December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: The Fortezza random number generator is not trustworthy
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A nice addition to any Netscape RNG hacks is the comment that, while Netscape may have a bug in their RNG, it's detectable and fixable; the NSA may have a BUG in theirs, and only they'll know for sure... >> Yes Fortezza cards can be instructed to produce a random number through one >> of its library calls (someday they'll have a real API). One of the >> diagnostic tools I had tested this function. What algorithm do they use? >> Haven't a clue. Sources say that the RNG implementation may vary from vendor >> to vendor (i.e., GTC, Spyrus, Mykotronix, etc.). John Gilmore's comments on CAPSTONE, subliminal channels, and FOIA blackouts certainly add depth to this suspiciousness. I'd initially not been too worried about the Fortezza (besides the obvious Master Key problems) because the NSA is letting the military use them for Defense Messaging Service. However, if the RNG might be different for different vendors, the non-military versions may be using a weak RNG, which the NSA has a backdoor to. Alternatively, the RNGs may all be the same, but there may be an option that the military can use to get full-strength random numbers while the public, not knowing this, gets weakened ones (e.g. the first n bits of the RNG may be random, and the next N-n bits may be a strong hash, while there are N-n real random bits in another register if you ask for them nicely.) On a technical note, I would have thought that Fortezza and/or CAPSTONE used some sort of hardware RNG, i.e. noisy Zener diodes or whatever. I've seen it mentioned on this list that some other NSA secure phones, such as STU-III, do that. #--- # 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: Nightmare Scenario: Public Key Distribution Controlled
by Antonomasia 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim wrote: > "Distribute a key, go to prison." > How does the New World Order limit the use of strong crypto without "key > recovery" when so many copies of older, pre-ban crypto are already out > there? > Simple, by declaring that public keys themselves are crypto material, as > the Brits did in their Trusted Third Parties draft proposal, and hence > declaring that distribution of keys after the effective date of the > legislation constitutes a violation. Give someone your key, either by > placing it on keyservers or even by mailing it to them, and one has just > "distributed" crypto. > This will make the public key infrastructure essentially useless, as the > public key servers go down, as corporations yank any directories they may > have, and (possibly) as individuals stop putting PGP or S/MIME fingerprints > or pointers in their messages. > How possible is this? Recall that the British proposal formally classified > key material, the keys themselves, as cryptographic products. The language > of the current unSAFE and Procto-CODE draconian bills, still changing of > course as committees rewrite them to be more Big Brotherish, is vague on > what constitutes crypto. I agree with the gist of this nightmare view, but don't think it describes the British TTP proposal very well. 140 These proposals - aimed at facilitating the provision of secure 141 electronic commerce - are being brought forward against a background ha ha ha 1122 Encryption services_ is meant to encompass any service, whether 1123 provided free or not, which involves any or all of the following 1124 cryptographic functionality - key management, key recovery, key 1125 certification, key storage, message integrity (through the use of 1126 digital signatures) key generation, time stamping, or key 1127 revocation services (whether for integrity or confidentiality), 1128 which are offered in a manner which allows a client to determine a 1129 choice of cryptographic key or allows the client a choice of 1130 recipient/s. My giving you my key does not provide you with 'choice of cryptographic key or ... recipient/s' as I read it. But if I signed your key and distributed it, that would probably be a certification service (to you) in which you had chosen the key to be signed. Also if I gave you 2 keys of mine I think that would be banned, because you'd have a choice. This certainly does discourage effective use, but I don't think the current wording is quite so dire as to outlaw distribution of a single key. I'd also say that when an ISP carries my emailed key to someone they are providing a transport service, and not a cryptographic one. The 'or allows the client a choice of recipient/s' looks to me like a direct reference to remailers. As to signing non-key material; a service would be if someone I know brought something (a photo for me to certify true likeness, a will for me to witness their signature ...) and I signed it for him to indicate something to others. Signing my outgoing letters is not normally considered a service. My checking the signatures on my incoming mail is probably not a service, even if it forms part of the decision on whether to reply. As to self-signing a key; it may be permitted following the model of the above paragraph, or not. I believe the proposal is deliberately vague for FUD - and is bad law, regardless of the bad content. I mentioned the difficulty of deciding exactly what would be banned by this proposed law in my article: "Ruritania Discovers Motor Transport". Check the ar...BANG -- ############################################################## # Antonomasia ant(a)notatla.demon.co.uk # # See http://www.notatla.demon.co.uk/ # ##############################################################

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Entropy VI: "Shannon's Choice" (with apologies to Wm. Styron)
by adwestro＠ouray.cudenver.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm always glad to see stuff here about entropy: it's a topic that comes up in PGP 101 when locals ask, "How long should my passphrase be?" and, as we've seen recently, failure to generate adequate entropy for pseudo-random numbers is often the Achilles' Heel of otherwise solid cryptosystems. I found some info about Shannon's choice of the word "entropy" in an unexpected source lately. I had some free time this week due to the surprise snowstorm here, and used it to type in a few paragraphs. This is intended less for immediate discussion than for the list's archives, so that I can point folks to it in the future. And I'm not going to cite the source, to avoid copyright infringement nastygrams...if you know who the author is, keep it to yourself: you'll only suffer public ridicule and loss of "reputation capital" for Not Watching Enough TV!!! :-) N.B. -- some of this impresses me as pompous bullshit, and I'm not in agreement with it. But the story about von Neumann made it a worthwhile read, as least to me. ================================================================== I want now to turn to another juncture in the cascading bifurcations that mark interpretations of Maxwell's Demon. The juncture occurs when Leon Brillouin and Claude Shannon diverge in their opinions about what the relationship between information and entropy should be. In Brillouin's analysis of Maxwell's Demon, the Demon's information allowed him to sort molecules, thus decreasing the system's entropy; but this information had to be paid for by an even greater increase in entropy elsewhere in the system. For Brillouin, then, information and entropy are opposites and should have opposite signs. He emphasized the inverse connection between information and entropy by coining "negentropy" (from negative entropy) as a synonym for information. To Shannon, an engineer at Bell Laboratories who published a two-part paper that was to form the basis of modern information theory (1948), information and entropy were not opposites. They were identical. When Shannon devised a probability function that he identified with information, he chose to call the quantity calculated by the function the "entropy" of the message. Why he made this choice is unclear. Rumor has it that von Neumann told Shannon to use the word because "no one knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage." One could argue that von Neumann's comment was only one element and that the choice of "entropy" was overdetermined, with multiple factors leading to its conflation with "information." On a conceptual level, an important consideration was the similarity between Shannon's equation for infor- mation and Boltzmann's equation for entropy. Because the two equations had similar forms, it was tempting to regard the entities they defined as the same. On the level of language, entropy was compelling because it was a term of recognized legitimacy to the concept of information. On a cultural level, Shannon's choice anticipated the contemporary insight that proliferating information is associated with the production of entropy. [...] Whatever the reasons for Shannon's choice, it is regarded by many commentators within our scientific tradition as a scandal, for it led to the (metaphoric) knotting together of concepts that are partly similar and partly dissimilar. Typical is K. G. and J. S. Denbigh's reaction in their careful study of the way the quantity defined by Shannon's equation differs from thermodynamic entropy. Recounting the story about von Neumann's advice, they write that thus, "confusion entered in and von Neumann had done science a disservice!" Jeffrey S. Wicken is even more explicit, calling Shannon's choice "loose language" that served "the dark god of obfuscation." "As a result of its independent lines of development in thermodynamics and information theory, there are in science today two 'entropies,'" Wicken writes. "This is one too many. It is not science's habit to affix the same name to different concepts. Shared names suggest shared meanings, and the connotative field of the old tends inevitably to intrude on the denotative terrain of the new." Clearly Wicken's concern is to restore scientific univocality by closing off the ability of the information-entropy connection to act as a metaphor rather than a congruence. Yet at the same time he admits that shared language creates an inevitable "intrusion" into the "denotative terrain" of one term by the "connotative field" of another. The problem is more scandalous than he recognizes, for whenever a heuristic is proposed, it necessarily uses "shared names" that cause scientific denotation to be interpenetrated by cultural connotations. For what else is language but "shared names"? As Wittgenstein has observed, there are no private languages. Moreover, the distinction between denotative and connotative language is itself part of the distinction between language-as-vehicle and language-as-concept which metaphors, and particularly self-reflexive metaphors, bring into question. To turn Wicken's argument on its head, we might say he recognizes that metaphors in general, and the information-entropy connection in particular, directly threaten science's ability to separate ideas from the language it uses to express them. In his anxiety to suppress the metaphoric potential of Shannon's choice, Wicken misses the richly complex and suggestive connections that were instrumental in enabling a new view of chaos to emerge. By the simple device of using "information" and "entropy" as if they were interchan- geable terms, Shannon's choice gave rise to decades of interpretative commentary that sought to explain why information should be identified with disorder rather than order. For the alliance between entropy and information to be effective, information first had to be divorced from meaning (a premise made explicit in Shannon's 1948 papers) and had to be associated instead with novelty. Recall the random number generator, mentioned earlier, that produces a tape we can read. No matter how long we watch the tape, numbers keep appearing in unpredictable sequence. >From one point of view this situation represents chaos; from another, maximum information. Once randomness was understood as maximum information, it was possible to envision chaos (as Robert Shaw does) as the source of all that is new in the world. Wicken is correct in noting that denotative and connotative fields overlap; in the case of information, the connotation that "intruded" upon the denotative field of chaos was complexity. Whereas chaos had traditionally meant simply disorder, complexity implied a mingling of symmetry with asymmetry, predictable periodicity with unpredictable variation. As we have seen, chaotic or complex systems are disordered in the sense that they are unpredictable, but they are ordered in the sense that they possess recursive symmetries that almost, but not quite, replicate themselves over time. The metaphoric joining of entropy and information was instrumental in bringing about these developments, for it allowed complexity to be seen as rich in information rather than deficient in order. Sources cited: K. G. Denbigh and J. S. Denbigh, _Entropy in Relation to Incomplete Knowledge_ (Cambridge University Press, 1985) Jeffrey S. Wicken, "Entropy and Information: Suggestions for a Common Language." Philosophy of Science 54:176-193 (1987) ================================================================== 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

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Kerberos
by beckman＠cs.hope.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

We are studying kerberos, the security system implemented by MIT's Athena network. Has anyone started, considered, imagined or completed any similar security systems, preferably using public key cryptography (as opposed to a single 56-bit DES key)? Please mail any responses to beckman(a)cs.hope.edu. -- Peter Beckman Hope College beckman(a)cs.hope.edu http://www.cs.hope.edu/~beckman/

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Piggybacking
by lethin＠ai.mit.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In article <444bp8$sd4(a)life.ai.mit.edu> Adam writes: > Naturally, this works with programs other than Quicken. By leveraging on the popularity of Quicken and people's insecurities about their financial data cypherpunks might be able to spread PGP and SecureDrive technology more rapidly. If I were a marketing manager at a startup selling SecureDrive, for example, I'd suggest trying to exploit the above by selling my product as "QuickxxSecure" which would install after Quicken, make the secure drive, move quicken there, etc. It would then sell in a box with a graphical design (e.g. white stripe on red box, to blend nicely with Intuit's red on white) that Egghead would want to put it on the shelf right next to Quicken. Cypherpunks with a crypto-anarchic agenda might "package" shareware in a way that would exploit the same principles. Surely, a bigger market than people using EMACS RMAIL. --- Concurrent VLSI Arch. Group 545 Technology Sq., Rm. 610 MIT AI Lab Cambridge, MA 02139 (617)-253-0972

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Re: "random" number seeds vs. Netscape
by patrick＠Verity.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > Nor is there anything inherently wrong with having sex without the use > of a condom. YES! Safe exec! Use software protection;) (Can you tell that when I read this I was LOL!?) > > However, it is very difficult -- VERY DIFFICULT -- to prove to > yourself that there is never an instance in which your system() or > popen() can be abused. Well...you can tell by looking, certainly that's not true when you need a condem;) > In any case, I find its often more prudent just > to strip all these things out of my code. If you don't use them, you > don't have to prove they are done properly. Paranoia is your > friend. No one can ever break you for doing something you don't do. That's true, I have to admit that I usually don't use them either. Once you know how they're coded up, and how little code is actually used, it seems silly anyway to call a popen or system and suffer the overhead of the function calls and the loss of control. > > > The problem arises when you use information given to you from > > outside as the argument to popen or system without checking it. > > Yup, but often, you'd be suprised what turns out to be outside data. You're singing to the choir. Sigh, Eric Allman's been several times surprised about what turned out to be outside data. > > In any case, you obviously also understand why this is bad, but I hope > that people out there understan -- always make sure that you are > double extra careful about the use of such calls. Thanks:) 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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change of address notice for Marc Donner
by donner＠ny.ubs.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dear colleague, friend, or correspondent, My new business address is: Marc Donner Union Bank of Switzerland 299 Park Avenue New York, NY 10171 212-821-6229 You can send me email at: donner(a)ubss.com The destination list for this mail is gleaned from an automated analysis of many megabytes of mail that I have accumulated over the last three years. In some cases you are receiving this not because we are acquaintances or correspondents but because you were a recipient of some piece of mail that I also received and kept. If so, I apologize for the intrusion. I have pruned the list extensively, but some email IDs are sufficiently opaque that I cannot reliably identify the person at the other end. Marc

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Re: Real issue of crypto controls: security or taxation loss?
by jf_avon＠citenet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 13 Sep 97 at 23:44, iang(a)systemics.com wrote: > The battle should remain on the field of personal rights, because the > battle over economics cannot be won, right at this current juncture in > time. I.e., Now. Probably a sensible opinion. But what would be the effect of pulling in the other direction? Espcially if the population would be more personnally concerned with it? The way it is now, National Security is a scarecrow but the real thing is the govt corn to be protected... > As TCM will no doubt never tire of saying, the deployment of appropriate > infrastructure is something that takes time. Until the deployment of > all that juicy stuff is in place, nobody can provide a single transaction > of your three-orders-of-magnitude-reality. Only, to deploy any e-$ scheme would need an environment where govt would _tolerate_ crypto. But the way it is going, everything is set in place to trample on anybody's face that will use crypto with the "not-the-flavour-of-the-month-at-White-House" sauce such as e-$ programmers, etc. If the debate could be shifted-off, the legitimacy of the govt claimed goals could get strongly challenged. This is possible only if there is a cause that concerns citizens directly. Now, try telling me that taxation is the most popular of govt's measures... The fact that a majority voted for Politician A does not mean that a majority loves him... > Of course this raises the interesting question of why the establishment > does not shift the battle themselves ... Precisely. IMO, there is more hidden under there than meets the eye. What if we try prying at this tiny, well concealed crack in the big wall? Ciao jfa -- Jean-Francois Avon, Pierrefonds(Montreal) QC Canada DePompadour, Societe d'Importation Ltee Finest of Limoges porcelain and crystal JFA Technologies, R&D consultants physicists and engineers, LabView programing. PGP encryption keys at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon http://bs.mit.edu:8001/pks-toplev.html ID# C58ADD0D : 529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891 ID# 5B51964D : 152ACCBCD4A481B0 254011193237822C

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Lynx (or approx for Windows)?
by James Caldwell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 24 Sep 95 at 18:10, SysAdmin wrote: > Screw 'em. If they want to be the defacto standard for *some* OS's > but not all, someone else will come along and fill in the gap. > Besides, they already made the point that they don't want to make > money so why change the status quo. All the more reason to show the > weaknesses of the product before others get sucked in. I'll stick to > TkWWW and Lynx thank you. Sounds odd, but would there be something like Lynx available for Windows, preferably with forms features fixed. I don't browse for the pretty pictures and turning the graphics off in Nutscrape doesn't speed it up much.

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Re: macworld crypto articles
by dmandl＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:49 PM 9/23/95, steven ryan wrote: >They searched for an applications programmer *UN*skilled at cryptography to >try and crack the password protection of the 8 best selling Mac programs. >Quicken 5.0 was cracked in 5 minutes. Adobe Acrobat in 2 hours. Yup, pretty amazing. I only skimmed the article, but I believe that out of all the programs he tried, there was only one whose crypto he couldn't crack. I found it all a little hard to believe. I mean, even if they used the most obsolete algorithm, wouldn't you have to know _something_ about cryptanalysis to crack it? Are these vendors just putting a "this file is locked with this such and such a password" string at the front of the file, or what? Interesting historical note: In my old APL days (early 80's), IBM used to lock their VSAPL workspaces with just such a scheme--a "locked bit" at some fixed position in the file. But there were enough other reasons not to use that horrible product... --Dave. -- Dave Mandl dmandl(a)panix.com http://wfmu.org/~davem

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