December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Hassles taking App. Crypt. to Taiwan?
by pclow＠pc.jaring.my 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>If this were Singapore, they might consider it subversive literature, >because it is :-) ...............and the next thing you'll probably say is that Asians live in tree houses and have pet gorillas or whatever :)......

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Re: Netscape and NSA
by jwarren＠well.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:02 AM 01/19/96, Alex Strasheim wrote: >... > >I'm personally a little frustrated by the timidity of industry's >response. I don't understand it. Netscape's interests are clear, their >voice is loud, and their resources are vast. Where's John D. Rockefeller >when you need him? Having served on the Board of a half-billion-buck revenue software for half a decade, I will tell you -- from having once been on "the inside" -- that there is one and only one focus for almost all publicly-traded corporations ... optimization of profits in the next quarter. This *often* involves a broad range of cooperation with government agencies -- especially if/when the corporation is trying to peddle its products to the guv'ment. Corp management *know* how helpful -- or foot-dragging harmful -- bureaucrats can be ... and our current administration has been *hot* to have crypto suppression and wiretap expansion, big time! (The [unproven] word I've gotten from inside of Washington legal circles is that when Clinton hit the White House, the spooks and enforcers were there with endless horror stories about how the sky will fall and vile terrorists will bomb every building if they don't have unfettered electronic snooping freedom. And Clinton, never having dealt with national security issues before and having a total non-record re enforcement or int'l affairs, was totally cowed by the very effective bureau and agency terrorists ... uh, fear peddlers. --jim There is no safety this side of the grave. Never was; never will be.

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NSC_lub
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

1-22-96. W$J: "VeriFone and Netscape Plan Software To Ease Internet Credit-Card Payments." They aim to simplify payments with software for both banks and merchants. The bank software would allow banks to use their existing computer systems to read and process transactions. The merchant software would allow merchants to buy just one software package to put up an electronic storefront and payment system on the Web. Netscape said the software will include a new encryption technology that Visa and MasterCard are expected to announce in two to three weeks. That technology would break sensitive information into 1,024 bits instead of the 128 bits used currently. "AOL, Netscape Are Discussing An Alliance." Netscape and America Online Inc. are in talks to forge an alliance aimed at furthering their lead over the on-line push by software giant Microsoft Corp. "If you can't beat 'em, unguent 'em," Case-squirted an a-oiler. NSC_lub

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Re: Why is blowfish so slow? Other fast algorithms?
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:00 AM 1/22/96 -0500, David Mazieres wrote: >Failing that, can anyone suggest other secure, preferably unpatented, >shared-key encryption algorithms that could encrypt at ethernet speeds >(1 MByte/sec) without using most of the CPU on a fast Pentium or >equivalent processor? RC4 is of course unpatented and faster than anything else. Of course the name RC4 is trademarked, so you could simply call it "the well known algorithm" in your documentation and give the algorithm explicitly. RSA's present legal gimmicks seem to me to be based on the "trade secret" that RC4 really is the well known algorithm, so if you refrain from using the name "RC4", you should be OK. (I am not a lawyer.) T > >Thanks a lot, >David > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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CIA Stashes
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Reuter has a brief story today about "80 secret U.S. weapons arsenals that remain scattered across Austria for 40 years after they were hidden in case of a Soviet invasion" for use by resistance fighters. It says the CIA stockpiled the weapons without telling the Austrian government. The Austrian paper Kurier quotes the U.S. Ambassor as saying the CIA only recently informed Congress about the weapons stash. Does anyone in Austria or elsehere have more on this? ----- In a related matter, on Friday C-SPAN 2 aired several hours of comments and proposals by intel experts before the US Commission on Intelligence Reform. Mephistophelean former NSA head Admiral Bobby Ray Inman proposed among other brain-wavers to reorganize the thirteen or so bloated, bumbling, cat-fighting intelligence agencies: 1. Establish a new International Operations Agency to combine all operations units -- civilian and military -- into one, separate from the CIA -- which he thinks has irretrievably lost operations credibility. 2. CIA to do all intelligence analysis, but no collecting, to avoid contamination caused by "ownership of the data." The military to do intelligence collection and analysis only needed for immediate operations. 3. FBI to do all counter-intelligence, domestic and international, with agents stationed overseas. 4. Defense to do all imagery. 5. NSA/NRO/???, though not named in open session, presumably would continue ELINT and SIGINT. 6. All this will be very expensive, he roostered, intelligence on the cheap is worthless. 7. The total intelligence budget to be made public but no further breakdown of how the the pot of gold is distributed to supplicants is to be confessed. Former Ambassador to China Tilley, a 25-year veteran of CIA operations, emphasized the importance of continuing Non Official Cover operations, which, he said, are invaluable very-long term penetrations. He cited those he set up in China as COS and then revisited fifteen years later as ambassador -- still ferreting deepest of demon red-commie secrets, he black-comicly glowered to the glazed-eyes. NOC, while very expensive, is crucial, he, too, parroted. For the full eye-opening pack of lies to replenish the pot of gold, Tilley co-conspired that a closed session was needed. But all the intel gold-digging experts testified to that, grinning malevolently, thus continuing the grand tradition of looting national treasuries top-secret cloaked by national interest. So, where are all those not-yet-reported CIA Non Official Cover stashes of gold bullion (or $100 bills) to pay the world-wide "resistance fighters" for illusory supremacy?

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NYT New Web Site
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

NYT reported today that it has set up a new web site: http://www.nytimes.com It offers most of the daily articles as well as some from archives. More info on subscription and the offerings at the home page. Subscription is free, for now. Though there is a charge for downloading, and a battery of whistling-in-the-dark copyright proclamations and threats and pleadings. For the Times-addicted, today's WSJ has a page one article on NYT-leadership squabbling, fomented by board member Gerstner, infamous IBM-Lotus espionage-enabler.

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Lan Manager security
by lws＠transarc.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Have you seen an analysis of the security of the LanMan authentication scheme? It strikes me as better than K4, but worse than K5. I wonder if you concur. Since Don and Ted have probably not seen this before, here's the technique as I understand it (summarized from the SAMBA docs). The password is uppercased and truncated to 14 bytes (or padded to 14 bytes with nulls). This is split (0..6,7..13) into two DES keys which are each used to encrypt a static 8-byte value. The resulting 16 byte key is stored at the server. To authenticate a connection, the server issues an 8 byte random challenge. I presume this is returned in the clear since the docs don't specify otherwise, but I haven't sniffed one. The randomness of the challenge doesn't matter so much if it crosses the network in the clear (though I can't understand why they did this), as long as the period of the generator is large enough to prevent replay attacks. The client then pads the 16-byte key to 21 bytes (with zeros, natch), splits it in thirds, {0..6}, {7..13}, {14,15,NUL,NUL,NUL,NUL,NUL}, uses each third to DES-encrypt the challenge, concatenates the ciphertexts, and returns the response to the server. I don't want to prejudice you too much by posting my own thoughts on this protocol, but here are a couple of things that should be obvious: 1. It doesn't hand back free samples of enciphered known plaintexts to all comers for offline attack. This is a Good Thing, unlike some other NOTABLE EXAMPLES. 2. This business with padding the keys out with zero bits really simplifies cryptanalysis. Where my limited expertise breaks down, is identifying just how easy it makes things. 3. I'm kind of boggled as to why they do this multiple encryption of things and then *concatenate* the ciphertexts. If you're going to do multiple encryption, it seems to make sense to pipeline the stages. Doesn't it?

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(fwd) e$: PBS NewsHour, Path Dependency, IPSEC, Cyberdog, and the Melting of Mr.Bill.
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- - --- begin forwarded text Sender: e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com Reply-To: e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com Mime-Version: 1.0 From: rah(a)shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga) Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 10:37:28 -0500 Precedence: Bulk To: Multiple recipients of <e$(a)thumper.vmeng.com> Subject: e$: PBS NewsHour, Path Dependency, IPSEC, Cyberdog, and the Melting of Mr. Bill. I thought I'd crank this out in light of Friday's NewsHour segment about Apple and the path-dependency of the microcomputer market. Contrary to what PBS would have us believe, ;-), the concept of path dependency in technology, and in economics, for that matter, is a proven fallacy. At the risk of sounding credentialist (*I'm* not an economist, either), the NewsHour's Mr. Solman seems to be proof that journalism isn't economics, no matter the journalist's academic credentials. Journalists have to get a story out, and sometimes there's no story in the actual economics of a situation. Certainly there's no story in the non-existance of path dependency. The most famous example of path dependency, the idea that our previous economic choices doom us to repeat those choices forever, is the QWERTY keyboard, which has been proven *not* to be significantly slower than the Dvorak keyboard, its supposedly more efficient alternative. Dvorak, the designer of the alternative keyboard, was also the same person who conducted the "ergonomic" studies (spending our WWII tax dollars, I might add) "proving" it's efficacy, and elevated his keyboard to the status of an urban legend. Dvorak was at worst a fraud and at best deluded with his own grandeur. Reviews of Dvorak's own data show some significant flaws in both research methdology and data handling. In addition, several independent studies since then have shown that randomly selected beginning typists, starting out on one keyboard or the other, have *never* shown any significant difference in typing speed. The Betamax/VHS videocassete war, another example of path dependence, was more one of Sony not having an open standard than anything else. Sony played dog-in-the-manger with it's own technology, and consequently ended up owning the most lucrative market on a profit-per-machine basis, the one in television broadcasting. It also means they were leaving big money on the table where the largest market was, in consumer electronics. Doesn't this sound familiar to Mac fans? Path dependence had nothing to do with it. Consumer Reports did comparisons at the time showing only a marginal difference between Betamax and JVC, and nowadays there is absolutely no percievable difference between the two. I now challenge anyone (including, unfortunately, Apple's own *psychologist*, quoted in the NewsHour piece) to *prove* path-dependence in the current market "hegemony" of Microsoft on the desktop. It ain't so. The reason that Microsoft has business computer market dominance today is *not* because of it's original *perceived* incompatibility with legacy mainframe equipment ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM -- or Microsoft"). Technically, mainframe compatibility was a non-issue at the time. It certainly wasn't for the first 5 years of the Mac's life, anyway. Apple could have done something about the mainframe compatibility issue with simple marketing communications if they had paid any attention to it at all. Apple's heart was never in the business market. First of all, for all their lip service to business, they really weren't ever attracted to the idea of building better word-processing and spreadsheet boxes, even if they did have the best one, before Excel and Word moved to Windows, at the time of the big ramp up of the business microcomputer market. It showed in their attitude to most business people. Outside consultants and mavericks were always the heroes in Apple's commercials, and so outside consultants and mavericks were attracted to the Mac as a computing platform, but large businesses and conformists weren't. When compatibility with mainframes actually did become an issue, for the short time when people were offloading their mainframe data onto LANs, Apple didn't want to be there anyway. With the advent of LANs, Apple didn't build the technology to deal with LANs head on on their own turf, large corporations. Apple built peer-to-peer networks of collegial desktop machines. Unfortunately, they never paid attention to the bandwidth or the multitasking premia necessary for those networks to function properly from the high-volume user's point of view, and, so, when someone downloaded a file from your machine, and you printed something in the background at the same time, you suffered a performance hit if you tried to do anything else. Your mouse jerked around the screen, or your words wouldn't show up in a window as fast as you typed them. With PC file and print servers, this was less of a problem, because those two jobs were offloaded to a seperate machine, whose job it was to do nothing but run a printer, or to serve files. Since everyone had to be connected to these servers the local area network, or LAN, was born. On Apple networks, every machine is potentially a server for everyone else, and everyone is their own print server. Only after PC LANs became ubiquitous did Apple ever build servers of their own. Again, their hearts weren't in it, because they were more interested in the possiblities of more distributed, collegial, peer-to-peer networks. Fortunately, the first problem, network bandwidth, has been solved, because almost all Macs now come with ethernet, while the second problem, preemptive multitasking on faster processors, is being solved slowly. This is all very good for Apple, because peer-to-peer architecture is where the world's going to go anyway. The whole internet is a peer-to-peer, "geodesic" network, where each machine is optimized for it's own particular function, be it serving, or switching information. There is no central repository of anything. That has been Apple's view of networks since day one. If it's any consolation, we won't even need LANs to do business with, anyway. A couple months ago, I saw Netscape running in the bond trading room of this country's largest institutional trustee bank, of all places. In their case, Netscape beat Powerbuilder hands-down in a prototype development shootout. The prototype *was* the production version. Netscape can do anything from secure outside-the-firewall SQL calls to actually conducting cash commerce. Game over. By the way, Netscape is not special in this regard at all. So can any other sufficiently secure browser server combination. Either one, client or server, can be developed for a dime a dozen even now. This is especially true when compound document architectures come on-line, like Apple's Cyberdog, an internet implementation of their OpenDoc software object technology. The reason we won't need LANs is because the only real difference between a LAN and the internet is a firewall for security, and the need for clients to speak Novell's TCP/IP-incompatible proprietary network protocol. With internet-level encryption protocols like the IETF IPSEC standard, you won't even need a firewall anymore. The only people who can establish a server session with *any* machine connected to the net will be those issuing the digital signatures authorized to access that machine, no matter where those people are physically. When that happens, networks will need to be as public as possible, which means, of course, TCP/IP, and not Netware. It's like Heinlein's old joke about space, "once you're in Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere". So, once you've gotten *rid* of the firewall, you're everywhere. So much for the path dependence of the LAN market. What happens to the information concentrated behind those firewalls -- or proprietary software markets, for that matter -- when, because of strong cryptography, firewalls disappear? Remember what happened to those floating globs of grease in the detergent commercial? Surfacted away into little tiny bits. I can hear Bill Gates now: "I'm melting!, I'm melting!". Ding, dong, Mr. Bill is dead... Game over. Now you see why he's fighting so hard to be net-compatible all of the sudden. In this "decade of the internet", the [user interface, platform, desktop, LAN, whatever] is meat, and real life is on the net, to paraphrase William Gibson. For the time being, I have come to the conclusion that the Mac, at least as long as Apple makes most of them, is the computer for the "best of us", and, unfortunately, not "the rest of us". I've learned to live with that. I no more worry about Apple's prospects than I do about Porsche's. I expect that Apple management, like Herr Doktor Porsche, is just waking up to the fact that even though they designed the Volkswagen, they can't possibly mass produce them efficiently at a decent enough profit to advance the state of the art, which is really where their hearts have been all along. Sooner or later, Apple will go back to cranking out 917s, to demonstrate the power of the technology, 911s, for a more affordable version of that power, and 928s, for those of us who only want to look the part. ;-). Fortunately, there are lots of companies, like Power Computing, to produce those Volkswagens for those of us who can't afford Porches, and "Macintosh" won't mean just "Apple" anymore. So, for developers, and for me, a fully-credentialled Mac Bigot and camp-follower, the future for Apple means Cyberdog, because Cyberdog means breaking down large "glops" of information and software "grease" and surfacting them, fractally, into little bitty bits out into the net, where *all machines*, not just dumb Java-terminals, can use them better. It also means developing cryptographically strong internet-level security, so that anyone can talk to any machine from anywhere if they have permission to do so, and *nobody* with out permission can either get in or see what those authorized people are doing, with a packet sniffer, or worse, with a key-cracker. It means building into all network applications the ability to do digital commerce. That is, the ability to handle digital bearer certificates, like Digicash's ecash, and the ability to handle micropayments, like the MicroMint protocol or it's successor technologies. Imagine if your code could send you money in the mail, or if a router did real-time load balancing by changing it's micropayment price-per-thru-packet when traffic got too high or too low. The future of the net's going to be a strange place, indeed. Until that happens, I suppose Porsche parts is still a lucrative business, as long as developers keep in mind what business they're really in. Cheers, Bob Hettinga - -------------------------------------------------- The e$ lists are brought to you by: Making Commerce Convenient (tm) - Oki Advanced Products - Marlboro, MA Value-Checker(tm) smart card reader= http://www.oki.com/products/vc.html Where people, networks and money come together: Consult Hyperion http://www.hyperion.co.uk info(a)hyperion.co.uk See your name here. Be a charter sponsor for e$pam, e$, and Ne$ws! See http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ or e-mail rah(a)shipwright.com for details... - ------------------------------------------------- - --- end forwarded text -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMQO/sPgyLN8bw6ZVAQGuSgP/fkKrI6aTSmPIGOu+LOxRzO5Ptt7QZNxh 48+b7975jIfUMgovphKBWdWtO+jGMCyUWxUVqjVbN8nmwfLT1RZFckOdLK0iM4nD Fgl5+s9yoI0OllHS+oOMcAIyuLIkzazUgtQojm8qBFGSGulW0Keq2dIRNsThGLrk Kk7K3oGMrQs= =71fv -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The NEW(!) e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/

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Re: "Trustworthy" PGP Timestamping Service ??
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:51 PM 1/21/96, Matthew Richardson wrote: >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > >I have recently setup a free PGP timestamping service which operates >by email. > >The objective of the service is to be able to produce "trustworthy" >timestamps which cannot be backdated without detection. It achieves >this by:- > >(a) giving every signature a unique sequential serial number; > >(b) every day making a ZIP file of that day's detached signatures >and feeding the ZIP file back for signing (and hence the assignment >of another serial number); ... It sounds like a variant of the Haber and Stornetta work on digital timestamping, about which much has been written on our list (check the archives, and/or sections of my Cyphernomicon). They have a company, Surety, which is doing this (or was, last time I heard). www.surety.com will get you there. My hunch is that your scheme implements a version of a hash (the idea of hashing the doc and then publishing the hash as a "widely witnessed event," in Haber and Stornetta terms) that could infringe on their patents (assuming they applied, as I recall hearing they did). Before you go much further on this, it would behoove you to check on what they are doing and on what patents, if any, you might need to license. --Tim May Boycott espionage-enabled software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: NSA vacuuming down Internet traffic
by Rick Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

alanh(a)infi.net (Alan Horowitz) asks: >Is there any open source - or otherwise - knowledge or speculation about >which words/phrases the Terra-cycle cpu's are text-searching *for*? If it >were your responsibility to eavesdrop on Iranian terrorists ... >... would you know for sure which words/phrases to key on? It >doesn't sound like a tractable problem to me. There are two parts to this question. First, how do you choose targets? It's been a few years since I read Bamford's book (when *is* the next edition coming out, anyway?) but I seem to remember that there is some sort of "committee" that agrees on what to aim at. It probably contains the usual collection of bureaucrats from military and civilian agencies. Despite the lofty budgets, even the NSA's vacuum cleaner has a hose of limited size. The committee allocates the available resources to prioritized objectives. You can probably predict targets by estimating political priorities and clout of the various agencies, and, of course, by watching CNN. Second, how do you ensure that you capture relevant traffic? I'm sure you start with the obvious -- look at traffic that's definitely relevant and set up filters to find more of it. While it's attractive to want to treat this as a state detection problem (message is/isn't relevant) you really want more of a signal analysis solution (measure likelihood of relevance). Also, a high priority target would probably have its hit behavior evaluated by real humans to ensure that the expected amount of relevant traffic is continuously sucked up. My first job, twenty years ago, involved a prototype speech recognition system under contract for Rome Air Development Center (a traditional cover for TLA research). The machine was supposed to go beep whenever a specified word or phrase was heard over the input voice stream. We joked about testing for the term "Russian Spy" but settled on looking for "Kissinger" instead. That let us run tests by listening to news broadcasts of the time. We built custom boards with Schottky TTL and a blazing fast 120ns cycle time. Times change, eh? Rick. smith(a)sctc.com secure computing corporation

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Espionage-enabled Lotus notes.
by Trei Family 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've come up with a new term to describe the type of 'improved' security in the new International edition of Lotus Notes: 'espionage-enabled' It's specifically built for export, and has a backdoor to enable USG agents to read the messages more easily. From the viewpoint of a foreign purchaser, 'espionage-enabled' seems an appropriate term. If we spread this term sufficiently, we may be able to discourage the widespread adoption of this half-measure, and increase the pressure for good, unencumbered crypto. speaking only for myself, Peter Trei ptrei(a)acm.org

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Re: NYT New Web Site
by take＠imasy.or.jp 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dear Mr. John Young, This is Tsuyoshi Hayashi. At 11:18 AM 96.1.22 -0500, John Young wrote: >NYT reported today that it has set up a new web site: >http://www.nytimes.com Now I visiting there. It's very worth for me. Very very thanks for your info. (^^) >For the Times-addicted, today's WSJ has a page one article on Does WSJ have there own web site, too? - Tsuyoshi Hayashi <take(a)imasy.or.jp> --- hayashi(a)scs.sony.co.jp is no longer valid. --- Please update to take(a)imasy.or.jp

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An IDEA whose time has come (Notes from the RSA Conference)
by Jonathan Zamick 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well the RSA Security Conference is over, and I finally had time to sleep. Thus, I'll give you all a bit of my impressions. First, there were a heck of a lot more merchants this year. Last year, there were about 400 people. This year it was 1100, with a couple hundred waiting. Thus the conferences were a bit more mixed in level of topic. (As one person put it, the more interesting the title, the more likely it is a blatant plug for a product.) On the other hand there were a number of great conferences too. Sadly, I was busy at the Consensus booth and didn't have time for many of them. Last year Clipper was the big issue, but export controls were predicted to be the big issue this year. This year export controls were the big issue, but certificates were predicted to be the big issue next year. Lotus got low marks in everyone's book for setting the precedent of giving the government 24 bits of their key. (As if France is going to be satisfied with that solution.) I didn't meet many Cypherpunks at this conference. Partially it may have been because I was dirt tired after planning the booth in only two weeks, and running it. They had a lot of nice giveaways. I have a metal backed dayrunner which is cute, an etch-a-sketch keychain which is causing rabid jealousy in the office, and a nifty t-shirt with the logo 'A good marketing organization listens to its customers'... then the picture of a woman on the phone w/ two spooks listening in.. finally 'We Hear You... Your NSA'. Needless to say, I like it. Anyway here is the point of the subject from this message. A while back I asked for all your wish lists. One of the big issues was making IDEA available w/ RSAREF. Well, I did even better, you can now license IDEA from Consensus whether you use RSAREF or not. This was the biggest hit at our booth. A number of groups saw a very strong, fast, Swiss block cypher as a nifty thing. Imagine, you can use 128 bits in Europe. Right now I'm trying to convince Ascom to develop a crippled version of IDEA to simply give away if anyone wants it for export. (Like most of the folk here, I don't see a 40 bit key as very valuable, but it is useful for companies which don't have contacts in Europe.) As a little promo, Ascom, the company which developed IDEA, and will be licensing it in Europe, announced a challenge. If you can break one ciphered message in the next year, they'll send you on a vacation to the Matterhorn, give you a nice dinner w/ the creators of IDEA, and be really impressed. :) Anyway, I'll be putting more information up on our web pages about IDEA. If anyone wants info on my Etch-A-Sketch keychain, feel free to send me some mail. If you want info on anything else, you can send email for that too. Take care all. Jonathan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ..Jonathan Zamick Consensus Development Corporation.. ..<JonathanZ(a)consensus.com> 1563 Solano Ave, #355.. .. Berkeley, CA 94707-2116.. .. o510/559-1500 f510/559-1505.. ..Mosaic/WWW Home Page: .. .. Consensus Home Page ..

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No Subject
by owner-cypherpunks＠toad.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

January 15th Fortune (don't normally read it, but I picked up a free copy) has a lengthy and evidently well-researched article bylined Richard Behar on the efforts of BFI, a large regional trash hauler and recycler, to break into the (by most accounts) Mafia-controlled garbage collection industry in New York City. Cypherpunk relevance: BFI is cooperating closely with the DA in helping to prosecute its allegedly mob-affiliated competitors, which raises a lot of very interesting questions, for which I have yet to formulate any answers. Also a sidenote about how NYC's disclosure laws actually aid organized crime by helping the various bosses track who owns what territory. Electronic surveillance. Money laundering. Steganography (sending messages by way of the disembodied head of a dog). Open access to information and free-market capitalism versus violent bozos, with and without uniforms. Pen trumps sword. Rich says check it out. -- Rich Graves Fucking Statist

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The Collapse of Ideas in a Pop Culture
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Someone sent me a note asking about my recent comment that I no longer read "Wired." I replied to him by citing the trendy, busy, information-overloaded, and personality-oriented nature of "Wired"...and its dozen or so direct competitors, mostly GenX rags, plus the several dozen or so tangentially similar magazines that fill shelf after shelf in the Barnes and Noble and Supercrown sorts of superstores. Here's what I said to him: --- And "Wired" is frustratingly repetitive, trendy, over-busy with graphics, sidebars, etc. And the mine of good topics is being mined by several dozen other mags, such as Access, RayGun, Mondo, Details, etc. etc. Many of these are aimed at GenXers, with an explicit focus on personalities rather than ideas. (How many of these mags have had Traci Lords on the cover, for example?) I grew up with "Scientific American" as my standard: long, detailed articles. (And even their articles are getting shorter and more pop-oriented.) --- The Cypherpunks relevance, I think, is that many of the ideas we espouse just cannot easily be covered in a "personality" piece, or in a "freak of the week" (to paraphrase Dave Mandl) photo shoot. Journalists who want "some quick shots" of "Cypherpunks talking about privacy" do a disservice to the deeper ideas. To be fair to journalism, I think several journalists--whose names I have mentioned before, but won't here--do a fine job of in-depth reporting. They are the Jules Bergmanns of our modern age. (If you don't know who Jules Bergmann was, you're a GenXer and can't be held responsible for your ignorance :-}.) There is some hope. When people ask questions about what terms mean, about where to find more information, we don't refer them to articles in "Access" about how former porn queen is really big on PGP, or squibs in "Interview" about how Seattle's java houses are going apeshit over Java....we refer them to "Applied Cryptography," to "The Puzzle Palace," and even to articles on digital cash in "Scientific American." I wander through the cavernous bookstores that are so common these days, with miles of aisles, and wonder how I ever got educated in an era when a "big" bookstore was a Brentano's that would now fit in just the _magazine_ section of a Borders or Bookstar or Barnes and Noble. (Hmmmmh, attack of the killer Bs?). The answer is that in-depth study of ideas hasn't changed much. The Tofflerian idea of "overchoice" is solvable by simply ignoring the ephemeral cruft that threatens to engulf us. --Tim May Boycott espionage-enabled software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Hassles taking App. Crypt. to Taiwan?
by p.ruhnau＠jinxed.dinoco.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 21 Jan 96, TCMAY(a)GOT.NET wrote: > On the Taiwan side, though, they may wonder why you brought an > expensive > U.S.-printed copy when you get the special rice-paper edition of "Applied > Cryptography, 2nd Ed." for the equivalent of $2.25 in Taipei's book stalls. Can anybody tell me the addresses of taiwanese mail-order bookstores, please? MfG, Peter -- #define putc(c,fp) (--(fp)->_pc<0 ? (*(fp)->_pt)(c,fp) : (*(fp)->_cp++=c))

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DigiCash Ecash - 2 security topics
by Bryce 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- An entity calling itself "Marcel van der Peijl" <bigmac(a)digicash.com> is alleged to have written: > > (I wrote:) > > E.g. has there been a DigiCash response to Ian Goldberg's > > publication of a denial-of-service attack which operates by > > spending a coin with the same serial number as your victim's > > coin? > After discussing things with Ian we came up with several solutions. > One is encrypting more messages (which we will do in a next revision > of the protocol), the other is enabling ecash to work over ssl > servers. You may not see the answer directly in the list, but you > will see it in the next protocol revision. What kind of performance hit does this new encryption entail? (No additional performance hit if SSL does it, I know.) Are you considering having different protocols for SSL-protected transactions versus unprotected ones? Let me repeat something I said a couple of weeks ago: I suspect that the weakest point in DigiCash security is on the end-user's own harddrive. A malicious cracker could write a Trojan horse or even a virus which would steal the user's coins and send them to himself. Hm. Now that I think about it, if the user has a back-up copy of those coins then he can reveal their blinding factors to the bank after the theft, thus catching the thief! So the thief program would have to deposit those coins with the bank, make a new withdrawal (ouch!) and then steal the new coins. I'm not sure that anything can be done by DigiCash or by Ecash- issuing banks to prevent this, but I thought I'd mention it. (Hm. The program also has to steal the user's password in order to make the withdrawal.. This is getting to be a pretty smart program!) Regards, Bryce "Toys, Tools and Technologies" the Niche New Signal Consulting -- C++, Java, HTML, Ecash Bryce PGP sig follows -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Auto-signed under Unix with 'BAP' Easy-PGP v1.01 iQCVAwUBMQPWs/WZSllhfG25AQHv2gQAuJsZqQh+IF0vk8C2OY9zsvMlbqN0+GxN LinbZhWRDlqcRJ69dtzYDhbuvDphHuQYdNUJka5r3Bzplj5tim3sJ+wvEF2eiXTO vUSXrJ8DvnZPji+qEuv1Zs5D8gXdFs2ALsUbsDxQxVrVlcTbDKnz2EQel0apzqld VTV8CFvHaRY= =i3hX -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Netscape + Verifone
by Perry E. Metzger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

My pager delivers me selected miniaturized Reuters news stories. I just got one that reads: REDWOOD CITY, CA - Netscape Communications Corp. and Verifone Inc. will devise a system to make electronic payments on the internet more secure. Anyone know anything about this? I'm away from my normal sources of such things (like Bloomberg terminals)... .pm

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Lotus key breaking?
by Thomas Grant Edwards 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hmmm...how long is the single private key of Lotus Notes? Is it time to warm up the key-cracking net again? VTW Billwatch #33 said that: >LOTUS BLINKS IN INDUSTRY/NSA CRYPT STANDOFF ... >On Wed, Jan. 17th, 1996, Lotus announced that it had increased the key >length of its International version of the Lotus Notes product to 64 >bits. They did this by building in a back door for the Administration to >use to decrypt any international traffic that it might desire to read. >Although there are a lot of reasons why we think this is a terrible idea, >the first one that springs to mind is the fact that the one public key that >Lotus has embedded in all their software is a single point of failure >for every International Lotus user throughout the world. ... >You can find a copy of the Lotus press releases at >http://www.lotus.com

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ecash
by Juzzy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello, I'm new to this mailing list and i was wondering if someone could post me some information on ecash, what it is, and its implementation. Thank You Justin Walker

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Crypto comedy
by dmandl＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

During some free time over the holidays, I finally got around to HTML-izing a bunch of articles I've had published over the years. These are among the most riotously funny things ever written. However, one of these pieces may be of particular interest to cypherpunks, as it revolves around cryptography. Be warned that the piece has no scientific merit whatsoever, and even misuses some archaic crypto terms. I was aware of it at the time, but I knew that 99.9% of people would never notice. (This was six years ago, long before cryptography became hip.) The piece is called "Ching Chow's Hidden Agenda." (Ching Chow was a comic that used to appear in the New York Daily News.) That's: http://www.wfmu.org/~davem (choose the "Some things I've written" option). There's some other interesting stuff on my web pages as well, with equally little scientific merit. --Dave. -- Dave Mandl dmandl(a)panix.com http://www.wfmu.org/~davem

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Re: Ultimate Paranoia
by Lou Zirko 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:10 PM 1/22/96 +0100, Anonymous wrote: >Fellow Cypherpunks, > >I have been lurking around for some time and I have learned alot, But I have >a few questions that I either haven't seen posted or I've missed all together. > >I keep PGP stored on a removable hard drive and keep it under lock and >key when it's not in use. I write and encrypt messages on a stand-alone >computer, >that I only have access to. My passphrase is rather long and full of gibberish, >But I still fear the other things that I can not control. > >Does anyone make and sell a device that emits white and pink noise? > >How do you take the randomness collected from radation sensors to create >a truly random sample for creating a PGP key? > >Is there anything else that I might be missing besides lining the walls & >computer >in tin foil? :^) > >Thanks for your help! > >-Murphy > >-- There is a windows sond package that will generate brown, pink and white noise. The package is called Cool Edit. The currrent version is 1.52 and is available from : http://www.netzone.com/syntrillium/ Hope this helps. Lou Z. Lou Zirko (615)851-1057 Zystems lzirko(a)isdn.net "We're all bozos on this bus" - Nick Danger, Third Eye -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6.2 mQCNAzBLJocAAAEEAMlDzYJPYq0pvfMuSiKU0Y65L2nJql+qEJHYGjO5Pys4prDw YW1ooPWaqrPQAy/eyqrM7I9KNFDCtmaPxtgcPw2oEDfc/w6cPkrVzvovKLfHQvtg V/hHUekptSf6j525omrVAoM9MxVL3sEGCjn9VrTeC3h9upkfntHOJeL88i2NAAUR tB5Mb3UgWmlya28gPHppcmtvbEBkYXRhdGVrLmNvbT4= =Qlxm -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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No Subject
by owner-cypherpunks＠toad.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In article <9601200326.AA09366(a)toad.com>, Peter Trei <trei(a)process.com> wrote: > > > If they're nasty, they'll check on the receiving side as well, to > > > ensure that the LEAF and/or the espionage-enabling key have not been > > > patched in the sending 'International' version. > > > > Nearly impossible. Why? Because they can only include the public key, > > and not the private key, of the GAK authority in the code. You can > > encrypt the three bytes of key, but it is very hard for a receiver > > other than the govvies to read them. There is no shared secret > > information or private information available, ergo, they can't check > > their LEAF equivalent. > > Think it through. [suggesting that Alice encrypts 24 bits of key under NSA's public key, Bob repeats calculation and checks that the two LEAFS are the same] > Thus, you can prevent a non-complying copy of Lotus from talking to > a complying copy of Lotus, which is one of the goals of the GAKers. No, you're wrong, the process you've described does not work. Note that RSA normally is used as probabilistic encryption: encrypt the same plaintext twice, and you'll likely get two different ciphertexts. Thus, if RSA is used in the normal probabilistic way, the receiver can't tell whether the sender was compliant. Now you might suggest that the sender should not include probabilistic padding, and use RSA deterministically, so that (somehow) the receiver can check whether those 24 bits are correct. That again won't work, since a third-party eavesdropper will be able to do a 2^24 brute force calculation to recover those 24 bits. There are complicated ways to prevent a non-compliant copy of Lotus from inter-operating with a compliant copy (as others on cypherpunks have kindly pointed out), but they are complicated, and would require a re-design of Lotus Notes' encryption module. Since the export version is interoperable with the non-export version, this would seem to require too much foresight and work to be very likely. In any event, I've heard that the export version of Lotus Notes 4 always sends a LEAF, but the receiver never checks it. So I think a simple binary patch to change the NSA's public key should work. P.S. So does anyone know how large the NSA's public LEAF key is? - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBMQKzSyoZzwIn1bdtAQF/zAGAxODShPqrBQLsWzRVAkW7+jbVJidQIF5q 1Jyisn2EedTQoBLHnZD7ojnmws807XZK =bRAO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: More thoughts about digital postage (was Re: Digital postage and remailerabuse)
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:42 1/22/96, Alan Bostick wrote: >People asked in earlier in this thread how remailers could issue digital >postage stamps without being able to know who is using which stamp issued. > >One obvious approach is to use blind signatures. Sure. That is the obvious approach. It also is, IMHO, by far the best. One minor problem is that the blind signature technology has been patented by its inventor, David Chaum the ower of DigiCash. You can't just write your own implementation. You also don't need to. Just use DigiCash's Ecash for postage. There is some work being done on a new MIME based remailer standard that would allow this to happen. At this time, the big problem seems to be keeping the message size constant between hops. See the remailer-operators list for the current discussion. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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Re: DigiCash Ecash - 2 security topics
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:26 1/22/96, Bryce wrote: >What kind of performance hit does this new encryption entail? >(No additional performance hit if SSL does it, I know.) Very little. >Are you considering having different protocols for SSL-protected >transactions versus unprotected ones? It isn't just an issue of SSL vs. unprotected. The new Ecash API that DigiCash is jointly designing with developers, will support two basic levels of operation. The first is similar to today's Ecash software. The client handles the transport. The second just generates the messages. Your application is responsible for getting them to where they should go. Presumably securely. >Let me repeat something I said a couple of weeks ago: I suspect >that the weakest point in DigiCash security is on the end-user's >own harddrive. A malicious cracker could write a Trojan horse >or even a virus which would steal the user's coins and send them >to himself. Given the amounts likely to be found on a drive, I doubt it would be worth the effort. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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