December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: consumer products that make nice sources
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:46 PM 11/3/95, Brad Dolan wrote: >The tag on my Montana Sunshine Radon Mine radon pillow is a little blurred. >I think the following is the right phone number. > >Sunshine Mine is an amusing concept. People pay money to go breathe radon >there, while others are spending much money avoiding radon. > >Anyway, the pillows make nice sources and good conversation pieces. I'd say they make poor sources. Far too large. A smaller source has better access to the detector without adding much to the overall background the user is exposed to. (I'm not saying low-level uranium or thorium sources are much of a hazard, but the fluence presented at the detector is very low for such an extended source.) It depends on the detector type (alpha, beta, gamma, neutrino?), but high count rates can be obtained in a variety of ways. (Don't get too high a count rate, or the dead time characteristics of the pulse-height analyzers will introduce spurious correlations that decrease entropy--I mention this to show that even radiation detector sources of entropy have non-random issues to take into account.) --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Computers at wholesale, Pentiums & AMD(k-5,k-6)
by ceo35＠concentric.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re: National Security Committee amendments to SAFE
by Amanda Walker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I take it this last sentence is intended to kill Bernstein, Karn and Junger > and any other cases we might try to bring. Correct? Looks like a separation of powers problem at first glance; how many situations are there where the legislative branch and the executive branch can collude to take the judicial branch out of the loop entirely? Amanda Walker Ascend Communications, Inc. amanda_walker(a)ascend.com

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Re: Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography, 2nd Edition
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:48 PM 11/3/95, Ray Arachelian wrote: >Now does anyone want my old 1st edition? :-) I am interested. I will trade five (5) slightly used prime numbers for it. (Has anybody ever thought about using prime numbers as a medium of barter in a digital economy? Think of the labor that would be saved if we all didn't have to compute our own!! :-}) --Klaus! von Used Primes Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: video as a source of public randomness
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:17 PM 11/3/95, Tim Philp wrote: > Would not generating random numbers using video sources be >suseptable to the same 'external' influences as generating random numbers >from radio static? External RF fields could skew the 'randomness' of the >data. Do a thought experiment, if not an actual experiment. Tune your t.v. to an unused channel. Use no antenna, or perhaps just small rabbit ears. Notice the swirl of snow (as in "Snow Crash"). Imagine sampling bits from this snowstorm, perhaps 10 per frame. Apply the usual tricks to remove biases in one direction or another (*) and apply hashes as desired to distill bits of entropy. (* Such as von Neumann's scheme to turn even biased coins into "fair" sources: toss a coin twice and let H T be a 1 and T H be a 0.) To complete the thought experiment: Imagine the difficulty of an attacker being able to module this snowstorm in any predictable way. Imagine the difficulty when the antenna input has been disconnected, or the rabbit ears moved by air currents in the room, or.... "All crypto is economics." The cost of an attack based on modulating this source of randomness would be in the tens of billions of dollars, or more, and likely impossible at any cost at this time. (Depending on the sampling details, the antenna input, etc. I'm not saying a black bag job could not be done to alter the inputs to the t.v., just that external RF manipulation is unlikely in the extreme to be economically feasible.) > As another thought, has anyone done any work on RNGs involving >chaotic processes such as fluid dynamics and turbulent flow? I suspect >that pressure, or other parameter variences, in turbulent flow could yield >good random numbers. As a bonus, these parameters are easily measurable >without special, exotic, equipment and should be inexpensive Ignoring the work allegedly done on "chaotic encryption," the RF method described above essentially is relying on turbulence: the atmospheric variations ("spherics," "whistlers," are some of the buzz words) affect the snowstorm. Also, the rabbit ear antennas move in response to room air currents. Again, all unpredictable. (And as I noted above, sampling strategy is important...) I don't plan to belabor this point. Radioactive decay sources are certainly fine, though not likely to be purchased by most people. (I have nothing against radioactive decay, as some of you may know--it made my career.) --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re[2]: FBI seeks huge wiretapping system
by sharborth＠hai-net.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Subject: Re: FBI seeks huge wiretapping system Author: Jay Campbell <edge(a)got.net> at internet Date: 03-11-95 06:08 >I was being facetious. The point is that the government has no >inherent right to tap our phones -- indeed, it didn't do so for nearly >the first 200 years of our existance, and we did just fine -- better, >in fact. It is a well-known fact that it was common practice for NSA operatives to ^^^ masquerade as Injuns in the 1800's and waylay Pony Express riders in order ^^^^^^ I think you'll find the NSA was not in existence in the 1800's. to intercept communications between targeted parties. This practice lost popularity towards the end of the century with the advent of boxed cereal, and with it the Lone Ranger Decoder Ring, since the operatives were too underfunded to afford anything more than oatmeal. [ducks] -- Jay Campbell edge(a)got.net - Operations Manager -=-=-=-=-=-=- Sense Networking, Santa Cruz Node Jay(a)Campbell.net got.net? PGP MIT KeyID 0xACAE1A89 "On the Information Superhighway, I'm the guy behind you in this morning's traffic jam leaning on his horn."

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Re: Telephone bugging devices
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:49 PM 9/16/97 -0400, ERIC HUGHES wrote: > >I was wondering if you can give me infomation on how and where i can get >a non visible telephone bugging device. Cost as well. > >Or a room bugging device non visible as long as it can only be detected >by detecters > > Radio Shack. It's called a FM Wireless Microphone. You can probably get one for less than 20 bucks. You can then take the shell off of this, probably a little black rectangle or a childs toy microphone, and you will have a nie little circuit board. Battery life is a problem, but you can work out a solution to that depending on where you put it. Hide it either on the underside of surfaces below eye level or on the top surfaces of objects a foot or so above head level. They sell some more dedicated hardware out of the back of magazines like popular science and popular mechanics. Look for advertisements that claim that thier product can BROADCAST UP TO A HALF MILE and show a picture of something next to a quarter.

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Re: Sources of randomness
by Peter Monta 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm puzzled by the implication that thermal noise or avalanche or Zener noise is somehow inferior to noise from radioactive sources. It's not. Take as an example Johnson noise, the voltage noise from a resistance. It's the result of the interaction of vast numbers of electrons. It is unpredictable in the same way that individual radioactive decay events are unpredictable, and they are both results of friendly quantum mechanics. Small biases/interferences that come from nonideally sampling such voltages do not matter, since the entropy is still 1-epsilon bits per sample (more for nonbinary samples). There is no "chink in the armor" available for cryptanalysis---the user need only acquire N*(1+epsilon) random bits rather than N bits. The video-snow-noise described by Tim May is mostly Johnson noise in the low-noise-amplifier electonics, not atmospheric or ionospheric noise, at least above 50 MHz or so. Cheers, Peter Monta pmonta(a)qualcomm.com Qualcomm, Inc./Globalstar

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Physician, Heal Thyself
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:38 PM 11/3/95, Perry E. Metzger wrote: >Tim May will doubtless disagree, but he has nothing else to do in life ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >than read the net so his incentives to see traffic minimized aren't >the same as other people's. Perry, would you please knock off the drone of snide remarks about me? I mostly don't respond to your posts. You often make very good points, but at other times you demonstrate a shrillness and apparent lack of socialization that I find appalling. Your snide remarks are, to use your own rhetoric, "wasteful of bandwidth." They are also tacky, childish, and pointless. You are often quick to say "What has this got to do with Cypherpunks?," but you yourself are perfectly willing to rant on about Nietzsche, the East Germans, and Louis Freeh. Physician, heal thyself. --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Biological Warfare
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I came up with an idea for fighting GAK. Biological warefare. This is a tried and true formula for war. The Europeans used it to great effect against the Native Americans in the form of Rabies and Smallpoxs. The Europeans even used a form of it even earlier, throwing the rotting corpses of dead horses into beseiged cities to spread desease. The more modern chemical warefare has been used in both world wars and possibly by Saddam Hussain during the Gulf War. What I propose is a virus. For GAK to work, there have to be lines of code in the encryption program to give the government access. It has been commented here that anyone who can get the source code can comment those lines out. Let's be frank, very few will have that option. However, a software patch could be made that commented out the offending code of any given product. Perhaps also altering some visible part of the program so that you know that your conversations are now secure. Perhaps the addition of a small ascii character to the corner of the screen. The program that delivers the patch could be made in the form of a rather innocuous computer virus. Or, if you prefer, a worm. This way, the program can travel the same highways of silicon that the GAKked messages travel to deGAK the software that it targets whenever it encounters it. Give the software a relatively short lifespan, on the order of a year or so, before all copies check thier date and decide to self destruct. No need for the virus if the software has been upgraded. Then you'd need a new version of the virus. The project would be a large one as persons would have to get ahold of the source. Probably through decompiling it and figuring out what the now undocumented source does at each step. The actual virus would be easy to code by comparison. This should not preclude fighting the onset of GAK, rather the functional incorporation of GAK. What is the government going to do with 50,000 americans who have been using unGAKked software because they didn't know that it had been infected? Keep the visual clue as small as possible, maybe an extra period in a line of periods. That way an argument can be made for ignorance of the crime. That is all.

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