December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

PCryptoids
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A couple of cryptoids from PC Mag, 9-12-95: [Review excerpts] *Network Security, Private Communication in a Public World*, review by O. Ryan Tabibian The book is grouped into three parts: "Cryptography,' "Authentication," and "Electronic Mail." There is also a "Leftover" section, which covers security with popular network operating systems such as Microsoft Windows NT and NetWare. Most books fail to cover the difficult subject of cryptography effectively. *Network Security*, however, clearly describes the different cryptography methods -- such as secret key, hashing, and public-key cryptography -- as well as a variety of other technologies, including Diffie-Hellman and RSA. The second section, "Authentication," deals with how a system or persons you are communicating with can verify your identity. Verification schemes range from simple passwords to complex digital signatures. The authors do a remarkable job of describing and analyzing the variety of authentication methods. Since the majority of your access to the outside world is through e-mail, your messages are probably most vulnerable. The book covers some of the popular e-mail security schemes, such as public key and privacyenhanced mail. A brief overview of X.400 is also included. Overall this is perhaps the most comprehensive, yet easiest-to-understand book covering network security available. Network Security, Private Communication in a Public World, by Charlie Kaufman, Radia Perlman, and Mike Speciner, $46.00. Prentice Hall PTR, 800-947- 7700; ISBN: 0-13-061466-1. ----------- [Then, Bill Machrone muses on the utility of an electronic business cards. Excerpts:] Some of my correspondents want a magnetic stripe on the business card, pretty much like the one on your credit cards. Others want a bar code. Assuming that you don't use the back of your card for an alternative language, you've got several square inches back there, plenty of room for data. What will we use it for? The database stuff is the easy and obvious part. Since the computer industry and IS departments are likely to be the earliest adopters, it would be a simple matter to standardize on a format that the reader spits out for easy importation into just about anything. If the software and I/O devices are cheap enough, the rest of the world will come along -- and benefit. Authentication is a potentially huge application. In some South American countries, fraudulent representation is common. Crooks collect business cards from legitimate businesspeople and then misrepresent themselves to perpetrate a variety of scams. As a result, businesspeople commonly tear a corner of their card as they hand it to you. You don't trust a card that wasn't torn in front of you. A more elegant solution lies in a new Kodak technology that can encode your likeness in as little as 500 bytes, readable by your PDA, notebook, or desktop machines. You could also include a machine-readable version of your public encryption key, making it easy for people to send you secure communications. ----------

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Smalltalk Musings
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have a few musings on Smalltalk and its possible role in themes of interest to many of us. First, a comment on the "mailer" I tried last night: At 2:24 PM 8/15/95, Mats Bergstrom wrote: >> The manufacturer is apparently acting as the collection point, and any name >> can be put into the From: field. > >Then, effectively, Quasar is a new(?) kind of remailer. >There was no got.net in the headers I could see. The >next question is how they log incoming agents. I discovered that the "-- Tim May" added to the end was by them, not me. Just coincidence that I usually add "--Tim May" or "-- Tim May" before my automatic sig block. This was an experimental mailer included--"for educational purposes"--in the latest Developer's Release of SmalltalkAgents. It has a few specific things hardwired into it, such as using qks.com as its SMTP server. Not a very effective remailer, as nothing cryptographically strong is included. However, it shows that more and more languages and environments are "speaking TCP/IP" and that integration of this stuff into high level language environments is here. Java and HotJava do similar things, perhaps even more powerfully. And obviously Unix/Linux tools are the standard here. A few words on Smalltalk, an old language that is gaining in popularity. (Smalltalk is doing pretty well for large projects. Several banks and trading firms have aggressive Smalltalk programs, preferring it to C++ for large, object-oriented projects. The company behind NetBank and NetCash, SoftwareAgents, is using SmalltalkAgents. The leader in Smalltalk is of course ParcPlace, which recently merged with Digitalk. Lots of info is available on Smalltalk on the Web.) The richness of Smalltalk lies in the extensive class libraries. Everything is an object, no exceptions. (My personal interest--my asbestos suit is now on--is in looking at economic exchanges and finding the classes and methods, sort of "the ontology of money," and working on implementing them.) A few words of history. Most of you know that the current "graphical user interface" (GUI) of the Macintosh and (more recently) Windows and X, etc., goes back to two main sources: the Xerox work by Aland Kay, Dan Ingalls, and others on Smalltalk and the Xerox and MIT work on Lisp Machines. The machines from Xerox Parc in the late 70s had the features we now think of as central: bit-mapped screen, windows, menus, pop-up dialogs, mouse and movable cursor, variable fonts, etc. (And the Xerox Parc folks were of course influenced by the work of others, including Doug Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute and the object-oriented language Simula.) I'm not advocating that anyone use Smalltalk. Use what feels right, or what your companies and groups expect. C++ is without doubt the most popular. But diversity is good, so Python, Java, C+@, TCL, Lisp, Smalltalk, Perl, Eiffel, Scheme, and even REXX all have roles to play, especially in specfic situations. If Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen had dropped "hypertext" when it was "dead and buried," where would we be today? More info on SmalltalkAgents and their other products can be found at http://www.qks.com/ . The Macintosh version is currently their only supported platform, with a Windows NT (maybe Win '95, but doubtful) version due later this year, and various Unix versions due after that. They have some advances over ParcPlace's VisualWorks, but their longterm success is not assured. Nor is my longterm success assured. :-} -TCM ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- 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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VIACRYPT =money for Phil Z ???
by kutek＠ios.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Does anyone know if PKZ get's any royalties from the sale of Viacrypt- it is after all his code, isn't it?.Or is the Viacrypt source entirely different ? Speaking of which code, has Viacrypt been "verified" in any way by some independent agency?

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Re: My pseudo-anonymous dream list (fwd)
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:26 PM 8/15/95 GMT0BST, Kev wrote: >> I've heard this criticism of PGP before, but I don't quite understand it. >> PGP is free. Why not just upgrade to version 2.6? > >Easy to say not so easy to do if your outside the USA/Canada. Quite easily done. ftp.ox.ac.uk has a good collection of PGP versions. (Oh, no! Somehow these crafty foreigners managed to smuggle munitions out of the country right under the nose of our intelligence services! :-) PGP 2.6.i was written to be a 2.6-compatible version for non-US use, or you can use the 2.6.2 source code with RSAEuro instead of RSAREF and not violate your government's copyright rules. The reason PGP 2.6 is incompatible with 2.4 and earlier versions is that it let MIT make PKP happier about letting them use RSAREF, which gave them patent-legitimacy in the US. (Incompatibilities between earlier versions could be blamed on gratuituous attempts at standards-compatibility...) >However my point may be underlined by a little example :- [Example deleted.] Also, the code has been set up so that new versions can read files written by old versions, and can write files in old-format when needed; I assume the developers will continue this approach any time they make incompatible changes. But the big differences in 3.0 will be libraryizing the code - one effect is that people will be able to build their own PGP-based tools more easily than before, but aren't forced to include the whole package, so people may end up building incompatible parts using the libraries. Some of this is unavoidable - e.g. an encrypted telnet won't talk to a batch file encryptor, but they should still be using the same signature code for session-keys (or DH-halfkeys). #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #--- Storyteller makes no choice - soon you will not hear his voice. His job was to shed light, and not to master. RIP, Jerry

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Re: VIACRYPT
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:47 AM 8/15/95 -0400, No Name wrote: >Does anyone know if PKZ get's any royalties from the sale of Viacrypt- >it is after all his code, isn't it?. Or is the Viacrypt source entirely >different ? >Speaking of which code, has Viacrypt been "verified" in any way by >some independent agency? The RSA code in ViaCrypt 2.4 is different from the PGP code; most of the rest is the same. The documentation includes a note from Phil, and I think the code is signed by him. You can trust it. As far as money goes, I don't know their financial arrangements. My copy has a pretty low serial number; I hope they've sold enough to make some bucks. The Windows version of 2.7.1 is substantially different - it's got a GUI interface, with a shell-like piece underneath that looks more like vanilla PGP. The Preface says it's using ViaCrypt's DigiSig+ RSA implementation, the IDEA implementation is licensed from Ascom-Tech AG, the compression code is from Info-Zip bt Mark Adler and Jean-loup Gailly, and they've licensed Phil Zimmermann's PGP(tm) for the remainder. They also acknowledge that lots of people contributed, including Branko Lankester and Peter Gutmann. The code is signed by ViaCrypt, and their key is signed by Phil. The documentation is substantially rewritten, mostly for the GUI part. The examples are somewhat amusing (removing a signature from a key for Bill Haydon <bill(a)5thfloor.circus.com> ....) #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #--- Storyteller makes no choice - soon you will not hear his voice. His job was to shed light, and not to master. RIP, Jerry

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Re: Use of the IV in DES & stuffing the first block w/ random stuff
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:52 AM 8/15/95 -0400, you wrote: >I have recently started writing a small pair of encription and >decription programs. I was planning of gennerating the key by >taking the MD5 of the text password supplied by the user. A reasonable approach, but be careful in your implementation. I haven't seen the book "A Million Wimpy Passwords and their MD5s" yet, but the CD-ROM version may be out soon :-) And you can probably ftp it from dockmaster. >Seeing that I have 64 bits left over (MD5 gives me 128 bits, single >DES needs 56, tripple DES needs 168 - so I have a bit over 64 bits >left in both cases), is there anything useful that I could do with them? > >Does setting the IV (normally left at zero) buy me anything? IVs are designed to let you put random stuff in them to discourage known-plaintext attacks, replay attacks, etc. However, suppose you take a known 64 bits from MD5(password) and put them in the IV - instead of the Bad Guy needing to brute-force 168-bit-deep Triple DES, he gets to brute force MD5s of human-selected passwords instead, which makes a lot of pre-computation possible. Also, for 3-Key Triple-DES, how do you get 168 bits of key from 128bits of MD5? (for 2-Key 3-DES, you only need 112 bits...) If you do something like M1=MD5(Key), M2=MD5(M1,Key), realize you've got at most 128 bits of real key instead of 168, though that probably needn't worry you too much... >Does cramming it into the first data block help protect me from >known plaintext attacks? (I was going to use CBC so unless they >know the first block they can't use a known plaintext attack, right?) Won't hurt, as long as you remember to remove it on the decrypt-end. >Or am I better off putting the extra 64 bits of "key" into the IV, >and generating a strong random number to stuff in the first block >- since the decoder can just ignore that block anyway. Put the strong random number in the IV, if you've _got_ a source of strong random numbers... You might want to do something fancy like choose a random salt, use the salt for the IV, and use MD5(salt,human-selected-key) for the key. This makes pre-computation much less useful (unless you're careless and use MD5(key,salt) instead if MD5(salt,key)...), and means that you use a different session key for each batch of stuff you encrypt, even though you're using the same key. If you're paranoid about replay attacks, you could let some of the bits of the salt be random and some be a counter, and never accept a key smaller than the one from the previous successfully-decrypted message. #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #--- Storyteller makes no choice - soon you will not hear his voice. His job was to shed light, and not to master. RIP, Jerry

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RC4 key search report
by Philip R. Moyer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Are there any technical reports available describing the RC4 key search efforts? I am interested specifically in number of machines (compute power) and time to completion. Cheers, Phil

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Re: CoS Raid on "Copyright Terrorist"
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:17 PM 8/15/95 CDT, Mike McNally wrote: >Mailboxes Etc. insists on getting a picture ID; at least they did last >time I checked. Some smaller mom&pop places will take a business card >(time to break out your Jim Rockford Business Card Fabrication Kit). I always supply picture ID these days. It's really rough getting those cold lamination-Employee ID kits from Office Depot, taking the polaroid on a blue background, trimming the photo, and assembling the employment ID. I'm one of my best employees. Don't forget to include your EMP_NO. It gives the clerk something to write down. DCF "Governments are simply not fully sovereign in the world of information; their powers within it are strangely limited....This weakness of government control within computer nets--a product of strongly protected privacy, a lack of frontiers and confusions of jurisdiction--make them natural places for subversion." -- The Economist "Softwar--A Survey of Defence Technology"

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TYM_eup
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Time magazine of Augst 21 has a breathless cover story on cyber war, infowar and farside warriors, with a piece on a Rocky Horror Rand war game. Someone who knows the URL for Time articles may want to wave it. Or, for squeamish ossifragers who do not want to be IDed at the Time stakeout: TYM_eup (about 36kb in 2 parts)

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Re: Purple Boxes
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In article <199508152206.SAA23244(a)acmex.gatech.edu>, gt7508b(a)prism.gatech.edu (PHrEaK!) wrote: >Does anyone know of sources for des chips??? >Are there any public key chips out there??? >Has anyone ever tried putting PGP on a chip??? RSA??? (Are these too >slow for realistic real time hardware voice/data encryption??) >I know a little about digital electronics (I am a computer engineering >student) and I would love to get some data books and see if I could >come up with a secure "encryption box" that people could build. I don't know off the top of my head who makes DES and RSA chips. I am sure there are many manufactors of DES chips. Try TI, National, and Motorola. I belive that Schneier has a list of RSA chip makers. For the DSP part of a "bump in the cord" encrytion box, you want to get the "TI TMS320 Family Development Support" booklet by calling (800) 477-8924. You also want to look at Motorola's 68000 CPU, DSP, and controller on one chip. I can't recall the exact product number. Just call Motorola and ask for it. Have fun, - -- - -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. - --- [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 iQBFAwUBMDE5iSoZzwIn1bdtAQETkgGAjfPRJ09tGSauoSSWuaQiBqeVjI0sWXWH vJ5Ft3efVPBaZTEMXh0Q4MOkH23ot3hS =FJ9y -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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