December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

RE: Mass-market crypto phones
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:41 PM 11/22/96 -0800, Declan McCullagh wrote: >PS: Over margaritas and enchiladas tonight, I was talking with one of the >crypto-ITAR enforcers from State. I mentioned that I'd be going out of the >country soon and taking my PowerBook laptop. Quite sincerely, he urged me >to keep a record of when I left and when I returned for five years. You >see, I have domestic Netscape Navigator on it. Wacky stuff. Comments like that by Feds are meaningless absent the busts of a few "laptop smugglers." If they have never busted anyone, it's a dead letter (all the more so since they legalized casual carry with record keeping). DCF

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Re: wealth and property rights
by Jean-Francois Avon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 21 Nov 96 at 18:35, Dave Hayes wrote: > However, I would question the implication that "socialists" are > responsible for the higher tax rates you currently experience. > > For example, I could make a strong case that you really have some > clever "capitalists" who have learned how to express their > "capitalism" quite effectively across the space of all people in a > "country". OK. I am not on Cypherpunks anymore but this leftover of the mail queue landed in my mailbox. So, please, reply directly. I just couldn't let this one pass by me without jumping on it. :) Your second paragraph is attacking a straw man. You even included the word 'capitalist' in double quotes ("). The common point between socialists and theses so-called "capitalists" is that they both use that fact that some coercion is enacted on a given population to get rich an/or powerful. The socialists seek, as a value, power over producers and your "capitalists" seek to get rich and/or powerfull. But both blank out the cause of the obtention of their goals: legally exerted coercion (via govt rules and powers). To use terms coined by a well known writer, one is a Witch Doctor, the other is an Attila (morally sanctionned by the Witch Doctor). They natures are not opposite, they are simply both sides of the same coin. I sometimes wish peoples would use words for what they really mean... jfa Please reply or Cc. directly to me. Jean-Francois Avon, Pierrefonds (Montreal) QC Canada DePompadour, Societe d'Importation Ltee Finest Limoges porcelain and crystal JFA Technologies, R&D consultants physicists and engineers, LabView programing PGP keys at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon ID# C58ADD0D : 529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891 ID# 5B51964D : 152ACCBCD4A481B0 254011193237822C

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Re: IPG Algorith Broken!
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 24 Nov 1996 02:20:25 -0600 (CST), snow wrote: >> > diGriz >> Use an anon. remailer and sign your posts. Brilliant. Just brilliant. > The Stainless Steel Rat. Harry Harrison. Just as an off-topic SF note, how many people on the list read this series during their formative years? How many of them thought it was a guide book? # Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp # <cadams(a)acucobol.com> | send mail with subject "send PGPKEY" "That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them." --- Karen Hargrove, Microsoft (quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial)

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Stewart Baker on HP-Intel-Microsoft Crypto Announcement
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 22:14:34 -0500 From: Dave Farber <farber(a)cis.upenn.edu> To: interesting-people mailing list <interesting-people(a)eff.org> Subject: IP: HP-Intel-Microsoft Crypto Announcement Date: Sun, 24 Nov 96 21:43:47 EST From: "Stewart Baker" <sbaker(a)mail.steptoe.com> To: farber(a)cis.upenn.edu Subject: HP-Intel-Microsoft Crypto Announcement I also attended the Hewlett-Packard/Intel/Microsoft announcement, and I thought it might be useful to offer a slightly different perspective from Ross Stapleton-Gray's and Declan McCullagh's notes. It's understandable, given the coincidence of the two events, that Ross and Declan saw the announcement as tied to the government's key recovery initiative, but I think they may have been led astray by the timing. As I understand it, the HP framework is not so much an embrace of government regulation in this field as a recognition by some major companies that governments simply are not going to get out of the business of regulating encryption soon, or at least not soon enough for the people who want to build a secure global network right now. I see the announcement as an effort by business to sidestep the policy debate, to say to the politicians, "Whatever crypto policy you decide to adopt, this system will work with it." So, in my view, the HP technology is significant mainly for its flexibility rather than for supporting key recovery or any other particular policy. It allows PC manufacturers to build into their products virtually any form of encryption that a user could want and to ship those products around the world without falling afoul of export controls or domestic regulations on encryption. >From a security point of view, this is important because it allows commoditization of security hardware. One of the reasons why encryption hardware has not spread is that individualized licensing and local restrictions make it imprudent to include hardware security as a standard feature in PCs aimed at mass markets. The HP system has safeguards that have evidently persuaded governments that they can allow mass market sales of hardware encryption without giving up their current regulatory authority. What does this mean for the government's key escrow policy? First, as we heard at the news conference, HP's system will run the TIS commercial key recovery system (and presumably the CertCo./Bankers Trust system as well). So it will make key recovery products available to buyers. But it will also run 40-bit encryption, DES, and other strong algorithms without escrow. The customer decides what crypto to use; the framework doesn't favor one of those technologies over the other, except that it allows customers to buy strong key-recovery crypto today with the knowledge that the hardware won't become obsolete tomorrow if government policies change and something more attractive comes along. As a separate point, I'm not sure Declan is right to call this vaporware. The basic hardware has been available for a while. (I saw an early demo a few years ago.) It sounds as though the R&D is done; all that remains is engineering, and maybe not too much of that.

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Re: IPG Algorith Broken!
by eli+＠gs160.sp.cs.cmu.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dale Thorn writes: >Is the concept here that: Whereas conventional crypto generates/hashes >a *key* with which to encode the text, IPG generates a *pad* from a key, >more or less the length of the text, with which to encode the text?? A cryptosystem is given a key by the user. A block cipher uses it to encrypt chunks of plaintext, perhaps 8 bytes long. (This is an oversimplification.) A stream cipher uses it to generate a pseudorandom sequence that is combined with the plaintext. IPG's product is a stream cipher. >It seems to me they're putting an additional layer of stuff ("OTP") between >the key generation and the actual encoding, so what's the problem with that, >as a concept? The first problem is the name "OTP". A one-time pad is a well-defined thing, and this isn't it; they'd like to be associated with the term because the one-time pad is in fact provably secure. So they have a stream cipher. Is it a good stream cipher? Well, nobody knows, because no cryptanalysts have taken the time to attack it. There aren't all that many who publish in the open literature, and there are thousands of amateur proprietary schemes out there -- who has the time? If it were designed by someone known to be competent (RC4), or if it were widely used (pkzip), somebody might think it worth looking at. If you're not a cryptanalyst yourself (and I'm not, but at least I know it!), all you have to go on is the history of similar schemes. This is not encouraging; there are outfits which for a moderate fee will crack the proprietary encryption offered by dozens of popular products. IPG's history is even less encouraging Maybe this one's different from all of those. How valuable a secret would you like to wager on that? If IPG wants credibility, they should retain a respected cryptographer, or several, to attack their scheme. (Or just publish Don's proof of unbreakability. Since the scheme is provably _not_ information-theoretically secure, this must be a proof of computational security, presumably a superpolynomial lower bound. And as the scheme is trivially breakable in NP time, Mr. Wood is sitting on a _major_ result, a resolution to the central problem in computational complexity theory: a proof that P != NP. Do publish, sir.) -- Eli Brandt eli+(a)cs.cmu.edu

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Re: Does John Gilmore eat ass?
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

aga <aga(a)dhp.com> writes: > The question is, does this John Gilmore really take it > up the ass? Whether or not he is a FAGGOT is a very relevant issue > here, and it must not be overlooked. The Evil Queen of Cypherpunks swings both ways. John Gilmore also eats Dorothy Denning's (clean-shaven) pussy. He won't eat Esther Dyson's pussy because it smells so bad.

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Re: Does John Gilmore eat ass?
by nobody＠cypherpunks.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

aga <aga(a)dhp.com> writes: > The question is, does this John Gilmore really take it > up the ass? Whether or not he is a FAGGOT is a very relevant issue > here, and it must not be overlooked. The Evil Queen of Cypherpunks swings both ways. John Gilmore also eats Dorothy Denning's (clean-shaven) pussy. He won't eat Esther Dyson's pussy because it smells so bad.

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Re: IPG Algorith Broken!
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:21 PM 11/23/96 -0800, John Anonymous MacDonald wrote: >At 12:33 PM 11/23/1996, Eric Murray wrote: >>You point could have been that the same problem exists >>for proofs- that next week someone could come up >>with a way to prove, for all time, that an algorithim >>really IS unbreakable. So, to cover that posibility >>I should have said "it's currently impossible to >>prove an algorithim unbreakable". :-) > >Or, more accurately, nobody credible has seen such a proof. But, a >clever person might invent one. I thought Shannon proved one-time-pads to be unbreakable using information theory. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | The lottery is a tax on | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | those who can't do math. | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | - Who 1st said this? | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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Re: IPG Algorith Broken!
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:00 AM 11/24/96 -0500, Black Unicorn wrote: >On Sun, 24 Nov 1996 eli+(a)gs160.sp.cs.cmu.edu wrote: > >> Maybe this one's different from all of those. How valuable a secret >> would you like to wager on that? If IPG wants credibility, they should >> retain a respected cryptographer, or several, to attack their scheme. > >"They" attempt this nearly daily by trying to taunt c'punks into >evaluating the product for free. Then someone should not do it for free. They should do it as a "data recovery tool", advertise widely, make a few bucks, and show what a piece of crap the IPG snakeoil is in the first place. Cracktools are starting to become a profitable business as more and more snakeoil products appear on the market. (Most are marketed to law enforcement, but that will probibly change...) There is a buck or two to be made here. --- | "Remember: You can't have BSDM without BSD." | |"The moral PGP Diffie taught Zimmermann unites all| Disclaimer: | | mankind free in one-key-steganography-privacy!" | Ignore the man | |`finger -l alano(a)teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key | behind the keyboard.| | http://www.ctrl-alt-del.com/~alan/ |alan(a)ctrl-alt-del.com|

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Re: IPG Algorith Broken!
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:16 PM 11/24/96 +0000, The Deviant wrote: >On Sat, 23 Nov 1996, Bill Frantz wrote: >> I thought Shannon proved one-time-pads to be unbreakable using information >> theory. > >Different ball game. OTP isn't "unbreakable" . OTPs are secure because >no matter what key you use, it _will_ decrypt, so your plaintext is still >hidden simply because it could decrypt to whatever the person trying to >decrypt it wants it to. Its not that its unbreakable, its that its >breakable in _so many ways_. I think we differ on the definition of "unbreakable". A quick stab at my (admittedly very vague) definition includes the inability of the analyst to determine (by the structure of the plaintext) that he has a correct decryption. When I look in AC2, Schneier uses "break" in many ways. Let me evaluate OTP against his taxonomy of attacks: Ciphertext-only: Unbreakable Known-plaintext: Unbreakable, since the pad is never reused Chosen-plaintext: Unbreakable, ditto Adaptive-chosen-plaintext: Unbreakable, ditto Chosen-ciphertext: This attack doesn't seem to apply Chosen-key: This attack requires that the OTP doesn't have 1-bit-of-entropy/bit which implies it isn't an OTP. Rubber-hose: Since any decryption is equally plausable, OTPs are resistant to this attack. OTOH, it means they may keep beating you even after you've given them the correct decryption. Purchase-key: This attack seems the only way to break an OTP. If you accept Purchase-key as a valid attack, and it certainly has worked in many real-life situations, then no system is "unbreakable" and there is not any point in using the term. If you leave it out of the valid forms of attack, because all systems are vulnerable to it so it doesn't help in selecting a cryptosystem, then the OTP is "unbreakable". How do you want to define "unbreakable"? ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | The lottery is a tax on | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | those who can't do math. | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | - Who 1st said this? | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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