December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: The Digital Barter Economy
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As Mike Berch pointed out, an economy can grow just fine without increasing the supply of whatever money is being used - as long as the currency is easy enough to divide into smaller quantities. That's one reason gold and silver are quite good, though paper money and numbers in a ledger do quite well also. Yes, there are difficulties with a fixed money supply in a growing economy - money that you save keeps increasing in value, and money that you borrow becomes harder to pay back. That's ok - markets adjust the interest rates on borrowed money to accomodate people's expectations. It's certainly better than having one group of people decide that there should be more money in the market, print it, and force everybody to accept it from them. On the other hand, in an international free market, no single government's fiat currency is mandated, and if the bank or its customers want to hedge their bets by using multiple currencies, it may be worthwhile to offer them, and any banking protocols we develop should probably accommodate that. Banks have to be more careful in a multi-currency environment - if gold or yen go way up in value, people can do a run on gold or yen accounts even though the dollar accounts aren't getting hit. (e.g. gold prices jumped about 20% at the beginning of the Yankee-UN-Iraqi War, and anything slumps in value after *I* buy much of it.:-) If a bank has all its assets in dollars, and Clinton decides to inflate the currency to pay for Nationalized Health Care, same problem, unless all its acocunts are in dollars and it has to convert when trading with people who use other currencies. As far as inflationary effects go, if you're a government and print lots of fiat currency, the value of that currency goes down. Same thing if you're issuing a private currency, except you can't force your citizens to accept your zorkmids in exchange for real stuff. So either you don't print more zorkmids than you can back with something, or your accountholders get upset, withdraw their money, and you're in big trouble unless you've got insurance - and insurance companies tend to make sure you have a reasonable audit program before they're willing to risk their money insuring you. Private deposit insurance *is* available - a credit union down the street from me insures accounts to $350K, which is $100K federal and $250K private insurance. The only reason it's not more widespread is that people have tended to believe government insurance was enough. Bill # Bill Stewart NCR Corp, 6870 Koll Center Parkway, Pleasanton CA, 94566 # Voice/Beeper 510-224-7043, Phone 510-484-6204 # email bill.stewart(a)pleasantonca.ncr.com billstewart(a)attmail.com # ViaCrypt PGP Key IDs 384/C2AFCD 1024/9D6465

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Did NSA know about Public Key before Diffie and Hellman did?
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Did the National Security Agency and its crew of mathematicians know about public key cryptography before Diffie, Hellman, and Merkle made their mid-70s discovery? There have long been rumors that they did, but others say it hit them like a ton of bricks, that is, it surprised them. This question came up again on sci.crypt recently, and I cautiously offered the comments of a "source with deep ties to the public key community." This was Whit Diffe, who told us about this at a Cypherpunks meeting several months back, but I wasn't sure how public the information was or if Whit wanted his name attached to this revelation. In any case, Steve Bellovin, who of course is on this list himself, wrote the attached article for sci.crypt. I think it's pretty interesting and helps to clarify the history of public key crypto, a topic of some interest here on this list. Enjoy! --Tim Newsgroups: sci.crypt From: smb(a)research.att.com (Steven Bellovin) Subject: Re: HELP! National Security Decision Directive 145 Message-ID: <1994Jan15.192102.26379(a)ulysses.att.com> Date: Sat, 15 Jan 1994 19:21:02 GMT Distribution: usa Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories In article <tcmayCJKzyn.CDt(a)netcom.com>, tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) writes: > Lucien Van Elsen (lucien(a)watson.ibm.com) wrote: > : >>>>> Matt Blaze writes: > : > I recently got a copy of NSAM #160, dealing with requirements for > : > permissive action links on weapons systems, just by asking the JFK library > : > to initiate a declassification review. > > : So, does it shed any light on the rumor that came up at the ACM security > : conference that the NSA (or some other government body) knew about public > : key encrytion back then? > > A source with deep ties to the public key community says that Gus > Simmons, heavily involved in the creation of PALs while at Sandia > until recently, told him that the mid-70s announcement of public key > hit them like a ton of bricks, as something completely unexpected. You don't need to cite anonymous sources; at the Festcolloquium in his honor at the Fairfax conference, Simmons said it publicly. He said that he was on a plane to Australia, to give a talk, when he read the famous Martin Gardener column. He promptly tore up his slides and wrote up a new talk. On the other hand -- when a retiree from NSA alluded to NSAM 160, Simmons was the one who supplied the memo number. Both of them agreed that it was (at the least) the forerunner of public key systems. Did the NSA have PK in the mid-60's? The memo doesn't indicate that, at least in the declassified portions. A device meeting the requirements spelled out in the memo could have been constructed without PK, using hardware available back then. Envision a device with a core memory holding a key, an input line, a set of output lines, and some transistor and/or SSI comparator circuitry, all embedded in epoxy. You get exactly *one* chance to enter the right input value, since core memory uses destructive read-out, and there would be no reason to include writeback circuits. This isn't a design that would have been proof against a sophisticated enemy (let's be precise: against the USSR), but that was not a design goal. It would have stopped random maniacs, deranged weapons officers, and immediate battlefield use by enemy forces -- and those were the threats to be guarded against. I'm quite skeptical that -- with 1963 technology -- a high-reliabilty PK design could have been built. And high reliability was an explicit design goal. Now -- there was a portion of the memo, near the end, that wasn't released. In the context of the memo, that section *could* have spelled out long- term research efforts that would have led to public-key cryptography. And frankly, given the number and caliber of mathematicians who worked for NSA, if the right question was asked I think there's no doubt that they would have found an answer. According to Diffie's paper, it took just two years from the initial conception to when RSA was developed. Would NSA have taken much longer? I doubt it. As for why Simmons didn't know of it -- it does strike me as believable that NSA regarded the technique as too sensitive to use for PALs. After all, I claim that a secure (enough) nuclear command and control system could have been built without PK -- so why discuss it with someone who (to NSA) didn't have ``need to know''. Granted, PK would have strengthened the guarantees -- but security is a matter of engineering against a whole spectrum of risks, and balancing the tradeoffs; there's nothing that says you should favor one threat over others because the solution is sexier. You or I might have made different choices -- but I don't think my scenario is out of the question. --Steve Bellovin -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power:2**859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.

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Could I possibly be deleted, please...
by Thure 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The volume is far too high for mee. Thanx. / Bjoern

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Mondex Digital Cash System (fwd)
by Stanton McCandlish 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Barlow thought this might be of interest to y'all... Forwarded message:

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Re: Could I possibly be deleted, please...
by lware＠voxel.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Please remove me as well . . . Thanks, Lance

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Re: REMAIL: Cover traffic
by mcb＠net.bio.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim Miller writes: > > only one to leave the network. If the Opponent has the ability to > > monitor all traffic into and out of all nodes of the network (as he > > would have to do anyway to defeat remailers even without this cover > > traffic) then he will easily be able to find the messages which are not > > aimed at other remailers. > > How about extending the "send bogus messages" idea all the way out to the > users of the remailer system? Part of the price of using the remailer > system is that you will occasionally receive a bogus message. I was thinking about digital mix and defeating traffic analysis and realized that the perfect cover for private messages exchanged among remailers -- at least on the Internet -- is to multiplex them into a netnews feed. You would need a new transport protocol that basically handles an encrypted news feed and turns it back into normal NNTP/RFC1036 on the far end, while diverting private mail messages to the appropriate remailing software. If remailers were on large site servers that were set up as news hubs, there would already be a large amount of traffic between any pair of them; insert the private traffic and encrypt/slice/dice the result. This is a low-cost solution since the news has to flow somehow anyway and it is better than just sending around random garbage. -- Michael C. Berch mcb(a)net.bio.net / mcb(a)postmodern.com

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Thanks for RFC-822 help!
by Philippe Nave 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Many thanks to the dozen or more people who helped me locate RFC-822; I now have a copy of it, along with RFC-821 and a multitude of pointers to sites that keep RFCs available for anonymous FTP. I greatly appreciate your time and effort. [Flames and rants aside, the 'coffee house' crowd still comes through in a pinch... :) ] - -- ........................................................................ 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. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLUQ1dgvlW1K2YdE1AQEzlgQAtiJoyKQOXNIYKSHVG7wF1uI2BH3jDfXi JMFkTk23m//2xWuG2LLRVQrZveXG81QL2YTwVS0OeQFEM1lL9NKpZNm3d9i8AGxq TDz0QNCNV1sHT7ctjHIMx0vA43/lgRej0aDPt1HlKZD97oIg3FS/T+H0YTRSu1sP ry/15jfV4qY= =vY1A -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Offshore gets Wired
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From the Washington Post - 24 January 1994 INFORMATION HIGHWAY CROSSES THE SEA The Information Highway arrives at ... 14 Caribbean islands. Cable & Wireless (West Indies), AT&T and France Telecom announced a deal last week to build a fiber-optic network across the seabed. Scheduled to be commissioned in early 1995, it will run 1,100 miles from the British Virgin Islands in the north to Trinidad in the south. The cost will be about $60 million. It will be the largest system in the world that employs no "repeaters," units that sit on the ocean bottom and amplify the signal every so often. If ones goes bad, you've got to raise the whole cable and fix it. The cable will have capacity for at least 30,000 simultaneous phone calls, or the equivalent in data, video, you name it. Many islands in the region are trying to upgrade their telecom systems to attract service jobs. Notice that the clerk answering that toll-free vacation reservations number has a Jamaican accent? It might be because your call has rung straight through to Jamaica. One other reason to go with undersea fiber in this region: Hurricanes tend to take out earth stations every few years. --- WinQwk 2.0b#1165

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NBC Drug War poll.
by Nikolaos Daniel Willmore 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I forward this from Usenet. Seems drugs are the latest excuse to scare people into the need to trample the Bill of Rights and Constitution. alt.drugs #42770 (32 more) [1] Newsgroups: alt.drugs,talk.politics.drugs,alt.hemp From: trohan(a)eskimo.com (Tom Rohan) [1] CALL, FAX, AND E-MAIL NBC!!! TODAY!!! Organization: Eskimo North (206) For-Ever Distribution: usa Date: Mon Jan 24 08:52:48 EST 1994 Lines: 30 NBC is asking the question, "Will Legalization End The Violence?" They have a phone number to call if you think the answer is "YES". The call will cost you 55cents. The number is: 1-900-230-6221 You can also fax them any comments you have about the legalization/violence issue. I faxed them a 3 page letter. The fax number is: 1-212-664-5818 You can E-Mail them any comments at the following address: violence(a)NBC.GE.COM You can also call and leave them a Voice Mail comment. They have a 3 minute limit on this Voice Mail call and it costs 95 cents a minute. The number is: 1-900-678-6221 They said the phone lines would be open most of the day (whatever that means). Today is Monday, January 24, 1994. -- ** The Drug War is the Vietnam of the 90's. ** ===================== *** It is a guerrilla war waged by our *** | END THE DRUG WAR! ** government against its own people. ** ===================== Finally a USE for all those extra identities, voting twice ;-). -Nik

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Crypto Experts Oppose Clipp
by Dave Banisar 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Crypto Experts Oppose Clipper More than three dozen of the nation's leading cryptographers, computer security specialists and privacy experts today urged President Clinton to abandon the controversial Clipper encryption proposal. The letter was coordinated by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), which has long sought to open the issue of cryptography policy to public debate The group cited the secrecy surrounding the proposal, widespread public opposition to the plan and privacy concerns as reasons why the initiative should not go forward. The letter comes at a crucial point in the debate on cryptography policy. An internal Administration review of the issue is nearing completion and the National Security Agency (NSA) is moving forward with efforts to deploy Clipper technology in civilian agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service. CPSR has sponsored several public conferences on cryptography and privacy and has litigated Freedom of Informa- tion Act cases seeking the disclosure of relevant government documents. In one pending FOIA case, CPSR is challenging the secrecy of the Skipjack algorithm which underlies the Clipper proposal. For additional information, contact Dave Banisar, CPSR Washington, DC, (202) 544-9240, <banisar(a)washofc.cpsr.org>. ================================================================= January 24, 1994 The President The White House Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, We are writing to you regarding the "Clipper" escrowed encryption proposal now under consideration by the White House. We wish to express our concern about this plan and similar technical standards that may be proposed for the nation's communications infrastructure. The current proposal was developed in secret by federal agencies primarily concerned about electronic surveillance, not privacy protection. Critical aspects of the plan remain classified and thus beyond public review. The private sector and the public have expressed nearly unanimous opposition to Clipper. In the formal request for comments conducted by the Department of Commerce last year, less than a handful of respondents supported the plan. Several hundred opposed it. If the plan goes forward, commercial firms that hope to develop new products will face extensive government obstacles. Cryptographers who wish to develop new privacy enhancing technologies will be discouraged. Citizens who anticipate that the progress of technology will enhance personal privacy will find their expectations unfulfilled. Some have proposed that Clipper be adopted on a voluntary basis and suggest that other technical approaches will remain viable. The government, however, exerts enormous influence in the marketplace, and the likelihood that competing standards would survive is small. Few in the user community believe that the proposal would be truly voluntary. The Clipper proposal should not be adopted. We believe that if this proposal and the associated standards go forward, even on a voluntary basis, privacy protection will be diminished, innovation will be slowed, government accountability will be lessened, and the openness necessary to ensure the successful development of the nation's communications infrastructure will be threatened. We respectfully ask the White House to withdraw the Clipper proposal. Sincerely, Public Interest and Civil Liberties Organizations Marc Rotenberg, CPSR Conrad Martin, Fund for Constitutional Government William Caming, privacy consultant Simon Davies, Privacy International Evan Hendricks, US Privacy Council Simona Nass, Society for Electronic Access Robert Ellis Smith, Privacy Journal Jerry Berman, Electronic Frontier Foundation Cryptographers and Security Experts Bob Bales, National Computer Security Association Jim Bidzos, RSA Data Security Inc. G. Robert Blakley, Texas A&M University Stephen Bryen, Secured Communications Technologies, Inc. David Chaum, Digicash George Davida, University of Wisconsin Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems Martin Hellman, Stanford University Ingemar Ingemarsson, Universitetet i Linkvping Ralph C. Merkle, Xerox PARC William Hugh Murray, security consultant Peter G. Neumann, SRI International Bart Preneel, Katolieke Universiteit Ronald Rivest, MIT Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography (1993) Richard Schroeppel, University of Arizona Stephen Walker, Trusted Information Systems Philip Zimmermann, Boulder Software Engineering Industry and Academia Andrew Scott Beals, Telebit International Mikki Barry, InterCon Systems Corporation David Bellin, North Carolina A&T University Margaret Chon, Syracuse University College of Law Laura Fillmore, Online BookStore Scott Fritchie, Twin-Cities Free Net Gary Marx, University of Colorado Ronald B. Natalie, Jr, Sensor Systems Inc. Harold Joseph Highland, Computers & Security Doug Humphrey, Digital Express Group, Inc Carl Pomerance, University of Georgia Eric Roberts, Stanford University Jonathan Rosenoer, CyberLaw & CyberLex Alexis Rosen, Public Access Networks Corp. Steven Zorn, Pace University Law School (affiliations are for identification purposes only)

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