December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: standards...
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > AFAIK, RSA is the only feasible PK scheme available. There's eliptic > > curves, of course, but that's patented. > There are plenty of others, like Rabin's scheme, that are quite > practical, but just not used because they are all collectively > patented. After that patent expires in '97 things may change. There are different uses for public-key systems, and some systems support some but not all of the uses. For instance, Diffie-Hellman is useful for key exchage (and patented till 1997), and the NIST/NSA's DSS Digital Signature Standard is useful for signatures, especially if you like subliminal channels in your signatures :-), though the patent status depends on whether you believe NIST or RSA ....

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Re: The NSA (Was Re: Factoring - State of the Art and Predictions )
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 1:09 AM 2/13/95, Black Unicorn wrote: >There is a internet lore that says the more valuable and insightful a >given article is, the less response it gets. > >I hope this is right, as most of mine tend to be ignored. On the other hand, they also get forwarded to people not on the list who may be interested, which helps. Bruce's went to 3 or 4 mathematically aware people I know. The work of Mssrs 'corn, Froomkin, Hughes, Finney, May, et.al. get re-zinged all over the place by yours truly. Some of us don't have the chops to comment on the <mostly> excellent content of this list. We still appreciate the work. Thanks to all of you. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923

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List of reliable remailers
by Raph Levien 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I operate a remailer pinging service which collects detailed information about remailer features and reliability. To use it, just finger remailer-list(a)kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu There is also a Web version of the same information, at: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~raph/remailer-list.html This information is used by premail, a remailer chaining and PGP encrypting client for outgoing mail, which is available at: ftp://ftp.csua.berkeley.edu/pub/cypherpunks/premail/premail-0.30.tar.gz For the PGP public keys of the remailers, as well as some help on how to use them, finger remailer.help.all(a)204.95.228.28 This is the current info: REMAILER LIST This is an automatically generated listing of remailers. The first part of the listing shows the remailers along with configuration options and special features for each of the remailers. The second part shows the 12-day history, and average latency and uptime for each remailer. You can also get this list by fingering remailer-list(a)kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu. $remailer{"vox"} = "<remail(a)vox.xs4all.nl> cpunk pgp. post"; $remailer{"avox"} = "<anon(a)vox.hacktic.nl> cpunk pgp post"; $remailer{"extropia"} = "<remail(a)extropia.wimsey.com> cpunk pgp special"; $remailer{"portal"} = "<hfinney(a)shell.portal.com> cpunk pgp hash"; $remailer{"alumni"} = "<hal(a)alumni.caltech.edu> cpunk pgp hash"; $remailer{"bsu-cs"} = "<nowhere(a)bsu-cs.bsu.edu> cpunk hash ksub"; $remailer{"rebma"} = "<remailer(a)rebma.mn.org> cpunk pgp hash"; $remailer{"c2"} = "<remail(a)c2.org> eric pgp hash"; $remailer{"soda"} = "<remailer(a)csua.berkeley.edu> eric post"; $remailer{"penet"} = "<anon(a)anon.penet.fi> penet post"; $remailer{"ideath"} = "<remailer(a)ideath.goldenbear.com> cpunk hash ksub"; $remailer{"usura"} = "<usura(a)replay.com> cpunk pgp. hash latent cut post"; $remailer{"desert"} = "<remail(a)desert.xs4all.nl> cpunk pgp. post"; $remailer{"nately"} = "<remailer(a)nately.ucsd.edu> cpunk pgp hash latent cut"; $remailer{"myriad"} = "<remailer(a)myriad.pc.cc.cmu.edu> cpunk pgp hash latent cut ek"; $remailer{"xs4all"} = "<remailer(a)xs4all.nl> cpunk pgp hash latent cut post ek"; $remailer{"flame"} = "<tomaz(a)flame.sinet.org> cpunk pgp hash latent cut post ek"; $remailer{"rahul"} = "<homer(a)rahul.net> cpunk pgp hash"; $remailer{"mix"} = "<mixmaster(a)nately.ucsd.edu> cpunk pgp hash latent cut ek ksub"; $remailer{"q"} = "<q(a)c2.org> cpunk pgp hash latent cut ek ksub"; $remailer{"syrinx"} = "<syrinx(a)c2.org> cpunk pgp"; $remailer{"tower"} = "<remailer(a)tower.techwood.org> cpunk pgp"; $remailer{"eniac"} = "<vanklava(a)eniac.ac.siue.edu> cpunk pgp hash latent cut ek"; $remailer{"charon"} = "<charon(a)styx.jpunix.com> cpunk hash latent cut ek"; $remailer{"bonafide"} = "<remailer(a)bonafide.jpunix.com> cpunk hash latent cut ek"; $remailer{"ford"} = "<ford(a)prefect.jpunix.com> cpunk hash latent cut ek"; $remailer{"aegis"} = "<aegis(a)athena.jpunix.com> cpunk"; catalyst(a)netcom.com is _not_ a remailer. lmccarth(a)ducie.cs.umass.edu is _not_ a remailer. JPUNIX.COM offers a domain hiding service for remailers. Send email to perry(a)jpunix.com for more information. NOTE: JPUNIX.COM itself does not run a remailer. All subdomains of jpunix.com on this list are remailers that are not physically located on jpunix.com Use "premail -getkeys pgpkeys(a)kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu" to get PGP keys for the remailers. Fingering this address works too. Last ping: Mon 13 Feb 95 6:00:02 PST remailer email address history latency uptime ----------------------------------------------------------------------- tower remailer(a)tower.techwood.org *****#*#**** 4:34 99.97% mix mixmaster(a)nately.ucsd.edu ++++++++++++ 36:13 99.96% nately remailer(a)nately.ucsd.edu ++++++++-+++ 33:48 99.96% penet anon(a)anon.penet.fi +++-+++++--- 3:28:32 99.99% rahul homer(a)rahul.net *#-*+**-*** 13:52 99.97% xs4all remailer(a)xs4all.nl +**+*+++**** 11:02 99.94% bonafide remailer(a)bonafide.jpunix.com ##********.- 1:06:02 99.92% myriad remailer(a)myriad.pc.cc.cmu.edu **********.- 1:07:06 99.84% vox remail(a)vox.xs4all.nl ..---...--. 23:29:37 99.90% alumni hal(a)alumni.caltech.edu *##* *+***** 6:35 99.62% portal hfinney(a)shell.portal.com *##* *+#**#* 4:16 99.62% c2 remail(a)c2.org ++-+++++++++ 42:42 99.49% q q(a)c2.org ++-+++++++.+ 1:09:16 99.45% flame tomaz(a)flame.sinet.org **********.- 1:18:51 99.38% usura usura(a)replay.com *+ *** ***** 8:21 99.22% ford ford(a)prefect.jpunix.com ++-++++ ++.- 1:46:37 99.21% bsu-cs nowhere(a)bsu-cs.bsu.edu --**--#***** 27:38 99.18% soda remailer(a)csua.berkeley.edu ....._. .-. 9:40:51 98.93% ideath remailer(a)ideath.goldenbear.com --- ------.- 2:40:41 98.55% charon charon(a)styx.jpunix.com ++-*__****.- 3:38:09 98.24% syrinx syrinx(a)c2.org ++-*__****** 2:39:40 97.78% aegis aegis(a)athena.jpunix.com _ -+**.- 4:06:48 96.99% eniac vanklava(a)eniac.ac.siue.edu +#**** * 5:31 52.27% rebma remailer(a)rebma.mn.org - *-- 14:20:54 45.33% desert remail(a)desert.xs4all.nl -_.-_..- 33:07:32 42.87% extropia remail(a)extropia.wimsey.com 5:04:09 1.17% For more info: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~raph/remailer-list.html History key * # response in less than 5 minutes. * * response in less than 1 hour. * + response in less than 4 hours. * - response in less than 24 hours. * . response in more than 1 day. * _ response came back too late (more than 2 days). Options and features cpunk A major class of remailers. Supports Request-Remailing-To: field. eric A variant of the cpunk style. Uses Anon-Send-To: instead. penet The third class of remailers (at least for right now). Uses X-Anon-To: in the header. pgp Remailer supports encryption with PGP. A period after the keyword means that the short name, rather than the full email address, should be used as the encryption key ID. oldpgp Remailer does not like messages encoded with MIT PGP 2.6. Other versions of PGP, including 2.3a and 2.6ui, work fine. hash Supports ## pasting, so anything can be put into the headers of outgoing messages. ksub Remailer always kills subject header, even in non-pgp mode. nsub Remailer always preserves subject header, even in pgp mode. latent Supports Matt Ghio's Latent-Time: option. cut Supports Matt Ghio's Cutmarks: option. post Post to Usenet using Post-To: or Anon-Post-To: header. special Accepts only pgp encrypted messages. ek Encrypt responses in relpy blocks using Encrypt-Key: header. Raph Levien

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Re: Is Cyberspace Rich Enough?
by Wei Dai 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > That theme is this: Is cyberspace, or the Net/Web/Etc., sufficiently > rich or complex to meet our needs? [deleted] > Consider how the abstractions of the World Wide Web, URLs, HTML, HTTP, > and Web browsers have *increased the size of cyberspace* rather > dramatically in just the past two years. More places to visit, more > interconnectedness, more difficulties in controlling access to stuff, > etc. Home pages containing banned material are proliferating (a la the > Homolka-Teale ritualistic cannibalism trial in Canada, the Scientology > material, and so on--this is not the place for me to recap this). > Sure, ftp sites used to do this pretty well; in fact, I'm considering > ftp sites in this "evolution" toward greater complexity (in the > richness sense). I agree that cyberspace is certainly becoming more complex and interconnected. However, just as a complex ecosystem is not necessarily more stable than a simple one, and a complex cipher is not necessarily more secure than a simple one, greater complexity in cyberspace does not necessarily imply that it is less vulnerable to to centralized control. [more stuff deleted] > What Cypherpunks should be pushing for, in my view, is this increased > dimensionality. More places to stick things, more places to escape > central control, and more degrees of freedom (which has a nice dual > meaning I once used as the working title for a novel I was working > on). But if you wanted to exert greater control over others, you would also be pushing for increased dimensionality, because that shrinks the world and moves everyone closer to you. If you look at history, increased connectivity has always been necessary for increased central control. What I am saying is that increased connectivity alone does not necessarily favor decentralization. What makes the difference is the details -- the nature of the connectivity. > Is Cyberspace already rich enough (= high enough dimensionality) so > that central control cannot be reestablished (to the extent it ever > existed)? > > Many of this think that it probably already is past this point, that > the "point of no return" has been reached. After all, the Soviets > couldn't stop samizdats, the Chinese couldn't stop fax machines, and > the Americans can't stop drug use, so what hope is there in > controlling modems, crypto, cellular phones, satellites, Web links, > stegonography, terabytes of data flowing unobstructed across borders, > and so on. Just to "stop the Net" would disrupt the entire financial > system, which not even Clinton or the next (Republican) President > would be tempted to do....they might as well launch a nuclear war as > try to shut down this "anarchic" ( = high dimensionality) system. I'm not quite so optimistic. One way to control a distributed system such as the Internet would be to use a distributed method. I.e., use something like the Internet Worm, but a thousand times subtler and more powerful. There is no need for them to "stop the Net", just to subvert a substantial part of it. Wei Dai -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLz/I0Tl0sXKgdnV5AQGEewP7BGVcIdtKv5UIh8z3ydSoMdOdvLyBxww3 N3f4NKaXTwS6PPfdmRafcN7i3mKEDIlB6CKBBEL5qV2GkDpmTi9rehD2q5hZFzEX vdHYg8k/YRo8ZNnLdaelZO7EPFpFwX3XCeyd2Ap6efzrr7djX98ckJWb5ZMnK/Xp BOLeEwxTF6Y= =hcI1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- E-mail: Wei Dai <weidai(a)eskimo.com> URL: "http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai" =================== Exponential Increase of Complexity =================== --> singularity --> atoms --> macromolecules --> biological evolution --> central nervous systems --> symbolic communication --> homo sapiens --> digital computers --> internetworking --> close-coupled automation --> broadband brain-to-net connections --> artificial intelligence --> distributed consciousness --> group minds --> ? ? ?

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CNN (fwd) Communications (In)Decency Act?
by Robert Rothenburg Walking-Owl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: This was just sent to me. > Date: Mon, 13 Feb 1995 14:31:08 -0800 > Subject: CNN > Content-Type: text > Content-Length: 309 > > CNN's 6:00 p.m. (EST) news broadcast tonight (2/13) will include a > live segment on S. 314, "The Communications Decency Act," introduced by > Sen. James Exon (D-NE). Judy Woodruff will moderate a discussion > of the bill with Sen. Exon and Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic > Privacy Information Center (EPIC). >

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Re: Is Cyberspace Rich Enough?
by Wei Dai 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > [deleted] > But can we do more? One of my own wishes is to see hundreds (nay, > thousands!) of remailers, as these act as "teleportation booths" which > can dramatically increase connectivity. (They can increase the > connectivity in a different way that just straight connections > can...they "stitch together" otherwise visibly-connected regions with > unobservable connections, a desirable thing.) I'm not sure that thousands of remailers will ever exist. There will be little incentive for people to use small remailers, which, because of their low traffic, add little untracibility per additional unit of latency and monetary costs compared to larger remailers. Larger remailers will also likely have better reputations for trustworthiness. The economics seem to indicate that (if a market of remailers is ever established) there will be a small number (less than a hundred) of large remailers that are well used and profitable, and a larger number of small remailers that are nearly never used. > [deleted] > * Web access remailers. Like the "anonymous anonymous ftp," why not > explore combining Web systems with remailers? (Not so great for > browsing, of course, but there should be some interesting > possibilities.) Remailers don't seem to be a good way to access the WWW, which is much more efficient when done interactively. On the other hand, my proposed Pipe-net would seem to be perfect for this, and other communications that need both untracibility and low latency. Wei Dai P.S. People are more likely to respond to things they don't agree with (as I did here). If you write something and no one responds, it probably means that everyone except the lurkers agree with you, so take it as a good sign. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLz+uDzl0sXKgdnV5AQFvkwP/XiKF5kYexZUje14rk2iyxlLpLke8EHCY BbRMFQZFQPk0KFo/8iThSn1Xs0xgHrjud5hmpoBxkR+pKMTPfNx6rbTFoSF3HQtX VzNacOYflcb/eSjHDS02IhMH5wYeUpmKzBE+K4ZgZ35i7sdx8yoHb8laYp1Trhq5 iQ4fbWNy+UA= =DiM1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- E-mail: Wei Dai <weidai(a)eskimo.com> URL: "http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai" =================== Exponential Increase of Complexity =================== --> singularity --> atoms --> macromolecules --> biological evolution --> central nervous systems --> symbolic communication --> homo sapiens --> digital computers --> internetworking --> close-coupled automation --> broadband brain-to-net connections --> artificial intelligence --> distributed consciousness --> group minds --> ? ? ?

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RE: Is Cyberspace Rich Enough?
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Timothy C. May "(Actually, cyberspace is partly getting "bigger" and partly "increasing in dimensionality." Dimensionality of a space can be related to how many neighbors one has....think of the two nearest neighbors one has in a 1-D space, the 4 (or 8 if diagonals are considered) neighbors in a 2-D space, the 6 in a 3-D space, and so on. Arguably, if one has "100 close neighbors" in a space, it is roughly a 50 dimensional space. An equivalent formulation is in terms of the radius of the n-sphere that everyone fits into. For example, the "six degrees of separation," the 6 "handshakes" that separate nearly any two people in America, suggests that American society is in some important sense roughly a 15-17 dimensional space, because in some sense all 250 million Americans "fit into" a hypersphere of radius 3 (diameter 6) when the dimensionality is around 17. (Or slightly lower, as the slight corrections to V = r ^ n have to be included, which I'm not bothering with). What "increased connectivity" does is to increase dimensionality, about as one would expect from our usual metaphors about "a multidimensional society" and "the world is shrinking"...indeed it is shrinking, even as the absolute volume increases.)" Well, what I want to know about this, is: what are the symmetries involved in the product? (I learned that question this weekend) "What Cypherpunks should be pushing for, in my view, is this increased dimensionality. More places to stick things, more places to escape central control, and more degrees of freedom (which has a nice dual meaning I once used as the working title for a novel I was working on)." I think that this proliferation of places will increase as people find immediate, practical or entertaining uses for home pages and places to stash info, before they will seek to find places to hide, to evade detection, to escape notice, or to blend into the milieu as the aim of their cyberspatial activity. And shouldn't there be some mention of the "hardware" involved in making cyberspace possible? Wouldn't there some requirement for more cables underground to places which don't yet have them, and utility companies to manage the flow of electricity, etc? I don't know a great deal about these things, but it's hardly ever mentioned here, as though electricity just flows by itself somewhere called 'cyberspace' and all one ever has to think about (besides crypto and software commands) are how to plug oneself in, like 3C-PO. But somebody has to install the plugs in, first. .. Blanc

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perry@imsi.comRe: Does PGP scale well?
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > I was just reading RFC1034 about DNS, and one thing I noted was that > > there is a "reverse lookup" feature. [....] > > The RFC did not make it very clear how this is done. Does this use a > > "flat" database? > > No. Its fully distributed. The fact that networks are assigned in > heirarchical chunks should explain how its done, and why the bytes get > reversed for the lookup. As an example, MIT owns network 18, which is > to say that all MIT addresses are 18.XXX.XXX.XXX, and 18.IN-ADDR.ARPA > is a server at MIT. MIT may have sub-servers beyond that level, but > DNS makes us oblivious to this. Of course, that's more useful for MIT, which owns Network 18, than for the thousands of people on networks 192.xxx.xxx; reverse lookups don't seem as reliable for Class C. On the site I run, I implement reverse lookups for my subnet, and the folks who run our larger internal net have pointers that know how to find it. But DNS would work for forward lookups even if the reverse weren't maintained, or deliberately omitted some parts for security/predictability reasons.

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Re: TEMPEST Paper by Former Civilian (1/2)
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sigh. Some anonymous poster drags up "Christopher Seline"'s wildly inaccurate article about TEMPEST. Aside from having a reverse- engineered deacronymization of TEMPEST (which isn't an acronym and isn't about Transient Electromagnetic Pulses), misunderstanding TEMPEST certification, not getting its legalities right, it's in general just plain confused and sensationalist. Bill

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EPIC to Debate Exon on CNN
by Dave Banisar 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

CNN's 6:00 p.m. (EST) news broadcast tonight (2/13) will include a segment on S. 314, "The Communications Decency Act," introduced by Sen. James Exon (D-NE). Judy Woodruff will moderate a discussion of the bill with Sen. Exon and Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). _________________________________________________________________________ Subject: EPIC to Debate Exon on CNN _________________________________________________________________________ David Banisar (Banisar(a)epic.org) * 202-544-9240 (tel) Electronic Privacy Information Center * 202-547-5482 (fax) 666 Pennsylvania Ave, SE, Suite 301 * ftp/gopher/wais cpsr.org Washington, DC 20003 * HTTP://epic.digicash.com/epic

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