December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

900 Mhz. cordless phone with encryption
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Can anyone recommend a good 900 Mhz. cordless phone with some sort of voice encryption or scrambling? My most important objective is maximum range from the base unit, but I'd also like some privacy, too. Thanks.

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wanted SueDNym messages
by Arsen Ray Arachelian 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

If you have copies of the posts posted by Sue D Nym, please pass them my way. I have a new toy I'm working on and I just fed it D*weiler's messages to it as archived by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. I'd like to feed it Sue's message and see what it comes up with. Also send any other suspected or actual D*weiler messages. BTW: This new toy is now in Alpha testing. It's called M E D U S A's T E N T A C L E S. (I'm deliberatly munging up the names with spaces and such to get around your kill files as I belive this program may be of use to you, especially if you have our friend Det in your kill file. (I feel like I can't say the name of demon for fear of summoning it. :-) This is more like for the fear of killing this message. <g>) Thanx for your time.... Ain't Fuzzy Logic Grand?

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Re: wanted SueDNym messages
by Peter Murphy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

But what's this MEDUSA's TENTACLES program meant to be? An artificial intelligence modelled on the personality of LD? <yeegawdz!> Peter.

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Re: Double DES calculations
by DAVESPARKS＠delphi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hal Finney wrote: > Most of the time-space tradeoffs that I can think of for a basic MITM > attack like this are pretty costly. For example, instead of trying all > the keys on both sides you could try just half the keys each time. This > would take only half as much space but up to four times the time. You > could also do some hashing to save space at the cost of false positives > and more time. Again, the point is not so much that double DES is weak, > but more that if its strength is solely due to space costs that gives much > less of a good feeling than if you had an algorithm that was strong both > in space and in time. Agreed, Hal. I was just pointing out the fallacy of saying that 2-DES would only take *TWICE* as long to break as 1-DES. While there are some tradeoffs that trade space for time, the one virtually constant factor is monetary cost. Whether it's 300 million drives running for 10+ days to crack the key, or 10 million for a year or so, the total energy consumed will be virtually the same. By my calculations, the energy costs alone would be over half a billion dollars per key. Not only that, but one of these hypothetical $1.5 TRILLION "monster crackers" can still only break 30 keys a year. (Good reason to generate temporary session keys!) Also, I neglected the "overhead" costs associated, such as periodic maintenance on all those drives. Drives in nearly constant use will need frequent maintenance, especially head cleaning, which is not a trivial task on 300 million drives. The only way I can see that this would be cost-effective is to locate it near a prison (for cheap convict labor) with a cheap power source nearby. That, or invent a cheaper storage medium than DAT. In the final analysis, though, you're right. I'd hate to calculate the cost to break 3-DES. Unless you're encrypting a high speed data link in real time, where utmost throughput is essential, I see no reason to not use that, or something equally strong. /--------------+------------------------------------\ | | Internet: davesparks(a)delphi.com | | Dave Sparks | Fidonet: Dave Sparks @ 1:207/212 | | | BBS: (909) 353-9821 - 14.4K | \--------------+------------------------------------/

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Dialogue With Detweiler
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Blanc, While your conversation with LD may be too much for the whole list (I for one have been ambushed by this sudden spurt in activity) as his posts are rarely less than 15k, I'd request you to archive them, so that they can be added to The Detweiler Files, available on ftp from someplace on Robert Hayden's site. They should be interesting. After all, students of information society unable to find a topic for their theses can always choose The Proliferation Of Pseudospoofing Tentacles, or The Sniffer Of Medusas. Seriously. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "Clean the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in take stone from stone and wash them..." Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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Re: Schneier
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

tim werner <vikram!werner(a)mc.ab.com>: > I ordered [Schneier's] book, when it first came out, from the local Borders book > store. When I went to pick it up, they told me that if I decided to buy it > I could not return it, since it was not a book that they would otherwise > not stock it > Today I was there checking out the computer books, and they had a copy on > the shelf, so I guess it was in enough demand that they decided to stock it. I found a few copies in a local bookshop the other day. When it first came out, I thought I'd have to order it, and was pleasantly surprised to find it already in stock. But then I buy books on discount from an academic distributor, so that was probably to be expected. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "Clean the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in take stone from stone and wash them..." Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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Cypherpunks = alt.tentacles
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

C'punks, I hate to do this yet again, I'm all for free speech etc, but today I got 600k of c'punk mail. I don't mind paying for the extra garbage that comes over my SLIP link, but when there's so much of it, I have to protest. I propose the creation of a new news group: alt.tentacles (and alt.medusa.detweiler) to discuss what's occupied 70% of the past few days mail. Take care, and avoid too much seafood. Rishab ps. I _am_ enjoying the discussion on alternatives to 3DES. When I can find it, that is. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "Clean the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in take stone from stone and wash them..." Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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Re: Card Playing Protocol? (fwd)
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I thought of a simpler way to attack the blackjack protocol proposed by Karl, where the dealer shuffles the cards, commits to a hash, and then the player checks the hash at the end of the deck. Simply, this allows the dealer to stack the deck. He can put the cards in any order he wants, claiming he is shuffling them, commit to that, and the player will confirm that the hash matches at the end. Meanwhile the dealer wins every hand. So this won't do. An easy fix would be for the player and dealer to mutually choose a random seed for a PRNG that is then used in a specified algorithm to choose the cards of the deck. The dealer would commit to the hash of his part of the seed but would not reveal his part until after the deck is played out. The player's seed and the dealer's are then combined and the player can reconstruct the sequence of cards which should have been played. Again, this is only suitable for a one-dealer-one-player game since other- wise the dealer can collude with some subset of the players and tip them off to what cards are coming up. Hal

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leahy and the eff on clipper "reversal"
by Jonathan Rochkind 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I am amused to see that Senator Leahy's press release was in fact more "radical", and closer to the typical position of a cypherpunk then the EFF press release was. An actual politician simply read the Gore letter for what it was: no significant change in their policy whatsoever. While the "public interest" or "advocacy" group that the EFF is supposed to be appearantly decided it would be more politic to make friends with the administration by pretending they've made some progress. I'm sure Leahy (or one of his aides) assumed the EFF would be saying the same thing as Leahy was. He's probably berating one of his aides right now for releasing a statement that was more radical and likely to anger the administration then even the EFF statement. Sigh.

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Travelling ants
by Ben Goren 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A recent RISKS digest had an article that described a computer that simulated a colony of ants with independent software units that interacted in certain ways. The article said that the "ants" were able to find an efficient solution to the traveling salesman problem. Wouldn't such a system be perfect for a public key cryptosystem? It seems that mechanisms already designed for knapsack algorithms would work; it would remain to be worked out if the traveling salesman problem has the same cryptographic problems as the knapsack problem. b& -- Ben.Goren(a)asu.edu, Arizona State University School of Music net.proselytizing (write for info): We won! Clipper is dead! BUT! Just say no to key escrow. And stamp out spamming, too. Finger ben(a)tux.music.asu.edu for PGP 2.3a public key. du says to finger remailer-list(a)chaos.bsu.edu and > that account does not exist. Chael Hall changed operating systems on chaos and hasn't reinstalled the finger thing yet. You can get the list by sending mail to mg5n+remailer-list(a)andrew.cmu.edu

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