December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Case Studies Info Request
by Christopher Garrett Goebel 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm looking for info, articles, archives, book and journal leads on info related to applied cryptology in the 20th century... for a senior thesis I'm writing on cryptology, warfare, and national security. Specifically, I'm looking for o Clipper chip archives of articles o Articles on Phil (PGP) and RSA disputes o Articles on the export of cryptology I'd also like info on cryptology in the Cold War or leads to such info. Please send info to: genghis(a)blue.engin.umich.edu. Thanks, Garrett

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NSA
by The PUNISHER - Judge 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hey all, I just wanted to let you know (as an ex-SEAL), the NSA (and to a limited extent CIA) have UNBELIEVEABLE resources! If anyone could crack RSA, DES, OPP...they could. Never underestimate the power of a "black" budget (or for that matter soup) The PUNISHER Judge; Jury; Executioner....All in a day's work Mob Boss: "500 of my men killed; there is a limit to revenge you know" Punisher: "I haven't reached mine yet"

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Re: (fwd) Technosys, Prosody, the "NSA", and some unfunny BS passed off as a joke
by owen＠autodesk.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

And people think that corporations are going to entrust their information assets, and valuable corporate data/communication to a network where forgery is this easy. Right, and I am the emperor of China! This is classic. Expect to see lots more of these *harmless pranks*. LUX ./. owen

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Re: Can NSA crack PGP?
by owen＠autodesk.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: baum(a)newton.apple.com (Allen J. Baum) > But, there is one thing that is true about NSA's ability to crack it: > they won't give you cause to know whether they can or not. This statement, like the following, is like a rich vein of valuable insight into the extra-technical aspects of the issue. I found myself reading this next part over several times, and each pass I found that I associated what I understood to other unspoken questions I have. > e.g., if they can, and they read some mail of yours that you REALLY don't > want them to read, they won't act on that information in such a manner that > you can determine that they cracked the code for your message. They > couldn't use it on a warrant, & they couldn't testify as to its contents in > court. To do so would advertise their capabilities, which is a no-no for > them. (they might, of course, use that information to point people in the > right direction so they can attribute information to an anonymous tip, but > they have to be careful even there) and thus revealing that if you become a target of genuine scorn from that corner, it will operate from a position which is beyond accountability itself. I think that Doug Barnes hit the nail on the head by pointing out that sheer volume of stuff to filter through has the potential of affording us an edge. > Even now, when it's pretty certain they could crack DES, you won't > find them doing it for a law enforcement agency that asks; it gives away > too much. Anything you are *required* to keep secret, is more valuable to the *requiring agency* than to you. Anything you are expected to accept on faith, can't be proven. LUX ./. owen

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CORRECTION READ FIRST
by Christopher Garrett Goebel 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Don't mail those case studies to genghis(a)blue.engin.umich.edu It was a dormant account my brother used to keep in touch with friends from work (when he worked there). He said he could forward mail to me from there... well, it looks like they've closed down that account. Sorry, send mail to goebelc1(a)studentg.msu.edu Thanks, Garrett

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Pyrrhus Cracks RSA?
by Michael E. Marotta 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

CAN THE GOVERNMENT BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB? by mercury(a)well.sf.ca.us <Michael E. Marotta> Long ago, Captain Kirk and his crew stumbled on a Nazi planet. A Federation dude found them earlier and decided to industrialize their society by the "most efficient" means possible. No one was surprised at this. In "Mirror, Mirror" Spock-2 predicts that the Evil Federation will collapse. This was also accepted without comment. Star Trek, perhaps more than any other mass media production, reflects the American psyche. Americans, of course, are humans. Human nature accepts dualities easily. On the one hand, people admire the conqueror. On the other, the historical evidence is never denied: empires always collapse. (Look at what remains: farming, writing, arithmetic, ships and chariots, clothing,... These are useful.) Not so long ago, Ayn Rand showed that evil only triumphs when good people work f+ it. When good people do nothing, evil fails. Cypherpunks know that centralized systems are inefficient, yet they fear the NSA. Cypherpunks know that government employees are slugabeds, yet they fear the NSA. Cypherpunks know that qinnovation and enterprise are the antithesis of socialism, yet they fear the NSA. They don't fear that the NSA will kick in their doors and shoot them in a cybernetic Kristallnacht or burn t(their homes the way the Romans and Mongols did to Carthage and Samarkand. (Waco comes to mind, here.) No, the Cypherpunk is afraid that the government has "powerful computers" capable of a "brute force attack" on their algorithms. It may be true. Having Archimedes in town only bought the Syracusans time, it didn't assure them victory. The US Govt drafted 90% of the physicists in the world, gave them virtually unlimited resources and in five years, it had atomic bombs. The American and Soviet governments proved that they could harness nineteenth century technology and shoot things into space. (According to Willey Ley what made their rockets possible was the pumps which came from fire trucks.) Ask "anyone" and they will tell you that World War Two brought us nuclear power, spaceships, radar, television, the transistor, the computer, canned food, and recycling. In fact, it brought none of these. They already existed. Absent the person with an idea, the Government would still be beating farmers with rods for not giving up their goats and grain. (The pharoah's toughs used sticks with sharp stones in them until bronze came along. Later, their bronze weapons were chopped up by people with iron. Why didn't the pharoah's priests discover bronze and iron?) Both William Friedman and the man he detested, Herbert O. Yardley, despaired in wartime for the lack of people with "cipher sense." An infinite number of clerks with typewriters could not break the simplest code. The government enlisted people who liked crossword puzzles, mathematicians, polyglots, anyone and everyone who played with symbols. It made no difference. There was no way to tell who had "cipher sense" and there was no way to TEACH it. Friedman was an obsessive-compulsive who worked himself into a neurotic frenzy, breaking the Purple Code. Turing delivered the "Bombe" that broke Enigma. You know the people who could break DES, RSA, PGP, etc. Shamir unpacked Diffie's knapsack. What is most probable, is that these ciphers will stand for some unforeseeable time until someone who may not be born yet comes along and breaks them all as an idle {exercise on her way to greatness in another field. But the NSA? No way, Jose. They might be nerds who hacked some code at 3 am. But you put them on a salary and benefits in a pyramid, then tell them not to talk about their work, and you thwart whatever creativity they had. The NSA can kill you. But t({they can never out-think you. qiM{iW{x

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NYT: Virus; NeXT (unrelated)
by walter kehowski 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Cypherpunks and Extropians: Two articles of interest in today's NYT: 1) [Front Page, lower right] A software vendor allegedly planted a virus in a customer's machine because he threatened to stop payment on the software he bought. The virus was programmed to shutdown the customer's computer. 2) [Front page, bottom, Business section] NeXT and Sun have announced a partnership. Apparently, Sun is to invest 10mil in NeXT for access to the source of their OOP environment. BTW, how much did Sun make last year? How much is 10mil by comparison? Walter A. Kehowski <wak(a)next0.math.pitt.edu>

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ViaCrypt Details?
by Bruce C. Dovala 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, Does anyone have any details on ViaCrypt? Particularly availabilty, sources, user interface, compatibility with PGP, etc. Please post or write. Thanx, Bruce

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Re: Comments on NSA (was: "Pyrrhus Cracks RSA?")
by smb＠research.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(NSA has been making noises about how they'd already discovered public key crypto years before Diffie and Hellman did. This could be face-saving bragadoccio. Time will tell. Any NSA readers out there are free to post anonymously to this group or to alt.whistleblowers, or to "sell" your memoirs on BlackNet.) There was an interesting discussion on this point at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security a few weeks ago. At the ``Festcolloquium'' in honor of Gus Simmons, someone who used to work for NSA (his name escapes me, but I have it at home) stated that in 1963, President Kennedy signed a memorandum calling for -- in today's language -- the use of digital signatures for nuclear weapons command and control. The memo -- National Action Security Memorandum (NASM) 160 -- is still classified. Someone else on this list (I'll let him speak for himself) has contacted the JFK library about it. It may already be going through clearance release; if not, forms have been submitted to initiate the release process. And there's always FOIA if that fails. It will be very interesting to see the memorandum when it comes out. (Btw, it was written by Jerome Weisner, Kennedy's science advisor.) A lot of wisdom consists of asking the right questions; if the phrasing was right, I would tend to believe that NSA did indeed have public key technology in the mid-60's, once they were asked to create something with those properties. But if that was true, why didn't Simmons himself know of it? He said that he learned of public key from the Martin Gardener column in Scientific American, as I recall. Simmons was familiar with NASM-160, though; in fact, he was the one who supplied the number. --Steve Bellovin

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Re: Can NSA crack PGP?
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> [ Stanton McCandlish wrote ] >The persons holding this viewpoint espouse the idea that >the NSA can crack anything, pretty much, and that anything they could not >crack would not be available to the general public, but would have been >supressed. That view allocates to the NSA the power they wish they had over cryptographic creativity. I wonder if the author is really NSA him/her self. Vernam's one-time-tape [-file, for us] is provably unbreakable and not suppressed. RSA with enough modulus bits is unbreakable and not suppressed (although they tried). [We don't know how many bits is "enough", however.] There are ways to use DES which increase the difficulty of breaking -- but again we don't know how many instances we have to use to achieve enough security to foil the NSA. We know we can get there, however, and I'm willing to bet it's not difficult. Of course, I don't know and don't want to know. I want the NSA to be good at what it does. I want our team to be able to read the other team's signals. All I want is to preserve my freedom to use any cryptosystem of my own concoction -- straight invention or cobbled together from others'. I've had that freedom for all my life and intend to preserve it. ----------- Can NSA break PGP? Who knows? I'm not sure I care. I don't see the NSA as my enemy, per se. (That does *not* mean I'll hand them a skeleton key to my traffic, eg., via Clipper.) My secrets are from people I think of as criminals (in or out of government) and I want to use strong cryptography to foil them. I would trust PGP for that. I trust RIPEM with triple DES (and 1024 bit RSA keys) a bit more, for its better-tested conventional algorithm. For even better security, I would use: 2000 bit RSA keys true hardware ranno generator for session keys des-cbc|tran|des-cbc|tran|des as the conventional cryptosystem but, of course, there are always TEMPEST attacks, bugs in my office, ..., and as Diffie points out -- you have no control over the recipient. S/he might send cleartext of your messages right to the person you're trying to foil. Fact remains: there is *no* absolute privacy. There is only a computational hindrance on eavesdropping. - Carl

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