December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Certificate proposal
by danisch＠ira.uka.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I was busy in the last days and didn't keep track of the certificate discussion. I just read most of the discussion all at once. - There was some discussion about the bindings between the key and the real world attributes of the key owner. Under normal circumstances communication never happens without an originator. If the originator uses some kind of security feature, he normally doesn't do it just for fun. He uses it as a tool to give the communication certain properties. Authenticity and confidentiality don't make sense without knowing anything about the key owners. There is no use in having a signature as long as you don't know anything about the signator. And there is no use in encrypting messages as long as you don't know anything about the receiver. A digital signature is only the way to say who wrote the message. "Knowing the author" is the sense of the signature, not just having the signature. "Knowing" means know enough attributes about him. Same with encryption. Knowledge of the author may, of course, be quite bizarre, as well as the author itself. But security is always in context of some knowledge about the other side. It doesn't make much sense to communicate with a "smith(a)somewhere.edu", because this is not enough information to get sufficient knowledge of the key owner. There are a lot of people named smith being able to legally have this address. And it doesn't make sense to communicate with Bob, "Bob" or ISP+Bob, as long as the name Bob is not sufficient to provide enough information. I need to be able to get any knowledge about the key owner that could be a reason to be interested in communicating with him. I do not want to talk with bob because he is one of many Bobs. I want to talk with him because he is the Bob with phone number 123, red hair and living in XY street. Therefore, a certificate must be able to provide any information that could be required for the decision whether the key owner will be accepted as a communication partner. Obviously, the informations depend on the nature of the key owner (human, machine, committee etc.) - Under normal circumstances communication has an originator and in most cases an addressee. If you can talk to an addressee, you usually have some kind of address to locate him. But perhaps you don't have more than the address, not even a public key. Thus the address to communicate should also be good to locate the public key of the addressee (or the keys of all key owners listening on that address). Therefore, the communication address should be enough to locate a key server and to retrieve the key (or a small number of possible keys) for that address. After retrieving the keys, the originator of communication can decide whether there is a key sufficiently identifying his communication partner. Consequently, the key certificate should contain the communication address of the owner. It is helpfull if the address is unique. For a human this may be the email address. For a machine it may be the DNS host name or the internet adress. For a service (WWW-site) or an organization it may be the email address. The communication address must allow to locate the key server. The only existing infrastructure allowing this in internet is the DNS. If you have an email address, hostname or IP address, you can find the appropriate DNS server. The server should be able to help you. Best way to do this is to provide the address of a key retrieval system (similar to the MX record). Use the communication address of the key owner as a searchable index for the key. Inventing a MD5 hash sum as key index is useless and doesn't make sense in my eyes. It just creates the problem of knowing the index and typo errors. - A MITM between two communication partners can be avoided by apropriate protocols as long as there is a sufficient key management structure. - A MITM between a key owner and the certification authority is a problem, but a solvable one. I don't like the separation of creating the key and attaching attributes. The MITM can attack between. There is always the problem of managing all attached attributes. When the first attribute is attached to the key, the key doesn't have any other attributes. This make it vulnerable. It is better to combine the key and its attributes _before_ creation of the key. If the attributes are not attached, but an essential part of the key, there is no hole for the MITM. If key and certification are two things, there is the problem of bringing them together. Self-certified keys don't have this problem. (RFC 1824) - There is also question whether the key attributes can be trusted to describe the real key owner well enough. This implies that someone must check the attributes and participate in attaching the attribute or creating the self-certified key. PGP uses key signatures to do so, but there is not much information attached, just name/e-mail-address. As said before there might be interest in describing the key owner in other ways. The authority signing the key must be able to check the description of the key owner. An unorganized web of trust (trust in what? signator knows key owner?) isn't suitable. One reason is that there is much too much overhead in finding a path of trust in the web and storing or retrieving the keys while searching for the path. There must be a systematic, hierarchical organization of authorities which check the key attributes. (We call them SKIA : Secure Key Issuing Authority, see RFC 1824). So I would suggest the following: We create a hierarchy of SKIAs able to check certain attributes. E.g. hostnames and IP addresses might be checked by the same authorities which allow to use them. Key attributes are a composition of the communication addresses of the key owner and his natural attributes a communication partner might be interested in while identifying the peer. Key owner and SKIA create a combination of key and attributes. The key owner deposits his key on all key servers responsible for his comm. addresses. If you communicate with someone known at least by his communication address (otherwise you couldn't communicate), you can easily retrieve all possible public keys of all key owners able to use this address. Now you can decide and choose the key with appropriate attributes (bank account number or whatever). Any comments? Hadmut

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regulation of money transmitters
by cman＠communities.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I just had a very pleasant conversation with the California State Banking Department; they are sending me copies of the relevant laws, and applications for the necessary licenses to sell negotiable instruments and transmit money overseas. I spoke with an examiner and she didn't seem to think there was anything special about them being _digital_ negotiable instruments. Apparently it involves a $5,000 non-refundable application fee, background investigations, examination of the soundness of the corporation, and the posting of a bond proportional to the anticipated volume (updated if volume is larger.) All very reasonable. Those who might be intereted in actually doing something with this information should contact Alicia Adoc at (415) 263 8549, or the banking department in the applicable state.

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CoCom and Crypto Export
by futplex＠pseudonym.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I just sent this to the firewalls list in reply to a message there, but I thought it might be of interest here too. -Futplex <futplex(a)pseudonym.com> hmmm, haven't seen any mail from the list in a suspiciously long time.... Forwarded message: > Subject: Re: International Encryption Protocols > To: Firewalls(a)GreatCircle.COM > Date: Wed, 11 Oct 1995 > > Ted Doty writes: > > Certainly the signatory countries to the CoCom treaty all enforce similar > > export controls to those enforced by the USA. Therefore, do not go looking > > to purchase cryptography in the UK for use outside the UK. > > I think this is misleading. CoCom, the Coordinating Committee for > Multilateral Export Controls, amounted to a non-proliferation pact to > prevent the spread of supercomputers and other hot potatoes beyond the > club of countries to untrusted (non-CoCom) countries. As far as I can tell it > did not erect export barriers _between member countries_, except perhaps some > ordinary red tape. > > Before it officially dissolved in early 1994, CoCom included, among others, > all of the G7 plus a healthy chunk of Western Europe: Australia, Belgium, > Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, > the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the U.K., and the U.S. > According to http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/adressen/org-fact.html, Austria, > Finland, Ireland, South Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, and Switzerland > were voluntarily cooperating with the export restrictions. > > As far as CoCom was concerned, you could generally sell crypto from Britain > to most of the net. This is a far cry from the position of the U.S. ITAR, > which prohibits the export of strong confidentiality-protecting crypto to the > U.K., for example. > > Most of the other CoCom signatories do _not_ enforce export controls similar > to the U.S. ones. > > [...] > > Note: the treaty has expired, but the signatory countries seem to still be > > willing to follow it. Nobody really wants to see strong crypto widely > > deployed. > > Make that "No government really wants...." and I'll agree with you. > > BTW, ftp://ftp.eff.org/pub/CAF/law/software-export-law contains an > interesting, detailed memo dated 95/03/06, from a California law firm, giving > an "Update on Current Status of U.S. Export Administration Regulations on > Software Exports". > > -Futplex <futplex(a)pseudonym.com> >

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Re: NYT on Internet Flaws
by David Berger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[stuff deleted] >People seem to miss that the NFS hack was only an _example_ of a powerful >way to silently destroy the integrity of an executable. Spoofing the >insecure FTP session they used to retrieve it works. Sending them a random >trojan horse works. The point was not that NFS is insecure. It was that >unless you can authenticate your executables as being trustworthy NOTHING >ELSE MATTERS. No I don't think the community missed the point. While both NFS and FTP are equally weak in the way you point out, I think you should have used FTP as your main example because if we presume that the file server where the binary lives is reasonably trustworthy (like the guys at Netscape haven't inserted a trojan horse into their own binary and placed it up for FTP) then the way the file will propogate throughout the net is FTP and not NFS. Nonwithstanding, the NY Times writer took an otherwise reasonable point and blew it up into a "War of the Worlds" style article. I'd make sure he writes a decent article before quoting me in it. David (wondering whose stock fell because of this page one-er) =========================================================================== David A. Berger Software Engineer/Internet Product Development Enterprise Integration Technologies|800 El Camino Real|Menlo Park, CA 94025 dvberger(a)eit.com http://www.eit.com/~dvberger/ (415) 617-8792 ===========================================================================

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Re: Netscape & Fortessa
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Netscape to Offer Fortezza Cryptographic Capability for Its Software Products Underscores Company's Commitment to US Government Market Mountain View, Calif., Oct. 10 -- Netscape Communications Corporation announced today its intent to support the Fortezza security card, a security technology based on US government standard cryptography, as a low-cost upgrade capability for its Netscape Navigator(TM) client software and other Netscape products. The new capability will enhance Netscape's offerings for the US government market and enable the company to provide increased support for security services for World Wide Web-based tools and technology. Developed by the National Security Agency, Fortezza PC card technology provides strong authentication and encryption services using US government standard cryptography, implemented in an industry-standard PCMCIA security token. Fortezza PC cards are being used in the Defense Message System (DMS), a new Department of Defense electronic messaging system; Intelink, the new US Government Intelligence Community search system based on Web technology, and in a number of other government systems. "Fortezza is an important technology for major internal US government networks and for organizations needing Web-based technology with strong security," said Marc Andreessen, vice president of technology at Netscape. "Support of Fortezza technology will strengthen our position as a leading supplier of Web-based software products to the federal government. We can use the experience gained with Fortezza and the Secure Sockets Layer open protocol to implement support for additional cryptographic devices important to both the federal government and commercial markets." Netscape expects to work with information security specialist Litronic Industries and others regarding the development, integration and support of the Fortezza cryptographic interface. Litronic provides technical expertise for the implementation of Fortezza libraries and drivers on a wide variety of platforms. California-based Litronic Industries designs, manufactures and markets information security products used to secure applications and data transmissions through the use of encryption technology. Support for Fortezza has been added to Netscape's Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) open protocol. SSL provides a straightforward method for adding strong security to existing applications and network infrastructures. SSL is application protocol independent and provides encryption, which creates a secured channel to prevent others from tapping into the network; authentication, which uses certificates and digital signatures to verify the identity of parties in information exchanges and transactions; and message integrity, which ensures that messages cannot be altered en route. Netscape will upgrade Netscape Navigator and other Netscape products to support the use of Fortezza with SSL as an enhanced alternative to software-based cryptographic mechanisms. "The US government is rapidly moving to World Wide Web and related open systems technology as an alternative to proprietary networks and applications," said Paul A. Strassmann, former director of defense information and principal deputy assistant secretary of defense, and currently distinguished visiting professor of information warfare at the National Defense University. "Many federal agencies are adopting Fortezza technology as a means to secure network transactions over unclassified and classified networks. We are pleased to see Netscape provide support for Fortezza cryptographic cards in a commercial product based on open systems standards." Contact: Kristina Lessing of Netscape, 415-528-2661, or kristina(a)netscape.com

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Re: CancelMoose = William Nagengast?
by futplex＠pseudonym.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mark writes: > #define paranoia on > > Just ask your local TLA that has traffic monitors on the up and down links of > all the remailers so they can track a piece of email from sender to recipient. > They will take the (relatively small) logs of the hour and pump out a name > for you. > > #define paranoia off > > :) That's one of the principal advantages of Mixmaster over the earlier generation anonymous remailers. Approaching a Chaumian digital mix more closely than previous implementations, it uses only encrypted standard-sized packets in transit. This protocol should make it hard or impossible to narrow the list down to anything like a single name, depending on ambient traffic conditions. -Futplex <futplex(a)pseudonym.com> "Our encryption doesn't use an encryption algorithm" -Elementrix

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international clampdown on money laundering
by an215712＠anon.penet.fi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

----- Forwarded Message Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 23:35:58 -0400 (EDT) From: Brad Dolan <bdolan(a)use.usit.net> To: snet-l(a)world.std.com Subject: Int'l Money Laundering, Part the Second (fwd) - ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 19:31:40 -0800 Subject: Int'l Money Laundering, Part the Second INTERNATIONAL ASPECTS The increasingly long arm of US law Those of you who have read my earlier exploration on the subject of jurisdiction (http://www.communities.com/paper/swamp.html) should be aware of a wide variety of ways that the US can "reach out and touch someone" they're not pleased with. Well, last week, I learned a few more. There are several ways in which the US is attempting to exert hegemony throughout the world wrt banking regulation: o Identification of "fiscally tolerant" nations and banking havens, and close regulatory examination of all transactions with these countries. o Pressure on major US trading partners and allies to pass and implement anti-money-laundering legislation and regulatory regimes. o Regulations on foreign banks with offices in the US, making compliance demands on world-wide operations. o Criminal prosecution of banks suspected of institutional involvement in money laundering, even if said bank has no offices or branches in the US. o Worldwide pre-trial substitute asset forfeiture of banks suspected of institutional involvement in money laundering, even if said bank has no offices or branches in the US. Pariah Nations in Banking ========================= As I touched on briefly in the previous section, transactions with well-known banking havens can automatically qualify as "suspicious." And in addition to some of the better known havens, a number of countries were pointed out at the conference as being "fiscally tolerant", including Malta, Uruguay, Japan, Ireland and Belgium; in another presentation the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were identified as "rapidly growing" sources of suspicious baning activity. Transactions with counterparties in such countries will be flagged by regulators for closer examination -- banks with large percentages of transactions with these countries will be expected to meet a higher standard in their attempt to identify "suspicious" behavior and will be under increasing pressure to investigate their customers' business practicies and motivation for all bank transactions. Some countries are clearly going to continue to tell the US to "get stuffed." However, if the US is successful in pressuring more and more countries to "tow the line", it will leave a shrinking pool of transactions subject to closer and closer examination. New Money Laundering Legislation ================================ Two presentations, one from Taiwan, the other from Thailand, focused on new or proposed legislation wrt money laundering in those countries. Based on my direct experience of living in the former, and my reseach into the latter, it's going to be a very, very long time before such legislation has a significant impact on either country. Chinese people (who are in the majority in Taiwan, and form an economically active minority in Thailand) are very cash- oriented; I vividly remember payday in Taiwan, with the boss sitting at a table piled with money, bundling up salaries for everyone. I'd come home at the end of each month with a giant wad of cash from my several different jobs. One could hardly imagine a better environment for money laundering than a society in which large quantities of cash change hands on a regular basis. After his talk, the Taiwanese speaker acknowledged the problems, but seemed hopeful that progress could be made. The speaker from Thailand, Nualnoi Treerat, a professor of Economics, discussed the proposed legislation primarily as an attempt to reduce the impact of organized crime on political life and society in Thailand; however, by her own estimations, the underground economy in Thailand represents 17-19% of the country's GDP (mostly drugs and prostitution.) Given the extensive corruption which she also detailed, it seems that such legislation will be a very small step indeed. Other speakers addressed the issue of cultural differences with respect to the use of cash and attitudes towards privacy, and it came up at lunch both days -- in many cultures, financial privacy is held in much higher regard than in the US, and people have a much stronger suspicion towards the government. Furthermore, there are many people who feel this way in the US. There is going to be an inevitable clash between atttempts to closely regulate and monitor money movements and people's fundamental desire for privacy. It's not clear that people of any culture can be sufficiently frightend by the bad guys to give up as much of their privacy as would be required for ultimate success in the War on Money Laundering. Despite the dim chances of success, it's clear that the US has been at least partially successful in coercing and coaxing other countries to adopt measures against money laundering, and to some extent there is local support for these measures. But these direct efforts pale by comparison to some other techniques... Foreign Bank Regulation ======================= In various pro-privacy publications I've read, there have been oblique warnings about doing business with foreign banks that maintain offices in the US. At this conference, I learned some very concrete reasons for this. It turns out that if a foreign bank wants to open a US office, they must demonstrate compliance with US money laundering laws throughout their _worldwide operations_. Furthermore, they're expected to have solid leadership for these policies from their home offices. This puts such banks in a serious bind. For instance, while Annunzio-Wylie absolves (or attempts to absolve) banks from civil liability for filing Suspicious Activity Reports and Criminal Referral Forms on their cusomters, this absolution does not extend to the home countries of these banks, where substantially different laws may obtain -- possibly explicitly forbidding this kind of reporting. There is almost a certain kind of logic to this kind of activity, but not content to extend our laws over the worldwide operations of banks with US offices, there are two ways in which US authorities are now attempting to extend US laws to banks _with no US offices_. Extraterritorial Reach ====================== The best paper presented at the conference, hands down, was "Surviving the Solution: The Extraterritorial Reach of the United States," by Kirk Munroe, a criminal defense attorney practicing in Miami. [I intend to find out if an online version of this paper can be made available.] To quote Mr. Munroe: The US money laundering law specifically provides for extraterritorial jurisdiction when (a) the conduct is by a US citizen anywhere in the world, or, if by a non-US citizen, the conduct occurs, at least in part, in the United States, and (b) the transactions, or a series of related transactions, exceeds $10,000. [18 USC $ 1956(f)] Some add'l background: banks involved in international business typically have a number of _correspondent accounts_ scattered around the world that are used for clearing wire transfers and other transactions. Since the BCCI scandal, the US government has increasingly gone after these accounts when a bank is suspected of facilitating money laundering. Furthermore, banks can have these correspondent accounts seized, even if they no longer contain "dirty" money, because they _facilitated_ a money laundering activity. When you combine these elements, you get a strategy that permits the US government to confiscate worldwide correspondent accounts of banks, even if they don't have a US presence. The first case Mr. Munroe cites is that of Banco de Occidente (Panama), one of his clients, that was alleged to have facilitated the laundering of the proceeds of drug transactions. The indictment included criminal charges against the banks and a criminal forfeiture charge. The government also filed a civil action for the forfeiture of $412 million allegedly laundered (although it had already passed completely through the bank.) The government then proceded to freeze not only the bank's US correspondent accounts, but also accounts in Germany, Switzerland and Canada, leading to the insolvency of the bank and its subsequent takeover by the Panamanian Banking Commission. [The Germans quickly unfroze the account after a civil action brought by the bank.] Quoting Munroe: After months of difficult and complicated negotiations which involved the banks' various interests in eight nations, a resolution was reached with the governments of the US, Canada, and Switzerland... [the bank] entered a guilty plea and agreed to forfeit, over a period of four years, $5 million to the US. The US, in turn, paid the Swiss and the Canadians $1 million each from the initial $2 million forfeiture payment. [Those of you who are still under any delusions about the "safety" of Swiss bank accounts, take careful note of this.] Mr. Munroe concludes that the only reason that the bank got off this "lightly" was because of substantial evidence that it was, by and large, a highly respectable institution and that this instance of laundering was an aberration. The next case cited by Mr. Munroe is that of Bank Leu. I quote from his paper: In sum, a Luxembourg bank with no office in the US was charged and convicted of money laundering in the US on the basis of clearing US dollar negotiable instruments drawn on a US bank but deposited by non-US citizens in Luxembourg. In other words, acceptance of US-dollar negotiable instruments by a bank anywhere in the world outside of the US renders the bank susceptible to US criminal jurisdiction in the money laundering field. The case boils down to this: Bank Leu wanted to expand its private banking business, and hired an officer to market accounts in South America. Two related accounts were opened, and over a one- year period $2.3 million in cashier's checks, all below $10K, were deposited in the two accounts. Although no guilty knowledge could be shown, this case was pursued and won on a theory of "willful blindness", that is, the bank "should have known" that the transactions had no valid business purpose and were inherently suspicious (came via Columbia, were sometimes more than 6 months old, all in small amounts, etc.). According to a LEA representative at the conference, there was a lot of joking in the backoffice at Bank Leu about the money being dirty, and clerks were repeatedly told "don't worry, it's ok" by bank officers. Certainly if this is true, it amounts to _extremely_ willful blindness, but this case still represents an amazingly long reach for US laws. [more to come... "Things bad people do with money"] --****ATTENTION****--****ATTENTION****--****ATTENTION****--***ATTENTION*** Your e-mail reply to this message WILL be *automatically* ANONYMIZED. Please, report inappropriate use to abuse(a)anon.penet.fi For information (incl. non-anon reply) write to help(a)anon.penet.fi If you have any problems, address them to admin(a)anon.penet.fi

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Re: Basic Flaws in Internet Security and Commerce
by patrick＠Verity.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > So: If you can't trust your path to your own file system, what can you > trust? (And this is without even talking about things like firmware > upgrades and BIOS patches and all sorts of other potential approaches.) Can > we do no better than simply assume the local workstation file system can be > trusted? > Nah, it's not as bad as all that. There's fixes to all of this, they're well known, and actually in place at some places. Because it's such a pain having good security on all of the machines most sites choose to have really good security on a firewall to keep the bad guys out, and through policy, isolation, and less stringent security measures protect the machines inside the firewall. That's not to say that everyone with a firewall has good security, far from it. It's also not to say that everyone without a firewall is vulnerable, they're not...I know folks with all of their machines buttoned up tight. It's possible to close most categories of holes, and to detect intrusions in progress. You say you're worried about the system being corrupted so that you can't trust calls to the OS. Some attacks do work this way, but you can prevent the attack via a combination of good security and good practices. And yes, secure authentication and transmission of data makes everything much simpler;) Without it you have to essentially pull up the drawbridge and trust no one outside the moat, since there's no way of knowing if anyone, or any host is who or what they say they are. If anyone wants more specific information about how to protect from various attacks I can help or give you references to the literature, but I won't go into it here since I expect that most anyone you'd find on cypher- punks knows all this at least in outline already. Patrick _______________________________________________________________________ / These opinions are mine, and not Verity's (except by coincidence;). \ | (\ | | Patrick J. Horgan Verity Inc. \\ Have | | patrick(a)verity.com 1550 Plymouth Street \\ _ Sword | | Phone : (415)960-7600 Mountain View \\/ Will | | FAX : (415)960-7750 California 94303 _/\\ Travel | \___________________________________________________________\)__________/

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Re: SAIC bought InterNic, but who is SAIC? A spook contractor!
by Chris Claborne 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:18 PM 9/28/95 -0700, John Gilmore wrote: >Forwarded-by: gordoni(a)base.com (Gordon Irlam) >SAIC's board members include Admiral Bobby Inman, former NSA head and deputy >director of the CIA; Melvin Laird, Nixon's defense secretary; and retired >General Max Thurman, commander of the Panama Invasion. Recently departed >board members include Robert Gates, former CIA director; William Perry, >current Secretary of Defense; and John Deutch, the current CIA director. >Current SAIC government contracts include re-engineering information systems >at the Pentagon, automation of the FBI's computerized fingerprint >identification system, and building a national criminal history information >system. I am not supporting the idea that SAIC is not annother govt mouthpiece or cover op but it is standard practice to hire retired workers from government that worked in the area that you want to sell services into. I know of a ex army colonel that used to work for a government contractor. I'm sure that he used his contacts to sell services to the government. You gotta love it! Don't trust S/MIME, it's supported by RSA (a govt mouth piece) and uses DES. ... __o .. -\<, Chris.Claborne(a)SanDiegoCA.ATTGIS.Com ...(*)/(*). CI$: 76340.2422 http://bordeaux.sandiegoca.attgis.com/ PGP Pub Key fingerprint = A8 FA 55 92 23 20 72 69 52 AB 64 CC C7 D9 4F CA Avail on Pub Key server. PGP-encrypted e-mail welcome!

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Re: NYT on Internet Flaws
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There's a strange anxiety in Markoff's story, as though it was planted on page one to exaggerate a threat to cyber law and order. Reminds that his articles on Kevin were also melodramatic, himself a player, privileged to join the hunt. Maybe this is ambient hot material for his burbling potboiler on Shimomura and Mitnick, honing an author's creative edge, and artistic license, over that, ahem, of the tranquil and capaciously befriended journalist's, pissed that privileged news files were hacked, are hackable.

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