December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

OSF security announcement
by Bob Bruen, MIT Lab for Nuclear Science 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The following is part of an OSF announcement. Most of the marketing hype has been deleted, but I thought the security part would be of interest. Bob ------------------------------------------------------------------ CAMBRIDGE, MA, December 12, 1995 -- The Open Software Foundation (OSF) today announced the DCE-Web Advanced Technology Offering (ATO). The goal of this software project is to provide all of the essential capabilities of the distributed computing environment (encryption, ^^^^^^^^^ --snip--- * Secure Local Proxy - provides secure DCE-Web access using standard off-the-shelf browsers. It is possible to access DCE-Web using any browser without any modification. The Secure Local Proxy functions as protocol switch, forwarding proxy requests either as standard http or using the secure DCE-Web protocol. * Secure Gateway - integrates the DCE-Web with other secure Web protocols. The Gateway provides secure access to the Multi-protocol Server, providing DCE authentication based on public key identities. The gateway is designed to allow plug-in access for multiple public key Web protocols. --snip-- For more information on this ATO please refer to the project home page at http://www.osf.org/www/dceweb/. --snip--- CONTACT: Jane Smeloff Open Software Foundation (617) 621-8997 Email: jane(a)osf.org

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Re: Usability of Cryptography (was Re: More FUD from First Virtual)
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"jamesd(a)echeque.com" "James A. Donald" 13-DEC-1995 03:44:41.99 >If we stick to a lesser goal -- constancy of identity -- this is not so hard. In general it is impossible to prove that Bryce is the "real" Bryce, but it is trivial to prove that Bryce is the same Bryce who has a certain Web page, and the same Bryce who posted a certain article in archives. ----------------- I have been considering all the pieces of information that ought to be automatically linkable to a particular public key. They include: 1. Email address(es) from which mail signed with it is customarily received, to save on lookup time. 2. Web pages put up by this person. 3. Web pages/ftp files/etcetera authored by this person (i.e., the hks archives of cypherpunks). 4. Phone number if using a crypto-capable phone with a key-download capacity from a computer. 5. A declared name or alias. 6. In my files, whatever name I want to give the person. Ultimately, if I receive something signed by somebody, I would want to have hypertext links from that file to all of these- to remind me of whom I'm talking to and his/her/its/their past behavior. -Allen

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Re[2]: e-Cash: CAFE vs. Mondex
by David Klur 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Matthias Schunter Said [snip] >The CAFE system is a cheque based system. This means that the >customer receives an electronic chequebook, where each cheque is >(blindly) signed by the bank. >During each payment the customer has >to use one of these signed cheques. [snip] If the CAFE card contains cheques (which are not digital cash, and therefore must be tied back to a customer's checking account), how can the bank blindly sign them? The merchant will have to deposit the cheque in order to transfer the money out of the customer's account and into the merchant's account. I don't see how the bank can not know the identity of the customer. This is why digital cash can be anonymous - because once the bank (blindly) signs the cash tokens, these tokens ARE money. They are not pointers (in the case of cheques) to customers' bank accounts. However, if Alice (the customer) contacts her bank and requests a cheque be made out to Bob (the vendor) for, say, $12.50 then the bank can withdraw $12.50 from Alice's account and blindly sign a cheque for $12.50 payable only to Bob. Then the bank would not know Alice's identity. I don't think this is how CAFE works, since CAFE is designed as an off-line smart card system. Therefore, Alice cannot requests bank cheques from her bank made payable to Bob when she walks into Bob's store. Maybe your definition of a cheque is different than mine? ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________

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Re: Spotty c'punks service due to network outages
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:35 PM 12/12/95 -0800, you wrote: >Our network service is going up and down, probably due to the storms >in San Francisco. If you see delays, that's the reason why. As far >as I know, NSA has not figured out how to control the weather, so it's >not their fault :-). This is not just in San Francisco... Portland, OR has been having some pretty bad problems with power outages. (My ISP was offline all last night.) I expect that Seattle will be having similar problems due to the storm front that just went through. As for the NSA controlling the Weather Orginization... That only counts as a successfull attack if they have the Evil Geniuses for a Better Tommorrow assisting in the attack. (And they are controlled by at least one computer group.) Sorry... Been catching up on my mail from the Illuminati mailing list. | Remember: Life is not always champagne. Sometimes it is REAL pain. | |"It's only half a keyserver. I had to split the | Disclaimer: | |other half with the government man." - R. Rococo | Ignore the man | |`finger -l alano(a)teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key | behind the keyboard.| | http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ | alano(a)teleport.com |

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Re: e-mail forwarding, for-pay remailers
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"gbroiles(a)darkwing.uoregon.edu" "Greg Broiles" 13-DEC-1995 03:40:50.49 >I don't have much faith that the people who are currently doing the DNS for my domain name (goldenbear.com) are going to do anything about the current bouncing-messages phenomenon anytime soon, so I'm looking into other ways to get & send E-mail (e.g., more persistent than this address which will disappear when I'm done with school in ~ 6 months). I've found a few services which may be of interest to C-punks because they're useful for creating/maintaining persistent cyberspace identities with no necessary connection to a "real name". [...] netbox.com ( http://www.netbox.com ) provides web pages and E-mail storage or forwarding for people; they let you sign up for a trial month for free. They ask for name/address/phone (which could easily be a Mailboxes Etc address and a voicemail from Mailboxes Etc or whatever) and accept payment by check or credit card. They'll store incoming email or forward it to another account. They'll do header rewriting (similar to the anonymous remailers) so that outgoing mail looks like it came from this address. -------------------- There's one problem with this in regards to the "no necessary connection," and that 's the governmental requirement for mail forwarding. MBE and any legal other one will want to see at least two forms of ID including one photo, and have a form that they fill out using that and send to the local post office. Anyone have a way around this problem? -Allen

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Re: Blinding against Kocher's timing attacks
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:27 PM 12/12/95 -0800, you wrote: >From: ljo(a)ausys.se (Johansson Lars) >> Does anyone know whether David Chaum's patent on >> blind digital signatures extends to this application? > >I don't think it would. Chaum's blinding protocol has one major >difference: the blinding factor is applied by a different person than >the one doing the signing. The purpose of the blinding is different, >too; in Chaum's case the idea is to end up with a signature which is >unknown to the signer, while with Kocher's "defensive blinding" the >signature (or decryption) is an ordinary RSA one, and the blinding is >just done internally by the signer to randomize the timing. One thing I haven't heard mentioned would be the possibility of using TWO blinding factors, by two different people, to blind the unsigned cash. As you may know, I'm interested in payee-anonymous systems as well as payer-anonymous ones, and such a feature might assist in this.

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Attacking Clipper with timing info?
by jim＠bilbo.suite.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Could this timing attack be used to obtain the various keys used by Clipper devices? Jim_Miller(a)suite.com

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(U)
by Francisco Encarnacao 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

SUBSCRIBRE Regards, Francisco Encarnacao - Equipment Maintenance Technician Internet E-mail address:Francis@e-mail.com

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CryptoLib 1.0 now available
by Matt Blaze 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[Note! This is posted for Jack Lacy; please direct responses to him at cryptolib(a)research.att.com. -matt] Announcing CryptoLib - Release 1.0 12/13/95 Jack Lacy, AT&T Bell Labs CryptoLib is a portable and efficient library of primitives for building cryptographic applications. It runs under most versions of Unix as well as DOS, Windows and Windows-NT (and 95). We are pleased to make CryptoLib source code available without charge to researchers and developers in the US and Canada. (Because of export restrictions on cryptographic software, we are only able to make the software available within the US and Canada to US and Canadian citizens and US permanent residents.) CryptoLib is intended for research and experimental use, and is distributed without warranty or support. In particular, please note the following license conditions: * Copyright (c) 1995 by AT&T. * Permission to use, copy, and modify this software without fee * is hereby granted, provided that this entire notice is included in * all copies of any software which is or includes a copy or * modification of this software and in all copies of the supporting * documentation for such software. * * This software may be subject to export controls. * * THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED * WARRANTY. IN PARTICULAR, NEITHER THE AUTHORS NOR AT&T MAKE ANY * REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY OF ANY KIND CONCERNING THE MERCHANTABILITY * OF THIS SOFTWARE OR ITS FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE. The attached describes the library and some timing results. To obtain source code send electronic mail to: cryptolib(a)research.att.com with a statement of the following form: "I am a U.S. or Canadian citizen or a legal permanent resident of the U.S. and am aware that some parts of CryptoLib may be restricted under United States export regulations. I have read and understand the CryptoLib license." Name: Location: E-mail: Are you licensed to use the RSA patent? If yes, give name of licensed organization: =============================================================================== CryptoLib includes the following: arbitrary length bignums. bigmath package: bigAdd, bigSubtract, bigMultiply, bgiDivide, bigLeftShift, bigRightShift, bigAnd, bigOr, bigXor, bigCopy, Euclid's extended GCD, modular reduction and exponentiation crypto primitives DES and 3DES + modes Diffie-Hellman DSA (Signing and verification roughly equally efficient) El Gamal Rabin's scheme Random Number generation (PSEUDO and TRUE) MD[2,4,5] Prime generation RSA (provided only if you convince me that you have a license) SHA truerand (For Unix, NT and 95) quantization (Defense against Kocher's timing attack) quantized RSA, DSA and El Gamal private key operations. support functions asn1.c ioutils.c netIface.c Some timing information: All times assume 32X32 bit assembly of multiplication primitives. bigPow times (a^b mod c with a,b,c the same length) 512 bits 1024 bits -------- --------- bigPow 0.12s 0.72s Sparc II Brickell bigpow 0.43s 3.0s Sparc II with asm (gcc) 0.12s 0.78s Sparc 10 with asm 0.03s 0.17s Sparc 10 with asm (Brickell) 0.084s 0.45s SGI Indigo (150MHz) 0.109s 0.75s 100 MHz Pentium (gcc under DOS) Strong Prime Generation -- ProbTestAttempts = 5 100 primes generated in each test. Times below are: (total test time)/100 = avg. time per prime generated. Using Gordon's strong prime algorithm. 256 512 1024 Machine --- --- ---- ------- 2.8s 24.0s 5.11m Sparc II .45s 2.7s 77s 100 MHz pentium RSA Times (64 bit public exponent, message encrypted is full length) --------- 512 768 1024 bits machine --- --- --------- ------- encrypt 30ms 50ms 80ms sparc II decrypt 160ms 480ms 930ms encrypt 15ms 33ms 56ms 100 MHz Pentium (Under NT) decrypt 38ms 104ms 214ms DSA Times --------- 512 768 1024 bits machine --- --- --------- ------- sign 99ms 166ms 216ms sparc II (Brickell speedup) verify 156ms 316ms 416ms sign 21ms 38ms 49ms 100 MHz Pentium (Under NT) verify 27ms 43ms 71ms

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Re: And the standard continues to lower...
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >If the misuse of "One Time Pad" wasn't enough for ya, check out this ad that >I was e-mailed. > >And the chair of a CS department, no less. > >- ------- start of forwarded message (RFC 934 encapsulation) ------- >Subject: Secure No-overhead Online Order System for Publishers >Date: Wed, 13 Dec 1995 12:24:03 -0800 (PST) > >A secure no-overhead online title-ordering system is now available. It may >be viewed in operation at the home page for Blue Water Publishing, a >publisher, software developer and distribution company, at >http://www.bluewaterp.com/~bcrissey/ >or from the online bookstore area of ISCNI, the Institute for the Study of >Contact with Non-Human Intelligence at >http://www.iscni.com > >Blue Water's innovative online ordering system is called SimplySafe. It is >a needle-in-the-haystack approach to online security. It requires no >encryption or secure servers, yet the probability that a dedicated hacker >scanning 100 internet messages a second will intercept a usable credit >card number sent via SimplySafe is less than the probability of picking >our Sun out of the Milky Way. That is less than 1 in 200 billion. Safe >enough for most folks. There are easier ways for a hacker to pick up >credit card numbers than to waste time with SimplySafe transactions. Try >it out! > >SimplySafe currently supports secure online orders from Blue Water >Publishing, Wild Flower Press, Swan-Raven & Co., and ISCNI. >Direct inquiries to >SimpleSafe(a)aol.com > >***Dr. Brian L. Crissey, Chair CS Dpt, Linfield Col., McMinnville, OR 97128 >(503)-434-2426 brianc(a)linfield.edu >Professionals built the Titanic, amateurs built the Ark... The scheme is to send 4 digits of the credit card at a time. The "explanation" follows. >In order to proceed with your SimplySafe® encryption of your credit card >number, please enter the SECOND set of (4) digits of your credit card number: > >In the 41 seconds since you sent your first packet of four digits, >approximately 2869959 packets of information have passed across the internet. >Assuming that a hacker can scan 100 packets of information per second for >credit card information, there is 1 chance in 699 that he has scanned your >first packet of digits. >He is unlikely to have found anything useful. Sigh. Wilhelm Busch -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBMM9w94iUi5SQtQ3tAQENnAf6A2SdN+AZGryzJ/eCE/fj+YO71ngQXk8A 2tAomwUqAPmrCll+ucnDc/knsct2VYo4I9b+j84Ah+Gzz6rAu3LKY+joBrgDBmBY j79BOxik6tz9GCdBYDxTQ1BJpwbDAxaQHpNJYgEFryB59yxo4gi9xZbKZnnQv571 uQfuk1rAJbI+ESJK1Wlw8YrT+q8PoW8m5Y1qjBhxczRNaYAENsrVqHsz8L8bEBkW WEfi6wIQpRkB6Fo9hH2HAVamvUwJvDtPgll6U1zBgh/zEs1Jyot3XLV5UHrdL7oM 6FRPD1LW/cWGjUv2YNyv6a3vDFz9LdcCk9eX+gekODzaE+fgeQWI3g== =2n1S -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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