December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

International Capital Flows Called Criminal
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Financial Times, April 24, 1996, p. 8. US prosecutor attacks bank secrecy laws By Clay Harris Mr John Moscow, assistant district attorney for Manhattan: "Bank secrecy statutes in international finance are used by crooks, tax evaders, securities fraudsters, and capital flight fellows; they are used by narcotics dealers. But they are not needed by honest folks engaged in honest transactions." Now the last time I looked, 'Capital Flight' was as legal as church on a Sunday. Or is this a proposal for exchange controls. Is this guy a state or federal prosecutor? He was also unable to come up with legitimate reasons for $3 Billion to go from Egypt to the Bahamas. I can think of any one of a number of legal reasons, one being "International Tax Planning." DCF

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Re: arbiter/escrow agent for hire
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 0:23 4/25/96, Rich Graves wrote [paraphrased] >So are there any arbiters out there who would deal in non-digital cash? Or >someone who would convert US$ to Ecash for a smalle fee? I will be happy to do USD to Ecash conversions for a nominal fee. Disclaimer: My opinions are my own, not those of my employer. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.

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Re: Anonymous banking
by rkmoore＠iol.ie 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

4/24/96, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote: >>But Washington last year ranked Austria alongside Colombia, Venezuela and >>Thailand in a league table of nations that tolerate money laundering. Ha ha! The U.S. and Panama probably exceed all of the above in laundering, but of course the USA/CIA doesn't notice those, since they're "in the family". -rkm

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trusting the processor chip
by us028272＠interramp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Fri, 29 Mar 1996, JEFF C FLYNN wrote: > Does anyone know of articles regarding the possibility of subverting > processor chips? Is this a realistic threat? Is it possible to hack vhdl > compilers to embed intentional security flaws in silicon? Known cases? > Attempts? > TIA, > Jeff I received several responses to this question. My favorite was as follows... >This is probably science fiction, particularly at the VHDL level. >Maybe someone could make a crime of opportunity out of a microcode >flaw, but there's a risk of it being found out during testing. > >To do it right would require collusion of the design and test teams. >They need to ensure the back door stays closed, isn't tickled by >"normal" testing and only opens when really requested. So a lot of >people are in on the secret even before it gets exploited for >nefarious purposes. > >And what nefarious purposes would pay for the risks and costs of this? >If the secret got out, the design team, product line, and company >would be dead in the marketplace and probably spend the rest of their >lives responding to lawsuits. What could you use this for that is >worth the risk? > >Trying to do it to the compiler (like Thompson inserting a back door >in login using the Unix C compiler) is, again, theoretically possible. >But the only reason to hack the compiler would be to do the deed >without involving the processor development team. Risky in terms of >building a reliable back door and the risk of detection. It might not >work and the changes might be detected. To do it right would probably >involve as many technical people as the processor development itself. >Even "high grade threats" have finite resources -- there aren't that >many processor design gurus in the world to start with. > >At best, this might make a good plot element for Tom Clancy.> > >Rick. >smith(a)sctc.com secure computing corporation Still, I'm left feeling a little uneasy. My reasons for this are 1) Trusting the processor means trusting something I don't fully understand. 2) Processors these days are extremely complex. 3) On April 3rd, at Interop, Peter Neumann (in his keynote presentation) disclosed that a random number generator chip used in slot machines had been compromised. This lead to a huge bogus jackpot, and an investigation that revealed the scheme. It looks like I may have no other option than to give some processor some degree of trust. Which processor I should choose, and why that one? TIA, Jeff _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ Specializing in the Design and Implementation of SECURE NETWORKS JEFF FLYNN & ASSOCIATES NETWORK SECURITY CONSULTING 19 PERRYVILLE IRVINE, CALIF. 92720 JEFF FLYNN TELEPHONE (714)551-6398 PRINCIPAL _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

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coderpunks not elite
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) > Well, I was not invited to join the elite and secret coderpunks list, but I > still have some thoughts on coding and, especially, on the opportunities > offered by Java. As far as I know, the coderpunks list is neither secret nor elite. I joined it about a month ago, andd there wasn't any problem. Just send mail to majordomo(a)toad.com saying "subscribe coderpunks". It's just as easy as cypherpunks. According to majordomo, coderpunks has 355 subscribers, compared to 1284 for cypherpunks. These numbers are hardly representative of an elite list. The biggest difference between the lists is volume. Some days coderpunks gets a dozen or more messages, but for the last two or three days for example there haven't been any at all. The other difference of course is that coderpunks is for technical discussions. Where philosophy comes up it is more in terms of issues of security and reliability than politics. I do share Tim's concern about the political views of coderpunks subscribers. Despite the "punks" in the name it seems to be somewhat more of a mainstream group. Nevertheless I am determined to act as though the group favors unlimited access to privacy tools by individuals and to post under that assumption. If it comes to the point that someone complains there may have to be some air clearing but I don't think it's likely to come up. If the archives at hks.net ever come back people could take a look and see if they would be interested in subscribing. Mostly the discussions are pretty dry. A lot of them are on specific issues that are of interest probably to only a few people. It remains to be seen really whether the list can sustain itself. This has been the problem in the past with offspring lists. Cypherpunks continues to have a lot of vitality. What I object to most is the back and forth arguments people get into. I don't mind reading one message off-topic, but to have the thread drag on for days, with dozens of messages, is wasteful. People should just make their points and let them stand. They shouldn't feel they have to keep coming back and refuting the other guy. Hal

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Java security weaknesses
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This is a quick summary of the attacks listed in "Java Security: From HotJava to Netscape and Beyond", by Drew Dean, Edward W. Felten, and Dan S. Wallach, Department of Computer Science, Princeton University. <URL: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/pub/secure96.html >. Only attacks on Netscape will be listed here. Several more were found in HotJava, but that product is moribund at present. The version of Netscape used is 2.0. Denial of service attacks Busy-wait to consume CPU cycles Allocate memory until no more is available Lock crucial system classes, e.g. java.net.INetAddress. Blocks all hostname lookups. Several other classes are suitable for this attack. Denial of service attacks can be moderated to degradation of service, possibly after a time delay, to make someone else's product look bad. Covert Channels Can send mail via an SMTP port on server Lookup fictitious DNS name to send out info Tell browser to access fictitious URL (can be redirected back) Information available to applets Can benchmark machine by reading system clock Java hashcode() defaults to address of object, might leak some info Implementation errors DNS hack allowing connections to any machine (has been patched) Java disassembler (javap) has buffer overflows (not normally run by users) Inter-Applet security Applets running from previous pages can learn of new applets by getting a handle to the top-level ThreadGroup and enumerating every thread running in the system. Can then call stop() and setPriority() on threads belonging to other applets, making them appear slow and unreliable. Bytecode problem The big one: Java bytecode safety checker doesn't detect illegality of constructor() { try { super() } catch (Exception e) {} } This is not legal in the language - super() must not be called in a try clause. But the bytecode checker erroneously allows it. This allows subclasses of privileged system classes to be created. Normally those classes throw an exception in their constructor so they can't be instantiated. But this trick allows it. This way users can create their own ClassLoaders, SecurityManagers, etc. By creating a hacked ClassLoader the Java class type system can be defeated by resolving different classes against each other. Any non static variable can be set, any public method can be called, including native methods. The security is gone. Package name problem If the first character of a package name is / the system will attempt to load code from an absolute path, which would be trusted since it comes from the local disk. Any Java class which the attacker can get onto the user's disk can then be loaded in trusted mode. Classes can be gotten onto disk simply by fetching URL's in Netscape, which puts them into its cache. If you can figure out Netscape's class naming scheme you can then run any class, trusted. (I think this one has been patched.)

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Re: Golden Key Campaign
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: frantz(a)netcom.com (Bill Frantz) > Some people say that the millennium comes on Jan 1, 2000. Others say it > comes on January 1, 2001. I say it comes on September 20, 2000 when the > RSA patent expires. It is traditional to commemorate big events with annual observances. I say there's no reason the observances can't predate the event when it is known in advance. So I propose that September 20 be known as Crypto Freedom Day, and an annual celebration be held on that day. With each year closer to 2000 the party gets bigger, culminating on the day that the patent actually expires. We can all run our RSA in three lines of Java that Adam Back will have prepared, and taste for the first time the freedom which the rest of the world will have known for the past 17 years. Hal

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ANNOUNCE: new Microsoft Code Signing mailing list
by Microsoft Internet Announcements 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

CodeSign on ListAdmin(a)lists.msn.com CodeSign is a mailing list (discussion list) for discussions on Microsoft's Windows Trust Verification Services, a set of API's which determine whether a software component contains digital certificates that identify it as being authentic software released by a publisher trusted on the local user's system. For more information about Code Signing, see <http://www.microsoft.com/intdev/>. You can subscribe to the regular mailing list or a digest version. To subscribe, send e-mail to ListAdmin(a)lists.msn.com with the following text in the message body (not subject line): subscribe CodeSign your(a)email.address or digest CodeSign your(a)email.address where your(a)mail.address is your actual e-mail address (don't just use "your(a)mail.address"). To unsubscribe, send e-mail to ListAdmin(a)lists.msn.com with the following text in the message body (not subject line): unsubscribe CodeSign your(a)email.address To send a message to the subscribers of the list, send e-mail to CodeSign(a)lists.msn.com.

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Re: Golden Key Campaign
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:22 PM 4/24/96 -0700, Wei Dai <weidai(a)eskimo.com> wrote: >On Wed, 24 Apr 1996, Hal wrote: >You can do signatures with Rabin too. I have a version of it in >Crypto++ 2.0. It's been out for a while and RSA hasn't bothered me about >it. >Does anyone want to explain why, given the alternatives, people continue >to use RSA and pay for it? Sure. Because 1) it's a good algorithm for the job, 2) we've learned it, and have a PGP base behind our inertia, 3) The legalities of RSA are well-defined, 4) the Stanford patents mostly run out in 1997, unless Roger's suit succeeds first, 5) the price of RSA is fairly low, once free RSAREF came out 6) the price of licensing Cylink patents is high and/or unpredictable # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215

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Re: Is the public involved in the crypto policy debate?
by tallpaul＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Apr 26, 1996 02:05:40, 'tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May)' wrote: > >(If we were leftist theoreticians, we could debate for years or even >decades whether our movement is truly a mass movement, or just a vanguard >movement, etc.) > >--Tim May > I do not mind being trolled from time to time. Based on my anthropological, political, and journalistic researches, I look at cypherpunks as a heterogeneous, not homogenous, movement. By this, I mean that it can be examined in a variety of ways based on significantly different points. 1) Development (more accurately spread) of public key crypto: definitely vanguard. 2) Development and spread of anon remailers: definitely vanguard. 3) Opposition to CDA, etc.: Part of a smallish mass movement. Participation in the movement definitely limited to a small number of issues involved. E.G. good contributions to publicity; no contribution to issues of mass sexual hysteria around "kiddie porn," etc. 4) Other issues, like future role of e-cash, etc. Not vanguard, not mass movement, a "bunch of loons." --tallpaul

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