December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: cypherpunks-digest V1 #18
by smb＠research.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 11:54:45 +0200 (METDST) Subject: 15 years! About the EFF Wiretap Bill: The bill makes it a crime to possess or use an altered telecommunications instrument (such as a cellular telephone or scanning receiver) to obtain unauthorized access to telecommunications services (Sec. 9). This provision is intended to prevent the illegal use of cellular and other wireless communications services. Violations under this section face imprisonment for up to 15 years and a fine of up to $50,000. I commented on this before but feel like repeating myself: So an alt.2600 tec-addict makes some hardware hacks on his cellular - and gets 15 years in the slammer for catching some airwaves. A punishment scale suggestive of a very repressive state! And why outlawing it in the first place? What is crypto for? I'm not defending a 15 year sentence; it's far too harsh. But I strongly disagree with ``why outlawing it in the first place? What is crypto for?'' By analogy, why outlaw burglary? After all, what are safes and alarms for? The purpose of a civilized society is precisely to avoid this sort of ``arms race'' between bandits and those who pay for services. Even libertarians generally agree that theft is wrong, and theft of service is just as wrong as theft of tangible objects; otherwise, there is no way to recover the cost of the capital investment necessary to provide the service. That is, the marginal cost -- the electricity, wear and tear on the ICs, etc., to make a cellular phone call -- is obviously very low. But someone had to pay for all the cellular switches out there, to say nothing of the R&D that went into them, and a large part of the charges for a call go towards repaying that investment. Now, a prudent service provider may wish to invest in crypto as a way to prevent fraud, just as many homeowners invest in alarm systems. But failure to do so doesn't make either sort of theft correct. --Steve Bellovin

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\"they\" and Real Bullets
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The c'punks vote on continuing the "they" topic: 1 yes 1 maybe 1 no 2^512,000 plonks The "plonks" have it, but to hell with them. ----------------------------------- Responding to msg by wcs(a)anchor.ho.att.com (bill.stewart(a)pleasantonca.ncr.com +1-510-484-6204) on Thu, 18 Aug 8:46 PM >> From: Hal >> What does it mean to speak of a government in >cyberspace? It is the >> government in physical space I fear. Its agents >carry physical guns >> which shoot real bullets. >> >........................................................ >Without cryptography, all you've got left is security >by obscurity, the main technique used by the hackers in >the book; even cryptographic systems need strong >enough implementations built around the >mathematically-strong parts to be truly safe. Bill's suggestion about obscurity through strong crypto as a defense against real bullets is a provocative version of "the pen is mightier than the sword" homily. That rephrasing of the topic seems to be a good way to mix software and hardware issues that originated the "they" topic. Is it possible for mind stuff and its gadgets to beat the tools of physical violence? It seems that is what this list is about. Jim Dixon's elegant disquisition (and that of other respondents) on the rise and fall of governments is less persuasive than his (and others') remarks, say, on the NSA spy machine where he (and they) shows nitty-gritty expertise. I vote for the nit-grit as more pertinent to Hal's "real bullets" problem. Sorry, but geo-political bullshit apologizes for real killers of all political bent, in power or out. Geo-pol is overdone by talking heads who sound numbingly alike. The distincitive sound of crypto and techno stuff is what charms here, because it's rarely heard in public venues. We got to take responsibility for our individual actions, day by day, and resist the delusionary temptation of hallucinating on great problems to mask our daily marginalization. Ahem. John

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Zimmermann/NSA debate
by Loren Fleckenstein 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For those who haven't heard, Philip Zimmermann and Dr. Clinton Brooks of the National Security Agency will debate the national encryption and privacy policies Thursday Aug. 25 at the Thousand Oaks Inn, 75 West Thousand Oaks. Blvd. in Thousand Oaks, Calif. A cocktail hour will start at 5:45 p.m. The debate will start at 6:30 p.m. If there is anyone in the Moreno Valley-to-Riverside, Calif., area who is interesting in carpooling with me to Thousand Oaks., contact me by private e-mail. We'd return that night. -- Loren

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Re: 15 years!
by frissell＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:29 AM 8/19/94 -0600, Brad Huntting wrote: >In America cops often use armored battering rams to execute knock >warrants. Similarly, they can use court orders to obtain keys to >decode encrypted transmissions or files. If a person is ordered >to turn over their password to unlock their documents, they can be >held in contempt if they don't, and they can demand their right to >not have any of the documents used against them if they do. > >In America at least, there are no new civil liberties to be found >in the use of strong crypto. The legitimate, constitutional use >of police power cannot be thwarted by using this new technology. Brad -- perhaps you haven't grasped the full range of possibilities arising from the deployment of modern crypto technology. By the use of Stego and anonymous networking and operating system software, it will be possible to block the authorities from even identifying you as the target of an investigation. While it is true that they may be able to try and force you to reveal the contents of a "secret message", they can succeed only if: 1) They know that a secret message exists 2) They know that you exist 3) They know (and can prove) that you possess the key material necessary to decode the message. 4) You are capable of being coerced -- i.e. you are a human being and not a software agent or an institutional entity controlled by humans outside of the jurisdiction. 5) You are within their jurisdiction. 6) You have not used an encoding scheme that kicks out two alternative plaintexts (the 'real message' and the 'duress message') depending on what key material you use. 7) You decide not to take advantage of their offer of one or two years of free room and board rather than submit to their demands. Modern crypto techniques can make it very difficult in practice to extract any useful information from people's computer files or communication streams. At the least, crypto can make "fishing expeditions" impossible. When you combine crypto with the fact that on a network, people inside and outside the "jurisdiction" are equal, enforcement capabilities are reduced. DCF ************************************************************************* ATMs, Contracting Out, Digital Switching, Downsizing, EDI, Fax, Fedex, Home Workers, Internet, Just In Time, Leasing, Mail Receiving, Phone Cards, Quants, Securitization, Temping, Voice Mail.

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Re: Are "they" really the enemy?
by jdd＠aiki.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In message <9408191418.AA26762(a)sten.lehman.com> stanton(a)acm.org writes: > > did not have the consent of the white population. The Ku Klux Klan > > developed as a way for the whites to enforce their rules. > > It also had the more-than-tacit support of the government. > > > The Ku Klux Klan was in its way an instrument of democracy. > > Instrument of oligarchy might be closer. Many poor whites were 'kept in > line' by it, as well as the blacks. Most of these remarks follow from a simplistic definition of government. My point was that the government may in some cases consist of some overt and recognized elements and some unofficial but nonetheless real elements. In societies in which there is a significant level of internal dissent quasi-governmental groups spring up. In Ireland the IRA is such a group in many areas. The UK government sends car thieves to prison; the IRA kneecaps them (smashes their knees with sledgehammers or a gunshot). > > In Russia, the monarchy was replaced by a republic which was destroyed > > by the Bolsheviks. There was widespread civil war. But there whenever > > there was a governmental vacuum, people filled it. Russia was full of > > bands of armed men. People needed governments to protect them from > > the marauders. > > How can you distinguish the marauders and the government? The difference is only one of degree. Either brigands smash your door down and steal everything you have, or the IRS sends in their auditors. On the whole, people prefer the lesser evil, the IRS, to the greater evil, bandits. > There was an > anarchic transition period. Some areas/groups did well (such as the Coassaks, > and parts of the Caucasus) some did very badly. Does this signify anything? Not as far as this discussion is concerned. In a chaotic situation, the fate of areas and groups will vary. In part this will reflect differing levels of chaos. > > Stalin was an expression of the people's will. > > I think that you are confusing 'the people' and 'the government.' Trotsky > was much more the choice of 'the people.' That's why he was charged with > 'bonapartism.' Even now you find many old people who regret Stalin's absence. What I was saying was that there was a widespread desire for peace and stability. [There are also differences in meaning between the English word 'people' and the Russian word usually used to translate it, 'narod'. I was thinking of the term 'narodnaya volya'. Email me if you want to discuss this further! In-depth discussions of Russian culture seem irrelevant to this list.] > > The US government is a large and powerful organization. Let us say > > that somehow you contrive to successfully weaken, impair, and > > obstruct it. How will you do this? Not by yourself. One person > > cannot defeat millions. You need a group of some size, at the very > > least of thousands. This group must have a set of common goals and > > some sort of administrative structure to effect those goals... > > You seem to be hooked on organized conflict. I am aware of organized conflict. If you want to radically change the US government in a short period of time, it will resist you. If you are to succeed, you must apply a commensurate amount of force. > I think you vastly underestimate > the power of incompetence, corruption, and bureaucracy. ? I don't think so, and in any case I don't see what you mean. > > I could continue, but you must understand what I am going to say: > > governments can only be defeated by organizations with the > > attributes of governments. > > Tell that to the Afghans. The Afghan tribes have a long history of defeating > governments with only a lose tribal and clan system. I have spent around six months in Afghanistan. Most of this was in Kabul, but I also visited Mazar-i-sharif, Herat, Kandahar, Ghazni, Jelallabad, and smaller places. The 'loose' tribal systems are in fact very tight. You are talking as though only national governments were governments. In Afghanistan the central government has normally been very weak. When I was there the king controlled the cities but the chiefs controlled the villages. The chiefs and mullahs were very powerful indeed. Afghanistan is a very conservative society. Along certain lines men are encouraged to be extreme individualists. But the group is very powerful. A friend of mine lived in a village. Families live in small compounds with high walls around them. The women cultivate the land inside the walls. A young man from the village was walking along a high hill near the village and saw an unveiled woman working her fields. Someone from her family saw him and naturally took a shot at him, because he was looking upon a woman in his family without a veil. For several weeks no one could step outside in that village without being shot at, because everyone was in or related to one of the two families involved. This is not a loose society. -- Jim Dixon

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Re: NSA Spy Machine and DES
by Peter Wayner 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It is entirely possible that the Cray SIMD machine will use Xilinxs. The folks at the Supercomputing Research Center in Bowie are also building machines with these Xilinxs. They're known under the name "Splash" and they've built at least two generations. One of the architects told me that the machine was only good for "deeply pipelined" processes. There is one preprint, for instance, that describes how to do text searching with the machine. (Surprise.) Much of this should be public because the folks from the SRC often go to conferences and present information. Two names on the Splash project that I can think of are Buell and Arnold. If anyone can dig up papers on this topic, I would be intrested to read them. That being said, I still don't really see the advantages of Xilinx. But this really could be because I've never programmed the machines nor have I used them for anything. It just seems unlikely to me that DES can be done that much faster. But like I said, what do I know? I would be intrigued if someone could run a back of the envelope calculation on building a machine with Xilinx. How many processes can you do with it? How many testing circuits can you fit on a chip? How fast will these circuits go? What is the big win from pipelining the process? Sure you can build a sixteen stage pipeline, but will you need to put copies of the SBOXes at each stage? How much space will this take? How deep will the gates be? What is the gate delay at each stage? What will be resultant speed? The fact is that for all of DES's bitwise 6-to-4 sboxes and other weird stuff, it isn't that hard to implement in a RISC processor that has XOR, AND, shifts and fast table lookup. Any answers out there? -Peter

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RE: \"they\" and Real Bullets
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: John Young The c'punks vote on continuing the "they" topic: 1 yes 1 maybe 1 no 2^512,000 plonks The "plonks" have it, but to hell with them. ........................................................................... For continuing the System: 1.0 NSA 2.0 Rest of the Gvmt 0.5 various & sundry Citizens ------ 3.5 Against it: 0.5 c'punks The ayes have it, but who cares about 'them'. Or their system. Blanc

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Re: Outlawing the overhearing of conversations
by smb＠research.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

- I find a number which looks to be compressed or encrypted. I fiddle around with it and manage to decrypt it, and it turns out to be a useful to me (and possibly harmful to others). What law have I broken, plausibly? With the possible exception of this point, I suspect that we agree more than we disagree. My note included the following excerpt from the original: The bill makes it a crime to possess or use an altered telecommunications instrument (such as a cellular telephone or scanning receiver) to obtain unauthorized access to telecommunications services (Sec. 9). This provision is intended to prevent the illegal use of cellular and other wireless communications services. Violations under this section face imprisonment for up to 15 years and a fine of up to $50,000. My reply was keyed to the phrase ``unauthorized access to telecommunications services''. As I read it -- and you may differ -- the action that's being prohibited here is picking up things like ESNs, credit card numbers, etc., and using those to obtain fraudulent access to the phone network. I'm hard put to justify such behavior as ethical, and I have no problem with declaring it illegal. (Again, though, prudent folks and/or their insurance companies and/or the government may choose to use/mandate crypto. Banks started using DES authentication for EFT transfers because the Fed insisted -- they didn't see the problem.) As for decrypting numbers picked up over the air -- although I'm going to be vague, I suspect that there is a real issue here. Suppose that you run a pay TV service that you genuinely attempt to protect -- that is, you use DES or stronger. Am I *entitled* to watch for free because I happen to be smart enough and/or rich enough to crack DES? Can I legally or ethically give away or sell recovered keys? The point I'm making here is that you're making a reasonable effort to protect something, and thus implicitly declare it private and worthy of protection. This is in distiction to unencrypted transmissions (i.e., today's cellular stuff), security through obscurity (today's digital cellular), or marginally encrypted (frequency inversion). To be sure, I don't know where to draw the line here, and I don't think I want a judge (state-appointed or freely agreed upon) drawing it for me. Maybe we should take a leaf from NSA's book and say that 40 bits or less of key amounts to a welcome mat... --Steve Bellovin

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Re: SSS attachment - is that Splash II?
by nobody＠kaiwan.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

------- Forwarded Message Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 13:30:42 -0400 (EDT) From: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich(a)descartes.super.org> Subject: Re: SSS attachment - is that Splash II? The WSJ article on the Cray-3 deal involves a chip/system designed here called TeraSys. Maya [Minnich djf] has a forthcoming article in IEEE Computer about it. The basic idea is to embed bit-serial processors in the sram chips, one processor per bit in the memory row register. It's a simple processor with an ALU and three registers. The memory "words" can now be thought of as running vertically up the columns, rather than horizontally along the rows. Every time you fetch a row, you are in fact fetching 64 bits from 64 different words to be operated on in the ALUs.This gives you roughly a 100-fold increase in memory bandwidth, since you no longer mux the data down from 64 bits to 1 or 4 bits to bring it off-chip. The key contribution of the Cray (this idea due to Ken Iobst of SRC, who also was the architect of the chips) came from Ken's realization that the Cray vector scatter/gather hardware could push the bits around BETWEEN the chips as fast as the hardware networks on, e.g., the CM-2. Thus the Cray-3, a vector supercomputer, can function as a very high-performance SIMD system as well. You don't need to build the additional network found on so many SIMD machines, e.g. maspar or cm-2. You also can have phases of a program, wherein it runs SIMD for a while, then vector, then SMP mode, etc. The TeraSys processors built here at src cost about $80K each, and for several problems could easily outrun our $6M CM-2. The chips are National Semi SRAMS, with mods done here by Mark Norder and Jennifer Schrader. Ken Iobst is the architect of the chips. The programming environment was basically Maya Gokhale's DBC language, which also runs on Splash-2, the CM-2, and clusters. Cray has reimplemented the chips for the Cray-3. In keeping with the NSAs new plans for SRC, this project was terminated at SRC last January. The systems are gradually being turned off and the cabinets put to other uses. No further work is occurring at SRC in this area. Feel free to forward this article to people who may ask you. There was some good work done by people here. ron rminnich(a)super.org | Error message of the week: (301)-805-7451 or 7312 | NFS server localhost not responding still trying ------- End of Forwarded Message

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timestamp.c mangled
by weidai＠eskimo.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com timestamp.c was partially mangled, so I am sending it again, this time using PGP ascii-armor. -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- Version: 2.3a owHNVl1oHFUUbi1aNhjpixQR6umUdGf/N7UVNJnSND9tdNOEJsFCEsrszJ3NNbNz h7l3sl3a6pOi1kdbtUgt+KTQh6Ig9M0+iSjUB0UREakWf54LPkj13Dszm9lN0iqI OCyzM/ec853vnDn3nPvKlvP33b+1PL/jyJPianB5NWxv3frj9m1/Otc/Kr/56rlf d/3289GR2+++t3/k030zP731wK07X18aGx68vcd423u9eKkyfujMziuXPxBfXdz+ R+m7vS/cufbZ6IvW9Zdv7ZyfzD1/7bVHly+8czO4+tjjC2MDt+hDR9/44vy2Xfvf D76pnLm5Y+nzvoufzJx6RP/2h9/JhzfO2V8uvvT9g9WHf7lx4Ur/x2K7oE3Cy9YW vCp5UG/CbPplC0owEgrWNAW1YObIDMyhDGalkASwWi0P9vflAept9fcsoTBmUhhu EWqb9BDhK7TJyhZrHkS5UsnMhALEMgGXegS0Mx1fGlAP2iwMoOywoGUGNjjUJUUw PRsNKFfmfsAagdmEFnVdMBNmbhu4ZXpg4qKCaJrUBYQBEywSCBOheVh/jlgClolp U6+h0CQ0dVAx9OxihMlpw1P86sxuA3Pw2RQRXouKZZmDiBIn0lhA3bRWygptGs2C FuXIWQIomwYjHASLWAWkEbpmxK7OTkVWcxga4A8jq5t1jKTJuICQEyfECDlGoIkg 5ILYmvowoLKFESCDYJVapJykdp4TFTM5hd8GNT1huuCHgc84kmCe2y4DTBCCmQkI kayazKZOG6MoQh0/i+8SkxOFpaKTzhjeSEnFgpnCMMCWdgGRifHAwluDqHj32MTB b8oln0p/X3/fHupZbmgTGObCpqy8fLB7LcAg1i3aLq33LrZ5RbR9RO5edyxPuGoN VyPnMDUyWTs8fQK0SsiDCvcZcyuSfCWqSK1bszY9+sxmqmWXWSspffzwMyNzR6V6 pRXrVMp+w0/p1KaP9MjXtpLLGlqa6ej01NTIsTHQ1nZUVAtTyKGL54na5LFxGKzu 27+2OnF8egq0iYA1IaU7O3/46fHROdBmo2J/CpTLVUZtOE6abJWc9FzQ8aMFkM8N SRlG7Om5/r7T/X0Ztc5riLQQe10qApdOFvYdOKCecUcmz3NNXz0OJZZ5Xz5OTNbG Ie9Mh1hUeUcGI/9rrCGF1MMNM8YmUebYyn9GisDAwvWJp2MCi6CZWsQtw32sEeHo yi8KKqLpV3zBTw7YWhEaRPjU1nNSGeJL+u2gJWatDp6KpbpkVKP31jIqgO4gEtdV 4MUk3xggFq2Xg90GHJuv1TBFGZmjjOOHa8rSncTOZHBz6FjSntX0E6H8RhImcJGL fMnlwDCgKqEirB4wzEQElpHbWPcxECWCQhfKEGYa9u6VdySXhewQFAp+bJmXVtnF ajZ6RTvLb+sq8GKEVuhiFKl1iiPSjFbPyhtxsatsEFxcap344ve/H6IqA+QaAWPf 6YAXeiCLyV7pOIvfE2cJW+i50tylmULPwbABg7mIQ0DMFWl9VpaDrE+pnBSJIcPo xVS04/pJ1qSVWk/pn15v6lgudmI9qZl14ruVbq/yP6tc2OTasJbvQXu9QmeXYkdA ynGjNAZ41DNnZ40WzlDK5RCnNvPEisdaMMAr2DyhxHG8FuqmsJZxGmGpY+lb+LdK gjq6NapQsHAsBTiXDeY4aIY7P3aRelD52og9Dg9BmorbhsFFGVDMk+LcWEdb9LTN dUIPzzMreofGPbOkhk5o1dXIwSxANjUHMNXoE3f2AM/CMMZcNrmlxb04FSzu7/8m vB7yKUKbpD3JR8xrU6/5fD51qiE25NeuRa+Lk+pHcktHnbgX8P+0I2IuyMY21HZO DhtF7FaKRmkw1SJjODvujNwlxNcPbNrWENTCxiXSqE9U4zaYxlLjCkkaTocEno06 AxaFcjwb3R0niGV3zacy/Pfyma7AzkRNsqxcda108p7JxHWWZCLSu/dmjD2WSiXA szJnHp6Uo424dm1UfgmDZC0gIgw8XeU+niEbH7ai0258zpKnINp1BtEj+QJd2m1k F72sHO+ppWie0kIhPsYkEoWBfv8C =8h/W -----END PGP MESSAGE----- PGP Public Key available

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