December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

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

17 Dec '03

Hal Finney wrote: > I'll give you one similar example, though. I think this is the technique > used in Pollard "rho" factoring. You have an iterated series, x=f(x), and > you want to know if it has any cycles, any values which are eventually > repeated. At first glance you might think that to look for a cycle of > length N you would have to store N values of the series and check each > value for a match, taking order of N in time and space. The Pollard tech- > nique instead runs two copies of the iteration at once, one twice as fast > as the other: x=f(x) and y=f(f(y)). Each time you just compare x and y > for a match. This takes about twice as long but uses no memory. The thread was concerning the vulnerability of Double-DES with an intermediate layer of IDEA in the middle. It was proposed that if IDEA could ultimately be TRIVIALLy cracked, then DES-IDEA-DES was no stronger than Double-DES. At that point I did some "back of the envelope" calculations on the cost of breaking Double-DES using a MITM attack. I'm not sure how "cycles" fit into DES. The brute-force technique I was hypothesizing involved trying all possible keys on the encrypt and decrypt sides, storing them the resultant 64 bit blocks (all 2^60 bytes of them), then comparing them. How would Pollard rho speed that up? /--------------+------------------------------------\ | | Internet: davesparks(a)delphi.com | | Dave Sparks | Fidonet: Dave Sparks @ 1:207/212 | | | BBS: (909) 353-9821 - 14.4K | \--------------+------------------------------------/

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Steve Winter Declares War in Cyberspace
by nobody＠kaiwan.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I just FTPed this from the Fidonet archives over at ftp.fidonet.org. It looks as if, if this nut case has his way, we may have a "Waco in cyberspace". For those of you who "enjoyed" Ralph Stokes' Ruckmanite spam entitled "Beware of Roman Catholic Corruption" which brewed in the bowels of Fidoland for years before spilling over into Internet/Usenet, Steve Winter has the *POTENTIAL* to do far more damage. He owns not only a Fido node, but the entire "PRIME Net" structure, as well. His Internet address, BTW, is "Steve.Winter(a)f98.n18.z1.fidonet.org". Yes, the ".n18" means he's in Fidonet region 18, just like our old "friend" Ralph (the Mouth) Stokes <Ralph.Stokes(a)f1611.n375.z1.fidonet.org>. If those two were ever to team up... If you doubt the truthfulness of this, because of my need to post anonymously, feel free to FTP the file for yourself and have a look. The file can be obtained via anonymous FTP from ftp.fidonet.org as /pub/fidonet/fidonews/fnewsb29.lzh and you can verify this for yourself. Anyway, enjoy, beware, learn, or whatever: ********************************************************************** F I D O N E W S -- Vol.11 No.29 (18-Jul-1994) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The FIDO Crucifixion by Steve Winter (1:18/98) Some of you out there have been giving me a lot of bad press lately. I don't really care because the bible tells me that false christian scum will try to deter me from my mission to correct the lies and Satan-influenced false teachings of deviant so-called pastors. I don't care. They can flay my skin, draw and quarter me and even take steps to censor me in FIDO, but I will carry on. Recently, I became aware of a new threat to the true church of Jesus,that being these people who call themselves "Pagans". They should more properly call themselves Heathens or even Satanists. Yes, I have investigated many of these new age BBSs and I have only one thing to say. THEY MUST GO!! The devil will not be allowed to exert domain where Jesus rules King. We shall persue these godless satanic groups until the last one has been exorcised or given over to the Lord for disposal. We must seek them out and destroy their places of depravity and destroy their rings of stone and their alters where babies are sacrificed to appease their lord and master Satan himself. Good Christians everywhere must join together to eradicate this unwholesome threat to the very fibre and existance of mankind, and we must do it NOW! I am asking the following of every Christian FIDO reader that can see this message to disrupt, destroy and do away with every pagan BBS in their area. Crash their their boards, and upload ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ viruses, what ever you need to do. These are scum of the earth ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ and if I had MY way these idiots would be swinging from lamp posts like Mussolini did after World War II. Let the dogs eat their flesh and the bones be crushed under the feet of the legions of God's people. If we all can get together on this ONE thing, we can eradicate this threat to mankind within 6 months. Call your local police and report these deviants. Report their crimes against children and if possible, infiltrate them so that we can accumulate a listing of these disgusting pawns of Satan. We must act now or surrender FIDO to the Satan controlled minions of the dark side of man. Crush them like the vermin they are. THIS IS WAR! FidoNews 11-29 Page: 7 18 Jul 1994

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Re: Card Playing Protocol? (fwd)
by Arsen Ray Arachelian 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 23 Jul 1994 01:19:02 -0400 (GMT+4:00) From: Arsen Ray Arachelian <rarachel(a)prism.poly.edu> To: "Roy M. Silvernail" <roy(a)sendai.cybrspc.mn.org> Subject: Re: Card Playing Protocol? On Wed, 20 Jul 1994, Roy M. Silvernail wrote: > The effect could be different. I use i there because I want to traverse > the deck from one end to the other, and exchange each card with a > randomly selected card from the unprocessed remainder. This algorithm > goes back to my 8-bit days, when speed was everything. Although some > cards might be handled twice (probably about 35%, but I haven't done the > math), each position in the deck is filled only once (except the last > one, which is forced from the other 53). > > A card in position X will, in its turn, be moved to a random position > between itself and one end of the deck. But that card is also subject > to being 'picked from behind' when an earlier card is exchanged. So any > given card may end up on either side of its beginning location. > > But I think there's something to what you're saying. I can't articulate > it, but I get a sense that the single-pass algorithm might have a > definable shape The issue is this: at the start a card has a 1/54 chance of being swapped with >ANY< card. The second card has a chance of 1/53 of being swapped with >ANY< card, the third, a chance of 1/52... the 50th card has a chance of 1/4, ... the 53rd card has a 1/2 chance of being swaped with the last card or remains in its place (swapped with itself.) So what I'm getting at is that the cards at one end of the deck have more "mobility" than the cards in the other end of the deck. The 1st cards have a more spread out distribution so they have LESS of a chance of being swapped out with the cards at the back of the deck. The cards at the back of the deck have a very tight space from which to be swapped. Therein lies the problem of sorting. As for SPEED, in the eight bit days, it would be faster to do a MOD with a CONSTANT number than with a variable. Why? Because the compiler can find ways of optimizing the MOD via right shifts and substractions rather than using repeated substraction alone. There was some challenge somewhere to come up with ways of dividing numbers via shifting and substraction some time ago. I'm sure the division for 54 is faster than a general integer divide by substraction. It's hard to figure out how to divide by 54 via shifting, however, it would do wonders for an eight bit machine. These days, some machines have integer/floating division right in the CPU that's just as fast or almost as fast. With FPU's, even faster than shifting. :-) Let's see... how do I break 54 down.... hmmm.. Okay, if we trash the jokers it becomes easier: 52/4 == 52>>2. This equals 13. Now 13 being a prime can't be divided... I guess this is one way of looking at the card value and stripping off the suite. However, having divided by 4, you saved yourself four times the work already. So you take your picked card C and substract C>>2 from it. If the result is positive, you've got a remainder to a division by 4. You then substract 13 until you would get a negative value if you did one more substraction. The left over value is the mod 54 (I think. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.) Anyhow, this is moot as you don't need to do this by hand anymore anyway.. :-) Besides, if you want to cheat a bit, you can always take lrand() &0x0000003F which would give you a range from 0 to 63, and if you should get a value larger than 53, you substract 54 from it. :-) Since all you want is a random number from 0 to 53, it doesn't much matter. I guarantee that this is faster than division on most of the common machines anyway. :-) > An interesting thought. Guessing a card's location is pretty tough, > though. I was thinking more of seasoned players noticing the absence of > patterns they had become accustomed to. I know I saw some definite > trends when I was an avid Cribbage player. Yes, but an AI could also be trained with these patterns. A neural network attached to a tracking engine that keeps track of his hand and guesses at his opponents hand and the "odds" of what cards can come up next against the odds of what he needs to win with isn't easy, but if done right, it can prove a formidable opponent for the beginer poker player. :-) It would be matched by seasoned players undoubtedly. However, what I'm getting to here is an automated digital cash paying/payed casio dealer. That is you could set up a telnet site where others can gamble against your computer. (I'll leave the legalities of this to others :-) If this machine is done the right way, even with mental poker and even if it can't cheat you, it's still a very good card shark. You could charge say, half a ghostmark or whatever per 10 games just to play, plus a minimum bet of one ghostmark per hand with doubling/raising/etc being allowed. Hell, if you really want to get sick, you can have the AI keep databases of the player's past patterns and how he ticks. Unless players use random anonymous packet bouncers, such AI's could be properly used to run a real cypherspace <g> casino. I'm sure if we look up some mobsters and give them this idea they'd be happy to implement it once digital cash appears in wide use. Of course we're talking about ten years in the future, or never if digi cash never makes it... Don't however think that this can't be done. There are chess games that "think" ahead. If programmed with the right set of fuzzy rules and given extensive databases as to the opponents past moves/prefrences/bluffs/etc, such an AI would be a great card shark. Of course our player may decide to write a better auto-player and have it play against another AI. :-) But hey, if we're going to have smart agents, their owners can be "backers" as there are for real gamblers out there already. :-) > In poker, each hand gets a fresh shuffle. Blackjack will exhaust the > deck to a certain point and then shuffle. Depending on the house, Yep.. the reason I asked was because in high school we played by almost no rules. We'd have games where the "odd" numbered cards were wild, picture cards wild, etc.... shit like that was common place... I guess it's bastardisation, but hey, it was fun and not for money. And we didn't reshuffle often. BTW: Idea to prevent dealer cheating while shuffling the deck: Alice Builds the deck from Ace of Spades to King o'Diamonds, encrypts it, shuffles it herself, passes it to Bob, who shuffles it again, and encrypts it, then passes it to Alice who picks her hand, etc. If the cards are shuffled between every hands, this would prevent an AI from keeping tack of the odds of unplayed cards.

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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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