December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Linux security issues
by don＠cs.byu.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Has anyone heard of any information on the Linux swap partition, for example, if it does me the favor of storing my pgp passphrase? Anyone who's interested in compiling PGP under ELF, add ASMDEF="-DSYSV" to the end of their linux make line. Don

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Re: CJR returned to sender
by tbyfield＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:30 PM 10/25/95, Jeff Weinstein wrote: > Should they also reject the same content (RSA-PERL) delivered >in any of the following ways: > > Printed on paper > Printed on paper in OCR font > Printed on paper in barcode > Printed on paper with magnetic ink (like checks) > > The lines being drawn here seem very arbitrary. FWIW, in principle I agree with Michael and Tim: 90% of the point of the lark was the absurdity of a T-shirt being a "munition." OTOH, the arbitrariness of ITAR enforcement--regardless of the form of the CJRs filed--is very troubling. When the USG so selectively enforces federal law, one has to wonder what criterion is informing the selection. And this "little" adventure could (IANAL, etc.) have a bright side: if the CJR were submitted in a verifiable way (courier, certified, etc.) and the agency in question had documentably refused to examine the materials submitted or to take the application seriously, wouldn't this weaken any subsequent effort to prosecute in another, more practical case involving the same code? If so, maybe something halfway between a T-shirt and a book--y'all can figure out what--encoded with machine-readable source for PGP might be in order. In order not for some silly thread but, rather, for a meticulously documented CJR, with an eye toward slowly upping the ante: submit the exact same code in a variety of less and less absurd formats until the USG chooses to deal with it--all the while presuming that their failure to consider a CJR in this or that format constituted a de facto approval for export. ted

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Bill Gates on anonymity
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

BEGIN QUOTE I'm not suggesting we do away with all forms of anonymity. I can imagine electronic communities where anything goes and no one can trace the real origin of information - or verify its authenticity. You would enter such a community - by deciding to read or watch the information posted there - at your own risk, and if people said offensive or untrue things to you, your only recourse would be to set the record straight in the same forum. Consenting adults should be entitled to participate in this kind of community. But kids certainly should not. END QUOTE The full text is at http://nytsyn.com/live/Gates/270_092795_082520_2997.html

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Mail to News gateways
by don＠cs.byu.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I am compiling a quick list (for my own use, mostly) of mail 2 news gateways to link to from my homepage. (As opposed to, for example, posting it to Usenet or something) A while back there was Yet-Another-Rehash[tm] of this theme and I saved the messages: Homer's lightlink.com and Alex de Joode's mail2news(a)utopia.hacktic.nl. mail2news(a)c2.org used to be alive, but either wasn't getting the groups I was posting to or it was shut down. (Sameer: email me please about this) Anyway, if anyone knows of anything else please tell me. Oh, and the URL is http://students.cs.byu.edu/~don/mail2news.html Thanks. Don Oh, by the way, anyone have any cool PGP/crypto icons to Inline into my web page? <g>

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Need Mail-to-News gates
by bluebird＠alpha.c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Could someone PLEASE netmail me some _known reliable_ gates that use the straight netmail address format (alt.whatnot(a)bosco.kollege.edu)? All of the old reliables are shut down and none of the ones listed in the last remailer helpfile I got work either: group.name(a)news.demon.co.uk group.name(a)dispatch.demon.co.uk group.name(a)bull.com group.name(a)cass.ma02.bull.com group.name(a)paris.ics.uci.edu group.name(a)crs4gw.crs4.it group.name(a)berlioz.crs4.it group.name.usenet(a)canaima.Berkeley.EDU NONE of these work, or were nonfunctional when I tested them, anyway. I use the other gates like mail2news(a)utopia.hacktic.nl with the Newsgroups: field format, but the straight address format is useful for some other purposes. Thanks.

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ANNOUNCEMENT: sepp-talk mailing list
by Erik Bataller 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The sepp-talk mailing list is a forum for comments and discussion regarding the Secure Electronic Payment Protocol (SEPP), proposed by MasterCard to support credit card payments over the Internet. The SEPP specification is available for review from the MasterCard home page: http://www.mastercard.com The CommerceNet consortium operates this mailing list as a service to the Internet community. To subscribe to the sepp-talk mailing list, send email to: majordomo(a)commerce.net ...with a message body of: subscribe sepp-talk <your full name> You should receive a confirmation message which includes instructions for unsubscribing from the list. Shortly, CommerceNet will provide a WWW archive of this list on it's server. A notice will be sent to the mailing list.

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Re: Mark Twain Bank's DigiCash offer
by Andrew Loewenstern 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hal writes: > As far as I can tell there is no charge for moving funds between > your ecash wallet and the "mint" at the bank. The charges are for > moving between the "mint" and the world access account. If you > had a shop which was able to pay much of its expenditures in ecash > it sounds like there would be no percentage fee to the bank. The gotcha being that as long as your money is in the "mint" it is not under FDIC protection... Just how safe your cash is when it is in the mint is entirely related to the security of Mark Twain's systems, which are high-profile machines that will surely be subjected to many cracking attempts. Some may prefer to keep complete control over their cash and store all of it themselves. Unlike physical cash, this stuff can be split up, encrypted, and stored in multiple places, possibly offering more security than the Mark Twain "mint." andrew

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FBI/CIA/NSA, let's merge them all into one. [???!!!]
by Brad Dolan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

AP on 10/25/95: FBI Gets CIA Help On Olympics The FBI and CIA are working together to deal with "substantial" threats to security at next summer's Atlanta Olympics, top administration officials told senators Wednesday. [...] Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska ... chided the FBI for seeking to build a $37 million code encryption center that he said would duplicate facilities operated by the National Security Agency.

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MD4-derived hash functions
by JMKELSEY＠delphi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 13:14:41 -0400 >From: hallam(a)w3.org >Subject: Re: MD5 weakness >Ron has not mentioned such an event to me and if that were the case I would >seriously doubt that he would not have been told about it. The only comment he >generally makes is that he wrote MD5 because "MD4 was making me nervous". In the MD5 RFC, I seem to recall the statement that MD4 was trading off too much strength for additional speed. However, sometime around that time, it came out that there were attacks on two-round variants of MD4, which is the stated reason for the development of RIPE-MD. Does anyone know whether Rivest was motivated to design MD5 by the partial attacks on MD4, or whether those came later? (This is totally idle curiousity.) >NIST and the NSA trusted MD4 sufficiently to base SHA upon it. SHA is preferable >in many ways to MD5, it has a different approach to extending the scheduling and >resist differential cryptanalysis. There is a problem with the compressor >function of MD5 which I dislike. All of the well-known software hash functions seem to be based on MD4 these days, but that doesn't mean much about the security of MD4--3DES with three independent keys looks pretty strong, as does 3DES with two independent keys, but that doesn't mean that single DES is a strong enough cipher for modern applications. One issue that exists with MD5, but not with SHA or the longer hash versions of Haval, is that MD5 has only a 128 bit hash function output, which corresponds loosely to having a 64-bit key. This implies that a wealthy enough opponent could determine a pair of MD5 inputs that collide, and conceivably use this in an attack. I think we should stick to 160 bit or longer hashes for future designs. (See P. van Oorschot and M. Weiner, "Parallel Collision Search with Application to Hash Functions and Discrete Logarithms," in the proceedings of the 1994 Fairfax Conference, for example). As an aside, what hash functions are there out there that look reasonably strong, have hash outputs of at least 160 bits, and aren't based on MD4? Some of the Snefru variants with many passes (eight?) come to mind, and the GOST hash function fits all the criteria, except I have a hard time convincing myself it's as strong as it claims to be. Is there a generic construction for arbitrary-length hash functions from good block or stream ciphers? > Phill --John Kelsey, jmkelsey(a)delphi.com PGP 2.6 fingerprint = 4FE2 F421 100F BB0A 03D1 FE06 A435 7E36 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMI+Mc0Hx57Ag8goBAQFJ9gP/VMvNefSm77prSY/NMbJfGO1EVmQrUAHn kEQEse+cXiaoJTe7njxUqycuDX0PN09C4XhNVOQJ6IBpCPZOKQMiXsI9FwAfjGWb mibwSfzyiXwxny1kYgfDCffS8KwdlWiVjxj1+MhvqhGQnxPsVA6UVrSCyAyHPZVJ UTXUWBJlJho= =2Pti -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Let's Not Merge Mailing Lists, OK?
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm cc:-ing this to both lists just this once, because this message is more or less administrative. I'm not trying to merge www-buyinfo with cypherpunks. tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) said: >There is great danger in constantly "casting the net wider," in trying to >reach more and more people. I understand the temptation for some on both >lists to cross-post some messages. I urge that they do this, as Bob H. has >done on occasion, by personally forwarding the message, with only _one_ of >the lists getting it. (This because the real danger is as above, where >multiple lists are in the recipient or cc: fields, and followups semi-spam >multiple lists.) I agree with Tim. I've been doing one-way forwards from cypherpunks to www-buyinfo for most of a year now. Most of the people on www-buyinfo are business people who understand that digital commerce *is* financial cryptography, but they don't have time to read all of cypherpunks to find the e$ juicy-bits. When I do this, I put a "(cpx)" in the subject line so that the sizable community of cypherpunks on www-buyinfo can filter them out and won't have to see double. I've gotten a lot of fan-mail for this, even though it's not really in keeping with the original charter for www-buyinfo, which seems to have been subsumed by other groups, like the e-payments list and others. Recently Dave Kristol has said that he's going to retool www-buyinfo, and when he does, I'm hoping to have set up my own structure of 3 hypermail archived e$ lists (a netwide e$ digest, a discussion list, and a newsletter). I'm talking to about 3 or 4 different people about it, and I should have the details worked out within a few days, with an announcement next week, if I'm lucky. Anyway, I've sent a few messages in the opposite direction on occasion (from www-buy to c'punx), but I do try to hold it down, mostly because whatever the topic is, we've usually talked about it on cypherpunks before. I should note, however, that there's a good-sized discussion, for www-buy, anyway, going on over on over there about anonymity, which has heated up over the past few days. I forwarded a message here from Nick Szabo as an example of it yesterday. The cross-posting Tim's talking about is a result of that discussion. There's a whole lot of "what do we need anonymity for, anyway?" opinion in the business community, and it should be addressed with as much reason as possible, and not by shouting them down with moral arguments to the contrary, no matter how right those moral arguments are. Fortunately, I believe there's a great business case for anonymity, and frankly, there had better be, because, in a cryptoanarchic geodesic economy like the one we're fixing to have, nothing is going to survive without a market. Anyway, like I said, I agree with Tim. If you want to post to cypherpunks, you should subscribe to cypherpunks, and suffer the firehose like the rest of us have to do. However, those of us who are on both lists, especially those of us longer-term cypherpunks like Hal, and Nick, and Adam Shostack, should be the ones to forward messages, if any, to cypherpunks, because they are the ones who know whether cypherpunks has seen this before. For instance, the posting of Nick Szabo's that I sent to cypherpunks was more of a rah-rah exercise (no pun intended) than anything else. It was so well thought out that I thought it bore passing around a bit. However, as an actual contribution to the information content on cypherpunks, what Nick said has been said on cypherpunks before, if not typically with such eloquence. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 323-7923 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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