December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Linking = Showing = Transferring?
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:33 AM 9/15/95 -0700, Charles Lewton wrote: >Not quite squashed, Duncan. Bullet placement (poor by some standards) >is all that prevented Mr. Weaver from croaking like his unfortunate wife. >She is said to have "pissed off" the feds but was not charged with a >single actionable item yet she remains quite dead. > >Unless I have missed something somewhere, no TLA is concerned in the slightest >with individual liberty. That notion should keep a rational person awake >nights. > >Chuck > In response to Chuck and Lucky, I can only say that the Weavers suffered 57% casualties (4/7) and 28% KIA (2/7). The Feds suffered .25% KIA (1/400). I don't think any Feds were merely wounded. They brought murder charges against two members of the group and lost. They settled wrongful death suits for $3.1 million. They also lost the publicity war. They had to change their procedures because of Ruby Ridge and Waco. They energized the opposition. The casualties were unfortunate but when facing force ratios of 57/1 or better, the outcome has to be considered a major victory for Randy Weaver. The case is a demonstration of modern conflicts in which litigation and publicity count as much as guns. On that field, the Feds don't hold all the cards. DCF "The libertarian and conservative coalition of the 'Right' is a low-maintenance coalition because its members mostly want to be left alone while the special interest group coalition of the 'Left' is a high-maintenance coalition because all of its members need to be given a vast dose of government cash daily."

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Netscape Navigator 2.0 will implement secure e-mail
by danjw＠earthlink.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I just got off of Netscapes home page and they have announced Netscape Navigator 2.0. It will include full e-mail funtionality with S/MIME implemented. Does anybody know anything about the S/MIME Protocol? How secure is it? Dan Weinstein danjw(a)earthlink.net http://www.earthlink.net/~danjw PGP public key is available from my Home Page. "I understand by 'freedom of Spirit' something quite difinite - the unconditional will to say No, where it is dangerous to say No. Friedrich Nietzsche

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Netscape SSL implementation cracked!
by Ian Goldberg 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As some of you may recall, a few weeks ago I posted a reverse-compilation of the random number generation routine used by netscape to choose challenge data and encryption keys. Recently, one of my officemates (David Wagner <daw(a)cs.berkeley.edu>) and I (Ian Goldberg <iang(a)cs.berkeley.edu>) finished the job of seeing exactly how the encryption keys are picked. What we discovered is that, at least on the systems we checked (Solaris and HP-UX), the seed value for the RNG was fairly trivial to guess by someone with an account on the machine running netscape (so much so that in this situation, it usually takes less than 1 minute to find the key), and not too hard for people without accounts, either. See below for details. I've included the header to a program we wrote to do this key-cracking below. I would like to get some information, though: o Where should I put the full source (1 file, ~12k) so that ITAR lovers don't get mad at me? o Where can I find a version of netscape that does RC4-128? It is likely that it suffers from the same problem, and even a brute-force search of the entire seed space is _much_ less than 128 bits. Happy hacking, - Ian "who just saw _Hackers_ today with some other Bay Area cypherpunks, and it put me in the mood" /* unssl.c - Last update: 950917 Break netscape's shoddy implementation of SSL on some platforms (tested for netscape running RC4-40 on Solaris and HP-UX; other Unices are probably similar; other crypt methods are unknown, but it is likely that RC4-128 will have the same problems). The idea is this: netscape seeds the random number generator it uses to produce challenge-data and master keys with a combination of the time in seconds and microseconds, the pid and the ppid. Of these, only the microseconds is hard to determine by someone who (a) can watch your packets on the network and (b) has access to any account on the system running netscape. Even if (b) is not satisfied, the time can often be obtained from the time or daytime network daemons; an approximation to the pid can sometimes be obtained from a mail daemon (the pid is part of most Message-ID's); the ppid will usually be not much smaller than the pid, and has an higher than average chance of being 1. Clever guessing of these values will in all likelihood cut the expected search space down to less than brute-forcing a 40-bit key, and certainly is less than brute-forcing a 128-bit key. Subsequent https: connections after the first (even to different hosts) seem to _not_ reseed the RNG. This makes things much easier, once you've broken the first message. Just keep generating 16 bytes of random numbers until you get the challenge-data for the next message. The next key will then be the 16 random bytes after that. main() and bits of MD5Transform1 by Ian Goldberg <iang(a)cs.berkeley.edu> and David Wagner <daw(a)cs.berkeley.edu>. The rest is taken from the standard MD5 code; see below. This code seems to want to run on a big-endian machine. There may be other problems as well. This code is provided as-is; if it causes you to lose your data, sleep, civil liberties, or SO, that's your problem. #include <std/disclaimer.h> On the command line, give the time in seconds, the pid, the ppid and the SSL challenge data (each byte in hex, separated by some non-hex character like a colon) of the _first_ SSL message generated by the instance of netscape. This program will search through the microsecond values. You may need to run it again with a slightly different value for the seconds, depending on how accurately you know the time on the system running netscape. The output will be the master key (all 16 bytes; note you never even told the program the 11 bytes you knew) and the value for the microseconds that produced it. As a benchmark, this code runs in just under 25 seconds real time (for an unsuccessful search through 1<<20 values for the microseconds) on an unloaded HP 712/80. */

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Re: "Hackers"-- brief review and anecdote...
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> It's my impression that the play was staged a few years after my book > came out in 1984 (though I chose the title in 1982). I remember reading > the reviews then, and they didn't > seem to mention that it was a revivial of a years-old play whose name I had > unintentially used for my own book. (Unlike the case for the current > movie, whose screenwriter seemed to know of my own book.) If > you have evidence that the play was indeed produced before 1984, please > let me know. Otherwise, I'd be happy to accept your apology, Peter. > > On Mon, 18 Sep 1995, Peter Trei wrote: > > > >I saw "Hackers" yesterday. It's not bad and its political sensibility is > > > >very cyberpunk. The ad campaign even uses the tag line, "Their only crime > > > >is curiosity." > > > It may not be a crime, but it's not nice to steal a title. > > You mean, like you stole it from Dale Luck's (duck@mit oz) stage play of the same name? > > I saw this (in an Off-Off-Broadway production), years before your book came > > out. If I'm wrong (and I would not be suprised - I'm relying on fuzzy memories here), please consider my abject apology tendered. Namespace collisions seem to happen quite frequently in titles. I can remember when TMC made a big deal out their intention to air 'Brainstorm", the 1983 film with Natalie Wood. I settled down to watch, and up came a black and white movie with a totally different plot - it turned out they had been sent the 1965 film of that name, and no one had checked. Looking in the (ex)Cardiff film database, I note that there is now a 3rd movie of the title (1994). A couple weeks ago my daughter was making a big deal about wanting to watch 'The Red Shoes" on Disney. I was thinking of the 1948 ballet movie, and told her I didn't think she'd like it. She insisted, and it turned out to be a 30 minute (and charming in cloying sort of way) cartoon. Peter Trei Senior Software Engineer Purveyor Development Team Process Software Corporation http://www.process.com trei(a)process.com

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Re: Intellectual Property and Crypto collision
by koontz＠MasPar.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> ELECTRONIC MEDIA PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT LAW >> A presidential task force has recommended that electronic transmission of >> books, magazine articles and software should be classified as copies >> subject to existing copyright laws. The task force also recommended that >> it should be illegal to make or distribute products aimed at decoding > encrypted software without the consent of the copyright owner. >Would this make it illegal to produce tools for decrypting key-escrowed >software? :-) More importantly, would this firmly extend first amendment protection to electronicly transmitted forms?

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Re: Netscape SSL implementation is broken!
by norm＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 9:29 PM 9/17/95, Perry E. Metzger wrote: >Christian Wettergren writes: >> I guess we should send them the draft-ietf-security-randomness-00.txt >> asap. > >I thought that was an RFC by now. > >Perry It is! RFC 1750.

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Re: "Hackers"-- brief review and anecdote...
by Steven Levy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It's my impression that the play was staged a few years after my book came out in 1984 (though I chose the title in 1982). I remember reading the reviews then, and they didn't seem to mention that it was a revivial of a years-old play whose name I had unintentially used for my own book. (Unlike the case for the current movie, whose screenwriter seemed to know of my own book.) If you have evidence that the play was indeed produced before 1984, please let me know. Otherwise, I'd be happy to accept your apology, Peter. On Mon, 18 Sep 1995, Peter Trei wrote: > > > >I saw "Hackers" yesterday. It's not bad and its political sensibility is > > >very cyberpunk. The ad campaign even uses the tag line, "Their only crime > > >is curiosity." > > > It may not be a crime, but it's not nice to steal a title. > > You mean, like you stole it from Dale Luck's (duck@mit oz) stage play of the same name? > I saw this (in an Off-Off-Broadway production), years before your book came > out. > > > > > Peter Trei > Senior Software Engineer > Purveyor Development Team > Process Software Corporation > http://www.process.com > trei(a)process.com >

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ftp://www.brooks.af.mil/pub/unix/utils/des.tar
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This seems to be /* Sofware DES functions * written 12 Dec 1986 by Phil Karn, KA9Q; large sections adapted from * the 1977 public-domain program by Jim Gillogly * Modified for additional speed - 6 December 1988 Phil Karn * Modified for parameterized key schedules - Jan 1991 Phil Karn Would someone from outside the US try to download the above file? It would be, at least, amusing if an Air Force site were in violation of the ITAR (their README notwithstanding). /r$

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(noise) Re: SPAM bait
by liberty＠gate.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

nobody(a)alpha.c2.org (Anonymous) wrote: <snip> > >Don't worry, "Janet Dove", or actually sanghi3(a)grfn.org got mailbombed >severely for this one. I'm just glad he doesn't know how to use remailers. Good going, Anonymous. What I don't understand about inappropriate SPAMs like that one (or telephone ads) is; what's the business incentive to do it? I assume that no Cypherpunk has subscribed to "Janet's" magazines, and I know that no Ray has _EVER_ spent money over a telephone unless we initiated the call, yet *still* we get unwanted calls every once-in-a-while. WHY? [Please respond privately to liberty(a)gate.net ] JMR

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RSAREF Commercial Licensing
by Jonathan Zamick 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Well I've vaccilated between making a formal, dry announcement or letting you all know my way. Given the general tenor (and individual spirit) of many on Toad it is pretty easy to guess which path I chose. So, first of all, here is to a productive future for encryption and encryption technologies. Consensus Development and RSA Data Security, have finalized the contract for Consensus to license and support RSAREF(tm) for commercial use. This isn't an advertisement for RSAREF -- as we are seeking to first present our license to those who have already expressed interest in the product to 'beta-test' our standard agreement. Meanwhile, we would like to gather some information from the net community. Our foremost concern is for those who have been using RSAREF in the past. If you have discovered any bugs which have either gone unreported or unfixed, we need to know ASAP. No bugs have been officially reported in version 2.0, however we have heard in the past that some may have been found. If a report has gotten lost during this period of transition, we'd like to know. Consensus' first priority is to make sure RSAREF is bug free. Secondly, for those who have contributed code to RSAREF in the past, or have code they'd like to submit, send email to me at the address below. Our hope is that RSAREF will continue to improve and meet the needs of its users through the co-support of both Consensus Development and our commercial and non-commercial RSAREF developers. Lastly, we would like to hear suggestions and ideas on how to improve RSAREF. We intend to remain responsive to requests, and welcome ideas for the evolution of the RSAREF toolkit. Anyway, again, have a good day. For those who would like to be on our RSAREF announcement list, send mail to <RSAREF-Ann-L(a)consensus.com> with 'Subscribe' in the Subject header. Note: RSAREF is a trademarked term by RSA Data Security Thank you all for your patience, I'm sure many will be as excited as I am. Jonathan Zamick Knowledge Officer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ..Jonathan Zamick Consensus Development Corporation.. ..<JonathanZ(a)consensus.com> 1563 Solano Ave, #355.. .. Berkeley, CA 94707-2116.. .. o510/559-1500 f510/559-1505.. ..Mosaic/WWW Home Page: .. .. Consensus Home Page ..

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