December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Reference Correction Re: Thank you for the Archives 100 messages
by foodie＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Careful Alan; I didn't write that. That was qut(a)netcom.com, the latest addition to my killfile, who replied to my private email on Cypherpunks, and, rather oddly, called me a Mormon. Message in question appended. -j >> REAL crypto-anarchists, > > Like the folks who brought us Tiannemen Square? > >> of course, want the >> destruction of copyrights, trademarks, and >> other weapons of capitali$m, and will > > > > > >> Kill your Television > > Threw mine out in 1987. There's more people who don't have indoor >bathrooms, than don't have a TV. (source: 1990 Bureau of the Census). I'm >in a pretty elite group. ------------------ Return-Path: <qut> Received: (from qut@localhost) by netcom13.netcom.com (8.6.13/Netcom) id AAA24004; Sat, 8 Jun 1996 00:30:50 -0700 From: qut (Be Good) Message-Id: <199606080730.AAA24004(a)netcom13.netcom.com> Subject: Re: Thank you for the Archives 100 messages To: foodie(a)netcom.com Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 00:30:50 -0700 (PDT) Cc: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Reply-To: foodie(a)netcom.com In-Reply-To: <31B91EA0.16F(a)netcom.com> from "Jamie Lawrence" at Jun 7, 96 10:33:09 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1582 > qut4.qut(a)netcom.com wrote: > > > > Apologies, but rich has deleted me from > > his mailboxes, and for a few days now, > > As I have, too, now. > > > somebody has placed a global cancel bot on > > me. I'm gonna have plenty of fun figuring > > this out. Kwow any good sniffers? > > I'm glad! If my processor/filtering software doesn't > have to deal with your garbage, that's more time I have > to spend with folks who have something to say. The only thing your type of "cypherpunk" has to say, is blather about liability, copyrights, and other capitali$t bs. REAL crypto-anarchists, of course, want the destruction of copyrights, trademarks, and other weapons of capitali$m, and will implement crypto-anonymonity to proceed forthwith. > No, I don't know of any better "sniffers" (I assume you > mean, "software that can detect a cancelbot"), as such > software is impossible to detect. Of course, unless Rich > (or whomever cares so much about a moron) has either root > on toad.com, or at least as many resources as the NSA, he > can't cancel your mail to Cypherpunks (or anywhere else). I was talking about netnews, mormon. > > I agree the list should be public usenet: > > A mail gate-way to a usenet group that > > ALSO permits unmoderated posts. This > > would be a nice way to combine a strict > > moderated mail-list, with a standard > > netnews group. > > Er, what? > > That paragraph makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. There's already hundreds of groups like that, stupid. It will be implemented, whether you like it or not. -- Kill Your Television -- The signal is the noise. ____________________________________________________________________ Jamie Lawrence mailto:jal@cyborganic.net mailto:foodie@netcom.com

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US: Domestic Encryption Protected by US Constitution?
by C Matthew Curtin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Something that has come up in my recent random thoughts... Given that the US State Department classifies strong crypto as munitions, is it possible that any laws passed outlawing the use of strong crypto among US citizens could be declared unconsitutional, in violation of the second amendment? Are there any legal precedents that apply here? Is the question purely academic (i.e., no such laws exist, no such bills are in the works, or none have been tried)? Does anyone know of any laws on the books that might be relevant to my question? -- C Matthew Curtin Chief Hacker Fahlgren, Inc. 655 Metro Pl S, Ste 700, Box 7159 Dublin OH 43017-7159 http://www.local.com/~cmcurtin/ cmcurtin(a)fahlgren.com PGP Mail Preferred

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Anonymous return addresses
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Browsing through the 1995 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy proceedings at the library, I found two articles of interest here. The first, "Preserving Privacy in a Network of Mobile Computers", is really a method for anonymously receiving mail via reading it from a large database such that no one knows which part you are reading. This is a topic which we discussed here at some length a year or two ago, but I think this article has a new idea about it which I will discuss below. The other one was "Holding Intruders Accountable on the Internet" and it had one strange comment. Basically it was about a way of trying to track down cracker types who break into systems. One strategy these people use is to log into a whole series of insecure hosts, one after the other, before attacking their target. Then tracing back where they came from is very difficult. Cliff Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" is the classic account of how hard it is to trace these people. Probably the new books about Mitnick talk about the same thing. The idea in this article is that you monitor the whole net and track all the rlogin and telnet traffic between pairs of hosts. Then they describe a statistical technique for determining that two different telnet sessions are chained together by recognizing the same patterns of traffic on them. Basically they count the frequency of spaces and punctuation marks on minute-long time slices and try to correlate them. This way you can tell that the intruder attacking here is also using these other hosts over there, and try to track him down that way. I don't think this is very practical, and I have mixed feelings about the technology - I don't favor breakins, but the kinds of surveillance that would be necessary to implement their technique seem very threatening. Also they do mention the obvious countermeasure of using encryption at each stage, which would be easy with such things as the secure remote shell programs around now. The interesting comment came when they were discussing an alternative scheme, which would be to have all hosts keep track of their incoming and outgoing connections: "The difficulty with all such host-based tracing systems is that, when an extended connection crosses a host which is not running the system, accountability is altogether lost at that point.... Even if most hosts could be secured, the intruder community could easily maintain a set of machines to launder connections, just as they maintain anonymous remailers." So apparently in the view of these authors anonymous remailers are maintained by "the intruder community." It is unfortunate that we have this image among some member of the larger community. BTW, there are periodic suggestions here to run general-purpose connection redirectors, but people should be aware of the problem that cracker types would seize on these as another shield for their crimes. These would have to be limited to specific uses, such as port 80 which is the http port and which hopefully can't easily be used for attacks. In any case, let me describe the message-receipt idea from the other paper I mentioned above, which is by David A. Cooper and Kenneth P. Birman of Cornell. They have a few ideas, among them exchanging message labels for the next message in an ongoing conversation, so that later messages don't have any identifying information on them, but just opaque message labels which can be scanned for matches to those of interest. This is a concept we have discussed before. However you still have the problem at least for the first message to an anonymous recipient of getting it to him anonymously even though the message says what pseudonym it is for. A simple idea is to put all such messages into a database and to let everyone scan the message headers to see whom they are for. Then when they see one for them they download, decrypt, and read it. For more security, let the database machine be trusted, and let the download request and response be sent encrypted. Now only the database machine knows which person asked for which message. This provides a level of security analogous to sending through a single remailer. (Another idea is to download all messages, but that is generally infeasable if there are a lot of people using the system.) The new idea is to use multiple databases to get security similar to using multiple remailers. I'll describe it using two machines. Each holds a database of messages, and the two databases are exactly alike. Some mechanism keeps the two synchronized. Furthermore, all the messages need to be the same size. There will need to be some padding and fragmentation/assembly mechanism to arrange for this. Someone who wants to receive some mail anonymously first downloads all the message headers as before, and determines which messages are for them. Suppose just one is, and it is message number 20 out of a database of, say, 50 messages. Now what the reader does is to choose a random 50 bit number (where 50 is the total number of messages in the database). He makes a copy of this number, and toggles bit 20 in one of them (20 is the message he wants to receive). Then he sends one number to one of the database servers, and the other to the other server. Each one receives a random-looking 50 bit number. What each server does is to take the messages from the database which correspondo to 1 bits in the 50 bit number, and XOR all those messages together, byte for byte. The resulting output will be the same size as a quantized message. It is sent, encrypted, back to the requestor. Now all he does is to XOR the two messages he got back from the servers. All of them will cancel out except for message 20, which is the one he wants. This can be generalized to more than two servers, by creating multiple bit strings and arranging so that the XOR of all of them will just leave the bit set for the message he wants. If he wants more than one message the protocol has to be repeated separately for each message. There is no large amount of traffic needed, as each server only sends an amount of data equal to one message. The individual servers do not get any information about which message the requestor wants (other than that it is one of the 50). Only by colluding and XOR'ing their bit strings can they figure that out. The same kind of collusion is needed to trace a sent message using two remailers, so the security is similar to what we get sending messages. Messages would have a finite lifetime and would expire and be removed from the database after a while. The authors propose breaking the database up into batches with a fixed number of messages, but I don't fully follow the reasoning behind this. I guess it reduces the load on the server when it does its XOR's. I'm not sure whether this particular scheme was proposed when we discussed this concept in the past, but it does seem like an interesting alternative way to receive messages. Hal

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Re:
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:09 PM 6/8/96 -0500, Igor Chudov @ home wrote: >jim bell wrote: >> >> While I appreciate your...uh...appreciation, let me remind you that part of >> my "pronouncements" are that the current political and social system is >> sick. Many people around here seem to agree with this assessment. What I >> advocate is a comparatively simple change in the rules that could have the >> effect of vastly changing the way things are done. Whether these changes >> are in "the best interests of the inhabitants of this nation" is still an >> open question, and many people have agreed with me on this matter. >> > >Since corrupt officials are likely to have more anonymous cash that >phreedom phighters, guess who will win. The people, that's who. The reason is that while "corrupt officials" may have more money, per person, that ordinary citizens, there are FAR more ordinary citizens than officials. Further, these corrupt officials only have more money because they rob it from ordinary citizens, which means that they start out the game hated by the public. Finally, officials are, by definition, identified or identifiable, while disaffected citizens are not. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: How I Would Ban Strong Crypto in the U.S.
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:58 AM 7/15/96 -0400, Raph Levien wrote: >[much, much elided from Tim's post] >> ... and by opposition to Clipper I, >> Clipper II, and now Clipper III. > >Is this Clipper III or Clipper IV? I seem to have lost count. I think it's Clipper 3.14159. They seem to be going around in circles. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Global Government Access to Keys (GGAK)
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:37 AM 7/15/96, Bill Frantz wrote: >At 2:05 PM 7/13/96 +0000, Deranged Mutant wrote: >>Or what if some terrorist was using keys escrowed in a country that >>sponsered terrorist acts? > >Deranged Mutant is absolutely right. There are about 150 (or so) >governments in the world. When people talk about making keys available to >government (or law enforcement), always ask, "Which governments can access >these keys?" If I were a non-French corporation, I would feel distinctly >nervous if the answer included France. (There are a number of other >countries where the security services have also been suspected of engaging >in industrial espionage.) There are some interesting "public relations" stunts we can use to undermine support for the concept of GAK: * Announce in corporate press releases (for some Cypherpunkish company?) that "As per the laws of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, we have provided Col. Qaddaffi's Office of People's Security with our encryption keys for all communications passing into, out of, or over Libyan soil." (This would likely horrify the U.S. security establishment, were it to be actually true. But it is of course essentially symmetrical with the fear those in Germany, India, Iraq, etc. would have if told to deposit copies of their keys with the U.S. National Security Agency or any other "trusted third party" mandated.) (I can't resist another aside. Sorry. In addition to the abuse of the English language with using "escrow" in this warped sense, we now have "trusted third party" used in a warped sense. "We're not saying _you_ trust them, we're saying the NSA trusts them.") * "The U.S. has designated J. P. Morgan and Company as a Designated Trusted Authority for the deposit of encryption keys for Jewish persons wishing to communicate in primarily Islamic countries." (Making the point that any international key escrow scheme which complies with various nation's laws must collide with American values about such things. In many Arab countries, Jews are restricted in various ways. Do we want the government of the U.S. participating in such restrictions? And what about the Arab boycott? It may be in decline now, but not with all countries.) * "The United States Office of Communications Security has turned over to the government of Singapore a list of all persons suspected of circumventing Singaporan law regarding encryption." (ObNazi Reference: One can imagine how a GAK program would've worked during the Third Reich. Not only would communications have been read, regardless of the supposed legal protections, but GAK would have been used to compile contact lists of people to be rounded up. Sort of the way the U.S. government violated the laws about the U.S. Census to illegally use census records to locate "Japs" for assignment to concentration camps.) And so forth, concentrating on the essentially intractable problem of how to "escrow" keys with foreign governments imimical to Western values. (The crypto literature, esp. the Proceedings of the Crypto Conference, circa the mid-80s, refers to this as the "rogue government" problem, esp. with regard to the issuance of false "is-a-person" credentials. That is, suppose a Global Identification Infrastructure (GII) is implemented, consistent with Global Government Access to Keys (GGAK). What about some countries, whether they be the Free Republic of Libertaria or the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, who either refuse to play along or who subvert the system with false information? What if the United States itself issues false identities to its secret agents, its informants, and its 60,000+ people in the so-called Witness Security program?) There are other aspects of GAK which also collide with basic values. For example, consider several classes of communications we consider "privileged": -- attorney-client discussions, in person or over phone lines. -- doctor-patient discussions -- psychiatrist--patient discussions -- priest--penitent confessions Are the computer communications (likely in the future to increase, even if not common now) of these groups to be GAKked? Even with "safeguards," the priest--penitent relationship will be forever compromised, with neither side knowing whether some secret policemen is listening. These are not new issues; we talked about them several years ago. But now that GAK is being discussed again.... --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" 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, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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DCSB: Betting on the Future
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text X-Sender: rah(a)tiac.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 11:26:33 -0400 To: dcsb(a)ai.mit.edu From: Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: DCSB: Betting on the Future Sender: bounce-dcsb(a)ai.mit.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Robert Hettinga <rah(a)shipwright.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- The Digital Commerce Society of Boston Presents Duane Hewitt Idea Futures "Betting on the Future" Tuesday, August 6, 1996 12 - 2 PM The Downtown Harvard Club of Boston One Federal Street, Boston, MA Duane says: > I am a Molecular Biologist by trade but I am fascinated by all aspects of > science and technology and especially their long term ramifications. I am > completing my Master's Degree thesis as well as working full time at the > University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I have some part time work > maintaining Web pages and I have been involved with the Idea Futures Web > site from the very beginning. I also am currently working on a hypertext > reference on the biology of aging. Many of these interest can be accessed > from my home page at http://www.lucifer.com/~duane > > I will introduce the concept of Idea Futures which is a market in which > the odds of future events are set by betting. It is designed to reward > those who can accurately forecast future outcomes. It has been recognized > by the Austrian Broadcast System, and the Point Survey and mentioned in > _Wired_. I will discuss the implications of such a market as well as some > of the history behind it. I will also propose how a similar market could > be used to construct a market based voting system. This meeting of the Digital Commerce Society of Boston will be held on Tuesday, August 6, 1996 from 12pm - 2pm at the Downtown Branch of the Harvard Club of Boston, One Federal Street. The price for lunch is $27.50. This price includes lunch, room rental, and the speaker's lunch. ;-). The Harvard Club *does* have dress code: jackets and ties for men, and "appropriate business attire" for women. We need to receive a company check, or money order, (or if we *really* know you, a personal check) payable to "The Harvard Club of Boston", by Saturday, August 3, or you won't be on the list for lunch. Checks payable to anyone else but The Harvard Club of Boston will have to be sent back. Checks should be sent to Robert Hettinga, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02131. Again, they *must* be made payable to "The Harvard Club of Boston". If anyone has questions, or has a problem with these arrangements (We've had to work with glacial A/P departments more than once, for instance), please let us know via e-mail, and we'll see if we can work something out. Planned speakers for the following few months are: September Tatsuo Tanaka Some Economics of Digital Cash October Philippe LeRoux Stock Exchanges and the Web We are actively searching for future speakers. If you are in Boston on the first Tuesday of the month, and you would like to make a presentation to the Society, please send e-mail to the DCSB Program Commmittee, care of Robert Hettinga, rah(a)shipwright.com . For more information about the Digital Commerce Society of Boston, send "info dcsb" in the body of a message to majordomo(a)ai.mit.edu . If you want to subscribe to the DCSB e-mail list, send "subscribe dcsb" in the body of a message to majordomo(a)ai.mit.edu . Looking forward to seeing you there! Cheers, Robert Hettinga Moderator, The Digital Commerce Society of Boston -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMepi6vgyLN8bw6ZVAQFsOwP/UuOoWa0LUEyY4dmQ21KIR4GwhB6PurSa L97eVsbVOigP+TVPFJX7RKqYhCxIL8gDUnSRimGnATmhLo5wdE0UXvgakeGaD5s+ vKPfhuaG9/MnuZvWFbBEZOrTTKqVE8bfoU2yiw6xTvhyQY0lDA2BSO8vjip28nOA 0Wkuh1VUBhY= =/5+9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "'Bart Bucks' are not legal tender." -- Punishment, 100 times on a chalkboard, for Bart Simpson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To unsubscribe from this list, send a letter to: Majordomo(a)ai.mit.edu In the body of the message, write: unsubscribe dcsb Or, to subscribe, write: subscribe dcsb If you have questions, write to me at Owner-DCSB(a)ai.mit.edu --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "'Bart Bucks' are not legal tender." -- Punishment, 100 times on a chalkboard, for Bart Simpson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/

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Further Trends in Key Escrow?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm watching a CNBC report about the NASDAQ market and proposed fixes to certain alleged abuses about stock recommendations, bid-ask spreads, brokers, etc. One of the "industry" proposals involving taping the phone calls of NASDAQ brokers. (The proposal: 10% of all calls to customers would be recorded for later review.) It occurs to me that wider taping/interception of communications could be a consequence of a wide move toward "key escrow." And not just by governments. Once communications are "escrowed," the infrastructure for gaining access to communications is available. Thus, professional associations may request access, as with the NASDAQ talk of tapping the phone calls of brokers. (To be clear, this is a tapping system which NASDAQ dealers would have to agree to deploy in order to keep their affiliation; as this is ostensibly a voluntary, non-coerced, private arrangement, I don't argue it should be outlawed. I don't like it, but my concern is elsewhere: namely, the temptation to use a GAK system for these and similar purposes.) The whole infrastructure of mandatory voluntary key escrow could allow all sorts of special interest groups to ask for access and insist upon it with their members, customers, and affiliates. A danger to think about. Even if the non-government gakkings are ostensibly voluntary, the effect would be a sea change in expectations of communications privacy, with the key escrow infrastructure used to give access to formerly secure communications to growing numbers of groups. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" 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, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: CDT Policy Post 2.27 - No New News on Crypto: Gore Restates
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:05 PM 7/14/96 -0700, David Sternlight wrote: >This post is a courtesy to others who may have been expecting more. It's not that we're expecting more...it's just that we're hoping for BETTER. >It's a >one-time statement to this list, which I've just joined, of my current >practice: Silence does not constitute assent. >David Well, that's where you're confused. Our positions are not morally equivalent. Despite trying to hide behind the smokescreen of calling the government's GAK position "voluntary," we all know that they are trying to misuse their influence to gently force us to use GAK, if by no other means that forcing the taxpayer to pay for the system as they have done already. The opponents of GAK, on the other hand, are not denying to anyone the right to implement a truly voluntary "key-escrow" system, or more likely many privately operating ones. However, such systems will be a service for the customer, not the government, and the key will almost certainly not be provided to the government on request, and in fact the key will likely be stored in an encrypted form that the government won't be able to use. Quite simply, we do not require your "assent." You should be trying to get OURS. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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random numbers reverse-engineering
by Jüri Kaljundi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Is there somewhere where I could find more information on finding out RNG algorithms or reverse-engineering RNG's, once you have some quantity of random numbers generated by some RNG? For example a local bank is giving each customer a list with 600 one-time passwords (6-digit decimal numbers), and I believe they use the account number as (one of the) seeds for the RNG. Is there some program that I could use, together with the numbers and possible seed, to try to break the RNG? Jüri Kaljundi AS Stallion jk(a)stallion.ee

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