December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

secure phone quest
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In article <9310042017.AA26812(a)fegmania.wustl.edu> you write: >vat is available from ftp.ee.lbl.gov. There's no source at the moment >but there are binaries for different architectures. (And the dynamically >linked SunOS 4.1.x versions do work for Solaris 2.x) > >vat is intended for use as a IP multicast multi-user chat program, but I >believe that it is useable for point-to-point communication also. Using >it for IP Multicast may require kernel patches (depending on your OS). There's also nevot, last seen in gaia.cs.umass.edu:~ftp/pub G -- Personal mail to gtoal(a)gtoal.com (I read it in the evenings) Business mail to gtoal(a)an-teallach.com (Be careful with the spelling!) Faxes to An Teallach Limited: +44 31 662 4678 Voice: +44 31 668 1550 x212

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Re: second order homophonic substitution
by hfinney＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This homophonic cypher sounds interesting. If the authorities demand your keys, you could scramble each row of the matrix (scrambling each row separately), so that only the dummy message can be recovered. Real ascii messages have a character set of about 2^6, so the actual size of the key matrix will be 2^12, and that means that each entry will be about 12 bits. For full generality in handling binary data the character set would be 2^8, meaning a matrix of size 2^16 entries with each entry being 16 bits. This is a 128K byte key, which is pretty cumbersome. Also, the cyphertext is twice as big as the plaintext, which will stand out too. Plus, once the authorities see your decryption algorithm it may be pretty obvious that it was designed for this specific purpose, and whatever pressures they applied to make you reveal the key may now be redoubled until you reveal the "real" key. A one-time-pad has the advantage that the key is the same size as the file, and there is no size expansion in encryption, plus it's a plausible approach to use for high-security encryption. It will take less space and still allows for multiple decryption. Hal hfinney(a)shell.portal.com

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Re: Standard Headers for Anonymous Remailers
by pierre＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I wrote: > Who qualifies whom, based on what info, and to eliminate whom? > Paul mentions organizational qualification methods > Douglas defends the rights of private groups, and anonymity Yes, I meant that as a pointer to further problems. I did not mean that it is very difficult to find organizational or technical solutions (although in practice, it may very well be), nor was I lashing back at an Orwellian suggestion. (I still get caught in the way email gets read, not that I have much more luck in person :-) Even though there may be technical solutions to "limited access" groups, it is not clear how compatible each of these is with anonymity. And at the same time it will become harder and harder to figure out whether somebody is using hir Real Name or some Assumed Name. The book publishing market surprises people because an author's pseudonym is not obviously a pseudonym. Any "limited access" policy has to address the problem of pseudonyms, and of individuals offering their pseudonym for un-accredited public access. But the problem at hand is not even that... In the case of io.com, and current remailers, the problem is netnews newsgroups that don't like anonymous abuse without really understanding how hard it could be to eliminate it... Netnews, until now, is here to provide open discussion and "publishing" space. The idea of qualification can be implemented via automatic moderation for example, but it has to contend with: 1) votes by the general public, and acceptance by sysadmins who will carry the traffic (although they don't have much of a say about mailing list traffic...) 2) superset groups and cross-posting. If a "qualify"-only newsgroup is created, then a super-set newsgroup could be created that copies everyhting from the "qualified" groups, and adds open traffic. That superset still carries interesting traffic from people who shun administrative overhead. Qualified people who want to pursue the thread they started now read the superset newsgroup. 3) If you publish, and expect email responses, you need to publish your email address. That makes you vulnerable to mail bombing. It does not matter if the newsgroups carries only filtered traffic. And thanks to Owen for posting the description of some of these net.wars. It will take me a while to go through that. pierre. pierre(a)shell.portal.com

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WE'RE UNDER ATTACK
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In article <9309180534.AA27719(a)longs.lance.colostate.edu> you write: >We must try to determine whose rules we are playing by. Is this a >customs investigation? Treasury Dept.? The situation with NSA is that >they don't really ever act directly, they always go through some other >henchmen to do the dirty work. This smells like them. But the case of >the NSA convening a grand jury does not appear to have a historical >precedent. What's going on here? Here's my guess: the NSA isn't actually behind this - it was just unfortunate that Grady was getting up their nose at the time. Let's imagine someone who is an arse-licking toady and wants to keep in well with the government. Let's suppose he's the sort of person who, to paint the personality type, would go around hassling ftp site managers getting them to remove pgp. Then imagine that the cheeky bastards promoting pgp taunt him by offering it loudly from sites outside the US and there's nothing he can do about it. What does this person do now? Has a quiet word with his friends in the US Customs (you never know, he might have some connection with the government and exporting, for all we can imagine...) and points out as a loyal concerned citizen that a cryptographic munition has been illegally exported. He maybe even forwards them some postings by Grady saying that he was planning to publish these programs (and Grady is well known to publish his Moby Words through the Austin Code Works - anyone who gets Byte can tell you that...) If such a drittsekk came to the US Customs with such a story, I think they'd be duty bound to investigate it; *especially* when all they'll have heard until now is this persons highly one-sided view of the matter. Now, *I* can't imagine for a minute that any of our cypherpunks or sci.crypt readers would do such a thing, but then I always do tend to overestimate the common sense of the net.educated public... G

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Re: iss source
by accom!erc%accom＠uunet.UU.NET 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > I've been rather swamped by folks asking for the ISS source code, so would > > anyone mind if I posted it here? It's only 19K tarred, gziped, and > > uuencoded... > > Why don't you just tell all of these people to get it via anonymosu ftp > from ftp.uu.net in the /usenet/comp.sources.misc/volume39/iss directory. > If they only have access to mail they should find a nice ftp-to-mail > gateway to do the job for them. Because someone reported to me that the copy on uunet was corrupted or something... :( -- Ed

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distributed autonomous networks
by hiscdcj＠lux.latrobe.edu.au 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi guys, well, after reading through the backlog of spread spectrum stuff, I was surprised to read about the radio-network-on-a-board (Julieboard) article that someone posted. A couple of us here in Australia have been kicking around the idea of a cheap network, running via repeaters in _very_ small boxes tossed all around a city, which would be indestructible through sheer numbers (a la the arpanet). So: anyone got any ideas, schematics, information? The main idea is a huge number of small, low-power and CHEAP nodes which would handle through traffic which anyone with a radio modem could tap into, with the nodes disguised and placed in extremely hard to get to places (tops of telephone poles, buildings, on bridges and overpasses, etc). This would mean that it would cost an awful lot of money to remove each of these things, IF they could be found. Possible power sources: batteries (but they need to be changed) solar power (Australia leads the world in solar power technology, and I know people who know people). Near Field Interaction and EMF pickups (stick 'em near high-frequency power transmission lines). Something that convert heat to electrical energy or combinations of all of the above. The idea being that we would have an untraceable, unbreakable network. Sure, you may have an address (perhaps we could set it up as a FQDN domain?), but that address would not correspond to any actual physical location. And, it would be free, aside from the cost of the equipment. No more phone calls to pay for! I have no idea how this could be done across interstate or international distances, but I'm sure people might have ideas. Bounce signals off satellites (are those big shiny things from the 50's still about?); send stuff encrypted via the internet, etc etc. This could well mean that we would have a truly private network, with strong encryption and no centralised source of transmission (I mean, most of the internet traffic into and from Australia goes via a single link, so far as I know). Comments? Dwayne

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Re: Generating Random Numbers...
by catalyst＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bob Baldwin writes: >The english language has an entropy of 1.0 to 1.5 bits per letter, so it >is safe to extract one bit per character. [Shannon's work et al >demonstrates] that this bit per character is truely random. - entropy - In information theory, a visceral meaning of the term 'entropy' is 'a measure of surprise', or unpredictability. Entropy is the amount of information in some chunk of data, that could not be deduced. Equating entropy with randomness is a tautology. Entropy (like velocity) is relative, however, to the observer. If the observer has a good model of the data, the entropy will be low (not much information present). If the observer has a bad model, the entropy will be high. One example that demonstrates a difference in relative entropies is a block of ciphertext. The entropy of the block with respect to its intended recipient (who has the key) is low; with respect to an interloper (no key), it is high. - the entropy of english text - The paper cited by nobody, and alluded to by Bob Baldwin, is a landmark paper in estimating the entropy of english text. Note that these estimates are not lower bounds, but empirical values with respect to the human 'predictors'; and that the (1, 1.5) bits per character are an _average_ across an entire message. For example, if the message begins "Four score ", then, with respect to a typical American history student, there is very little entropy in the remainder of the sentence, should it continue " and seven years ago". - turning entropy into random numbers - >From reading Bob Baldwin's post, I am not sure how he intended to extract this 'one bit per character'. You would certainly not just pick the n-th bit from every byte. A good way to turn entropy into actual bits is to build a compressor. A compressor is usually a combination of a predictor (or model) and an encoder. The predictor plays the role of the human 'predictors' in Shannon's experiment, and for each new symbol of the message, generates a probability that represents (inversely) its 'surprise' at seeing that symbol. A good encoder uses the probabilities from the predictor to encode the symbol in the smallest number of bits. The better the predictor, the less it is suprised, the larger the probabilities it returns to the encoder, the fewer number of bits output. Thus, good predictors (and competent encoders) lead to efficient compressors. See Bell, Cleary, & Witten, "Text Compression" Prentice Hall, 1990. ISBN 0-13-911991-4. Especially Ch. 5 'From Probabilities to Bits'. - entropy and transformations - Both Bob Baldwin and nobody discuss the use of hash functions on the text to get random numbers, and wonder if redundancy in the underlying message will 'show through'. Cryptographically secure deterministic hash function are designed with this criteria in mind. That is, one goal is that the entropy in the bits of the hash itself, relative to an observer who knows the input stream, is 0; to an observer who does not know the input stream, it is maximal (i.e., has a lower bound related to your predictability in selecting an input). nobody asks: >could someone here describe how this compares to other pseudo-random >sources? how well would this function as a seed to some other >pseudo-random number generation process? Using hashes as random number generators is as secure as the hash which (for a cyptographically poor hash) may be dependent on the entropy of the input, and your use of it (e.g., don't always hash the 'Gettysburg Address' to get your random numbers). Using compression to convert the entropy in a message (with respect to the compression model) into a random number is dependent on the quality of the model. If you use a poor model, someone else will be able to find, and perhaps capitalize on, redundancy in your output. Related to this, in a conversation on this topic with Ron Rivest he noted that good enough compression might be secure in itself (with the model and its initial state as the key), and that he had students who were researching this. Hope this helps, Scott Collins | "Few people realize what tremendous power there | is in one of these things." -- Willy Wonka ......................|................................................ BUSINESS. voice:408.862.0540 fax:974.6094 collins(a)newton.apple.com Apple Computer, Inc. 5 Infinite Loop, MS 305-2B Cupertino, CA 95014 ....................................................................... PERSONAL. voice/fax:408.257.1746 1024:669687 catalyst(a)netcom.com

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Re: Generating random numbers from english text
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bob Baldwin, describing Shannon's info theory stuff, said: > 1. Ask a person to speak about any topic for a paragraph or two. > Instruct them to generate original sentences, not just repeats of > some passage of a written work. Write down what they say. > 2. The english language has an entropy of 1.0 to 1.5 bits per letter, so Actually, if you've got an audio input on your computer, one way to generate "true" randomness for use in keys or whatever would be to turn on the microphone and _speak_ about any topic for a few seconds, and take the MD-5 of the sound file; the differences in voice, timing background noise, microphone quality, etc., ought to add a lot to the randomness. (Or else, turn on the mike and type N random characters and record them :-)

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cypherpunk mindWHAT?
by Philippe_D_Nave 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello, all! I assume all of you saw the message about 'cypherpunk mindfucking' today. It appears to have come from an anonymous mail system (unless S. Boxx is the name of the sender- but then, that name sounds a lot like the S-box used in the DES encryption scheme. Call me paranoid, or give me a point for catching an inside joke.) That said, it seems that the point of the message is that there is a lot of smoke coming from people who use aliases or anonymous remailer services to post to the cypherpunks list. Does this posting contribute to that problem, or have I missed something? > i've been monitoring the list for some time. > something needs to be done about the fucking perversions. we are being > mindfucked by traitors. > thanks to everyone who has sent me mail. keep it coming. i intend to > get to the ugly bottom of this if i have to. there is a putrid rotten > stench here, i pray to GOD that others will finally smell it. i'm > getting closer. i'm breaking it _wide_ open. the pretenders and > traitors will be shot. the Cause has been stalled. the Cause will > conquer. the Cause will live on. What the hell ?!? I've either missed something significant (and would appreciate enlightenment) or this is a candidate for 'strangest post of the year'. If 'S. Boxx' really exists and is the author of this posting, I apologize- if not, then come out from behind your damn remailer and quit contributing to the problem. As for monitoring the list for traitors, go ahead- I post under my own name, and I don't give a shit what you do with the text. If I was concerned about lurkers building 'traitor files', I'd encrypt my messages and happily watch you choke on them. ........................................................................ Philippe D. Nave, Jr. | The person who does not use message encryption pdn(a)dwroll.dw.att.com | will soon be at the mercy of those who DO... Denver, Colorado USA | PGP public key: by arrangement.

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Generating random numbers
by Mike Johnson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

If you have an audio input to your computer, try recording noise from a fan, traffic on a busy street, or the roar of a crowd at a football game. Then compress the output to remove any obvious redundancies such as 60 Hz hum from a fan motor or unused dynamic range of the input digitizer. This results in much better "randomness" than some keystroke timing techniques. Of course, writing cryptographic software would be a whole lot easier if all computers had a built in real random number generating device that could produce quantum physics related data as fast as you could read it. Anyone want to build a serial or parallel port attachment that could be read by any software needing random numbers for crypto or other applications? Mike Johnson mpjohnso(a)nyx.cs.du.edu

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