December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Shrinks as Narcs for the State
by Brian B. Riley 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 8/30/97 12:00 PM, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM (dlv(a)bwalk.dm.com) passed this wisdom: >Can the priest be prosecuted for not telling the cops about the confession? Unless something has radically changed the sanctity of the Catholic confessional has never been breeched involuntarily ... i.e.,I do not believe that any court has ever successfully compelled a priest to divulge what he has heard in the confessional. Of course a problem lies in the construction of the question ... its easier to want to try to breech the confessional when you speak of a guy talking about killing a hundred people as opposed to a guy talking about stealing a candy bar. In various ethics discussions on this subject over the years it usually seems to comes down to the fact that morally the priest is bound to try to do something to stop the carnage without divulging what he was told. Brian B. Riley --> http://www.macconnect.com/~brianbr For PGP Keys - Send Email Subject "Get PGP Key" "When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates. For once, let him clean up after me! " - Christian Worley

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Re: Privacy book list
by Richard P. Klau 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I got a letter in the mail today from Plenum Publishing Corp in NY, > advertising a book called _Mind Your Own Business: The Battle for > Personal Privacy_ by Gini Graham Scott. It seems I am on a > mailing list for privacy freaks. Oh the irony! > > They must have gotten my name from somewhere. The only two sources that > I can think of are the lists for CFP '94 and '95, and a > revolver club that I used to be a member of. Has anyone else on the > list gotten this ad? I got the ad (and a subsequent review copy, upon request) after we published the first issue of the Journal of Law & Technology on the web. It appears that they got my name, and address, from the web (both are displayed in the "Contacting the Journal" page). I haven't had much time to read the book, but my recollection is that it is somewhat misguided in its analysis of privacy online. Its historical perspective is fairly thorough, however. --Rick Klau --------- Richard P. Klau (3L) // klaurich(a)uofrlaw.urich.edu Editor in Chief, Richmond Journal of Law & Technology http://www.urich.edu/~jolt/

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Re: Key Escrow Papers
by cme＠acm.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From: John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> >Date: Thu, 7 Sep 1995 20:55:49 -0400 > Note 1: It was Michael Nelson of the White House who said > that the reason to maintain the 64-bit limit for export was > because the key escrow methodology had not yet been proven > reliable and that the security agencies insisted on the > relatively weak system in case key escrow failed. Clint Brooks of NSA repeated this assertion, at least once. He said it during the August 17, 1995 meeting as well. I find this interesting, not least as a violation of security. This amounts to an open declaration that NSA can break through 64-bit keys. Could it be that NSA was miffed at being upstaged in the announcement of breaking through a 40-bit key and wanted to up the ante? .... :-) - Carl +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison cme(a)acm.org http://www.clark.net/pub/cme/home.html | |PGP: E0414C79B5AF36750217BC1A57386478 & 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2 | | ``Officer, officer, arrest that man! He's whistling a dirty song.'' | +----------------------------------------------------------- Jean Ellison -+

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Re: Day 2, nist GAK meeting
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Date: Fri, 8 Sep 1995 06:36:00 -0700 >From: pfarrell(a)netcom.com (Pat Farrell) >Penny Brummitt of NSA was to talk about Clipper's key escrow agents, >but called in sick. I didn't catch the name of the replacement. It was Jan Manning. He's NSA's person designing the Law Enforcement decrypt box and possibly other related equipment for the Clipper program.

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Developments in the _Junger_ suit
by Peter D. Junger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Now that Judge Patel has declared again in the _Bernstein_ case that cryptographic software is entitled to the full protection of the First Amendment, it is time for me to bring you up to date on some developments on the Cleveland front. To assist in the preparation of an amended complaint in my suit that, like _Bernstein_, seeks to enjoin the enforcement of the export regulations restricting publication of encryption software, my Legal Attack Team on June 12 submitted several ``classification requests'' to the Department of Commerce in an effort to determine exactly what is, and what is not, covered by the definition of encryption software set out in the Export Administration Regulations. The Bureau of Export Aministration in the Department of Commerce responded to these requests on or about July 4 and amplified their response on or about August 7. That response, though not generally very helpful, did contain a number of surprises. In particular, two versions of a one-time pad encryption program using the XOR function that I wrote in 8086 assembly language and machine code and a similar OTP program written by Paul Leyland in one line of C, were classified as EAR 99, which means that those programs are ``not subject to the licensing restrictions for encryption software''. No explanation was given as to why these programs implementing the one unbreakable form of encryption are not classified as encryption programs subject to ECCN 5D002. More importantly, the classification requests included several pages of HTML links to strong, unexportable encryption programs on several FTP servers outside of the United States, but the Bureau of Export Administration said that they were unable to classify that material, and instead supplied us with an advisory opinion with respect to that request saying: ``Professor Junger's activity is not an export that is subject to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR).'' The Bureau subsequently amplified this response, saying: ``While the use of html links by a person might, in some applications, involve an export . . . we reiterate that the activity described by your submission is not an export activity that is subject to the EAR and would also not constitute conduct prohibited by Section 744.9 of the EAR.'' The Bureau did, however, classify several programs that we submitted, including one written by me in C that implements several different encryption algorithms and Adam Back's RSA program in three lines of Perl (which is available at <http:/www.dcs.ex.ac.uk>), as being encryption programs that are subject to the export restriction of the EAR. The most significant part of the Bureau's response, however, was their professed inability to classify one way or the other all programs implementing certain specified encryption algorithms such as, for example, OTP programs that XOR the bytes comprising the message with the bytes in a one-time pad. The Bureau said as to this request: ``BXA cannot provide a single classification opinion for any encryption product that `implemements' a certain algorithm''. Due to the kindness of John Young, our requests for classification and BXA's responses will be available shortly at <http://www.jya.com/>. The links to cryptographic programs on FTP sites outside the United States are already available at <http://samsara.law.cwru.edu/links/cryptolinks.html>. Stay tuned for further announcements once this labor day weekend is past. -- Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH EMAIL: junger(a)samsara.law.cwru.edu URL: http://samsara.law.cwru.edu NOTE: junger(a)pdj2-ra.f-remote.cwru.edu no longer exists

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Re: Slightly faster checking for encrypted messages to me
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:31 AM 9/5/95 -0800, Doug Barnes wrote to Hal and us: >If two entities want to communicate via a message pool, >without worrying about traffic analysis, but don't want >the overhead of trying to decrypt every headerless >message to the pool, then they can do the following: > >1) In a "headered" message, one of the entities (A) sends > a collection of large random numbers to be used as return > markers, encrypted with the public key of the desired > correspondent (B). > >2) B can then respond to A with an essentially headerless > message prefixed with one of the numbers send by A. > This initial message should contain a list of similar > numbers for B, that A can use to send messages to B. There's a way to get this without sending as much data - using a relative of S/Key (probably not affected by S/Key patent.) A sends B two random numbers, thing1 and thing2. B's headers include a prefix of n, hash( thing2, hash^n(thing1) ) where hash^n is n rounds of hash, e.g. MD4 or MD5. Thing2 can possibly be a well-known string instead. Assuming there's no special relationship between thing2 and the hash function, it should be hard to derive hash( thing2, hash^n(thing1) ) from hash( thing2, hash^(n-1)(thing1) ) presumably as hard as inverting the hash. (Brute-force is an option if thing1 is not chosen well, involving a few hundred hashes on a few million popular wimpy passwords, but S/Key suffers from the same weakness.) Including n in the header is a mild message-correlation risk, though messages don't have to be sent with consecutive n's (at a cost of more runs of hash per message.) This lets you recover easily from lost messages. There's also the mild risk that the thing1 and thing2 keys need to be stored, though Doug's method also suffers from that. It is also possible to use S/Key itself - the original message from B to A contains Xn = hash^n(key) and maybe n. The next message contains Xn-1 = hash^(n-1)(key), which A checks by hashing it and looking in his table of messageids for Xn. A can recover from small numbers of lost messages by hashing a few times. (Since you're not using it for authentication, is it covered by the S/Key patent?) This method has the weakness that Traffic Analysts can also correlate messages by hashing the fields and comparing with previous. One workaround is to for B to also send A the keys for some simple encryption method E such as "Ek = m xor k" and use Xn = Ek(hash^n(key)). This requires A to perform an xor and a hash for each correspondent (B, C, D, ...), but is probably secure enough. Alternatively, since the numbers are fairly short, you can use "Ek = m^k mod p", but that's starting to look like work :-). #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

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Re: University logging mail to anon.penet
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:30 PM 9/6/95 -0700, you wrote: >Our local University apparently has been logging ALL mail to anon.penet, >including faculty, students, and off-campus users. Any time you're using non-encrypted remailers, you've got no protection against people doing that; even with encrypted messages they can still tell who's sending mail to anon.penet.fi, but can't tell who the messages are forwarded to. There may be ECPA issues involved, especially if CalPolySLO is a government- run university; the sysadmins certainly need to learn some ethics... If your ombudsperson can be reached by email, a note through anon.penet.fi explaining the usefulness of anonymous remailers for sensitive communications might be educational. After all, it's a technique they might want to use for handling sexual harassment cases or other problems requiring two-way communications. #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

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by darlene＠uunet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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GAK Hacks and Position Surveillance
by kqb＠whscad1.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> GAK Hacks! > We did it for SSL, let's do it for GAK. > Demonstrate that superencryption (encrypting within a GAK wrapper) defeats > GAK. And other kinds of hacks, including releasing "damaged" (inoperative) > versions of the proposed code (when it becomes available). Tim, That's a start. Superencryption can protect the _content_ of the conversation, but it will not prevent _traffic analysis_. That is an important issue because, as I explain below, in our increasingly wired world, effective traffic analysis may become a _position_ escrow system, except that there won't even be any escrow. A GAK Hack that combines superencryption with a method to defeat traffic analysis would raise a lot more eyebrows than superencryption alone. Unfortunately, since we don't yet know what kind of LEAFs will be in the next-generation GAK proposal, I can only refer to some comments made awhile ago about Clipper-based traffic analysis: Date: Mon, 14 Mar 94 10:36:05 EST From: smb(a)research.att.com > The LEAF can be decrypted with just the family key; from what's been > disclosed so far, local law enforcement agents will be able to do that > without contacting the escrow sites. The LEAF contains the unit id of > the chip, independent of what phone number it's being used from, ... Imagine someone using a GAK/LEAF communication device while travelling throughout the day. Especially if the communications are wireless, no court order will be needed to track position during his/her journeys because a packet sniffer armed with the family key could detect any of his/her communications automatically. You may wonder "what packet sniffer could track communications like that"? Maybe I'm wrong, but isn't that what the recent Digital Telephony legislation was for? Now let's return to a recent message from tcmay(a)got.net: > The pernicious nature of the "escrow" idea, ... is that it says that > surveillance is not so bad after all, because the results of the escrow > will not be looked at except when "justified." ... Or perhaps, once a GAK system with some kind of LEAFs is in place, no justification at all will be needed to accomplish efficient and fully automated massive position surveillance. Maybe key escrow is just a red herring to distract us from position surveillance? Of course, we can assume that these LEAFs will not be as vulnerable to forging as Matt Blaze demonstrated for Clipper (Tessera?). First we had: GAK = Government Access to Keys. Perhaps now we have: GULPS = Government Unlimited License for Position Surveillance? Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if I have overstated the threat and more technically knowledgeable minds on this list will expose the flaws in my reasoning. Please do. Kevin Q. Brown kevin.q.brown(a)att.com kqb(a)whscad1.wh.att.com

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Cyphernomicon
by dsc＠swcp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks to all who helped me get my hands on Cyphernomicon. I now can breeze through the html site at www.oberlin.edu. I guess at 2am it didn't work because either I or oberlin were too sleepy. I still cannot open an FTP port at netcom. I got a copy on my Mac by giving a lot of memory to Netscape and getting it from www.swiss.ai.mit.edu. I also got a copy from Jeff's zipped copy at ftp.goblin.punk.net, but my unzipping utility hacked out a few lines. Here is a summary of what I learned: Cyphernomicon File Size: 1,287,731 (single character newlines) FTP sites: ftp.netcom.com/pub/tc/tcmay/CP-FAQ The original. "crowded" (I couldn't open an FTP port.) ftp.goblin.punk.net/pub/docs/cypherpunk.faq.gz ftp.goblin.punk.net/pub/docs/cypherfq.zip 28.8 bps modem, newline=CR, but .zip will change to newline=CRLF About 432Kbytes. (On PPP(a)14.4 it took me 6+ minutes to get it.) "until someone posts it on a site with higher bandwidth" [the upcoming new/changed/mirrored Cypherpunk site] HTML site: http://www.oberlin.edu/~brchkind/cyphernomicon/ nice. Other http: sites: http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6095/articles/cyphernomicon/CP-FAQ text. very responsive and fast (6 minutes for my 14.4 connection). http:/www.isse.gmu.edu/~pfarrell/crypto/CP-FAQ text http://www.msen.com/~lwp/Cyphernomicon.gz About 432Kbytes. Need g[un]zip utility. Clearly missing are credits and contact info. I probably won't get to the FAQ much this weekend (wife & kids expect me to do my share and bring home the bacon), but maybe in a week or two. Do I have to read the sci.crypt FAQ, too, to earn my FAQ badge? Dar (list newbie) =========================================================== Dar Scott Home phone: +1 505 299 9497 Dar Scott Consulting Voice: +1 505 299 5790 <--- 8637 Horacio Place NE Email: darscott(a)aol.com Albuquerque, NM 87111 dsc(a)swcp.com Fax: +1 505 898 6525 http://www.swcp.com/~correspo/DSC/DarScott.html My preference for attached files are in this order: AOL, Mime, Binhex4, PGP, UUencode ===========================================================

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