generate > that bit sequence. Not quite, It is so unlikely that any DES key would exist to turn a one time pad encrypted message into an intelligible plaintext with no errors, proper linguistic structure etc. that it just wouldn`t wash. I shiver at the idea of calculating the probability (my statistics is a bit rusty) but it is a pretty damn small probability given that the set of all possible DES ciphertexts is a smallish subset of all possible binary values (if memory serves correctly, I may be off the mark here though). This may work with a stream cipher (which is pretty similar to a OTP apart from not being provably secure because the entropy of the key is greater than or equal to that of the message) where you can have any possible binary value as your ciphertext... However, for a block cipher, this would appear to me to be impossible for most ciphertexts. Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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Re: Question: OTP
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> This whole thing seems crazier each time I think about it. > basically my question is: given that he picks his key securly does he have > an OTP if the plaintext is shorter than the key? > Bob Yes, if he were just to modular add the key to the plaintext (or XOR them) he would have an OTP if AND ONLY IF the key were real random, however, he doesn`t do this, he uses the key to seed an array or linear congruential generators, which have been cryptanalysed to hell and back. Basically, ALWAYS, and I mean ALWAYS dismiss anyone trying to sell an OTP, they are totally impractical, he`s just using technobabble to get around the fact that his system is actually a stream cipher and is of no value because it has been broken within days of being announced. Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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Re: Q.E.D. reply to petty MESSger (fwd)
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > IPG Sales writes: > > [approx. 300 lines of ramblings deleted] > > Mister, if we printed out your last message on fluffy paper and folded > it together a number of times, then maybe we would end up with something > that a poor woman would call a one-time pad. Period. Clap clap whistle clap....... Aha, wit still survives on the cypherpunks list!!!! Truly inspired. Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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Re: Don't ask why, thank you.
by C. H. Lim 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well said ! Users please take note about abuse of system.

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Reno at FCBA
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Communications Daily, October 19, 1996 U.S. Attorney Gen. Janet Reno offered to "set the record straight" at FCBA lunch Thurs... U.S. Attorney Gen. Janet Reno offered to "set the record straight" at FCBA lunch Thurs. on why controversial issues of encryption and digital wiretapping "deserve support" of communications industry. She said law enforcement community agrees that encryption is "critical" to citizens who want to protect sensitive data but "our ability to protect life and property is threatened" if people use encryption that can't be accessed by law enforcement officials: "The only solution is encryption that allows data recovery." She said it's "important to understand" that digital wiretapping "doesn't expand the government's ability to conduct electronic surveillance." ----- If any citizen has access to a full transcript of the AG's talk, please post here or send it to us by fax to 212-799-4003.

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Re: Prof Shamir arrested
by Jim Byrd 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:56 PM 10/21/96 +0100, Tom Womack <thomas.womack(a)merton.oxford.ac.uk> wrote: > >A few column inches in the British Independent had Prof Avi Shamir (who I >guess is the S in RSA) arrested in Israel, on (I believe) suspicion of >involvement in a substantial fraud. The S in RSA is Adi Shamir. Do you know if this is the same person? Do you have any more details?

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Chinese internal internet
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I seem to recall someone predicting that China and other such countries would set up an internal net with strict controls. Good prediction... I wouldn't be surprised to see Cuba recruited to it, for instance, although North Korea doesn't appear likely (too insular). -Allen > ______________________________________________________________________ > Centura > ______________________________________________________________________ > China's Xinhua launches business computer network > __________________________________________________________________________ > Copyright © 1996 Nando.net > Copyright © 1996 Reuter Information Service > BEIJING (Oct 21, 1996 10:25 a.m. EDT) - A China-wide computer network > launched by a subsidiary of the official news agency Xinhua on Monday > will take Chinese businesses online and supply them with news and > economic information, company officials said. > The China Wide Web (CWW) created by China Internet Corp would provide > Chinese customers with online services in their own language and would > give overseas subscribers a window on to the Chinese business world, > company chairman Ma Yunsheng said. I've about concluded that we'll see a Web dominated by two languages - English and Japanese. It's very hard for native speakers of Indo-European languages to learn Japanese, it's very hard for native speakers of Japanese to learn English, and no other such language has a prosperous-enough home country to work. Such internal nets may alter this, however... [...] > In January, Xinhua was appointed the government regulator for foreign > suppliers of economic information in China, a role that some analysts > say clashes with its involvement in enterprises that supply financial > and business data. [...] > Unlike the open-access Internet, CWW was modelled on internal company > networks or "intranets," Edelson said. > "There will be a lot of real-time information available," he said. "I > think there's going to be very fast growth from a zero start." > China Internet would enjoy free use of Xinhua's communications network > and already had access agreements with the powerful Minstry of Posts > and Telecommunications, he said. > Ma said domestic economic information would also be available through > Xinhua news services and databases. He declined to say how many > clients were expected to subscribe. Heavily edited domestic economic information... > The Internet is viewed by some Chinese officials as a haven for > pornography and political dissent but CWW would likely be a > politically correct alternative. > "CWW should reflect Chinese culture," technology officer Wong said, > without giving details. Ah, yes, the old claim of cultural difference to try to justify censorship. So Nazi Germany was due to a cultural difference? ****** MESSAGE DAMAGED IN TRANSIT ******

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Re: Paper on Network Security
by Ryan Russell/SYBASE 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

See! And you all said us Mormons had no crypto relevence :) I missed the pointer to the article/paper...I wanna see what my church's involvement is.. Anyone got it handy? Ryan ---------- Previous Message ---------- To: jya cc: cypherpunks From: declan @ eff.org (Declan McCullagh) @ smtp Date: 10/21/96 06:44:56 AM Subject: Re: Paper on Network Security On Sun, 20 Oct 1996, John Young wrote: > We posted news* a few days ago of a white paper by the > OURS organization on network security. We have put it at: Thanks, John. The members are interesting. -Declan *** MEMBER ORGANIZATIONS Bellcore Cedars-Sinai Health Systems Chase Manhattan Bank Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Compaq Computer Corporation CoreStates Financial Corporation Data Securities International, Inc. Digital Equipment Corporation EDS Corporation Educational Testing Service EXXON Company USA IBM Corporation IDX Corporation Intel Corporation Learning Tree International Levi Strauss & Co. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Merrill Lynch, Inc. Microsoft Corporation Motorola, Inc. New York Life Insurance Company Novell, Inc. Oracle Corporation Pacific Gas and Electric Company Phillips Petroleum Princeton University Security Dynamics, Inc. Societe Generale Software AG of N.A., Inc. SunTrust Service Corporation Sybase, Inc. Synopsys, Inc. Texaco, Inc. The Open Group Washington National Insurance Co. Ziff-Davis Publishing Company Information Protection Task Force Participants American Express Bellcore Chase Manhattan Bank Data Securities International, Inc. Digital Equipment Corporation IBM Corporation ICL, Inc. Levi Strauss & Co. Mergent International, Inc. Merrill Lynch, Inc. Motorola, Inc. Novell, Inc. Pacific Gas and Electric Company Phillips Petroleum Security Dynamics, Inc. SunTrust Service Corporation Trusted Info Union Camp Corporation

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improving cpunk S/N via grouplens/filtering
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

an interesting new field called "collaborative filtering" seems to have strong potential in helping separate signal-to-noise, and might be of interest to some cpunks here as a pet project. Brad Miller is working on his PhD. in this area and put together a nice system inside many news readers that allows people to read/ratings articles and track their ratings. the system uses the heuristic that people who agree or disagree consistently on ratings on particular messages in the past will tend to do so in the future, and it uses this to extrapolate ratings on messages a person has not yet rated. essentially he has all the technical stuff down and mostly just needs trial users. it wouldn't be hard to plug it all into the cpunk list to see how well it works. its the most promising route I know of at the moment, for solving an extremely difficult problem that pervades cyberspace. however, B.M. has been working on the project for a long time and at least from my perspective it doesn't seem to have reached "critical mass" yet, which surprises me. anyway, the URL http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/GroupLens/grouplens.html is anyone here familiar with this project? what do you think about how effective it is?

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Re: Prof Shamir arrested
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:00 PM 10/21/96 -0400, Jim Byrd wrote: >At 02:56 PM 10/21/96 +0100, Tom Womack <thomas.womack(a)merton.oxford.ac.uk> >wrote: >> >>A few column inches in the British Independent had Prof Avi Shamir (who I >>guess is the S in RSA) arrested in Israel, on (I believe) suspicion of >>involvement in a substantial fraud. > >The S in RSA is Adi Shamir. Do you know if this is the same person? Do you >have any more details? Since we posted the item below to c'punks this morning, I see that WSJ and Financial Times have stories on the News Datacom tax fraud raid. Perhaps Shamir has not been actually arrested, maybe only implicated. Anyone in Jerusalem know more? ---------- In a coincidence with the Biham/Shamir smart card attack, AP reports October 20 on an Israeli raid of News Datacom Research for $150 million tax fraud, allegedly because locally developed crypto products were smuggled out of the country. News Datacom develops and markets encryption systems for pay-TV based on Shamir's work, and he is a part-owner. Recall that Markoff's story on DFA cited Bahim's experience with pirate-TV and smart-card tampering. Financial Times ran stories last May about the company's financial derring-do, which we've placed with the AP report at: http://jya.com/keylok.txt We've also put the Biham/Shamir DFA post and NYT article at: http://jya.com/dfa.htm

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Re: Prof Shamir arrested
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:56 PM 10/21/96 +0100, Tom Womack wrote: > >A few column inches in the British Independent had Prof Avi Shamir (who I >guess is the S in RSA) arrested in Israel, on (I believe) suspicion of >involvement in a substantial fraud. We should carefully note the use of the word "fraud" in this message, and presumably it's how the news story will describe the situation. Notice that the authors of the idea, "Binding Cryptography," repeatedly like to use the term "fraud" to describe sending bits with other than the prescribed pattern which shows that the key has been appropriately GAK'd. Further recall that the so-called "Bit Tax" idea, the one most recently proposed by that Belgian (?) Luc Soete, would apparently require that any data transmitter keep account of any data it sends, in order to collect some sort of tax, and thus any mistake in the count (either as a result of misinterpretation of the rules, or a disk crash, or a power surge, etc) would presumably turn a minor error into "tax fraud," or maybe they'll call it "bit fraud." My opinion was and is that one of the worst aspects of that bit tax idea was that it would automatically result in essentially everybody becoming unavoidably guilty of this "bit fraud", which from the name would presumably be criminalized. Further, unlike taxing the profits of the ISP or a gross tax on revenue which was analogous to a sales tax (neither of which had anything to do with the actual data being transmitted) a "bit fraud" situation would presumably be used to justify wiretapping, ostensibly just to count bits, but in reality would allow content monitoring as well. And since the ISP would be under the gun for such a charge, presumably the government could extort cooperation from him, particularly encouraging him to violate the terms of the agreement he may have previously signed with his customers and divulge information without a warrant. Isn't it interesting, however, that the term "fraud" can be misused to make what was previously not a crime into a crime? Don't you wonder why the authors of that "Binding Cryptography" idea don't explain why a person would agree to some kind of GAK'd encryption standard which would (given the repeated use of the word "fraud") leave him open to what could become criminal charges some day? After all, the term fraud implies that somebody is being misled, and seriously misled at that. However, most owners of equipment which is used to carry data on the Internet have only limited and marginal interest in the content of that data, and certainly would have no reason (absent some arm-twisting by government) to monitor and check the keys of the data it transmits. If I owned equipment which transmitted Internet data, I wouldn't consider myself "defrauded" if some data went over that circuit which didn't have the correct-GAK data included. Against whom, then, is this "fraud" against? There's an old saying: "When the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat all problems as though they are nails." Well, governments and its apologists and minions seem to think that the main tool they have is being able to declare something to be "fraud" and punish it accordingly, and naturally they're anxious to convert all problems to "fraud" problems. That's why Luc Soete wants a bit tax, and I think that's why our Dutch friends keep talking about fraud in their government-friendly GAK system. And I won't be surprised if Avi Shamir is yet another victim of the "fraudification" of cryptography. I wonder if Professor Shamir will now be receptive to a cryptographic solution to a political/governmental problem? Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Tim May is a fine person.
by anonymous＠miron.vip.best.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May's early support of the cypherpunk concept has helped advance the culture of humanity! A true scholar, Tim analyzes the various ideas presented to the cypherpunks list, and gives his honest opinion, even when that opinion is not popular. In doing so, Tim displays truly noble courage. Unlike some others on this list, Tim has not sought to make purely personal attacks of the other inhabitants of the list and has shown impeccable restraint in doing so.

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Selections from RISKS DIGEST 18.54
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The latest issue of RISKS has some info of Crypto interest. The second one may have been posted to the list, but the first is well worth reading. (Shamir Adi on new methods of breaking sealed module cryptosystems. Maybe this is why they hauled him away...) >Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 16:58:50 +0200 >From: Shamir Adi <shamir(a)wisdom.weizmann.ac.il> >Subject: A new attack on DES > >You have recently referred in RISKS [18.50, 18.52] to the ingenious new >attack against public key cryptosystems developed at Bellcore. All the >published information on the subject (including Bellcore's press release) >stress that the attack is not applicable to secret key cryptosystems. Well, >Eli Biham and I have just released a research announcement in which we show >that an extension of the attack can, under the same realistic fault model, >break almost any secret-key algorithm, including DES, multiple DES, IDEA, >etc. The attack on DES was actually implemented on a PC, and it found the >key by analysing fewer than 200 ciphertexts generated from unknown >cleartexts. > >Adi Shamir > >= = = = = = > >Research announcement: A new cryptanalytic attack on DES > >Eli Biham Adi Shamir >Computer Science Dept. Applied Math Dept. >The Technion The Weizmann Institute >Israel Israel > > 18 October 1996 > (DRAFT) > >In September 96, Boneh Demillo and Lipton from Bellcore announced an >ingenious new type of cryptanalytic attack which received widespread >attention (see, e.g., John Markoff's 9/26/96 article in the New York Times). >Their full paper had not been published so far, but Bellcore's press release >and the authors' FAQ (available at >http://www.bellcore.com/PRESS/ADVSRY96/medadv.html) specifically state that >the attack is applicable only to public key cryptosystems such as RSA, and >not to secret key algorithms such as the Data Encryption Standard (DES). >According to Boneh, "The algorithm that we apply to the device's faulty >computations works against the algebraic structure used in public key >cryptography, and another algorithm will have to be devised to work against >the nonalgebraic operations that are used in secret key techniques." In >particular, the original Bellcore attack is based on specific algebraic >properties of modular arithmetic, and cannot handle the complex bit >manipulations which underly most secret key algorithms. > >In this research announcement, we describe a related attack (which we call >Differential Fault Analysis, or DFA), and show that it is applicable to >almost any secret key cryptosystem proposed so far in the open literature. >In particular, we have actually implemented DFA in the case of DES, and >demonstrated that under the same hardware fault model used by the Bellcore >researchers, we can extract the full DES key from a sealed tamperproof DES >encryptor by analysing fewer than 200 ciphertexts generated from unknown >cleartexts. The power of Differential Fault Analysis is demonstrated by the >fact that even if DES is replaced by triple DES (whose 168 bits of key were >assumed to make it practically invulnerable), essentially the same attack >can break it with essentially the same number of given ciphertexts. > >We would like to greatfully acknowledge the pioneering contribution of Boneh >Demillo and Lipton, whose ideas were the starting point of our new attack. > >In the rest of this research announcement, we provide a short technical >summary of our practical implementation of Differential Fault Analysis of >DES. Similar attacks against a large number of other secret key cryptosystems >will be described in the full version of our paper. > >TECHNICAL DETAILS OF THE ATTACK > >The attack follows the Bellcore fundamental assumption that by exposing a >sealed tamperproof device such as a smart card to certain physical effects >(e.g., ionizing or microwave radiation), one can induce with reasonable >probability a fault at a random bit location in one of the registers at some >random intermediate stage in the cryptographic computation. Both the bit >location and the round number are unknown to the attacker. > >We further assume that the attacker is in physical possession of the >tamperproof device, so that he can repeat the experiment with the same >cleartext and key but without applying the external physical effects. As a >result, he obtains two ciphertexts derived from the same (unknown) cleartext >and key, where one of the ciphertexts is correct and the other is the result >of a computation corrupted by a single bit error during the computation. For >the sake of simplicity, we assume that one bit of the right half of the data >in one of the 16 rounds of DES is flipped from 0 to 1 or vice versa, and >that both the bit position and the round number are uniformly distributed. > >In the first step of the attack we identify the round in which the fault >occurred. This identification is very simple and effective: If the fault >occurred in the right half of round 16, then only one bit in the right half >of the ciphertext (before the final permutation) differs between the two >ciphertexts. The left half of the ciphertext can differ only in output bits >of the S box (or two S boxes) to which this single bit enters, and the >difference must be related to non-zero entries in the difference >distribution tables of these S boxes. In such a case, we can guess the six >key bit of each such S box in the last round, and discard any value which >disagree with the expected differences of these S boxes (e.g., differential >cryptanalysis). On average, about four possible 6-bit values of the key >remain for each active S box. > >If the faults occur in round 15, we can gain information on the key bits >entering more than two S boxes in the last round: the difference of the >right half of the ciphertext equals the output difference of the F function >of round 15. We guess the single bit fault in round 15, and verify whether >it can cause the expected output difference, and also verify whether the >difference of the right half of the ciphertext can cause the expected >difference in the output of the F function in the last round (e.g., the >difference of the left half of the ciphertext XOR the fault). If >successful, we can discard possible key values in the last round, according >to the expected differences. We can also analyse the faults in the 14'th >round in a similar way. We use counting methods in order to find the key. >In this case, we count for each S box separately, and increase the counter >by one for any pair which suggest the six-bit key value by at least one of >its possible faults in either the 14'th, 15'th, or 16'th round. > >We have implemented this attack on a personal computer. Our analysis >program found the whole last subkey given less than 200 ciphertexts, >with random single-faults in all the rounds. > >This attack finds the last subkey. Once this subkey is known, we can >proceed in two ways: We can use the fact that this subkey contains 48 out of >the 56 key bits in order to guess the missing 8 bits in all the possible >2^8=256 ways. Alternatively, we can use our knowledge of the last subkey to >peel up the last round (and remove faults that we already identified), and >analyse the preceding rounds with the same data using the same attack. This >latter approach makes it possible to attack triple DES (with 168 bit keys), >or DES with independent subkeys (with 768 bit keys). > >This attack still works even with more general assumptions on the fault >locations, such as faults inside the function F, or even faults in the key >scheduling algorithm. We also expect that faults in round 13 (or even prior >to round 13) might be useful for the analysis, thus reducing the number of >required ciphertext for the full analysis. > >OTHER VULNERABLE CIPHERS > >Differential Fault Analysis can break many additional secret key >cryptosystems, including IDEA, RC5 and Feal. Some ciphers, such as Khufu, >Khafre and Blowfish compute their S boxes from the key material. In such >ciphers, it may be even possible to extract the S boxes themselves, and the >keys, using the techniques of Differential Fault Analysis. Differential >Fault Analysis can also be applied against stream ciphers, but the >implementation might differ by some technical details from the >implementation described above. > >------------------------------ > >Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 09:21:58 -0400 (EDT) >From: Edupage Editors <educom(a)elanor.oit.unc.edu> >Subject: "Key Recovery" Replaces "Key Escrow" in Encryption Plan (Edupage) > >The latest government proposal for encryption software controls touts a new >approach called "key recovery." This provision would allow law enforcement >officials to rebuild, or "recover" the mathematical key to encoded messages >with the help of third-party code-breakers. The new policy reflects >suggestions made in a National Research Council report released earlier this >year. Under the Clinton plan, encryption keys would be expanded from 40 >bits to 56 bits in products to be exported, provided the company agrees to >the key recovery process. In addition, authority to issue licenses for >overseas sales of such products would move from the State Department, where >they're handled as "munitions," over to the Commerce Department. The >Business Software Alliance, however, is still not completely happy with the >compromise. "We expect to go back to Congress," says a BSA spokeswoman. >"Although the announcement was clearly a step in the right direction, it's >not at all what the industry was looking for in its entirety." (*Investor's >Business Daily* 17 Oct 1996 A4; Edupage 17 October 1996)

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Re: Question: OTP
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:06 PM 10/21/96 +0000, paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk wrote: > >> This whole thing seems crazier each time I think about it. >> basically my question is: given that he picks his key securly does he have >> an OTP if the plaintext is shorter than the key? >> Bob > >Yes, if he were just to modular add the key to the plaintext (or XOR >them) he would have an OTP if AND ONLY IF the key were real random, >however, he doesn`t do this, he uses the key to seed an array or >linear congruential generators, which have been cryptanalysed to hell >and back. I think that there may be at least one potential application for a sorta-OTP system to be overlaid on a reasonably-secure public-key system: I think there might be an use for a system that allows the recipient of a message to prove to his own satisfaction that the sender of the message is who he says he is, but does NOT allow him to prove this to anyone else's satisfaction. The goal would be to prevent one party to the commucation from being strongarmed into not only revealing the data, but also providing trustworthy evidence against the other person. I haven't thought about this in enough detail to know if this is practical. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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[NEWS] Crypto-relevant wire clippings
by dlv＠bwalk.dm.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

American Banker: Friday, October 18, 1996 Internet Tops Bankers' List Of Leading-Edge Technologies By DREW CLARK A year ago, when the first U.S. bank was launched giving customers account access through the Internet, nearly half of all banks in a survey said they had no plans to follow its lead. They have since changed their minds. The Internet is high on bankers' emerging-technology priority lists, according to the 1996 American Banker technology survey. "The Internet is a medium that no banker can ignore," said Mary Donadoni, an analyst with Payment Systems Inc., the Tampa-based research firm that conducted the survey. To ignore it "is like saying you are not going to put a branch on Main Street." Over the past year, the number of U.S. banks, thrifts, and credit unions on the Internet's World Wide Web has grown from 132 to more than 1,000, according to James Bruene, editor of the Online Banking Report newsletter. "Banks are making decisions now," said William A. Soward, director of application marketing for Edify Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif. "Twelve months ago, they were kicking tires and trying to understand what the issues were." The American Banker/PSI survey showed one-third of the top 300 banks view Internet-related issues as the most critical they face - second only to the 35% who cited nonbank competition. Though only 10% of the top 300 U.S. banks offer Internet access to customers, 92% plan to by 1998. Community banks are expressing slightly more reluctance about the medium. Some 8% now offer Internet access, and half said they plan to do so within two years. They placed the Internet second on their list of concerns, behind general technology and software issues. "We're seeing more and more banks jumping on the bandwagon and saying, 'I need to do this,'" Mr. Soward said. "There is an emerging perception that a lot of the security issues have been addressed, but I'm not sure that's gotten out to the consumers." The bankers' thoughts about interactive services are being translated into action, with much of the emphasis on home banking via personal computer. Many of the higher-profile moves by big banks -- such as Citibank's slashing of fees for on-line customers, which caused subscribership to soar -- were complemented by community banking initiatives. In its first five months American Banker: Friday, October 18, 1996 Declining Costs Lead to an Explosion In On-Line Corporate Banking Services By STEVEN MARJANOVIC The increasingly competitive nature of business banking puts a premium on technology to improve customer satisfaction, boost revenues, and keep costs down. And that has brought an explosion in personal computers for connecting banks with their business clients. The American Banker technology survey indicated that 63% of the top 300 banks offer businesses access to their banking information via personal computers. Well over 90% plan to offer the information services by 1998, typically including account balances, statements, and electronic funds transfers. What's more, on-line corporate banking -- the equivalent of home banking for wholesale customers -- is getting easier and cheaper for more small banks and businesses. George Hart, president of Harbinger Corp., an Atlanta-based supplier of cash management software packages, said he has seen a marked increase in his business this year. About 25 banks are resellers of Harbinger's systems, including BankAmerica Corp., Barnett Banks Inc., and smaller customers, such as United American Bank of Memphis and Stillwater Bank and Trust Co., Stillwater, Okla. "These types of services . . . are not expensive any more" Mr. Hart said. "It's not a big deal to offer them." Also hot in the corporate realm, according to the survey, is financial electronic data interchange, or the exchange of payments and related documentation in standard computer formats. More than 40% of the top 300 banks plan to offer financial electronic data interchange by 1998. "We expect a lot of growth among companies in financial electronic data interchange in the next three years," said Maria Erickson, director of corporate services at Payment Systems Inc., which conducted the survey. The economics become especially favorable, she added, if "you consider the development of Internet-based financial EDI services." Among a new breed of cash management services, integrated payable and receivable services have garnered a lot of corporate attention lately, especially among larger and middle-market companies. Integrated payables are quickly growing in popularity from major banking companies like Chase Manhattan Corp. and Wachovia Corp. The service American Banker: Friday, October 18, 1996 A Second Bank Is Launched into Cyberspace By JENNIFER KINGSON BLOOM Almost a year to the day after the first Internet-based bank opened its virtual doors, the second such entity -- Atlanta Internet Bank -- has begun taking deposits. The new bank, a part of Carolina First Corp., is hoping to skim customers off the Internet by offering an eye-catching 7% interest rate on money market accounts. The founders say they are trying to prove the viability of the Internet as a banking channel and to show that the low overhead associated with doing business electronically can be passed on to customers. In the last year and a half, several well-established banks have opened "branches" on the Internet, enabling customers to pay bills, apply for loans, and manipulate accounts on-line. The services have proven popular, and both BankAmerica Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. say the number of customers migrating to the remote channel has "exceeded expectations," although neither will divulge precise figures. And last Oct. 18, a Kentucky banker named James S. "Chip" Mahan took the idea to an extreme, establishing with great fanfare the Security First Network Bank, in which customers transact business exclusively on-line and over the telephone. The bank has since been spun off from its community bank parent, Cardinal Bancshares, moved its physical operation to Atlanta, attracted more than 4,000 customers, and amassed $15 million in assets. Across town from Mr. Mahan, an Atlanta entrepreneur named T. Stephen Johnson decided to put together a rival institution. Beginning early this year, he hired a skeleton executive staff and secured an investment from Carolina First, a $1.5 billion-asset bank based in Greenville, S.C. Then he forged a partnership with AT&T and, this Tuesday, the bank went live on the telecommunications giant's on-line service. Plans call for a full product line by yearend. "The reason we're so late in getting open is that we started watching to see how this thing was unfolding," Mr. Johnson said. "It seemed you had to start with Internet users and try to make bank customers out of them." Today, the Atlanta Internet Bank exists as a "product" of Carolina First, said Mack Whittle, the South Carolina bank's chief executive. But the term is mostly semantic. "Our plans are to roll it out as a separate, stand-alone financial institution sometime in the next 12 months," he said. Mr. Johnson said he has formed a corporate shell that is prepared to buy all the new bank's accounts from Carolina First. "We wanted to go ahead and get in business so we're doing it as a subsidiary, but we have a company that has a right to buy all the accounts for a dollar," he said. Mr. Whittle anticipates the Internet bank will raise private equity capital or issue an initial public offering next year. Carolina First will own 40% of the new entity, he said. Mr. Whittle predicted the drift of customers to cyberspace would happen "faster than most of us want it to," and said banks needed to learn quickly how to deliver banking services electronically. "It's about 70% cheaper to deliver it through the Internet than through traditional means," he said. "Plus, the next generation of consumers is going to demand it." If Silicon Valley was the first to put Internet banking on the national map, then Atlanta seems to have become the second pushpin. Atlanta has "more PCs per capita and more Internet users per capita than anywhere else in the South," Mr. Whittle said. Even so, Mr. Whittle said, the Internet bank is reaching for a national customer base, competing "very definitely" with Security First. "We're trying to market this not to our customers as much as to Internet users," he said. "It's a much easier sell for us to market to people who are already accustomed to using the Internet." Mr. Johnson takes a slightly different view. "I hope they don't think we're competitors, because we don't think they're competitors," Mr. Johnson said of Security First. "I think we both have a lot of hard work ahead of us to get the public to use this as a means by which they conduct financial business. "We won't compete with Wells Fargo or any of the other people involved" in the Internet banking arena, he said. "We all have a job to do, which is ultimately to help all the banks get their overhead structure in line with other businesses." Michael McChesney, an officer of both Security First and a subsidiary, Five Paces Inc., said the officers across town at the competing bank were "friends of mine," and wished them luck. "I'd like to see anyone who gets on the Internet doing banking succeed," Mr. McChesney said. "Our belief is that every bank will be on the Internet in five years." That said, Mr. McChesney also predicted the two banks would "compete head-to-head for some Atlanta Internet customers" and that it would be a "gentlemanly competition." Despite the mutual kind words, some hard feelings may linger: the Atlanta Internet Bank had originally agreed to use software supplied by Five Paces, then changed its mind and chose a system from Edify Corp. instead. The Atlanta Internet Bank tested its site with 60 to 70 people - mostly Carolina First and AT&T employees - and drew 150 newcomers in its first few days, said Donald Shapleigh, whose title is president of the Atlanta Internet Bank. The bank's Web site -- at www.atlantabank.com -- is spare, with far simpler graphics than those of Security First and other banks in the virtual world. "This is not Disney -- it's a bank," Mr. Shapleigh explained. "We want convenience, speed, and access. We want people to feel like we're a bank, to know that it's FDIC insured, but also to know that it's different because we're a virtual bank. "We don't have any branches and we're not interested in running a fleet of branches. We want people who are savvy with computers." For the first six weeks, the new service will be accessible only through AT&T's WorldNet. WorldNet, which charges a flat rate for unlimited Internet access, has 425,000 subscribers. The on-line service is giving the Atlanta Internet Bank a free advertising "banner" on its home page, placing subscribers a mouse-click away from the bank. The banner will remain in place at least until the bank receives two million "hits," or visits. Mr. Johnson said his goal is to have 20,000 accounts after a year - or one for each 100 hits. "Even credit card solicitations run about one percent," said Mr. Johnson, who will be? the new bank's chairman. Such a success rate would run counter to the experience of Security First Network Bank, which has run banners on America Online and elsewhere. The advertisements generated heavy traffic but relatively few accounts. Beginning Dec.1, the Atlanta Internet Bank's products will be available to anyone on the World Wide Web of the Internet. The whopping 7% interest rate -- which applies only to a short-term money market account -- will end at that time. Future rates will be "very aggressive," said Ched Hoover, director of marketing for the Atlanta Internet Bank. He said the highest money market rate he had seen other banks offer was 5.5%, which his bank would beat. Other initial offerings include interest-bearing checking accounts, direct deposit, electronic bill payment, account transfer capability, and ATM cards. Loan products and brokerage will be added by yearend, Mr. Johnson said. The nascent bank has four officers and eight customer service representatives. Mr. Shapleigh, the president, is a 20-year veteran of retail and corporate banking who has worked at SunTrust Banks Inc. of Atlanta. The tie-in with Atlanta Internet Bank is just the latest of several quasi-experimental technology initiatives that Carolina First has begun recently. The bank has installed 17 loan kiosks in shopping malls, and is preparing to place others in automobile dealerships. It is also investing in supermarket branches. "Like most banks, we see the delivery system changing," Mr. Whittle said. "We have tried to be as innovative as we can in seeking lesser expensive ways of delivering the product, in ways that the customer of the future is going to expect." News Release (IBM): Tuesday, October 15, 1996 Smart Card Pilot To Be Initiated By American Express And IBM Smart card to be used for "ticketless travel" on American Airlines American Express Co. and IBM today announced plans to pilot a system which will enable business travelers to move more quickly through airports by using the world's first multi-purpose corporate "smart card." By early December, the two companies will begin testing an American Express(R) Corporate Card using IBM smart card technology for use with airlines' electronic ticketing capability, often referred to as "ticketless travel." Initially, these smart cards will be tested with American Airlines' enhanced gate readers, which are now installed in 21 U.S. airports. For travelers, this process eliminates the hassle of carrying a paper boarding pass, enabling them to proceed directly to the gate after showing identification at the airport. At the gate, the traveler inserts the smart card into the gate reader, receives confirmation of seat assignment, and is ready to board the plane. In the pilot, American Express will issue fully-functional Corporate Cards, featuring IBM's multi-function smart card (MFC) technology, to a select group of employees at both companies. The companies made the announcement at the International Air Transport Association (IATA) Passenger Services Conference in Los Angeles. At the conference, IATA delegates are expected to vote on a proposed resolution establishing airline industry specifications for the use of smart cards. Travel Industry Milestones This product represents the first multi-purpose corporate card with a computer chip, the first commercial smart card application by American Express, and the first travel industry implementation of IBM's MFC technology. In this initial application, the smart card will verify the electronic reservation and confirm traveler identification in greater detail and with more reliability than existing cards. "This is an important first step in developing smart cards that allow business travelers to 'do more,'" said Ed Gilligan, president of American Express Corporate Services. "Smart cards will also allow travel suppliers to streamline the check-in process and to enhance customer reward programs. At American Express, our plan is to lead the way in developing smart cards that provide customers with additional value, convenience and security as part of an increasingly automated process from on-line booking to electronic expense reporting." "The travel industry is well-poised to take advantage of smart card and other innovative technologies," said Jerry Cole, general manager of IBM's Worldwide Travel and Transportation Industry Solutions Unit. "This application is another prime example of IBM working with its customers to apply powerful technologies in integrated solutions that translate into significant business benefits." American Airlines' AAccess system, which was launched in September, offers passengers the option of automated check-in at the top 21 domestic airports, which account for about 70 percent of the airlines' passenger boardings. The enhanced gate readers, in addition to reading normal magnetic-stripe boarding passes, will read charge cards and smart cards to issue boarding and seat confirmations. Smart Card Innovators American Express, which along with IBM and American Airlines, is a member of the Smart Card Forum, is developing a number of smart card applications to provide customers with enhanced convenience and value. In travel, American Express will pursue multi-function applications that will speed travelers past check-in points at airports, hotels and car rental agencies. "Our vision for smart card product development is to provide customers with an array of innovative products that can store and capture monetary value and information, extend payment options and perform a variety of non-financial tasks," said David Boyles, senior vice president and head of the Smart Card Center of Excellence at American Express. "This pilot with IBM demonstrates American Express' commitment to assume a leadership role in shaping global standards for smart cards to ensure a level playing field and to speed development of new applications in a variety of industries." At the IATA conference, IBM will demonstrate to the association's airline members how the next generation of smart cards can enhance the entire ticketless travel process -- from reservation to boarding. The steps in the process include: -- the passenger makes a reservation on-line through the Internet or other on-line service, or through a travel agency; -- the passenger then downloads the ticket confirmation number to a smart card via personal computer with smart card capabilities or at an airport self-service kiosk; -- the passenger then checks in, using the smart card at the airline desk or kiosk, and then proceeds to board, using an enhanced gate reader. IBM has provided technology solutions, products and services to the travel industry for more than 30 years. Many industries, including travel -- airlines, lodging, car rentals and travel agencies -- are quickly adopting technologies into their business operations. The IBM Worldwide Travel and Transportation Industry Solutions Unit collaborated with IBM's Smart Consumer Services group on this effort and will continue to do so on future smart card solutions projects targeted to the travel industry. And this one is especially for Timmy May: FIRST "GAY-FRIENDLY" MUTUAL FUND In what appears to be the first of its kind, a new mutual fund has been launched that is being marketed directly at homosexual men and women. "We won't invest in companies unless they have a progressive policy towards gays and lesbians," said Shelly Meyers, portfolio manager of the Meyers, Sheppard Pride Fund. The 37-year-old Meyers, an MBA who describes herself as gay, said she has found that the technology, financial services and consumer services sectors have a higher proportion of companies that are "gay friendly," with utilities and energy among the least friendly. The fund's investment philosophy is value-oriented, seeking equities that are undervalued, she said. The fund has about 40 issues in its portfolio, and ranges between 35 and 55 stocks. Its top five holdings are: Arrow Electronics Inc., McKesson Corp., Time Warner Inc., Glendale Federal Bank and American Express Co. -- Reuter, 10/18/96 MAJOR LONDON BANKS SKIP SIGNATURE VERIFICATION The big four High Street banks have stopped checking whether customers have put the correct signatures on personal checks for amounts below 1,000 pounds. Lloyds Bank, Barclays, NatWest and Midland have all decided that it is less expensive to reimburse defrauded customers than to instruct staff to scrutinise all checks. The banks last week refused to confirm the existence of the limits, which start at 1,000 pounds and can be as high as 5,000 pounds at some branches. -- The (London) Telegraph, 10/15/96 --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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[NEWS] Crypto-relevant wire clippings
by dlv＠bwalk.dm.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

NPR's Morning Edition: Monday, October 14, 1996 'Smart Cards' Becoming Next Generation of Debit Cards BOB EDWARDS, Host: This is Morning Edition; I'm Bob Edwards. The next generation of plastic money is ready, with banks and credit card issuers preparing to introduce smart cards to consumers. Smart cards use new technology to take debit and credit cards a step further, and could replace many of the transactions that still utilize cash. However, Ancel Martinez of member station KQED in San Francisco, reports that smart cards are not catching on quickly. ANCEL MARTINEZ, Reporter: You may not have noticed it but smart cards have been around for some time, mostly on a trial basis in various cities. VISA tried to make them popular during the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. Vendors and merchants accepted the cards, which contain a computer chip instead of the magnetic strip. Smart cards replace the need of cash at places, from fast-food joints to service stations. Tom Sack [sp] at the Veri-Phone Company [sp], oversaw the installation of hundreds of smart card terminals in Atlanta. TOM SACK, Veri-Phone Company: What we were interested in doing was raising consumer awareness of an alternate payment type, so what we're doing with stored value cards in general is to move some of the coin and bank note traffic into an automated form. ANCEL MARTINEZ: Smart cards keep track of individual bank balances, actually storing money on their microprocessors. They're faster to use than ordinary credit or debit cards. Sack says smart cards are better than regular cards, which must be constantly checked for authenticity and credit limit. TOM SACK: We're able to set up a session between the card and the terminal, where you really have two computers talking to each other, and what they can do is they can exchange secrets to prove each other's identity, for example. So what this allows us to do is to actually conduct the transaction without making the telephone call, so that we can do a transaction very inexpensively because we have more processing power in the card itself. ANCEL MARTINEZ: Designers and manufacturers hope to have as broad of application as possible for smart cards. State agencies are considering the use of smart cards for commuters to pay turnpike tolls, and as a way for people on welfare to receive government assistance. Another target is the booming cellular phone industry. Telecommunication companies suffer tens of millions of dollars in losses from rampant theft, but if customers' phones use smart cards, so key information is not embedded in the telephone itself, the chance of fraud is greatly reduced, since the phone won't work unless the owner inserts a smart card. But the card's value as a security device as come under question. Belcor Laboratories [sp] in New Jersey recently announced cryptologists discovered hidden problems on the smart cards, which have been advertised as tamper-proof. Bill Barr [sp] with Belcor says researchers discovered two things. BILL BARR, Belcor Laboratories: One, we've discovered how to manipulate a piece of computing technology and force it to make an error; and second, we've discovered that if it does make that error, then we can, by using our sophisticated mathematics, figure out how to extract the key out of the computing device, the secret. ANCEL MARTINEZ: If a sophisticated criminal can make a copy of a legitimate card, or if smart cards can be manipulated around the notoriously feeble security systems of the Internet, the technology may not be any good. Some experts, however, say there's no reason for panic. They say the Belcor study will not slow the eventual nationwide acceptance of smart cards. According to analyst Karen Apple [sp] at Forester Research [sp] in Cambridge, Massachusetts, banks remain steadfast in the belief that smart cards can, and will, reduce fraud. KAREN APPLE, Analyst, Forester Research: The credit card industry suffers from about a billion dollars in fraud every year as it is. I don't think it can get much worse than that. Smart cards do provide a greater level of security than the systems that are in place today. ANCEL MARTINEZ: Smart cards may be a good way for banks, credit card companies and merchants, to cut costs and save money, but smart cards are not in high demand with the people who matter most, consumers. Again, Karen Apple- KAREN APPLE: You have sort of a chicken-and-the-egg problem where nobody wants to be the first to make a move. Consumers don't want to embrace smart cards until they're accepted more widely, and merchants don't want to foot the bill to make smart cards more widely available, or more widely accepted. ANCEL MARTINEZ: Facing such a dilemma, retail groups, banks, financial service companies, have formed a coalition to negotiate new technical protocols for smart cards, as well as a means to finance the new technology. Called Smart Card Forum, it's a who's who list of American business. Citibank, Hewlett-Packard, American Express and Motorola are but a few, and there's a Microsoft representative. Software companies are keen on smart cards because they forecast that the electronic cash will set a new standard for commerce on the Internet For National Public Radio, I'm Ancel Martinez in San Francisco. Associated Press: Tuesday, October 15, 1996 Online Banking: Cutting Edge or Over The Edge? By PATRICIA LAMIELL A future television commercial, brought to you by your bank: Dawn creeps through the windows of a house. Logging onto his personal computer, a young executive instructs his bank to pay bills, checks on his investments and completes an online car loan application. His wife calls. Away on a business trip, she has just transferred cash, via a laptop computer, from the family's savings to their checking account. His son charges in, late for school and bellowing about lunch money. Dad grabs the boy's smart card - a plastic credit card look-alike embedded with a computer chip - and swipes it through a card reader in his PC to download electronic cash from his bank account onto the card. Banks hope this scenario becomes reality in the not-too-distant future. They're betting that online innovations will transform the way consumers complete most financial transactions, from buying a cup of coffee to investing for retirement. About 200, or 1 percent, of financial institutions in North America currently offer online banking, but because most large banks offer it, it is available to 60 percent of consumer banking customers, said Jim Bruene, editor of the OnLine Banking Report, an industry newsletter based in Seattle. If the industry has its way, every household will be banking soon from a home computer. "We see the numbers of online banking customers exploding from prior years," enthuses Michael Papantoniou, vice president for electronic commerce at Chase Manhattan Corp. But it's not certain that consumers will take to the new technology in enough numbers to justify the expense to banks. Dana Massie, an online client of Wells Fargo Bank, is director of technical research for Creative Technology Ltd., a multi-media company, and is probably as computer-savvy as banking customers come. But, Massie said, "I don't have a lot of patience for complicated stuff at home. When computers are as reliable and easy to use as televisions, then they will take off, because they're a lot more fun. But computers have to stop crashing, they have to turn on instantly - and computers are loud." Financial companies believe online banking will lower transaction costs and give them an edge over competitors. They've taken studies showing that customers like online banking because it saves them time, and that it appeals to merchants because it saves on billing and processing costs. But the notion of winging theoretical money through cyberspace still sends many consumers into a panic. And it prompts questions about security and privacy. Many people still want to handle cash and speak face-to-face with their bankers. A closer look at online banking: HOW DID WE GET HERE? Online banking actually has been around for years. "It may be one of those overnight success stories that took 15 years to develop," quips Bob Schettino, a spokesman for Intuit Corp., which makes the Quicken home finance software. The huge growth in consumer purchases of PCs over the past decade has fed the expansion of online banking. By 1995, more than 30 million households in the United States had home computers. More than a third used some type of personal finance software. Intuit and other software makers figured out how users of their home finance software could communicate via PC and modem with their banks. And the Internet became vastly more popular and more secure, leading to the creation in October 1995 of Security First Network Bank, the first Internet-only bank. Meanwhile, significant innovations in the smart card made it possible to carry electronic cash and perform financial transactions from a computer or telephone. The smart card - even more than the magnetic stripe card, which made automatic teller machines and debit cards possible - turned on its ear the notion that banking customers must visit a bank. Financial institutions began using online banking to attract and keep customers. PC owners, who as a group are young, well educated and affluent, are prize customers indeed. A few large banks, including Chase Manhattan Corp., Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, developed or acquired online banking systems. Other financial firms formed alliances with technology companies - Visa International has teamed with Microsoft Corp., while 15 banks formed a consortium with IBM. But online banking is still nascent. Of the 10 million households that use Intuit software products, only about 350,000 or 3.5 percent, have signed up for online banking, Intuit said. The American Bankers Association said about 1 percent of transactions in 1995 were completed online. ONLINE BANKING AND YOU What does this trend mean for the banking customer? Online banking shortens the amount of time consumers spends on finances, and allows them to work on them any time of the day or night. No more racing to the bank Friday afternoon to deposit a paycheck - Chase said 40 percent of its online banking is done on the weekend. Some consumers have been leery of doing banking or other personal business on the Internet, which works like a huge electronic party line, for fear someone could steal private information. But developers of online banking technology say new scrambling and encryption techniques have made Internet transactions safer. Indeed, researchers are concentrating on new applications that allow banking and commerce directly on the Internet, as well as through online service providers like America Online and CompuServe. They say online commerce is safer than giving a credit card number out over the telephone. A big stumbling block to the growth of online banking is that most vendors such as department stores and utilities don't accept electronic payments. Right now, this is a chicken-and-egg problem for banks - vendors are reluctant to invest in technology that their customers won't use. Consumers are leery of investing in technology that vendors don't accept. John Dickinson, a self-professed computer geek and freelance magazine editor, has been doing online banking for 12 years and pays 95 percent of his personal and business bills that way. But he still gets into scrapes with vendors. He said he can't get his phone company, for example, to consolidate the eight paper bills that it sends each month for different accounts at his San Francisco home and office. And Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. was taking two weeks to process his payments, and then started dunning him for being late. Three months ago, he "got really bored with calling them up all the time, so I just threw up my hands" and got the utility company to automatically debit his checking account each month. WHY THE BANKS WANT IT Financial institutions are in a life-or-death race with technology and telecommunications companies to provide home banking services. Electric utilities, telephone and cable companies already have lines into homes that can transmit financial information and are trying to develop new services. If customers can transfer money and get loans via a technology or communications company that already has lines into their homes, why would they need a bank? So banks must reassert control of the banking business, or cede it to non-financial companies. But regaining control is tricky indeed. Banks have invested billions of dollars in technology - such as machines to read magnetic stripes on cards - which is fast becoming obsolete. They have also built, at tremendous expense, a lavish branch system that, while shrinking, is expensive to maintain. Banks have to make good on these investments before they charge into new technologies that may themselves be quickly obsolete. They also must stay innovative enough to keep their increasingly computer-adventurous customers. The task is somewhat like catching a moving bus. "By the time people get literate with PCs," said Frank Woosley, director of financial services consulting for Deloitte & Touche in Dallas, "the smart banks are going to take the stuff that would normally be done on a PC and eliminate it altogether," like drafting checks, reconciling statements and moving money between accounts. If they are to continue to be the place where people deposit and borrow money, banks must devise cost-effective ways to turn the new technology into programs customers and merchants will use. That is a tall order, even for banking powerhouses. "But if we're not doing that," Woosley said, "we're not going to be in business much longer." Reuters: Tuesday, October 15, 1996 Deutsche Bank Gears Up For Virtual Shopping Test By Catherine O'Mahony FRANKFURT-- German shoppers weary of the long queues and curt service that typify the High Street here may soon have a more relaxing option -- virtual shopping courtesy of the biggest bank. Deutsche Bank AG is gearing up to test "Ecash" -- a system based around electronic "coins" which allow the user to buy goods and services over the Internet -- in just the third initiative of its kind worldwide. "Cyber money" is being hyped by computer boffins as the cash of the 21st century, although the initiators of Deutsche Bank's project are somewhat sceptical of the hype. "You can't expect people to change their habits overnight. This will start with the technology freaks who go along with everything," Christof Blum, head of Deutsche Bank's technological developments team, told Reuters. But Blum is confident that specific services, especially media-related products such as newspapers, magazine articles and other information, can sell well on the Net. Eventually, he said, "This will be pretty big." Blum and his team are working on a six-month pilot programme expected to start by January 1997, giving a selected group of Germans their first taste of a virtual shopping spree, albeit with a limited choice of products. Some 1,000 bank customers and a group of around 30 service providers, mainly publishers, will take part. Using software supplied by the bank, and developed by the specialist Dutch firm Digicash NV, customers will be able to ask Deutsche Bank via their PC to transfer funds from their regular bank account into an interim "Ecash" deposit account. The required amount of "electronic coins" -- denominated in deutsche marks -- can then be stored on the customer's PC hard disk, where they will be displayed in the form of a purse icon. Payment is simple: Internet users will be able to call up prices on screen for goods on offer and transfer the right amount of Ecash to the vendor by clicking on the purse icon. With even credit card acceptance still strikingly limited here, the day Germans switch on their PCs instead of their car engines for their weekly shopping trip is some way off. But Deutsche Bank says it wants to be ahead of the game when it arrives. Established in the late 19th century, the bank has been defying its stuffy image of late by making strong efforts to modernise its products, especially in retail banking. Part of its modern face is a six-month old "communications centre" at its main office for technological developments in suburban Frankfurt -- an open-plan space where staff can surf the Internet and test out prototype equipment. Blum, whose team is one of several at Deutsche Bank working on a variety of innovative products, says it will decide whether or not to proceed fully with the Net cash project on the basis of its six-month test. If so, the bank would join a tiny group of financial institutions involved with cybermoney -- the world pioneer is Mark Twain Bank of the U.S., which introduced digital dollars last year. Finland's Merita Bank is also running a test. Deutsche Bank says it is aware of the reservations many hold about the security of Internet cash but Blum says the Ecash software is completely secure. As in a regular ATM withdrawal, customers have to identify themselves to the bank to get access to the electronic cash and the "coins" are issued with code numbers similar to the serial numbers on regular banknotes. Nonetheless, Deutsche Bank has involved the Bundesbank in its discussions on the Internet project from the start. The guardian of Germany's famously solid deutsche mark is keeping a watchful eye on cashless payments in general amid concern that electronic commerce could be open to abuse and that virtual money could eventually disturb world cash flows. The bank has also been flooded with queries on its Internet cash plans from as far away as Japan. Its rivals on the home market, several of whom have set up banking services on the Internet in recent months, are also taking a keen interest, but none have yet taken the plunge with their own initiative. American Banker: Thursday, October 17, 1996 Amex Testing Its First Smart Card, with American Airlines By VALERIE BLOCK American Express Co. will join the smart card parade with a test of electronic ticketing for American Airlines passengers. After standing on the sidelines while the banking industry announced pilots around the globe and the bank card associations created an industry standard, the charge card giant is finally entering the ring. Using technology developed by IBM Corp., the program lets passengers insert a corporate charge card with a computer chip into a reader at American Airlines departure gates. They would receive a boarding pass, without presenting a paper ticket. The chip will contain the passenger's identification and frequent-flier number, which will be matched with ticketing information in American Airlines' data base. The cards, with magnetic stripes, will also function as corporate cards that may be used at any location that accepts American Express. Most major airlines, including Continental, Delta, Northwest, and United, are testing electronic ticketing. Lufthansa, which has such a smart card program in Europe, may be the only carrier with one in place. Initially the pilot program will be modest, with just "hundreds" of corporate charge cards combining magnetic stripes with chips being issued to American Express and IBM employees. But the plans are ambitious. Bill Hohle, smart card technology leader, described American Express' venture as "the first step to a comprehensive multiapplication travel and entertainment product." He envisions that cardholders could book travel, purchase airline tickets, expedite car rentals and hotel check-in, and electronically insert travel information into an expense report for reconciliation. The pilot is to begin by mid-December at 21 U.S. airports, including ones in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Chicago. American Express provides corporate cards for IBM in the United States. Mr. Hohle said American Express also intends to test an electronic purse application for smaller purchases. Rumors have it that American Express will purchase Proton, a stored value smart card program designed by Banksys of Belgium. But Mr. Hohle said it's "too early to discuss" those plans. Proton is in its pilot phase in several countries in Europe. It might seem odd that American Airlines is American Express' new partner, given that American Express issues the cobranded Delta Sky Miles Optima Card, while Citicorp issues the American AAdvantage card. But the charge card firm gained a technological break from the deal. American Airlines recently introduced a ticketless travel program, called AAccess, that uses magnetic stripe cards. To accommodate the program, the airline installed enhanced gate readers that can also read chip cards. Piggybacking on that technology, American Express will avoid the costs of installing and wiring card readers. It will also alleviate the onerous job of persuading merchants to accept the cards. Visa and its bank partners were forced to do that for the Visa Cash experiment, introduced in Atlanta during the Summer Olympics. Other bank smart card tests, such as the MasterCard program in Canberra, Australia, have been stymied by merchant resistance. "I see it as big win" for American Express, said James Accomando, a Fairfield Conn.-based consultant. "Now it gets a relationship with a dominant carrier in the U.S. that it didn't have before." Jerome Svigals, a card industry consultant in Redwood City, Calif., called the move a "willingness of American Express to explore new partnerships." He noted that all the card organizations are searching for "the best way to move forward" with smart cards. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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cypherpunks ftp site
by Norman Hardy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I am trying to get some code from <ftp.csua.berkeley.edu:pub/cypherpunks>. I get: ftp> get README.MIRRORS 200 PORT command successful. 425 Can't create data socket (128.32.43.51,20): Address already in use. ftp> Any suggestions to how to get eliptic.src and elliptic.doc reported to be at <ftp.csua.berkeley.edu:pub/cypherpunks/ciphers>? I searched AltaVista.

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Finally -- A crypto question from me...HD encryption
by h2＠juno.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Are there any good programs out there that can encrypt my HD?? Since there probably are, please mention some and where I can get them. Also, no one mention PGP.

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Re: IP spoofer
by Matthew Ghio 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Assuming that this was I troll, I took this to private mail. Since there is some relevance to computer security and anonymity I am forwarding it back to the list. Here is my reply to him: >>> Anyone got a good IP spoofer that can spoof the whole domain? The >>only >>> shit I can find is those shitty ones that spoof the first part of >>the >>> IDENTD which is possible to do in mIRC if you use it. Oh yeah, it >>has to >>> be for Win95. Yes I know that no one likes win95 but I dont have a >>> choice....I'll tell about that later. >> >>You're kidding, right? >> >>Either that or you need to find out who is forging mail from you. :) >> >Why would i be kidding...what forging mail.... Well, you posted to a mailling list about cryptography and asked a silly question about IP spoofing. Smells like a troll. Apparently others thought so too; I guess I was the only one silly enough to respond. "...what forged mail..." Well, your whole post was about forging the sender... Now, to answer your question: In order to do a successful IP spoofing, you must either gain access to the routing mechanism for one or more non-local IP addresses, or spoof a DNS (Domain Name System) server. To send packets with a forged IP address generally requires substantial ability to modify the behavior of the local TCP stack. Since Win95 does not provide such functionality via the winsock.dll interface, and the source code to the tcpip module is not available, in order to use Win95 for such purposes would necessitate rewriting and replacing a substantial portion of the IP-networking code. Since you expressed no interest in doing so, I assumed you were joking when you said that you wanted to use Win95. On operating systems which provide an interface for the user to insert raw packets into the local tcp/ip stack, ip spoofing is much more practical. Please see the post I made to the list about a month ago on the subject of IP Tunneling. I included two scripts, written under the Linux Operating System, which serve to give you a non-local IP address (using ssh as the tunneling transport mechanism). I assume that this would be sufficient for the purpose you intend. You will, however, need to find a cooperative network administrator from whom to borrow an IP address. The other option is DNS spoofing. The simplest form of this is to only forge the reverse-dns lookup. This requires access to the reverse-dns server, or merely suffient information about it to forge packets from it. (eg information obtained using a packet sniffer on the local ethernet) This method is fairly widely known and practiced. For this reason, most servers now check the reverse-dns against a forward-lookup, so you are unlikely to succeed at doing this. It might also be possible to engage in a denial-of-service attack (such as a packet flood) in order to prevent the reverse-dns lookup. This is, however, of limited utility since the IRC server, if it accepts a connection without a reverse-dns entry, would publicly display the numeric address, which anyone could then independently look up, or do a traceroute on. I hope this answers your questions about IP spoofing. In the future, please try to familiarize yourself with the ongoing list discussions, as this will encourage people to take your questions more seriously.

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GET ME OUT OF HERE - TOO!
by crumrig＠us-state.gov 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

UNSUBSCIBE

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Re: Prof Shamir arrested
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hi Jim! Could you please tell me where I could find more about it? Is there a URL presenting the story? Did you broadcast the story to other groups? On 21 Oct 96 at 14:34, jim bell wrote: > Further recall that the so-called "Bit Tax" idea, the one most recently > proposed by that Belgian (?) Luc Soete, would apparently require that any data > transmitter keep account of any data it sends, in order to collect some sort > of tax, and thus any mistake in the count (either as a result of > misinterpretation of the rules, or a disk crash, or a power surge, etc) would > presumably turn a minor error into "tax fraud," or maybe they'll call it "bit > fraud." There is one other thing that you probably saw but did not point out: At least here in North America, networks and cables are *privately* owned. A bit tax would thus tax the use of private property by it's ownner. That is going a bit far! Also, the only one who could file for fraud is the owner. Otherwise, I could file a complaint and charge you for fraud that there are too much fart marks in your underwear... Or maybe they could institute a spoon and fork tax. Or a comma or alphabet tax, why not since it is in the same line? This is absolutely absurd and anybody planning such a scheme has *much more* than innocent intentions in mind. Ciao jfa - -- Jean-Francois Avon, Montreal QC Canada DePompadour, Societe d'Importation Ltee Finest of Limoges porcelain and crystal JFA Technologies, R&D consultants physicists and engineers, LabView programing. PGP encryption keys at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon ID# C58ADD0D : 529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891 ID# 5B51964D : 152ACCBCD4A481B0 254011193237822C -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2i iQEVAgUBMmu/r8iycyXFit0NAQEePQf/TPFiji22lXaInCLXlYXJcJL+e8sHgk+r JXJ6n+54R81rJMTCOh6pSI/KzckXoBVpu8YEUTh46XcZICldzJGF1C5wHca9uJy9 MebhB+ccAAwxjELTbbSTUTYh/1cIHyJiucY6h3Vy/q3TAu3tJx5H248EAOvr21wc pfBp9nqAsC+WlHku1uhmOj9JbErGIhxW9rISYHNOQiCfIl1z1DPxVtac0zptG0Br Z8WDRQsOdXB6Efo8/n9oEdpJt5MaUgZdW1Ocz+bLsvQ6LdmfG5KenGYd4vW2nn2y 8tDdB9BOW5FMUFBatw7vfANOhT3O52paZ0qDJRAsJRG069MgfcrRdA== =ROpW -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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