December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

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by agil.home＠mail.telepac.pt 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

unsubscrive * agil.home(a)mail.telepac.pt unsubscrive * agil.home(a)mail.telepac.pt unsubscrive * agil.home(a)mail.telepac.pt

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NSA Oil
by cpunk＠remail.ecafe.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

NYT, 5 April, 1996 Pentagon Spy Agency Bares Some Dusty Secret Papers By Tim Weiner Washington, April 4 -- The National Security Agency, the Pentagon spy service that eavesdrops on global communications, said today that it had declassified more than 1.3 million pages of secret documents, some from before World War I. All the declassified material is more than 50 years old, older than the agency itself, and represents a tiny fragment of the billions of pages of Government documents that have been kept secret on the grounds that their release would damage national security. Agency officials were at a loss to explain why these documents, now at the National Archives, had remained secret for so long. Among the documents declassified today is a January 1919 memorandum from CoL A. W. Bloor of the Army, a commander in the American Expeditionary Force in France, explaining the origin of the "code talkers," American Indian soldiers who spoke in their native tongues to confound enemy code breakers in World War I and World War II. Their languages were largely unwritten and largely unstudied by foreigners, and so constituted an instant code translatable only by the speakers. "The German was a past master at the art of 'Listening In,' " on radio transmissions, the memorandum says. "It was therefore necessary to code every message of importance and coding and decoding took valuable time." Then, Colonel Bloor wrote, he remembered that he had a company of Indians in his regiment who among them spoke 26 languages or dialects, and that "there was hardly a chance in a million" that the Germans could translate them. David Hatch, the National Security Agency's historian, said Choctaws, Navajos, Comanches, Winnebagos, Pawnees, Kiowas and Cherokees served as code talkers. In World War II, he said, the Marine Corps used more than 400 Navajos as communicators in the Pacific campaign. That story has been popularized by Hollywood films, documentaries and books. Mr. Hatch said he could not explain why the documents stayed secret for so long. The agency's archives run into the billions of pages, and the agency, loath to disclose anything concerning codes, has only begun to consider declassifying documents in the past four years. "We have so many pages and we've only been at it for a few years," Mr. Hatch said. "The interesting thing to me is that this is coming out. What was known only to insiders is now becoming known to historians and outsiders." ----- WSJ, 5 April, 1996 Secret Cables of '43 And the Hiss Case May I offer a distinction that may clarify a point in Eric Breindel's March 14 editorial-page piece "New Evidence in the Hiss Case?" The matter deals with the newly released Soviet cables dated from 1943 to the early Cold War, and intercepted and solved by the National Security Agency and its predecessors in a project called Venona. As Mr. Breindel states, "The single most interesting document in the new Venona batch is a March 30,1945, Washington-to-Moscow report on an agent whose cover name was 'Ales.' The cable was decrypted on Aug. 8, 1969, and the NSA glossary ... explains that 'Ales' is 'probably Alger Hiss.' " A distinction must be made between the test of the cables and the identification of the individuals mentioned in the text only by code name. The cables were cryptanalyzed. The internal cross-checks in this work make the likelihood of their being incorrectly solved all but zero. This means that the code names are almost certainly right. But the determination that a particular code name represents a particular individual did not come from cryptanalysis. It came from FBI field investigations. I have no reason to question their accuracy, but they stand on a different basis than codebreaking. This is why NSA qualified the Ales=Hiss identification with a "probably." David Kahn, Great Neck, N.Y. (Mr. Kahn was scholar in residence at the National Security Agency in 1995.) -----

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Why pay???
by kreidl＠newrock.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >Thanks for your interest in Cypherpunks Lite. > >I provide a moderated version of the Cypherpunks list called >"Cypherpunks Lite". A one year subscription costs US$20 and is >payable by check or money order to "Communication Security Corp". >Cypherpunks Lite is available in either individual messages or a >more-or-less daily message digest. The content of both are the same. >In either case, I forward approximately 5 - 10% of the total >Cypherpunks feed. This works out to about 5 - 10 messages / day. > >To take a look at what you can expect there is an archive of the previous >selections organized by month at ftp://ftp.crl.com/users/co/comsec/cp-lite. >The files with the extension .gz are compressed using gzip. > >If you would like to subscribe, please send payment to: > > Communication Security Corp. > 1275 Fourth Street, Suite 194 > Santa Rosa, CA 95404 USA > >Be sure to provide the email address you want us to use, as well as >indicating your preference for individual messages or the digest. > Why would I pay if I can get it for free this way?????? ÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑ Chris (or Richard) Kreidl Ñ kreidl(a)newrock.com Ñ ÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑ

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RC4 improvement idea
by Jack Mott 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I got a paper from the cryptography technical report server "http://www.itribe.net/CTRS/" about a weak class of RC4 keys. The report said that with some keys, it was possible to predict what some parts of the State-Box would be. I was thinking of a way to fix this, and had this idea: do some sort of hashing function with the key that derives a number between 55 and 500 or something like that, then scrabmle the S-box that many times. In this way, the chances that the State-Box will have any correlation becomes extremely small. I think it is 1/125 to begin with anyway, so this would make it around 1/(125*NumPasses). And since the exact number of passes is a function of the key, the cracker won't know how many times it went through. I tried this out and having 1000s of passes doesn't effect the randomness of the state-box in any negative way, possibly it makes it more random? If anyone has any thoughts I'd love to hear them. -- thecrow(a)iconn.net "It can't rain all the time"

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Re: Blue Water spooks
by nyap＠mailhub.garban.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Have the Chinese turned their thought towards cryptography, > or cryptanalysis yet? If so, I suspect the answer is > yes, If not, then the answer is a definate No. > > The Chinese Intelligence Service traditionally has > not looked outward, preferring to ply its trade domestically. > That said, the earliest extant text on espionage is Chinese. In addition, (if I remember correctly from _The Puzzle Palace_), a person who was heavily initially involved in the formation of NSA also helped establishing the Chinese Intelligence Service. Also from the same book, in the US has set up, with Chinese approval, a sigint shop within China. This was done to sigint the Russians. With the tensions between the US and China now, I'm not sure whether they closed shop or not.

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rc4 weak keys fix?
by Jack Mott 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I got a paper from the cryptography technical report server "http://www.itribe.net/CTRS/" about a weak class of RC4 keys. The report said that with some keys, it was possible to predict what some parts of the State-Box would be. I was thinking of a way to fix this, and had this idea: do some sort of hashing function with the key that derives a number between 55 and 500 or something like that, then scrabmle the S-box that many times. In this way, the chances that the State-Box will have any correlation becomes extremely small. I think it is 1/125 to begin with anyway, so this would make it around 1/(125*NumPasses). And since the exact number of passes is a function of the key, the cracker won't know how many times it went through. I tried this out and having 1000s of passes doesn't effect the randomness of the state-box in any negative way, possibly it makes it more random? If anyone has any thoughts I'd love to hear them. -- thecrow(a)iconn.net "It can't rain all the time"

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Re:
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:52 PM 4/4/96, AndrÈ Gil wrote: > unsubscrive * agil.home(a)mail.telepac.pt > unsubscrive * agil.home(a)mail.telepac.pt > unsubscrive * agil.home(a)mail.telepac.pt What the hell is going on? We seem to be under attack by foreigners. --Tim Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed

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Re: unsubscrive * Peter.Posch@koeln.netsurf.de
by David Loysen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:33 PM 4/4/96 -0500, you wrote: >On Thu, 4 Apr 1996, Peter N. Posch wrote: > >> unsubscrive * Peter.Posch(a)koeln.netsurf.de > >Why don't we just patch Majordomo to recognize "unsubscrive", >"unsuscribe", "unscribe," and "take me off this fucking list" as all being >equal to "unsubscribe"? > If these people had sent their messages to majordomo that would work.

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Re: "Contempt" charges likely to increase
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:57 AM 4/5/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote: >So, I see a rise in the use of "contempt" charges. Contempt charges have a >kind of time limit, in practice, and there is a common interpretation that >a person may be jailed on contempt charges so long as there is likelihood >that she will eventually reveal the information sought. (Reporters have >been jailed for more than six months, and I recall that Rebecca Morgan was >jailed for a couple of years for refusing to tell the court the whereabouts >of her daughter...) Hence the proper approach which is to constantly demonstrate your contempt for the court. Daily (hourly) phone calls, faxes, email, physical letters going on in boring detail all the reasons that you have for never purging yourself of the contempt. Logically, that should shorten your imprisonment but in practice... Obviously offshore key escrow facilities should have provisions similar to those in Foreign Asset Protection Trusts (FAPS). For example (from a recent non-fiction work on FAPTs written by one of the greatest minds of his generation): ******************* Duress Provisions The trust document should also contain language that basically says, "The Trustees should not obey any instructions that anyone else gives them under the orders of any court that has no jurisdiction over them." You see, a foreign-based trust is not under the jurisdiction of a court in any other country. A court can only order people to do things if it has them under its physical control. For example, a German court cannot send the police to Bermuda or to the Channel Islands to force your trust's trustees to transfer trust assets to the court for payment to creditors. What creditors in a German court will try to do in such cases is to find someone in their jurisdiction who has some powers over the trust. They then order this person to direct the Trustees to cough up the trust assets. A duress clause frees the Trustees from any obligation to obey instructions caused by orders from a German court. It is a powerful method of protecting your trust from the asset grabbers. But, you may ask, "What if a persistent creditor manages through some miracle to get an order against the trustees from a court in the foreign jurisdiction where the trust is located? That's easy. You include "flight provisions" in your trust. Flight Provisions You know that German courts or those of any other country will have no jurisdiction over your offshore trust assets. But what do you do if a really dedicated creditor tries to pursue your trust in the courts of the trust's home jurisdiction. Flight provisions take care of this situation. These provisions will require that the location (situs) of either the trust or the trust assets (or both) be changed automatically, in the event that creditors move against your trust in its home location. So even if they do manage to get a court order against your trust, the trust will have been moved to another jurisdiction. Your creditors will have to start all over again. It is important to realize that having a "flight" clause in your trust is no guarantee that the trust will successfully escape. The trust and its assets must be moved in time. It is possible that the trustees will fail to act in time and your trust may be frozen in its foreign jurisdiction. These provisions do add an additional layer of protection, however. If you do run into financial problems, you may move your trust in advance of need -- before any lawsuits are filed. You can also protect yourself further if your investments are physically located in a third jurisdiction -- neither in your country of residence nor in the trust jurisdiction. Trustee Switching Provisions In addition to moving the trust itself, you may also want or need to change Trustees. Trustee switching provisions give power to both the Trustee and the Trust Protector to remove Trustees and name new Trustees. For example, if Trustees in one country come under court order to relinquish the trust's assets, those Trustees can be removed and replaced with new Trustees, who are not affected by the court order. ********************** DCF

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.sig followup
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:52 PM 4/4/96 +0200, Ulf Moeller quotes: >"In some ways the online environment in 1996 feels like Hong Kong in the >last days of British rule: a very free community wondering what's going to >happen as the forces of law and order start moving in." -- Charles Platt A better analogy would be free, peaceful, self governing Denmark waiting for the jack booted Nazi thugs to arrive and start hauling people off to jail. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | dead teenagers | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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