December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

(None)
by Jeff Gostin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dan Harmon <harmon(a)tenet.edu> writes: > What do they know that we do not? Makes you wonder about all of PKP's > claims. Has PKP ever sued anyone over their patents or have they just > threatened? Very curious. They know that they have deep pockets. AT&T has some of the deepest pockets in the country, and could out-money PKP/RSA in yesterday's heartbeat. PKP fights little guys... that's all they've HAD to fight, so far. Now that they have a real opponent, who can meet (and surpass) their level of gameplaying, it'll be interesting to see what happens. --Jeff -- ====== ====== +----------------jgostin(a)eternal.pha.pa.us----------------+ == == | The new, improved, environmentally safe, bigger, better,| == == -= | faster, hypo-allergenic, AND politically correct .sig. | ==== ====== | Now with a new fresh lemon scent! | PGP Key Available +---------------------------------------------------------+

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ANOTHER CELLULAR VIC
by bmorris＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com KK> Bear in mind that OJ himself placed a call to 911. You sort of expect KK> to lose some of your privacy when you do that. Actually OJ called his ex-wifes condo, her father answered, OJ said he was coming over to kill himself, the father ran out yelling "Call 911". But yes, I would want my cell phone number to appear on the 911 dispatchers screen too. * RM 1.4 B0037 *

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(NONE)
by bmorris＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com CC> Alas, the full quote runs "Under the rule of men entirely great, the CC> pen is mightier than the sword". Pen wielders tend to omit that awkwa CC> preface. Perhaps a better ( and more optimistic ) way to put it would be "All the armies on earth can not stop an idea whose time has come". * RM 1.4 B0037 *

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No Subject
by Martin Strzyzewski 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Y0 I want more info about cypherpunks....who r they? im form Poland.,..... thx -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- | Martin Strzyzewski | | kefir | | kefir(a)pluton.pol.lublin.pl | -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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Re: Andy Grove on Clipper
by qwerty＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Tim May concluded, after an insightful essay, >Is it hopeless? For public relations, probably yes. Fortunately, the power >of strong crypto lies in its use. The leverage effect. > >As Phil Karn put it: "Don't get mad, get even. Write code." The crypto code exists, for whatever you may wish to do (at least if it isn't real-time voice, but that's also being written). What is now needed has nothing to do with crypto. It has to do with art, not science, not mathematics. Interface design and interface creation, for PGP. It means Mac and Windows. That's a 100+ million user base. That's why we started the Mac Crypto Interface Project, and why similar is needed for Windows. We already have a simple Apple Script interface almost done (by Pete Hinely) which will allow MacPGP2.6 to be used by millions, not just a few fanatics. "g(x) = O(f(x))" doesn't matter now, no more than E = hv mattered for getting microwave ovens in every household. Nice GUI matters now. The product exists but it needs packaging and marketing. I'd like to see a shift in focus here, brought on not by my nagging, but by realizing how radical a thing it would be, were a five-minute learning curve, "No Questions Asked" PGP interface available for the Mac and Windows. And in this effort, newbies are the experts, and the leaders, for it is they we must serve. It comes down to, do you want strong crypto tools just for your group of a few hundred, or do you want to change the world? -=Xenon=- P.S. ftp to ftp.netcom.com in /pub/mcip to get MCIP.Design.Spec.cpt.hqx to see pictures of future MacPGP. There's will also soon be a simple-Simon interim interface (already almost done) which will use MacPGP2.6/2.6ui as a dummy crypto engine. No more 14 buttons and four text areas every time you want to encrypt the Clipboard. Also, it looks like AOL and Compuserve etc. will finally start carrying PGP. That's a mainstream market. PGP2.6 is a radical thing, thus. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLgMjewSzG6zrQn1RAQHriwP9EHp1N392+kOSezzjxce/TgcDFokilrGL wks/v9Cyi/MlxGIG1pyZU1U1kM/VM8VrrAuAI1f5/3KevfpeJLuBdoO04wH1TDcb EkBBjjOw5WgNUhF7QVJc52WSroQB/8Mle95H1bLlEKeYL1eVP0l6bDDGQK6T2+KZ Rzl+zkaXhJY= =hRbR -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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DECLINE AND FALL
by bmorris＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com LL> If capital flees a country, the population will be less LL> productive, dissatisfied and vote the politicians out of office. So LL> policies that favor capital in some sense also favor labor. LL> Anyone else care to take shots at his argument or support it? Hot money ( investing money ) is always going wherever the best yield is, and ignores national boundaries. While this isn't capital investing money, a big inflow/outflow to/from one country, especially a small one, probably will affect the politics. With global banking, and stock and commodity markets effectively open 24 hrs a day, this trend will increase. For instance, the stock market of Turkey zoomed up last year, and is zooming down now. The hot money was there last year as is leaving now. This is undoubtably affecting their internal politics. * RM 1.4 B0037 *

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Re: L.J. Freeh and the Opposition
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Check out sunday's _Parade_ magazine for an article on Louis J. Freeh, the > director of the F.B.I. "Tough on crime", "man of the streets", and ruthless > eliminator of directors :-) If he ever throws his weight behind Clipper, the > battle will get *MUCH* tougher. Yeah. On the other hand, his weight *is* strongly, if quietly, behind Clipper - he's pushing the Digital Tele-phony Initiative to prevent the phone companies from offering real crypto, so that if one of them *does* decide to offer real non-Clipper encrypted service (e.g. cellphones), they won't be able to. If he were officially on the side of Clipper, then the Clipper forces wouldn't be able to say "it's purely voluntary"; for now they can pretend to be totally separate efforts.

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Magic O(logn) RSA decryption algorithms
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Complexity theory often uses the concept of an oracle, which is a function that gives you a correct answer in constant time; some oracles only hand out one bit at a time, while others give you more data than that. One reason that oracles are useful is that they give you lower bounds on how much work is required to do something - if a job requires O(f(x)) time with an oracle doing the hard parts, you know the whole job is at least that complex. NP completeness uses Non-Deterministic Turing Machines, which are one formalization of oracles - an NP complete problem requires polynomial time to solve if the Turing machine is allowed to make O(p(n)) correct non-deuerministic steps (e.g. gets the bits from an oracle), where p(n) is some polynomial or smaller function of the input size. (NP complete problems are normally formalized as a function that returns 0 or 1 depending on whether the input is a correct solution to the problem, so solving is equivalent to demonstrating that a given solution is correct.) So, if you've got an oracle around (and oracles cost more than the $10,000 Perry bet Jim, if you buy good ones :-), how much work does it require to demonstrate that the oracle just handed you a correct key? Public Key: n = pq, where p and q are secret, e relatively prime to (p-1)(q-1) Privatekey: d = e**-1 mod (p-1)(q-1), which is about logn bits long. Encrypting: c = m**e mod n Decrypting: m = c**d mod n n, d, c, and m are all about logn bits long; d may be a couple bits shorter. p and q may be shorter, but logp + logq = logn. One way to demonstrate that the oracle handed you a correct key is to encrypt a piece of data and then decrypt it. This requires two exponentiations, and two or more modulo steps. My copy of Knuth is buried somewhere, so I don't remember the complexity of mod n, but it's got to be at least log n or so. Encryption is fast, since e is a constant (fast is log n in this case), but decryption requires O(logn) multiplies, and each multiply takes at least logn steps since the answer has 2logn bits (it may be slower, I forget; it's probably logn * logn single-bit adds plus carries.) So the time required is >= logn**2, which is too slow for Jim. The other way to demonstrate that the oracle handed you a correct key is to show that de = 1 mod (p-1)(q-1), which requires knowing p and q, and is thus equivalent to factoring n, as Perry said. I suppose the oracle could hand you (p-1)(q-1) = pq-p-q+1 = n-p-q+1 without handing you p and q, but that's asking a lot from an oracle. Bill

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No Subject
by pfarrell＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- A while ago some folks talked about being willing to pay for a hardware random number generator. Not a PRNG, but a real one. There are lots of uses listed in TCMay's document that can't be named, but generating blinding factors for digital cash is my favorite. I've got a friend who is a professional electronics engineer that is willing to help, but he has some questions on the design. The Prime Assumption: White noise due to molecular motion is truly random. Noise generated in a carbon resistor or zener diode is white noise. Is this true, cryptographically speaking? The circuit is essentially a "Hiss Generator". The hiss waveform, after being amplified to the proper amplitude, would be sent to a rude, crude, inaccurate analog to digital converter. From there we send it to a serial or parallel port. Probably just grab the LSB, but that is an implementation detail... We have some design options based upon the Prime Assumption: 1.A a device would use a cheap noisy carbon resistor and a rude, crude, noisy amplifier to amplify the noise generated by the resistor. 1.B. A zener diode may make a "louder" noise and require a cheaper amplifier. 1.C How about if we take the hiss that you find between stations on an FM receiver, and digitize them through a PC soundcard? 1.D Another wonderful source of hiss is the telephone when it is off hook. Is there any solid justification to pick one over the others? (I expect that 1.C limits our audience too much, but maybe not, esp with VoicePGP coming RSN.) This clearly needs support, such as a UART or similar chip would convert the signal to RS-232 to to dangle off of your ports. Some type of clock would be required to sync the UART, providing a more or less constant baud rate, so the computer can read it. There needs to be a DC power supply to make this thing go. This is accessable in the power supply of most PCs. It is my opinion that nobody wants to put 9 volt batteries in this thing and have to remember to turn it off when they are finished using their computers. We think that we could create these beasts for less than $25.00 in some quantity. The first one would probably cost about $50.00 to produce plus somebody's time (which isn't typically free or this probably would have been done already). Seriously, is there really much market out there for this? Will there be a bigger market in the future as more people get on the "Information Superhighway"? I get the impression from folks a while ago that real random data is a problem, but nobody wants to spend more than the price of two cases of beer to solve the it. Is the value of random data really that low? More questions: 2. Do people really want to tie up a serial port with this or should it contain a switch to cut it in and out as needed and free up the port? This sounds like an A-B switch. 3. Maybe it should go on the PC bus as an adapter card. This would greatly raise the cost, up to maybe $100, but would preserve "valuable" serial ports. Most PCs only have two, and one is used for the mouse, and the other for the modem. Since DOS can't handle more without help, this is a real limit. 4. How secure should the device itself be? Bruce's wonderful _Applied Cryptography_ talks about OS Virtual Memory managers writing out keys to disk without the user/programmer knowing, which is a serious potential problem. We have that same problem with the random number that this device generates. Wose, it wouldn't be hard for a `bad guy' to write a TSR that constantly reads the random port, and records the numbers in parallel with whatever wants to use it for real. While I'd like to think that I really control my PC, once you get networking TSRs, smartdrv, APSI drivers, CDROM and Soundcard drivers, HIMEM, etc. loaded, do you really _know_ that they are your friends? Is this a real problem? I can imagine a design for an internal card that allows only one read of the number, so even if a bad guy were there, they would get alternating (and thus different) numbers. I can't imagine doing this off a parallel or serial port. Is there a need for this level of sophistication (and added expense)? Any comments are greatly appreciated. And if you are seriously interested, let me know, as that will surely add to my motivation. Cypherpunks write code (or maybe work on hardware :-) ! Pat Pat Farrell Grad Student pfarrell(a)netcom.com Department of Computer Science George Mason University, Fairfax, VA Public key availble via finger #include <standard.disclaimer> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAgUBLgN03rCsmOInW9opAQG0wAP/RNJ8VeZDq5KhVI4JFs0tdXxUkVvSiY06 lHvjmf8EL3kxn2ruxNYmigvxocvIn5mOSJQbpUl4CyLa++HMBkSDN06PMYVVreTX LA1XvHFgzjoC/WILD6LNy9XyUn0W/g2KkbQM/4FYCTa1b82f+vdq/7L6glHJ4cm3 GKlCaeklSXU= =dzwk -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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No Subject
by Jef Poskanzer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>1.C How about if we take the hiss that you find between stations on an >FM receiver, and digitize them through a PC soundcard? Hmm. And if an attacker discovers you're using this method, and decides to send out a signal on the same frequency? You might find your "random" numbers are suddenly all zeros... --- Jef

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