December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: pgp broken?
by greg pitz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 16 Jan 96 at 19:16, Derek Atkins wrote: > Also, it could be that a small PGP key has been broken. A 384-bit > PGP key has already been broken by a factoring attack. That is > neither surprising nor alarming to say the least. Without more > information it really is impossible to analyze what happened. I focused my interrogation in this direction, because, as many of you have pointed out, it is VERY doubtful that PGP itself was "broken". To give further perspective, he kept claiming that a "triple DES with RS4 overlay" was the most secure method of encryption. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< greg pitz pitz(a)onetouch.com >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

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DC-Nets and Noise
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:40 AM 1/17/96, s1018954(a)aix2.uottawa.ca wrote: >(Speaking of sublists, whatever happenned to the DC-net list mentioned in >the cyphernomicon? Is this a figment of my imagination or was there any code >written that I might partake of? Btw, why call it a DC network when it is >really a ring? Maybe I haven't taken a good enough look at the protocol. >Dinner calls. :> ) Without consulting the Cyphernomicon, my memory is that there were two main proposals for a DC-Net (Dining Cryptographers Net) mailing list. The first was by Yanek Martinson, a Russian emigre, circa 1992. The second was by Jim McCoy, of Austin. Yanek I have not heard from in a few years. Jim McCoy has also not been active on our list in at least a year, maybe longer. I recently heard from Doug Barnes that Jim may be coming to the Bay Area, so things may change. Neither of these proposed mailing lists seemed to have gotten to a critical mass. There are many reasons why mailing lists and subgroups fade out. DC-Nets are a hard thing to pull off (anyone see any working versions lately?), about as hard to pull off as true digital cash; and with less economic benefit, less incentive to do the work. So, I can't say I am, or was, surprised that such mailing lists atrophied. An equally interesting question is why the Cypherpunks list has kept on growing in size, given the nontechnical digressions that some subscribers so object to. My view, shared by others I think, is that too technical a list will atrophy...only a handful of folks are usually competent to contribute, and so message volume drops to only a few messages a day, then a few per week, then it fades out altogether. The "noise" that some decry may help to keep lists vital. (In any case, even for those who disagree, modern filtering techniques make it trivial for the "gurus" to filter out all messages except by the several of themselves, so I've never understood the point about how the list must purge itself of "noise.") --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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The object....
by tjm＠easynet.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dear Mr. McNally, A correction. I did not say the statement. I submitted it. You have constructed a context which was not in the original email. By posting just a segment to the list you no doubt have created what you wanted.....you remind me of a person that I know - a journalist..... The submission was because I felt that it would be of interest to someone, if you did not find it so, such is life........ Your comments at the bottom of the email.....well....good luck with your monoply, I hope you pass go soon...... Terence. "Its funny how those who fight against tyranny eventually become tyrants." Mr. McNally, I did write this.

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FW: Net Control is Thought Control
by blanc 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Vladimir Z. Nuri(a)LD.com I don't understand your point. both the agent provocateur and "victim" are crucial to the process of brainwashing. they are the yin and yang of it all, of course, and I am certainly not arguing otherwise. what I was pointing out was that it is increasingly difficult to identify people's secret agenda in cyberspace. .............................................................................................. "What distinguishes coercive persuasion from other kinds of influence processes is the degree to which the person who is to be influenced is physically or psychologically confined to a situation in which he must continue to expose himself to unfreezing pressures. Not only did the prison confine him physically, but the round-the-clock vigilance and pressure from cellmates confined the person psychologically to an environment in which unusually intense unfreezing pressures were present at all times...." (from the book) Now, you know that no one either on this list or anywhere in cyberspace is confined, either physically or psychologically, to continuously & unwillingly expose themselves to alt.usenet.kooks or http://www.ho-hum.com or cypherpunks, etc.. If they continue to do so it is because they themselves have put themselves there or have not seen fit to leave when it behooved them (sometimes requiring the use of kill files to avoid them). A person in an unrestricted setting, who is so easily persuaded by others that they cannot resist being influenced, has a lot of work to do in finding out about their own lack of self-confidence & direction. A "victim of information" must study & discover the difference between valid info & dangerous nonsense. There are ways to know when someone is trying to supplant one's own initiative with their own preferences. And here's plenty of debate & unrestricted flaming in cyberspace to challenge anyone's passive acceptance of another's conclusions (or of their own unexamined presumptions). And there's always new software tools to enable participants to make a quick exit if they feel uncomfortable with a conversation. "the next time you see a flamewar, ask yourself this question: what would I think if I found out every opinion and post on one side was manufactured by a single person? how can you be so sure they aren't?" Unless I was thinking of going out to lunch with one of them, I can't see why I would care. i.e., unless I needed to make a decision for action based on what they had said, it wouldn't really matter to me. I expect I would have more effect on them than vice-versa. :>) .. Blanc

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A WfW security curiosity (possibly another security hole)
by pgut01＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

When WfW is installed, it creates a file in the Windows directory called WFWSYS.CFG. This is a standard Windows password file and may be decrypted with the password "23skidoo" (note that this is lowercase, since it's passed to the .PWL-handling code at a level which bypasses the usual password case smashing. The mangled 32-bit form which is passed to the RC4 key setup routine is { 0x67, 0x6F, 0xE3, 0x81 }). WFWSYS.CFG seems to be mostly identical for the few copies I could get to, and WfW networking won't work without it. Decrypting the file doesn't seem to give anything useful, the string "SYSTEM" and what looks like a few 8 or 16-numbers. I don't know enough about how WfW networking works, but my (very vague) guess is that it contains some sort of cookie to uniquely ID each machine for resource sharing over a network. If it does then it it's (yet another) pretty serious security hole, since it's encrypted with a fixed password and seems to be mostly identical over multiple machines. OTOH it may be something to do with serial numbers so you can't install the same copy of WfW on multiple machines on a LAN. Can anyone shed more light on it? Peter.

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A Modest Proposal: Fattening up the Proles
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:57 AM 1/17/96, tallpaul wrote: >-- >tallpaul > >"To understand the probable outcome of the Libertarian vision, see any >cyberpunk B movie wherein thousands of diseased, desparate and starving >families sit around on ratty old couches on the streets watching television >while rich megalomaniacs appropriate their body parts for their personal >physical immortality." > R. U. Sirius > _The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook_ The absurdity of this point is obvious to anyone with a brain. Why would we want the donors to be "diseased" and "starving"? It is imperative that donors be healthy and non-anorexic (we used to use the phrase "fattened up," but this is no longer au courant). To keep the proles reasonably healthy, the plutocrats are encouraging the current wave of exercise videos, ThighMasters, Buns of Steel, etc. And lots of beer, as the Kobe beef quakers have shown. Other than this, R. U. has it about right, I think. (Ironically, I brought up the new book, "The Winner Take All Society," at the last Cypherpunks meeting. No time to discuss it here, but it confirms my strong belief that we are heading for a economy in which a shrinking fraction of workers have really valuable things to contribute, and a growing fraction of the population does not. I had not recalled the authors, but Strick had a battery-powered laptop and Metricom wireless modem, and ran an Alta Vista search from where he was sitting: ROBERT FRANK & PHILIP COOK, The Winner-Take-All Society, New York: The Free Press.) This may shock some of the newcomers here, who haven't heard this, or who haven't deduced it from our posts, but many of us are elitists. Or, more precisely, we are for people looking out for Number One, with the expectation that many other people simply won't make it. Think of it as evolution in action. --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Ann: NOISE.SYS v0.4.1 (should be) available...
by wlkngowl＠unix.asb.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Latest version of NOISE.SYS has been uploaded to ftp.funet.fi, and a few other sites, as "noise04.zip". It is a random-noise device driver for DOS, which samples fast timings between keystrokes, disk access, clock-drift, and even mouse movement or audio card and hashes with SHA-2 algorithm to generate some good-quality randomness. Note changes since previous version: this one defines two devices akin to random.c patch for Linux, /dev/random and /dev/urandom. The latter will output as many bytes as are requested, while the first will only output as many bits as are estimated to be in the pool. Source included. 386 req'd. Take care, --Rob (Still waiting on comments or suggestions about earlier versions...)

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THE RECIPROCAL ?......
by tjm＠easynet.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dear Cypherpunks, Speaking to a colleague who works at Queen's University of Belfast about the speculation of someone recently breaking PGP her response was, although short, very interesting which I thought may be of interest to the group..... "When people talk of encryption they use the word break, they are approaching from one way but not the only way. I am at present trying the reciprocal, that is, to mend." I asked her to go into more detail but she declined saying that..... "The early experiments have worked." What this means I don't know and she never anwsered whom the work was for but maybe this is a route which one has not considered - if at all it exists......the reciprocal ?..... -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6.2 mQCPAzCsvtYAAAEEANjIsO3Q0cSdEgYifAiA5+aUEVSBFFZTZIpqQXbgXxExsrjk bFiJ6haaWaD60KPjxH8QJ8PHr9x2tk2K1ktpbcL2+YjPHd+fJzqgz3llu2FV1Xu/ k1C7SWA5G8Do66I0MrQD3/jbAI2zp/0LnVoiI7LWCvPPKoxYCiHdIQ/n5PcJABEB AAG0JVRlcmVuY2UgSi4gTWFsbG9uIDx0am1AZWFzeW5ldC5jby51az6JAJUDBRAw uju1Id0hD+fk9wkBAXuUBACjGEmj3AO/rSUD0WRRHdYjDfR8L1FvcV0J/ZNwp7WJ 2cmHvtecLaOlTVWulRhVI6suUSwwzBYZFWmHJA7lR67gLZN8xqWyo/jWPVLDxAte pdC7ruZI1ZrFc90uPpymnVdC00gwgcG3F4RDQ9B1uY+4KiNG//fULwT6xUVzthak qA== =QN61 -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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Microsoft's CAPI
by Matt Blaze 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I attended a meeting at Microsoft the other day at which they described their Crypto API project. As CAPIs go, it's reasonable enough; nothing particularly exciting about it or especially wrong with it (though they don't yet support nonblocking calls to crypto modules). They've defined 23 cryptographic services (establish key, encrypt, etc.) that an application is expected to use for its cryptographic needs. The idea is to hide the crypto details (and keys) from applications, and to make it easy to switch from, say, wimpy export-approved crypto to good crypto just by switching to another DLL at load-time. The cryptography used depends on the crypto modules in use at runtime. The API will be part of the WIN32 interface. The next version of NT (and windows 95, I think), to be released in a few months will support loading ``Cryptographic Service Providers'' (CSPs) that contain the crypto functions that sit below the API. They have (or will have soon) an application development kit to allow you to write code that uses the API, and a CSP development kit to let you write the crypto functions. The interesting part is that they say they've made a deal with the government to allow applications that use the API to be exportable as long as they don't also try to implement crypto on their own. Ordinarily, the government claims that ``crypto with a hole'' (applications that call a crypto API) are just as export-controlled as crypto functions themselves, so this is something of a surprise and would represent considerable forward progress. But, of course, there's a catch. The OS will not load just any old CSP. CSPs have to be signed by Microsoft. The kernel contains a (hardcoded?) 1024 RSA public key that it uses to check the signature when the user tries to load a CSP. If the signature check fails, the CSP won't load. Microsoft says it will sign any CSP from anyone AS LONG AS THEY CERTIFY THAT THEY WILL FOLLOW THE EXPORT RULES. So you can get your CSP signed if you use exportable cryptography or if you agree not to send it outside the US and Canada, etc. But an end user can't just compile crypto code and use it as a CSP, even for his or her own use, without getting it signed by Microsoft first (actually, the CSP development kit does allow this, but it uses a special version of the OS). I'm not sure whether this whole thing is good or bad. One important issue is whether MS will really sign anyone's CSP or whether they will start charging high fees or making business-based decisions on who's CSPs they will allow (with they sign Netscape's CSP, for example). They say they won't even look or keep a copy of your CSP (at my suggestion, they are probably going to change the process so that you send them a hash of your CSP instead of your CSP code when you get the signature). For now they promise to sign CSPs for anyone who returns the export certificate, at no charge. We (Jack Lacy and I) will probably implement, get signed, and give away a CryptoLib-based CSP (not for export) for which we will also make source available so people examine the source to their crypto (most CSPs will, presumably, not include source). Despite all this, I think it will be easy to get around the CSP signature requirements and use homebrew, unsigned crypto even with pre-compiled .exe files from other sources. I suspect it will be easy to write a program, for example, that takes an executable program and converts CryptoAPI calls to calls that look like just another DLL. And I'm sure someone will write a program to patch the NT/Windows kernel to ignore the signature check. Needless to say, it would be nice if someone outside the US were to write and distribute programs to do this. It would also be nice if someone would write a Unix/Linux version of the API/CSP mechanism. It might make it possible to export applications for those platforms as well. I haven't tried any of this out yet, but they say they will have beta versions of the API and CSP developers kits out in a few weeks. They say that the API kit will not be export-controlled but the CSP kit will be. They plan to announce all this at the RSA conference this week. -matt

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Espionage-enabled Lotus notes.
by Trei Family 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've come up with a new term to describe the type of 'improved' security in the new International edition of Lotus Notes: 'espionage-enabled' It's specifically built for export, and has a backdoor to enable USG agents to read the messages more easily. From the viewpoint of a foreign purchaser, 'espionage-enabled' seems an appropriate term. If we spread this term sufficiently, we may be able to discourage the widespread adoption of this half-measure, and increase the pressure for good, unencumbered crypto. speaking only for myself, Peter Trei ptrei(a)acm.org

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