December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Confessions
by GoToWebPage＠GoodNews-1998.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

********************************************************************* - Remove from list information is after this important message - ********************************************************************* ******* One person's journey from insurance adjuster, to crusader for equity of access: http://Ppage.net?Tony.B ****************************************************************** ****************************************************************** TO BE REMOVED FROM OUR MAILING LIST, TYPE: Legooo(a)ix.netcom.com in the (TO:) area and (REMOVE) in the subject area of a new E-mail and send. ****************************************************************** ******************************************************************

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Kaczynski attempts suicide
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> SACRAMENTO, California (AP) -- The judge in Theodore Kaczynski's > trial declared him "lucid, calm" and free from signs of mental > illness just hours before the Unabomb suspect tried to kill himself > in his cell. I don't get it. The guy is facing the death penalty, and now they're trying to keep him alive.

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Wassenaar Rule Update
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Update of yesterday's post: The Bureau of Export Administration published 15 January 1998 in the Federal Register, "Implementation of the Wassenaar Arrangement List of Dual-Use Items: Revisions to the Commerce Control List and Reporting Under the Wassenaar Arrangement; Rule." The rule in TXT format is available in three parts as published: http://jya.com/bxa-wa-rule.txt (354K) http://jya.com/bxa-wa-rule2.txt (373K) http://jya.com/bxa-wa-rule3.txt (32K) Or all three parts (742K) in a compressed self-extracting Zip file: http://jya.com/bxa-wa-rule.exe (194K) Excerpt for Category 5 -- Telecommunications and "Information Security": http://jya.com/bxa-wa-cat5.htm (39K)

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Legality of faxed signatures.
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-- I believe that there is case law or legislation that a faxed signature is worthless if it is bit for bit identical with another signature, which of course it usually is these days. Can anyone with a spot of legal knowledge give me something impressive sounding to scare people who rely on those signatures. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG m3FpGHzBYajbGdNyApmYfwBYZOzY44LHPv7+KZPs 4hFtbEu745IQyZxamC5p6PUwCCpOVAo/LKzZD8Uqu --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the state. http://www.jim.com/jamesd/

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No Subject
by James Little 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi. I just recently subscribed to your mailing list. I've read ALL of your stuff. I just don't understand what it is u guys are really about. Please help.

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No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re: I'm going to count to ten... etc
by wabe 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-- I have to say, I really enjoy your posts TruthMonger - as deranged as they are. So out of all of us, who's going to the steg conference this april? Also, is there a java version of crypto kong so I can use it in linux? And the solution to the speeding-ticket-giving camera is, of course, camo paint jobs. But you all knew that, right? --digsig EojdyErVslc/s6aQeIHwnOlMw3lUKJhdZc/ZeCNfe7H QbR0ngV/+ZI9uuiEe6o4CkfBhQowsHozF7TsZU5f 40HJxqCEceUgzeJFjTbRWSH9LJxdzYMLQbtwctBfM

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Re: e-mail muddling.
by wabe 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-- Also wouldn't it be easier to de-muddle an e-mail message than a brute force attack? I mean, you KNOW what muddled it. And you know the general way it got muddled. It's not pgp, it's just some line breaks a bit too early for their time... -wabe --digsig EojdyErVslc/s6aQeIHwnOlMw3lUKJhdZc/ZeCNfe7H zvMubhARmsdOWVOYi7Su/Y9qnSIOIjc9Wuqb6G5G 40asyOJEF0Kflm3y9623Ab0qCaryGJ1TtAaE4JU1y

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Re: Legality of faxed signatures.
by Robert A. Costner 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:07 AM 1/16/98 -0800, James A. Donald wrote: >I believe that there is case law or legislation that a faxed >signature is worthless if it is bit for bit identical with >another signature, which of course it usually is these days. > >Can anyone with a spot of legal knowledge give me something >impressive sounding to scare people who rely on those >signatures. In Georgia, the state appeals court declared that faxes are "beeps and chirps" and therefore not writings. As a fax is not a writing, it cannot have a signature. Therefore the signature cannot be valid. This was in a case that involved a required notice to arrive by a certain time. Traditionally, on a writing anything is a signature including an 'X', spit, and the words "Mickey Mouse". -- Robert Costner Phone: (770) 512-8746 Electronic Frontiers Georgia mailto:pooh@efga.org http://www.efga.org/ run PGP 5.0 for my public key

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Re: Wassenaar Rule Update
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Good point about the hazard of EXE files. Thanks. A zip file is available: http://jya.com/bxa-wa-rule.zip (168K)

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Nanotechnology
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I think people here seriously underestimate how long nanotech will take. Suppose you have a machine which takes atoms and deposits them onto a surface, building it up layer by layer. This is possible with today's technology, but it's a slow process. Consider this: If someone builds a replicator which takes a week to make a copy of itself, every person on this entire planet could have one within eight months. Think about it.

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Nanotechnology (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 22:10:07 +0100 (MET) > Subject: Nanotechnology > From: nobody(a)REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) > I think people here seriously underestimate how long nanotech will take. Speak for your self...;) ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Re: Legality of faxed signatures.
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-- Thanks, though this sounds like a silly judgment. It looks to me as if the great majority of judges and lawyers, and hence presumably the great majority of CEOs, are blissfully unaware that one can do anything with a fax other than scan it in from paper and ink at one end, while it is printed out on paper and ink at the other end. In actual fact a very large proportion of faxes never see paper and ink at either end, creating endless opportunities for manipulation. This is a big problem for me, because I want to scare businessmen into using digital signatures. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG E05oBvvh8W9NDUWZgPx6YirXgrcL6+CEkbWuhVNo 4MQrt6D7Hjqw8OzIX9J2wbPBc7D77B+PochPDi4KZ At 02:35 PM 1/16/98 -0500, Robert A. Costner wrote: >At 10:07 AM 1/16/98 -0800, James A. Donald wrote: >>I believe that there is case law or legislation that a faxed >>signature is worthless if it is bit for bit identical with >>another signature, which of course it usually is these days. >> >>Can anyone with a spot of legal knowledge give me something >>impressive sounding to scare people who rely on those >>signatures. > >In Georgia, the state appeals court declared that faxes are "beeps and >chirps" and therefore not writings. As a fax is not a writing, it cannot >have a signature. Therefore the signature cannot be valid. This was in a >case that involved a required notice to arrive by a certain time. > >Traditionally, on a writing anything is a signature including an 'X', spit, >and the words "Mickey Mouse". > > > -- Robert Costner Phone: (770) 512-8746 > Electronic Frontiers Georgia mailto:pooh@efga.org > http://www.efga.org/ run PGP 5.0 for my public key > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the state. http://www.jim.com/jamesd/

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Eternity - an alternative approach
by Kay Ping 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In one of the messages on the eternity thread someone suggested using radio signals. This is an interesting approach which certainly deserves further attention but digital radio requires special hardware which I prefer to avoid. However, some of the characteristics of radio signals can be emulated on the internet. Radio links are perfect for hiding the location of receivers. The equivalent for this is of course services like usenet and IRC. Both are already used for providing anonymity. Radio is also quite good at hiding the location of the transmitter - you tune your radio and the signals are just there, coming down your antenna. It takes special equipment to locate where they originated. It occured to me that the equivalent on the net would be to receive packets with invalid source addresses. They are just there, coming dowm the phone line to your modem. It takes significant resources and snooping on a massive scale to locate where they are coming from.. All this is assuming you can find some way to send a request with your address to the server. For eternity this means that the location of servers where documents are stored can be kept secret if they transmit the documents using packets with invalid source addresses. Receivers of eternity documents will not be able to tell where they are coming from. Since there is no bidirectional link between transmitter and receiver the protocol must be implemented over UDP. To protect against packet loss the data may be encoded with redundancy. The correction code can be similar to that used on RAID disk arrays - adding redundant blocks consisting of XOR of other blocks. Missing blocks can be reconstructed by XORing together other blocks received. To provide even better anonymity the transmitter may send the messages through one or more onion routers which decrypt one layer of encryption. These routers do not store information, do not know what information passes through them and do not know where it's coming from. Any packets they forward are sent without a valid source address. This should make them less vulnerable to attacks of all kinds. Can anyone speculate about their liability under US law? Putting caches on the routers will help both performance and security. Will it affect their liability in any way? If encryption is implemented properly all packets will look identical: blocks of random data of the same size and no source address. This will make traffic analysis difficult. The distance to the transmitter can be hidden by initializing the packet's time-to-live field to a value with random variations. That was the easy part. The hard part is to get the requests to the document servers without knowing their addresses. This can be done through the equivalent of remailer reply blocks or some kind of broadcast medium. The reply blocks would be implemented by the onion routers. Each hop could generate several copies, both for redundancy and as decoys. Packets used in reply blocks can look identical to packets with document data, including the use of invalid source addresses. In the broadcast version clients and servers subscribe to channels with many participants to hide their identity in the crowd. The system could use an existing service like IRC or a dedicated network, possibly based on modified IRC server code. Sympathizers with bandwidth to spare can subscribe too to provide better cover for the actual document servers. Servers could listen using trusted proxies or chains of semi-trusted proxies. The division into channels allows growth of the system if the total bandwidth of requests becomes too high. Using the public IRC networks has the advantages of being less suspicious and not requiring the deployment of new infrastructure. Requests could even be hidden steganographically in IRC traffic. Unfortunately, IRC server operators are touchy about abuse of their systems. Requests should be small. This allows replicating them to a large number of receivers without taking too much bandwidth. They can also be made to be of fixed size and contain no controversial information. Requests contain the document index as a compact one-way hash, the requester's IP address and the server's ID code. It may also contain hashcash or ecash payment. Requests should be encrypted to the server's public key. To keep them small, elliptic curve encryption may be used. A server may send random cover packets to hide the correlation between a request and its response. It may also add random delay before responding to the request. Delay will also help limit the bandwidth. Users of eternity need to be more patient that the average web surfer and the protocol should use generous timeouts. Since UDP has no flow control the server should always assume the client is using a modem connection and limit its transmission speed accordingly. Security has a price. The client software may be implemented as a local web proxy (in Java?) which identifies requests to eternityspace and converts them to this protocol. Public gateways may be set up to allow anyone to read eternity URLs. These public may also be used to protect the anonymity of the reader like the Anonymizer. Document servers and routers must be located on networks where there is no spoofed packet filtering. Since the common use of spoofed packets is in denial-of-service attacks more and more filters are being installed. It may become harder in the future to find places to put the servers and routers. I believe it should always be possible since it is not practical to implement filtering in places where there is a lot of traffic from different sources. In cases where the document server is located on a filtered network it may have to trust the routers to hide its location. This system is far from perfect: it has too many components and the weakest link is the transmission of requests to servers. I still believe it has some interesting sides which deserve further discussion. Your ideas are welcome. - ----------------- Kay Ping nop 'til you drop finger kping(a)nym.alias.net for key DF 6D 91 18 A6 59 41 96 - 89 01 69 B7 9D0 4 AE 53 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: cp850 iQEPAwUBNL26txHPAso8Qp7tAQGLEAfPeRgIL3OqiG67CLBO9TCe/oV5lmw66Pz1 Wl17ajHeSCX6qjACSZ3La73drUjIftL0G/18PkLd48VGmsF6izCnXB4fh8MAB6Ve QWjhRTvRSkKkwXK4t2tx6CUCdxOaJ9Phd6J02Z+MdjEGJ3jAdUdaHWo5zM5i6Ris wkgATEhGMpw8tjlnvR4erwu51iSrt62huPWJXl1pjyPfQbl0iyQtcGdQ1spIWLJC oaOI7QchHK3LjSuzN54MVCjRdz8fiI6JHAUnlqqsW29LBOZQkSnQedORCuIALwqe qOhSxMKbciLdVde3BBtpILpz5y91ulAecxOOwcnc7m5Pjw== =iLP5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: remailer resistancs to attack (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 04:50:37 -0500 > From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh(a)efga.org> > Subject: Re: remailer resistancs to attack > An obvious thing to try is to add some more remailers. 300 remailers would > not be immune to simultaneous shutdown by the authorities, but it would > make it more difficult. A dozen of so remailers makes shutdown fairly simple. Considering that the federal law enforcement agencies have had decades to deal with organized crime and such over a national and even international level, 100' level warrants is not even a resource strain if the pay off is large enough. Now if we had 10,000 or 100,000 the picture begins to change radicaly. > Threats to the remailer network come from a few basic places. > > 1. Traditional law enforcement > 2. Unauthorized law enforcement > 3. "friends" of message recipients or "friends" of the remailer > 4. unreliability of the machines that form the network > 5. Hacking attacks > 6. Design > 7. User incompetence 8. Operator incompetence 9. initial startup difficulties 10. lack of an effective financial model > Traditional law enforcement takes so long to investigate, the keys could be > canceled and replaced several times. This is another problem with the entire crypto process as now implimented. Users of keys, either for encryption or signing, tend to think of the keys as long term entities. Considering the increase in computing power, the coming ubiquity of law enforcement monitoring on the network, increased payoff for hackers as the traffic of personal info increases, and general human failure keys should in fact be changed often (say a couple of times a year, annualy at least) > A significant problem is in design. The remailer network is not designed > to be robust or fault tolerant. There is no error notification to the > user. If your message gets dropped along the way, there is no recovery > system that gets it through another route. If you misspell your > destination address, or other problem exists, you don't get notified of the > event. These are all criticisms of the TCP/IP and associated network mechanisms and not specific faults in the remailer model. It has to work with what it has. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Re: I'm going to count to ten...
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

TruthMonger wrote: > I also sent a letter a few weeks ago to Ted Kaczynski, offering to >carry on his work while he is incarcerated. I got a letter back from >him today, but I'm afraid to open it... TM, Do us all a favor--open the letter!

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Eternity - an alternative approach (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: 16 Jan 1998 22:02:55 -0000 > From: Kay Ping <kping(a)nym.alias.net> > Subject: Eternity - an alternative approach > In one of the messages on the eternity thread someone suggested using > radio signals. This is an interesting approach which certainly deserves > further attention but digital radio requires special hardware which I prefer > to avoid. There is at least one way to do it with standard equipment, course it must be 1-way only. The source takes the phone line from their standard 4800 modem and put it in the audio in (both should be 600 ohm, be shure to use a matching transformer for isolation). At the other end you do the same sort of thing but use the modem to decode the data. You can not have full-duplex with this method, half-duplex only. > Radio is also quite good at hiding the location of the transmitter - you > tune your radio and the signals are just there, coming down your antenna. > It takes special equipment to locate where they originated. Yeah, another radio, a map, a ruler & pen, a omni-directional antenna, and a car. Check out the ARRL for various antenna designs. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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non-transferable signatures (Re: Crypto Kong penetration.) (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 15:30:05 GMT > From: Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> > Subject: non-transferable signatures (Re: Crypto Kong penetration.) > It might in fact be a dumb move to sign messages to the cypherpunks > list -- proving that you wrote whatever, when for example the USG adds > cypherpunks to it's growing list of terrorist organisations. We're an 'organization'? Where is my monthly newsletter?....;) We should also pick our treasurer with some care. It is the prime target for law enforcement since it provides them access to the money records. In general I have to agree with Adam though, in the real world with ubiquitous and surreptitious monitoring signing documents is actualy a liability in many if not most cases. About the only exception is dealing with a contractual relationship. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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forward secrecy for mixmaster & email (Re: remailer resistancs to attack) (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 21:54:34 GMT > From: Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> > Subject: forward secrecy for mixmaster & email (Re: remailer resistancs to attack) > > Make that instant key changes for mixmaster remailers by using forward > secrecy and direct IP delivery to enable the interactive > communications pattern required for immediate forward secrecy. Ulf > Moeller (current mixmaster maintainer) has this on his to do list I > think. I agree. It is probably one of the most misunderstood and must under-addressed problem with crypto in my opinion. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Re: Sun to fight MS w/ new workstations [CNN] (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sat, 17 Jan 1998 00:00:09 +0100 (MET) > Subject: Re: Sun to fight MS w/ new workstations [CNN] > From: nobody(a)REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) > Hmm... Considering that you can buy a PC w/ Linux and have a Unix > workstation for less than the cost of a new computer with NT, I wonder > who Sun is really targetting here. Corporations and businesses which feel more secure with a commercial enterprise backing the system. > Most of the people buying NT are the same people who bought their last > OS from Microsoft, and don't feel like trying anything new. There are *many* businesses which have been unix shops exclusively in the past who are now implimenting NT based servers for a variety of reasons. In some cases the intent is to drop the Unix boxes completely over the span of say 5-10 years as alternate applications become available. It's a bigger market than the home, soho, or individual corporate user at stake. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Re: Legality of faxed signatures.
by Robert A. Costner 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:56 PM 1/16/98 -0800, James A. Donald wrote: >This is a big problem for me, because I want to scare >businessmen into using digital signatures. Part of the process for having a Digital Signature law is to establish the definition of a writing. Since faxes are not writings, but email is, you should be able to scare them into digital signatures pretty easily. -- Robert Costner Phone: (770) 512-8746 Electronic Frontiers Georgia mailto:pooh@efga.org http://www.efga.org/ run PGP 5.0 for my public key

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Re: how to release code if the programmer is a target for coercion (fwd)
by Jonathan Wienke 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 01:41 AM 1/15/98 -0500, Ryan Lackey wrote: >Another attack would be having 5 NSA agents sign a piece of code, but >you could prevent that by having the list made up of distinct well known >individuals who are unlikely to all be bought -- if the NSA wants to >give $100m each to the most frequent 100 posters on cypherpunks, I want >to get in line :) You can have cuts right behind me! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Business Security 5.5 iQA/AwUBNL+2K8JF0kXqpw3MEQK5vgCdH8N7F7fyTkrWn1E+mBhznrIDqZwAnjpG xE2ngJSG0BZJ4crdJb6EAYm8 =huFc -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: how to release code if the programmer is a target for (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 12:29:34 -0800 > From: Jonathan Wienke <JonWienk(a)ix.netcom.com> > Subject: Re: how to release code if the programmer is a target for > coercion (fwd) [my entire previous post deleted...geesh] > Jim, there are > 2 parties in the matter being discussed: EXACTLY. That is why there is a potential for a MITM (requires at least 3 parties) attack. > My key is publicly available at the MIT keyserver; it has been since PGP > 5.0 came out. So what? If Alice is being monitored for whatever reason and she requests your key Mallet simply intercedes and inserts their own key. How is Alice going to catch a clue? > key. It would be fairly difficult for any attacker to forge a signature > with a false key; It isn't the source but the recipient that is under attack. [rest deleted] ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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OK to send e-mail?
by owl＠owlseye.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

OK to send an e-mail to cypherpunks(a)ssz.com?

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Swisskey: Swiss issuing office for Internet certificates established
by Alexandre Maret 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

http://www.swisskey.com/mitteilung_e.html Swisskey: Swiss issuing office for Internet certificates established Zurich/Berne, 18 December 1997 - Swisscom, Telekurs and DigiSigna have established the joint venture Swisskey and thus laid the foundations for secure electronic commerce in the worldwide web. The certificates issued by Swisskey are available to individuals and companies and enable clear and secure mutual identification in the Internet. Swisskey will be registered in January 1998 and will start offering its services on the Internet at www.swisskey.com in the second quarter of 1998. Electronic commerce has good future prospects: telebanking and teleshopping in the Internet and the secure exchange of EDI messages between applications are some of its possible applications. So far, however, service offers and their acceptance have both been limited, since service providers and customers cannot identify each other immediately and are dependent on bilateral agreements. Electronic certificates are the solution to this problem. They offer mutual trust in the otherwise anonymous field of electronic commerce. They allow users to be identified and texts to be signed digitally and encoded in such a way that only the recipient can read them. Users can obtain a certificate from a registration office by showing some form of identification. Possible registration offices are post offices, Swisscom shops, banks and chambers of commerce. "The Swisskey joint venture aims to encourage the development of electronic commerce in Switzerland by offering a customerfriendly, secure and upgradeable certification service," explained Swisskey Managing Director, Christian Graber. Swisskey will offer SSL certificates as supported by all common Internet browsers (X.509 certificates), Edifact certificates for EDI messages and application and companyspecific certificates for uses such as Intranet applications. Swisscom Ltd and Telekurs Holding AG each hold 47.5% of Swisskey AG and DigiSigna (an association of chambers of commerce of Switzerland and the Principality of Liechtenstein) holds the remaining 5%. DigiSigna also aims to win international approval for the Swisskey certificates. For questions: DigiSigna Otto Müller omueller(a)zurichcci.ch Tel. 01 / 221 07 42 Fax. 01 / 221 76 15 Telekurs Holding AG Bernhard Wenger wnb(a)holding.telekurs.com Tel. 01 / 279 22 20 Fax. 01 / 279 23 36 Swisscom Sepp Huber Josef.Huber(a)swisscom.com Tel. 031 / 342 13 00 Fax. 031 / 342 13 10

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