December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: e-mail forwarding, for-pay remailers
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:20 PM 12/14/95 EDT, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote: > The more critical question is likely to be what the people at the local >MBE/whatever _think_ the rules are. When I last got a box (under my real name, >in case anyone's wondering), I seem to recall that they'd accept credit cards. >Once one has one box under a given name, this opens up the possibility of >getting a secured credit card to make future access easier. However, I believe >that they do want at least one form of photo ID; I can't remember just off what >their specifications were. > -Allen I have found that credit cards are very good ID (even though they aren't ID at all) since people are sure that you can't get one without getting thoroughly checked out. A secured credit card in a nome de guerre backed up with employment photo "ID" will usually get you what you want. The reason that market access controls like these break down is that they are dependent on every seller on earth giving up the profit involved in selling to you. Sellers are different. You can usually find one who doesn't check ID well or is in another jurisdiction (in the case of non physical transactions). A new effect is the spread of libertarian (small L) political ideologies which means that a growing group of market participants are philosophically opposed to traditional control regimes. Eg C2.ORG. A final problem for control freaks is that Friction Free Capitalism is eating away at the traditional market institutions that have grown up during the control era. Thus if traditional banking, telephony, and electricity distribution are wiped out by new forms of competitive business activity it is hard for regulatory agencies to extend their traditional controls to the new entities. Budget restraints play a part as does inertia. All of this is before the new market players deploy anti control technologies and procedures. They are in business because they can displace traditional quasi-monopoly institutions and often see government as just another competitor to be bypassed. DCF

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Re: ADDRESS DATABASE? [getting noisy]
by Charles Gimon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: [Sandfort summer picnic invitation list deleted] > > > This took about a minute using a shabby consumer-level DB. > *Now* do you get it? > > > Hieronymous > Well, "information wants to be free", and all that stuff...

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Re: Secured RM ? (source)
by jps＠monad.semcor.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I don't think this will work. When you > if ( (Pfp = fopen(Pfilename, "wb") ) == NULL) the file will be truncated. Subsequent writes could be anywhere on the platter; you're building a new file. I think you can work this way if you open the file for read/write access, although I'd be more inclined to take the file name into the directory and then walk the inodes. jps -- Jack P. Starrantino (215) 674-0200 (voice) SEMCOR, Inc. (215) 443-0474 (fax) 65 West Street Road jps(a)semcor.com Suite C-100 Warminster, PA 18974

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Re: "Strongly Voluntary" Key Escrow
by liberty＠gate.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Tim wrote: <snip> >All of these are "voluntary" key escrow (though I hate that misuse of the >word "escrow") [...] I do too, and I hate it enough that I must (again) object to any use of it where there is not a _NEUTRAL_, _THIRD_ party involved, as explained before on the list (at length) by me, James A. Donald, and many others. [So, why are you *again* consuming bandwidth on this subject, Jim?] Because I love the English language, and because I am quite aware that those who define the terms end up winning the debate, every time. I do not want the word "escrow" in a key context to go the way of the word "voluntary" in an income-tax context (or the word "take" in an enviro- law context). The government has snaked in a Newspeak meaning for the latter two terms, but I hope that cypherpunks will only use the term "GAK" when talking to or about the government. Failure to do so will not only put "our side" in a worse public-relations position, it may (in the future) do violence to the English language. While I enjoyed Tim & Uni's "voluntary" sarcasm, I think we have enough material for *ample* humor without adding even more words to the Newspeak roll. <snip> >there are few circumstances where I think "government certification" "Government Key Certification" might be an OK compromise-term compared to "key escrow," but we should [IMNSHO] continue to stick to "GAK." As you know, I prefered the term "FUCKED," but now we must be "decent" in our communications. <sigh> >is even useful, let alone necessary. I can think of only two, but perhaps there are others: 1. Government employees (but only while working on government time). 2. Convicted felons (I wouldn't include the failed drugwar's felons). >Any scheme in which the government interjects itself in what would not >normally involve them can hardly be said to be strictly voluntary. Indeed, but we have already "lost" the word "voluntary" to Newspeak, which is why it's necessary to qualify it with words like "strictly" and "strongly." JMR - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Regards, Jim Ray http://www.shopmiami.com/prs/jimray "Thank God we don't get all the government we pay for." -- Will Rogers [Said back when we paid for (and got) a _lot_ less government.] - ----------------------------------------------------------------------- PGP key Fingerprint 51 5D A2 C3 92 2C 56 BE 53 2D 9C A1 B3 50 C9 C8 Public Key id. # E9BD6D35 <liberty(a)gate.net> IANAL - ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Help Phil! e-mail zldf(a)clark.net or http://www.netresponse.com/zldf _______________________________________________________________________ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Freedom isn't Freeh. iQCVAwUBMNF6U21lp8bpvW01AQGhXwP/ZDmtjY77AnAnnmddpd/rX93E4nGm7JBg 8KXyM7TGiiifpPfLRLJR3LncS0OE7V6CIcaq6zSox+qK97SfNZJhwP+GUIMegChJ WiqIaU5el2x6n0KeD/Km4loXMah6o4q4RJyVyo/M3uLlvYsBUyi9i4MQHy6fHpdU BSBnPIz0j0w= =9K29 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Blinding against Kocher's timing at
by ljo＠ausys.se 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hal <hfinney(a)shell.portal.com> wrote: >From: ljo(a)ausys.se (Johansson Lars) >> Does anyone know whether David Chaum's patent on >> blind digital signatures extends to this application? [Parts omitted] >It's conceivable that Kocher's blinding would be a patentable technique >in itself, and not impossible that he has already applied for a patent >before publishing. Probably he would have said so if that were his >intention, though. I just found this at RSA:s <http://www.rsa.com/rsaqa.htm> home page: >Q: Has RSA been "broken"? > > A: No. The attack that Paul Kocher describes is academically interesting, but it is >easy to defend systems against his attack using a technique called > "blinding", developed by Dr. Ron Rivest of RSA. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ When did Dr. Rivest develop this "blinding" technique? Was it pre or post Chaum? Perhaps Rivest himself have applied for this patent. More info from RSA:s home page: > Another way is to use a technique called "blinding", in which a random number > is introduced into the decryption process, making it impossible to get any useful >data out of timing these transactions. > >so instead of doing the usual RSA decryption: > > m = c^d mod n > >we perform: > > m = r^-1*(c*r^e)^d mod n > >where r is a random number, and is its inverse. /Lars

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Re: kocher's timing attack
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: dreschs(a)austnsc.tandem.com (Sten Drescher) > On Firewalls, "Jonathan M. Bresler" <jmb(a)FreeBSD.ORG> said: > JMB> After > JMB> several large key signing parties hundreds of known ciphertexts > JMB> could have been generated using Alice's key--each one a public key > JMB> of someone else. over several years it piles up. the known > JMB> ciphertexts can be tested/analyzed to yield Alice's secret key. > JMB> ouch. ;/ > > Are you sure about this? It would seem that the same principle > would then apply to signed messages as well, and I find it a bit hard to > believe that signing messages would make ones key pair vulnerable. As Kocher's paper implies, the known ciphertext attack is a TIMING attack. Simply accumulating known text/signature pairs as you would have after a "key signing party" does not help. You must know exactly how much time each signature took. Hal

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Re: Kocher's RSA attack
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Derek Atkins <warlord(a)MIT.EDU> > I must disagree, software implementations of RSA can and probably do > allow the timing attacks. It all depends on the modexp implementation. > Most implementations that I know of, when performing an x^y mod n will > require a squarings and b multiplies, where a is the number of bits in > y and b is the number of 1-bits in y. This is not enough - Paul Kocher's attack depends on the individual modular multiplies taking different times. (Actually, that is for his attack on Diffie Hellman. The RSA CRT decryption attack uses a completely different principle, but I guess we are ignoring that for now.) The fact that timing a modular exponentiation would give information about the density of 1 bits in the exponent is not particularly new or surprising, as has been mentioned here. What is new is that you can actually figure out the specific exponent value. But that requires variable-timing modmult, not just variable-timing modexp. PGP is somewhat unique in having a multiplicity of modmult algorithms which can be selected at compile time. I am not sure which of these might be variable time and which might be fixed. The most likely place for time variation IMO is in the modular reduction rather than the multiply; the multiply is generally deterministic with no variation due to data values (although as was pointed out here, on some processors a hardware multiply instruction may take variable time depending on its inputs). Some modular reductions involve trial division to some extent or other, with different numbers of iterations possible depending on certain (maybe unusual) values. However I believe at least one of the PGP modular reductions consists of multiplying by the reciprocal of the modulus, followed by a fixed shift, and this one should be constant time on a machine which has constant-time multiplies and shifts. (This is just going from memory, I haven't looked at the algorithm in several years.) Hal

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DCSB: Future Scenarios for e$
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- The Digital Commerce Society of Boston (Formerly The Boston Society for Digital Commerce) Presents Art Hutchinson and John Kelly Northeast Consulting Resources Inc., (NCRI) "Future Scenarios for e$" Tuesday, January 2, 1995 12 - 2 PM The Downtown Harvard Club of Boston One Federal Street, Boston, MA Mr. Hutchinson is a Senior Consultant at Northeast Consulting Resources, Inc. (NCRI). His primary area of focus is NCRI's Information Commerce practice. He has advised clients on the application of different approaches to, and technologies for managing (and getting paid for) digital intellectual property on the Internet, the World Wide Web, and private/hybrid networks. Mr. Hutchinson is an active member of the Electronic Rights Management Group of the Information Industry Association, and a founding member of the Digital Commerce Society of Boston. He speaks regularly at conferences on the topic of rights management in cyberspace He is a principal contributor to NCRI's Future Mapping(r) conferences, including "The Future of Information Commerce" and "The Great Infrastructure Debate"(r). Prior to joining NCRI, Mr. Hutchinson was Director of Consulting Services at BIS Strategic Decisions. Prior to BIS, Mr. Hutchinson managed the Distribution Channels Information Service at International Data Corp. (IDC). Mr. Kelly, a Senior Consultant at Northeast Consulting Resources, Inc. (NCRI), has specialized in designing group planning and decision making activities that help teams clarify their strategic options. He also analyzes new applications in multimedia training and groupware. He is one of the leaders of the Mapping the Future of Information Commerce seminars. Mr. Kelly has led seminars on strategic planning and Future Mapping for a large international oil company, a Fortune 100 diversified manufacturing company, a leading computer hardware and systems company, and numerous software and telecommunications companies. He has contributed to the development of databases of critical events that help companies chart their future business opportunities in the areas of computing, communications, and interactive multimedia. Before joining NCRI, Mr. Kelly served as an Associate Editor and consultant for the Seybold Office Computing Group. Mr. Kelly also worked for the Information Systems Group at Lotus Development Corporation and was the Director of Interactive Technology Projects at the WGBH Educational Foundation. Prior to that, Mr. Kelly was Manager of the Seminar Division at Information Mapping, Inc. and later served as a consultant to IMI. Art says: >Art Hutchinson and John Kelly of Northeast Consulting Resources, Inc. (NCRI) >will facilitate an interactive exercise that helps to paint a picture of the >group's collective thinking about future events and milestones >in the development of electronic commerce. Specifically, we will be culling >through the last year of posts to www-buyinfo, e-payment, and various other >mailing lists, as well as our own database of 17,000 "events" used in >previous scenario planning conferences. From this, we will be create a set >of about 40 potential future events which - depending upon whether they >happen or not - will drive the digital commerce arena in varying directions. > > >Everyone at the lunch will be given an opportunity to 'vote' on and discuss >with their peers the likelihood (or un-likelihood) of these events happening >within a particular time frame. After the 'voting', we will lead a >discussion of what the results might mean, and how some things that this >group believes correspond to what other corporate and industry groups have >said in the recent past in voting on some of the same events. Suggestions >for controversial, interesting, watershed events that might happen in the >digital commerce arena over the next 3-5 years are welcome. Please e-mail >them directly to Art Hutchinson at <hutchinson(a)ncri.com> This meeting of the Boston Society for Digital Commerce will be held on Tuesday, January 2, 1995 from 12pm - 2pm at the Downtown Branch of the Harvard Club of Boston, One Federal Street. The price for lunch is $27.50. This price includes lunch, room rental, and the speaker's lunch. ;-). The Harvard Club *does* have a jacket and tie dress code. We need to receive a company check, or money order, (or if we *really* know you, a personal check) payable to "The Harvard Club of Boston", by Saturday, December 30 (that's two weeks from this Saturday), or you won't be on the list for lunch. Checks payable to anyone else but The Harvard Club of Boston will have to be sent back. Checks should be sent to Robert Hettinga, c/o The Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02131. Again, they must be made payable to "The Harvard Club of Boston". If anyone has questions, or has a problem with these arrangements (We've had to work with a few glacial A/P departments ourselves, for instance), please let us know via e-mail, and we'll see if we can work something out. Planned speakers for the following few months are: February Fred Hapgood Freelance Author March Glenda Barnes X.9 Electronic Commerce Security Group April Donald Eastlake CyberCash May Perry Metzger Security Consultant and Cypherpunk June Dan Shutzer FSTC We are actively searching for future speakers. If you are in Boston on the first Tuesday of the month, and you would like to make a presentation to the Society, please send e-mail to the DCSB Program Commmittee, care of Robert Hettinga, rah(a)shipwright.com . For more information about the Boston Society for Digital Commerce, send "info dcsb" in the body of a message to majordomo(a)ai.mit.edu . If you want to subscribe to the DCSB e-mail list, send "subscribe dcsb" in the body of a message to majordomo(a)ai.mit.edu . Looking forward to seeing you there! Cheers, Bob Hettinga Moderator, The Digital Commerce Society of Boston -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMNGdJPgyLN8bw6ZVAQGSgQP/Q5PfwoevxNRBaC1B6dUaIDl07bhGTpSm v9pYx3kuHTEc0Mei3Zzxj4G/yaSGFHoOuz8rslxsKBIrsLeB0Xc7gehs8OjgXsuU fcR6gvT4mlY9Mvs8E9MaeTlTlHAz5R38g1lv1ST4Xti7kBQ4l9EEErTjPOM4oHy/ 6kglzZsCSM4= =QJbV -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 958-3971 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell The NEW(!) e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/ >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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Re: Web O Trust, active attacks against same, etc. AGAIN. (was: Usability of Cryptography (was Re: More FUD from First Virtual) )
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:39 PM 12/13/95 -0700, Bryce wrote: > >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > An entity calling itself "James A. Donald" <jamesd(a)echeque.com> >allegedly wrote: >> >> Web of trust is a mess because it attempts to link keys to >> physical people, which in general cannot be done. > ******************************* > > >Do you wish to substantiate this rather brazen assertion? >I am very sure that PGP public key 0xCC56B2E9 belongs to my >housemate Sebastian Kuzminsky <kuzminsk(a)colorado.edu>. Is >there some reason why I should doubt this belief? No, but there is some reason you should gain familiarity with the english language If I had intended to say "generally cannot be done" I would have said "generally cannot be done" instead of saying "in general cannot be done" --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Re: [NOISE] The Enquirer
by blancw＠accessone.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Now, THAT's what I call "The News Update". This is the kind of encapsulated [NOISE] we could all stand to hear! ha-ha-ha .. Blanc

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