December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Denning Presentation and Q&A at George Mason University
by cfrye＠ciis.mitre.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On March 8, Dr. Dorothy Denning was a guest speaker for LRNG 572 - Taming the Electronic Frontier, a course at George Mason University. The professor, Dr. Brad Cox, is a veteran software developer who has turned his attention to developing models for electronic commerce and "student-centered education". The latter is my own term for his concept of students, through a demand-based process, having much more control over and interaction with the university education process. Brad has expressed strong opinions on several issues regarding personal privacy and the Clipper/Digital Telephony proposals; I don't presume to speak for him, but I should note that our homework includes installing PGP 2.2 or 2.3a on our personal machines, generating key pairs, distributing our public keys, and broadcasting an essay encrypted with everyone else's public keys. The lecture was broadcast on the George Mason University channel, 48 on Media General Cable Systems in Fairfax County, VA, and other channels around the DC Metro Area. Tapes are available in the GMU Library and, I believe, may be copied and distributed freely. If any of you would like a copy of the session, I'll look into what has to happen to get it done. I do not have a VCR at home and am not referring to the tape as I write this summary, so there may be some inaccuracies. Further, as I was not taking careful notes, my own comments and questions are most prominent in this summary. In my note to the class, I'll ask them to contribute their own views of the proceedings. I am forwarding this note to Brad, Dr. Denning, and the class to ensure all parties have the opportunity to correct any misrepresentations or omissions. ***The Presentation*** Dr. Denning was clearly nervous -- she indicated that she had never worked with the combination of television, overhead projector and computer-cueing system in the video classroom. Also, I surmise that Brad had warned her that she wouldn't be facing the most sympathetic audience in the world. Each student had written an essay about Clipper and emailed it to Brad, cc'ing the rest of the class. Most of the class didn't think Clipper/Digital Telephony was a hot idea, but there were several supporters. After a brief intro describing Clipper as a "voluntary" standard, she quickly described the key initialization and two-party decryption processes. This part of the lecture was notation-laden and somewhat hard for me to follow, and I've read most of Schneier's _Applied Cryptography_! The folks around me seemed to be lost in the particulars of how the various keys were generated and interacted (especially the session key). However, I believe the basic points got through clearly enough - the class is mostly professionals and is sophisticated enough to pick up anything that's explained well. After Denning indicated that NIST and Treasury were to be the two escrow agents, I asked about VP Gore's 9 February remarks on the potential problems of both agents being in the Executive Branch etc. She glossed over the issue by replying that the process was still being examined and that she didn't see a problem with the two agents residing in the same branch of government. The theme that "the key escrow system prevents abuse" resonated throughout her presentation. A few minutes later, I asked Dr. Denning whether she her earlier published (on Usenet, anyway) statements to the effect that if Clipper were made mandatory she would probably withdraw her support for the standard. She did not dispute the basis of the question but did not answer it per se, either. Her final response (paraphrased) was that she could not foresee all possible outcomes and did not want to commit herself to a position without observable results. After further questions, Denning described the Digital Telephony proposal, stressing that the idea was to maintain the current level of wiretap capabilities despite technological advances. She was very careful to delineate the goals for Clipper and Digital Telephony as follows: o Clipper is designed to provide US citizens strong cryptography that won't threaten US national security; o Clipper is *not* designed to catch crooks; o Digital Telephony is designed to maintain the current level of wiretap capabilities and gives law enforcement officials no new abilities. The first statement is hard to dispute on its face, despite the invocation of that vague concept called "national security". As many others, including Tim May, have said, the government is fighting an imaginary enemy which is, by virtue of it being imaginary, capable of anything. If cellular phones, baby monitors (!) and regular telephones used Clipper-like technology, many citizen-to-citizen privacy worries would be solved since ham radio and scanner operators would be unable to monitor these transmissions. However, the idea that the standard is voluntary, an idea she defended even when pressed that everyone in the government (except the judiciary) answers to the same guy raises a question as to how voluntary the standard is. The second statement goes against much of the rhetoric Clipper supporters have used to link the proposal to the War on Drugs and the general fear of crime. It's interesting to note that, even while she was disavowing Clipper's link to catching crooks, she read anecdotes from the back cover of a book entitled something like _The World's Dumbest Criminals_ and opined that, if someone is dumb enough to call hotel security and report $1000 of cocaine missing from his room, they just might be dumb enough to use Clipper. After all, they talk in the clear now! I think this argument has gotten short shrift on Cypherpunks and does deserve more attention. If the price of ClipperPhones comes down enough so that they're affordable _and_ there's no market competitor of note, why wouldn't drug dealers use the equipment? After all, even assuming the full search warrent process is bypassed, the government needs to know what's happening before they tap the line. The solution, of course, is to market alternative crypto-boxes that can fit between the phone unit and the wall socket. Price competition against high volume manufacturers will be a serious obstacle to successfully circumventing the escrowed technologies. The difference in the rhetorical significance of crime-fighting when Clipper is presented to technical and non-technical audiences is interesting. The final theme, that Digital Telephony adds no new law enforcement capabilities, was not something anyone in the class seemed to have the knowledge to dispute on technical grounds. When I raised the issue of phone calls being directed to central law enforcement sites instead of requiring agents to move to a remote location, Dr. Denning indicated that wiretaps are done by directing calls to a central location now. While J.P. Barlow challenged related issues in the America On Line debate, I have not seen a refutation of this particular point. Can anyone elaborate? ***Personal Notes and Editorials*** o None of us brought up the government ability to request and examine phone usage information without a warrant or pointed out that law enforcement agencies currently do this more than 100,000 times per year. [I wasn't aware of the number until Barlow cited it on AOL.] o I would hope that the ability of government to accumulate behavioral dossiers on private citizens through the information mosaic and link analysis tools is something that would appear in _Time_ right beside the Clipper and Digital Telephony expository articles in the future. If Digital Telephony makes this ability stronger, there is a greater danger of the fishing expeditions and data matching exercises the 1974 Privacy Act is designed to prevent. o In my opinion Dr. Denning sincerely believes these proposals will make a positive difference; however, the sincerity of the advocate does not give credence to the position advocated. -- Best regards, Curtis D. Frye - Job Search Underway!!! cfrye(a)ciis.mitre.org or cfrye(a)mason1.gmu.edu "MITRE's in the past, now. Time to move on!"

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Re: digital cash
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mike McNally wrote: > > > >Neither Mark Hittinger nor Perry Metzger wrote: > > > > The global monetary system... > It was me, the well-known international monetary expert. And if it hadn't been him, it could have been me. Watch whenever I'm buying or selling precious metals or stocks, and do the opposite, and you should be able to out-perform the market just fine :-) Unfortunately, as they say, knowing Murphy's Law doesn't help either, so I'm not able to use this strategy effectively....... Bill

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digital cash hot and cold
by Mark Hittinger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Yes. There will be nothing more liquid than information in an information >society. Nothing. How about dis-information and lies? >> As more people see >> the advantages of digital cash then there might be bidding for the >> available pool. If digital cash supply is restricted in some way, >> early converters would gain advantage. >Limiting the pool is harder than you would think. Use all the numbers you >want, we'll make more :) If the supply of digital cash is unlimited, then how can it have value? --------- His system was just roadkill along the information superhighway. -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.3a mQCNAiz4FWMAAAEEALBCb7HZS7V4gbsp9yJ7Yty49jQ9wcgRhkLjNNgdyJbrJZCq 5/sv4Ljy/4AhVhjlJyZS8L3owS8l0ClZVzWw4/kO3KN7MPz4YPPR7+qIlPQVM0yv gWpJ43EZZ8b8cvAkE9HATCKWktY2ReRSX5DLnScDH/n5jivw+MD/UO8fURCVAAUR tCBNYXJrIEhpdHRpbmdlciA8YnVnc0BuZXRzeXMuY29tPg== =VbKi -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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The Joy of Digicash
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It occurs to me that digital cash could be a collector's item. Paper money is widely collected, as are coins. I got a book out of the library on old American paper money, and many of the old bills are startlingly beautiful. Interestingly, the old money is still legal tender so there is a floor under the value of the bills that you collect. Until 1861, the U.S. did not issue any paper money, only coins. In those days, paper money was issued by private banks (usually with state charters). The money was backed by dollars, coins, which the bank owned. Unfortunately, capitalism is a dynamic system and in those days bank failures were no more unusual than corporate failures are today. When this happened, the bank's notes became worthless. Counterfeiting was also a big problem with the thousands of different banks issuing notes. It is interesting to speculate that digital cash might lead to an electronic system with some similarities to those old days. Collecting digital cash has some problems. Collectors are generally attracted to items that are beautiful, interesting, and rare. Digital cash is interesting enough, but its beauty is rather abstract. Rarity is also hard to evaluate; each individual note has a unique serial number, and what it has in common with other notes of its denomination is the bank key and the exponent. Uncirculated notes are generally more valuable than others in the paper world; with digital banknotes the only way to tell whether it has been "circulated" would be to have access to the bank's database of spent notes, to verify that the note had never been deposited. Rarity could be determined by the bank's key and exponent. The Magic Money system has a provision for the bank to periodically move to another set of exponents to represent the same denominations (in order to keep the size of the note database from growing too large). If banks would do this at regular intervals, then particularly the early issues would be relatively rare. One might even have an early banknote notarized (digitally timestamped) so that one could prove its value in later years. Beauty is harder to deal with. Strictly speaking, digital cash is invisible, consisting only of an information pattern in RAM chips or on a disk. The numbers which represent the cash can be printed out, though, and this representation could perhaps have some beauty. Unfortunately, in my opinion several lines of random hex digits are not beautiful. I have been working on ideas to display the information in digital cash in some other way that is more esthetic. It would be nice if the display somehow only worked for correctly signed cash notes, with forged cash not displaying anything nice. My general idea is to display a "fingerprint" of each individual banknote, something that is unique to that note and which has a sort of beauty. One idea I have worked on is to seed a 1-D cellular automaton with a bit pattern based on the digital cash. This seed is then processed by the CA algorithm to produce some pattern, with each row being a function of the previous row. My thought was to start the CA at the top and the bottom of the screen with the two different functions applied to the cash which should be equal if the cash validates (taking the number to the proper exponent on one hand, and applying the MD5 hash of the serial number on the other, for the case of magic money). Then we work inwards with the two seeds. Proper cash will produce a symmetrical pattern. By choosing good CA rules, the patterns will be different for each bill, some nicer than others, leading to attractive fractal-looking patterns for many bills. When you wanted to "look at your money" you could run the program on the digital cash. People might even trade for especially attractive bills. A similar idea is to use the cash as the basis for some fractal algorithm. Many fractals have the property that most of the plane is plain, while only a fraction looks really fractal. Digital cash has the property that when exponentiated it leads to a number most of whose bits are fixed but which has a small number of varying bits. If we had a mapping which took the fixed digicash bits onto the interesting parts of the fractal, then fake cash would not produce pretty pictures, while real cash would produce some part of a beautiful fractal. Again, you would have validation and beauty being tied together. I've been doing some experiments with the first idea, hoping to produce something nice. With a little more thought I hope to come up with a viewer for your Magic Money that will bring out its natural beauty and rarity. This will be a must for all serious collectors of digicash. Hal

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OTP for remailers?
by jimn8＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I hope this isn't redundant; if this idea has been covered, sorry. Wouldn't it make sense for remailers to use OTP's for encryption? Public keys are great, but they can be black-bagged. I'd imagine that a copy of the private key to a popular remailer could be very valuable to anyone who could monitor remailer traffic transparently. A one-time pad on CD-ROM should hold enough pad data to last for several days' worth of data sent between remailers, even at high message volumes. So OTP's could be used practically between friendly remailers. Do existing remailers change their public keys often enough to limit exposure by their users in the event of the key being compromised? If so, perhaps I should be less concerned than I am. Nevertheless, I'd like to be able to talk to a remailer via a one-time pad. The OTP could be sold to remailer users as a means of generating revenue (a OTP CD-ROM could be made for about $20 and sold for a very reasonable price but still be profitable!) Once the OTP is used, it can (and should) be destroyed. On the other hand, data encrypted with a public key is vulnerable to black bag attacks on that key, as I just said. The cost of burning CD-ROMs is going down pretty rapidly. Wholesale cost of a burning mechanism should be well under $1,000 within the next year or two, and RNG hardware is coming online too. Blank media runs $15-$20, although Kodak sells PhotoCD media cheaper, at a loss, to developers who promise to use the discs for PhotoCD images ;) I don't really have anything in principle against the use of public keys for remailers; it would just make me feel a bit easier about their security if the private key couldn't be black-bagged with a using them if my communication to them couldn't be black-bagged with a simple bug that transmits the private key. I'd imagine a bus snooper chip could be made easily enough that could look for instruction and data flow corresponding to keys, and transmit it over low bandwidth channels to a listening station. I find it harder to imagine a device that could tap an entire data stream from a hard drive and transmit the complete contents undetected (assuming the remailer operator checks for bugs.) Now for a discussion on how to get a OTP CD from Finland without having the mail intercepted... nahh, never mind. - Jim Nitchals

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No Subject
by Ed Switalski 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

------- Forwarded Message Return-Path: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com Received: from hedera.bnr.co.uk on bnsgs200.bnr.co.uk over SMTP (5.65c/UK-2.1-MX(adur)); Thu, 17 Mar 1994 09:37:18 GMT Received: from eurogate.bnr.co.uk by hedera.bnr.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Thu, 17 Mar 1994 09:37:14 +0000 Received: from relay2.UU.NET by eurogate.bnr.co.uk with Internet SMTP (PP) id <25474-0(a)eurogate.bnr.co.uk>; Thu, 17 Mar 1994 09:37:08 +0000 Received: from toad.com by relay2.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AAwhpd03977; Thu, 17 Mar 94 04:28:59 -0500 Received: by toad.com id AA08739; Thu, 17 Mar 94 01:16:04 PST Received: from eurogate.bnr.co.uk by toad.com id AA08728; Thu, 17 Mar 94 01:15:46 PST Received: from bnr.co.uk by eurogate.bnr.co.uk with SMTP (PP) id <25199-0(a)eurogate.bnr.co.uk>; Thu, 17 Mar 1994 09:15:20 +0000 Received: from bnsgs200.bnr.co.uk by hedera.bnr.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Thu, 17 Mar 1994 09:15:11 +0000 Message-Id: <199403170915.5154(a)bnsgs200.bnr.co.uk> Received: from bnsgs207.bnr.co.uk on bnsgs200.bnr.co.uk over SMTP (5.65c/UK-2.1-MX(adur)); Thu, 17 Mar 1994 09:15:06 GMT To: Matthew J Ghio <mg5n+(a)andrew.cmu.edu> Cc: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Subject: Re: Radio Networking In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 16 Mar 1994 21:12:00 EST." <YhVvlky00awO45VkcL(a)andrew.cmu.edu> Date: Thu, 17 Mar 1994 09:14:32 +0000 From: Ed Switalski <E.Switalski(a)bnr.co.uk> Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com Precedence: bulk >About how far can one transmit with 250mw? *** Quite Far ! With coherent CW you can key morse Japan/US i.e cross the Pacific on a few watts. CCW involves getting the Tx master oscillator and the receivers local oscillator phase-locked (by using the local time/frequency standard transmitter (e.g. WWV MSF etc -one can also get nifty little rubidium standard clocks quite cheaply these days). US readers might care to look in the ARRL handbook for 1982 or thereabouts. CCW implies slow signalling speeds- a few baud, very narrow detection bandwidth few hertz (to match signalling) and coherent TX and RX. The ultimate limit is probably phase shift in the ionosphere. Use a frequency that a bit off Big Brother's scanner channel spacing and your emmission may not be detected -unless the spook is right on top of you. Which is just as well given it might take DAYS to download a .ps document ;-( Note this is a slow and gentle way of doing things, as opposed to a high-bandwidth, time-compressed (fairlyly high-power) "screech" transmission with somthing like meteorscatter. Regards, __o __o Ed \<, \<, _________________________________________()/ ()_____()/ ()_____________ Ed Switalski email: eswitals(a)bnr.co.uk Dept GM21, BNR Europe Ltd, Oakleigh Rd South, tel: +44 (0)81 945-2924 New Southgate, fax: +44 (0)81 945-3116 London, N11 1HB LON40, internal ESN (730) 2924 _______________________________________________________________________ ------- End of Forwarded Message

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Clipper hearings
by Black Unicorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Begin Forwarded Message talk.politics.crypto #3763 (4 more) Subject: Clipper hearings. Not yet scheduled for CSPAN. From: kwebb(a)unm.edu (Kyle L. Webb) Date: Wed Mar 16 21:07:21 EST 1994 Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque Lines: 28 Forgive me if this has been put out before. I called Senator Leahy's office, and was told that the Clipper hearings were to be held Friday March 18th at 1030 am EST in room 226 Dirksen Senate Office Building. I sent email to cspanviewr(a)aol.org which is CSPAN's viewer comment address letting them know of this. Today I got back a reply that there was as yet no plan to cover this event, but that the info had been forwarded to the programming staff. My guess is that it is far more likely that these hearings will be shown by CSPAN if there are a large number of requests to either the email address for CSPAN or phone calls to the CSPAN office, inquiring if the hearings will be broadcast. If getting information on Clipper into the public eye is important, then getting the hearings carried by CSPAN would be a good way to start. CSPAN's viewer services phone number is (202) 626-7963 (I got this number from CSPAN's gopher server, so it's been on the net before) Kyle L. Webb Dept. of Physics + Astronomy kwebb(a)carina.unm.edu University of New Mexico - fin -uni- (Dark)

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Senator Leahy's hearing
by bart＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Will you be covering this hearing on the important issue of the Clipper chip and our rights to privacy? It will be on March 18th, this Friday, at 10:30 am EST in Room 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Hope you can tape it for rebroadcast if you can't cover it live. Please let me know your schedule as soon as possible as I would hate to miss it, and have lots of friends who I would like to advise of the time and date.

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Address correction
by bart＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The address given by Black Unicorn to mail to cspan was in error, my mail to cspanviewr(a)aol.org bounced. To rattle their cage, try cspanviewr(a)aol.COM.

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Guardian, front page, March 17.
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"The security services are said to have warned the Department of Trade and Industry that they will need to act more publicly if the service (talking about the Royal Mail - G) is privatised. They also point out that unlike the privatisation of the telephone network, which left the British Telecom network intact and easy to tap, the privatisation of the Royal Mail will lead to independent competitor services, making the interception of mail much more difficult." G

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