December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

No Subject
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I will be establishing an offshore corporation in the very near future. I am currently leaning towards doing so in Hong Kong both because it raises fewer flags than a Cayman Island corporation and because I've seen ads in _The Economist_ detailing existing corporations for sale. Can anyone recommend a lawyer experienced in setting up such organizations who can be trusted to be discrete? Location (of the lawyer) is unimportant. In particular, I need to determine if a foreign corporation needs to establish a U.S. corp to do business in the U.S. (consulting work, of course), and I need someone who can set such things up. My apologies if this post is too far off topic for this list. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help(a)anon.penet.fi. Due to the double-blind, any mail replies to this message will be anonymized, and an anonymous id will be allocated automatically. You have been warned. Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin(a)anon.penet.fi.

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Digital Cash
by mpd＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim writes: > If Frank the Forger, to pick a standard sort of crypto > example, takes a set of bits (possibly made with the > elaborate system Mike Duvos described in an earlier posting) > and copies that set of bits n times and then "spends" them n > times, how can any of his recipients know that parallel > transactions are happening, that the "same" money is being > spent n times and that it is very likely that n - 1 of the > recipients will be screwed? I didn't mean to oversell the degree to which the scheme deters multiple spending. It doesn't prevent multiple spending. It merely breaks the anonymity of the perpetrator if two or more people he has transacted the same note with break their own anonymity and voluntarily cooperate with the bank. There is nothing to prevent you from making N copies of your floppy, spending each one, and hopping the next plane to Argentina. Sad but true. In the real world, there would have to be some sort of limit on the number of times such a spoofed transaction could propagate before being cleared with the central bank, much like restrictions on multiple-party checks today. Merchant cooperation would also be necessary. Probably easy to get with the corner store than with the local cocaine dealer. > The other main approach is to build in to the blinding > protocols which protect anonymity ways to detect the > identity of those who spend a unit of digital money more > than the specified number of times. "Double spenders" is the > common term. This can avoid online clearing, but at the > expense of additional protocol complexity and some peculiar > wrinkles which can develop. This is really all I had in mind. Again, double spending is discouraged but not prevented. If you are leaving town and never returning, you can go on a shopping spree. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.3a Public Key available $ mpd(a)netcom.com $ via Finger. $

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Re: Digital Cash
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I think there are two issues here. One is the intractability of defeating encryption protocols such as RSA, digital signatures, blinded signatures, etc. These form the basis for digital cash and they appear to be quite secure. The other issue, which I know less about, is the possibility of cryptograph- ically strong obfuscated code. Mike Duvos first mentioned this. You could have an algorithm running on your own computer and have it be impossible to determine what it is doing, or (presumably) to effectively alter the internals of the algorithm. This seems a lot more difficult to achieve, since all the information needed to tell what the program is doing is in principle in your hands. Yet the ability to actually determine this is computationally out of reach. It's not just a matter of the kinds of complexity and obscurity we have been discussing here (self-decrypting code and such tricks), but rather some mathematically strong transformation has been done on the structure of the code to hide it in a cryptographically strong way. I vaguely recall hearing about such technologies, but I can't remember where now. Can anyone provide some references, or (better) a summary of how this works and what can actually be accomplished along these lines? Thanks - Hal

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Not just Netherlands - Italy too.
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I missed this one - the NSA stooge dropped it in passing at the CFP conference: : STU BAKER But look, Italy has just banned forms : of encryption on the phone system. The significance I think of the Three down, nine to go? (France has long since banned encryption) G

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Whoa, now... (was Re: Digital Cash)
by James G. Speth 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Graham Toal <gtoal(a)an-teallach.com> writes: >There is a *considerable* difference between kiddy hackers breaking >game protection, and breaking a cryptographically secure protocol. It seems to me that Mikolaj Habryn's original posting was taken out of context. He made a valid point that so called un-interpretable and un-alterable algorithms are routinely cracked by elite warez d00dz. He never implied that the software crackers were going to render your PGP key insecure. In fact, he began this thread by citing someone who was talking about using an obscured algorithm to prevent digital cash double spending. (ie. If you can't get to the algorithm, you can't cheat the system.) His comments were on the dangers of relying on this. Graham Toal <gtoal(a)an-teallach.com> writes: >Sure, but what's that got to do with cracking crypto? If you can't see >the difference between STO protection schemes and mathematically hard >algorithms, ... That's the point. Mikolaj was _never_ referring to cryptographic security. He was pointing out how security through obscuring algorithms can never be considered reliable. Extinguishing a match with a fire-hose, Jim ________________________________________________________________________________ james speth email for pgp compatible public-key december(a)end.com ________________________________________________________________________________ Have you ever had your phones tapped by the government? YOU WILL and the company that'll bring it to you... AT&T

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"If you're against unreadable encryption, don't use it!"
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It's probably time for us to remind the security services (over and over) that they're within their rights to pass rules like "if you have access to classified information, then you're required to include the info's owning agency as a recipient in every encrypted message you send (since PGP and RIPEM both allow multiple recipients and there's nothing to stop the Dept of Energy, the CIA, the NSA, etc., from generating PGP and RIPEM keys to be used for this purpose.) This might have a chilling effect on whistleblowers, but it should keep those agencies from claiming that PGP and RIPEM are a security threat via spies. - Carl Ellison cme(a)sw.stratus.com RIPEM MD5OfPublicKey: 39D9860686A9F075A9A83D49589C677A PGP 2.4 Key fingerprint = E0 41 4C 79 B5 AF 36 75 02 17 BC 1A 57 38 64 78

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Re: Where is PGP 2.4?
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> What's PGP 2.4 ? There are several PGP 2.4's around. The ViaCrypt commercial version calls itself 2.4, and if I'm not mixing it up with something else, the SGI internal-use version (which uses a licensed RSA) also calls itself 2.4.

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Yet another crypto/Clipper article
by dmandl＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This time it's the magazine "New Media." The cypherpunks are mentioned prominently, and there are a few quotes (or more) from tcmay. Seemed like a pretty sympathetic piece, based on my quick skim of it. It's also fairly long. --Dave. -- Dave Mandl dmandl(a)panix.com

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EFF Pioneer award: I nominate Phil Zimmerman...
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Folks, with the political climate the way it is in the US at the moment, I think the EFF pioneer award has to make a political point as well as a technical one: I'll be nominating Phil Zimmerman. I hope others will too. Without Phil's pgp program, all our efforts against the Clipper chip would look very hollow indeed - he's given us a flag to rally round in the name of freedom. G

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Re: EFF Pioneer award: I nominate Phil Zimmerman...
by Pat Farrell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Robert A. Hayden" <hayden(a)krypton.mankato.msus.edu> writes: > A hearty second! I officially nominated PRZ for last year's award, and got a reply from the EFF vote/nomination counter that I was one of many. But it didn't make the cut then. Pat Pat Farrell Grad Student pfarrell(a)gmu.edu Department of Computer Science George Mason University, Fairfax, VA Public key availble via finger #include <standard.disclaimer>

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