December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: CIA Stashes and Looted Gold?
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

U.S. Hid Weapons In Austria Vienna, Austria, Jan 21 (AP) -- Fearful of a Soviet takeover after World War II, the United States hid at least 79 weapons caches in Austria for anti-communist partisans. According to the newspaper Kurier, a U.S. congressional committee monitoring CIA activities found documents on the weapons caches that had not been known to the Clinton administration. A report Saturday in the Boston Globe prompted Hunt to inform the Austrian government, Kurier said. The Boston Globe report said CIA agents stashed the weapons while the U.S. military conducted loud military maneuvers. However, Fritz Molden, a former Austrian journalist, said Sunday that the secret weapons depots were established at the initiative of the Austrian government led by Chancellor Leopold Figl, and planning for them began in 1948. He claimed that some depots were also placed in the Soviet occupation zone in eastern Austria. Molden told the APA he had acted as a liaison between the Americans and the postwar Austrian government. However, it was not clear why the information was not handed down to subsequent governments. -- Austria demands details on secret US arms depots Vienna, Austria, Jan. 21 (Reuter) -- Austria's leadership Sunday demanded the United States supply details of 79 secret U.S. arsenals scattered across Austria. "The Americans should give us a plan indicating where the weapons depots are, how serious they have to be taken and what dangers they pose," Chancellor Franz Vranitzky said. Speaking on television Sunday, Vranitzky cautiously indicated the possibility of secret stockpiles from the other occupation forces -- France, Britain and the Soviet Union. "Approaching the other three occupation powers and asking them whether they too still have secret depots on Austrian soil will be dealt with in a very pragmatic and sensible way," Vranitzky said. The chancellery said the U.S. government was working on an exact list detailing the locations of the depots, and U.S. Ambassador Hunt promised to furnish details as quickly as possible. The television said experts assume each of the arsenals contained sufficient weapons and explosives for 150 anti-communist guerrillas and could also contain significant amounts of gold. Austrian television said that while the U.S. foreign ministry had assured Austria it would act as soon as possible, the CIA, which alone knows the exact locations of the arsenals, has remained silent on the issue. -- Postwar leaders acted with U.S. on arms caches Vienna, Austria, Jan. 22 (Reuter) - Austria's postwar leaders cooperated with the United States to stockpile arms around the country in a top-secret operation to safeguard against a Soviet attack, an ex-resistance fighter said Monday. Fritz Molden, who acted as a liaison officer between the resistance and the allied powers, said that if the Kremlin had discovered the plan to organize an anti-communist underground, Soviet troops would have immediately annexed eastern Austria. "It was all top secret. There were no archives, no papers made, no protocols written," Molden told Reuters. Molden said he was surprised that Austria's current political leaders were unaware of the arsenals. Details had appeared in two books, one of which he wrote 16 years ago. Austrian media speculated that the arsenals were part of a wider anti-communist strategy by the United States, which feared Soviet expansionism following the end of World War II. Newspapers cited the Gladio operation in Italy, set up as a secret Cold War resistance group in the 1950s to fight any Warsaw Pact invasion. Austrian experts estimated the depots held enough weapons and explosives for 150 anti-communist guerrillas and might also contain gold. They said likely sites included graveyards where digging would have gone unnoticed. Molden said arms were transported on U.S. trucks and trains into Vienna, which was surrounded by the Soviet eastern zone, and then secretly passed on to Austrians who risked their lives stashing the weapons away. He suspected most arsenals in western Austria were handed over to the Austrian army and gendarmerie after 1955 and that the arms sites in eastern Austria might now also be empty. --

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Re: Query over PZ
by dmandl＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:00 AM 1/23/96, tallpaul wrote: >Anonymous User had a question over PZ's politics. > >PZ has posted to the list and thus has, I believe, his address available to >list subscribers. > >How did PZ answer the question privately when Anonymous User posed the >question to PZ on private e-mail? > >If Anonymous User did not first pose the question to PZ privately, why did >he post it to the list publically? Seems to me Ms. Anonymous wasn't taking it seriously, but was posting the news clip here for our amusement, or to show the kind of shabby work some journalists do, or to scare us by demonstrating how insane rumors get started. I can't imagine that anyone who knows the address of the cypherpunks list and can use an anonymous remailer could take a ridiculous claim like that seriously. --Dave. -- Dave Mandl dmandl(a)panix.com http://www.wfmu.org/~davem

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IBM knuckles under
by Edgar Swank 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

IBM TO PROVIDE GOVERNMENT WITH ENCRYPTION KEY FOR NOTES IBM has agreed to provide the U.S. government with a special key that would enable government agents to more easily decode electronic messages, in exchange for permission to export a version of Lotus Notes that includes 64-bit security. The arrangement provides government officials with a key to the first 24 bits of security code, meaning that they only have to crack the remaining 40 bits to decrypt a message. U.S. Notes customers already use a 64-bit system. "We were desperate enough to try to negotiate a short-term, pragmatic solution," says Notes developer Ray Ozzie. "But we do not believe this is the right long-term solution... Our customers have been telling us that, unless we did something about the security, we could no longer call it a secure system." (Wall Street Journal 18 Jan 96 B7) -- edgar(a)Garg.Campbell.CA.US (Edgar Swank) The Land of Garg BBS -- +1 408 378-5108

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New Nym Server
by John Perry 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted as well. Hello Everyone, I'm proud to announce the new nym server at nym.alias.net. The address for the nymserver is: nymrod(a)nym.alias.net (Catchy name huh?) Anyway nymrod is running Matt Ghio's latest nymserver code. It's been tested and I think (cross your fingers) all the bugs have been worked out. It works the same at the nym server at c2.org and gondonym. If you need a quick tutorial, send email to: help(a)nym.alias.net Enjoy!!

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NOISE.SYS Stupid Bugs w/Int13h
by wlkngowl＠unix.asb.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There's an unpleasant bug in NOISE.SYS, BTW. It doesn't properly return the flags from the Int 13h handler, so disable that for now unless you'd like to do funky things to your disks. Sorry 'bout that. Rob.

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Re: Ultimate Paranoia
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 12:10 PM 1/22/96 +0100, Anonymous wrote: >Fellow Cypherpunks, > >I have been lurking around for some time and I have learned alot, But I have >a few questions that I either haven't seen posted or I've missed all together. > >I keep PGP stored on a removable hard drive and keep it under lock and >key when it's not in use. I write and encrypt messages on a stand-alone >computer, >that I only have access to. My passphrase is rather long and full of gibberish, >But I still fear the other things that I can not control. Gives you a headache, doesn't it? <G> Welcome to the club! > >Does anyone make and sell a device that emits white and pink noise? Reverse-biased zener diodes produce bandwidth-limited white noise. Pink noise is (I think) white noise filtered 3db per octave with a lowpass filter. > >How do you take the randomness collected from radation sensors to create >a truly random sample for creating a PGP key? Dunno. I'm not a programmer. >Is there anything else that I might be missing besides lining the walls & >computer >in tin foil? :^) The best defense is a good offense. Klaatu Burada Nikto. (Remember this... It'll become important...soon.) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMQRNTvqHVDBboB2dAQGTyQP/Vkf84+SUZLkQ1o/yXqma4M/vh5gy/KBp uyM2LarS8wL361qo8SBj8wxt1htclJmOYEyoI0A4vEdAKircsnLNK35NLA4ZZQyx oBrMGo+KY6wpz28/SbOLeslk6DcjIhbkd/r1+ntGt62QQESb7TMjG+XLaVJiu/Ri HD9vwrhrJs8= =qDYN -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Random noise from disk drives
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Don Davis has done some interesting/important/widely-referenced work on using disk latencies as a random number source. We were talking about some of his techniques, and he kindly gave me permission to forward along his email. He's not on the list, so I cc'd him. /r$ --------------------forwarded message----------------- well, if you're willing to accept a temporary peak load on your machine, then a paging rng is easy to write. the basic idea that worked is: * allocate a little more memory than is available in ram; * walk through it in steps of a prime # near 4kb or 5kb; * time each access with whatever system clock is easiest; * throw away accesses that take less than 5 millisec or so; * keep only the parity of each access that remains. naturally, on the first passes through the array, you'll get mostly fast accesses; thereafter, most accesses will cause page-faults. mostly a page-fault's access-time reflects where the page was on the disk, where the head and spindle were before the page-fault, etc. that's why you keep only the parity. however, you're not going to get a bit of entropy from every access, by any means. the reason for a prime-valued step is that you want to be sure of visiting every page, but you don't want to have to know the page-size. (i haven't checked this trick yet; i used 2kb or 4kb steps, if i remember correctly). the reason for the 5 msec cutoff is that it's rare for a disk access to happen so fast, and you want to screen out other causes of non-immediate memory accesses. you'll only get a real access that fast, if at the moment of the page-fault, the head's already in the right track, and if the block you want is less than a third of a rev away from the head. i used a byte-indexed table to get the parity quickly. you don't really need to bother packing the parity bits into bytes; store the 1's and 0's as chars into the md5 buffer, & hash it; then, put the hash itself into the buffer, xor more 1's & 0's back in on top, rehash, etc. running md5 8 times as often as necessary doesn't matter. note that this algorithm should defeat caching disk controllers, but i haven't checked for sure. if it doesn't, the symptom will be long stretches of fast access-times. any fancy stuff you put in, like feeding noise-bits back into your path through the array, is a bad idea; first, it really only adds pseudo-randomness; second, it's liable to reduce the frequency of page-faults. though i knew it was a bad idea, i tried it anyway, lots of ways, and that's what i found. simple is best. really, the only complicated code should be outside the rng: reallocating when memory availability changes, minimizing the ui, stuff like that. it is worthwhile to run find, or some other filesys- traversing program, while you're running the paging-rng. the benefit is not from the changed paging-times, but from the extra head-motion, which perturbs the spindle speed. if you choose to measure the rng's quality, study the raw parity-bits, not the hashed output. the hashes would look perfectly random, even if the parity bits were periodic. look for periodicity (fft), long-term autocorrelation, and measure the entropy with an entropy estimator. don't bother with runs tests and the others; the hashing will produce nice output bits, even if the parity inputs are periodic or are highly correlated in the long-run. but if they're not periodic and uncorrelated, the output bits will be random, instead of pseudo-random. on the only machine i studied closely, i got 100 bits/min, with a 1 khz interrupt-clock; if your interrupt schedule is more frequent, then you can expect proportionally more entropy. remember that even for long rsa keys, you only need enough entropy to prevent exhaustive key-search. use 100 bits or so to seed the prng, then use the prng to generate a prime. reseed for each prime, and as often as you can for symmetric session-keys. i don't trust pseudo-random key-generation (it's no surprise that i don't, i suppose). please let me know if anything comes of this, like if someone builds it properly before i get around to it. i suppose i ought to build it, test it, and write a paper about how much fun it was, but i have too much work, and too many papers to write. -don davis, boston -----------------egassem dedrawrof--------------------

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FORSALE: HP48GX
by teg 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Given the usefulness of an HP calculator as a secure point of encryption, someone might be interested in my old calculator. I haven't used it since I graduated, except for balancing my old business books, way overkill. I'd love to give it a good home. HP 48 GX Calculator The most powerful calculator in the world Currently loaded with many Applied Math and Engineering programs written by myself (yours free with the calculator ;-) About 2 years old, excellent condition $125, negotiable HP IR Calculator Printer Infrared printer for the HP line of calculators Very light, battery operated About 2 years old, excellent condition $75, negotiable Please contact me if you are interested. My apologies if you consider this post selfinterest and off topic. - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBMQRl3CoZzwIn1bdtAQGoYQF9GrClhiKQZgx9RApC2G7fwRZllDV8sNcx sX+Vr8tk1FqXRqZkCHa6UrZRS3xm/91o =pzQ7 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Random noise from disk drives
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

**I blew it.** Don's address is don(a)cam.ov.com. Sorry.

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Query over PZ
by tallpaul＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anonymous User had a question over PZ's politics. PZ has posted to the list and thus has, I believe, his address available to list subscribers. How did PZ answer the question privately when Anonymous User posed the question to PZ on private e-mail? If Anonymous User did not first pose the question to PZ privately, why did he post it to the list publically? -- tallpaul PS: I'm likely to have some followup on these questions, but wanted to pose them to AU first.

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