December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

In need of help for a paper
by SZARAC＠guvax.acc.georgetown.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I am in need of source material, both technical and analytical in nature, for a paper I am writing. My topic is a discussion of the current data encryption debate within the administration. I am a student at Georgetown University (home of the infamous Dorothy Denning) in its National Security Studies Program. This paper is for a class on Intelligence and National Security. My goal is to try to inform my fellow students about the right to privacy crisis going on in the data encryption area. Basically I am looking for any references to good articles and books about this topic. They can be discussions or very technical, I don't care. So if you know of anything that could help, please let me know. Thanks, Chris <szarac(a)guvax.georgetown.edu>

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Re: Crypto Idea, Multi-Party Sigs
by Karl Lui Barrus 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forcing all three people for signing the document can be done as by merely splitting the secret key into three parts. Then, all three must be used to reassemble secret key in order to sign the document. If both methods co-exist, then each individual can sign the document from information they know from being able to decrypt. Unless you go to a modified RSA system like Eric described. (it's much easier to force all three to sign and all three to decrypt :-) -- Karl L. Barrus: klbarrus(a)owlnet.rice.edu keyID: 5AD633 hash: D1 59 9D 48 72 E9 19 D5 3D F3 93 7E 81 B5 CC 32 "One man's mnemonic is another man's cryptography" - my compilers prof discussing file naming in public directories

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No Subject
by nobody＠rosebud.ee.uh.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:04 PM 10/4/93 -0700, Hastings(a)courier8.aero.org wrote: >Maybe you >think messages posted to an international mail reflector are private? Time to start up those digital pseudonyms! Eternal!Optimist(a)anon.penet.fi

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Re: Need Suggestions for Random Numbers
by peter honeyman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> What PRNGs would you suggest using? i don't know, but my friend don mitchell knows about these things, and the last time i asked him about prngs he recommended that i check out marsaglia's paper in annals of applied probability v1n3 1991. peter

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EFF pornography file warning
by L. Detweiler 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Boy, I sure have gotten flamed by the best on this one. And its rather deafeningly silent on the list. I'm bleeding from shrapnel wounds and hung out to die. Let me justify a few things. Enclosed: - why I posted the announcement - why I flamed EFF - things that have upset me about this affair - a classic cypherpunk rant on child pornography worthy of T.C. May * * * I posted the announcement to the cypherpunks because 1) there has been a long past history of interest in BBS type investigations 2) there was a huge flame war over CERT sending a notice to E.Hughes for his FTP site, saying `please look into this'-- this EFF announcement struck me as amazingly similar. (BTW, I had virtually nothing to do with that flame war, which was incredibly prolonged) 3) EFF of course is very close to the cypherpunk cause with S.Steele, M.Godwin, and J.Gilmore regular readers and contributors. 4) consider that comp.org.eff.talk would be another forum, but I rejected it, because this forum is more private and still watched by EFF. * * * Now, why did I flame EFF for this action? In one word: quagmire. I said it was `silly, useless, and damaging' 1) this opens them up to having to do this *regularly*. Is this what they want to be doing? 2) since when does EFF help federal BBS investigations? 3) M. Godwin just got done informing us the beauty of *non* liability with a hands-off BBS operator policy. 4) its silly to post a notice about given filenames. They simply are as amorphous as cyberspace itself. 5) a recall of any type is a notorious way to generate paranoia, perhaps a cure worse than the affliction. this kind of message spreads like wildfire. `What? EFF says file [x] is child pornography?' There are tens of thousands of BBS operators in the U.S. -- is this a service or a disservice to them? hence my urban myth ramblings. 6) Releasing this kind of notice only draws more attention to those files. Suddenly, they become collectors items. People start hunting them down. People create empty files with the same name as a joke. All because `EFF says file [x] is child pornography' 7) many other reasons that will become obvious and important in retrospect, but look like hypersensitivity at this point. * * * I'm very upset that 1) everybody on the list is hiding, and refuses to criticize EFF despite the strong parallels to CERT. at best this is cowardice and at worst hypocrisy. this tiptoeing and silence is very reprehensible, IMHO. 2) it does not appear to me that EFF has thought this through. this announcement reflects on EFF. why couldn't they have phrased it differently? e.g. Agents [x] of government agency [x] have requested that operators remove these files. As it stands, EFF associates its own reputation with this investigation and the file recall. 3) there have been requests from EFF representatives to `let it drop'. well, yes, that is one way of dealing with the issue, but IMHO more appropriate to a species of animal called `ostriches'. 4) in general, I object to this philosophy found elsewhere on the list of `if its in our backyard then don't criticize it'. the Fidonet operators are like this. EFF is like this. The former, in their cryptophobia and surveillance, are implicitly supportive of the philosophy of Clipper and the NSA. The latter, EFF, has a critical role in promoting coolness, not hysteria, among BBS operators. 5) In a rather low blow, S. Steele writes ``I figured those who sought to challenge the child pornography laws would poo poo the message. I guess I figured right.'' For the record, I do not seek to challenge child pornography laws or federal investigations. My message made rather clear that I was objecting to the role of *EFF* in the affair. * * * Lastly, I guess I'm a little confused. tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May) >No, I won't say it was silly, useless, or damaging. >[...] >Do I hear any volunteers to become a test case? I tweaked T.C. May in the hope of seeing a message analyzing child pornography in digitized images over cyberspace, because I thought I recall him writing a rather amazing essay on the subject some months ago on the list. Apparently, based on my recent private email exchange, he wasn't associated with that. I guess I just misremembered because it seemed like such a classic cypherpunkesque rant in the spirit of his best. Anyway, as I recall, *someone* about 3 or 4 months ago posted to the list a remarkable analysis of a brouhaha surrounding the creation of the group `alt.pictures.erotica.children'. The person talked about posting a PGP file to the group, as I recall with an anonymous remailer, and then talked about the fierce reaction (melee?) involved. The person stated that the group appeared to have been created as a joke, and the file itself as PGP code was actually not legal syntax for `plausible deniability' of the author, but nevertheless raised important questions. The essay talked about the fruitlessness of trying to track down actual `child pornography' over cyberspace. One of the main points was that child pornography is not illegal everywhere, as I recall the person mentioned Denmark as a place where it particularly flourishes. Is a GIF illegal if it was taken in a country that prohibits it? that's easy. But what about if it was taken in a country where it was legal and imported? well, in the U.S. this is illegal too. But the poster raised a lot of other very fascinating questions that were highly relevant to pornography in cyberspace. Digital composition tools allow artist to cut and paste pictures with astonishing realism. What about a situation where adult models (as young as possible) are used and child's faces are plastered on top? Or how about the situation where *entirely imaginary pictures* are created? These are very real possibilities. Are they illegal too? How is it that just a particular configuration of pixels constitutes illegal pornography, and another does not? I think the poster made various humorous remarks about baby pictures too -- the type of children on bearskin rugs. Shall we imprison all parents that have taken these? (ug, I can't wait for all silly flames on the `I know it when I see it' definition of pornography.) This was my point with the EFF warning: the whole area is a quagmire, and the only consistent and enforceable philosophy seems to be a `hands off' approach. It is very likely to evolve in the long-term future because of all the quandaries. And in particular I was hoping the essay would pop up again on the list so they could see that perspective. Anyway, the poster then made some characteristic comments about the changes that cyberspace will introduce to these kind of pornography laws. The whole essay was such a brilliant exercise, IMHO, and involved actual `research' and `analysis', that I guess I just sort of misremembered T.C. May writing it, but apparently this is not the case. Anyway, I apologize for the misattribution. Just `attribute the misattribution' to my degenerating memory for specifics after 35 hundred cypherpunk postings <g> (But I would be fascinated to see that essay again, if anyone has a clue of what I'm talking about. Hopefully the writer is still on the list, has it in archives, and can post it. It's highly germane to the EFF warning, and was a really brilliant cypherpunk document, IMHO. If I'm just hallucinating over the whole thing, well, maybe its time for me to unsubscribe <g> )

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Cyphertrivia
by Alan Mason 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > OK, so if you were really paranoid, you wouldn't even let 'THEM' know you > were using pgp. > > But... if you were only mildly paranoid, you would: > > 1. Break your message into several short blocks > > 2.. Encrypt them with your friends public pgp key in ascii format > > 3. Change the parts of the messages that say "BEGIN (END) PGP MESSAGE" to > read "BEGIN (END) PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK" > > 4. Post them in an innocuous place and let the recipient know that they > are there. When he/she decypts them, he/she doesn't even need to change > "PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK" back to "PGP MESSAGE". Thanks, Phil :). > > In this way, you can console your paranoia by telling it that while the > cryptocops may know you HAVE pgp, they don't know you are using it > to send messages. > > Trivial, I know, but hey - it was one of those trivial days........ > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- > A Paranoid 2 | Any time you find a simple answer to a question, > aka vznquest(a)netcom.com | The odds are you asked the wrong question. > ******************* | > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Strong PRNGs
by cme＠ellisun.sw.stratus.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I can think of two: 1. a long-period PRNG (like subtract-with-carry) feeding a cryptographically strong hash function (perhaps triple-DES in ECB mode with both key nad input taken from the PRNG and output becoming the new PRNG output; 2. Russell Imagliazzo's (sp?) PRNG as strong as subset-sum. Reference: R. Imagliazzo, M. Naor, ``Efficient Cryptographic Schemes Provably as Secure as Subset Sum.'' FOCS89. For example: (if I remember correctly) Algorithm: Take an array of 512 numbers, each 521 bits long. Fill those with true random bits (coin flips, etc.). fill a 512 bit register with random bits. associate each bit of the register with one entry in the array. loop: for each bit in the 512-bit register, if the bit is a 1, add the corresponding array entry into a 521-bit accumulator (init'd to 0 at the start of this pass), modulo a 521-bit prime. at the end of the pass over all 512 bits, take the low order 8 bits of the accumulator as your output byte (a pseudo random value) and the next 512 bits as the new register for the next round. Toss the top bit. goto loop

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Re: Need Suggestions for Random Numbers
by cme＠ellisun.sw.stratus.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Message-Id: <9310060445.AA16280(a)toad.com> >From: peter honeyman <honey(a)citi.umich.edu> >Date: Wed, 06 Oct 1993 00:44:29 -0400 >Subject: Re: Need Suggestions for Random Numbers > >... recommended that i check >out marsaglia's paper in annals of applied probability v1n3 1991. I have this algorithm coded in C -- and will send it to anyone who wants it. It's not strong -- just long period. It's also part of the new "tran", as posted on sci.crypt and available for FTP on ripem.msu.edu - Carl

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Crypto Toolkit Suggestions
by Mike Ingle 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm writing a toolkit to allow crypto programs to be written using pipes and shell/perl scripts. There will be several small programs, most of which will act as filters, to give direct access to rsa, idea, md5, keyrings, etc. This should allow quick and easy coding of digicash, zero-knowledge servers, and other interesting things. So far I've got the MD5 and IDEA functions. MD5 is just a filter - it takes whatever you feed it and outputs the MD5 hash in hex. IDEA takes e or d for encrypt or decrypt, a key, and (if encrypting) an initialization block. Then it acts as a filter. The output is ten bytes longer than the input - init block and two key check bytes - just like the idea_file function in PGP's crypto.c file. MD5 links with md5.c and md5.h, and IDEA links with idea.c and idea.h from pgp23a. For example, you could do: key=`md5` passphrase^D init=(16 random hex digits - another MD5 is okay, it will ignore excess) export key init idea e key init < infile > outfile idea d key < outfile > decrypted Questions: what is the best way to pass a key? The command line is definitely out, because ps shows it. Right now, IDEA takes the name of an exported environment variable containing the hex key. Can you securely wipe an environment variable? Is there a better way? (A temporary file could be dangerous; a key could be left lying around.) What else should I write? Ideas: direct access to rsa with hex numbers, direct access to modmult, etc, for dh and stuff, a filter for armor/dearmor and zip/unzip. A program to pull key material out of a keyring in hex, so you could use PGP keys with the rsa routines. What would really be nice is a filter that could generate pgp-compatible packets, so you could make up any "pgp object" using a pipe. You could also use the hex output directly. --- MikeIngle(a)delphi.com The enemy is not just the federal government. The enemy is centralized power, wherever it may exist.

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Enough already!
by nobody＠pmantis.berkeley.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Has everyone on this list lost their minds? Can't someone give a well-intentioned piece of advice without getting bogged down in a ten-day flame war? I don't think anyone here questions the integrity of the EFF. They were trying to help by giving the names of those outlaw GIFs. What's the big deal? If there's someone smoking a cigarette on the subway platform and I see a cop coming, I'll tip the person off. Common courtesy. (I'm not saying this is the exact same thing that the EFF is doing, just making an analogy.) Why blow this all out of proportion? Please do your part to save bandwidth and keep S/N as high as possible. If you're going to harangue people, do it via private email. Probably 40% of cypherpunk posts in the last few weeks have been stupid bickering that never should have started and probably persuaded quite a few people to unsubscribe besides. There's no need to let everyone on the list know about every tiny disagreement you have with someone's opinion. Especially when that person clearly has the best of intentions. Maybe we SHOULD make people pay to post the list. -Mr. Funn

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