December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

oh, and by the way...
by perry＠imsi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I forgot one element of my proposed alternative to SSL. For securing HTML documents themselves, use something like the new IETF security multiparts standard, which is suitable for protecting MIME encapsulated documents. .pm

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Re: alt.anonymous.messages propagation
by cactus＠seabsd.hks.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- L. McCarthy <lmccarth(a)ducie.cs.umass.edu> wrote: >Hmmm, does MIT get alt.anonymous at least ? I understand alt.anonymous was >created to serve a purpose similar to that of alt.privacy.anon-server, but >at the moment it's a de facto equivalent of alt.anonymous.messages. >alt.anonymous is somewhat better propagated than a.a.m, from what I've heard. Nope, no alt.anonymous. 'Leastaways, not off the servers that the turist accounts use. And since I configured news on the machine, I'd love to hear if there are MIT servers that have a larger set than life.ai's. >You should request one or both groups from the MIT news admins. If users there >want to read the group, they'll likely be quite happy to carry it. Alas, I am but a turist at MIT, though one who helps maintain the turist machine. I'll be looking at getting a real newsfeed from elsewhere, but asking the MIT newsadmins for favors isn't in the cards. If anybody here has a bit of a stronger standing on campus, their asking would be way cool. >I'm a fairly well-known regular in alt.config, and I believe I can probably >recruit some prominent news admins to send booster newgroup messages for >alt.anonymous.messages. Apart from that, it's a matter of people asking their >local news admins to pick up the group if they aren't already carrying it. That would be a most excellent thing to do, regardless of how it affects my situation. - -- Todd Masco | It's difficult to be loud about keeping your enumerated cactus(a)hks.net | rights when you're busy exercising your unenumerated ones. cactus(a)bb.com | http://www.hks.net/~cactus/cactus.html - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBLuwLBSoZzwIn1bdtAQHxqgGA3WuDp+3/5A8pqGNpFc5UqAVJafaSL7je bUpZDrHpYMXycfCUPAgh+HpxJpCTLWU1 =c8Gt -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: BofA+Netscape
by amanda＠intercon.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Amanda complained that Netscape pisses all over the > standardization committees. > > Well guys, the victor has room to move. It must come as a big > shock to Apple, Microsoft, and IBM, but reality is that Netscape > can set WWW standards and they cannot. I disagree. The WWW is no longer a research project, and if it is to survive it will have to do so by consensus, either formal or informal. That's what standards committees, and groups like the IETF, exist to facilitate. The alternative is fragmentation, which we're already starting to see (in part because of Netscape's unilateral changes to HTML). Let me re-iterate something here: I'm biased. I'm a commercial vendor. I'm perfectly happy to live by the sword and die by the sword if that's how the market ends up--I just think it would be better for the Internet as a whole if the actual on-the-wire protocols and formats become standards, so that people don't have to worry about what clients or servers they are talking to. UI, performance, service, and such are fair game. Infastructure has to be consensus-based or it fails. But hey, if Netscape can innovate by fiat, so can anyone else. Right now, I'm betting that Netscape will decide it's worth cooperating with the standards process. If they don't, they'll just fragment their own market. I can live with that, but I think it would be a shame. Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation

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Herbert S. Zim dies
by Philip Zimmermann 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Herbert S. Zim, author of over 100 children's books, including "Codes and Secret Writing", died at age 85 on December 5th in Plantation Key, Florida, where he has lived for many years. He had Alzheimer's disease. I mention his passing because he wrote the first book I ever read on cryptography, which I read in 4th grade in 1964. If it weren't for Zim, I might not have created PGP. -Philip Zimmermann

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Re: Broadcasts - Bandwidth Problem ?
by L. McCarthy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Jonathan Rochkind writes: > Many people seemed to think that a newsgroup for this sort of a thing was a > waste of bandwith. I don't really agree, and think that the bandwith is > neccesary for a distributed method of making the remailer net more robust > to remailers popping into and out of existence. In case the bandwidth on {alt.anonymous, alt.anonymous.messages} started to bother news admins, we could actively encourage them to put the groups on very short expiration periods, i.e. articles might expire after only a day. Assuming people are using automated sniffers to collect their anonymous mail, this shouldn't present any obstacle to the use of the groups as message pools. Keeping the ciphertext around in public for a shorter time sounds like a Good Thing (tm), anyway. I agree that bandwidth seems essential to foiling traffic analysis. - - -L. Futplex McCarthy; PGP key by finger or server "We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines; I know that that ain't allowed" --Talking Heads - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.1 iQCVAwUBLuwe/Wf7YYibNzjpAQFK4AP/YFtRJMd0emeRJgZf4QaL4qPvMFKNn3Uv MYFhJ8GR2M4x1q/ZAwhJsP3NuIeRk5UAWc1Ti1OYKjDkNvoQ52DK3uOW6aCqxYp0 3REpK53F0PkuVL9EnfGImrUWAyeUr2oZOzp1O67hD0eCYhM4IdcdDudA/97Xh0R+ zRIhgC6/Gfo= =n6qM - -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBLuwgPSoZzwIn1bdtAQFFgAF+LXvBnjZEZxsMx9MU+fGX9ynuAnrqKs6S EFbgsBG8aFvul2skOsgIBrVW5luJm4c7 =iPbm -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Time to exhaustively break 40-bit RC4?
by raph＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The SSL documents say that exhaustively searching 40 bits of RC4 keyspace takes 64 MIPS-years. When I brought this figure up at the cpunks meeting, it was roundly derided. However, I think it might be a sound estimate. The key schedule operation in RC4 does 256 "swap" operations. Let's say it takes four instructions to do each swap. So, it's 2000 instructions per key. A one-MIPS processor can search 500 keys a second. There are about 30 million seconds in a year, so that's 15 billion keys a year. 40 bits is a trillion keys, so it works out to 66 years, which is well within the Pentium-style accuracy of the calculations I've done. Am I missing something here? On the second floor of Soda Hall are about 100 HP Snake workstatations. I think they're about 100 MIPS each. During the winter break, they will be sitting mostly unused. If the math checks out, they should be able to search keyspace in two and a half days. Anyone wanna do some cracking? Raph

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Re: extra dashes in PGP-related blocks?
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:03 PM 12/12/94, Andrew Brown wrote: >but is a remailer (or pgp) smart enough to take the output from checking >a signature and run pgp over it again? is it going to know to take something >and pass it through pgp until pgp can't do anything with it any more? i think >that's the problem that jrochkin was addressing. he has a pgp encrypted >message and then signs it and then wants to mail it to a remailer so that the >remailer can decrypt the message but it won't ecause the encryption is >nested... > >wasn't that it? Well, no, not really. My problem was that a user would send me their public key, inside of a signed message, and the "BEGIN PUBLIC KEY" stuff would have the "- " on it. Which means that before I can add it to my keyring, I've got to edit out the extra "- "s, and then save it in a file, and then pass it through PGP, instead of just passing the original message though PGP, or using the Mac "copy" command on a part of the message and sending that through PGP. Or someone sends me an encrypted address block inside a signed message, and I've got to do the same before I can use it. I now understand why PGP does what it does, but it's still a pain. Perhaps the ideal mail reading program would run my incoming mail through PGP before I even saw it, so I wouldn't have this problem. Well, actually not. My ideal mail reader would check the signatures before I saw them, but would also leave them intact on the message, so I could re-check them myself manually if I wanted. Oh well. It's not a limitation on functionality of any kind, just on convenience.

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Remailer and gateway list
by skaplin＠skypoint.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Can someone please provide me with a list of all of the current remailers and mail -> usenet gateways? Thanks, Sam ============================================================================== The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. - Albert Einstein ============================================================================== skaplin(a)skypoint.com | "...vidi vici veni" - Overheard | outside a Roman brothel. PGP encrypted mail is accepted and | preferred. | Change is the only constant in the | Universe..."Four quarters, please." E-mail key(a)four11.com for PGP Key or | Finger skaplin(a)mirage.skypoint.com | Smile!! Big brother is watching. ============================================================================== -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: This message digitally signed to verify the identity of the sender iQEVAwUBLuzfI8lnXxBRSgfNAQEH8wf8CON8wTlCcJPalXWfXMUC4efhG319fISX 8DdRWu7hRJWIbxWQ3kUmqVSk6oGHQv9OuiRR1xJH0x+dcKmdfb7CzJkZ50eX92vI HBCdSE4xfBGWKr/CtLVP3ag8OOcd2dMsZRjG0p0y2oV54fYD70KkUXW6mg1L5xUC eZMpWmi3ZgFZC3xSZREa7nv8TnPkpZBgT7mojFNpwn7vPY29L5Zbb78USSmfR0E0 oNY0JyePxiuMXT4XDHV8XrA/f7fTNtXgGJTZAtHE8ZaU6R10NQBx2AKUnh362X0L RqxHPbgC1Q9ooTkAPPw/4qleceM2j2ZjKbzb5DozCshUdEB88fcNsQ== =z2QT -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Real-time surveillance of the police
by Sandy Sandfort 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SANDY SANDFORT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C'punks, Don Doumakes wrote: ... why on earth would the police, who will not consent to civilian review, ever go along with something orders of magnitude more extreme? (1) There are civilian review boards; the consent of the police is not a prerequisite. If they don't like it, they can get a real job. (2) It is in their best interests to be protected from false accusations, and to be able to be quickly located under emergency conditions. ObCrypto/Privacy: I suspect there would be an immense amount of radio traffic involved in keeping track of a substantial group of people ... [I doubt] the ability of the receivers to digest it all in real time. (1) My suggestion was for (probably local) recording, not real time monitoring of video; therefore, no bandwidth problems. (2) Tim might want to comment, but my understanding of the localizer technology is that it too is somewhat "local" and that polling or burst transmission keeps the bandwidth requirements at manageable levels. S a n d y ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Re: alt.anonymous.messages propagation
by cactus＠seabsd.hks.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- (Replied to this once privately, but since mail continues to come in I'll repeat here) In article <9412122127.AA17019(a)hodge-podge.MIT.EDU>, Derek Atkins <warlord(a)MIT.EDU> wrote: >> Nope, no alt.anonymous. 'Leastaways, not off the servers that the turist >> accounts use. And since I configured news on the machine, I'd love to >> hear if there are MIT servers that have a larger set than life.ai's. > >I just looked on news.mit.edu and bloom-beacon.mit.edu (the MIT >news-transport machine), and I found both alt.anonymous and >alt.anonymous.messages, so I don't think saying "MIT doesn't get >alt.anonymous" is at all correct. > >It may be correct to say that "GNU.AI.MIT.EDU doesn't get >alt.anonymous", but GNU is _NOT_ MIT! Yup, that's why I qualified my statement. Can't check on servers I don't know about, after all. FTR, it's not GNU that I'm on/help maintain. It's bronze. So, life.ai.mit.edu is a deficient newsserver and I'll switch the default on bronze to news.mit.edu after appropriate consultations. - -- Todd Masco | It's difficult to be loud about keeping your enumerated cactus(a)hks.net | rights when you're busy exercising your unenumerated ones. cactus(a)bb.com | http://www.hks.net/~cactus/cactus.html - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBLuz6VCoZzwIn1bdtAQG1/wF7BAGUuLjGM1JVjpYxP1e6eUYNRSUPrvbX /alvpNH0g8mVFKaSPf8EH1nEeiV4K4Pf =MsKC -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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