December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Triple DES Wanted
by thug＠phantom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm looking for a Triple DES file encryption program that takes arguments in the same form as /bin/crypt or /usr/bin/des. Is there a /bin/3des out there somewhere? Has anyone come across 3des.c? And if so, can you point me in the direction where it may be found. Thanks.. If no such program exists, I think it would be very useful to the cypherpunks community if it were made available. I'd also like to see a similar stand-alone version of IDEA (/usr/bin/idea?), but since it is patented, that's probably not going to happen, which is why I'm looking for something like /bin/3des. l8r, thug

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Re: Disturbing statistics on wiretaps
by Matt Blaze 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mike Goodwin writes: >Steve Bellovin writes: > > >Here's the actual language of 18 USC 2515 (note the omission of >"electronic communications"): > > >Sec. 2515. Prohibition of use as evidence of intercepted wire or oral >communications > >Whenever any wire or oral communication has been intercepted, no part of >the contents of such communication and no evidence derived therefrom may >be received in evidence in any trial, hearing, or other proceeding in or >before any court, grand jury, department, officer, agency, regulatory >body, legislative committee, or other authority of the United States, a >State, or a political subdivision thereof if the disclosure of that >information would be in violation of this chapter. >--Mike Out of curiousity, what's "wire communication" for the purpose of this statute? How does that differ from electronic communication (other than, perhaps, non-voice data traffic sent via cellular telephone)? Thanks -matt

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Re: Disturbing statistics on wiretaps
by Perry E. Metzger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mike Godwin says: > Sec. 2515. Prohibition of use as evidence of intercepted wire or oral > communications > > Whenever any wire or oral communication has been intercepted, no part of > the contents of such communication and no evidence derived therefrom may > be received in evidence in any trial, hearing, or other proceeding in or > before any court, grand jury, department, officer, agency, regulatory > body, legislative committee, or other authority of the United States, a > State, or a political subdivision thereof if the disclosure of that > information would be in violation of this chapter. How does the statute define "wire" communication? Perry

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Re: Subterranean Clipper Chip Blues
by J. Michael Diehl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

According to Jim Thompson: > > Subject: Subterranean Clipper Chip Blues > > PC/Computing, October 1993 > Page 468 (opposite inside back cover). > Note: _abc_ indicates italics. > > Illustration: several computers with keyholes in the screens. > Clinton's smiling face rises from the White House, as a long > arm reaches out with a key... > Anyone out there with a color scanner??? PLEASE scan this puppy! Distributing .gif images represents the next generation of Electronic Propaganda! So, if anyone has a scanner, please scan this one and make if available to us. Thanx in advance. J. Michael Diehl ;^) |*The 2nd Amendment is there in case the mdiehl(a)triton.unm.edu | Government forgets about the 1st! <RL> Mike.Diehl(a)f29.n301.z1 |*God is a good Physicist, and an even .fidonet.org | better Mathematician. <Me> al945(a)cwns9.ins.cwru.edu|*I'm just looking for the opportunity to (505) 299-2282 (voice) | be Politically Incorrect! <Me> Can we impeach him yet? |*Protected by 18 USC 2511 and 18 USC 2703. PGP Key = 7C06F1 = A6 27 E1 1D 5F B2 F2 F1 12 E7 53 2D 85 A2 10 5D

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Re: Clipper specifics
by cme＠ellisun.sw.stratus.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'd be surprised if they allow you a month or two for more comments. My current fantasy about Clipper is that the NSA did a deal with AT&T, demanding removal of DES chips in favor of Skipjack, getting AT&T to buy into a limited delay in product introduction with the gov't promising to get the Skipjack standard in place by Summer so that the AT&T phones weren't held up too long. That's all out of my own head, but it hangs together. Does anyone know specifics about AT&T's prior plans? Was there a DES version? - Carl

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Re: Orange book, the NSA, and the NCSC
by jim＠Tadpole.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Been to "the fort" twice, once on 'official business', once on a joyride around the 'campus'. :-) ("See them big sat dishes? Don't want to get too close to them, marines with guns up there.") The visitor's center has a small, but facinating museum of crypto stuff, everything from enigma-style machines to a device that does I-don't-remember-how-many-but-it-was-huge gigaflops on a hand-rolled chip made on site, to a device for intercepting (and decrypting) microwave transmissions. Not much satilite stuff. Pretty cool. The guards all wear big (loaded, I checked) guns. You're issued a little badge to carry around your neck. Get too far from your escort, or in a room without your escort, and they get really upset (from what I was told, I didn't try). Across the highway is a state camp for delinquent boys. Jim

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Re: Easy cracking
by smb＠research.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> The same kind of thing happened at Sun, except with the >> secure rpc stuff. Had a guy send mail saying, "I know your >> two primes." Sun replied, "No way." (And lauged internally.) I'm not sure this is how it happened, but the person (maybe there's more than one?) who did this is a cypherpunk, who will identify himself if he wants. He also wrote a paper on this. The first version of the paper had the private key at the top of the first page, but it got removed because certain spooks got upset. ?? As far as I know, Sun's secure RPC uses Diffie-Hellman with a 192-bit modulus. LaMacchia and Odlyzko solved the discrete log problem for that size, but there's no single private key to disclose. For those who are interested, the reference is @article{nfscrack, author = {Brian A. LaMacchia and Andrew M. Odlyzko}, journal = {Designs, Codes, and Cryptography}, pages = {46--62}, title = {Computation of Discrete Logarithms in Prime Fields}, volume = {1}, year = {1991}, xnote = "11211-900629-12TM" }

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soda.berkeley.edu
by pmetzger＠shearson.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi folks. I just tried doing an anonymous ftp to soda.berkeley.edu and it failed. Has something happened? Perry

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Re: Clipper specifics
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Their spokesagency, NIST, has said that it will be illegal to encrypt > on top of Skipjack or to mung the LEEF. Pre-encryption is not > mentioned, AFAIK, and would be borderline impossible to detect anyway. Actually, it won't be illegal, unless they get CONgress to pass some laws, but they may be able to do some contractual constraints on it as part of the process of getting your Skipjack products approved, either through the current process of export approval, or through the approval process described in the proposed FIPS (which basically says "Whatever NSA wants"); they could even place restrictions on selling Clipper chips to unapproved companies. It *will* violate the FIPS, if the FIPS gets approved, so you won't be able to sell SkipJack/LEAF products to the government unless they're capable of operating without post-encryption. That doesn't mean they won't buy dual-mode products that are switchable between secure and FIPS modes, though obviously the politics of the situation don't make that real likely :-) An interesting question is whether the export or manufacturing approval processes will ban the use of Clipper/etc. in programmable devices, either explicitly user-programmable ones, or devices in which the PROMs are easily replaced. It costs a little, but using flash-EPROM in a secure phone would make firmware upgrades easy, and that could include a LEAF-masking option.

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Re: Easy cracking
by Brian A. LaMacchia 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Subject: Re: Easy cracking From: smb(a)research.att.com To: Marc Horowitz <marc(a)GZA.COM> Cc: jim(a)Tadpole.COM (Jim Thompson), cypherpunks(a)toad.com, honey(a)citi.umich.edu Date: Wed, 29 Sep 93 14:32:27 EDT >> The same kind of thing happened at Sun, except with the >> secure rpc stuff. Had a guy send mail saying, "I know your >> two primes." Sun replied, "No way." (And lauged internally.) I'm not sure this is how it happened, but the person (maybe there's more than one?) who did this is a cypherpunk, who will identify himself if he wants. He also wrote a paper on this. The first version of the paper had the private key at the top of the first page, but it got removed because certain spooks got upset. ?? As far as I know, Sun's secure RPC uses Diffie-Hellman with a 192-bit modulus. LaMacchia and Odlyzko solved the discrete log problem for that size, but there's no single private key to disclose. The discrete log problem is "brittle" -- you have to do a lot of precomputation work for any particular modulus, but once you've done that work finding individual discrete logs is easy. We had received a "challenge number" from someone at Sun (i.e. they gave us g^x mod p, and we had to find x). We included both numbers in our paper. Interestingly enough, although Sun used a 192-bit prime, the comments in the source code refer to p as a 128-bit prime. Also, g=3 for the Sun RPC system, and code comments refer to g as a primitive root modulo p. But 3 isn't a primitive root modulo this particular p. We suspected that someone at Sun decided 128 bits was too short, and increased the length of the modulus to 192 (still too short) without changing the comments and verifying the primitivity of g. --bal P.S. I've put a PostScript version of the paper up for anonymous FTP, if you're interested in the details. Get the file martigny.ai.mit.edu:/pub/bal/field.ps

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