December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: questions about bits and bytes [NOISE]
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:20 AM 4/12/96, JonWienke(a)aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 96-04-11 20:26:44 EDT, jeffb(a)sware.com writes: > >>[I told myself I was going to stay out of this, but Jim Bell's dogmatic >>stance irks me... ] Here's a citation from "Portability of C Programs >>and the Unix System" by S.C. Johnson and D.M. Ritchie (yes, that Richie) >>in the Bell System Technical Journal volume 57, Number 6, July-August 1978. > >Citing sources from 1978 in the computing field is a little like using >dictionaries from the 1800's to dictate modern English usage. My desktop ... I've been ignoring most of these quibbles about the definition of "byte" and when it came about, etc., but the debate never seems to end. I went to the Jargon File (aka The Hacker's Dictionary), where a nice online version resides at http://beast.cc.emory.edu/Jargon30/JARGON.HTML This is what I found: byte : /bi:t/ [techspeak] n. A unit of memory or data equal to the amount used to represent one character; on modern architectures this is usually 8 bits, but may be 9 on 36-bit machines. Some older architectures used `byte' for quantities of 6 or 7 bits, and the PDP-10 supported `bytes' that were actually bitfields of 1 to 36 bits! These usages are now obsolete, and even 9-bit bytes have become rare in the general trend toward power-of-2 word sizes. Historical note: The term was coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer; originally it was described as 1 to 6 bits (typical I/O equipment of the period used 6-bit chunks of information). The move to an 8-bit byte happened in late 1956, and this size was later adopted and promulgated as a standard by the System/360. The word was coined by mutating the word `bite' so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. See also nybble.

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Re: "Contempt" charges likely to increase
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"jimbell(a)pacifier.com" "jim bell" 7-APR-1996 03:10:38.36 >Over time, technology is dramatically increasing our protections: From >locks to alarms to monitoring systems to remote cameras, with bank accounts >that are secure from ordinary criminals, we are becoming less and less >dependant on government for our security. Since the ostensible purpose of >courts is nominally to protect us, if those protections begin to be replaced >by technology the logical conclusion is that courts will become less >numerous and less powerful. The problem is, that isn't happening, and the >reason is that organizations tend to act in ways to protect their own power >and influence. In fact, the average citizen is subject to far more theft of >his assets BY THE GOVERNMENT than by common criminals, so at some point we >have to realize that the government is now a net problem, rather than being >a net solution. Quite. I can see clear justifications for, say, allowing whatever money is spent on private security as a tax deduction. Unfortunately, the PC egalitarian types who don't seem to realize that inequality is a fact of life will claim that this will give the poor worse security than the rich. Yes... and the rich are the ones who need the most security. One, they're the banks: they're where the money is. Two, the rich tend to be the smarter ones, and thus the most valuable. >I think that most crimes that subpoenas would normally be used for are >probably not crimes at all, and are probably "malum prohibitum," not "malum >in se" crimes. And in the future, they would likely be used to harass >political enemies, as harassment was done in the 1950's and 60's. This >means, for anybody of a libertarian bent, that it would actually be better >if the government could be rendered incapable of enforcing them. Naturally, >governments and courts will resist, but that will be irrelevant. I would guess that most instances of violations of banking secrecy, wiretaps, et al fall into this category also. -Allen

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Re: A MODEST PROPOSAL (fwd)
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>This happens any time anybody signs up with an an######(a)anon.penet.fi address. >>Ideally, someone could, in their copious spare time, hack majordomo >>to automatically translate all subscription requests of that form to >>na######(a)anon.penet.fi ; as an alternative, if majordomo has some sort >>of subscription blocking list an*(a)anon.penet.fi belongs on it. > > In other words, majordomo is broken. I should have suspected as much, No, it's not broken, it just interacts badly with anon.penet.fi. Of the two of them, majordomo is doing the obvious unsurprising thing, while anon.penet.fi needs a bit more complicated support because of difficulties with its implication and the workarounds it uses. Somebody did comment that they modified majordomo to handle this, but presumably vanilla majordomo can at least pattern-match block an######, and if it can't, you can always pre-process with egrep or sed. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215

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Re: Known Plaintext attacks on symmertric algorithms
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:09 PM 4/12/96 -0400, you wrote: >Now maybe I have this all wrong, but it is my understanding that a known >plaintext attack is when the cracker knows part of the plaintext of an >encrypted file. Then he/she uses that and runs the inverse of the >algorithm to calculate the key. Some algorithms have usable inverses, but good ones try not to; one class of known plaintext attack is working your way back through the algorithm to discover the key bits using the known parts. Another kind of attack is just to brute-force the key, assuming the algorithm or key length is short enough to do that quickly. > Whether or not I am right about what known plaintext means, isn't the >entirely possible on all of the symmetric algorithms out there? If I >grab a file that I know is, say, a standard credit card transaction >form, and I know what the first 256 bytes are because they are always >the same, shouldn I always be able to find the entire key that >corresponds with those 256 bytes? (assuming the key is 2048 bits or >less) And then with that key decrypt the whole file? Algorithms vary widely on their susceptibility. Consider a one-time-pad: even if you know the first 256 bytes of the transaction, all that does is let you recover the first 256 bytes of key, which will never be used again, even in the second half of the message. Pretty useless, usually. On the other hand, consider a simple "xor with the key, repeating as often as needed"; if the key's no longer than your known plaintext, xor again, find the key, repeat as often as needed, and you've got the whole message. Using the same technique with DES will be left as an exercise for the reader :-) # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215

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Cryptography Forum - Churchill Club
by stevenw＠best.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Seen in ba.internet. This may be of interest to people living in the San Francisco area of California. ------------------------------------->8-------------------------------------- Information Security and the 20th Anniversary of Public Key Cryptography Monday, April 29, 1996 Marriott Hotel, Burlingame, CA 5:30 PM Full Dinner 6:30 PM Program Members: $20 Non-members: $35 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Senator Conrad Burns (R, MT) Senator Larry Pressler (R, SD) Congressman Robert Goodlatte (R, VA) David Morris, Vice President, Cylink Corp. Jim Omura, Chief Technology Officer, Cylink Corp. James Freeman, Special Agent in Charge, FBI Phil Mellinger, Chief Engineer, Government Securities Assoc. Paul Raines, Project Manager, United State Postal Service Whitfield, Diffie, Martin, Hellman and Ralph Merkle - Pioneers and original patent holders for public key cryptography Economic espionage is costing the nation billions of dollars in lost business every year. U.S. companies are in danger of losing everything from trade secrets and proprietary financial information , to the bottom line figures on contract bills. Three bills are now in Congress to protect government, business and home computer users from outside snooping of sensitive information. These proposed new laws have been written to encourage the use of encryption and loosen export restrictions on encryption technology. Congressman Goodlatte is the author of one of these bills. April 1996 is also the 20th anniversary of the creation of Public Key Cryptography. The three principal pioneers and patent holders will also be present to share their views on the need for strong encryption. Morris of Cylink Corp. will provide an overview of what state-of-the-art security solutions are needed, and available, to truly protect business from unauthorized access. James Freeman of the FBI will discuss the recent study on industrial espionage and Paul Raines from the U.S. Postal Service will talk about electronic postmarking and certificate authority key registry bureau. TO REGISTER: Please call (408) 371-4460 or fax reservations (408) 371-4180 or email chrchllclb(a)aol.com PRESENTED BY THE CHURCHILL CLUB - A NON-PARTISAN FORUM FOR SILICON VALLEY ------------------------------------->8-------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steven Weller | Weller's three steps to Greatness: | 1. See what others cannot | 2. Think what others cannot stevenw(a)best.com | 3. Express what others cannot

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Re: questions about bits and bytes
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:34 AM 4/12/96 -0500, Doug Hughes wrote: > >On Apr 12 at 8:07 >jim bell wrote: >> >>Are you sure they're not referring to 8 bits of data and a parity bit? In >>any case, please give the address to the list so that it can be checked out. > >Come on, give it up already and admit you were wrong. At least 8 different >people have cited examples of machines that supported non 8bit bytes. Your >pride is getting the best of you. Jim is unwilling to admit his errors, even in things he has little or no training in. (I remember him claiming at one point that he was not a programmer or did any coding for that matter. Why he continues to persist in such things I will not speculate on...) I have worked on a couple of machines (that are still in use today) that were non-standard bit sizes. Many of the legacy machines from the old mainframe days (about 20+ years ago) had non-standard bit sizes. (Which made communication between then an interesting mess.) The old Microdata PICK machines had a weird byte size, for example. Some of the old Vax machines had the same "difficulty". >If you mean 8 bits, you should really say Octets as has always been the >form of Internet RFC's where the distinction is important. Making the assumption as to the stability of the sizes of bytes, words, and characters can get you into alot of trouble in the coding world. Characters are a good case in point. Depending on your OS and/or language, you could be talking about 5, 7, 8 or more bits. With the need to distribute applications internationally, the need to support all sorts of character schemes makes it even more variable. Unicode is 16 bytes per character. Shift JIS can be variable. (Either 8 or 16, if I remember correctly.) It just depends on the hardware, software, and compiler being used. I am sure that alot of old code is getting broken by the assumption that a character is always 8 bits. Assuming the same about bytes on old machines will do about as much good. >It may be standard today, but it was not always so.. And the standards change. I expect that at some point, some standards group will change all the terms again. (And this argument will flare up again...) --- Alan Olsen -- alano(a)teleport.com -- Contract Web Design & Instruction `finger -l alano(a)teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ "We had to destroy the Internet in order to save it." - Sen. Exon

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Re: the cost of untracability?
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:42 PM 4/12/96 -0400, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote: >From: IN%"weidai(a)eskimo.com" "Wei Dai" 7-APR-1996 10:52:52.30 > >>I think you're right. There is no need for the issuer to pay explicit >>interest. The easiest way to eliminate signorage would be to steadily >>increase the value of each denomination of ecash. ... > > Another method would be for ecash to have a label on it as to when the >issuer would redeem it. Until then, if you want cash from it, find someone else >to trade to. ... And if you are using a "first to clear gets the money" system like Digicash, the holders can race to see who gets the money. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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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Re: "Contempt" charges likely to increase
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:37 PM 4/12/96 EDT, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote: >From: IN%"jimbell(a)pacifier.com" "jim bell" 7-APR-1996 03:10:38.36 >>I think that most crimes that subpoenas would normally be used for are >>probably not crimes at all, and are probably "malum prohibitum," not "malum >>in se" crimes. And in the future, they would likely be used to harass >>political enemies, as harassment was done in the 1950's and 60's. This >>means, for anybody of a libertarian bent, that it would actually be better >>if the government could be rendered incapable of enforcing them. Naturally, >>governments and courts will resist, but that will be irrelevant. > > I would guess that most instances of violations of banking secrecy, >wiretaps, et al fall into this category also. True, I think. For example, 10-20 years from now there will probably be no need anymore for laws against wiretaps, because crypto telephones will become so cheap and ubiquitous that it will be assumed that anybody saying anything "valuable" on the phone will be using good crypto. If that's the case, nobody will even bother doing wiretaps, and nobody will ever lose anything as a consequence of being tapped. There's no point in having a law against a crime that never occurs. Likewise, "banking secrecy" will become a contractural obligation: Nobody who isn't privy to this information will be able to retrieve it. Looked at in this light, laws against victimless crimes can be seen as a last, desperate attempt by government to replace the real crimes which are "lost" to technological developments with placeholders; things the cops can do when nobody needs them. I think it would be reasonable to present so-called "law enforcement" with an ultimatum: "Make yourself obsolete within 10 years or we do it for you." In other words, choose only those crimes which have real victims, and figure out technological ways to either prevent them entirely, or solve then once committed. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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What can the judge do to me?
by Black Unicorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

An unnamed cypherpunk asked: > I was just wondering how/if [International Union] fit[s] in with frequent >claim 'the judge can throw away the key' if he wants...... c'punks - I've been involved in a private discussion with a list reader about the extent to which courts can impose contempt fines and sanctions. I thought I would post the results to the list as many have expressed interest in the ways that courts might try to compel production of crypto keys or compel offshore e-cash institutions. The bulk of my answer follows. The key to limiting the ability of a court to summarily enter contempt sanctions has always been the classification of the sanctions. "Criminal" sanctions, may entitle the witness to a trial by jury. "For 'serious' criminal contempts involving imprisonment of more than six months, these [procedural] protections include the right to jury trial. " International Union, United Mine Workers of America, et al. v. Bagwell et al., 114 S. Ct. 2552 (1993)(hereinafter, International Union)(citing Bloom, 391 U.S., at 199; Taylor v. Hayes, 418 U.S. 488, 495, 41 L. Ed. 2d 897, 94 S. Ct. 2697 (1974)). "Civil" sanctions do not require such protections and can be imposed on the spot and without review. "...civil contempt sanctions, or those penalties designed to compel future compliance with a court order, are considered to be coercive and avoidable through obedience, and thus may be imposed in an ordinary civil proceeding upon notice and an opportunity to be heard. Neither a jury trial nor proof beyond a reasonable doubt is required." International Union, supra. The court in International Union also makes a distinction between "direct" and "indirect" contempts. "Direct contempts that occur in the court's presence may be immediately adjudged and sanctioned summarily." International Union, supra. These would certainly include refusing to reveal non-privileged information on the stand, and may include the refusal to reveal the passphrase to a crypto key while on the stand. The court also recognizes that the indefinite confinement option is available to judges. Specifically, "[t]he paradigmatic coercive, civil contempt sanction, as set forth in Gompers, involves confining a contemnor _indefinitely_ until he complies with an affirmative command such as an order "to pay alimony, or to surrender property ordered to be turned over to a receiver, or to make a conveyance." International Union, supra (emphasis added)(citing Gompers, 221 U.S., at 442). See also, McCrone v. United States, 307 U.S. 61, 64, 83 L. Ed. 1108, 59 S. Ct. 685 (1939) (failure to testify). Shillitani v. United States, 384 U.S. 364, 370, n. 6, 16 L. Ed. 2d 622, 86 S. Ct. 1531 (1966) (upholding as civil "a determinate 24 month sentence which includes a purge clause"). My favorite language from the court defining such sanctions is this: "In these circumstances, the contemnor is able to purge the contempt and obtain his release by committing an affirmative act, and thus "carries the keys of his prison in his own pocket." International Union, supra (citing Gompers, 221 U.S., at 442, quoting In re Nevitt, 117 Fed. 451 (1902)). The court goes on: "A contempt fine accordingly is considered civil and remedial if it either 'coerces the defendant into compliance with the court's order, [or] . . . compensates the complainant for losses sustained.'" International Union, supra (quoting United States v. United Mine Workers of America, 330 U.S. 258, 303-304). And, "Where a fine is not compensatory, it is civil only if the contemnor is afforded an opportunity to purge." International Union, supra, (citing Penfield Co. v. SEC, 330 U.S. 585, 590, 91 L. Ed. 1117, 67 S. Ct. 918 (1947)). And on per diem fines, "Like civil imprisonment, such fines exert a constant coercive pressure, and once the jural command is obeyed, the future, indefinite, daily fines are purged." International Union, supra. The court makes a point to justify severe sanctions where testimony is sought, or the proceedings are threatened. "The necessity justification for the contempt authority is at its pinnacle, of course, where contumacious conduct threatens a court's immediate ability to conduct its proceedings, such as where a witness refuses to testify, or a party disrupts the court... [t]hus, petty, direct contempts in the presence of the court traditionally have been subject to summary adjudication, 'to maintain order in the courtroom and the integrity of the trial process in the face of an 'actual obstruction of justice.'" International Union, supra (quoting Codispoti v. Pennsylvania, 418 U.S., at 513 and citing numerous other sources). Most interesting to the crypto crowd: "Contempts such as failure to comply with document discovery, for example, while occurring outside the court's presence, impede the court's ability to adjudicate the proceedings before it and thus touch upon the core justification for the contempt power.... Similarly, indirect contempts involving discrete, readily ascertainable acts, _such as turning over a key_ or payment of a judgment, properly may be adjudicated through civil proceedings since the need for extensive, impartial fact-finding is less pressing." International Union, supra (emphasis added). Hence, International Union preserves very broad contempt sanctions which can be imposed without much review provided they fall into a rather wide "civil" categorization, rather than a "criminal" one. I think it's clear, the court literally spells this out, that holding a witness indefinitely until he complies with court orders is within the discretion of a judge. Compelling through sanctions the production of a "key" (though I'm not sure a crypto key is directly contemplated) is likewise clearly permitted. --- My preferred and soon to be permanent e-mail address:unicorn@schloss.li "In fact, had Bancroft not existed, potestas scientiae in usu est Franklin might have had to invent him." in nihilum nil posse reverti 00B9289C28DC0E55 E16D5378B81E1C96 - Finger for Current Key Information

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PGPCrack
by Mark M. 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I have written a UNIX program that will brute-force crack a PGP conventionally encrypted file using a dictionary of passphrases. I am working on making it possible to break secret keys also. If you have any suggestions or bug reports, feel free to e-mail them to me. The URL is: http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/pgpcrack5b.tar.gz The MD5 hash of this file is 46aa9e37020ac2efce73d870fe1acbdc. - -- Mark =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= markm(a)voicenet.com | finger -l for PGP key 0xf9b22ba5 http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/ | bd24d08e3cbb53472054fa56002258d5 "The concept of normalcy is just a conspiracy of the majority" -me -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBMW6j0LZc+sv5siulAQETGAQAnKr1n/OnWS6CpQqTQSRAJhTTCkq1zP8N l0QZYKrvO9i3EE0uXYF88EIXludrXq2mzEZCOeh4vjF0Ym8KEc82gUdRwAfxPxTU YxHylDI56PdvgLwRBAoBiGTaUZwajM+sEtvJaH1fYshPR7neTF+Aw3YL+cMQ/iQt PMFKXEM9GWQ= =fgA8 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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