December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

RE: tcmay in favour of redistribution of wealth?
by Hard Media 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 10:15:35 -0800 tcmay wrote: > While I won't get started again here, understand that my views are much > more than just "justifiable apathy" about the people of the world. Justifiable? I dunno bout that. (Sorry couldn't resist.) > > My point? I feel more strongly about the death of one of my pets than I do > about hearing that some natural catastrophe in Bangla Desh has killed > 100,000. And I think all honest persons will admit that this is a natural > reaction. The "Hamming distance" matters, and people I have never met on > the opposite side of the earth simply are _abstract numbers_ to me, as I am > to them. Natural. "Natural" is a dangerous word to use. I hadn't met any of the people involved in the Oklahoma bombing, nor had most of the world, yet there was worldwide condemnation of the event. I hadn't met any of Hitler's concentration camp victims but I'm still outraged at these events. There are tangents and there are skew lines. Oh yeah why people think I'm making an attack on Tim's character, his looks, or whatever I don't understand, all I'm doing is criticising something he wrote. Where Walter Wriston/Third World debt is concerned the events are not natural, we'r not talking about a flood, which is a "natural" event but the actions of a man, or if you prefer an organisation. There is nothing "natural" about these. A country in debt to the IMF/World Bank or Citibank must accept "Stabilisation Policies" : "stabilisation policies are often viewed as measures designed primarily to maintain poverty and dependency of Third World nations while preserving the global market structure for the industrialised nations." - "Economics for a Developing World", M P Todaro. this is also known as "debt slavery". Not so good eh? Zaid

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Re: Privacy Issues
by Hal Finney 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

I recommend the web/gopher site <URL: http://chaos.taylored.com:1000/ > managed by Chael Hall and Karl Barrus. It has a collection of articles from the early days of the cypherpunks list when we initially explored a lot of the ideas which are getting rehashed today. In fact, I would recommend this to all new readers of the list in order to understand what has been discussed before and what some of our goals have been. Looking back, some of the essays seem a bit naive in our hopes and expectations for what crypto would do; things have turned out to be more corporate, more political, less grass-roots, than many of us expected. But the basic issues have remained much the same. Hal

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Re: Encrypting Hard Disks
by Edgar Swank 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- FCri Kaljundi wrote: > Tue, 22 Oct 1996, Michael B Amoruso kirjutas: > >> 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. > >F-Secure Desktop from Data Fellows is pretty good. It uses Blowfish >algorithm which means it is very fast on 32-bit Windows machines. > >More information at http://www.datafellows.com/f-secure/ - From a quick perusal of the above web site, it appears as though F-Secure Desktop offers encryption by file, much like PGP does, only a little more automatic. But an entire encrypted file must be decrypted before you can process it and the entire file must then be re-encrypted if it is updated. - From http://www.datafellows.com/f-secure/desktop/ With the built-in AutoSecure(TM) feature, you can define sets of files, directories, and Windows 95 folders that will be automatically encrypted and decrypted every time you start or close Windows. - From this, it appears encrypted files are decrypted while windows is open. Obviously if Windows crashes a lot of plaintext files can be left lying around! I prefer the methods of SecureDrive http://www.stack.urc.tue.nl/~galactus/remailers/securedrive.html or Secure Device ftp://utopia.hacktic.nl/pub/replay/pub/disk/secdev14.arj in which data is decrypted "on-the-fly" as it is transferred from disk to memory. The data is -always- encrypted on the disk. Both of the above use strong IDEA encryption (same as PGP) and both are free for non-commercial use. (Commercial use is possible by paying a small royalty to the holders of the IDEA patent; see http://www.ascom.ch/systec In contrast, F-Secure Desktop is $99 a copy. Edgar W. Swank <edgar(a)Garg.Campbell.CA.US> (preferred) Edgar W. Swank <EdgarSwank(a)Juno.com> Edgar W. Swank <Edgar_W._Swank(a)ilanet.org> Edgar W. Swank <EdgarSwank(a)Freemark.com> Home Page: http://members.tripod.com/~EdgarS/index.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMnR3B94nNf3ah8DHAQFJQgP7BRpqrcXAMGJDNXvxQzyQE5y6E47bwSDm CpA7X/rDmlxdm3XvB96O9jMLqtPRAbri4qoZ3hAd3jLycO/wTZV+gkxMwKxadMcC mtGSss5fTcNP1R+MTmvHJsyWrAb9rGBs0+X7n/sGa9km+VepdKTkCbVemNRa3w7L HoNEpkYlXeA= =9Kp4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- edgar(a)Garg.Campbell.CA.US (Edgar Swank) The Land of Garg BBS -- +1 408 378-5108

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Re: When did Mondex ever claim to be anonymous?
by Hallam-Baker 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

Derek Bell wrote: > > In message <Pine.HPP.3.91.961029194511.27228A-100000(a)cor.sos.sll.se>, Asgaard w > rites: > >Disinformation is a time-honoured weapon in political struggle. > >A rumour is called just that because it can't easily be checked > >- somebody heard from somebody, who heard from somebody etc. The > >spreader is hardly ever discredited since he does not guarantee > >the validity of the information. 'It's just a rumour, but...' > > The problem I have is with the "hardly ever" part - there is always > a chance of being caught out. Or of being ignored entirely. I quite often know something that I can't point to proof of. I wouldn't try to use such evidence in an argument as "proof". Acting on rumour is ultimately self defeating. The republicans have been dirt digging on Whitewater for four years and have failed to unearth anything. As a result they are finding it very difficult to get anywhere with their latest allegations of campaign corruption which are probably true. Of course they might not be having any effect for other reasons such as the fact that its Bob Dole's campaign vice-president thats in jail for corruption at the moment and not Clinton's but the general principle holds, you don't shoot until you know you can hit the target. > >Those arguing in favour of Big Brother - 'the needs of law enforcement' > >- frequently use (probably false) information that is hard to check, to > >impress the public: about terrorists stopped by wiretapping, > > This is interesting, as the UK police don't claim they need such > powers to deal with the IRA. Now they may already have large wiretapping > powers under law, but I get the impression that most successful anti-IRA > action is due either to infiltration or informers. Actually the police are currently asking for permission to use wiretap evidence in court. There is some opposition because there are those who want to keep the extent of the capability quiet. There is very good evidence for widespread use of wiretaps and SIGINT against the IRA. > IIRC, the bullshit claims are enough to annoy most netizens, though > the politicians aren't aiming at us. Still - I think documented risks of, > say, Mondex would hold more weight. Since when was cash annonymous? In the UK each banknote has a serial number which is recorded at the banks when it is passed arround. There is no reason why the US federal reserve wouldn't have added it to its existing note processing machinery since they must read the serial number during their checks for countrefeit notes. If Mondex said their product was "like cash" that does not mean they claimed it to be anonymous. Phill

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Cracked DES?
by TheShadow＠nym.alias.net 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

This was in the 10/28 issue of Network World Infusion. Did anyone else see it? Gurus prove that encryption's not all it's cracked up to be Two eminent Israeli cryptographers last week sent a shock wave through security circles with the announcement that they had figured out a way to extract private Data Encryption Standard (DES) encryption keys from such things as PCs and smart cards. Adi Shamir and Eli Biham showed they could get at even a Triple-DES secret key, by applying small amounts of heat or radiation to change the key's bit structure. Then, using a technique known as Differential Fault Analysis, they compared the encrypted outputs from both the damaged and undamaged cards to derive the key. ... Links include Biham's own overview of their findings, encryption primers and a time line of cryptography through the ages. DocFinder: 2814.

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Discrete logs 1
by Hal Finney 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

"Even adders can multiply using log tables..." PGP is moving to discrete log based cryptography. It will still support RSA, but people will be encouraged to generate discrete log keys. It will use RSA to encrypt to people with RSA keys, and discrete log crypto to encrypt to people with discrete log keys. Many discrete log cryptosystems will be patent free after next year. It may be that they will become more popular over the next few years for that reason. RSA has several more years before its patents expire. Most people are not as familiar with the math behind discrete logs as they are with RSA. The general idea of the difficulty of factoring is pretty easy to understand. It's much easier to multiply two large primes together than to figure out what the primes were just by looking at the result. Discrete logs require a little more explanation. First I am going to write a little bit about the lore of logarithms. I think today a lot of people don't know what they are. When I was a boy, in the 1960's, computers and even calculators were not widely available. Yet engineers in many fields needed to perform calculations. Reaction rates, material strengths, friction, current flow, all such calculations require multiplication and division of numbers with several significant digits. The choices were basically to multiply it out the long way, which was slow, error-prone, and wasteful because it generates twice as many digits as you need; use a slide rule, which usually only gets you two or three digits of accuracy; or to use log tables, which could get you four or five, or sometimes even more, accurate digits. The logarithm of a number is the power that you have to raise some specified base (usually 10 for these purposes) to in order to get that number. The logarithm of 100 base 10 is 2 because 10**2 = 100. The log of 1000 is 3. For numbers not powers of 10, the logarithm has fractional parts. The logarithm of 20 is about 1.3, for example. To multiply two numbers, you find their logs and add them, and then turn the result back into a number. To divide, subtract the logs. So most of the work is just in looking up what the logs are using published tables. Actually we do use logs in a crude form in much of cryptography. Any time you say that the product of two 512 bit numbers is 1024 bits what you mean is that the log base two of the smaller numbers is about 512, and so the log base two of their product is 512+512 or 1024. By the time I was in high school calculators were becoming fairly widespread, but we still learned how to use log tables to do multiplication and division. Whole books were published containing nothing but tables of the logarithms of numbers. You can still find these sometimes in used book stores. There were lots of tricks to using these tables which we had to learn. Logarithms of numbers less than 1 are negative, but the trick was to treat them as the sum of a positive fractional part and a negative integer, so for example the log of .2 was treated as +.3 - 1. This made it easier to look up the values. And there were special sub-tables within the tables to help with interpolating, looking up log values between the entries in the table. Using these you could get more accuracy in your answers. All this was part of the craft of working engineers and scientists of the time. It's hard for people today, raised on throwaway and even virtual calculators, to understand the sense of power that came from using logs for calculations. Until we learned these advanced techniques the only accurate alternatives were the terribly tedious hand methods. Being able to get results by adding up a few numbers from a book was an amazing improvement. The discrete logs used in crypto have very different mathematical properties than regular logarithms, but I thought this bit of history would spark some memories in old-timers and give a new perspective for younger people. Hal

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Key for dbell@maths.tcd.ie (key id 0x20C0C719)
by Derek Bell 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In message <199610310150.RAA09499(a)blacklodge.c2.net>, Lou Zirko writes: >Date: Wed Oct 30 20:49:53 1996 >Can you provide the key for key id 0x20C0C719, or a location where it can >be obtained so that your signed messages to cypherpunks can be verified. OK - my key is at http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dbell/key.asc Apologies for the oversight, Derek -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: noconv iQCVAgUBMnjte1XdSMogwMcZAQHPTwP/RvZ6psgaexodOyQ7MvzeS58UdhDZymA6 lJJMyc9ndKeL7v+z6nMzSxA+Isnhe1huGFs9A8ICFVXY6zT+uml//352StwClIoc 0qR4N64vHJVz1G7O5uXjyehT+viI08R5f6qdH5tDjJ9Zt7+zLRCDGOVcCp5mgSdO BRkAQuB+u9Y= =uBxL -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Inappropriate postings
by Kimmo Suominen 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

Dear Cypherpunks, I apologize for having gatewayed inappropriate messages to this mailing list via my systems. One of our new feeds for centralized mailing list subscribal was leaking in messages from their USENET feed. I've asked them to fix this. I have also taken steps to make sure no such misconfigured systems can cause gatewaying through my system again. Sincerely, Kimmo Suominen Trans-Atlantic Communications

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COR_set
by John Young 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

10-31-96. FiTi: "How to crack secret computer codes." Bellcore researchers plan to publish on the Internet this week technical details of a new method of cracking encryption systems used to protect computer data. The approach relies on spotting errors made by computers and applying a mathematical equation to work out secret encryption codes. "This is very sophisticated math. The only people who will understand it are other cryptography experts." ----- http://jya.com/corset.txt (3 kb) COR_set Details of the Bellcore smartcard hack? When, where?

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RE: tcmay in favour of redistribution of wealth?
by Duncan Frissell 18 Dec '03

18 Dec '03

At 02:27 PM 10/31/96 +0000, Hard Media wrote: > >Where Walter Wriston/Third World debt is concerned the events are not >natural, we'r not talking about a flood, which is a "natural" event but the >actions of a man, or if you prefer an organisation. There is nothing "natural" >about these. > >A country in debt to the IMF/World Bank or Citibank must accept >"Stabilisation Policies" : Tim is opposed to the existence of the World Bank and Robert McNamara. No libertarians I know of favor the existence of the World Bank. DCF

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