December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

First known purchase of physical goods with cyberbucks
by Rev. Mark Grant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[Feel free to forward to anywhere you feel is appropriate] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- For some time now, Adam Back has been offering to sell RSA T-shirts for cyberbucks (DigiCash's experimental anonymous digital cash system), but no-one has had enough available to take him up on it. However, thanks to the success of the ecm mailing list (ecm(a)ai.mit.edu) and WWW site (http://www.c2.org/~mark/ecash/ecash.html) today I finally managed to collect enough c$ to buy one. It was something of a feat to gather that many c$ in one place, as the number of sellers is limited. There are many more buyers than sellers, everyone wants c$, but few people are selling at a realistic price. As it stands, we have managed to take a worthless currency (c$ are not backed with anything) and give it value based solely on what the market is willing to pay for it, due to its security, anonymity and ease of use advantages compared to the other digital payment systems on the Net. Once a DigiCash licensee starts offering to sell (and buy) ecash via VISA/MasterCard and chequing account, I could see ecash getting very popular very quickly. Using ecash once you've got the c$ in your ewallet/DigiCash bank account is near instant. If used through the WWW forms interface as provided by the Windows and X-windows user interface, the transaction is as easy as clicking on a button. Instant buy, much more convenient than filling in credit card forms, talking to people on the phone, sending things in snail mail, etc, and anonymous too. Now you can even use the beta-test currency to buy and sell physical goods as well. Anyway, if anyone knows of an earlier transaction of cyberbucks for physical goods than this (at 15:00 GMT 17th August 1995), then please let me know. Also, if you have c$ that you wish to sell, or have run out and want to buy some more, come along and join in the fun on the WWW site or mailing list... Mark P.S. If anyone in the UK wants to buy a rusty but reliable FIAT X1/9 convertible, it's yours for only 5,000 cyberbucks... (For the record, I have no connection to DigiCash other than as an ecash beta tester, and the ecash market is not supported by them in any way.) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQEVAgUBMDN1YFVvaTo9kEQVAQE4Bwf/WYTlYShkIyP0jOLyDmOpG/Bzdya5q+Xp QY60CS8Po/cSIEPy26cDs62Yn5HIEq0g+afw0NZS4BiH2xanqDFnwrumNE78q2iW 03AlX/RuDkGFabpxUfFoYRkf2qgsDI1wnt7vzryKlxgBSGzoEGS7j7UKesEtASIl 3iw3EgINnX+BN7nSWsLcpyN3BHUPKxLSKWUg/hduS7D8AlVqMFq8JUu2wDKxJwJV 1FJ5oN8dF5bSa+VQINA4LXK9Nx/DVqMGAedg37E3/CGuassGBfW1YtTiRwauaj6q cV7D2zg52hvoq7qeQdesWHLUeqBbK9U/7Xbb80SP87eny+1XkIsgig== =M1jD -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: First known purchase of physical goods with cyberbucks
by Marcel van der Peijl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Anyway, if anyone knows of an earlier transaction of cyberbucks for physical > goods than this (at 15:00 GMT 17th August 1995), then please let me know. As far as I know, the first transaction took place when I (while testing) bought a postcard from GlobalX, the first ecash store to open besides our own (and mine). It is stored in the 'DigiCash museum' next to early prototypes of all kinds of smartcards, emulators, wallets etc. This must have been around October last year (or August? Can't make out the postmark). Hundreds of cards were shipped by several shops, and stickers, lotteries, etc. Check the 'physical objects' section on http://www.digicash.com/shops/categorical.html Maybe you should restrict the 'first known' claim to 'first known purchase of physical goods with cyberbucks traded at the ECM'. Sorry! // Marcel van der Peijl, DigiCash bv, http://www.digicash.com/~bigmac/ // The hottest instruction on a P90? JMP $ @ 2.633A or 52C (with fan)

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Denver area meeting, SUNDAY, 8/20, 2 pm
by adwestro＠ouray.cudenver.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- This one is on SUNDAY, 2 pm, at the Tivoli Food Court (at least initially). Send email for directions, etc. Alan Westrope <awestrop(a)nyx10.cs.du.edu> __________/|-, <adwestro(a)ouray.cudenver.edu> (_) \|-' 2.6.2 public key: finger / servers PGP 0xB8359639: D6 89 74 03 77 C8 2D 43 7C CA 6D 57 29 25 69 23 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Exon blows goats...but I suspect you already knew that. iQCVAwUBMDOBpVRRFMq4NZY5AQEnVAP8CLg9z5AwjIw0ouJtxPPr6CUytFOeVPrt cMrEm8MRUt0ay0S4F+TGMq1npcF8pxdU0jwWk9EBj+1XvTOKVpEED+kp8shafsVj qlWGplAVUHMTF19H1VAByoz7j3VGMB2zmdNDm2ifDMNzR5Di81o7CeyvQT0sZ6zt 5XGWmHkoX3g= =GD3W -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Idle compute cycles [Re: Netscape's Offical Response]
by Damien.Doligez＠inria.fr 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From: Jim Gillogly <jim(a)acm.org> >and one thing that seems to miss the point. As usual, I agree with all Jim has to say, but there's another problem with Netscape's response: they UNDERestimate the cost of breaking RC4-128 (by brute force) by a factor of about 300 trillion. If someone know of an URL for Netscape's response, I'll be glad to include a pointer in my virtual press conference. I would have to ask for permission before I put a copy on my disks. Copyrights, you know... -- Damien

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Breaking DES anyone? (was: Breaking RC4-40 for less)
by aba＠dcs.exeter.ac.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Fred Cohen <fc(a)all.net> wrote on cpunks: > Since messages sent with netscape are fairly standard for the first > so many bytes, why not make a 2^30 element table, store it on a few > gigabytes of disk space, use a hash table on the message, and find > the keys to one in every 1,000 messages about 1 time per second. If > this code is being used to send millions of credit transactions per > day, we should be able decode thousands of credit card numbers per > day for a one-time cost of about $5,00. Nice idea and one which works for pure RC4, but unfortunately not for 128 bit, 88 bit known + 40 bit unknown "export" SSL. Netscape's SSL uses "40 bit keys" that are composed in a strange way: you are given 88 bits of known key, and this is combined with the 40 bit key, to give a 128 bit key. That key is used to do the encryption. The problem is that this has a unix password salt like effect, only this time there are 88 bits of salt rather than 12 bits. So this means that you can't precompute anything on the 40 bits as the 88 bits are randomly generated, and likely vary with each session. > The $10,000 estimate of the cost of computing time is far too high > for a production-based attack on the netscape codes. Agreed, it's too high for the other reason that lots of people have spare compute cycles. Idle cycles have low to non-existant incremental cost, and there are plenty of them around in the world. Back to breaking crypto systems. There are a couple of things you can do, there is your pre-compute some proportion of the key space - so that you get some of them, this would work well for straight 40 bit RC4 - and there are quite probably such products around - microsoft has a number of "secure" [sic] things around the Microsoft Access we were looking at earlier, another system for doing remote access (modem) and having the sessions encrypted. The problem with micro$oft is they are a darn closed system, and no-one so far has invested the time to decode what they're doing with a debugger. That was the reason for the failed brute RC4 a while back - no specs. So precompute regions of keys would work on pure RC4-40 as you describe. It would be fast too - a disk seek time being the bounding factor - per key! Another approach is to do lots of keys simultaneously - so you set up this distributed effort which is continually re-sweeping the 40 bit keyspace, say every couple of days or whatever. You can sweep for more than one key at once at very low incremental cost, an extra key costs close to nothing. So say you are searching for 1000 keys at once - a dragnet approach - well keys just pop out at random as they are hit, maybe straight away maybe at worst case the sweeping roll-over time, but on average a key will fall out every 3 minutes. The same approach is applicable to 1 guy with 1 humble PC, it'll sweep the full keyspace it in a year or two, but what does he care if he gets a couple of keys a day, and they're all nice transactions he can pilfer / make nefarious use of. DES breaking schemes... Something similar applies to DES, I mean what's a piffling 56 bit keyspace if you don't really care *which* key of several thousand that you actually want. There are bound to be a large enough supply of DES encrypted banking transactions flowing around the various financial networks in the US to make a nefarious breaking of them emminently possible. It moves on the time for a complete sweep as you now have 56 bits to contend with - but I think with a team of say 1024 workstations like the one I am typing on (an SGI Indy ~$5k workstation) in a distributed effort, and a large supply of DES keys, you could get a workable break on *one* of those keys in a shortish time how long? Well I'm not sure how fast DES can be made to go for these purposes, but 60k keys/sec is a figure I have for DES set_key (Eric Youngs code on a Sparc 20) I'm not too sure of the details of what you'd need to brute a DES key, but setting up the key, and presumably a small additional cost to test the first byte and every 256 tries to test 2 bytes etc. Anyone know if 60k keys/sec sounds reasonable for a DES brute? Anyway working on that, 1024 workstations, 60k keys/sec = 60 M keys/sec = 37 years! But (here's the saving bit) if you try say 64k keys *at once* so you've hoovered up a stack of keys (hypothetically - technically plausible too a tap on a banking network should yield you a whole load of them) *then* you can get much nicer figures: A DES key every 5 hours! I'm thinking 1024 workstation equivalents shouldn't be insurmountable to organise - lots of people have faster / multiprocessor machines, and farms of workstations / PCs etc. Perhaps 64k keys is a bit generous, and 1024 keys would be a more sensible figure, even then that translates to 13 days expected. As some one said a while ago (breaking) Netscape is the big win! Breaking DES is *the* big win! Adam -- HAVE *YOU* EXPORTED RSA TODAY? --> http://dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ --rsa--------------------------8<------------------------------- #!/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL $m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa 2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length($n)&~1)/2) -------------------------------8<------------------------------- TRY: rsa -k=3 -n=7537d365 < msg | rsa -d -k=4e243e33 -n=7537d365

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Re: Netsacpe's Offical Response
by Doug Hughes 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>So in conclusion, we think RC4-40 is strong enough to protect consumer-level >credit-card transactions -- since the cost of breaking the message is >sufficiently high to make it not worth the computer time required to do so .... .... >Finally, we'd like to reiterate that all this person has done is decrypt >one single RC4-40 message. RC4 the algorithm and products which use the >algorithm remain as secure as always. > > > I disagree with the cost assumptions that it costs $10K. These are "relatively" imaginary costs. If you already have the machines (like a lot of universities and corporations) then the marginal cost of breaking the key is practically nil. The person doing the cracking certainly doesn't incur any costs. So what if it takes 2 weeks. An evil student/hacker/whatever would be willing to wait two weeks for a credit card with a $5-$oo limit if he could just use the machines at night when people might not notice. Just my $.02 Re: security of RC4 - agreed completely.

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Cost to Crack Keys
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:45 PM 8/17/95, Rev. Mark Grant wrote: >> In this case he had to use roughly >> $10,000 worth of computing power (ballpark figure for having access to >> 120 workstations and a few parallel supecomputers for 8 days) to break >> a single message. > >Hmm, I don't know about anyone else around here, but my workstation is >idle 99% of the time. I could almost certainly get access to all the spare >CPU cycles on 120 workstations for free, and I suspect that a lot of >people (particularly hackers) could do so as well. There's no need to >spend $ 10,000 on renting them. But, Mark, estimates of the cost to crack a key _must_ be based on market prices, not on opportunistic access to machines. Such access is good for occasional, or one-shot, deals, but not for routine use. For example, one doesn't say "Hey, I don't see how Hertz can charge $40 a day to rent a car...my friend lets me use his for free." The technical issues of whether there are faster ways to break the keys, or how fast and far MIPS prices will drop, is a separate issue. "Standard accounting practices" dictate the way to estimate production costs. --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net (Got net?) | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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RC40 and what we still need to do
by Robert A. Hayden 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I have been watching the backlash of the cracking of RC40 and am quite impressed with the fact that it is being used as a positive reason for repealing ITAR. I expected the media to jump on the "hacker" bandwagon and denounce the efforts. However, I think there is still value in writing the software that will allow cooperation amoung hundreds or thousands of people. That way, we could harness the space CPU of machines all over the globe and make the cracking of this kind of stuff routine. So instead of taking 8 days, it takes only a day or so, further eliminating the idea that it "takes too long to be worthwhile". Maybe there would even be value in going at a 128-bit key (granted, it would take a year). I'd anticipate with proper advertising, easy-to-use software, and little programming knowledge require, we could easily harness 10,000+ machines and a few dozen parallel machines. I know we have a 99.9% idle MasPAR I can contribute to the effort, which should be able to do 1million+ keys/sec. It's just dying to have a purpose.... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: PGP Signed with PineSign 2.2 iQCVAwUBMDNwmDokqlyVGmCFAQEzTQQAtkDhi0XD1L1PGJgSYA0XcxMXOIszjtB0 sQcHdSqeVHBpIn7K0/F4JE0tiIgXFhmaKsU8FaIaf/5sbDpRj/cTZXnvE/evt4G0 GKploXjcqXQ/dBpSWakCzsKLJvqvhKEyZyAnF/5VHgSI5WChMKYm68qiuDNyN05Q He6bvbZGbBs= =oPni -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ____ Robert A. Hayden <=> hayden(a)krypton.mankato.msus.edu \ /__ Finger for Geek Code Info <=> Finger for PGP Public Key \/ / -=-=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=-=- \/ http://krypton.mankato.msus.edu/~hayden/Welcome.html -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GED/J d-- s:++>: a-- C++(++++) ULU++ P+ L++ E---- W+(-) N++++ o+ K+++ w--- O- M+ V-- PS++>$ PE++>$ Y++ PGP++ t- 5+++ X++ R+++>$ tv+ b+ DI+++ D+++ G+++++ e++ h r-- y++** ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

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Re: First known purchase of physical goods with cyberbucks
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:39 PM 8/17/95, Marcel van der Peijl wrote: >> Anyway, if anyone knows of an earlier transaction of cyberbucks for physical >> goods than this (at 15:00 GMT 17th August 1995), then please let me know. > >As far as I know, the first transaction took place when I (while >testing) bought a postcard from GlobalX, the first ecash store to >open besides our own (and mine). It is stored in the 'DigiCash >museum' next to early prototypes of all kinds of smartcards, >emulators, wallets etc. > >This must have been around October last year (or August? Can't make >out the postmark). Hundreds of cards were shipped by several shops, >and stickers, lotteries, etc. Check the 'physical objects' section >on http://www.digicash.com/shops/categorical.html > >Maybe you should restrict the 'first known' claim to 'first known >purchase of physical goods with cyberbucks traded at the ECM'. > >Sorry! Also, there are other potential claims for this sort of thing. Based on varying extents to which the "electronic money" is really secure, is cryptographically interesting, etc. For example, more than two years ago on this list (I think it was spring of '93, but it could've been spring of '94) there were a flurry of transactions involving the "MagicMoney" and "TackyTokens" of Pr0ductCypher and others. I recall Black Unicorn and others talking about transactional exchanges involving sixpacks of beer or soft drinks. I could check my archives, but you get the point. And before that, there were "HExmarks" being used on the Extropians list. There was a nominal conversion rate to real dollars, and at the time I left that list, I had more HExmarks than anyone else. And dozens of token-based systems, coupons, LETS systems, etc. Not to mention the various commercial smartcards and "e money" systems. Granted, most of these are not "Chaumian," which is what most of us think of us as digital cash. Claiming credit for being first is a tough issue. --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net (Got net?) | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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The Official Cypherpunks Screen Saver?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:11 PM 8/17/95, Jim Gillogly wrote: >I would hazard a guess that 90% of the compute cycles in the world are used >running screen savers... this gives a <lot> of slack for people who would >like to harness them to perform productive work like making points about >the strength of security. It would really be cool to have a screen saver that did useful work while displaying pretty pictures. Imagine a screen saver, maybe with code modules running in "After Dark," that updates the screen with keys tried...could be a nice demonstration of bignums in crypto, etc. Every now and then the user would get lucky and alarms would go off... (Details: getting the modules to automatically divvy-up keyspace...or maybe just let user pick his own key, or from a list, or whatever. A la the "Chinese lottery" keycracking scheme, where set-top cable boxes (containing computers) crunch on keys and try to match to signals sent over the air...Schneier may have something on this in his book.) Just a thought. The "Official Cypherpunks Screen Saver"? I'd rather have this running on my Mac than have a t-shirt. --Tim May (Berkeley Systems, makers of "After Dark" for Macs and Windows, supports third-party modules. Maybe the "Flying Toasters" could swoop down, pick up a "key" laying on the "ground" and proceed to munch on it...the mind boggles.) ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net (Got net?) | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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