December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

No Subject
by nobody＠rebma.rebma.mn.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Subject: spam ignore this is a test "To be responsive at this time, though I will simply say, and therefore this is a repeat of what I said previously, that which I am unable to offer in response is based on information available to make no such statement."

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Re: hi/. .
by mench＠cs.unr.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > hey, send me info on your movement! > > pete > > > > Well, this morning I was a bit constipated, so I ate four bran muffins, > and by late afternoon I succeeded in producing quite a decent bowl > movement. All in all I'd have to say I'm feeling much better now. Thanks > very much for asking. > > l8r, thug > Oh, thanks very much for the smartass reply. I take it this is a list? so do I send to Cypherpunks-request(a)toad.com? Also, I'd like to get a hold of Chris Odhner. Chris! email me! pete

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dc-nets
by root＠satelnet.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Marc Ringuette, and Yanek Martinson are some of the folks on this list who > are interested in working on DC-Nets....Yanek even claims to have a > primitive one running on his local machine and is interested in volunteers > to test it on a larger basis. I did write a dc-net system in perl that uses e-mail as the transport mechanism. It worked quite well when all the "participants" were on the same machine, and with immediat emessage delivery, no batching or queuing. As soon as I attempted to run it with a few people over the net, there were severe synchronization problems. E-mail messages are not guaranteed to arrive in the same order as they were sent, or to arrive to all the addressees within the same time frame. DC-nets work only if all the participants see the same set of messages in the same sequence. I have since decided that e-mail is not a very good transport mechanism for a dc-net and am experimenting with tcp/socket connections instead. That seems to be working pretty well, but has quite a high load on the network. If someone does want to work on some sort of a synchronisation protocol for the e-mail based dc-net, let me know and I will send you the perl code. The tcp version is not ready enough to give to anyone, and I have been quite busy with a few other (only marginally cypherpunks-related) projects and can't spend very much time on the dc-net system.

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Re: Sharing a secret
by koontzd＠lrcs.loral.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>I know that there is a way to have a key, K, divided into >n parts such that any i of them are needed to recunstruct >K. The property holds that no i-1 parts are sufficient, >and ANY i parts will do. How does this work exactly? Is >it really the case that no i-1 parts give information? >Is there a way to cheat? With a key K of size j (goddamn fortran anyway), i parties can share the secret with a threshold of i (requiring all i parties key part) by generating i parts P such that K = Pi XOR Pi-1 XOR ... P1. All the parts P are the same size as K, which keeps the effort of guessing a missing part equal to j, or the size of the key k itself. Such a scheme is not ideal for keys K that have a deterministic characteristic.

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Clipper chip stuff (fwd)
by Stanton McCandlish 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Could you forward this to cypherpunks for me? Walter is a technoid and > happened to be one of the plaintiffs in Steve Jackson Games (e-mail user on > Illuminati). I'm hoping one of the 'punks might be able to comment to him > on his theory -- it sounds interesting to me, but I'm not technical enough > to know if its got any merit. Thanks. > > >Date: Thu, 21 Oct 93 18:05 EDT > >From: Walter Milliken <milliken(a)BBN.COM> > >Subject: Clipper chip stuff > >To: ssteele(a)eff.org > > > >Hi Shari -- it's been a while.... > > > >I know you're probably not the right person to talk to about Clipper > >chip stuff, but I figured you could forward this and tell me who is. > > > >Basically, I think I see NSA's backdoor in the whole scheme. Probably > >other people have noticed this too, but in case they haven't (and I > >haven't seen any comment on these lines on comp.org.eff.talk), I figured > >I'd point it out. > > > >The trick isn't necessarily in the algorithm (which I don't know, of > >course). I think it's in the key generation process. I read Dorothy > >Denning's description as posted to comp.org.eff.talk the other day, and > >decided it sounded fishy. Why are the secret per-chip keys generated > >from the chip serial number (which is observable by anyone with the > >law-enforcement key)? To escrow keys, all you need is to 1) associate a chip > >serial number with a secret key and 2) split the secret key into two, > >unusuable parts for the escrow agents. I can't see any reason why the > >secret key isn't just a random number (or rather the XOR of two random > >numbers, one for each escrow agent). > > > >Instead, we've got this complex algorithm for converting the chip serial > >number into the chip secret key. Thus, if you know the chip serial > >number, the key generating algorithm, and the initialization states for > >the key generator (provided by the two escrow agents) *you can compute > >the chip secret key*! (Or so it appears on a very superficial reading.) > > > >I suspect you could dispense with knowing the initialization states, if > >you were NSA and could obtain any chip from the same batch -- you open > >the chip up (I'm sure *they* know how to do that), extract its secret > >key, and reverse-engineer the initialization data. (This last step is > >non-trivial, but I'd be surprised if NSA couldn't do it -- it's a > >variant of known-plaintext attack.) It's also possible that NSA may > >*supply* the initialization states, or an algorithm for generating them, > >or at least advice on how to pick them. After all, it's their game, > >they get to make the rules.... > > > >In any case, I can see no way that using the *observable* chip serial > >number to help generate the chip secret key can in *any* way improve the > >security of the system. You'd be much better off just sticking any old > >random number into the chip as a secret key, and just noting it down > >with the associated chip serial number in the escrow files. Personally, > >I think I'd use a non-algorithmic mechanism for generating random keys > >-- perhaps a truly random number source, such as atomic decay processes. > >There's only one of these things -- it can afford to get fancy. > > > > > >Disclaimer: I'm not a cryptography expert, so it's possible I'm missing > >something here. Possibly factoring in the chip serial number makes it > >harder to crack secret keys if you somehow manage to obtain a few chips > >from the same batch and open them. But it certainly seems suspicious to > >me.... > > > >---Walter -- -=> mech(a)eff.org <=- Stanton McCandlish Electronic Frontier Foundation Online Activist & SysOp "A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood of ideas in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." -JFK NitV-DC BBS 202-232-2715, Fido 1:109/? IndraNet 369:111/1, 14.4V32b 16.8ZyX

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700 club
by Mike Johnson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> The right to encryption and the "right" to abortion don't have the same > basis - encryption kills no one. Amen! But encryption IS regulated as a munition. In military applications, weak crypto could (and has) cost some people their lives. Strong crypto reduces the power of governments or other entities to oppress people of differing views. Strong crypto is a powerful influence to resist oppression of one group by another, just as Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Speech, and the Right to Bear Arms do. I don't see strong crypto as a threat to Christians. Strong crypto is a major threat to totalitarian governments, spies, and criminals. Strong crypto is a minor inconvenience for certain law enforcement agencies in some circumstances. Three out of four isn't ideal, but life just isn't that simple. By the way, if you think 700 Club support for strong crypto without key escrow is strange -- call my BBS for some amusement. You will find Bible search software, church management tools, and two file areas devoted to cryptography. Not everyone on this list is an athiest, anarchist, or whatever. Mike Johnson mpj(a)csn.org BBS 303-938-9654

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Re: Subliminal Channels
by hfinney＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Steganography, the art of hiding a secret message inside of an openly readable one, can be thought of as a subliminal channel. In the prisoner example, the prisoners could have pre-arranged that, say, every 10th character in the typed messages they exchange would be used to spell out a secret message. Or perhaps word or sentence lengths or spacings could send a message. In general, in any system where there is ambiguity, more than one way of expressing a valid message, there is a subliminal channel. Since DSS signatures are apparently not unique for a given message (unlike, say, RSA signatures as specified in the PKCS standards), they have such a channel. Hal

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cellular
by abootch＠sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hey Cypherites, While taking a *study* break last night I caught the last couple of minutes of a report on the cellular phone hacking on Prime Time Live - KABC(?) west coast. Someone, presumably, from one of the cellular phone co's came up with a security scheme that would stop people from hacking into other people's accounts - using digital signatures! When asked how long this *technology*'s been around he answered its been out for awhile, only it has been implemented yet because no one was willing to pay for it. I wonder.... Also, they mentioned something about 400 people being caught by the S.S. so far this year(?) on cellular hacking charges. Is this correct? I didn't catch the whole show and am not sure if I ingested what was being said properly (I was too tired to chew) so if anyone caught the whole piece or knows more please post. Thanks.

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Re: Paper Shredders
by norm＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The garbage disposal in a kitchen sink is very effective.

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Clipper Chip report on 700 Club today (Wednesday)
by James K. Huggins 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Phil Karn (karn(a)qualcomm.com) writes: > If I hadn't seen the show with my own eyes, I never would have > believed it. The Religious Right, so ready to mind everyone else's > personal business and to reshape the government in its own image, > opposes something that would make it easier for the government to > control the private lives of its citizens. Let's be honest, though ... the "Non-Religious Left" is interested in the same thing (though in different ways). Just about everybody in politics wants to change something or other. > Of course, the Religious Right is at odds with the current government, > what with talk of using the federal racketeering laws against > anti-abortion demonstrators. So perhaps they can be forgiven for > their current anti-government stance. It ain't just governments that oppose the religious right. There are a lot of moves on college campuses lately to kick conservative religious groups off campus because they aren't PC. I can easily see a time when having cryptography might be very useful to me if the administration at my university starts grepping my e-mail to see if my group meets the latest PC test. Sure, the US government tends to like Christian folks right now. But there are lots of governments around that don't -- ask people who live in Muslim countries where being a Christian is illegal, punishable by death as heresy. Any applications for cryptography there? > And there's supreme irony in the right to encryption and the right to > abortion both being founded in the same basic concept: personal > privacy. It all depends on whose ox is being gored, I guess. The problem ain't with privacy ... it's with what do you with privacy. Should we all have microphones installed in our homes because the privacy of my house out in the country means that I can beat my wife and no-one will hear her scream? The problem isn't that my house is private ... the problem is that I'm a jerk. So make being a jerk illegal and forget the microphones. Disclaimer: I don't have a house or a wife, and 4 out of 5 officemates don't think I'm a jerk ... Jim Huggins (huggins(a)eecs.umich.edu)

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