December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Military & dependants
by qwerty-remailer＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Nobody asks: > Can American Military members or their family take copies of PGP > or other encryption programs with them when being stationed at > overseas bases? Aren't the overseas installations considered to > be American soil while occupied, thus permitting such transfers? I'm not sure what the ITAR rules say about export of armaments by the military; it would be nice if it were illegal :-) Also don't know if sending to American military bases overseas counts as export, especially if it involves going through non-US territory (if there is such a thing any more :-() Use of encryption technology by the military is probably subject to all sorts of rules; use for official purposes certainly is. You could probably get in major trouble for doing so without authorization, and I doubt PGP is officially approved; it's certainly not approved for classified information. Patent issues are also involved; the government is allowed to use RSA as part of the terms of the funding deals for their research, but this presumably doesn't apply to private use by government employees. On the other hand, IDEA wasn't developed with US funds, and its patent probably doesn't give the government any rights to use it. Ascom Tech probably could try to restrict it if they wanted.

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RE: Magic Money questions
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>What does the bank hope to accomplish by claiming a coin was already spent? >It can print more coins any time, so it has no reason to cheat. If the bank issues coins in return for real money, and then refuses to accept them back, it's gained the amount of money it just ripped off. Doing this often enough to be noticed loses reputation, of course; you can sometimes get away with it if you're a government central bank and get a law made saying you no longer have to pay back silver for those paper dollar notes. On the other hand, printing extra coins doesn't get you anything, since nobody gave you any real money for them. Of course, if you can start up a big bank in remailer-space, and get lots of depositors, but nobody knows where you are, you can ignore the damage to your reputation by ripping off all your depositors at once and forwarding your email to Argentina, just as bank-embezzlers occasionally abscond with the whole pile.

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Soap Boxx's Brother??
by jdwilson＠gold.chem.hawaii.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Taken from paperboy a briefing given by Mr. Dennix Boxx - any relation to Soap? <hehehe> Forwarded message: > From paperboy(a)tecnet2.jcte.jcs.mil Thu Feb 3 17:01:04 1994 > Date: Fri, 4 Feb 94 02:26:12 GMT > Message-Id: <9402040226.AA01090(a)tecnet2.jcte.jcs.mil> > To: jdwilson(a)gold.chem.hawaii.edu > From: paperboy(a)tecnet2.jcte.jcs.mil > Posted: Fri Feb 4 02:26:10 GMT 1994 > Subject: News Briefing 02/03/94 > > DoD News Briefing > Thursday, February 3, 1994 - 1:00 p.m. > Mr. Dennis Boxx, Deputy ATSD, Public Affairs > > > Mr. Boxx: Good afternoon. I've got a couple of > announcements. > > Today we have a Memorandum for Correspondents, which > announces that Secretary of Defense-Designate William Perry will > leave Washington, Friday evening, to attend the Munich Conference > on Security Policy '94. Deputy Secretary Perry is scheduled to > deliver the U.S. address at the conference on Sunday morning. > Throughout the weekend he will also hold bilateral meetings with -Jim

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Please, please write to your reps!
by nate＠VIS.ColoState.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In light of recent news from the EFF concerning the Clipper/ SkipJack/Key Escrow/Rape of Privacy issues (see comp.org.eff.news), I would like to ask everyone out there to take the time (a few minutes, maybe an hour if you really take time) to write to your Congress-unit and Senator, as well as the President, Vice President, etc... and voice your strong opposition to the recent policy decisions about Clipper. Also, write to CNN and any other news agencies (ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, etc) and tell them that they should get their act together and start to cover this issue, as it certainly is "newsworthy" Thanks for your time, and please write. -nate sammons -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Nate Sammons <nate(a)VIS.ColoState.Edu> <nate(a)yuma.ANCS.ColoState.Edu> | | Colorado State University Computer Visualization Laboratory | | Data Visualization/Interrogation, Modeling, Animation, Rendering | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

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Remailer Security
by nobody＠pmantis.berkeley.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Just a qucik question. How safe am I from being traced if I use a remailer? If I hop it through say three of them?

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bounce from <MAILER-DAEMON@rosedale.org> ??
by nate＠VIS.ColoState.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I just posted to the list about writing to congress-units, etc, and was sent a bounce from <MAILER-DAEMON(a)rosedale.org> that the recipient's mailbox was full... anyone else get this? -nate -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Nate Sammons <nate(a)VIS.ColoState.Edu> <nate(a)yuma.ANCS.ColoState.Edu> | | Colorado State University Computer Visualization Laboratory | | Data Visualization/Interrogation, Modeling, Animation, Rendering | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

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Re: Remailer security.
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mr. Someone asked, >Just a qucik question. >How safe am I from being traced if I use a remailer? If I hop it through >say three of them? Depends on how much they are willing to pay for the extropia secret key and pass phrase that I am selling. Too bad they don't guard their company at night, and don't use rotary locks instead of six pin tumblers. How much do you think your enemy is willing to offer? The point is.... Decide for yourself. No one knows. -Citizen #487-22-3398/C class.

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a little information, please...
by nate＠VIS.ColoState.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Could some kind sole out there please tell me a few things? 1) How many legal wiretaps are conducted each year? 2) How much will it cost to implement the key escrow system, specifically, how much startup cost and how much per year to maintain? 3) How much money is lost per year as a result of strict export controls on encryption technology? (Lost from business revinue, that is) 4) How much money has it cost to design the Clipper Chip and the DSS? Thanks, - -nate - -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Nate Sammons <nate(a)VIS.ColoState.Edu> <nate(a)yuma.ANCS.ColoState.Edu> | | Colorado State University Computer Visualization Laboratory | | Data Visualization/Interrogation, Modeling, Animation, Rendering | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

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Magic Money Update
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- <mmnyfast.zip update sent to csn.org> This is an update for Magic Money. The PGPKGEN.C here contains a very fast mp_inv function, provided by an anonymous poster on the Cypherpunks list, which reduces the time to unblind a 1024-bit coin from minutes to a few seconds. The C.C contains a new -r option which generates a blank message, similar to the -i option, without generating a new key. This should be used by infrequent server users, to update their elists and make sure they do not miss an expiration. The message generated by -r has no coins, but causes the server to reply. Blinding is now fast enough to use a 1024-bit server key. A server operator should re-integrate the assembly-language speedups from PGP, or the server will be very slow in signing coins. The PGP makefile might help you do this. Pr0duct Cypher -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLVSTlsGoFIWXVYodAQGIVgP/aU0rqTccbAonRO2Mv4O3Z9WAXswy1BkN VY1psOyNTgT+C7Uvet1dm92rlRgvShAEcF5CK7crrO+hjhp7QgU6rnCY5ZrAN/i5 Oavn8CZcjxGb7nSkMhPQIIO7yoeKJoV+zaIYJ8uhGwSI6s7L/sDRsqebpxqoN4Bv EMAIK3BZ8Zg= =uahV -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Magic Money vulnerabilities?
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- People have mentioned possible attacks against Magic Money. I don't think it is possible to send the server a value to sign which would reveal the server's secret key. The server signs your message x by raising x to the power d. If you know x^d and x, finding d would seem to be a discrete-logarithm problem, which is just as intractible as factoring. Can a small or otherwise rigged x help you to find d? If so, participating in any blind signature protocol is very dangerous, but I don't think that you can find d this way. wcs(a)anchor.ho.att.com wrote: (some deleted) (attack 1) >One security hole in online digicash systems of the Chaum variety is >that you _do_ need to make sure the money is only transmitted in >encrypted forms not susceptible to playback attacks. >If Eve can read the cash either before Bob gets it or before Bob's >message gets from his fast LAN across the slow part of the net >to the bank, then she can occasionally spend it before Bob can. (attack 2) >If Eve stomps on the Account-number bits, even though she can't >break the encryption to substitute her account number for Bob's, >she can substitute a random account number for Bob's. >This acts as a denial-of-service attack against Bob. >As a defense, either the message has to contain signatures or at least >MACs for validation, and be rejected if invalid, or the format >needs to make it impossible to find the account number field >or to modify it without trashing the cash as well. Magic Money is not susceptible to the first (intercept) attack, because the coins are encrypted with the server's public key. The reply is also encrypted with a response key sent to the server inside the encrypted packet. The server signs its responses, so you couldn't send someone some bogus coins and then fake the server's response to fool the person into believing that the coins were good. Magic Money has no account numbers; the server just exchanges old coins for new coins immediately. A version of the second attack is a problem. The message from the user to the server has no authentication. It is just an encrypted PGP message to the server. There is an RSA packet and an IDEA packet, and the data is directly inside the IDEA packet. If you were to dearmor the message and garble something near the end, then re-armor it, the server would bounce the garbled coins with a bad signature. Some of the first coins would already have been cancelled, and their value would be lost. To prevent this, the next version will MD5 the data packet before encrypting it, and include the MD5 value. This will be checked, and if it is bad, the message will be thrown out before processing any of the coins. This is not a pressing problem. Who would go to all the trouble to make a remailer detect and corrupt certain messages? The person doing the corrupting would not have anything to gain. A while ago I read of a program in alpha-test called Nautilus. This was specifically designed to compress speech for modem transmission. The author said that the beta, when it was ready, would be Copylefted. PGP Tools, if combined with Nautilus, has everything you need to do a secure phone. With the Clipper push, we need one badly, and now. It should use PGP keys for authentication, but either DH or a one-shot RSA key for key exchange. That way they can't record the session and demand your key later, as they could if you used your regular PGP key for the key exchange. Pr0duct Cypher -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLVSdtMGoFIWXVYodAQHC9AQApMjaIF2+h0k6Zb2YSwjkFL1/zAgCXJU+ Dm+kS0us9kusKMc2wr2pc4cEzQow9apM/Od2CisXAaRtHZNUyE8tN3mYWEPxAdcd 6qG03ZekvTqQB+do2HBGRAH3KXGscPIDCyjuh9iIKp9bB7/GWLNoAYm7fPjxpIYz gnWTuRyBme4= =wOox -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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