December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Faster way to deescrow Clipper
by Matthew Ghio 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

russ <nelson(a)crynwr.com> wrote: > From: Derek Atkins <warlord(a)MIT.EDU> > > ...not be able to decrypt the communications, but they still get your ID. > >"your ID"? You mean your phone's ID. Goodness gracious, if you were >a criminal, you wouldn't go out and steal someone else's Clipper >phone, would you? Let's not get too high tech here, just because we >have the ability. Or you could just steal someone else's LEAF, by keeping a copy of it, and use that for spoofing. Then you could have a valid IV too...

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BBS anonymity policy
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Pierre(a)eworld.com: > I thought this might interest people... eWorld's "policy" on anonymity... Commercial net providers or BBSes usually don't bother much about anonymity. A user may want anonymity on a BBS for three reasons: 1. to avoid harassment, or avoid situations like Unicorn's where the 'outside world' gets to know your electronic views 2. to avoid being included in statistics - though most BBSes need statistics for charging or whatever 3. to do something either illegal, or provocative to legal action, such as tmp's. BBS providers are unlikely to condone or want to protect such users. A simple way to provide anonymity for (1) is used by a BBS I'm co-sysop of. Everyone's identity is scrupulously recorded, for billing purposes. Users can create any number of identities for the purposes of posting or receiving mail, and no corelation between these pseudonyms and real ones is available to other users. For administration purposes, all pseudonyms for real names are available to sysops. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in Voicemail +91 11 3760335; Vox/Fax/Data 6853410 H-34C Saket New Delhi 110017 INDIA The National Fairness to Game Animals Association says: Support your right to arm bears! --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Micali's 'fair' crypto
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

tcmay(a)netcom.com (Timothy C. May): > Bill Sommerfeld writes: > > > disclaimer: I haven't read Micali's papers in detail, but I understand that > > the "fair' cryptosystem is effectively "key escrow in software". Actually, > > I haven't seen his protocols discussed in any level of detail on this list. > > An overview might help improve the S/N ratio here.. > > I look forward to hearing your summary, Bill! Micali's paper was > presented at the '92 Crypto Conference ("Proceedings" should be Micali's system is really quite simple. While one can't expect everyone to read all Crypto Conference Proceedings in their full technical glory, at least read Schneier. He has a short, but clear and readable summary of "fair" crypto and indeed most technical things we discuss here. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in Voicemail +91 11 3760335; Vox/Fax/Data 6853410 H-34C Saket New Delhi 110017 INDIA The National Fairness to Game Animals Association says: Support your right to arm bears! --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Faster way to deescrow Clipper
by Mike Ingle 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The attack posted here uses a brute-force search to find a phony LEAF which has a valid checksum. Instead, why not just initialize the chip with a session key and get the LEAF. Reset the chip and initialize it with a different session key, but send the first LEAF instead of the second one. The LEAF would look good unless you tried to decrypt the session key. The wrong-IV problem would remain. The NSA should have designed the Clipper so that, if the IV was wrong, the chips would not accept the LEAF. They also should have used a much larger (32-bit or even 64-bit) checksum. --- Mike

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NYT article
by Ezekial Palmer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- This is essentially the same as what David posted, but it's directly from the New York Times and it includes a few bits that were edited out of the San Jose version. I'd already typed this in when David's version showed up here, so I decided to compare the two -- which helped me to find some typos (in both versions :-) and to see the odd collection of minor stylistic differences between the two papers. Zeke ============================================================================== The New York Times Vol. CXLIII Copyright (c) 1994 The New York Times Thursday, June 2, 1994 FLAW DISCOVERED IN FEDERAL PLAN FOR WIRETAPPING ---------------- CLIPPER CHIP IS AT ISSUE ---------------- Scientist at Bell Laboratories Says Criminals Can Close an Electronic Backdoor ---------------- By JOHN MARKOFF A computer scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories has discovered a basic flaw in the technology that the Clinton Administration has been promoting as a way to allow law enforcement officials to eavesdrop on electronically scrambled telephone and computer conversations. Someone with sufficient computer skills can defeat the Government's technology by using it to encode messages so that not even the Government can crack them, according to the Bell Labs researcher, Matthew Blaze. For more than a year, the Clinton Administration has been advocating the encoding technology as the best way to insure the privacy of telephone and computer conversations while retaining the traditional right of law-enforcement officials to use court-authorized wiretaps to eavesdrop on the conversations of suspected criminals or terrorists. The technology, based on what is known as the Clipper chip, has been widely criticized by communications executives and privacy-rights advocates, who fear its Big Brother potential. The industry also fears foreign customers might shun equipment if Washington keeps a set of electronic keys. But now Dr. Blaze, as a result of his independent testing of Clipper, is putting forth perhaps the most compelling criticism yet: the technology simply does not work as advertised. Dr. Blaze detailed his findings in a draft report that he has been quietly circulating among computer researchers and Federal agencies in recent weeks and which he made available on Tuesday to the New York Times. ``The Government is fighting an uphill battle,'' said Martin Hellman, a Stanford University computer scientist who has read Dr. Blaze's paper and who is himself an expert in data encryption, as the field is known. ``People who want to work around Clipper will be able to do it.'' But the National Security Agency, the Government's electronic spying agency, which played a lead role in developing the technology, said yesterday that Clipper remained useful, despite the flaw uncovered by Dr. Blaze. Agency officials do not dispute the flaw's existence. ``Anyone interested in circumventing law-enforcement access would most likely choose simpler alternatives,'' Michael A. Smith, the agency's director of policy, said in a written statement in response to a reporter's questions. ``More difficult and time-consuming efforts, like those discussed in the Blaze paper are very unlikely to be employed.'' Since announcing the Clipper coding technology 13 months ago, White House and Justice Department officials have argued forcefully that it is a necessary information-age compromise between the constitutional right to privacy and the traditional powers of law enforcement officials. The Clinton Administration intends to use Clipper, which is [sic] is trying to promote as an industry standard, for the Government's sensitive nonmilitary communications. The Federal Government is the nation's largest purchaser of information technology. But industry executives have resisted adopting Clipper as a standard for several reasons. Because the underlying mathematics of the technology remain a classified Government secret, industry officials say there is no way to be certain that it is as secure as encoding techniques already on the market. They also fear that Clipper's electronic ``backdoor,'' which is designed for legal wiretapping of communications, could make it subject to abuse by the Government or unscrupulous civilian computer experts, who might eavesdrop without first obtaining a court order and the electronic ``keys'' that are to be held in escrow by two Government agencies. Privacy-rights advocates have cited similar concerns. Industry executives have also worried that making Clipper a Federal Government standard would be a first step toward prescribing the technology for private industry or requiring that it be included in sophisticated computing and communications devices that are to be exported. Dr. Blaze said that the flaw he discovered in the Clipper design would not permit a third party to break a coded computer conversation. But it would enable two people to have a secret conversation that law enforcement officials could not unscramble. And that could render Clipper no more useful to the Government than encryption technology already on the market to which it does not hold the mathematical keys. Circumventing Surveillance ``Nothing I've found affects the security of the Clipper system from the point of view of people who might want to break the system,'' Dr. Blaze said in a telephone interview yesterday. ``This does quite the opposite. Somebody can use it to circumvent the law-enforcement surveillance mechanism.'' Dr. Blaze said that several simple changes to the Clipper design could correct the flaw, but that they might be difficult to adopt because they would require the Government to start over in designing the Clipper. The Government has already begun ordering telephones containing the Clipper chip for use by Federal agencies, and it is designing another Clipper-based device, called the Tessera card, for use in personal computers. Dr. Hellman at Stanford said that the Government was counting on most crooks and terrorists not to go to the trouble of modifying the Clipper design or otherwise seeking to disable it -- if they used it at all. Oliver North Cited He cited the example of the Reagan Administration aide Oliver North, who he said was both intelligent and security conscious; yet he ignored the existence of computer back-up tapes of his electronic mail messages, which were later obtained by Federal investigators in the Iran-Contra inquiry. One computer scientist who has been a proponent of the Clipper plan and who is familiar with Dr. Blaze's paper said that the flaw would not immediately subvert the system. ``I don't think this undermines the Clipper,'' Dorothy Denning, a computer scientist at Georgetown University and part of a team chosen by the Government to evaluate the technology, said. ``But it's good to know what the vulnerabilities are.'' Clipper was designed by researchers at the National Security Agency in cooperation with computer scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a civilian agency that is responsible for setting computer standards for nonmilitary Government applications. The Clipper chip is known as an ``escrowed encryption system.'' It is designed so that law enforcement officials wishing to eavesdrop on Clipper-encoded communications must present a court warrant and a special number -- or key -- generated by a Clipper chip to two separate Government escrow agencies. Each of the agencies would hold portions of a special number, which can be used together to decode the conversation. The flaw found by Dr. Blaze exploits the technology feature of the Clipper system that creates the number key that can later be used by law enforcement officials to generate the second key number. The first number is known as the Law Enforcement Access Field, or LEAF. The LEAF elements includes a unique number known as the encrypted session key and a separate number -- called a checksum -- that mathematically verifies that the session key is valid for Clipper. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLe4igxVg/9j67wWxAQGV3AP7BYrXK/G1YKwwCwzgjSsMDXaDiG6s8oY9 jCKKOGNKNX5X5EhpuzrdNDOEEjGTEvQEONZR9scc77Fx1ZSaR629QlykRIzAY3WA hd1mbgYcfwznY/oAPgoLkTWamMSpuyYK1fIPU/RMVh4RQypfcbUzcZDf42Ho25tI WL1l1isAFio= =aID9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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back to programming projects...
by Jim choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have recently come into the possession of 3 working Ridge 3200 super-mini's running Unix. I intend to place all 3 on a ethernet hooked into my inet feed and have one as a re-mailer. On the remialer front what I intend is sorta the following: 1. all messages sent out will be sent encrypted. This will require both sender and reciever to have a public key on record w/ the mailer. 2. messages will be cached and re-transmitted after a random delay. I intend to generate a random number between 0 and 24. When the appropriate hour arrives all messages with that time stamp will be sent encrypted. 3. We intend to support anonymous as well as explicit addressing. Anyone got any experience w/ Ridge products? I have contacted the designer and he is willing to help us out (Ridge is out of business) with support on the 3 machines. Just for info, of the remaining two - one will be used as a remote ray-trace engine and the third there just as backup and for playing with. These macnines are pretty quick from what little experience I have with them. The Wired Society - Dedicated to a global VR network and taco's...

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Newsgroups via. Email...
by nobody＠cyberspace.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello Cypherpunks, Another new remailer anon(a)cyberspace.org is on-line now... Does anyone know if one can get news postings via. email? My site doesn't support a few of the groups i'd like to read. Can i get subscribed to any using email? I know that my INBOX would see more traffic... Thanks in advance, Anonymous Remailer. ps - sorry no pgp support... <not enough disk space for pgp executable or for any logs> thanks...

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RE: PGP 2.6
by MichaelRgn＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hello C'punx, I really enjoy reading this list. Keep up the good work. I do have a question though. Is PGP 2.6 available for the Macintosh?? If so, where can I find it? Thank You, Michael Ragan michaelRgn(a)aol.com

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PGP in Australia
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

dichro(a)tartarus.uwa.edu.au: > If anyone wants to give me a copy, drop it off at > tartarus.uwa.edu.au:/pub/dichro/incoming > - provided, of course, that it is legal for you to do so ...:) Pick up PGP versions 2.2 - 6, and the non-RSAREF 6ui, from ftp.dsi.unimi.it /pub/security/crypt/PGP Unless Australia forbids _importing_ crypto, not a crime. PGP 6 is the MIT RSAREF version, so someone violated ITAR to get it to Italy. Using it outside the US and Canada also violates RSADSI's _copyrights_. PGP 6ui was released from the UK, and therefore does not violate ITAR. It doesn't use RSAREF, so it doesn't violate RSADSI copyrights. If used in the US, it does violate RSADSI _patents_. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh They came for the Jews, and I was silent because I was not a Jew; rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in They came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not protest, because I did not Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 belong to a trade union; Voicemail +91 11 3760335 They came for the Catholics, and I said nothing because I was not a Catholic; H 34C Saket And then they came for me. New Delhi There was no one left to say anything... INDIA ----Father Niemoeller

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Censoring the Internet
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A >The agenda of people like David Sutherland, L.Detweiler's A >friend at the NSA who rants about a "Waco in cyberspace", A >Al Gore, and their ilk runs along the lines of the following: A > There won't be a "Waco in Cyberspace" until the feds can figure out how to stuff a couple of hundred BATF and FBI agents with tanks down a strand of glass fiber. DCF & LR "Watch the Senate Hearings on HSA'94 on CSPAN. Would you hire any of those guys to clean your yard much less design a health care 'system'?" --- WinQwk 2.0b#1165

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