December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Noise: anyone experience with brain waves input devices (IBVA,...)
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

We've sent the full version of the article below to Laurent. Anybody else want it, send a MIN_wav. ---------- [Excerpts] Financial Times, September 27, 1995 When it's all in the mind At the department of medical informatics at Graz University of Technology in Austria, Gert Pfurtscheller is working on a project that could result in thought-controlled devices. Stephen Roberts, a researcher at the electrical and electronics engineering department at Imperial College London, has worked with Pfurtscheller's team. He hopes to improve the signal classification accuracy by using artificial neural networks, computer-based systems designed to mimic the way the human brain works. Roberts's work is part of an EU research programme called Anndee (Artificial Neural Networks for Diagnosis and Enhancement of EEG) which involves around 30 researchers in a dozen European universities. The Consciousness Research laboratory at the University of Nevada is pursing a more controversial line of research into psychic phenomena or, as its director, Dean Radin, prefers to call it, Direct Man/Machine Interaction (DMMI). A number of Japanese companies including NEC and Matsushita, have also conducted research into DMMI. Radin believes that in 20 to 50 years' time, it will be possible to use DMMI to operate devices. The technology company The Other 90 Per Cent, based in Sausalito, California, has developed MindDrive, a computer games system whose programs are controlled by thought. MindDrive is designed to work with most IBM-compatible personal computers. A console, which analyses the user's brain waves, plugs into the back of the computer. Users wear a sensor sleeve over their index finger. At present, the system can only be used to move a cursor up and down. MindDrive will be on sale in the US early next year. The console will cost between $100 (65 pounds) to $200, and MindDrive games some of which will enable users to create music or draw on a computer screen by thought, will cost around $30 to $40 each.

1 0

VCRplus code Algorithm
by ogre＠brainlink.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've been trying (without success) to crack the encryption scheme that Gemstar uses in its' VCRplus codes. I have written a TV/cable show management system that generates plus codes for half-hour boundary shows (ie 4 to 6 digit codes). I can't seem to find anything on 7 and 8 digit codes which handle 5 minute increments for program start time and length. (And yes, I have the article "Decoding a VCR Controller Code" by Ken Shirriff, Curt Welch and Andrew Kinsman. It was published in Cryptologia. Unfortunately, they didn't get beyond 6 digits either.) BTW, this is strictly for my own use. I'm just tired of approximating shows and also a bug that I have that occasionally gives incorrect results (I think it may be a leading zero being trimmed by the math formulas). Can anyone help?

1 0

Re: MITM attacks and True Names (again...)
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 07:02 PM 10/6/95 -0600, bryce(a)colorado.edu wrote: >(As an aside I fully sympathize with those who rail against the popular >(?) impression that a True Name is somehow necessary to communication. >That is a dangerous idea, since all a True Name is really necessary for >is violence. (And, pending certain eagerly-awaited technological >developments, for sex.)) That's incorrect - it can also be necessary for _avoiding_ violence. You don't need a full True Name for that, but you do need an accurate partition of the namespace into those entities who will, won't, or might come and beat you up based on what you say. Thus, if you're talking to Subcommandante Marcos about your plans for overthrowing the governor, you don't need to know his True Name, but you do need to know if he's a cop; anybody doing a successful MITM job on your data communications probably is. Similarly, if you're in the pharmaceutical retail business and talking to your wholesaler, you may even want to avoid knowing his True Name, but you not only want to know if he's a cop, but you may want to know whether, if you show up at the appointed physical location with your physical body, you'll be met by just him (with his merchandise), or by other people as well (eavesdroppers using MITM because it's easier than cracking crypto), or by one of his or your competitors trying to rip you off. (You'd also like to know if you'll be met by him without his merchandise, but with his big ugly friends, which is why you plan to meet him in a public place...) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.7.1 Comment: PGP available outside U.S.A. at ftp.ox.ac.uk iQBVAwUBMHdVcPthU5e7emAFAQHRNwH9ErIcbgioSJOD5270SJ2hRfycNd6sMAj3 Q5jzguJVkbmsrI9I85eB/caV9UOOkSTX29v3gTAHWbeNuAL9t/Yyrw== =3qir -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

3 2

Re: cypherpunks digicash bank?
by cman＠communities.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I strongly recommend that anyone considering licensing from Chaum first read my paper on some interesting aspects of his basic blinding patent. The paper is at: http://www.communities.com/paper/agnostic.html. I will be putting up another short paper on anonymous currency management within the next few days. Also, I strongly recommend that anyone serious about this not use the word "bank", and take the time to figure out how to structure the service as an NBFI (non-banking financial institution) and not a "bank". Note that NBFIs are still regulated, and you will, at minimum, need to consult with your state banking regulators as well as the IRS (who also regulate money transmitters, i.e. issuers of traveller's checks, moneygrams, etc.) Note that the BSA (Bank _non_ Secrecy Act) does in fact apply to NBFIs and money transmitters, and you should be sure to educate yourself as to the implications of this. I will be covering some aspects of these issues at length in my trip report on the anti-money-laundering conference I recently attended, which was a real eye-opener in a number of ways.

2 1

Two bugs in CERN3.0 HTTPD
by Ray Cromwell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have not verified whether or not both of these are security holes yet, but the first one is very probably a security hole. 1) overlong domain bug in Proxy mode Symptom: send a proxy request to the server, for instance GET http://overlongdomain HTTP/1.0 This is the same bug that's in Netscape 1.1. The domain buffer is a 256 byte buffer declared on the stack. (char host[256]) 2) too many headers from CGI script Symptom: HTScript.c allocates an array of pointers to char on the stack. This array has size 100. The loop where they parse the output of a CGI script is not bounds checked. To crash the server, create a CGI script that outputs a large number of headers before the document body. (I simply made a perl script that did for($i=0; $i<1000; $i++) { print "Header$i: $i\n") Although this bug can coredump the process servicing the request, I doubt it is exploitable. All that happens is an unchecked header_line[header_index++]=malloc(some space) gets executed. In the worst case, you overwrite the stack with excessive malloc pointers. You may be able to cause a foreign server to crash by having your own fake server return the exploit, and then getting the foreign server to read the headers by issuing a proxy request to your server. Suffice it to say, the CERN code is *littered* with temporary local stack arrays, and I'm guessing that many of them have faulty bounds checking (or none at all) -Ray

1 0

Re: Graphic encryption
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:17 AM 10/6/95 -0700, privsoft(a)ix.netcom.com (Steve ) wrote: >Also if any of ya'll are famillar with graphic encryption, I am looking >for opinions as to its strengths / weaknesses. While normally I'd agree with Lucky Green and say that a good encryption algorithm's strength is independent of its input data, there are exceptions. The description of Privasoft's method on their web page sounded like* it broke up a fax image into little squares and shuffled them around based on some proprietary (hence presumably weak) algorithm, somewhat like feeding them to a shredder or puzzle-box, then put them in a file you can ship with regular fax software or decrypt yourself. If that's the case, and if the squares are sufficiently big to have enough pixels for fax software to compress decently, then it's weak no matter _how_ strong the encryption algorithm that shuffles them is, because you can piece together matching edges like a jigsaw puzzle, or like a bunch of Iranian students with American Embassy shredded documents. Using computers is a lot easier, since you've got precise images of print - most edges will match pretty well with the edges of the adjacent squares, and you can jigsaw the parts that still need work if you get too many multiple matches. A much stronger way to encrypt faxes is to do the Group 3 (or G4) compression first, then encrypt using a real algorithm, ship the (now-useless-for-fax) encrypted bits, decrypt, and read with your favorite fax-image viewer. Or, of course, take the raw file you would have done this with, which is much smaller than the fax-compressed image, encrypt it, ship, decrypt, and view, but that means the person on the far end needs the same word-processor. ------- * The software was on the web page; if I'd had spare disk space that day and some slack time I could have downloaded the demo version and tried it, but this is what the description sounded like it meant. #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

1 0

Certification Authorities in history.
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy C. May (or somebody like him, or Tim the Enchanted) wrote: >> The talk of certification authorities is OK, so long as the practice is >> _completely_ and "strongly" voluntary (*). It occurred to me that the authors of the US Constitution had direct experience with the equivalent of mandatory certification hierarchies for legally acceptable digital signatures. They called it "The Stamp Act". If you wanted to make a legal document, such as a contract or will, it needed to be on paper with a tax stamp on it; I forget if this was a watermark or a stick-on stamp, but you could only get it from the authorities. They didn't like it. There was also a few-percent sales tax on tea around that time. They didn't like that either :-) -------- </serious_mode> <Don_Hopkins_Monty_Python_Voice> <i> WHAT </i> is your name? <i> WHAT </i> is your certificate number? </Don_Hopkins_Monty_Python_Voice> <serious_mode> #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

3 3

NEW Netscape RNG hole
by an402976＠anon.penet.fi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Did anyone else notice a bug in the new, public Netscape RNG code? It appears that on Windows builds, during the RNG seeding, the function that hashes in file contents (EnumSystemFiles) doesn't close a file handle (lFileHandle). This doesn't hurt too badly on the client, but on a server, leaking these resources is deadly. I ran some experiments. It took a few thousand calls before these open file handles forced not only the file content function to fail, but also made OTHER calls quietly fail. With these calls quietly failing, the RNG is significantly weakened. In my tests on Windows NT, ALL of the following RNG functions failed: * GetComputerName * GetVolumeInformation volume Name, volume Serial Number, Maximum Filename Length Filesystem Flags Filesystem Name * GetDiskFreeSpace SectorsPerCluster BytesPerSector Free Clusters Total Clusters * subroutine for the inclusion of system files, both number of them & contents ReadSystemFiles() * subroutine used for other history file accesses SEC_FileForRNG(*filename) How did this get past Netscape testers? Does anyone know if this was fixed before Netscape shipped? Does it rate a shirt, or does this mean Jeff W. gets to shave his head? I seem to remember him promising to shave it if we could show a significant weakness in the new RNG code, and since this does (IMO)... On another note, has anyone noticed the 73 (!!!) or so handles that are leaked by simply opening and closing &Options -> &Preferences... ? Looks like somebody had a problem coding the tabbed dialog. RingZero --****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

2 1

Image Tape - view with Java enhanced Netscape mail reader
by Andy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

http://www.javasoft.com/JDK-prebeta1/applets/ScrollingImages/example1.html Title: Image Tape The source.

1 0

FOR_who
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

10-8-95. NYPaper: "Foreign Policy 3.1. Microsoft as World Power." [Foreign affairs column] Does Microsoft have a foreign policy? Mr. Ballmer says Microsoft doesn't have a foreign policy per se. But it does have a global business agenda. Since Microsoft today has twice the market value of General Motors, it's worth looking at that agenda because it is bound to influence U.S. foreign policy. Microsoft doesn't need Washington to open doors for it because foreign governments are begging Microsoft to come in and translate Windows 95 into their languages, so they can get on the information highway. Describing his contacts with foreign leaders, Mr. Ballmer put it this way: "People say, 'You have this technology. We hear it's changing the world. Tell us how it can help us.' " 10-7-95. The Econofog: "The myth of the powerless state." [lead for a superb 40- page survey of the world economy] The increasing "globalisation" of the world economy is a fact, and one that nobody can ignore. To many, however, one aspect of this change is especially important: its effect on "economic sovereignty". They claim that global integration is emasculating the modern state. If the number of believers is any guide, these views are appealing. Yet the new orthodoxy is wrong. The world has changed, the global economy has indeed arrived: nonetheless, the emasculated state is a myth. Micro and Macro: FOR_who (19 kb)

1 0