December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Q.E.D. reply to Perry Metzger
by cypher＠cyberstation.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > IPG Sales writes: > > Some of you have sardonically written to say "Nihil Est > > Demonstrandum," N.E.D. because an OTP must be derived from a > > hardware source, that is, it must be a pure random sequence > > of limitless entropy. Accordingly, they unbashfully assert > > that an OTP generated by a computer program is not possible. > > > > How do they know that? Does the Bible tell them so, or the > > Koran, or do they get it from the Torah? Why not cite the > > source of their certainty instead of advancing an unsupported > > proposition. > > See Claude Shannon's papers on information theory. [Available as: C.E. > Shannon, Collected Papers: Claude Elmwood Shannon, N.J.A. Sloane and > A.D. Wyner, eds., New York: IEEE Press, 1993.] > > Shannon invented information theory in 1948 and 1949. Part of his > papers discuss the information theory of cryptosystems. He > mathematically proved that only a O.T.P.. using non-reused physically > random numbers could provide what he termed "perfect secrecy". I > accept mathematical proofs above the Koran or the Bible. (The Torah is > a subset of the Bible.) As in so many other cases, you are so F.O.S. that it is unbelievable. Your eminence pontificating about it does make it true. Furthermore, Shannon certainly did not prove that physically random numbers are required to provide what he termed "perfect security." I believe that closer reading and interpretation will reveal that what he was saying was that any mathematical series other than truly random numbers can theoretically be reconstructed by some means, including brute force, should that be required. Obviously that is true. I do not disagree with the fact that brute force can be used to attack the algorithm that I have advanced. It you try all of the possible OTPs, PRNG encryptor streams, against the ciphertext, then only a limited few and maybe only one meaningful plain text can be obtained. There is absolutely no dispute about that. Accordingly, Shannon is quite correct in saying that it is not "perfect." It is not perfect in a mathematical sense, and in that limited sense only, you are correct. However to try all possibilities, is mathematically impossible - thus the algorithm must be attacked analytically - as EVEN you, or anyone else, will be able to clearly see, if you examine the algorithm, it cannot be attacked analytically. My algorithm most certainly does NOT produce a theoretical pure Random Number Stream, accordingly it is a PRNG, but it most certainly does produce an OTP that meets each and every requirement of such, other than some theoretical definition that you seek to impose on it by your dogmatic words. You do not have to take my word for it, the FULL ALGORITHM, which has never before been published, is set out on our web site. There is no mathematical proof that my PRNG streams are not an OTP - because they are OTPs. There are 156.8816 megabytes of raw encryptor stream data at our site. They constitute 10 OTPs, all using the same key, only the message numbers vary.but with different message numbers only. > > I do not mean to be rude, > > You are anyway. > You are so vane, so crass, so dogmatic, so blinded by your opinions, that you obviously look at yourself in the mirror wheneever given the opportunity. You do niot know what the hell you are constantly pontificating about. talking aboutand including the one under discussion herein. Why not show everyone your prowess by telling us what the key and the As, Bs, and Cs, are they were used to generate the 156.8816 megabytes referred to above. Of course, you cannot, so you bray like an ass to cover up your crypto impotence. > > but excuse me, what > > scientific proof can they offer for that immovable avowal? > > See above. See above > > > There is no scientific proof whatsoever, none at all, > > See above. See above > > > except > > for the words and their steadfast, and maybe self serving, > > postulate. > > See avove. See above and below > > > Accordingly, obviously it is they, not us, who are > > the ones that have "Nihil Est Demonstrandum," in this matter. > > See above. See above > > > There is not one scintilla of sustainable evidence to support > > such a doctrine. > > See above. See above and below. > > > While the vast majority of people knowledgeable about > > cryptography have not heretofore believed that it is possible > > for software to produce an OTP, > > It is not possible. It is absolutely possible, Q.E.D. > > The information content, or entropy, of the key stream is necessarily > no larger than its keyspace. That is, if you have a software > pseudo-random number generator using an N bit seed, the entropy of the > keyspace is necessarily never greater than N. This is mathematically > certain -- no amount of prayer on your part can change that. > > > that does not make it a > > scientific fact, More of your meaningless B.S. - Obviously you wrote your reply before you read my entire message. > > Sorry, its even better -- a MATHEMATICAL fact. > You saying it, like a lot of other supercilious crap that oozes out of you brain as "write bites," does not make it so. All kinds of crap is running loose up there, you need to get it under control someway. It is absolutely not perfect in the Shannon sense, but it does not have to be theoretically perfect to fulfill the requirement of being an OTP. You definition of an OTP, or a OTP as you mistakenly refer to it, is an extraneous mathematical definition that people have mistakenly extrapolated from Shannon. > > In support of their position, some have pointed out that John > > von Neumann, to paraphrase, stated that ARITHMETIC cannot > > produce random numbers, > > von Neumann meant any deterministic algorithm, actually. > There you go again, pulling things out of you crazy hat, head, running off at the brain again, stating a falsehood and hoping that people will overlook it. I assume that you held a seance with von Neumann and he told you that from the great beyond, since that is clearly not what he said. A careful reading of von Neumann does not reveal that he said one thing and meant another. He used the word ARITHMETIC, if he meant something else he world have said so. Furthermore, he was referring random numbers, and to repeat emphatically, my algorithm is a PRNG, but it also happens to be an OTP, as we can prove. Q.E.D. > > We stipulate the obvious fact that the encryptor stream > > generated by EUREKA is a PRNG stream, though we do consider > > it gross denigration to castigate it as ONLY a PRNG stream. > > If it is a PRNG, you do not have a One Time Pad, period. What you have > is a stream cipher. > It is a stream cipher, but it is also an OTP, just as a hardware sourced RNG is a stream cipher that is also an OTP. > > Furthermore, past examination has shown you have a POOR stream cipher. > Did you see the movie, Dumb and Dumber - you are obviously getting dumber and dumber and dumber - would I have come back to you 5 months later with the same thing - you are obviously brain dead - as I have stated on numerous occasions, the previous proffer was only a part of the overall algorithm, to solicit help from some of the cypherpunks, which I did get. The so called breaking with "Known Plain Text," was an absolute farce, it would have applied to only one message where it could be applied, if at all - it did not apply to the whole system, each OTP was, and is completely different - but that is beside the point, we did make some changes to negate other possible attacks, but those were modest changes. Any one that looks at the algorithm, which obviously, as a self proclaimed crypto Diety, you have not deign to do, can determine that it is in now way what you have looked at before. > > It is a PRNG issue that also happens to be an extremely well > > behaved OTP sequence, with limited but ample entropy, as well. > > If the entropy is limited, you do not have a One Time Pad, period, end > of discussion, its over. > You say that Shannon, or you, or someone can prove that mathematically, so let's see someone do it. 156.8816 megabytes of raw encryptor stream output should be enough to work with - if you need more, I can provide same. I agree that theoretically it can be broken by brute force but that is patently impossible as you can quickly discern if you examine the algorithm and try it, instead of salivating your mouth off with baseless blabber. Obviously, my algorithm does not produce a pure random stream. I agree with Shannon that it is not "perfect," but it most certainly is perfect enough to meet any and all practical requirements, now and forever. > > It meets each and every criteria rationally established for an > > OTP in all reasonable aspects. > > Set by WHOM? By you? Your criteria bear no resemblance to those > accepted in general. Are you one of those people who sells someone a > loaf of bread and says "this is an automobile, by every criterion I > have set for automobiles"? > There you go again, strutting about and spreading your pretentious turkey droppings, manure, all over the place. As you know, I headed the OTP group at NSA, and while there I conceived and implemented, under the direction of Abraham Sinkov, Dottie Bloome, Leon O'mera and William J. Cherry, LONE STAR, the Library of ONe time pad Encryption Statistical Analysis Routines. I was responsible for the generation and computer analysis of OTPs at NSA. I have worked on thousands of OTPs, both in the generation of, and comprehensive analysis of same, including looking for repetitive usage of the same OTP, including direct as well as nth degree derivatives, over the last 40 years, at NSA and at Mauchly-Wood. I make no claim that I am the world's greatest OTP authority, or even an authority on them like you obviously THINK you are, but I think that I have more than a little knowledge about the subject of OTPs. That brings up something that utterly fascinates me. Which is your frequent oblique writings about VERONA, or is it VENONA, or maybe it is VERONICA, or maybe even VERONIKA - anyway you know what I mean. Would you be so kind as to enlighten me, us, about that subject - I would like to finally find out what really happened from an authoritative source. How were we able to break some of those messages. Please help me, us, out with details instead of blabber. For those who have not seen my resume', it together with dozens and dozens of references, many of whom are well known, and some of whom you may know, is posted on our web site, but obviously that does not prove anything, except to provide a point of reference. The point is that we have disclosed the complete algorithm, for the first time at the web site, so let's see someone provide us with the key or the ABCs. Our server is downloading an enormous number of the algorithms/data/statistical tests, over 1,000 so far, so we assume someone is testing it and evaluating it. And for you to claim that my contention is analogous to comparing bread to an automobile, petty nonsense and mindless hyperbole. > > Think about that simple supposition for a moment. What do we > > mean by an OTP? > > Something different from what everyone else means, so it makes no > difference. Obviously something different from what YOU, and most others, mistakenly think it means. It is not some esoteric, theoretical mathematical meaning that has no relation to our real world. It is a tool to encrypt and decrypt messages with, it is not a mathematical formula. If you say that a random number sequence is not generated, I agree. If however, you go on and add that, "thus by definition it is not an OTP," then that is patently and absolutely a false statement, though subscribed to by most of the cryptography community. You are a mix-master stirring up cryptography and IT, and you simply cannot homogenize them into a fully blended mix. I assert that an OTP is a tool used for encryption which by definition, can never be used again, and which consists of a sequence of bits which can not be derived by any POSSIBLE, not theoretical but POSSIBLE, means. Granted, our stream could theoretically be derived by trying all of the possible 10^34322 keys/table values, but that is theory, it is absolutely clear that there is no way to try all the possibilities, or even the first 800 bits of an encryptor stream. Any relatively informed mathematician can quickly discern that there is no analytical attack that can be made against the stream, it is that simple, as readers/evaluators will find. If the only method of cracking the system is by brute force, and that is impossible, then it is absolutely an OTP for encryption and decryption purposes, which is its purpose - it is not something to define in IT writings. Our algorithm is absolutely not perfect in the theoretical sense but it is PERFECT as far as the ability to determine the underlying plain text is concern. > > > Not only that, but you can prove it to yourself, Q.E.D. We > > maintain that it is discernible to any knowledgeable person > > who probes the algorithm, that the only analytical tack that > > can be mounted against EUREKA is brute force and that is > > patently impossible.. One of your Cpunk colleagues says he > > uses Triple DES, 168 bits, and he does not believe that it > > can be brute forced - I agree, 3-DES, 10^50+ possibilities, > > cannot be brute forced now, or in the foreseeable future - > > then what about the EUREKA's 10^34322 possibilities, > > 10^34271+ greater than 3-DES? No way, not now, not ever. > > Furthermore, EUREKA is an order, or more, magnitude faster > > than triple DES, easier to use, much more secure, etal. > > I believe that we have already established that your cipher is easy to > crack, so your claims that it is hard to crack really don't matter. > > Perry > To repeat, we have made some a changes, and for the first time disclosed, detailed, the FULL ALGORITHM at great length at our web site. The reason that you do not want to argue that is obviously because you are absolutely impotent in that regard and you are unable to dispute facts, so you blindly conjure up some witches brew of words and think that people will never know the difference. To paraphrase John Dean, the truth will always come out and your ass braying will never stop that truth. Don Wood,

1 0

Blue Box Plans & hacker bbs's
by h2＠juno.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I know this is my second question in a short period of time...but anyone got or know where to get any good blue box plans?? I cant find shit on the web, and I need some good hacker telnet bbs's. Someone please give me either. THanks HeLiUM

2 1

Re: Stego via TCP/IP (was Re: crypto wish list)
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>>Where is highly sophisticated stego? >>What are our options? >>- Stego in english text. >>- Stego in audio and graphic file formats >>- Stego in Internet Phone protocols. >>- Stego in Internet video conference formats My experience with CU-SeeMe has been that it loses huge quantities of data, though that's partly because I've only used it over 14.4 modem, which isn't really fast enough. If the data formats are documented, it wouldn't be hard to add a few frames of "pictures" every second or ten that are designed to get sidetracked. CU-SeeMe can talk one-to-one, but is generally used through "reflectors", which are conference bridges. One technique is to stego-equip both the client and reflector; a more generally useful but harder method would be to see what you could get to pass through a reflector between two stego clients. Motion pictures in general give you a lot of slack; not only do they have high data rates from uncheckable sources, but you can hide data in ways you correct later, e.g. for Frame1 ... Frame2 ... Frame3, where the values for a given pixel change between Frame1 and Frame3, you can encode some bits by picking whether the change happened between Frame1 and Frame2 or Frame2 and Frame3, and your output is perfectly valid video, readable by anybody, only a bit fuzzier than it might have been from that cheap $89 camera you're using in bad lighting with the ceiling fan going in the background. Stego in innocuous-looking data is another approach. Send those spreadsheets of traffic data or SNMP stats or daily sales of products from your supermarket or whatever! I've been wondering about _un_sophisticated stego, for cases where you're trying to slip below the radar of simple bots or dumber eavesdropping thugs. For instance, you could send that DOS executable .exe or animated GIF which really _does_ expand into the cover-traffic file or generate the annoying flaming background for your web page, but which also drags along a bunch of stegobits that the executable thinks are just data it's ignoring or the GIF thinks is past the last frame. Then there are pictures which have inherently high entropy, so you can get away with a lot more stego - like the animated cloud picture movie you interpolated from the weather satellite photos, or the photo of the wheelbarrow of sawdust. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk Imagine if three million people voted for somebody they _knew_, and the politicians had to count them all.

3 2

Re: extortion via digital cash
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:46 PM 10/15/96 -0500, Andrew Loewenstern <andrew_loewenstern(a)il.us.swissbank.com> wrote: >scottb(a)aca.ca writes: >> I was wondering, what if you demanded payment via Ecash, >> through nym servers, aliases, etc. From what I understand, >> it is just like cash, ie: no record of transaction, but you >> get the added bonus of not having to meet the other party-like >> a fund transfer. > >This has been discussed quite a bit on the list before and there is even a >bit about it in Applied Cryptography. Basically the extortionist must be >careful in how he arranges payment. As Andrew says, yeah, you can do it. Chaum's Digicash is currently implemented as payer-anonymous but not payee-anonymous, primarily because Chaum's worried about this kind of problem. But Chaum's original mathematics give payee-anonymity as well, and there are ways to adapt the payee-non-anonymous implementations to get that back (though you'll have to write your own application code to do some of it.) In some implementations it's sometimes easier to be payee-anonymous if you're willing to take the risk of double-spending (i.e. trust the payer not to double-spend the money before you can take it to the cambio to trade it for unmarked money.) And, yes, there are all kinds of scary applications for it, such as Blackmail, extortion, ransom for kidnappers (which breaks the main connection that police have with those kidnappers who really _do_ want to collect the money and return the victim alive), and paying assassins (who have less risky payoff problems.) It also has many non-scary but politically incorrect applications, such as making change and trading foreign currency (aka money-laundering), paying for politically incorrect recreational substances, bribing politicians to do things they shouldn't, bribing government employees to do things they should but aren't, getting paid for work without the inconvenience of taxation, etc. Tim May's Cyphernomicon and the various Blacknet authors talk about this in some detail. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk Imagine if three million people voted for somebody they _knew_, and the politicians had to count them all.

1 0

Re: Car Rental: Refusal to take Check Cards
by drose＠AZStarNet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 20 Oct 1996, Black Unicorn wrote: >Go try it out. Renting cars with cash, while possible, is extremely >difficult. Piffle. Just look for the sleazy little car rental outfits. I quote from the Tucson, AZ yellow pages: "Cash Deposit Accepted. Rental Into Mexico." "Cash Deposits Accepted. No Credit Required." "Yes, We Can! Mexico! Cash Deposits!" "No Credit Card Needed. Se habla espa~nol." "Save A Buck. Used Car Rentals. Low Low Rates. Clean-Inexpensive-Dependable. Se Habla Espanol." Seems easy to me (and ideal for Sub-Commando Marcos or Cody or whomever). Dave

1 0

amnesia@chardos.connix.com DOWN
by Scott Kenney 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Effective immediately <amnesia(a)chardos.connix.com> is DOWN. I was requested to terminate remailer service by my ISP, which has received numerous complaints recently (from people who obviously don't have the ability to read the headers correctly), and finally had enough. The acquisition of my own domain name should alleviate any future objections, but this will have to wait till after the 1st of the year :( For the next 10-15 days I will manually process any mail destined for nymservers or just passing through to other remailers. Scott Kenney <saken(a)chardos.connix.com> <amnesia+admin(a)chardos.connix.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMmrP75QgY7wl3Gh1AQFqcAQA3W86FvrThZ7kYiKxJxf2GMZlDm+OIczo fe27kSLtW6xpWegl95FGBYhLnf/PUWIpziUblGaY7lfvn7WfXQ2pOMapOWO5Uq/j 5iIiHf3cQogMeFeUp3clD10zfvkV698mdl22dj12BXQbxOcxJBvv9Tu++bzAuJZm c6QErMfwghI= =y24d -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

Paper on Network Security
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

We posted news* a few days ago of a white paper by the OURS organization on network security. We have put it at: http://jya.com/recsec.htm (63 kb) OURS is an our-gang of gorilla industries such as Bellcore, Chase, LDS(!), Compaq, DEC, EDS, EXXON, IBM, Intel, MIT, Microsoft, Motorola, Novell, Oracle, Princeton, Security Dynamics (!), Societe Generale, Texaco and Ziff-Davis. Mother of all GAK-enfeebled alliances. The report was prepared by an Information Protection Task Force of OURS members assisted by Amex, ICL, Mergent and TIS. It's a fair overview of what mega-corporations fear of network vipers and what they pray will exorcize the Edenic mayhemics. Sorry, it's a bit too long for E-mail. * That original news report is at: http://jya.com/oursay.txt

2 1

Re: Blue Box Plans & hacker bbs's
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:09 PM 10/20/96 EDT, you wrote: >I know this is my second question in a short period of time...but anyone >got or know where to get any good blue box plans?? I cant find shit on >the web, and I need some good hacker telnet bbs's. Someone please give >me either. goto alt.2600. Around here we generally can afford to pay our phone bills :-) Also, the network's signalling has changed, and the basic Captain Crunch Whistle doesn't work many places any more - most of the signalling is digital out-of-band rather than inband audio. Phreaking isn't impossible (or there wouldn't be as many people chasing the Dread Pirate Mitnick), but at this point you actually need to know what you're doing to succeed at it, and merely having plans for a device you don't know well enough to emulate in code on your PC isn't going to buy you much. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk Imagine if three million people voted for somebody they _knew_, and the politicians had to count them all.

6 8

AOL/remailer testing
by Raph Levien 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi cypherpunks, It has come to my attention that there may be problems sending mail from the anonymous remailers to AOL accounts. I'd like a volunteer with an AOL address to recieve a test messages sent by me, and report back to me which mails got through and which didn't. Thanks very much in advance. Raph Levien

1 0

Apologies and Clarifications -
by cypher＠cyberstation.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

First of all, I would like to sincerely apologize for my personal attacks on Perry. It is the first time that I have ever done that and I apologize for wasting you time and mine in that regard. He is obviously going to try to pontificate and rehash the old forever. Accordingly, to paraphrase Chief Joseph, "from where the sun now sits, I will fight Perry Metzger no more, forever." I further apologize for any offense that you feel that I may have caused. As to other matters: Instead of replying to the attacks being fabricated by Perry and other I have opted to recapitulate the matter at hand as perspicaciously as my limited abilities permit. As we know, Shannon was not a prolific writer. We also know that IT has not advanced very far during the 50 years since Shannon's nascent ground breaking work. Why? Because of the very issues that are at the heart of this matter. The differences between black, white and all the multitude hues of grey in between. I am extremely skeptical, and believe many readers may be too, of people that go around flaunting their understanding of Shannon, entropy and its application in absolute unequivocal mathematical terms. I hold that such a position, except in terms of delimiters, does not reflect an understanding of Shannon's impartations but au contraire, it is evidential proof that they do not have any real appreciation of Shannon at all. That is in no way intended to denigrate Shannon's very important contribution to our endeavors. I embrace the predicate that Shannon in terms of mathematical certainty has only defined the boundary conditions of the playing field within which we must play our games. If we stray outside that field, we are errant in the absolute sense. If we however play within those mathematical certain boundaries, we may be in error for other reasons, but Shannon cannot be cited as the casual agent. The recondite "parti pris" hijacking of the definition of the term OTP on the basis of conflict with Shannon is ludicrous, when such usage is apodictically within Shannon's delimiters. I have witnessed several definitions of an OTP which I maintain are entirely consistent with Shannon. Among such are: An encryption where any ciphertext may in fact be an an encrypted expression of any plaintext of the same or lesser length; or an encryption where the only information obtainable from the ciphertext is the maximum plaintext length; and so forth. All of these definitions have the essential quality that at the bit level, they can be reduced down to the equation: Pb xor Ub = Cb where Pb is a Plaintext bit, Ub is an Unknown bit and Cb is the resultant Ciphertext bit. Of course the combining form is normally XOR, but could be table lookup, modulo additive, or other. The important thing is that so long as only Cb is known, it is impossible to determine either Pb or Ub. If somehow the Ubs can be subtracted or cancelled out, as for instance by any discoverable reusage of Ub, even in a derivative form, then you may be able to recover some or all of the Pbs. The assertion that an Ub must be an Rb, a truly Random bit, is irrelevant ideology unless there exists the means to convert the Unknown bit, Ub, into a Known bit, Kb. That is the sublime basis of the IPG algorithm, which is to generate a stream of "unknown bits" which cannot be analytically reconstituted in the absence of the OTP generator key, and possibly other related key like parameters. The additional caveat of course is that the key cannot be guessed, nor can it be derived from brute force methodologies, both of which are patently impossible with the IPG algorithm. You do not have to be a Stephen Hawking to comprehend why that is a fact; each of you, with possible minor exceptions, will be able to discern that because it quickly becomes self evident as you ply the algorithm. There are those who will advance the contention that the ciphertext cannot in fact represent any possible plain text. That is incontestably true. In fact with reasonably long ciphertexts, say for example an encrypted FAX, unlike a hardware sourced OTP, there will only be one meaningful plain text that can be derived from the resultant ciphertext. Does that mean that a given ciphertext might not represent any plain text of that same, or lesser, length? One would think so, since it obviously cannot. The problem being though, is exactly how do you go about proving that any given plain text cannot be represented by a known ciphertext. There are two prongs to such a proof, both of which must be substantiated in any specific case at hand:. 1. Inclusionary Proof - the one most frequently advanced alone, which simply stated says that since each encryptor stream may represent any possible encryptor stream of that same length, then the ciphertext may be the XOR product of any plaintext of same said length. Obviously, a hardware sourced OTP DOES meet that proof. Also. it is patently evident that the IPG software OTP DOES NOT meet the inclusionary proof test. 2. Exclusionary Proof - which is equally valid, and simply stated consists of two propositions: A. Can any plaintext be encrypted with the OTP? Obviously the answer is YES for BOTH both hardware sourced OTPs and the IPG software sourced OTPs. B. If 2.A is true, is it possible to exclude any plaintext possibility? Obviously in the case of hardware sourced OTPs, no plain text can possibly be excluded. What about the IPG software OTPs? . One method that you could theoretically be used to exclude a possible plaintext for the software OTP, would be to by brute force try all possible keys, until the correct one is obtained. That however, would be difficult to say the least, as a matter of fact it is impossible: If every subatomic particle in our known universe was a Googol, 1 with 100 zeroes after it, of Cray T3E computers - and each of them had been brute forcing a partition of the possibilities at the rate of 1 Googol of them per picosecond which could not be done - but assume that it could - and they had been doing so since the Big Bang say 20 billion years ago - and they were to continue to do so for the next 20 billion years, that is beyond the life expectancy of our solar system/galaxy, and perhaps the universe, then approximately 10^322 of the possible OTPs would have been tried. Thus it would still take 10^34000 times as long as that to try all of the possibilities - that is they would have tried only one part in 1 with 34000 zeroes after it - not theoretical infinity by any means, but a very, very large extra-astronomical number. Brute force is patently impossible. . Another possibility might be to guess it - anyone recognizes that would not be practical, and how would you know that you were right. All of the IPG OTP generator, aka Encryption, keys are themselves OTPs. . Another possibility would to be to analytically exclude the invalid possibilities. As stated previously, and as you can discover for yourself, this reduces itself back down to to the exact equivalent of the brute force method set out above. With the algorithm, there is no difference between analytically exclusion and brute forcing - they are one and the same. So in fact, any known ciphertext may indeed be an encryption of any plaintext of that same, or lesser, length, because you cannot prove that it is not a specific plaintext. Some will contentiously assert that the key and other parameters might be hacked. While we include within the system facilitators that reduce that risk to a minimum, and to near zero if you use simple precautions, it is true that the hacking possibility exists. However, that possibility exists for RSA, PGP, hardware sourced OTPs, or any other form of security or encryption. We are better positioned in that regard than others but in terms of the human element, as we all know, there is no such thing as perfection. With warmest regards, Don Wood

1 0

Alice in Cypherspace
by David Lesher 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I found my copy, if the person asking last week still needs it.... -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz(a)nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

1 0

Dimitri
by David Lesher 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM sez: > Sounds like a crontab job, or Timmy May, or both. THIS sounds like our friend SternFUD. {Who, BTW, is back attacking folks in the pgp groups..} -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz(a)nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

2 1

Re: Wrap Up: Conference on Law Enforcement and Intelligence
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:13 PM 10/20/96 -0600, C Kuethe wrote: >On Sun, 20 Oct 1996, Bill Frantz wrote: >> (3) The devil is in the details. I still am not convinced that MacPGP has >> enough sources of entropy for its IDEA key generation. (But I am not >> convinced that it doesn't either.) I put integrating Jon Callas's entropy >> manager into MacPGP as a high priority. > >Tell me more... I use macpgp. I just built some new keys tonight, a 2048 >bit monster. PGP wanted 1496 bits of rand info... where is it's entropy >"Hole" > >And what is the "Entropy Manager"? When you build RSA keys in PGP it uses keyboard timings to acquire "true randomness" or entropy. This kind of randomness is related to quantum mechanical uncertainty. It probably has enough entropy to safely generate RSA keys by the keyboard technique it uses. In addition to RSA keys, it generates symmetric IDEA keys whenever you send a message. It uses keystrokes accumulated during normal operation and saved in a file called randpool (or something like that) to generate these keys. Since you almost never enter keystrokes during the normal operation of MacPGP, I am concerned that randpool does not have enough entropy. Entropy Manager is a program Jon Callas of Apple is working on. It uses well-known sources of entropy in the computer to build up a pool of entropy for use by programs that need it. The last I heard, it was nearly ready. I would trust it more than the ported PGP since Jon has examined sources available in the Macintosh specifically. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | Tired of Dole/Clinton? | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | Vote 3rd party. I'm | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | Voting for Harry Browne | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

1 0

Re: Usenet and Re: extortion via digital cash
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> As an already existing, widely >disseminated and easily used message pool, Usenet is very valuable to us. >I'm concerned that it may not last though. Many people now complain about >how low the signal to noise ratio is [...] So, if it gets too bad, might it >just fade away? Or, if it remains but becomes unpopular, will it be easy to >restrict if we use it for anonymous messages? I haven't read all of Usenet in 10+ years :-) But it keeps growing, and if you're trying to piggyback anonymous messages on it, then it's great to have VOLUME, VOLUME, VOLUME, as the talk.bizarre folks put it. On the other hand, there are technical difficulties with using the current modes of Usenet for real applications, and volume may make it worse. Usenet used to work by flooding - every message goes to every machine, so it's not suspicious your machine receives an Anonymous Message. Most machines had multiple users (Unix, after all), and didn't log who accessed what files in the news spool (which you could do directly as well as through your newsreader.) Now, however, most users use NNTP to fetch news articles from their ISP, and the number of machines receiving the whole Nx100MB/day flood is probably smaller, though perhaps businesses and universities are putting up with it, and perhaps the usage patterns are different outside North America. Fetching material by NNTP is probably logged by many ISPs, and can also be detected by sniffers in the places where security is weak enough for them, which probably includes many major ISPs. So it's easier to detect who's reading alt.anonymous.messages, especially if some government agency subpoenas logfiles. azur(a)netcom.com (Steve Schear) wrote: >In the U.S., at least, attempts to enforce identification of Internet users >or anonymous posters to newgroups and such are likely to meet with stiff >legal resistance. The Supreme Court has ruled that anonymous use of >protected speech (e.g., political handbills) must be permitted. No legal resistance at all, if it's done by ISPs or businesses or individuals - only if the government tries it does it get into "protected speech" territory. There may be market resistance, and the Internet and Usenet are fundamentally worldwide cooperative efforts, so if the protocols support anonymity, then participants in the nets can choose to have their systems cooperate with or refuse to cooperate with anonymous messages, and you'll find some people doing each one. This may mean that small-ISP.net and xs4all.nl will permit anonymous users and aol.com, compuserve.com, and proxy.gov.sg will demand Internet Driver's Licenses to let your postings through, while nihilism.net won't allow any non-anomymous messages. Spontaneous order is like that. And the US government could probably get away with sponsoring Internet access for Real American Citizens and Green-Card Holders that requires positive identification because you can file your tax forms over it, as long as they don't prevent anonymous messages on _some_ part of the net. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk Imagine if three million people voted for somebody they _knew_, and the politicians had to count them all.

1 0

Re: [crypto-philo]OTP or DES?
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:45 AM 10/20/95 -0500, walrus <walrus(a)tcgcs.com> wrote: >I would argue that the security of an OTP is >derived not from the fact that it really is secure, but from the fact that >it is claimed to be an OTP. The meaning of "Security" depends on your threat model. Are you worried about - having your message noticed? - having your message decoded? - being able to deny a possible decoding of your message? Whether your message noticed or not depends a lot on the environment; in some places "pure noise" is not noticeable, while in others it really stands out (posting it to a text newsgroup, for instance.) If you simply remove the "----- BEGIN PGP" etc. headers/trailers from a PGP message, it's still got a well-defined format, including magic numbers indicating what kind of data is in each block, block length indicators, etc. They're both noticeable to someone who's trying to find them and strong evidence that something is a PGP message. That's why there's a Stealth-PGP, though even it's not perfect. As far as "Secure" meaning "They can't decode the message", if you use a One-Time-Pad more than once, you can lose (viz. VENONA.) If you use a pad that's not true random numbers, but is some simple LFSR or LCM PRNG, or some random English-language book, it's pretty easy for skilled cryptanalysts to decode it. If you use something that has a well-defined structure as a pad, and the Bad Guys notice your message and decode it, it's not credible to say "oh, no, it's just a one-time pad, the fact that there's one chance in 2**168 of that particular series of random numbers matching the output of triple-DES shouldn't influence you any, Judge".... You're gonna go to jail. What gives you deniability with OTPs is that they _can't_ produce a meaningful message that's any more probable than any other meaningful message of the same length, so you can argue that it really says "BUY MORE" instead of "RUN AWAY" or "ATTACK!!" and even if they guess you're lying, they can't tell what the true message was. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk Imagine if three million people voted for somebody they _knew_, and the politicians had to count them all.

1 0

lambda 2.11 - Short-circuits in Burma
by -Jerome Thorel- 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

netizen's --> Lambda Bulletin 2.11 <-- contents + Short-circuits in Burma + Medical privacy and PGP + New York's CDA on tracks * * * * * SHORT-CIRCUITS IN BURMA The military regime in Burma decided last month to ban information technology use and possession, in order to sustain its new iron fist on dissidents and members of the National League for Democracy. Among other news here's a message sent through the mailing list of the US organisation CyberPOLIS. ---fwd message--- >>From: George Sadowsky <George.Sadowsky(a)nyu.edu> >>Subject: Re: Burma Bans modems >>RANGOON, BURMA, 1996 SEP 27 (NB) -- Burma has made owning, using, >>importing or borrowing a modem or fax machine without government >>permission a crime, punishable by up to 15 years in jail, according to a >>report by United Press International. >>Burma's military government has imposed what's called "The Computer >>Science Development Law" which empowers the Ministry of Communications, >>Posts and Telegraphs to specify what exactly can be restricted, UPI >>reports. >>UPI quotes the government-run newspaper New Light of Myanmar as saying >>the same punishment is prescribed for anyone who sets up a link with a >>computer network without the prior permission of the ministry, or who >>uses computer network and information technology "for undermining state >>security, law and order, national unity, national economy and national >>culture, or who obtains or transmits state secrets." >>UPI reports that in July a diplomat, Leo Nichols, died in prison after he >>was sentenced to a lengthy term for illegal possession of fax machines. >>It's clear from this action that the SLORC, i.e. the "State Law and Order >>Restoration Committee" (sic!) understands full well the benefits and >>importance of the Internet and other forms of electronic communication to >>open societies, and is determined to deny these benefits to its citizens. >>Given its recent history and the quasi-imprisonment of Daw Aung San Suu >>Kyi, this new action is perfectly consistent with the government's >>previous abysmal record. >>Countries who would deny open Internet access to its citizens might well >>pause to consider if they wish to be associated with the current >>government of Myanmar in doing so. ... c y b e r P O L I S ----------------------------------------------- C o m m u n i c a t e T h i s C u l t u r e ( Christopher D. Frankonis -- baby-x(a)cyberpolis.org ) ---end of fwd message--- ------------------- FURTHER INFOS According to other sources--international press reports and electronic forums like Usenet's *soc.culture.burma*--it turns out that Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991 Nobel Peace Prize and NLD leader, saw her telephone line cut on Friday, Sept. 28 on the evening. That was the beginning on a widespread crackdown on dissidents and a ban of NLD meetings. University Street, where Ms Suu Kyi lives, was blocked to avoid demonstrations. Hundred of citizens and NLD supporters were detained, some were released by mid-October. The Web site http://freeburma.org is a well known relay for the Burmese diaspora, especially the daily newsletter BurmaNet, which offers a rich compilation of dissidents' communiqués and Western newspapers articles and editorials. Ms Suu Kyi writes a daily letter from her home in Rangoon which is published in the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun (in japanese, http://www.mainichi.co.jp) - a translation appears daily in soc.culture.burma. It seems that the letter (surely copied on an audio tape) continues to be shipped ouside the country to be published in the Tokyo-based newspaper. Furthermore, other reports claimed that Burma doesn't have any official connection to the Internet. It seems to be true, but a Burmese and US resident found that the domain name "mmnic.net" (mm for Myanmar) was reserved by the Burmese governement in February, 1994. The operation was made possible with the help of the Internet provider Asia Pacific NIC based in Tokyo, Japan. A spokesman confirmed he reserved the domain on the behalf of Burma's State, and that it was dedicated to a future Internet connection. * * * * * MEDICAL PRIVACY AND PGP ---fwd message--- >Sender: dfickeisen(a)cpsr.org (Duane Fickeisen) > Subject: cr> Health Info Database Misused > >An AP story from Tampa Bay appearing in the Palo Alto Daily News asserts >that a public health worker took a laptop and disks with confidential >lists of people with AIDS and HIV home and to a gay bar to check out the >HIV status of potential dates and offered to look up names of people his >friends were interested in dating. One person asserted that he had warned >friends away from potential dates, telling them that their names were "on >the list." Another claimed that people interested in dating him backed >away after the health worker talked to them. The County Health Department >has fired him, although he claims he did nothing wrong. The former health >worker also owns and lives in a funeral home. The state had permitted such >databases to be removed from offices and taken home until they changed >their internal rules two weeks ago. > >Raises anew questions about privacy and confidentiality of records, >security, and misuse/abuse of information for personal and private gain. >This ought to be raised up as an example of abuse in response to the >announced plans for a national health information database. > >Duane H. Fickeisen, Interim Director >Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility ---end of fwd message--- As far as I can remember, Phil Zimmermann, speaking during the international encryption conference in Paris on Sept. 25, mentioned this story to explain how easy it was to have his privacy on personal medical records beached. And that to encrypt this sensitive information may be the ultimate solution. Zimmermann is president of PGP Inc., which develops computer security software based on his popular program Pretty Good Privacy (http://www.pgp.com) * * * * * NEW YORK's CDA ON TRACKS ---fwd message--- >============== >VTW BillWatch #61 > >VTW BillWatch: A newsletter tracking US Federal legislation >affecting civil liberties. BillWatch is published about every >week as long as Congress is in session. (Congress is in session) > >BillWatch is produced and published by the >Voters Telecommunications Watch (vtw(a)vtw.org) > >Issue #61, Date: Thu Oct 17 01:17:52 EDT 1996 > ... > >FREE NOV. 3RD SEMINAR ON NY STATE INTERNET CENSORSHIP BILL > >To learn more about this free cybercast seminar see http://www.vtw.org/speech/ > >New York state recently passed a bill that criminalizes expression >online that is currently legal in print. When it goes into effect on >November 1, World Wide Web pages, Usenet postings, and email lists that >fall under the law may become subject to criminal prosecution, as might the >Internet providers that host them. > >But don't panic! VTW and the Netly News (http://www.pathfinder.com/Netly/) >are putting on a seminar to educate you on the history of the bill, the ins >and outs of it and what you should ask your own lawyer, as well as the >status of any pending legal challenges. > >Who should attend? >------------------ >Anyone who publishes information on the Internet, including through >World Wide Web pages, Usenet, Email lists, or interactive chats. >Attorneys whose clientele include any of the above. >Journalists whose beat include the Internet or online services. >....and you! ... >Who will be there? >------------------------------- >Speakers marked as "invited" have told us they intend to come, but have >informed us of potential conflicts that same day that might interfere with >their attendance. > >Live speakers . Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) invited: Opening remarks . >Shabbir J. Safdar, President (VTW Center for Internet Education) . >Steve Barber, Legislative Counsel (VTW): How will this bill affect you, and >what you should ask your own attorney . >Ann Beeson, Litigation Staff (ACLU) invited > >Speakers available online through interactive chat >Diana Jarvis, Staff Counsel (VTW Center for Internet Eduation) >Stephen Filler, Law Offices of Stephen C. Filler invited ... >Where and when is this seminar? >------------------------------- > >The seminar will be held at Outernet, Inc, home of bway.net at, > >Outernet, Inc. >626 Broadway, Suite 3-A >(Very close to the Broadway/Lafayette stop on the F train) ... ---end of fwd message--- -------------------------------- the lambda bulletin, 2.11 http://www.freenix.fr/netizen =+= the lambda bulletin -> www.freenix.fr/netizen =+= =-= Jerome Thorel, Journalist, Paris (Planete Internet Editor) =-=

1 0

Re: Blue Box Plans & hacker bbs's
by Pyros Everflame 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Check out these sites: L0pht heavy industries <a href="http://www.softaid.net/nuke/marks.html">Mad Dingo's Bookmarks</a>

1 0

RE: Goodbye
by jbugden＠smtplink.alis.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Blanc Weber <blancw(a)microsoft.com> wrote: >It all depends, as usual, on the individuals involved - on the quality >they bring to the subject, to the list, to the enterprise. >Interesting question: what do elite sophisticates *do*, once they've >reached their pinnacle? Harlan Ellison suggests one possibility in his 1967 story titled: The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World. James

2 1

RE: Q.E.D. reply to petty MESSger
by jbugden＠smtplink.alis.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Deadwood <ipgsales(a)cyberstation.net> wrote: >To paraphrase John Dean, the truth will always come out and your >ass braying will never stop that truth. >Don Wood Be careful of what you wish for. You may just get it. James

1 0

Crypto Raid
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In a coincidence with the Biham/Shamir smart card attack, AP reports October 20 on an Israeli raid of News Datacom Research for $150 million tax fraud, allegedly because locally developed crypto products were smuggled out of the country. News Datacom develops and markets encryption systems for pay-TV based on Shamir's work, and he is a part-owner. Recall that Markoff's story on DFA cited Bahim's experience with pirate-TV and smart-card tampering. FiTi ran stories last May about the company's financial derring-do, which we've placed with the AP report at: http://jya.com/keylok.txt We've also put the Biham/Shamir DFA post and NYT article at: http://jya.com/dfa.htm

1 0

List of reliable remailers
by Raph Levien 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I operate a remailer pinging service which collects detailed information about remailer features and reliability. To use it, just finger remailer-list(a)kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu There is also a Web version of the same information, plus lots of interesting links to remailer-related resources, at: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~raph/remailer-list.html This information is used by premail, a remailer chaining and PGP encrypting client for outgoing mail. For more information, see: http://www.c2.org/~raph/premail.html For the PGP public keys of the remailers, finger pgpkeys(a)kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu This is the current info: REMAILER LIST This is an automatically generated listing of remailers. The first part of the listing shows the remailers along with configuration options and special features for each of the remailers. The second part shows the 12-day history, and average latency and uptime for each remailer. You can also get this list by fingering remailer-list(a)kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu. $remailer{"extropia"} = "<remail(a)miron.vip.best.com> cpunk pgp special"; $remailer{"flame"} = "<remailer(a)flame.alias.net> cpunk mix pgp. hash latent cut post reord"; $remailer{"mix"} = "<mixmaster(a)remail.obscura.com> cpunk mix pgp hash latent cut ek ksub reord ?"; $remailer{"replay"} = "<remailer(a)replay.com> cpunk mix pgp hash latent cut post ek"; $remailer{"ecafe"} = "<cpunk(a)remail.ecafe.org> cpunk mix"; $remailer{'alpha'} = '<alias(a)alpha.c2.org> alpha pgp'; $remailer{'nymrod'} = '<nymrod(a)nym.jpunix.com> alpha pgp'; $remailer{"lead"} = "<mix(a)zifi.genetics.utah.edu> cpunk mix pgp hash latent cut ek"; $remailer{"nemesis"} = "<remailer(a)meaning.com> cpunk pgp hash latent cut"; $remailer{"exon"} = "<remailer(a)remailer.nl.com> cpunk pgp hash latent cut ek"; $remailer{"vegas"} = "<remailer(a)vegas.gateway.com> cpunk pgp hash latent cut"; $remailer{"haystack"} = "<haystack(a)holy.cow.net> cpunk mix pgp hash latent cut ek"; $remailer{"ncognito"} = "<ncognito(a)rigel.cyberpass.net> mix cpunk pgp hash latent"; $remailer{"lucifer"} = "<lucifer(a)dhp.com> cpunk mix pgp hash latent cut ek"; $remailer{"jam"} = "<remailer(a)cypherpunks.ca> cpunk mix pgp hash latent cut ek"; $remailer{"winsock"} = "<winsock(a)c2.org> cpunk pgp hash cut ksub reord"; $remailer{'nym'} = '<config(a)nym.alias.net> newnym pgp'; $remailer{"balls"} = "<remailer(a)huge.cajones.com> cpunk pgp hash latent cut ek"; $remailer{"squirrel"} = "<mix(a)squirrel.owl.de> cpunk mix pgp hash latent cut ek"; $remailer{"middle"} = "<middleman(a)jpunix.com> cpunk mix pgp hash middle latent cut ek reord"; $remailer{'cyber'} = '<alias(a)alias.cyberpass.net> alpha pgp'; $remailer{"dustbin"} = "<dustman(a)athensnet.com> cpunk pgp hash latent cut ek mix reord post"; $remailer{'weasel'} = '<config(a)weasel.owl.de> newnym pgp'; catalyst(a)netcom.com is _not_ a remailer. lmccarth(a)ducie.cs.umass.edu is _not_ a remailer. usura(a)replay.com is _not_ a remailer. Groups of remailers sharing a machine or operator: (cyber mix) (weasel squirrel) The winsock remailer does not accept plaintext messages. The alpha and nymrod nymservers are down due to abuse. However, you can use the cyber nymserver. The nym.alias.net server will be listed soon. See http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~raph/n.a.n.html for details. 403 Permission denied errors have been caused by a flaky disk on the Berkeley WWW server. Hopefully, this is fixed by now. The penet remailer is closed. Last update: Mon 21 Oct 96 6:48:54 PDT remailer email address history latency uptime ----------------------------------------------------------------------- jam remailer(a)cypherpunks.ca *-***-****** 21:15 100.00% cyber alias(a)alias.cyberpass.net +-*++-****** 35:41 99.99% dustbin dustman(a)athensnet.com --+++--+-+++ 1:18:22 99.97% exon remailer(a)remailer.nl.com -##+##**### 5:20 99.95% winsock winsock(a)c2.org ---__----.-- 11:50:31 99.90% squirrel mix(a)squirrel.owl.de --++--+++++ 2:21:46 99.88% lead mix(a)zifi.genetics.utah.edu +-+++-+++ ++ 43:41 99.56% balls remailer(a)huge.cajones.com * ********** 8:52 99.21% middle middleman(a)jpunix.com ._- --+--++ 2:53:38 98.98% replay remailer(a)replay.com +- * *+***** 10:30 98.49% haystack haystack(a)holy.cow.net +-*#+# +*## 7:47 94.62% mix mixmaster(a)remail.obscura.com --++++++ 2:07:07 51.53% extropia remail(a)miron.vip.best.com ------- 10:39:07 50.37% History key * # response in less than 5 minutes. * * response in less than 1 hour. * + response in less than 4 hours. * - response in less than 24 hours. * . response in more than 1 day. * _ response came back too late (more than 2 days). cpunk A major class of remailers. Supports Request-Remailing-To: field. eric A variant of the cpunk style. Uses Anon-Send-To: instead. penet The third class of remailers (at least for right now). Uses X-Anon-To: in the header. pgp Remailer supports encryption with PGP. A period after the keyword means that the short name, rather than the full email address, should be used as the encryption key ID. hash Supports ## pasting, so anything can be put into the headers of outgoing messages. ksub Remailer always kills subject header, even in non-pgp mode. nsub Remailer always preserves subject header, even in pgp mode. latent Supports Matt Ghio's Latent-Time: option. cut Supports Matt Ghio's Cutmarks: option. post Post to Usenet using Post-To: or Anon-Post-To: header. ek Encrypt responses in reply blocks using Encrypt-Key: header. special Accepts only pgp encrypted messages. mix Can accept messages in Mixmaster format. reord Attempts to foil traffic analysis by reordering messages. Note: I'm relying on the word of the remailer operator here, and haven't verified the reord info myself. mon Remailer has been known to monitor contents of private email. filter Remailer has been known to filter messages based on content. If not listed in conjunction with mon, then only messages destined for public forums are subject to filtering. Raph Levien

1 0

Prof Shamir arrested
by Tom Womack 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A few column inches in the British Independent had Prof Avi Shamir (who I guess is the S in RSA) arrested in Israel, on (I believe) suspicion of involvement in a substantial fraud. Tom We will do what we have always done when we've had our back to the wall; we will turn round and fight.

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

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

2 1

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

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

3 2

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

Reno at FCBA
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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

3 2

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

17 Dec '03

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

3 2

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

17 Dec '03

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

3 2

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

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

2 1

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

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

7 10

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

cypherpunks ftp site
by Norman Hardy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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

3 2

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

17 Dec '03

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

4 3

Re: IP spoofer
by Matthew Ghio 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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

2 1

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

17 Dec '03

UNSUBSCIBE

3 2

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

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

17 Dec '03

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

1 0

Re: Usenet and Re: extortion via digital cash
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:34 AM 10/20/96 -0400, Scott McGuire wrote: >"Timothy C. May" <tcmay(a)got.net> wrote: >> At 11:01 PM -0400 10/15/96, Rabid Wombat wrote: >> >> >Also - in order to communicate back to the perpetrator, the victim needs >> >to communicate to the first step in the chain. The operator of that chain >> >> BlackNet-type pools eliminate the chain. There is no "first step in the >> chain," only a message pool or Usenet group which is propagated to tens of >> thousands of sites around the world (and even available via one's satellite >> dish and local cable, a la DirectPC, @Home, etc.). >> > >I've been thinking about the use of Usenet as a message pool and this seems to >be a good place to bring up my thoughts. As an already existing, widely >disseminated and easily used message pool, Usenet is very valuable to us. I'm >concerned that it may not last though. Many people now complain about how low >the signal to noise ratio is (even more than they complain about this list). >I've heard people say that they have given up on newsgroups in favor of mailing >list, web-zines, etc. So, if it gets too bad, might it just fade away? Or, if >it remains but becomes unpopular, will it be easy to restrict if we use it for >anonymous messages? What's needed is a method for an individual to read all of Usenet, and more, without anybody else knowing what each individual is reading. It's been mentioned before that on the back of those DSS boxes there's a connector which is supposed to eventually be able to provide computer data. Somebody mentioned that the data rate of Usenet is 100 megabytes per day. That works out to just about 9300 bits per second, continuous. That's probably only about 1/1000th of the data required to represent a NTSC video picture, and so it's about 1/100,000th of the data rate of the dish. I don't know the economics of this service in any detail, but if we assume 2 million such dishes generating about $1 of revenue per day, 1/100,000 of this revenue is about $20 per day. Obviously, the cost of this bandwidth is miniscule compared with the number of people who might want to use it. Sure, they're not just going to carry Usetnet, of course; they'd probably carry email and other services as well. However, many of the higher-bandwidth-consuming uses of the Internet will involve one-to-many broadcasting, which could be more easily provided by a dedicated satellite connection. Further, the company selling the dishes has a powerful motivation to make its product as useful as possible, since many people currently served by cable systems may have little reason to switch over absent a new feature. Given the low cost of this, there should always be enough bandwidth to implement some sort of blacknet-type system. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

1 0

Radikal in English
by silenced＠meaning.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Rough English translations of issues 153 and 154 of _Radikal_, a German newspaper from-and for-the radikal/autonomous left, are now available at: http://www.meaning.com/library/radikal/ The newspaper has been banned by the German government. I have no connection with the organization and had never heard of them prior to the German government's attempted blocking of xs4all.nl. -silenced (silenced(a)meaning.com)

1 0