December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Anonymous wrote: >> (untransferable signatures) > >This is also a good idea, but it needs more work, too. There is a >big education problem here. People barely understand the >implications of regular digital signatures. Now you are throwing >this new kind in, which guarantee the message came from another >person, but aren't binding. What happens when an employee receives a >message from a supplier signed with that kind of signature? Can he >make a decision on that basis, or not? > >In paper business correspondence, there is no such distinction. A >signed letter is transferable. Go beyond this and business will be >scratching its heads. It's a solution looking for a problem. How about arbitration? Two parties may wish to make an agreement to be judged by an arbitrator of their choosing. In certain cases, the State can be expected to intervene. If only the arbitrator knows the signatures to be valid, the State has no fair basis on which to make an intervention. Monty Cantsin Editor in Chief Smile Magazine http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBND5vYpaWtjSmRH/5AQGzygf/TdMgevKLw87e6ZtJ6++pyrOKliu/OunT Z4uxcWzDGPEcyNchhOsb6B+NSOehcgvqIhxs4NNTJqMVICiJCBhBTZlsQt7bW6kq Ayz62YWFZZeMcYbsP87FmuGLxsyh/wW2Nh/s80J9obS6vn7HQJBUp/Ox7Ho9RPIp bdijOAw6nxtPt0SWcr38F8XVj/XpqA768nn5uWwdtd2aCAIQf7uLE7poZLVL7+UQ VMiHlgsRIlcHEakNbCExrBTuyCzyoKo5LY+PPzlLCTC93rzXyPIdO8Ain6p49qa5 i/7z+WbT8powUsmwj5BEfPSKOo1CcuHfdAUgeSI4JawfhqYJAnzpRg== =m09K -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Free Email Software!
by webtech＠lostvegas.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re: anonymous poster quality up
by jimg＠mentat.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May wrote: > - --Tim May (I'll sign this with my new PGP 5.0 key, which has also been > signed with my 1992 PGP 2.0 key) So what <is> your new PGP 5.0 public key? I checked for the key ID 0xDF02DF6A on the key server at www.pgp.com and didn't see it. I <do> believe your claim that it's a 5.0 key, though, since it ends in the even nibble 'A', and all RSA key IDs are odd. :) Jim Gillogly jim(a)acm.org

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Object code disassembly (was Re: [LONG, off-topic]] Interactive Programming)
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> It worked. After a few iterations of this I had all the entry points, and > everything that didn't disassemble cleanly was outputted as hex data. > > For fun, run objdump on a cleanly compiled unix binary... It makes it all > look so easy... :) Not quite that easy. Awhile back I disassembled RealAudio because I was curious how their codec worked. Turns out it was not all that interesting and the codecs in nautilus and speak freely are probably better. But anyway.... Running objdump on the binary spit out ~800000 lines of code. They statically linked the whole thing, motif, c library, and all. I'm not sure what they compiled it with, the c-library they had in there didn't look like any of the standard ones. It disassembled fine, but 800k lines of assembler dump is not really all that readable. So I ended up doing it interactively, setting breakpoints on the I/O operations and backtracing to find the coder. The user interface code tended to get in the way a lot. The 1kb/s coder is very basic. No predictor/corrector, and no redundancy (eg lempel-ziv, rle) compression at all. It's just a frequency/band coder at 10 frames per second. I guess thats so it can handle dropped frames. No checksums at all. The "28.8" codec is more sophisticated. It appears to be a LPC and compresses data into much larger blocks/packets. I didn't look into it too deeply because there are lots of other lpc coders available. Shortly after this, they put out a new version 3.0, with yet another codec, which I never looked at. This was quite awhile ago, and all this is from memory. So the codec was rather uninteresting, but there were a number of other "features" which got my attention. I looked at the network protocol. Its pretty simple. The client connects to the server and requests the file it wants. It also sends a whole bunch of other info, like host operating system, version number, etc. ("for statistical purposes, right? uh huh..." are you guys over there at anonymizer.com reading this? hint, hint.) Then it does something truly bizarre. The client and server exchange 32-digit hex numbers. The client calls gettimeofday() and gethostname() and uses this as a random seed. Then it sends a 128-bit random number, encoded as 32 ascii hex digits. The server does the same. I haven't a clue what this is for. Considering that the other data structures are all binary, sending this as ascii is really dumb. It looks as though its part of some third-party library. I thought maybe it was some variant of netscape cookies but it doesn't save anything to disk. It's just wierd. I tried stepping through this section of code a few times, but doing so usually caused the server to time-out. Then the server starts sending the audio file as one big stream of packets - same format as the files it saves to disk, just broken up into packets, each preceeded by a length byte. In udp mode the client sends acks every second or so. In tcp mode there are no in-band acks at all, it relies solely on the tcp protocol driver. No checksums on anything, and it uses predictable port numbers. You can probably spoof it real easy. That might make for an interesting prank.

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Re: What's really in PGP 5.5?
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The danger with the PGP system is that it could be easily perverted into a British style trusted-third-party system for GAK. The government would set up a key management infrastructure to provide an official repository and CA to register keys. It could even be "voluntary" if only government-approved CAs had liability protection which private CAs didn't have, making it hard for the privates to compete. However the price to use the government registry is that each key has to use the PGP features to specify a TTP as an additional recipient. Every message encrypted to that key should also be encrypted to the TTP key. Only government-approved TTPs may be used, and although there are many to choose from, all have to provide easy and secret GAK. The PGP 5 software will then automatically encrypt to the TTP key. Yes, this can be defeated using superencryption or faking the additional-recipient block in the message. But we know any scheme can be defeated. It still satisfies the government's requirement to get routine access to most email communications, and to allow criminals who use standard email packages to be watched.

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Defeating MITM with Eric's Secure Phone
by John Kelsey 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- [ To: cypherpunks, coderpunks, Perry's Crypto List ## Date: 09-Oct-97 ## Subject: Defeating MITM with Eric's Secure Phone ] >Date: Wed, 8 Oct 1997 23:48:33 +0100 >From: Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> >Subject: computationally infeasible jobs for MITMs (Re: Secure phone) >How about this for a computerised method to do something similar. Aim >of the game: to make the MITMs job computationally infeasible. [Method using stegoed audio noise deleted.] I prefer to work on the more immediately useful problem: How can I secure my use of the (very nicely done) Comsec secure phones using existing infrastructure? I am concerned with the MITM voice impersonation attack, since that's the easiest attack on the system. (Actually, it's probably easier to physically tap my office, but I can't fix that right now.) The simple MITM defenses (like restating your checksum spontaneously in the middle of the conversation) take care of lots of this. Here's another way that may make some sense, though it's a little hard to use: 1. Exchange PGP-encrypted e-mail establishing a set of sixteen different words, labeled for 0..f in each direction. Thus: 0. Dilbert 1. Alpha 2. Cable 3. Swordsman ... f. Marxist Now, the checksum reading is very hard to spoof. Suppose I get 0x33f. I say ``My checksum is Swordsman Swordsman Marxist, or 33f.'' An attacker with digits besides 3 and f in his checksum simply doesn't know how to impersonate me to the other party. He lacks the secret information we've shared. Now, the problem with this is that it's too cumbersome. I would like the shared secret information to be usable with less effort. If we just want to detect the MITM eventually, then I can send the other participant a PGP-signed e-mail, in which I include the whole 6-digit checksum. That won't prevent the MITM attack from working once, but it will let us know after-the-fact if our conversation was exposed. If we find evidence that our conversation was intercepted, then we can start using my one-time word lists, or some other more paranoid mechanism. Still another approach, which may be applicable for some people, is to write a simple calculator-type application that uses a shared-secret to compute a checksum on the checksum. Thus, when I call Alice, I do the following: 1. Type the shared secret between Alice and me into the calculator app. 2. Make the call to Alice and push the ``secure'' button. 3. Type the six-digit checksum into the calculator app. 4. Read the calculator's first three checksum digits. 5. Listen to her next three digits. The simplest way to do this seems to be to just exchange a six-digit hex value as a one-time password for a given secure phone call. This is done using PGP or some other mail encryption package, and can legitimately be used to exchange a long list of one-time passwords at once. Then, use Windows' calculator application (with View set to Scientific, and Mode set to Hex) to add your one-time password to the checksum. Thus: 1. I pull up Alice's latest encrypted e-mail, and get today's phone password. 2. I open the Windows calculator, set it to View/Scientific and hex mode, and type in the password (a six-digit hex number) and ``+.'' 3. I call Alice, say hello, and push the ``SECURE'' button. 4. I type the six digit hex checksum into my calculator. 5. I read the first three digits of the result to her. She reads the next three to me. All of this (except for maybe re-reading the checksum in the middle of the conversation) is probably overkill. Still, it may be worth something to someone. Is there a clean way to have the secure phone box take input from the dialpad on the phone, without sending it out on the phone line? If so, then maybe some later version could include a PIN-secured mode, using EKE or SPEKE or something similar. (For a supported mode, the checksum wouldn't need to be read over the phone anymore. We would need to protect the shared PIN from brute-force attack, however.) >Adam --John Kelsey, jmkelsey(a)plnet.net / kelsey(a)counterpane.com - -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6.2 mQCNAi5JqlEAAAEEAPCEHMBdDCAJ83/ibNM7ngCaaibv7YkTxcpKPjTO+WcjswFV SEzMeTqW4MX2wSKdfcMq1HembbgfYs7v2UCnUFkLPZF19s3yUSISGcS7JxlBc3q1 7uj8W5XfBoGpgCYQqYFL2+AB/+3tLu7lU5iiEYCnevY5GQkq0kHx57Ag8goBAAUR tCdKb2huIE0uIEtlbHNleSBKciA8am1rZWxzZXlAZGVscGhpLmNvbT6JAJUDBRAv 5uh7QfHnsCDyCgEBAQZ2A/9/OMeWK4YC+PnEzBTmgpF4WAOsVXfzRD3zAbzfNWY9 MEGo4gRF8Mr1lPHdK+0JOHp327mj9ZvYqQb1bV5fwc5dJa8/Z34VLPYlVg2rV7vJ Hd0YnrgkoaIerbRmtP8dmZGeygeFtrk8aDCdcnMm27+tTJACl5hv2yjFO9rxBq+R MLQpRXhwaXJlcyBmb3IgbmV3IHNpZ3MvbXNncyBvbiBEZWMgMzEsIDE5OTc= =pOyw - -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBNDy68UHx57Ag8goBAQGP1QP9H6Z9Infv1z1swBzpEsvn+VZyweMj20to EQNRFcfLvNFu140kWokWfgIcSXh1CBrsz93/CMoZgIb8l1cpGIU51kFgz/DTXGvj 5XQCFcUzBRAEraxeF7xFnEH+Ss35lcCvzAXaWaVLB6apBvXP5ZkZtFr/vUYLhrtF Y34E8AAXFrg= =AlX3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --John Kelsey, Counterpane Systems, kelsey(a)counterpane.com PGP 2.6 fingerprint = 4FE2 F421 100F BB0A 03D1 FE06 A435 7E36

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Applying ``Crowds'' idea to anonymous e-cash.
by John Kelsey 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- [ To: cypherpunks, coderpunks, Perry's Crypto List ## Date: 10/09/97 ## Subject: Applying ``Crowds'' idea to anonymous e-cash. ] I was thinking about applying the ``Crowds'' idea to anonymous e-cash, and came up with what I think is a pretty good idea. I am interested in seeing if anyone sees either holes in it, or ways to improve it. I am also interested in hearing about whether or not it has been invented before. Crowds, for those who haven't seen it, is a way of giving web users partial anonymity by making it impossible to determine which member of some ``crowd'' of users did some action (such as requesting a document). (This is a very rough summary--read the paper for the real analysis.) I can see a way to do something very similar with withdrawing electronic coins. (This works best with online-cleared coins), without any blinding being used. I think this gets around the Chaum patents. I also think it can probably be implemented more-or-less on top of the web-anonymizing Crowds stuff, though I may be wrong. Here's the basic idea: 1. A Crowd of users forms up, each wanting to withdraw some reasonably large amount of money, such as $100, in $1 e-coins. 2. Each user provides a public key and pays some money (perhaps $101) into the bank. The bank registers each public key as belonging to a member of the crowd. 3. Each member of the crowd is given all other members' public keys. 4. Each member prepares 100 one-use symmetric encryption keys, each with a 64-bit key ID. 5. The members organize themselves into a sort of one-time anonymous routing network, using those public keys. Each message to be sent is encrypted in layers (a la onion routing), so that each member appears at least once in the message's path. Each message ends up at the bank, eventually. I'll talk about likely network architectures later, if anyone's interested. 6. The bank publishes something noting that it has received N*100 keys, where N = the number of members in the crowd. It also publishes the hashes of all N*100 symmetric keys. 7. Each member digitally signs something saying that he agrees with the keys published, he hasn't been railroaded, etc. Nothing proceeds until this has been published from each member. 8. The bank encrypts one $1 online-cleared e-coin under each symmetric key. It publishes a list of (key ID, encrypted coin) pairs for all the members to receive. 9. Each member walks away with $100 in $1 e-coins. Nobody can prove which member got which coin. No linking of coins is possible. Now, the protocol isn't all *that* important here, but the idea is: We interface with the traceable money world, but grant a sort of weak anonymity for all users in the crowd. Because the coins are online-cleared, they must be deposited immediately. To protect recipient-confidentiality, these can be deposited under a pseudonym account--basically just a one-use public key. The recipient accumulates a bunch of credit under that public key, and then goes through the withdrawal procedure again to get new, weakly anonymous coins, which he can openly deposit without direct traceability. (That is, the bank can still learn that certain coins were spent at the same place, but can't identify the final recipient of the money. I can think of ways to adapt this idea to unlinkability, though they involve some implementation hassles.) Note that multiple iterations of the withdrawal protocol make things much stronger. That is, there is no reason why the participants in the withdrawal protocol have to spend their e-coins directly--they can also use them, along with a one-use public key, to go back into the withdrawal protocol again. An attacker who manages to link a given coin to a given crowd (possible only with the help of the bank) with some anonymous participants (who paid in with coins from this scheme) must face the possibility that this coin could have come from the anonymous participants--which can then be traced to another pool, with other anonymous participants, etc. The attacker can't even make statistical statements in many cases, since, if I were doing something really hot, I'd want to go through the withdrawal process lots of times. The bank can tell only what crowd your coins came from, not how many times you have swapped your coins out. If you're willing to pay the transaction costs and time, you can withdraw and deposit as many times as you like. Comments? Is this idea practical at all? Has someone else already done it? --John Kelsey, jmkelsey(a)plnet.net / kelsey(a)counterpane.com - -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6.2 mQCNAi5JqlEAAAEEAPCEHMBdDCAJ83/ibNM7ngCaaibv7YkTxcpKPjTO+WcjswFV SEzMeTqW4MX2wSKdfcMq1HembbgfYs7v2UCnUFkLPZF19s3yUSISGcS7JxlBc3q1 7uj8W5XfBoGpgCYQqYFL2+AB/+3tLu7lU5iiEYCnevY5GQkq0kHx57Ag8goBAAUR tCdKb2huIE0uIEtlbHNleSBKciA8am1rZWxzZXlAZGVscGhpLmNvbT6JAJUDBRAv 5uh7QfHnsCDyCgEBAQZ2A/9/OMeWK4YC+PnEzBTmgpF4WAOsVXfzRD3zAbzfNWY9 MEGo4gRF8Mr1lPHdK+0JOHp327mj9ZvYqQb1bV5fwc5dJa8/Z34VLPYlVg2rV7vJ Hd0YnrgkoaIerbRmtP8dmZGeygeFtrk8aDCdcnMm27+tTJACl5hv2yjFO9rxBq+R MLQpRXhwaXJlcyBmb3IgbmV3IHNpZ3MvbXNncyBvbiBEZWMgMzEsIDE5OTc= =pOyw - -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBNDzFQkHx57Ag8goBAQHYkQQA0Oud9OvEX7qJdxJgGyirqzrAN4jI005p aOVl9UnSf4XGEPj1DFMONW61HaLoh46tEDmnfMrXjI706IfwNF3HfY14FIrGe5Nb U386CP5iztc6rpS6YsiX+prN9Q9RIXzari9uSHrmYSlGAcqa571vy7kkn7uejGBC jv+0hnYNE1M= =aHpr -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --John Kelsey, Counterpane Systems, kelsey(a)counterpane.com PGP 2.6 fingerprint = 4FE2 F421 100F BB0A 03D1 FE06 A435 7E36

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Improper biometric controls...
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Resent-Date: Thu, 9 Oct 1997 11:55:35 -0400 X-Authentication-Warning: qnx.com: localhost [127.0.0.1] didn't use HELO protocol To: 0xdeadbeef(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org Cc: bostic(a)bsdi.com Subject: Exam tip o' the day Date: Thu, 09 Oct 1997 11:50:58 -0400 From: glen mccready <glen(a)qnx.com> Resent-From: 0xdeadbeef(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org X-Mailing-List: <0xdeadbeef(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org> archive/latest/2317 X-Loop: 0xdeadbeef(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org Precedence: list Resent-Sender: 0xdeadbeef-request(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org Forwarded-by: Rob Windsor <windsor(a)oc.com> Forwarded-by: Kirk A Schneider <kschneid(a)oc.com> It was the week of finals, and obviously, everyone was stressing. This happened in a big (+300) lecture class, it was some hard science course with one of those real pain-in-the ass professors. Everyone taking this course had been dreading this final from the start. They all knew they had no hope. There was one student in the class who felt confident in the area if he could just take his time and work his way through each problem. So, on the day of the final, he decided he would just take his time on the test. The exam began, and he slowly paced himself, carefully working out each problem. This was diffficult because the professor was one of those guys who would obnoxiously yell to the class how much time they had left every three minutes. He was just one of those guys who needed a smack in the face. Finally, time was up, and the teacher told the class to stop, and to bring their test papers down to his desk. With over three-hundred people, this procedure took quite a while. That one student just continued working on his test. Eventually, ten extra minutes turned into twenty, until the student was there for almost an hour after the exam had ended. He looked at his paper, and decided he had completed the test to his satisfaction, and he could now hand it in. He gathered his things and walked down to the teachers desk. The professor was sitting at the desk, the tests were still sitting on the desk in a neatly stacked pile, and it was clear he had just been waiting for this student to finish so that he could tell him that he had failed. The student reached his professors desk with a big smile on his face. The professor said to him, "This test was due an hour ago. By handing it in now it is considered late, and consequently, you fail." The student looked right at the professor and said to him "Do you know who I am?" The professor clearly upset by his student's response said "What are you talking about?" Again the student said, "Do you know who I am?" The professor responded by saying no, of course not... Just as he said this, the student lifted up half of the test papers still sitting on the teachers desk. He casually slipped his test on the pile, and let the rest of the tests fall naturally back onto the stack. He looked at his professor and said "I didn't think so." --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>

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Secure Phone: Making man in the middle audible.
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Here is a method to render Man in the Middle audible on a telephone connection. Before speech can be encrypted, it is digitized and compressed. It is turned into digital packets. There is some choice in the size and other properties of the digital packets. Suppose that Bob's computer from time to time formulates a plan to do groups of a particular size and form, and sends Ann's computer a hash of that plan and the DH negotiated shared secret. Malloc (the man in the middle) cannot send this hash to Ann's computer for Ann would discover the shared secret she is using is not the same as the shared Bob is using. So his computer must formulate its own plan, and send its own hash, which will not agree with Bob's plan, because Bob's computer does not reveal the plan except by actually sending the packets. So malloc must decompress Bob's speech packets, repacketize them, and recompress them, Often he will not be able to send off a packet, until he has received two of Bob's packets. So this triples the delay, and increases the speech degradation. This should quite noticeable, noticeable enough to provoke Bob and Ann into verifying their connection by reading the hash digits of their shared secret. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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RE: EU Rejects GAK
by Phillip Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Before people get carried away it is important to realise that the EU institutions do not map onto US ones. The EU Commission does not have an analogue in the US system. It is an unelected group of beureacrats whose purpose is (roughly speaking) to harmonize EU law. It does not have legislative powers in its own right, nor does it necessarily have much influence. The EU lawmaking process is essentially that the Commision drafts some suggestions and passes them onto the council of ministers which accepts, rejects or ammends them. If there is unanimous agreement in the concil of ministers (majority vote on a restricted number of issues) then a directive is issued which the national parliaments must then enact into law. The limited scope of EU laws is critical, the EU is much like the US prior to the civil war, the member states are sovereign. Thus there is nothing the EU Commission can do to prevent member states outlawing crypto, nor for that matter can they force them to allow it. They can assist in forming EU wide regulations either way however. The real importance of the EU report is probably that it denies the statements made by the Freeh et. al. claiming that US alies in Europe are in favour of GAK. Despite the fact that there has never been any public demonstration of a commitment the administration has disingenuously claimed that it has the support of and indeed is being pressured to take its stance on export controls by other countries. Needless to say it is unconvincing to be told 'trust me' by someone who is clearly peddling a lie. Few people can prove it is a lie because few people can claim to have the personal access to European politicians the administration can. I know UK politics well enough to know that the current parliament is not going to back any increase of powers for a security service that many members of the government was used politically by the Conservatives. It would be like the nation of Islam calling for arbitrary arrest powers for the police. Phill

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