December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Pass Phrases
by norm＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 20:15 1994/07/03 -0700, Eli Brandt wrote: >> If I pick a verse of a song that makes it easy to remember. > >Aaaaaaagh! ... .. NSA must have an interesting collection of literature on line. They need high bandwidth (but not rapid) access to it. This could be the beginning of a new business if they ever turn their swords into plowshares. Conversely if anyone aspires to digitize a great deal of literature I am sure that NSA would subscribe, thus seeding a new industry. I seem to recall something about a Midwest university beginning to digitize a large body of literature.

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No Subject
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have followed with interest this discussion of passphrase "entropy". What I'm not clear on is the effect of a hashing algorithm on the final entropy. If I come up with a "random" set of printable characters which contain 128 bits of entropy, and feed them to MD5, let's say, will I still have 128 bits of entropy on the output? Or do I need some sort of safety margin above 128 bits to "be sure"? What's lurking in the back of my mind is this -- if you enter something with LESS than 128 bits, the hashing algorithm has to "pad" or otherwise fill in the missing bits from <somewhere>. Now if I have entered a phrase with EXACTLY 128 bits of entropy, hypothetically, is that enough to have flushed the padding or whatever out of the pipeline? Can we really treat MD5 as a "magic black box", or does the optimal input require a knowledge of how the box works? .

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Re: Remailers
by norm＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 23:33 1994/07/03 -0500, David Merriman wrote: >Grady Ward, over on alt.security.pgp/sci.crypt posted a little something >to the effect (I'm paraphrasing, here) that sending a couple meg of random >noise/bytes to an out-of-U.S. person/site would probably be a Good Thing >To Do. ... In the middle 70s, after Tymnet went international, I would occasionally send a megabyte to our Paris computer in a proprietary compression format. I do not believe that NSA spent the time to decode our format, although it would been relatively easy for them to do so. I can only conclude that they did not then have blanket surveillance in place, else they would have contacted me. Both their capacity and international traffic have increased many times. I suspect that I could do the same now.

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Password Difficulties
by sico＠hacktic.nl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi folks, Saturday July 02 1994 04:00, Kent Borg wrote: KB> Hey folks, passwords are hard to choose! It is indeed a problem. I hear that grady(a)netcom.com recently posted some useful info on this matter somewhere on UseNet, but I can't find it. I recall having found an interesting article sometime last year, but I lost it. In short, it said that pass phrases and such should be "shocking nonsense". The "shocking" element will help you remember it, and the "nonsense" element will make it difficult for others to guess it. KB> It boils down to this: I can't remember as many bits as the TLAs can KB> crack by brute force. My pass phrase is a couple of words long and contains deliberate misspellings and unusual capitalization. To be able to remember it, I simply use PGP every day, even if there's nothing to sign or decrypt. ;-) I'm a (long time) 2-finger typist but I have no problems with echo off. [rest deleted] CU, Sico.

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Re: War of the 2.x versions!
by Jeff Gostin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Joseph Block <jpb(a)gate.net> writes: > So what stops someone from patching 2.3? Since 2.3 is already allegedly in > violation, why not just make it compatible with 2.6? Because if you did that, you wouldn't need 2.6ui. Of course, 2.6ui uses no MIT code and doesn't use 2.3a code either. It's from scratch. Yeah, that's the ticket. --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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Re: PC Expo Disk Available
by markh＠wimsey.bc.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Subject: Re: PC Expo Disk Available > Hey guys, I've just sent up the PC Expo disk package to ftp.wimsey.bc.ca > incase anyone is interested in it. Give it some time as Mark has to clear it > but it's in the incoming folder right now... It is available to U.S. and Canadian persons at ftp.wimsey.bc.ca /pub/crypto/software/dist/US_or_Canada_only_XXXXXXXX/pcxpo/pcxpo.zip Mark -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.4 iQBVAgUBLhnkIWrJdmD9QWqxAQFk2QH/VZnf1PqE0ftwQdfQLIu8Q4kaOeBh0C2R wN8mdxSEpSgWsCOzqgpN9jv195/GrQMETqAznUs2L6jA4rWyfnlbPg== =nPCR -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Mark Henderson markh(a)wimsey.bc.ca - RIPEM MD5: F1F5F0C3984CBEAF3889ADAFA2437433 ViaCrypt PGP key fingerprint: 21 F6 AF 2B 6A 8A 0B E1 A1 2A 2A 06 4A D5 92 46 low security key fingerprint: EC E7 C3 A9 2C 30 25 C6 F9 E1 25 F3 F5 AF 92 E3 cryptography archive maintainer -- anon ftp to ftp.wimsey.bc.ca:/pub/crypto

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RE: ACAPULCO H.E.A.T.
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Sandy Sandfort Gooder News: Lots of shots of Alison Armitage in swim suits. ........................................ Oh, good. I feel safer now. Blanc

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(None)
by Jeff Gostin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Joseph Block <jpb(a)gate.net> writes: > 1701THQ1EBA7FLJ0SOM1THL1EDA7 > Without knowing the phrases, method, or number, what makes this insecure? > I'm not deliberately trying to be dense, I'd like to know why I shouldn't use > this sort of mnemonic method to remember the pass phrase. _Essentially_, you have a random string of text. Mind you, it's not statistically, nor cryptographically, random, but it's something that no PERSON would guess. If you are trying to get something to keep PEOPLE out, you've picked a nice one. If, OTOH, you're trying to get something to keep HACKERS/MACHINES out, you've got a somewhat time consuming one. Does that answer your question? :-) --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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RE: FW: A third voice re: science and spirit
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: <nobody(a)shell.portal.com> "Ingore"? Is that anything like an "AlGore"? Is that a verb to describe the state of the country, as in "we've just been INGOREd"? ........................................ Could be, if you want it to be. But it could also be part of some shocking, nonsensical AlGoreYTHM. Blanc

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GOPHER: AOL, CPSR, cypherpunks
by Karl Lui Barrus 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Cypherpunks, Earlier, somebody (I beleive Carl Ellison, but I screwed up and deleted the file) asked about AOL and the gopher site. The problem may not be AOL or CPSR actually. What happened is this: Chael reorganized the gopher site, placing the Cypherpunks Gopher Archive into a subdirectory. So the archive is still at chaos.bsu.edu, but no longer immediately at the top level. Perhaps CPSR's pointer to the site is no longer valid! Or maybe the problem is that he also upgraded to a new gopher server, which is supposed to be backwards compatible ;) and one of these days I'll create some sort of index files (?) to take advantage of the new features, etc. So maybe this is the problem, a new version that AOL doesn't handle. So try gopher'ing directly to chaos.bsu.edu and then into the "Cypherpunks Gopher Archive" if going through somebody else isn't working. Hm... I'll inform CPSR about the change. Karl Barrus klbarrus(a)owlnet.rice.edu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAgUBLhnpG8SF/V8IjI8hAQGn0gP/YjRzP3OODE9e7pXdHhOpHtY6UddH75Fj 7z1T/RA9JuL3es926zNZP2K9C1p9AlgwKyPcea2GWkgT8q79Ink4VXKGJbwEzzwV Kyh5a3Efm7ZsewxlUnrkRtppH2qc//bhNkpaTSIlM1Ccl7+yBttONyq6qHFfpzLd m88J8APnLWM= =AbvY -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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