December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Can someone explain to me how to get the "Subject" line of an anon message to appear using the "##" features? I dpn't seem to be having much luck...

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Reply to Tim May's comments
by Michael Wilson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May wrote (reply comments offset by leading '***'): Subject: Re: 'Black' budget purchases Michael Wilson writes: > The data from the Maryland Procurement Office that is stored in certain > databases (and removed from others, as I have just discovered when I checked) > provides the complete 'black' budget purchases of the intelligence community, > not just their purchases of supercomputers. Such raw data goes a long way > towards confirming other bits of intelligence, such as the establishment by NSA > of its own chip manufacturing facility owing to a lack of trust in undocumented > sections of commercial silicon. This data is useful beyond knowing the numbers That the NSA contracted National Semiconductor to build a facility on-site has been common knowledge since 1989-90. The fab is not state of the art (i.e., is not 1.8 micron or better) and is believed to be used for the very reasonable purpose of producing keying material in a secure environment (ROMs, PROMs, fuse-linked micros, PLAs, etc.). It is unlikely--but possible--that high-performance micros are being manufactured there. *** We were tracking NSA purchases of material over a decade ago; as for their usage of the technology, my statement was simply that they felt, after serious analysis, that they couldn't trust commercial silicon. The issue was trust, not computation power. > of supercomputers available (although it does help provide an upper boundary on > raw processing power, useful for quantifying tolerances). > > What we find interesting regarding the number of supercomputers at NSA is what > they do to the keyspace; a supposition of ours from the early period of > commercial public key was an attack on the domain of potential keys. Given a > known keylength, a powerful systematic search for primes that fit that range > can, over time, begin to damage the strength of the system. Careful analysis of This is nonsense. A typical 1024-bit RSA system uses p and q close to 512 bits each, e.g., 511 and 513. Whatever. Now a 512-bit number is a 150-plus decimal digit number. About .5-1% of all of these numbers are prime (by the Prime Number Theorem, or somesuch...about 1/N of all N-digit numbers are prime, as I recall). How big a keyspace is this to start searching "systematically"? Considering that there are "only" about 10^73 particles of all kinds in the entire universe (based on our best estimate of the size of the universe, the density of galaxies, gas clouds, etc.), this means that if every particle in the universe were searching for and recording the primes they discovered, each particle would have to store 10^77 primes! So much for "a powerful systematic search for primes that fit that range." *** You assume that your selection of primes is random; it is the case, particularly in the initial usages of public-key systems, that attacks could be made on keyspaces based on the prime generation method. A point that number-crunch jockeys tend to forget is that psychology and systems analysis provide greater in-roads against secure systems than brute force. > technical resource also allows one to speculate--are CM platforms (pardon the > pun) used for exhaustive systematic search for keys, while Cray systems are used > for attacks on the keyspace? Differentiation of parallel versus scalar > processing towards attack domains is interesting. "Parallel versus scalar processing"? Parallelism means nothing at these scales...see the above point. *** Your point is orthogonal to our point. The two systems are used for different attacks--parallelism can be used for exhaustive search, such as for DES keys, while scalar processing can be used for testing primality. > Michael Wilson > Managing Director, The Nemesis Group > The Adversary --Tim May *** TNG

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Simulated stock-market...
by gtoal＠an-teallach.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anyone wants to flame me for cross-posting an article so soon after whinging about everyone else doing it, feel free - I deserve it. I thought a few of us would like to see it anyway though! <duck & run...> If it's a well simulated real market you might want to try some of those tricks we were discussing some time ago to move money around... G From: orwant(a)ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jon Orwant) Newsgroups: misc.invest,misc.invest.stocks,alt.internet.services Subject: MAMMON: telnet mammon.media.mit.edu 10900 Date: 2 Jul 1994 05:59:59 GMT Organization: MIT Media Lab Lines: 32 NNTP-Posting-Host: puttanesca.mit.edu Keywords: stocks MAMMON An Internet stock-picking "tournament" MAMMON allows you to manage a virtual portfolio in which you can buy and sell stocks at their current market price. You can view MAMMON as either a competition to develop the most valuable portfolio (the wealthiest accounts are available via the TOP command), or as a way to test your stock strategies, or merely as a way to record your investments. * New accounts get $100000 in play money * 24 hours/day operation * It's free. Just telnet mammon.media.mit.edu 10900 Try it. Jon Orwant orwant(a)media.mit.edu MIT Media Lab

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NSA Wafer Fab
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> That the NSA contracted National Semiconductor to build a facility > on-site has been common knowledge since 1989-90. The fab is not state > of the art (i.e., is not 1.8 micron or better) and is believed to be Whoops! I meant to say "0.8 micron." For reference points, 66 MHz Pentiums are typically 0.8 micron, 90 and 100 MHz Pentiums are typically 0.6-0.65 micron, and absolute state of the fabs are 0.4 micron (a few in Japan, a few in the U.S.--all very large and very expensive). Intel is spending $1.3 billion (that's $1.3 thousand million to you Brits) on a 0.25 micron fab to be completed in 1996-7 in Chandler, Arizona. If the NSA is building special-purpose cipher-crunchers (which would not surprise any of us), they could easily buy the 1000 or 10,000 or whatever number in the market. They would be fools to try to manufacture state of the art microprocessors in a relatively small, several years old, facility on the outskirts of Fort Meade. (By cipher-crunchers, I mean DES-busters, maybe password-searchers, but not 300-digit number factorers, a la my last post.) The NSC fab at NSA may well be a 1 - 1.5 micron fab, considering it's genealogy. But not much better than that, I would guess. Just as important as the lithographic feature sizes supported is the "Class" rating of the wafer fab (a measure of air purity in terms of particles per unit volume). The NSA fab is almost certainly not a Class 10 fab, and is probably used to fab MSI and LSI components. Maybe a little bit of VLSI. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... 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. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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too bad Bush didn't propose Clipper
by fasttech!zeke＠uu4.psi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This is a very obvious observation, but bear with me. I haven't seen anyone enunciate it, but maybe I haven't been paying close attention. If Republican ex-CIA director George Bush had publicly proposed the Cripple system developed during his administration, then the whole concept would have been "dead on arrival". In fact, the quite-similar FBI telephony proposals were originally floated on his watch, and went absolutely nowhere in Congress. Can anyone imagine the Democrats accepting something like this while a Republican President was in power? Can anyone imagine any left-wing special interest groups not immediately and loudly foaming at the mouth about this? But both of these groups accept Slick Willie as "one of their own", and Cripple is being seriously debated in Congress. Too bad George didn't win the election.

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FW: A third voice re: science and spirit
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Bhikkhu ... I don't know if you have been around many research-type psychologists, but they can be every bit as neurotic as you imply :-) --------------------------------- This is sort of amusing: Does this make it a case of the "blind leading the blind", or "it takes one to know one"? Blanc

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FW: A third voice re: science and spirit
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

OOps - sorry, I sent that message to the wrong list. Ingore, delete, forget it. Blanc

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IS IT POSSIBLE?
by bmorris＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com PP> can put someone on a raft in the middle of a lake plinking away on the PP> keyboard -- and discern every keystroke from the shoreline. Then the typing of a passphrase could be intercepted - in the unlikely event that one is deemed important enough to be monitored by several people with some presumably expensive equipment - ah well, I'm not going to worry about it. * RM 1.4 B0037 *

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Re: Dr. Dobbs Dev. Update 1/5 July 94 & Schneier
by tim werner 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >An interesting thought hit me when reading this. The "classic" >Cray series (Cray-1, X-MP, Y-MP) all have a rather curious instruction >generally known as population count. All it does is to take a register >and count the number of one bits in it, and return that count. > ... >Just a thought. It's the only plausable use that I have yet thought of >for this instruction. Has anyone else got any ideas? This instruction would be useful in all sorts of applications. I was just wishing I had such a thing only last week. I had to write a little loop to check the number of bits set in a word. Each bit represented an action, and in my particular case it was an error if more than 1 action was requested. The loop was really a waste when you consider that it could have been done in 1 instruction. tw

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NSA and CSS Computer Resources
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Earlier I mentioned the list of supercomputer installations that Gunter Ahrendt maintains and I included a few (dated) excerpts. Well, tonight I found a new version posted. I'm only including the top handful of sites. Not reported are installations in non-U.S. intelligence agencies, such as Chobetsu, SDECE, Mossad, BND, etc. They probably don't have Crays, Connection Machines, or Paragons. I'll also edit the intro material a bit. The sites are ranked in order of what I'd call "Cray equivalents," where the Cray Y-MP/1 is rated at 1. For example, the top-ranked site has the estimated equivalent of 380 Cray Y-MP/1s. --Tim May From: gunter(a)yarrow.wt.uwa.edu.au (Gunter Ahrendt) Newsgroups: comp.sys.super Subject: JUL-1994 List of the world's most powerful computing sites Date: 3 Jul 94 01:37:07 GMT Organization: The University of Western Australia Message-ID: <gunter.773199427@yarrow> 03-JUL-1994 List of the world's most powerful computing sites ============================================================= (available by fingering me, joining my mailing list or in comp.sys.super) .... Ratings are ratios to a Cray Y-MP/1 based on NASA NPB BT Size A benchmark reports. Figures prefixed '~' denote approximations usually based on comparable programs, figures suffixed '?' denote relative guesses based on Intel iPSC/860 peak Gflops ratios. The current minimum performance for inclusion is a benchmarked rating of 4 BT, or 10.56 Gflops peak for unbenchmarked systems. ... 1) 380.82 - (27-JUN-1994) [NAL] National Aerospace Lab,Chofu-shi,Tokyo,Japan, nahirose(a)asuka.aerospace-lab.go.jp 1) NAL NWT 2/140 ~357 (5.1 @ 2 cpus) 2) Intel Paragon-336 18.38 (7 @ 128 cpus) 3) Fujitsu VP2600/10 ~ 5.44 2) 196.1 - (APR-1994) [CSS] Central Security Service,National Security Agency Headquarters,Fort George G Meade,Maryland,US,postmaster(a)dockmaster.ncsc.mil 1) TMC CM-5/512 44.8 (2.8 @ 32 cpus) 2) Cray C916-1024 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 3) Cray C916-1024 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 4) Cray C916-1024 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 5) Cray Y-MP/8E-256 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 6) Cray Y-MP/8E-256 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 7) Cray Y-MP/8E-256 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 8) Cray Y-MP/8E-256 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 9) Cray M98-4096 ~ 7.01 10) Cray 3/2-64 [-4Q96] 5.73? 11) NSA SMPP-2/2M [+4Q96] 7407.05? 3) 146.41 - (10-JUN-1994) [LANL] Los Alamos National Labs,Los Alamos,New Mexico,US,iaa(a)lanl.gov 1) TMC CM-5/1056-32 [-4Q94] 92.4 (2.8 @ 32 cpus) 2) Cray T3D SC128-8/3-64 15 (12 @ 128 cpus + 1 * 3 cpus) 3) Cray Y-MP/8-128 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 4) Cray Y-MP/8-128 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 5) Cray Y-MP/8-64 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 6) Cray Y-MP/8-32 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 7) Cray M98-2048 ~ 7.01 8) TMC CM-5/1056-128 [+4Q94] 92.4 (2.8 @ 32 cpus) 4) 142.08 - (10-JUN-1994) [NSA] National Security Agency,Dallas,Texas,US,postmaster(a)dockmaster.ncsc.mil 1) Cray C916-512 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 2) Cray C916-512 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 3) Cray C916-512 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 4) Cray C916-512 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 5) Cray C916-1024 [+2Q95] 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 6) Cray C916-1024 [+2Q95] 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 7) Cray C916-1024 [+2Q95] 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 8) Cray C916-512 [+2Q95] 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 5) 112.97 - (16-JUN-1994) [CRI] Cray Research Computer Network,Eagan,Minnesota,US,root(a)cray.com 1) Cray C916-256 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 2) Cray T3D 256 24 (12 @ 128 cpus) 3) Cray Y-MP/8E-128 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 4) Cray Y-MP/8D-128 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 5) Cray Y-MP/8D-64 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 6) Cray Y-MP/8D-32 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 7) Cray M98-4096 ~ 7.01 8) Cray Y-MP8I/6-64 6 = 1 * 6 cpus 9) Cray C92A-128 4.44 = 2.22 * 2 cpus 10) Cray Y-MP/4E-64 4 = 1 * 4 cpus 11) Cray T91 [+1Q95] 4.44? 12) Cray T3D 1024A [+4Q96] 204.8 ? 13) Cray T932 [+4Q96] 142.08? 14) Cray T3D 1024B [+4Q99] 640 ? 6) 106 - (20-MAY-1994) [SANDIA] Sandia National Labs,Albuquerque,New Mexico,US,arbreck(a)sandia.gov 1) Intel Paragon-1840 98 (7 @ 128 cpus) 2) Cray Y-MP/8-64 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 7) 104.38 - (29-JUN-1994) [MSCI] Minnesota Supercomputer Center,Minneapolis,Minnesota,US,consult(a)msc.edu 1) TMC CM-5/896VU 78.4 (2.8 @ 32 cpus) 2) Cray C916/9-512 19.98 = 2.22 * 9 cpus 3) Cray T3D 64 [-4Q94] 6 4) Cray T3D 128 [+4Q94] 12 8) 98.4 - (02-JUN-1994) [ATP] Angstrom Technology Partnership,Tsukuba,Japan,sato(a)jrcat.or.jp 1) Fujitsu VPP500/32 76.8 (4.8 @ 2 cpus) 2) TMC CM-5E/128 21.6 (5.4 @ 32 cpus) 9) 83.52 - (17-JUN-1994) [PSC] Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center,Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania,US, remarks(a)psc.edu 1) Cray T3D 512 48 (12 @ 128 cpus) 2) Cray C916-512 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 10) 82.4 - (10-JUN-1994) [CALTECH] Caltech,Pasadena,California,US,goss(a)delilah.ccsf.caltech.edu 1) Intel Paragon-555 30.35 (7 @ 128 cpus) 2) Intel Touchstone Delta-513 ~28.05 (7 @ 128 cpus) 3) Cray T3D 256 24 (12 @ 128 cpus) 11) 81.55 - (21-JUN-1994) [LLNL] Lawrence Livermore National Labs,Livermore,California,US, seager(a)llnl.gov 1) Cray C916-256 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 2) Meiko CS-2/256-512VU [-4Q96] ~ 24 (1.5 @ 16 cpus) 3) Cray Y-MP/8-128 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 4) Cray Y-MP/8-64 8 = 1 * 8 cpus 5) Cray 2S/8-128 6.03? 6) Cray T3D SC128-8/3-64 [+3Q94] 15 (12 @ 128+1 * 3 cpus) 7) Meiko CS-2/1280-2560VU [+4Q96] ~120 (1.5 @ 16 cpus) 12) 77.31 - (07-APR-1994) [TSUKUBA] Uni of Tsukuba,Ibaraki,Japan,root(a)ume.cc.tsukuba.ac.jp 1) Fujitsu VPP500/30 72 (4.8 @ 2 cpus) 2) Tsukuba QCDPAX-480 5.31? 3) Tsukuba CP-PACS/1024 [+3Q96] 113.68? 13) 75.44 - (25-JUN-1994) [NAS] NAS,NASA Ames Research Center,Mountain View,California,US, jet(a)nas.nasa.gov 1) Cray C916-1024 35.52 = 2.22 * 16 cpus 2) Cray C98-128 17.76 = 2.22 * 8 cpus 3) TMC CM-5/128VU-32/256 11.2 (2.8 @ 32 cpus) 4) Intel Paragon-204 11.16 (7 @ 128 cpus) 5) IBM 9076 SP2/160 [+3Q94] ~63.8 (3.19 @ 8 cpus)

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