December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

`Random' seed.
by Richard Martin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Vaporware which I heard around CFP '95, and have been sort of wondering about ever since... Some one told me that some one else [possibly Matt Blaze] had been looking at how much randomness could be got by forking two child processes which would just run as asynchronous clocks: whenever the parent program needs a little `random' bit, it queries both and gives (clock(A) + clock(B) % 2) or something. Questions about this [to the list]: * who has done any [the?] work on this? * was it found to be useful/good or not? * what would be the drawbacks to adding this [Yet Another Source Of Entropy] to the Netscape scheme? frodo =) -- Richard Martin Alias|Wavefront - Toronto Office [Co-op Software Developer, Games Team] rmartin@aw.sgi.com/g4frodo@cdf.toronto.edu http://www.io.org/~samwise Trinity College UofT ChemPhysCompSci 9T7+PEY=9T8 Shad Valley Waterloo 1992

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Re: Defense against a class of programming bugs
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Unfortunately, strdup is not posix compliant. If you want to use >it and maintain portability, you'll have to write your own. Er, you're kidding, right? drand48 isn't in Posix either, for example. Someone who runs on Motif and Mac has strdup as the least of their worries. But just in case it's stopping anyone: char *strdup(const char *x) { char *p; return (p = malloc(strlen(x) + 1)) ? strcpy(p, x) : 0; } (Deliberately written too-cleverly. Lame compilers will need to cast to 0)

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real randomness for netscape - user clicking mouse
by Vincent Cate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jeff Weinstein <jsw(a)neon.netscape.com> >If anyone has specific suggestions I would love to hear them so that we >can do a better job. Why not just do something similar to what PGP does? For netscape you could have a user make circling motions with the mouse and clicking at random times. For each click of the mouse you could get a few bits of randomness from the time, the X position, and the Y position. You could get random bits really fast this way. You only need to do this the first time a user uses encryption, or you might just go ahead and force all users to do this as part of starting up netscape the first time. On subsequent times you use your encryption algorithm to make your next seed. To be safe you could make up two seeds, encrypt each of them to mix them up a bit, and then XOR the results together. A random bit XORed with a non-random bit still produces a random bit. Actually there is probably a better way to just encrypt each input whole (padding to block size) and XORing as you go along - that way you would get whatever randomness was there to be had. Anyway, do something so you have as many or more bits of randomness in your seed as there are bits in your key or it will still be a weak link in your security chain. You could even get the randomness during regular mouse use. Unless the first thing a user did was try to use encryption I am sure you would have enough by the time he did use encryption (keep track). You must get the random bits from something that nobody else could watch. Network packets, process IDs, date, time, etc are not secure. On the other hand, an attacker would have to have broken the machine to get the mouse info used above, in which case netscape would have no security no matter what. -- Vince PS I want a free netscape server site license if you use this idea! :-)

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John Deutsch
by Rev. Ben 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Is coming to Yale tomorrow and I'm going to get the opportunity to have tea with him(and about 10 other folks). Is there anyone here that has anything that they want me to ask the man? Ben. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Auto-signed with Bryce's Auto-PGP v1.0beta3 iQB1AwUBMGYm+r5ALmeTVXAJAQFeIQL9FmuCB93W4XANBdyQBOg224WW/sVetRI8 AZhM3HHjvNJ41YT7LCnRjLeRU1nUeBX1cI5MWBLNmKQXqR8+XmqboVU/k3jOxndy bNhH4rqb/zgH1cD65lo7IbTsVOJoHeDe =18Lm -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: John Deutsch
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Is there anyone here that has anything that they want me to ask the man? Why did he argue against MIT getting rid of Lincoln Labs?

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Net KiddiePorn Hype on TV
by futplex＠pseudonym.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Yet Another Alarmist TV Show About Child Molesters on the Net: During their coverage of an NFL game on Sunday, the Fox announcers plugged an upcoming episode (sometime this week) of _New York Undercover_. They used a depressing line like "Think the Net is a safe place to play ? Think again !" Apparently the show will portray a child molester luring kids via the Net, etc., etc. "In a story pulled straight from today's headlines !" Anyway, the mainstream media trashing of the Net continues. Check your local listings. -Futplex <futplex(a)pseudonym.com>

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Re: macworld crypto articles
by lethin＠ai.mit.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In article <4444rl$nrh(a)life.ai.mit.edu> Chen writes: > It's truly a deplorable state of affairs. For the next version, include PGP free with every version of Quicken, and have Quicken just "call" PGP. Of course, users can encrypt their files now with PGP. Is there an Intuit bboard where someone could post instructions? -- --- Concurrent VLSI Arch. Group 545 Technology Sq., Rm. 610 MIT AI Lab Cambridge, MA 02139 (617)-253-0972

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Colin Powell coming to Dallas
by Ed Carp [khijol SysAdmin] 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Colin Powell will be in Dallas at the Taylor's Bookstore out on Belt Line Rd. and Prestonwood (right next to Prestonwood Mall). October 3 at 6 PM. I plan to be there - anyone else from the DFW area going? Anyone have any questions they want asked (other than the usual "where do you stand on the administration's position regarding the use and exportation of so-called 'strong crypto' and the Clipper/Capstone fiasco"? - -- Ed Carp, N7EKG Ed.Carp(a)linux.org, ecarp(a)netcom.com 214/993-3935 voicemail/pager Finger ecarp(a)netcom.com for PGP 2.5 public key an88744(a)anon.penet.fi Q. What's the trouble with writing an MS-DOS program to emulate Clinton? A. Figuring out what to do with the other 639K of memory. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMGY6vSS9AwzY9LDxAQGLeQP/R9wlGd5wRImcP/37nX9oxAA8+ob2+QHX uCSgdVQOBEYWCEcUXXioa4YgOJx/aptrQBUI23IudEJMMbXTVnQeZx8DPFbzLERI cva9aHTVcQwp/tqOa8NSjvm5UtOC9YtSlyyfFDaH4Amai2dYUPFFZXhhLp6O6jLt PZ56cNfMRYk= =iIKo -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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17 Dec '03

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What version of PGP?
by bret＠bjohns.win.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I got PGP 262 off MIT. The file was PGP262si.tar Is this the international version with week crypto? os is it the US version? Thanks....

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