December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Brute Force and Smart Force
by Adam Shostack 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I think its worth pointing out that instead of taking (arguably) $10,000 worth of computer time to brute force SSL, Goldberg-Wagner's attack exploits a weakness in the system to spend maybe a few dollars to crack it. Clever attacks on cryptosystems like this are the bread and butter of 'practical' cryptanalysis. It might take until slightly after the heat death of the universe to break IDEA or your 2048 bit RSA key, but there exist other attacks, and they are the ones which will be exploited. (Also, as Robert Morris pointed otut, never underestimate the time, money or effort your opponent will put into cryptanalysis. Cypherpunks, collectively, have put a great deal of time, effort, and CPU into proving SSL bogus, and I don't think anyone here made any money doing it.) Perhaps we should refocus our efforts on attacking PGP, to see if there are holes there? (I'm not suggesting there are, but it would be nice to see some code written to extend Crack to phrases, do some more code review, etc.) Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume

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VeriSign Introduces the First Digital ID Issuing Service
by Chris Claborne 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I thought the folloing would in interesting. It looks similar to what SLED whanted to do. Would be interested to see what their method of verification is. - ------------- [Begin forwarded message ] VeriSign Introduces the First Online Digital ID Issuing Service; Users Get Unique Digital IDs to meet the Security Needs of Commerce and Communications REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 18, 1995--VeriSign today announced the World Wide Web's first Online Digital ID Issuing Service. Being released in conjunction with Netscape Navigator 2.0, this service will allow users to directly enroll and receive their own unique Digital IDs. VeriSign defined today the class structure of its Digital ID brand of public identification certificates, establishing four classes of identification to meet the varying security needs within different environments. The service will begin Beta testing in late October. A company or a consumer will be able to get a unique Digital ID online through VeriSign's Online Digital ID Issuing Service located on the World Wide Web. A user can register for a non-commercial Class One Digital ID at no cost, or a commercial version for $6, through an online autoresponder. This unique Class One Digital ID is designed for casual World Wide Web browsing and secure e-mail and is used by Netscape Navigator 2.0 to allow users to communicate securely and identify themselves to other users, as well as merchants on the Internet. "The Online digital ID Issuing Service was created to provide a one-step process for obtaining a Digital ID for our corporate and individual users," said Stratton Sclavos, President and CEO of VeriSign, Inc. "We are offering non-commercial users Class One Digital IDs at no cost to introduce the concepts of authentication and privacy to the market. We will also offer higher classes online using higher assurance policies. We believe Digital IDs will help everyone in the online community safely conduct their business or personal transactions over public and private networks." Public identification certificates Working closely with application developers, service providers and affiliates, VeriSign issues and manages multiple classes of Digital IDs supporting a wide range of public identification certificate-enabled products like Netscape Navigator 2.0. VeriSign's public identification certificates can be issued for individuals as well as entities such as merchant servers. These public identification certificates, categorized into four classes with escalating levels of identity assurance, can be obtained from VeriSign directly or through the Online Digital ID Issuing Service. Class One Digital IDs: These IDs insure the uniqueness of a name or e-mail address. Class One Digital IDs are primarily used for casual World Wide Web browsing and secure e-mail. VeriSign offers non-commercial Class One Digital IDs at no cost or VeriSign supported commercial versions for $6. Class Two Digital IDs: These IDs provide a higher level of assurance regarding a person's identity by involving third-party proof of name, address and other personal information provided in the registration process. Class Two Digital IDs are primarily used for inter-company e-mail, online purchasing from electronic malls and online subscriptions. Class Three Digital IDs: These IDs further raise the level of identity assurance by involving personal presence or registered credentials. Class Three Digital IDs are used primarily for transactions demanding a higher level of assurance of the identity of an individual. Typical applications include electronic banking, large-sum purchases from electronic malls and membership-based online services. VeriSign additionally offers Class Three Digital IDs for electronic commerce servers such as Netscape's Commerce Server and Open Market's Secure WebServer. Class Four Digital IDs: These IDs are for individuals and companies requiring a maximum level of identity assurance. To obtain these IDs, the individual and/or organizations they represent is more thoroughly investigated and personal presence is required. Typical applications include access to confidential information, authorization to trade financial securities, and access to corporate databases. VeriSign is the only company 100% committed to the digital authentication market. Home banking, electronic payments, and subscription based services are some of the areas in which VeriSign is working, with clients that include NASA, TRW, Netscape and Apple. VeriSign's public identification certificates offer multiple levels of identity assurance. In addition, VeriSign is extending its certificate issuing technology to include new X.509 version 3 format, which greatly expands the flexibility and capability of Digital IDs. Navigator 2.0 users will be the first customers to receive version 3 compatible Digital IDs. Being X.509 compliant, VeriSign can include authorization parameters in a Digital ID allowing both corporate and individual users to customize them according to their electronic commerce and communications needs. X.509 certificates are becoming the internationally recognized standard form of "I.D." on public and private networks. Pricing and Availability Netscape Navigator 2.0 users will be able to download Class One Digital IDs from VeriSign's new Online Digital ID Issuing Service on the World Wide Web beginning in late October. Non-commercial Class One Digital IDs will be offered at no cost, or if users desire a VeriSign supported commercial version, the cost is $6 annually. Class Two Digital IDs are available for $12 annually. Class Three Digital IDs are available for an individual for $24 annually. Corporate site license discounts are available. Class Three Digital IDs for an entity such as a corporate server are available for $290 for the first Digital ID and $95 for additional IDs at the same site annually. To obtain pricing on Class Four Digital IDs users should contact VeriSign directly. VeriSign, Inc. VeriSign provides Digital ID products and services for the electronic commerce marketplace. VeriSign's Digital IDs play a key role in ensuring the privacy and authentication of electronic transactions and communications. VeriSign, founded in 1995 as a spin-off of RSA Data Security, is working with its investors including Ameritech and Visa International, and partners such as Netscape and Apple, to open the digital marketplace to all consumers. VeriSign's goal is to provide consumers with the confidence necessary to conduct electronic commerce worldwide. For more information, contact VeriSign at 415-508-1151, or visit their Web sit at http://www.verisign.com. Note to Editors: Copyright 1995 VeriSign, Inc. 100 Marine Parkway, Redwood City, CA 94065. All rights reserved. VeriSign is a service mark and trademark of VeriSign, Inc. Digital ID, Providing Driver License for the Information Superhighway and Certificate Issuing System are all trademarks of VeriSign, Inc. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners. CONTACT: VeriSign Inc. Web Augustine, 415/508-1151 web(a)verisign.com or Niehaus Ryan Haller Public Relations Marcos Sanchez, 415/615-7912 marcos(a)nrh.com 07:35 ET SEP 18, 1995 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.7.1 iQCVAwUBMF3nBFzvpSsKhLftAQHBSQP+PCmXw9P2EWjweTIWoT65BYKgmhnxZbx0 Ig0Zi7dVgFS+dIAxTnc23p4BBBapfZMrN2Ho/zhm7csPB4+XQ65y+vDVlDH8ehvA d/b7gAtsE9tOe1YglNeeNaxba/xB2OuGN6XJHH2A8wojIPw7ALK66XMPJ6YGn24T N7eychxo61A= =xgjH -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ... __o .. -\<, Chris.Claborne(a)SanDiegoCA.ATTGIS.Com ...(*)/(*). CI$: 76340.2422 http://bordeaux.sandiegoca.attgis.com/ PGP Pub Key fingerprint = A8 FA 55 92 23 20 72 69 52 AB 64 CC C7 D9 4F CA Avail on Pub Key server. PGP-encrypted e-mail welcome!

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Re: Automatic E-Mail
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[This isn't quite on topic, though you could stretch it to deal with remailers. Can the winsock remailer do this?] At 10:50 PM 9/18/95 GMT, Rick.Sciorra(a)hudson.lm.com wrote: >Does anyone know of an E-Mail package that will automatically connect >to the Internet and retreive mail at specific intervals? Sigh. Folks have gotten too used to PC-market email systems, which are generally braindamaged by having been around operating systems where you can't just run a listner program that waits for somebody to call you when they want to send you mail, which of course fits in very well with letting ISPs avoid having to make outgoing phone calls instead of just receiving, plus the market reluctance of many of them to forward mail for you to competing mail services and the client/server-orientation that makes peer-to-peer services harder to implement. Unix systems did this job just fine on PDP11/70s, which could support a dozen or two users on a machine with about the horsepower of a PC/AT. And Henry Spencer could do that on a /44 :-) Just about anything that does UUCP can be set to do that, if you've got an ISP who doesn't charge you lots extra for using UUCP. Most high-end terminal emulation packages have scripting languages that let you call up and do stuff, which you should be able to call from timer programs; you can probably even find a free Kermit version that will do it. I use Eudora Light with Trumpet to call Netcom's newbie-friendly Netcruiser service; when I hit the menu item for send or retrieve mail, it pops through all the layers and dials, and hangs up when it's done. If Commercial Eudora can't already do that automagically, it should - ask Qualcomm to add it to the next version... Alternatively, Winsock programming isn't really all that hard, and POP3 is a pretty simple protocol, so you could roll your own. #--- # 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: MIME attachments and ranting.
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> >Attachment Converted: D:\DOWNLOAD\MIME\RePGPfor.8 >> I, for one, don't need Mystery MIME Attachments cluttering up my drive. If >> it's worth saying, then *say* it. >I really don't know why any mailers call a monopart MIME message an >"attachment". Mail readers come in three basic flavors of unMIMEificationness: 1) Ignorance+bliss - the mailer doesn't know or care about MIME headers, and you can ignore them when you read them, and may be able to configure the reader not to bother you with most of them (e.g. BSD Mail.) 3) Intelligence - the mailer does something genuinely useful to help you read the attachment, like letting you pop up some appropriate reading tool. 2) Naive friendliness - the Sirius Cybernetics approach. "Your mail file has been tastefully shredded into little pieces and sprinkled around your disk drive. Thank you for making a humble mail system so _very_ happy." Free Eudora versions offer you several choices of tastefulness and shredditude, partly intended to provide artistic functionality and partly to encourage you to buy the commercial version which gives you a more flexible user interface for extensions like MIME. So buy it, or cope with it, or tell Eudora to use your RAMdisk for its attachments where they'll soon go away and not bother you. There's also another approach, typified by a vendor whose name will be omitted but they'd know who they were if they had a <perjorative deleted> clue.... 0) Downright hostile - Not only does it _pretend_ to be Intelligent, while only really doing the right thing with its own proprietary data formats*, though generally doing something reasonable with uuencoded documents with names that it understands, but it chokes and dies on messages that have even moderately large amounts of simple, basic, non-attachmentized _text_, and if you _do_ try to package text up to send to some poor sucker who's stuck with one of these <perjorative deleted> systems, it hands it to a brain-damaged user-friendly mouse-editor that _also_ chokes on more than 64KB of text.... [* where "the right thing" allows it to mindlessly run arbitrary code handed to it as macros in the proprietary data formats that the company encourages its users to use instead of real text....] #--- # 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: NYT on Netscape Crack
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> The New York Times, September 19, 1995, pp. A1, D21. > ...... > "The good news and the bad news of the Internet is that > when you put something up there, many more people can test > it," said Mike Homer, the vice president of marketing at > Netscape. "You also give yourself the opportunity of having > people point things out which you can fix quickly." That's a good, and realistic, attitude. > Netscape officials said today that they would strengthen > the system, by making it significantly harder to determine > the random number at the heart of their coding system. They > said they would no longer disclose what data would be used > to generate the random numbers. I do hope this is just John Markoff's simplification of what Netscape's folks said and not an endorsement of security-by-obscurity. I realize that some data does need to be kept around on disk or in the program, since obtaining a lot of random bits at the beginning of every transaction either requires annoying user interactions or takes too long to get decent quality, and certainly this data ought to be kept private by the algorithms involved. One concern I've had about the popular "crunch some bits repeatedly through MD5" approach to random number generation is that knowing one sample from the stream (e.g. by doing a transaction with the victim) gives you the rest of the stream. There's a way to improve that. let X(0) be some number you keep around from a previous session, modified by whatever hardware randomness is available, and seeded by user input the first time. let X(i) = MD5(X(i-1)) let Y(i) = hash(X(i)), where hash is something like MD5(key,X(i)) use Y(i) as the output random number. This eliminates the ability to determine X(i) or Y(i+1) as a function of Y(i), since the search space of X(i) is presumably too large to reverse (unlike the number of bits you can cheaply get in one session). Keeping some of the bits of Y(i) around to use in addition to the other key for the hash, or to key the MD5(X(i-1)) with, may be useful as well. #--- # 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: Caribbean Internet Services? (fwd)
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim wrote: >>> I suspect "Caribbean Data Havens" and "Internet Sites" are further off than >>> they were a few months ago. The governments of the affected islands will have to make some tradeoffs - do they allow providers of these services to operate freely, bringing in new telecomm facilities so they can get the revenues from (let's keep the Minnesota AG happy) gambling and other private-communications trade, or do they leave their telecomm monopolies in place, so they can get the telecomm revenues which get into government coffers more quickly? Is there enough market to convince them to open up, which will attract more services? How much does being first matter? #--- # 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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Quick ITAR question....
by descarte＠mcqueen.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've just about finished the perl SSLeay implementation and I was musing about how I would manage to do one for SSLref also....... Here's the situation: I'm in Britain, but I have access to a machine which I wll develop on in the States. Can I develop Net::SSLref on this machine? My feeling is, no, since I'm not a US citizen ( does this matter with ITAR? ). Similarly, it could be construed that the characters constituting the source code are crossing the Atlantic to my machine here, albeit not being stored. Conversely, I'm not reading *all* the code, so I couldn't necessarily build SSLref from this action ( a parallel may be the export of 1/723 of PGP in a .sig! ) Any comments would be much appreciated. Thanks. -- Alligator Descartes | PGP Key available on request. descarte(a)mcqueen.com | http://www.mcqueen.com/hermetica

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Re: taxonomies of 'real money' and e-cash
by P.J. Ponder 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On the 18th, Tim May wrote: > > I wasn't saying they are all on the same footing, or are all separate and > compartmentalizable things. Clearly some of them are just slightly > different "flavors" of other things. I listed a bunch of them not as a > taxonomy or ontology, but as an illustration that there are many kinds of > financial dealings, many kinds of roles played. > > That the real world has so many flavors of financial things could of course > be due to inertia and ignorance, partly. But there are also different > functionalities, and costs. Fitting the different needs, the different > roles of the players. I won't go on and on, as my last post on this I think > hit the main points, but consider how many flavors we have just of > "checks": the "ordinary" checks we write, counter checks, dual-endorser > checks, traveller's checks, and so on. (If you are arguing that only > "digital cash" is a real issue, and all other constructs are "small matters > of programming," then we disagree profoundly.) My mistake then. You obviously have in mind some things much more subtle and more logically removed from money, or currency, or even liquidity than what I thought you were referring to. I'm going back to reading the list in the mornings. --PJ . . . . > --Tim May > > ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- > 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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Errors in Applied Cryptography, 2nd Edition
by Bruce Schneier 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have taken a three stage approach to reducing the number of errors in the second edition: 1. Correct the errors from the first edition. 2. Ensure that I don't create any new errors while writing the new material for the second edition. 3. Make sure that additional errors don't creep in during the production of the second edition. In order.... I have done a lot more than incorporate all the corrections from the errata into the second edition. Minor things, too trivial to make the errata list, were also corrected. The first edition was translated into French, and the translator sent me hundreds of queries: things that were unclear, ambiguous, or erroneous. All of those queries resulted in changes to the second-edition manuscript. I was a lot more careful adding new material, reading it over several times to ensure accuracy. And a lot of other people read the chapters over, too. For the first edition, I asked about a dozen people to proofread the manuscript for me. Most people read the first chapters carefully, and then petered out somewhere in the middle. This time I asked about seventy people to each read a chapter (or two)--a chapter within their area of expertise. Each chapter was edited by at least two people, often more. Additionally, two people were paid to read the entire book for accuracy and comprehensibility. I learned a lot about the publishing process during the production of the first edition. For the first edition, I had no control of any of the production decisions. The copyeditor added errors to the manuscript. Some computer idiot lost all of my italics, boldface, superscripting, and subscripting while translating my files from my word processor to their page layout program. The proofreader didn't catch errors that the production people added. I had almost no time to review the manuscript at any of the stages. This time around I was able to choose my own copyeditor, proofreader, and indexer. In fact, there were two separate rounds of copyediting with two different copyeditors. The proofreader is not only the most meticulous proofreader I know, but someone who knows enough math to catch errors in the equations. I verified all file translations myself. And I reviewed the copyedited manuscript twice, and two separate passes of page proofs. I'm not stupid enough to state that the book is 100% error-free, but I am confident that there are far fewer errors in the second edition than there were in the first. I was embarrassed at some of the errors in the first edition, and I put a lot of effort into making sure it doesn't happen again. Bruce ************************************************************************** * Bruce Schneier * Counterpane Systems For a good prime, call 391581 * 2^216193 - 1 * schneier(a)counterpane.com **************************************************************************

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Una FTPaper 2
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

ftp.hacktic.nl/pub/incoming/unabomb.txt

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