December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

info assembly line, "flits" (long)
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

these are a few ideas I've been working on intermittently for some time on the possibility of an "information assembly line" of the future. Alvin Toffler was one of the first futurists to predict the "third wave" or information economy. we are very steadily moving our way into this new shift, with numerous signs attesting to it, and reactionary forces ("Buchananism", see recent Wired) arising as well. however, we are only at the tip of the iceberg. even state-of-the-art information economies like Silicon Valley I would not consider full implementations of the idea. what would it really mean to have an entire economy that is related to information? (caveat: I certainly am not saying that we will no longer have physical goods, this is a misunderstanding of Toffler's thesis, and anyone who wants more info on this point should consult his writing). Moore's law comes to my mind, the trend that computer capability has been doubling approximately every 18 months ever since chips were first invented. what could this power have on a future information economy (henceforth abbreviated IE)? I tend to think that the future IE will make the current world wide web look like child's play, although it will be built on top of it. we are far from implementing the full capabilities of information technology in our economy. == first, I think the use of microcurrency is going to play a very major role in the future IE. it will allow people to easily own mini-businesses in much the same way the web has allowed everyone to own printing presses. I've written elsewhere on cybercurrency, but I also tend to think it will have the effect of creating new monetary standards. whereas in our current economy, wealth is typically tied to major world economies, particularly the US through dollars, I've said how I think stocks will come to be thought of as a kind of currency, and that any company that sells stock is essentially circulating its own currency. I think the short term effect of cybercurrency is going to be a grafting on top of existing government cash schemes, but that much to their chagrin they are going to eventually realize it tends to make their own regulatory and supervisory role obsolete-- or at least displace it. == now imagine taking the cybercurrency concept and applying it to an information economy. what you will tend to see is that cash transfers will increasingly be automated. cash will be like the blood flow of society. you will see companies automating their payment processes so all the man-labor associated with handling the paperwork will tend to evaporate. you will of course still have verification systems that prevent payment when payment is unjustified, but the massive frameworks and bureacracies inside companies today that are used to deal with cash flows will tend to be automated and diminished in size. == the idea that strikes me most about an information economy is that you're going to see systems that are similar to the concept of the assembly line for the industrial economy. I believe we will literally see information assembly lines in the future. what kind of form would they take? we already have "information assembly lines" in companies today but they are abstract concepts of flow of work that are not fully automated. parts of the assembly line involve people moving around documents, sending letters, having conversations, etc. I tend to think that much of this will be increasingly encoded in cyberspace. a company will see its role as an information processing component. let's say this sample company gets a work order. the primary means of transfer will be through cyberspace. today cyberspace is seen as an adjunct to paperwork-- the paperwork is primary, but you can put the paperwork in cyberspace file cabinets, send it via cyberspace, etc. I believe this will exactly flip in the future, so that the paperwork is seen as an adjunct to cyberspace. the documents will be freely transportable in cyberspace, and one can always track their location, just like one can always see where some object is on an assembly line. the work order will be thought of as primarily a document existing in cyberspace, with it taking various forms in different places on the assembly line based on actions of the information workers, who process it and tie it with other documents, etc. == what does today's cyberspace lack to pull off this vision? after a bit of thought I think one word to describe it might be "continuity" or "persistence". there are so many obstacles in cyberspace to transporting documents. it requires too much manual effort on the part of each person to translate documents into particular formats, send them via email, etc. what we need is the cyberspatial equivalent of continuity: people anywhere can look at the same object and see the same thing, and that thing can be moved around in cyberspace without ever losing its identity. the problem is that today the concept of a "document" in "cyberspace" is merely a concept. I can't point to some "place" in cyberspace when I want someone to grab a document from me. I can't say, "here it is". I have to go through an artificial series of steps to encode the document, such as emailing it, ftping it, uuencoding it, or whatever. what I am getting at is that we need a kind of virtual reality to pull off the information assembly line to its utmost potential. I believe we literally need to create a visual metaphor for the information assembly line that transcends the concepts of email, different computers, etc. I should be able to "pick up" and "move" a document in cyberspace as easily as I move a piece of paper in the real world. the whole system of different servers, different software packages, different protocols, all this should be *invisible* to me in the same way it is invisible on the current WWW. imagine that one actually created a total virtual reality information assembly line. what kind of form would it take? you would see different things that can be done to documents as "tools" that can be applied to them. you would see their locations as simple visual metaphors that ignore the concepts that segregate information. for example, you might see a single file cabinet that represents every record in an entire company, regardless of its location anywhere in that company. tough to pull off? of course, but this is what we are headed towards, in my opinion. === I've written multiple times about Negroponte's ingenious concept of "bits vs. atoms". in the above spirit, I think we need a slight additional paradigm shift on the concept of bits, something I call a "flit". the concept of a bit is too abstract for me. for a virtual reality and an assembly line, I would prefer to say that information has two additional components other than a binary true/false value: a *location*, and a *time* that it is at a location. in this way information better matches our reality that we deal with every day. I would say the "flit" concept is a pivotal missing link in creating an information assembly line. I would say that an information assembly line document is actually composed of "flits" instead of bits. each "flit" can have a different location at different times in cyberspace. it is a sort of "fleeting bit", a bit that can move around to different places. this requires a somewhat radical shift in current technological thinking. currently we see data as stationary stuff that sits in some place, and people come along and run programs that churn up the bits and spit out new bits. but the new bits are not nicely tied to the old bits except through our own memories. == instead I would say that the key concept of information is to say that it has a content and a state at some time. a document composed of a bunch of "flits" can be broken up into its component "flits", and the "flits" can be sent in different directions and recombined into different documents. but because they are "flits", I can *trace* their destinations over time. what does this mean? it is the concept of debugging applied to information technology. imagine that I once had a document, and I want to know what happened to it. because it is made of "flits", I could say, "where did the flits that comprise this document go?" I would get an answer about their entire history-- what programs the moved through, how they were recombined, where they now reside. I could trace backwards too. "where did this flit come from?" -- the system would trace the origination of the flits. what the flit concept does is introduce a *context* to a bit. a bit has no "context". where did a bit come from? the situation with information is that it always has a *context* and is tied with other information. (so in addition, I might like to suggest that "flits" can be "tied together" with each other). when today's software spits out some document, there is nothing necessarily tying that document with the original input except the memory of the humans. I would suggest that the information assembly lines of the future will replace this concept. nothing will be left to the imagination. things that are part of people's memory today will be made explicit in the systems of tomorrow. the abstract concepts we have of systems being "tied" together will look very embryonic and impoverished compared to these new techniques. "flits" would have an identity irrespective of companies. one could track them moving through different companies if necessary. (the "flits" might therefore also have security aspects associated with them.) the point is that the data must not be disconnected, it must be seen as continuous, and I think a flit-like concept is key to accomplishing this. == notice today how much our systems diverge from the flit concept. we are always losing bits, and not tying them together. whenever a system goes down, all those bits evaporate. this would not be acceptable in a flit universe-- it would be like an object suddenly blinking out of existence. obviously we don't consider that an acceptable behavior of objects in our current reality, why should we allow it in cyberspace? cyberspace has a long ways to go. today's cyberspace is barely sufficient for what is required. in a flit universe, I would like to see flits "pile up" in a queue when a machine breaks, like what happens in a real assembly line. the assembly line metaphor is really crucial here. imagine that on some assembly line, all your objects suddenly disappear when a machine anywhere on the assembly line breaks. you have to then run other machines to "bring back" the flits. a ridiculous concept. instead, I'd like to see flits pile up when some machine goes down on the assembly line. once you get the machine running, it automatically starts back going through the flits. a lot of this implies "transaction tracking" by conventional standards. I would suggest that "transaction tracking" and integrity assurance are only the barest rudiments of what is required to pull off an information assembly line. the belief that these are now considered incredibly cutting-edge and state-of-the-art technologies is a good indication of how far we have to go. == I mentioned Moore's law above because I think it takes care of all objections that "so and so that you are proposing would take too much time". imagine that we have virtually unlimited computational capabilities-- what could we then do with this kind of power? tracking "flits" would be an excellent use for all this power, imho. in future essays I may explore further the properties of flits and give more examples.

3 3

Re: Science Lessons in the Mountains of New Mexico
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:39 PM 6/21/96, se7en wrote: >Cryptography may not academic science's only contribution to making >business work in an unpredictable, technology-driven world. If a growing >community of natural scientists, social scientists, and business >theorists are right, then the cryptographic algorithms taht make >electronic transactions secure will soon seem downright prosaic. > >This unusual admixture of pure researchers and real-world practitioners >tends to congregate around research institutions in New Mexico, which has >been a scientific hotbed ever since the atomic bomb project of the 1940s. ... Se7en, I am curious. Did you write this, or is this a forwarded article? If you wrote this, it is very typical of journalistic treatments, and is well-written. You have a career in journalism ahead of you (or perhaps you currently are a journalist, under another name, in which case you should still indicate what your actual journalistic name is, as I doubt you write under the name "se7en." If you did not write this, then you need to start including indications about who did write it, and where it appeared, and that it's a forwarded article. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

1 0

Re: Federal Key Registration Agency
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Michael Froomkin writes: >> I have seen the text of the speech. The wire service accounts wildly, >> wildly exaggerate. This is a non-story...except for AG Reno's assertion >> that it would take the government a year to break one DES message with a >> "supercomputer". She presumably believes this. .... At 07:54 AM 6/21/96 -0400, Perry wrote: >The numbers in the Blaze et al paper are very realistic on this. A >year is total bull -- not even within several orders of magnitude of >accuracy. Actually, it may even be low - Cray-type supercomputers aren't particularly designed for the bit-twiddling you need to do DES well. An application- specific cracking machine can do it several orders of magnitude faster for a smaller amount of money. Wiener's design was two orders of magnitude more cost-effective than the two previous designs (Peter Wayner's content- addressible-memory design and somebody-from-DEC's GaAs chip design were both about $50M for a 1-day crack), and those were substantial breakthroughs when they came out. But yes, she's giving out very misleading numbers for what cracking DES really costs, and I'd assume she's way too competent to be doing so by accident - or at least she should be... As far as Jim Bell's cracking cost estimates go, a Wiener-style machine would cost about $1M for a 3.5-hour crack, or about 7 keys per day with known plaintext. If the on-chip penalty for detecting probable patterns instead of specific ones is small (e.g. first cut is to accept keys which have all the high-bits zero, which is 1/256 of the total), you should be able to do better than three days per crack, especially if it's also not too expensive to haul the key-schedule out of the chip on the 1/256 hits. Double the cost if you think there's a random initialization vector, and do other minor annoying things to the chip design if you're checking for several popular known plaintexts and other creeping featurism, and you're still close. You may be willing to feed the hits from the first round set of crunching into a more normal computer as well... # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs # Dispel Authority!

1 0

Re: Win95 Blowfish Implementation
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>So correct me if any of the following statements are incorrect: >1. Blowfish is not patented and can be used without royalty. According to Schneier's book (which should be authoritative, since it's his algorithm), the algorithm is unpatented and the C code in the back of the book is public domain. >2. SHA can be used without royalty. Yup. Use SHA-1 rather than the original SHA, though; the NSA "updated" it in ways that do appear to strengthen it. >3. MD5 can be used without royalty if the RSAREF library is used, >and if the proper credit is given to RSA. >Also, can the MD5 algorithm be used outside the RSAREF library? In >other words, can I rewrite the code to take in effect MFC classes? Yeah. I think there's even an RFC that comments on it. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs # Dispel Authority!

1 0

Re: Science Lessons in the Mountains of New Mexico
by Deranged Mutant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

So where did you get this promotional hype? At least quote your sources. (Or did you write this?) The tone of that piece sounds like an advert telling me to invest $$$ into Santa Fe Inst. On 21 Jun 96 at 13:39, se7en wrote: [..] > The current thinkers are looking into not just mathematical complexity, > but complexity itself. Complexity theory. Complex systems of any > definition--the weather, perhaps, or the human immune system, or the > organizational behavior of insects--and how their workings and > adaptations might hold lessons for other fields, not least business. [..] Methinks "Complexity theory" (aka Dynamical Systems Theory) is wonderful hype to get research grants. Certain people think by throwing money into this area that they can predict better, when much of theory deals with how these systems *cannot* be well predicted in *some* areas of behavior. Other people over-mystify the complexity of a system and declare *nothing* can be predicted, of course. Something akin to 60s-70s electrical utility exces bragging to each other on golf courses about how they own nuke plants. Hip thing now is for the company to invest in research or use methods based on "Chaos Theory"... you'll be really cool at parties if you drop those words to people. Any form of analysis that uses lots of variables gets labelled as having to do with "Chaos Theory" and the research grants grow, even though it may not deal with those variables as a *dynamic system*. Substance though? Not that studies in compelx systems are useless. By far the opposite. (though the question of useful to *who* is important. Using chaos theory to enhance methods of central control rather than allowing emergent behaviors is one downside of what some people are looking to the Santa Fe institute for.) Other than noting crypto in the first paragraph and mentioning SmartCards, what does this have to do with crypto and socio- political implications of widespread use of crypto? ObCrypto: similarities in literature on chaos theory and cryptanlysis. I've seens refs to using various forms of chaotic equations or cellular automata for crypto, but most of the writers seem ignorant of any crypto-literature (never mentioning that Wolfram's PRNG is crackable, for instance). Backburner Idea: if all 1D CA's are equivalent to LFSRs, and if [need to find refs to this alleged proof] all 2+D CA's have an equivalent 1D CA, then if a crypto algorithm can be duplicated as a CA... Alas I ramble on about ideas which I am not an expert at... Rob. --- No-frills sig. Befriend my mail filter by sending a message with the subject "send help" Key-ID: 5D3F2E99 1996/04/22 wlkngowl(a)unix.asb.com (root@magneto) AB1F4831 1993/05/10 Deranged Mutant <wlkngowl(a)unix.asb.com> Send a message with the subject "send pgp-key" for a copy of my key.

1 0

Re: FW: Bashing "Wired"
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:32 AM 6/21/96 -0700, you wrote: >And notice that increasingly the "journalists" are the quoted thinkers and >strategists in important areas? Someone majors in English, starts writing >for "Netizen" or "HotWired," and the next thing you know they're debating >crypto policy with Conrad Burns and Dorothy Denning. We're in an age where >the medium truly is the message You don't think the rest of the press is truly any better, do you? At least on the net, you get to see the horse's mouth on a bad day, and sometimes you can even meet the people and track down the rumors hat eventually become headlines, and pull the wool over your own eyes. Dorothy Denning may know a lot of mathematics about cryptography, but that doesn't make her any more fit to decide what policies the government ought to enforce than I am. She'll get the technical details correct far more often than Senator Burns, as would most people here, but being a trained ethicist would perhaps be more relevant than being a trained mathematician - it doesn't take that much technical explanation to know that crypto lets you have private conversations. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs # Dispel Authority!

2 1

Reno's Cyberspace Address
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks to LG: "Law Enforcement in Cyberspace Address by the Honorable Janet Reno, United States Attorney General." Presented to the Commonwealth Club, June 14, 1996. http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/addres.txt (25 kb) ADD_res

1 0

Bad Signatures
by geoff＠commtouch.co.il 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Date: Sat Jun 22 18:22:50 1996 On Fri, 21 Jun 1996 10:15:13 "Travis J.I. Corcoran" wrote: > I use a lisp package for emacs that I wrote to automatically verify > signatures on incoming mail, so I already see the 10% of messages > which are improperly signed displayed in a red "bad signature" > font. Thus, I'd have no need of this service. > > Further, it makes philisophical/political sense to me to have > verification distributed. Every node should be doing it's own > security. I am not convinced. For a mailing list it makes sense for all members to be aware of message integrity problems. Not all cypherpunks have your lisp package or Pronto Secure which make signature verification of the 10-20 pgp signed messages per day on the list a non trivial task. I also like the idea that cpunks provides as a byproduct a platform for developers to test and debug their security products. We really should be getting the bugs out of plain text signatures. You cannot expect Joe User to differentiate between an intruder and a gateway massaging the message. Geoff Klein Pronto Secure Product Manager -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBMcwPzkLv5OMYFK1FAQH8tgP/Y/Qai5TQj45CGk7U9OdF5BrdycyQpKuE UfAnlFut/LmgumyiM2wuy6+CPv8mPITAp375rNVx9UxvyRj8Gv8MFfEEuwVFZpNb WbiWvl2yPBCV/ZBlEdmXJUPhfYto3FFjZX6AwKTMXgHd1j7uW3pBGSW24McEjM2I aBQ1iDbLUY0= =Igm9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

2 1

Re: Federal Key Registration Agency
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:09 AM 6/22/96 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: >Actually, it may even be low - Cray-type supercomputers aren't particularly >designed for the bit-twiddling you need to do DES well. An application- >specific cracking machine can do it several orders of magnitude faster >for a smaller amount of money. Wiener's design was two orders of magnitude >more cost-effective than the two previous designs (Peter Wayner's content- >addressible-memory design and somebody-from-DEC's GaAs chip design were >both about $50M for a 1-day crack), and those were substantial breakthroughs >when they came out. It would be foolish to use GaAs to build a DES-cracker. If there's one thing we've learned from the fact that microcomputers have "won" against mainframes, and massively-parallel computers have "won" against super-speed scalars, it is that it is much, much cheaper to build 10 transistors of speed "1", than 1 transistor at speed "10." Presumably, they can get the same amount of work done. The main thing that kept vector (parallel) machines back in the 70's and 80's was the problem of subdividing programming tasks into hundreds or thousands of such tasks, suitable for such a machine. That "problem" is no problem at all for DES cracking, since trying large numbers of codes is inherently a decomposable problem. It seems likely that the most economical solution would be to build the cracker on a not-quite state-of-the-art fab, say a 0.5 micron facility, purchased from some semiconductor company who has one too many old fabs. The costs of the hardware would be amortized already, and the product would be sufficiently fast to help minimize the parallelism required. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

1 0

IAG: "Non-violent demonstrations" planned after Net-attacks
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I subscribed to the IAG list and there's not much (or anything) happening on it so far, but the idea has potential. Here's how to join if you're interested. -Declan // declan(a)eff.org // I do not represent the EFF // declan(a)well.com // ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 21 Jun 1996 11:13:57 -0700 (PDT) From: Marilyn Davis <madavis(a)deliberate.com> To: iag(a)deliberate.com Subject: For forwarding: IAG Invitation Alabama, Australia, Belgium, California, China, Connecticut, Florida, France, Georgia, Germany, Illinois, India, Indonesia, Italy, Jordan, Kansas, Malaysia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, U.S., Viet Nam, Virginia, and Washington. ** INTERNET UNDER ATTACK BY LOCAL AND NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS EVERYWHERE ** Fight Back!! Join the Internet Action Group gathering now on the email list: iag(a)deliberate.com. We will organize simultaneous local non-violent demonstrations at coordinated sites around the world in response to local and national attacks on the internet. Our list has new technology for polling ourselves so we can plan our actions democratically. To join the IAG, send a message to majordomo(a)deliberate.com. Your message should say: subscribe iag This initialization of the IAG is the democratic decision of the cyber-rights list, cr(a)deliberate.com. To join this group or to communicate with us, your message to majordomo(a)deliberate.com should say "subscribe cr". <Please circulate widely.>

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

At 3:12 PM 6/22/96, geoff wrote: >I am not convinced. For a mailing list it makes sense for all members >to be aware of message integrity problems. Not all cypherpunks have >your lisp package or Pronto Secure which make signature verification of >the 10-20 pgp signed messages per day on the list a non trivial task. > >I also like the idea that cpunks provides as a byproduct a platform for >developers to test and debug their security products. We really should >be getting the bugs out of plain text signatures. You cannot expect Joe >User to differentiate between an intruder and a gateway massaging the >message. > >Geoff Klein >Pronto Secure Product Manager Trusting others to perform cryptographic functions (encryption, decrytion, signing, signature verification, etc.) is counter to the usual notions of security. Of course, people are free to ask others to do cryptographic functions for them, to tell them which signatures are valid, and which are not. It's a free society, after all. However, I think there's already enough traffic on this list without having "bounce" messages chastising folks for having signatures that for one reason or another failed their tests. (Could be munging at _their_ end, for example.) Those who want to compile lists of "bad signatures," as determined by their tests, could include a pointer to a URL at their site which says something like "A list of suspected bad or improperly-formed signatures may be found at hyyp://www.key-trust.org" This heads off having a message with a bad sig generating N more messages to the list announcing some conclusion or another about the sig. Not something we need. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

1 0

Re: Bad Signatures
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 18:12 6/22/96, geoff wrote: >> Further, it makes philisophical/political sense to me to have >> verification distributed. Every node should be doing it's own >> security. > >I am not convinced. For a mailing list it makes sense for all members >to be aware of message integrity problems. Not all cypherpunks have >your lisp package or Pronto Secure which make signature verification of >the 10-20 pgp signed messages per day on the list a non trivial task. If you think about the issue in more detail, you will realize that having a third party do signature verification is no more useful than having a third party do your encryption for you. In other words, not only is it not useful, it is downright dangerous, since it provides you with a false sense of security. If someone wishes to bounce messages that don't verify back to the originator, great. But please do not further add to list traffic by bouncing these messages to the list. Thanks, -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. Disclaimer: My opinions are my own.

1 0

Practical Solutions at USENIX SECURITY Symposium
by Cynthia Deno 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

If you are responsible for your company's computer security, you may want to attend the 6th USENIX Security Symposium - Focusing on Applications of Cryptography, in San Jose, CA, July 22-25, 1996. There will be refereed papers, invited talks, BoFs, and Vendor Exhibits. Tutorial speakers include Ed DeHard, CERT; Dan Geer, Open Market; Jon Rochlis, BBN Planet; Marcus Ranum, V-One; Matt Bishop, UC Davis; and Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Systems. For detailed information, please visit our Web site: http://www.usenix.org, or send email to: conference(a)usenix.org. /-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/- | Cynthia Deno | USENIX | | Tel: 408 335 9445 | The UNIX and Advanced Computing Systems | | Fax: 408 335 5327 | Technical and Professional Association | | cynthia(a)USENIX.org | | | Check out USENIX on the Net..........http://www.USENIX.org | /-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

1 0

Programmers and Hackers v/v Patents, Intellectual Property, etc.
by attila 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Addressed to: Bill Stewart <stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com> Paul Penrod <furballs(a)netcom.com> Cypherpunks <cypherpunks(a)toad.com> ** Reply to note from Bill Stewart <stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com> 06/22/96 01:20am -0700 = At 02:57 PM 6/21/96 GMT, attila <attila(a)primenet.com> wrote: = = > personally, I think RSA has been most generous in their = > licensing: a personal use license of the basic algorithm is free. = > How do you suppose PGP really exists? it's free! RSA has done = > more to advance cryptography with this policy than any other in many = > years. the political and public relations benefits to our rights = > to cryptography and the public relations bonanza for public = > awareness is not even estimable, let alone measurable. The Federal = > persecution of Phil Zimmerman was a PR bonanza and a rallying cry. = = One of the main reasons that PKP let people use RSAREF free was that, = mostly through PGP, people were already using it; this lets them both = control the market to the extent that they can as well as letting = free-software writers advance the state of the art and make commercial = companies and their markets aware that RSA is the algorithm to use. = absolutely. if you are being "bootlegged" on a basic conceptual patent by a class of users which are impossible to either regulate or litigate (individual users), might as well maximize your advantage --in this case, the combination of the privacy aware and the intense effort of the government to suppress 1,2,4, and 5 combined for a reward of public awareness which would be difficult to attain any other way, particularly for free --I seriously doubt that even saturation advertising time during superbowl would be effctive! (joe sixpack audience)! = > on the other hand, the Free Software group, despite the = > tremendous value to those of us who develop, does nothing to = > protect our basic freedoms, and place the issue before the U.S. = > (and world) forum. = = The League For Programming Freedom, closely intertwined with FSF, = has been lobbying against software patents for a long time. = Maybe it's a losing battle, but they've been one of the prominent = sets of good guys. And then there are heavy-duty GNU supporters, = like Cygnus Support (which makes its money developing and supporting = free software), one of the co-founders of which was John Gilmore.... = free knowledge is a state of mind. free software takes away the "American" work ethic incentive. when a nation state (or state or world, etc) decides to appropriate the work of a class of entreprenuers (say software developers), there will be no more creative productive results; few, if any, programmers will work 14-20 hours per day, 7 days a week for what could be several years unless they are: a) crazy (good possibility); b) deranged (more than a few whom I know fit this class) c) obsessed (goes with the turf) d) hoping to swing on the brass ring (not the gold ring). I never met or hired a "real old-style hacker" programmer who did not fit _ALL_ 4 of the above categories and was not obnoxious as well. It is the same difference which separates real hackers from programmers: a) what languages do hackers use? any, except they do not waste time on x86 b) where do you find hackers? in a (usually rented) place in the Valley (pick one) in a room littered with old newspapers and fast food bags, lit only by the glow of a CRT... c) what's the real difference between hackers and programmers? programmers code; hackers tweak! = But yes, software patents do mostly suck.... = that's the basic idea. the only useful patents are like those owned by RSA which protect a fundamental principal. The rest of softwware success is marketing and intimidating anyone who copies your basic ideas which are protected by intellectual property rights --often more valuable than a patent. The RSA saga was first published in Scientific America in Aug of 1977 --it's been a long, and expensive, road which may yet pan out before the basic patent expires in 2001 or so. attila -- Fuck off, Uncle Sam. Cyberspace is where democracy lives!

1 0

Re: Cash Is Dying
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:10 AM 6/22/96 -0500, snow wrote: >On 21 Jun 1996 nelson(a)crynwr.com wrote: >> Cash is anonymous. > > And will remain as long as it still is. E-cash is a great idea, >and I hope to see it _really_ working soon, but it will not be anonymous >anytime in the forseable future. > > Also, people won't trust it. Not the people that read this list, I >trust some of the people here, and if they say it works, I trust that. Not >just one, but _all_ of the group I trust. No, people like my parents and >other relatives. People smart enough to read the papers, and smart enough >not to trust everything the "experts" say. After hearing some of my friends and aquaintences rant about the little metal strips in money and how it is a conspiracy to see how much cash you have in your pockets from the orbital mind control satelites, I am just waiting to see what they will say about e-cash. Probibly something about the hidden methods the government will force into the protocol to enable them to track each and every transaction. (Better not say that too loud though, or they might get ideas...) You will know that e-cash is here to stay when the conspiracy freaks latch onto it as the next increment of the "Number of the Beast(tm)". > Cash is easy, cash is plentiful, you can hold cash in your hand >and KNOW that you have it. And you do not have to check in with the bank every time you spend it... --- |"The moral PGP Diffie taught Zimmermann unites all| Disclaimer: | | mankind free in one-key-steganography-privacy!" | Ignore the man | |`finger -l alano(a)teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key | behind the keyboard.| | http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ | alano(a)teleport.com |

1 0

ISAKMP Security Architecture
by Lou Zirko 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Date: Sat Jun 22 14:20:39 1996 Some of the subscribers to this list might be interested in the following URL: http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp/ciscokmp.html It is a link to Cisco Systems ISAKMP distribution. Cylink and RSA have both announced support of the protocol. Lou Z. Lou Zirko (502)383-2175 Zystems lzirko(a)c2.org "We're all bozos on this bus" - Nick Danger, Third Eye -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: latin1 iQEVAwUBMcxHqctPRTNbb5z9AQEGTAf9H+PXHJ1J1c4gfVCqRaRZhI0adRqJAiwk b+B9f8OQMeXcgWiFHtpGtEm5roOQT2qujwjDXLGNKvWCtPbkJvmlbwLgwGkCtykx Ndycy3fjz0oWimCpb+GI2MLPTgs4xMHmMck0TaeVDaxV9+G+GTekOD/jDgNptpxn gmNJbw3Ww84XTUGswLofhBZTikjkhXLgFWv6lx408Yxp65b+XEEneGqGh/k7z9CW BsXFu50y6JN5/aacztWg1krFHXVD8Msw3cqEMQ5YiiKF5lt0VILOxTOLxIURCkim lpTZ9AqDE+2WwVWc3ltumb1kyRKbJQvgcS0i27OHMGlUv0GEk99Trg== =700Q -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

Re: Bad Signatures
by Omegaman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > From: geoff(a)commtouch.co.il > > IMHO Getting message authentication to work correctly should be a > cypherpunk objective. how does posting notifications to the list satisfy that objective? read on.... > Putting something like "Bad Signature Notification" in the subject will > make it quite easy for not-interested readers to killfile. True. But my opinion is that this list isn't the appropriate place for it. Opinions were asked for, that is mine. A separate list maybe... > BTW this is the first time I have sighted the word "veracity" being > used in relation to signatures. Is the term used elsewhere? Could it be > used to separate the integrity property of a signature from its > authenticity property? Oh lord. I don't want to get into semantic hair-splitting. It's the word I chose at the time. It may be the wrong one. Don't read too much into it. To put the issue simply. Bob doesn't like Jane for whatever reason. Jane signs all her messages with PGP. Bob posts false" bad signature notifications" to the list to discredit Jane. Am I to just read Bob's messages and believe the notifications he's posted.? No. I still have to examine Jane's messages myself for signature authenticity. I understand that this is one person who wants to perform this service objectively. But why should I trust his motivations? I still have to do my own individual signature checking to be sure. For this reason, I think the idea accomplishes little. The intentions are good, but I don't see a major benefit. Maybe someone else has another idea or angle.... me -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMcwm5ab3EfJTqNC9AQGl3gP9HD4mhPY6dg69ZaWTeUYEsm+45rDFkgWW mNDbfeudTAgfl6Jdnm+xs0g+yfZcQQUe5g/qBpp0Nk0SRyzzL+mq+U+CJr9GA6Pr Mm3a3JY65mwYqTis1dO4FzHDvmhlN5GaBlQT0HOGPywQZGkMf3IXCGZIDZG7z4lH V6/4Y94A7ho= =paU2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Omegaman <omega(a)bigeasy.com> PGP Key fingerprint = 6D 31 C3 00 77 8C D1 C2 59 0A 01 E3 AF 81 94 63 Send E-mail with the "get key" in the "Subject:" field to get my public key ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 0

Accounting costs: the need for better metaphors
by szabo＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To assess the desirability of a transaction, and to avoid being mischarged, the parties to a transaction have to count up, ie account for, the money paid for particular products and services -- whether making sure that cash payments ar made as promised (eg looking at the display as products are scanned at the store, or the receipt afterwards), or making sure the phone bill is proper. Herein I use "accounting" in this broad sense. I may be paying in cash, but I'd still like to keep track of how and why my cash is going in and out, for many of the same reasons that accountants reconcile and analyze book entries. Right now a transaction log (whether ecash(tm)'s or a credit card's) is the most useful way to do this. There may be other metaphors more appropriate for some circumstances (eg, eg absolute level gauges, rate gauges with high and low water marks, etc.); this is a potentially fertile new field to explore. There may be agents that can do some of the accounting (eg comparing payments made to terms promised, payment limits, etc.), but for the vast majority of products and services software cannot judge the quality or personal desire for the product or service, and thus the net desirability of the transaction. The user must undertake this comparison with whatever information the computer can provide via the display. The user interface and the cognition of the user thus remain the bottleneck to transaction granularity. A big task is to use the power of GUI to come up with new metaphors to make this easier. It is the intuitive yet accurate metaphor that will lower accounting costs. Cryptographic protocols potentially lower only security-related transaction costs such as forgery and extortion. For the normal accounting transaction costs, which are currently too high for micropayments, we need better interactive visual metaphors. For transactions free of records, we need transactions that can be fairly transacted once, immediately accounted for by the parties via a nice visual metaphor, then forgotten. The potential for unresolvable disputes in record-free systems is vast for transactions where this is not possible (probably most of desired commerce: where quality of a product or service cannot be well determined until after the purchase transaction is complete, or where credit is involved). Price is one kind of contractual term; we also need nice metaphors to keep track of other kinds of contractual terms. Lack of observability of the protocol on the part of the user leads to the ability of the counterparty to engage in hidden actions. See "http://www.best.com/~szabo/smart.contracts.2.html" for further discussion of this and other computerized contracting issues. One of the barriers to creating good contracts is determining what the parties want in the first place. People tend to think in terms of standard or stereotyped conditions: payment in dollars, investing in stocks, etc. when there exist a far wider variety of alternative contractual structures that, combined properly, could better meet the parties' needs. I'd like to see tools which allow parties to explore their desires interactively with the computer. In finance this might include interactive personal yield curves, determining the partial order of desires (as in decision theory) for particular alternate securities, derivatives, and synthetics; and so on. Software would then analyze this input, make recommendations, and even undertake automated contracting(*). Metaphors should be developed so that make it easy for lay users to express such desires without extensive knowledge of finance or decision theory. Such metaphors would provide a friendly front end to automated exchanges, auctions, and other online contracting mechanisms. Currently budget programs (like Quicken) provide some of the metaphors, and financial analysis programs provide extensive feedback on the cash flow properties of particular contracts, but a potentially large untapped market lies between in a combination of these two technologies. (*) contracting-like transactions done by automated agents raise interesting questions about what constitutes a "meeting of the minds". Nick Szabo szabo(a)netcom.com http://www.best.com/~szabo/

1 0

Re: CDT Policy Post 2.25 - Senate Encrypti
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>In a historic first that demonstrates the increasing power of the Internet >Community as a political force, HotWired, DIGEX, the Voters >Telecommunications Watch, and the Center for Democracy and Technology have >teamed up to provide a live, interactive "cybercast" of the Senate Commerce >Subcommittee encryption hearing on Wednesday June 26. > >The "cybercast" will provide netizens concerned about privacy and security >on the Internet the ability to participate in the hearing, ask questions of >the witnesses, and submit comments for the record. Details on how you can >participate are printed below. > >This hearing is the second encryption hearing held before the Senate >Subcommittee on Science, Space and Technology; the first hearing was held >on June 12. Subcommittee Chair Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) presided over both >hearings. > Of course except for PRZ they didn't invite anyone who cares about privacy (see later in this msg) What a fucking joke. Typical statist. >TELL CONGRESS WHY ENCRYPTION IS IMPORTANT TO YOU - ADD YOUR VOICE TO THE >CONGRESSIONAL RECORD > >Senator Burns, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and the other sponosors of the >Pro-CODE bill want to hear from the Net.community about why encryption is >important to privacy and security on the Internet. > >Please be sure to visit http://www.crypto.com/ and add your voice to the >debate over encryption policy on Capitol Hill. Responses will be tabulated >and the results, along with selected statements, will be included in the >Congressional Record by Senator Conrad Burns. The restults will also be >featured during the Security and Freedom through Encryption Forum (SAFE) on >July 1 (details on that event are attached below). > >To add your voice to the crypto debate in Congress, visit: > > http://www.crypto.com/submit/ > Right. Sure. And then they have a record of all the ppl interested in cryptoprivacy (keep reading) >ATTEND THE SAFE FORUM - JULY 1, 1996 STANFORD CALIFORNIA > >On July 1, 1996, in the heart of California's Silicon Valley at Stanford >University, members of Congress, prominent computer industry leaders and >privacy advocates will meet to discuss the need to reform U.S. encryption >policy. > >The event is FREE and open to the public, but space is limited and is going >fast. To find out more, and to reserve your free ticket, visit the SAFE >Forum Web Page at: > > http://www.crypto.com/safe/ > And sign up for a free trip to the roundup of people who want privacy. Coming soon to a police state near you. WHY THE FUCK DO THEY NEED TO KNOW YOUR NAME FOR THIS SHIT??? WHY IS NO ONE ASKING THIS??? Look carefully at who's sponsoring this. Who are they, and where does the money come from? Hint: three letters. Notice how they don't use PGP to sign the msg? Wonder why? [///// THIS LINE ADDED BY EZBBS-MAIL / DO NOT DELETE / MSGID-33f107 / END /////]

1 0

NS on TTPs
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

New Scientist, 22 July 1996, p. 10. Crackdown on Net Crooks 'a charter for state snoopers' Britain and France have become the first European nations to take concerted action against swindlers and other criminals operating on the Internet. The governments of both countries last week announced plans to license Trusted Third Parties (TTPs) to act as "honest brokers" for online business transactions. But civil liberties campaigners fear that the schemes may be snoopers' charters, giving police forces and security agencies unprecedented opportunities to spy on the world of business. The idea is for TTPs to act as "introduction agencies" that will reassure each party to a deal that the other has been vetted and is reputable. TTPs will also hand out encryption software that business partners will use to exchange information in confidence. But in both countries, TTPs will be required to release the keys to this encryption to the police or the security services, on production of an appropriate warrant. Currently there are few safeguards to protect those contemplating buying goods or services over the Internet from fraudsters. "Cyberspace has become the new frontier for scam artists," concluded a report released by the US Federal Trade Commission last month. "The scams are not new but the medium is." John Moroney, a senior consultant at the computer consultancy Ovum, believes TTPs are the best way to drive forward the growth of business over the Internet. As online transactions become commonplace, he argues, banks may be especially keen to volunteer as TTPs, to protect their dominance in the financial services market. "If home shopping takes off they could be left exposed," says Moroney. But Simon Davies, director of the London-based civil liberties watchdog, Privacy International calls the plan "naive". He argues that businesses are perfectly capable of setting up secure systems for electronic trade without government involvement: "What is the government doing in this field in the first place?" The British and French proposals, Davies says, bear a strong resemblance to the failed "Clipper chip" plan in the US. The Clipper scheme involved building a scrambling chip into all new telephones and computers. The keys to the scrambler would have been in the hands of government-appointed agencies. "With Clipper it quickly became clear the agenda was broader than initially stated," says Davies, "and that is exactly what will happen in Europe." He fears that if the scheme takes off, companies not using TTP-approved encryption software will instantly come under surveillance by the police or security services. The Department of Trade and Industry in Britain rejects this claim. "The government licensing of TTPs is just a way of enhancing consumer confidence," says a spokesman, who adds that there are no plans to ban non-TTP software. Banks, trade associations and telecommunications firms are the most likely candidates for becoming TTPs, the DTI says. -- Mark Ward [End]

1 0

RE: info assembly line, "flits" (long)
by blanc 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Vladimir Z. Nuri "flits" would have an identity irrespective of companies. one could track them moving through different companies if necessary. (the "flits" might therefore also have security aspects associated with them.) the point is that the data must not be disconnected, it must be seen as continuous, and I think a flit-like concept is key to accomplishing this. ................................................................... Wouldn't this accounting of "flits" require that each of them be assigned a tag? Since this would encompass all the "flits" in cyberspace irrespective of who/where used them, whose "flits" would be counted first, beginning where? And once one "flit" was attached to a document which was maintained as a permanent structure somewhere in someone's database, that means it could not be used anywhere else, and how would this work for copies made of that original document? Once a "flit" was used as a copy and then detached and re-associated with some other document several times, would each new copy carry a record of where it had been previously, so that half of the amount of space of a document would be comprised of the historical record of where that "flit" had been? Sounds very costly. .. Blanc

2 1

Re: Sen. Specter and Kerry move to delay crypto legislation
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:15 AM 6/22/96 -0700, someone anonymous wrote: >Don't confuse Kerry and Kerrey. This was not Kerry from >Massachusetts. Kerry from Mass seemed to have mixed feelings about it. One one hand, he wants more business for his state, but on the other, he's got a military background and is concerned about the so-called legitimate needs of law enforcement. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs # Distract Authority!

1 0

Re: Generation of private key from pass
by Julian Assange 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Matt mentioned difficulty in finding a public domain dictionary that had > parts of speech. The reason I am posting is because a few weeks ago > Grady Ward announced that he was making his "Moby Lexicon" available for > free, and I seem to recall that this included part of speech information. > If so, this could be an opportunity for someone else to explore this > method. Get the Oxford Learner's dictionary.

1 0

SKIP IP-layer encryption release Beta 2.3
by skrenta＠osmosys.incog.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

We are pleased to announce the newest release of our domestic source reference implementation into the public domain. >From this public domain source release, you can build a fully functional IP-layer encryption and authentication package with full key management. Both FreeBSD 2.1.0 and SunOS 4.1.3 are supported in this release. DES, triple-DES and SAFER are supported for encryption and keyed-MD5 is supported for authentication. This source produces a package which contains a loadable module which works with existing TCP/IP stacks. You do not need to replace (or even recompile) your IP stack to use this package. SKIP encrypts traffic at the IP packet layer. Applications do not need to be recompiled or modified to take advantage of encryption. Source and pre-built binaries (for FreeBSD 2.1.0) may be obtained by US and Canadian citizens from http://skip.incog.com/ This software may be used without restriction, for commercial and/or non-commercial purposes. Features of this release ------------------------ o Support for FreeBSD2.1.0 o SKIP V2 compliant implementation using ESP and AH encapsulation. o Support for Authentication using keyed-MD5. o Support for DES, 3DES, and SAFER 128SK for traffic and key encryption. o Support for nomadic users o Support for multiple local identities with different sets of parameters. o Support for multiple CA (Certificate Authority) certificates. o Transport mode is supported. o New Certificate Discovery protocol. o Highly configurable key manager. o Support for RAW AH and ESP protocols. o Diffie-Hellman Public Key Agreement based system. o Support for multiple NSIDs and multiple local certificates. o GUI tool for user friendly manipulation of access control lists and key statistics. o Command line tools for manipulating access control lists, etc. o Implementation of the Certificate Discovery protocol fully integrated into SKIP. o Implementation of X.509 public key certificates. o Implementation of DSA signature algorithm for certificate signatures. o Implementation for MD2, MD5 and SHA message digest algorithms. o Implementation of ASN.1 DER encoding/decoding. o SunScreen(tm) SKIP compatibility mode. o Implementation of hashed public keys as defined in the SKIP draft. Implementation of programs to generate hashed public keys, to convert X.509 Certificates to hashed keys and print both X.509 and Hashed certificates. o High performance Big Number library for Diffie-Hellman calculations. o Implementation is effectively "public domain" and may be used both commercially and non-commercially. o Patent Agreement with Cylink allows royalty-free use of the Diffie-Hellman and other Stanford patents with this package for commercial and non-commercial use. Read README.PATENT for some restrictions. o Inclusion of prime generation program used to generate the primes in SKIP draft.

1 0

Re: Win95 Blowfish Implementation
by David F. Ogren 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Thanks to everyone who replied to my original message. I was confident I could use those algorithms (I wouldn't have spent months on the code otherwise) but I wanted to check one more time before I publicly released software using them. One question though. The following text is quoted from Bill Stewart. > >2. SHA can be used without royalty. > Yup. Use SHA-1 rather than the original SHA, though; the NSA > "updated" it in ways that do appear to strengthen it. > What exactly is the difference between SHA and SHA-1? Is it the left circular shift when generating the W array? I coded the SHA alogrithm according to _Applied Cryptography_ Second Edition. Is that the updated version of SHA? Many thanks. David F. Ogren P.S. Here is the super short description of Hootie: Hootie is a Windows 95 implementation of the Blowfish algorithm. It is a fully graphical interface which includes drag and drop support as well as Explorer launch. It can support both CBC and ECB modes. The passphrase can either be directly entered by the user or the passphrase can be SHA hashed before use. Hootie can optionally add headers at the beginning of the file which automatically select the block encryption mode and confirm good passphrases, or (for people concerned about known-plaintext attacks) omit the headers. Future features include: generation of keys via a TNG (which are then saved to file), using MD5 rather than SHA, and a primitive text editor which which can be encrypted/decrypted to/from. I currently expect to release the alpha version in two to three weeks. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMczT+fBB6nnGJuMRAQGcXgP+LcOp17aHIpoyScq9O8MlK+HcNBUsbdxq KoFEqeDJyyL9pOcn9IdMHvZXmzzdBpEdk2q7DrObhk9z8Dy3jqai4t222upJ2kmn blXGW3zIRdyycGg0ij0GCZzUkD6cSLpe4k5/HdhWhcgyDFx6t95sJIQAm/YIoC1R JTTc86tmjss= =iXHL -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- David F. Ogren ogren(a)concentric.net (alternate address: dfogren(a)msn.com) PGP Key ID: 0xC626E311 PGP Key Fingerprint: 24 23 CD 15 BF 8D D1 DE 81 71 84 C8 2C E0 4B 01 (public key available via server or by sending a message to ogren(a)concentric.net with a subject of GETPGPKEY)

1 0