December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Hack Lotus?
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Phill writes: > > I've been thinking about how I would do the lotus hack. I certainly would not be > wanting to do a public key operation for the benefit of the government on every > message. How about the following: > > During installation of program: > Select a random key ER, encrypt it under the govt. public key to give Eg(ER). > To start encrypting, > > chose a random value R, encrypt under destination public key to give Ek(R) > set 40 bits of R to 0 to produce R' > Encrypt R' under ER to give E-ER(R') > Hash R, E-ER(R') and Eg(ER) with a one way function (MDMF like) to produce the > actual key. > Send across Ek(R), E-ER(R'), Eg(ER) > To decrypt the message one needs the information for the escrow authority. > > Phill Wouldn't this interoperate only with other systems which had a similar setup? I suspect the Lotus wants the US-Domestic and the International versions to interoperate transparently, including with their older versions. Kaufman describes the encryption setup of Notes in moderate detail on pages 448-454 of 'Network Security'. It's a typical mixed system, with a secret key encrypted under the recipient's Public key (a short one or a long one, depending on the local of the recipient and/or sender). I suspect that Lotus has not completely reworked it's security system for the international version, and that they are in fact doing a second public key operation on the 3 bytes of GAK'd data. If they're nasty, they'll check on the receiving side as well, to ensure that the LEAF and/or the espionage-enabling key have not been patched in the sending 'International' version. Peter Trei trei(a)process.com Peter Trei Senior Software Engineer Purveyor Development Team Process Software Corporation http://www.process.com trei(a)process.com

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ITAR and hash functions (Perry's question)
by Phil Karn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Perry quoted part of the joint declaration of facts in my case and asked >Would this not mean that the government is estopped from ever again >claiming that hash functions are export controlled under the ITAR? Not according to them. They have made it clear throughout their filings that they consider each CJ request on a case-by-case basis. Furthermore, they repeatedly assert that under the power delegated to them by the President, they have the absolute power to add and delete items from the Munitions List and to make inexplicable, inconsistent and arbitrary rulings whenever they damn well feel like it, and no court can overrule them. They even feel free to ignore their own rules whenever they get too inconvenient. See my attorneys' brilliant analysis of why the ITAR as written clearly permits the export of public domain crypto code under the public domain exemption. It's about halfway through http://www.qualcomm.com/people/pkarn/export/karnresp.html But State wrote the rules, so they can ignore 'em whenever they feel like it. Why gosh, National Security is at stake! And that's something we mere mortals can't possibly know anything about. Grep for the word "estoppel" in their arguments -- I know they used it at least once to discuss this exact point. So the bottom line is this: at the moment the ODTC will let you export hash functions as long as they don't encrypt data. They'll probably grant CJ requests to that effect. But they could change their minds at any time if they feel like it. Isn't it wonderful to live under a government of laws, not of men? Phil

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Re: Wipe Swap File
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:38 PM 1/20/96, Dr. Dimitri Vulis wrote: >tallpaul(a)pipeline.com (tallpaul) writes: >> Remember that one simple wipe is *not* secure. Current Department of >> Defense security regs call for wiping the same space something like 8 or 9 >> times. Even then the wipe is not secure enough for higher level DofD >> classified material. There the regs call for the physical destruction of >> the medium after it has been wiped. > >Degaussing the media (running a household magnet over it :-) may be an option. Ordinary household magnets fail for a couple of reasons: 1. Their field strength is not high enough to affect modern media, due to the extremely high coercivity of modern media. (Try it out, you'll be surprised at hard it is to really change a lot of bits with a household magnet.) 2. Most "swap files," as used above, are of course on hard drives. Encased in metal. In any case, the nearest a household magnet can get to the surface is several centimeters. Unless the magnet is very large (such as the 20-pounder I have from my childhood days), the field strength will drop drastically in several centimeters. (Modern disk drives, and even modern videotape machines, use very high-coercivity coatings, including pure metal, and the heads must ride very close to the media to flip the domains. A magnet several centimeters away is effectively at infinity.) 3. A time-varying field is preferred. Bulk erasers work this way, by plugging into an a.c. socket and generating a time-varying field. And even these are getting harder to use to erase video tapes, for example, due to the high coercivity of modern media. Most folks I know no longer even try to bulk erase tapes. >1. Does anyone know a cheap way to recover the traces of the previous >(overwritten) recordings on the media? There are custom drives for various media which have multiple heads, and heads that can be "jogged" a little bit. This allows, I have read, the subtle variations of multiple writes to be extracted. Much more expensive would be various electron microscope-based imaging methods to directly image the domains and extract subtle signs of past write cycles. --Tim May Boycott espionage-enabled software! 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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Re: Wipe Swap File
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 12:56 PM 1/21/96 EST, Dr. Dimitri Vulis wrote: >tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) writes: >> >Degaussing the media (running a household magnet over it :-) may be an optio >> >> Ordinary household magnets fail for a couple of reasons: > >I've just established experimentally that thoroughly running a household magnet >over a 3.5" floppy messed up less than 1/2 the sectors I tried to read. Was that with the floppy in the case, or with the case popped open... Also: Did you rotate the disk physically to expose the data normally partially shielded by the door slider? And was it an ordinary ferrite magnet, or an alnico, or...? >Not a good option even for floppies. Ditto! >(Actually, there _was a smiley up there) Yes, I noticed. <G> [stuff deleted] >Jim Bell mentioned the trick of hiding information into 'extra' tracks and >sectors not used by the usual DOS formatting. It's very old too. I will admit that at this point, even calling it a "trick" is giving it excessive credence. Actually, I think it wasn't really used initially for "data hiding" purposes. I'm talking about the early days of CP/M and other such systems, circa 1977 and such, when individuals "discovered" that floppy drives had no hard mechanical stop past the "last" good track, and they "stole" a few percent of extra capacity from a floppy by simply ignoring the recommended "last" track. Naturally, it would work okay on some drives but not on others... which is why it was a bad idea. In addition, I also discovered that it was possible to put a few more than 26 sectors on each track of an 8" single-density (240 kilobytes!) floppy disk. The main problem with using these "tricks" is that the floppy had no method of conveying formatting information to the system it was in, which meant that any floppy using this trick was by definition non-standard. ("feature" or "bug" depending on your goal...) > I think I saw >copy protection schemes circa 1982 that hid important data on tracks 41--43. >360K diskettes normally had 40 tracks. If the diskette was copies by DISKCOPY, >it didn't know about the extra tracks, and the copy didn't have the info >(usually, a piece of the program). It's very easy to do with just BIOS calls to >format/read/write the track. Problem is, many cheap floppy drives these days >aren't capable of seeking beyond track 80 when the FDC asks them to. You can >write the data there and give the floppy to a friend who won't be able to read >it from there. I started building my own 12.5 MHz Z-80 -based CP/M system in 1978, fully designed and wire-wrapped by myself, and wrote my own BIOS. (Used a WDC 1791 FDC) Had total control. I didn't try this trick even then because of compatibility reasons, but one thing I _DID_ do was to write a floppy formatter that "undid" the 6-sector skewing that standard CP/M had to do to keep up with the data read/write. (in other words, I physically re-skewed the sector numbering to make the next "desired" sector come faster...) I ended up with an effective skew-factor of 2. Even a skew factor of 1 worked on my system (no skew at all), but the problem was that when I gave the most extreme of these oddly skewed floppies to my friends with 8" floppies, they took A LONG TIME to read the data! (Their systems always missed the next sector because their systems were too slow, so they only ended up being able to read one sector per disk rotation.) All this helps to explain why I asked if PGP had ever been ported to CP/M. Nostalgia! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMQMF6vqHVDBboB2dAQG1+QP7BpyrLaVbTJISLo12rWMo9sqyfwtpv6A2 r7GGTvQTw6MwACA3pTh6HnnjpllveQSznNLpHaUeEjfpQX9NUXuJc4Z63E+EBFYw Xp3c0rygdC4fHS2WJbrhn0JUpC1C5V+Cn/oEpL5qygfaoqE1mAvsw7cCAht44ne+ /dJvdnm+N9M= =CbtQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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V-chip?
by oO F145C0 Oo 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Apparently the US government is planning on starting up its V-chip program again, which will allow public/cable TV to be censored at will. What does everyone thing about this ploy? And whats next? Chips in my radio, to prevent music, or a chip in my phone to make sure i dont call anyone bad? The V-chip is just as much a privacy/1st amendment violation as the clipper chip is/was. I believe the worst part of the V-chip plan, is to force all new TV's manufactured or imported to the US, to have this new chip. Could this chip even be part of a Chinese lottery? ......fiasco

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"PRZ a nazi" to be retracted
by Philip Zimmermann 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Sunday Telegraph of London printed a story last Sunday about neo-nazis using PGP to encrypt their communications. The story said that PGP was devised by an American neo-nazi sympathizer. As the creator of PGP, and a human rights activist, I was outraged by such a defamation from a major newspaper. I called my lawyer Phil Dubois, who seemed to look forward to having some fun with this newspaper. Not wanting to wait around till the morning, and slow lawyers, I called Robin Gedye, the reporter in Bonn who wrote the story, at 7am Monday morning Bonn time, and woke him up at home. I introduced myself and told him how I felt about it. He had never heard of me, the Clipper chip, the controversies of cryptography, and knew nothing about PGP outside of the couple of sentences in his story that mentioned PGP. He said it wasn't really so bad, because he didn't specifically identify me by name. One can imagine the effectiveness of that excuse with me. I then went into some detail with him to bring him up to speed. I also called his editor in London, who also had never heard of me or PGP. After some checking, they discovered that the Daily Telegraph, a related newspaper, had run an article about my case just a week before. They also found about 20 recent articles on me in the UK press. The editor said that my story "checks out". It was good to know that they now believed that I was not a neo-nazi after all. Anyway, Mr. Gedye says that the Sunday Telegraph will print a retraction next Sunday. Not just a little retraction, but a whole article on the subject, written by Mr. Gedye himself. I'm glad to see that this probably means that he will dig into the subject more, in order to write such an article. I guess this means maybe I'll find some other things to occupy Phil Dubois's time. -Philip Zimmermann 23 Jan 96

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Hack Java
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This illustrates the difference between a language with no dangerous constructs, and one where you must trust the implementation. >From some internal OSF email: ---------- Begin Forwarded Message ---------- class Data { // an object storing 16 bytes byte word[16]; } class Trick { Data data; long tricky_pointer; } Now suppose, I fake a compiler (or I have a malicious compiler) and I generate by hand malicious byte code such that in the symbol tables, tricky_pointer and data have the same offset. Then if I have the code tricky_pointer = 10000; for (; tricky_pointer < 50000 ;) { dumptofile(trick.data) tricky_pointer += 16; } what I am doing with this code is that I am actually setting the data object reference to point to address 10000, then I am core dumping the contents of memory upto address 50000, 16 bytes at a time! The byte code is completely legal, I have cheated with the field offsets so that I can access to the same memory as two different types. In order to detect that the byte code verifier must verify that all the fields of an object do not overlap in their memory layout. That's what has to be checked. ----------- End Forwarded Message -----------

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Re: SS Obergruppenfuhrer Zimmermann (NOT!)
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:21 PM 1/23/96 -0800, Simon Spero wrote: >On Tue, 23 Jan 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > >> Alan Horowitz writes: >>>[...] >> Okay. I think I understand. You're a fruitcake. Easy enough. > >The official pastry of the 1996 Cypherpunks. > >One might note that Zimmerman isn't, er, a common name for yer typical >Neo-Nazi... This sort of accusation is sufficient grounds for libel in >the UK (such accusations have been found to be defamatory, and would >almost certainly be settled within a few days. > >Of course Phil (Hallam Baker) has more experience with this sort of >thing... >Simon Maybe this is common knowledge, but the name "Zimmermann" and crypto had another relationship, in World War I. If anybody knows more about this incident than my vague recollection of the famous "Zimmermann cipher" would you care to tell the story?

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"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail"
by Perry E. Metzger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Phill refers to the man who said "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail", (Henry L. Stimson) as a twit. I highly disagree. In some ways I regard him as our patron saint (although the man was actually far from saintly and later as a member of the Roosevelt cabinet adopted an opposite policy of aggressive signals intelligence.) Why is he our patron saint? He was a government official coming out against invasion of privacy. Isn't that what we are all after, in the end? The reason we deploy cryptography is to assure privacy for all. We often refer to those who listen in on conversations (regardless of who they are) as, in some sense, our opposition. Therefore, is not Stimson's remark in closing down Yardley's "Black Chamber" to be praised rather than attacked? Perry

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Re: "This post is G-Rated"
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

... Discussion of rating systems elided. Does anyone have suggestions for achieving the goals of the V-Chip with many non-govermental rating agencies? It seems to me that empowering parents would head off the TV/Internet censors. Any parent who was interested in acting as a censor for their children's TV/Internet would be happy to pay an extra $20 or so for the technical means to achieve that goal. The big problem is how are the labels attached to the programs. I agree with Tim that it is probably imposible for individual Usenet postings. However is should be possible for TV programs, and whole newsgroups. BTW - I think that such hardware/software is a wonderful way train hackers. Most of the teenagers I know, know more about their home electronics than their parents do. And the teenagers RTFM. Bill

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