December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

RE: Re: How the FBI/NSA forces can further twist SAFE
by jay holovacs 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

========================== >From: "Paul Spirito" <berezina(a)qed.net> >Date: Thu, Sep 25, 1997 11:58 PM > >And next year *is* an election year. If nothing awful happens, it shouldn't be much of an issue, but sooner or later there'll be a big bang made by terrorists who've used crypto in the plotting, & then anyone who opposed the FBI line will get drubbed, perhaps fatally (i.e. they'll lose their seat). On the other hand a publicized security disaster or "infowar" attack could spin things in the other direction. Jay

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Re: Digital Postage (fwd)
by Syniker＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>If remailers are going to work as a business we can't turn our back on traditional payment mechanisms. The problem, as I see it, is that there is no clear mechanism for me to write a normal check and have that turn into a anon account easily without involving 3rd parties and their concommittent extra costs - further increasing the end-user cost to do business. There better be a reason or they won't pay for long.>> I'm probably not thinking right Jim -- but what if I bought a postal money order, or such, with cash... sent it too you... along with an encyrpted email that referred to the serial number of the money order... then, you uncyphered my email... to verify payment, and recyphered my account info to me... Would something like that work to establish a paid-up account? Best to you... LarryM pgp pubkey@ http://www.jetlink.net/~aargh/

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None
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

That vile salamander Gingrich, squeaker of the House, is slobbering about a drug-free America by the year 2001. What a dreary prospect! Of course this does not include alcohol and tobacco, of which the consumption will soar. How can a drug-free state be achieved? Simple. An operation can remove the drug receptors from the brain. Those who refuse the operation will be deprived of all rights. CM

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Leaving again
by Paul Bradley 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I`ll be off the list again for a while, and this address may well be closed, not sure yet. If anyone needs to get me +44 (0)410 933621 is always a good one to try, I should be back on the list within a few weeks though. Bye for now. Datacomms Technologies data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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No Subject
by gmd＠earthling.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The empire never ended. The black iron prison is still with us. Aramchek.

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FBI Technical Assistance Draft
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks to Willis Ware we offer the full text of the FBI's August 28 "technical assistance draft" for encryption legislation, a few paragraphs of which Declan posted here: http://jya.com/fbi-tad-s909.htm (57K) Although prepared to revise McCain/Kerrey's S 909 to satisfy law enforcement, it's the source for the various amendments to SAFE which copied much of it unchanged, and some portions not yet lifted may foretell what's coming.

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Re: Remailer latencies
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- David E. Smith wrote: >> Incidentally, if somebody offered you colocation space, would you be >> willing to set up your machine there? > >I wouldn't, and I hope not many other remailer operators would >either. A lot of the security on my machine comes from having >physical control over it. Good point. Also, using a dialup gives you another layer of physical privacy. You could even move the machine around from time to time. This could even foil the Big Boys if they don't want to reveal how well they can track things. (Corollary: Even if PGP is NSA breakable, you can still use it for drug dealing and bribery.) >(That includes the ability to rapidly delete things with extreme >prejudice should the spooks come knocking at the door.) If I'm not >sleeping in the room next to my machine, I don't have that kind of >control. What is on your machine that has to be deleted? I suppose you'd want to power cycle it since the private key (or a passphrase) will be sitting in memory. Is there anything on the disk that must be deleted? More operations questions: according to Raph's chart, your machine has an "uptime" of 99.64%. I assume that means Raph's experiments showed that 36 messages out of 1000 disappeared. Did I assume correctly? If so, what accounts for these message losses? I would expect that if your machine was down, even for a couple of days, that the incoming messages would be queued up on other machines and none would be lost. BTW, my intention is not be critical of your volunteer work running a remailer, but to develop an understanding of the issues involved. Even a response like "the machine was down for three days because I was in Las Vegas partying" is useful because it would suggest that remailer operators are not adequately compensated for their work. Monty Cantsin Editor in Chief Smile Magazine http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNCyf1JaWtjSmRH/5AQG1lAf9HS5Hu9HX32Uij93MEaWzG4BOqgj9/mok W+Ngjnz2yDKW3g7MoN+Ypvy05EGPNtwZjhigRkUzSIHfT7gYGlbclcf1p2aZk4L5 MT1wP1zdT0cdUoIjTwSa/VXgHuuPLTo68LhnbdCTVgLjbqMaC7DxvrGam7C7CXcT POxjh7bpwrz8LJ0YmALuhqITv+QxPqv0jeCigsYqtv9wEcPdIp9Y+If4+u5+aln4 FejVogjqSGl8E8bICc5GMNFifXKcpGkGNb992P4IUHjyZmmgQRqMhuS6yWjHM2cM uWj0fbH+/Yab+svKsULz0aqbG670A5VzriP+800JAJd8XtZd7T5y9w== =gqzn -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Remailer Attack
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Robert A. Costner wrote: >>Also, by my reading of the "uptime" statistic in Raph's remailer >>chart, a reply block is not going to be very reliable for receiving >>mail. > >The Redneck remailer, for instance, has a 99+% uptime rate. The >reason for this being high is that it is run under a business model. >The connectivity basically cannot go down. There has only been 23 >minutes of connectivity downtime in the last year. Redneck is run on >a business quality network with multiple backbone feeds. But things >break down after that. Redneck also runs on an underpowered 486 with >no "hotfix" backup machine. It is not considered to be a mission >critical piece of equipment. I might notice Redneck have a problem >at 1:00 am, but it can wait until in the morning to get fixed. >Situations like this, combined with software upgrades account for >downtime. Thank you for this detailed description. One more question: When redneck is down, do other remailers discard their mail if they cannot connect to it? If this is the case, it would seem to be a serious design flaw, probably prompted by the desire to save disk space. A quarter per message would probably cover the cost. Another general comment on remailer statistics: 99+% uptime sounds good, but really it isn't. For some reason, we are accustomed to the idea that remailers should lose messages. Well, they shouldn't. A remailer is just electronic mail with a few extra features and electronic mail is exceptionally reliable. According to Raph, redneck has an uptime of 99.83%. By my understanding, this means for every 1000 messages handled, redneck loses 17. That's actually pretty high, especially if it's your message that gets lost. I do not mean to pick on redneck in particular, or, really, any of the remailers. But where the remailer network stands right now, it cannot be used for everyday mail which cuts down its usage quite a bit and makes it a lot harder to build nifty things on top of it like reply block systems. >This is similar to the AOL effect. It is often hard to have respect >for an unknown poster from AOL. The remailer at EFGA is new. I've >come to realize that this natural hostility towards a remailer is a >good reason to put the remailer on a separate domain. We might do >this. Ideally the domain would be shared by other non-anonymous users, but hostility would probably be reduced even if the domain were something like "guest.efga.org", even if many people knew that really meant "anonymous". Monty Cantsin Editor in Chief Smile Magazine http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNC2EIJaWtjSmRH/5AQESzQf+NzGRBRjoYL7mQl9q50VsphcnkgQiq1wR XW+UKjrCokfW/Bwt6vMKKJco9cquZiuOkISoCX9+JZlhJkm2l5YxswUcrxaaVNpr T4w1aVQGzcNSDVq3oUwfFiG29S4DQaKV6HD+hz9ffS8fCMtyoA4wkFgLLALqxJpE MsHPQoI2vZtAU7Ht8HgFg2dQsJqoYDAWp8Un9CFnWNYECQ2yPZNVvbiQ7jlmplP6 IrOBQ9E5dk+gaAq4yPfoWD0GTAjBIIaaLMbh+rg+0oUe9LaK0Vl/kIbHx9DvuRN+ 0IbxUy5kwGDhBhWLznDo0B19Xl5QQdj65qBp3TmZqqtQC2MCpeynFA== =2Oiw -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Peter Landrock's CRYPTO 97 rump session
by Chris Hall 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I know that many of you attended this years CRYPTO and probably went to the rump session too. Does anyone remember the details of Peter Landrock's presentation? If I recall correctly, he presented an amusing talk in which an attacker tried to blackmail a bank by claiming knowledge of the bank's RSA private exponent. He did this by revealing successive bytes of the exponent starting with the most significant. The ransom doubled with each successive byte revealed (and I believe he got up to 52 in his example). The catch was that any person can do this for the first X number of bytes of the exponent *without actually knowing d* (where X varies depending at least upon n). What I would like to know is what the details of the attack were: 1) Am I out of my mind and there was no such attack? 2) Given an RSA modulus n and public exponent e, can someone determine the X most significant bytes of e (presumably X is less than half of the byte length of e)? 3) If so, what are the restrictions on e? Are there choices of e which make this attack infeasible? 4) If so, does one get only the most significant bits of d that are non-zero (i.e. if d=0x0078... then one gets 0xF000 back as the result)? Or does one actually get the "length" of d (i.e. log_2(d) can be derived)? Please post any response to the list (so other people can have the info), but please Cc me too. I am subscribed to a filtered version of the list and may not see the reply. Thanks, Chris Hall

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Remailer Ecash Bounty
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I, Monty Cantsin, will pay fifty dollars to the first operator of a remailer on Raph's list to get a machine up and running which accepts ecash as payment to forward a message. Offer expires October 27, 1997 C.E. Disputes are to be settled by Tim May. If Mr. May declines to participate, Monty Cantsin will decide. Monty Cantsin Editor in Chief Smile Magazine http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNC10kJaWtjSmRH/5AQEY5Af+PBBY0QU8ixNYgqIpWQkHEDf22lhVleaB JJ81Pe4TCllk3KJ0WU8+B7fVdt3oQEzaZLKobQqP6NJOfXai3dwxc5C4MPQe+YGw N6jQbcKetIwX7EUb2siKOq07W1hxVhYm6liYxeUHEBR8hWjCeUM1JiJ3IC3GALAi bJ0mDhkhEIugYkfBXl2mBm4VjQRPWSt8GxqhWDneyn4maJjmOs1lco1WvGuLC+GA fK1F9PnJIKZITzeAEjTB87H7LFxhy0eRuL+r9y8Fqw288bSkKC6aG//fTLOV7B8d MeIXu2UHa2HuB/L1MWmAVFGyKfoI0xJqeXeWCNmrLRlcp6GdCrQgig== =sNwa -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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