December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Non-News Govt Announcement on Key Escrow
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 9:49 PM 8/17/95, Dave Banisar wrote: >The White House and NIST annouced today that they were planning to hold two >open meetings next month to develop standards for "acceptable" software key >escrow. The standards will then be made into a FIPS. The programs cannot >have keys larger than 64 bits. > >Its great to see that it only took them 18 months (since Feb. 94) to come >up with a call for public meetings for something that nobody really wants >anyway, expcept for the officals who plan to make it mandatory by slipping >it through bit by bit and a couple of vendors. (sorry, sarcasm mode >off...) One thing I'm hoping for is that Clinton will, as he contemplates his last year and a bit in office, have an attack of "liberalism." That is, I am hoping he realizes that any mandatory key escrow system is not only a massive infringement on the right of people to speak and communicate as they wish, it is also handing the keys to the Surveillance State to the likes of Bob Dole, Jesse Helms, Alonse D'Amato, Newt Gingrich, and William Bennett. --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net (Got net?) | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Export policy change
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Just heard on the 11:30pm NPR news update. The Clinton Administration has changed the crypto export policy. You will now be allowed to export strong crypto, provided it is a key escrow system. The reporter (Dan Charles?) said something like anyone can hold the keys, as long as they will be made avail when presented with a court order. He also said, US citizens will still be able to use strong crypto without key escrow internally. Terrorists and drug pushers were given as "reasons." /r$

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Re: Export policy change
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:48 AM 8/18/95, Rich Salz wrote: >Just heard on the 11:30pm NPR news update. The Clinton Administration >has changed the crypto export policy. You will now be allowed to >export strong crypto, provided it is a key escrow system. The >reporter (Dan Charles?) said something like anyone can hold the keys, >as long as they will be made avail when presented with a court order. >He also said, US citizens will still be able to use strong crypto >without key escrow internally. Terrorists and drug pushers were given >as "reasons." And I want to formally announce "Tim's Sort of Good Escrow Service." I accept keys, thus meeting Our Leader's dictum, but can't really say the keys will be retrievable, as my floppies often get warped from sitting in the sun. Hey, if "anyone can hold the keys".... Somehow I doubt this. I suspect that any mandatory GAK key escrow system will involve all sorts of hoops which must be jumped through, all sorts of approvals which must be gotten, etc. My neighbor has agreed to be the escrow agent for my keys. He doesn't know anything about computers, so he's taking my word that the things I give him every couple of months are disks. He figures that if the Justice Department ever asks for them, he'll point to the dusty box on the floor of his garage and say, "There they be." --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net (Got net?) | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: I need exportable crypto revisited.
by patrick＠Verity.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

But don't forget the International Cryptography Experiment, (ICE). You can read about it in a file available from TIS. They're trying to evolve something with pluggable authentication and encryption that will pass ITAR. Patrick _______________________________________________________________________ / These opinions are mine, and not Verity's (except by coincidence;). \ | (\ | | Patrick J. Horgan Verity Inc. \\ Have | | patrick(a)verity.com 1550 Plymouth Street \\ _ Sword | | Phone : (415)960-7600 Mountain View \\/ Will | | FAX : (415)960-7750 California 94303 _/\\ Travel | \___________________________________________________________\)__________/

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Re: I need exportable crypto revisited.
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In article <199508180030.RAA04988(a)mycroft.rand.org>, jim(a)acm.org (Jim Gillogly) wrote: >> "Perry E. Metzger" <perry(a)piermont.com> writes: >> If you have hooks for arbitrary encryption, you will find it to be >> virtually impossible to export the product. > >That's my understanding also (as I told him in e-mail) but I haven't found >any legal justification for it. You migh as well stop looking, because there isn't any. The brownshirts have long ago decided that the law means what they say it does. Welcome to reality. - -- - -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBMDQd8ioZzwIn1bdtAQGyEwF9HHGf5vVL0EbVt7RVrXwLlQQUGLF+nFEl +KP+YB4/JYjjvE9G8By7RlezFhZF3Iy6 =MRsO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Legality of the ITARs
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm not an expert on ITARs, but I'll pass along something I heard about a year or year and a half ago. At 4:58 AM 8/18/95, Lucky Green wrote: >In article <199508180030.RAA04988(a)mycroft.rand.org>, jim(a)acm.org (Jim >Gillogly) wrote: > >>> "Perry E. Metzger" <perry(a)piermont.com> writes: >>> If you have hooks for arbitrary encryption, you will find it to be >>> virtually impossible to export the product. >> >>That's my understanding also (as I told him in e-mail) but I haven't found >>any legal justification for it. > >You migh as well stop looking, because there isn't any. The brownshirts >have long ago decided that the law means what they say it does. Welcome to >reality. Lawyers within NSA are apparently of the same opinion, that the ITARs would not stand up to a court test. Carl Nicolai, the inventor of the "PhasorFone," whose case was described in Bamford's 1982 "The Puzzle Palace," once called me up to tell me that he and his lawyer were allowed to view, but not copy, files on the ITAR issue. Some memos they came across from Agency lawyers warned that any ITAR court case would likely see the ITARs overturned. (I passed this information on to Phil Karn a year or so ago, as he was starting his suit to get Schneier's stuff approved for export. I later saw a note from Lee Tien and/or John Gilmore saying they had gotten similar documents under an FOIA they did. Maybe these were the same documents Carl Nicolai saw, maybe not.) On the other hand, these comments came from an era of judicial liberalism, not the current era in which the Supremes uphold random searches of bus passengers, of high school students, etc., when "good reasons exist." It may be that the current Supremes would uphold the ITARs. Wait until furrin terrorists are found to be using exported crypto for some nefarious plot... --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net (Got net?) | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Cheap Brute Force Attacks
by John A. Limpert 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The use of idle cycles on workstations or PCs for brute force attacks made me think about the economics of this problem. How cheaply could a massively parallel system be built for key cracking? Much of the cost and complexity of current massively parallel systems is in the inter-processor communications and memory systems. Why not build a system with a large number of single chip processors (ROM/RAM/IO on one chip) and a simple/slow/cheap communication bus? I'm assuming that each processor can attack a small chunk of the keyspace without needing any external support. One or more PC boards could be populated with an array of cheap processors. There would be a master controller to assign chunks of key space and check for results. It could also download the software if it was to be stored in on-chip RAM. A PC board could be designed that would provide 5V power, a shared serial I/O bus and a wired-or interrupt for the microprocessors to signal the master controller that a key has been cracked. What would be a good microprocessor for this task? It would have to be cheap, reasonably low power with lots of integer MIPS. A decent amount of on-chip RAM would allow the software to be downloaded instead of being masked or burned into ROM. 1000 processors could be put into a relatively small box, lets say 10 boards each containing 100 single chip microprocessors. It shouldn't cost more than $10-$20 per processor, about the same total cost as one decent workstation ($10K-$20K). -- John A. Limpert johnl(a)Radix.Net

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Where is the key cracking farming software?
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- With all the talk about cracking SSL, where is the cracking software? Sombody just offered me a six Pentium workstation, if I agree to give it a "real workout". I'd like to be able to say: "Sure, will do." - -- - -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBMDQu2yoZzwIn1bdtAQF+iAF/WrvfsHBTRhh8fYfWENS0oxOUagl1GrBo PMeo+yJOa7/CN5/pl0xQTFUdusijXqxO =DiNO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Netscape security
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mr. Shank - I'm a bit disappointed by your posting about the RC4-40 crack. >Late Tuesday evening a person from France posted a news article to the >hacker community claiming success at decrypting a single encrypted message (You could have used his name, and use of the term "hackers" to the press tends to be interpreted as a negative...) Anyway, as to content: >What this person did is decrypt one encrypted message that used RC4-40 for >encryption. He used 120 workstations and two parallel supercomputers for 8 >days to do so. "Two" parallel supercomputers? You can't really call the Encore Multimax or the Sequent B8000 a supercomputer - both of them together are slower than the HP workstation. The KSR gets closer to supercomputer territory, but it's only cracking keys about six times as fast as the faster DEC Alpha (which Damien only had one of); it increased his horsepower about 20% for two days. Now, I can see calling a MasPar a "parallel supercomputer"; another effort at the SSL challenge got the answer about 2 hours before Damien's did, and used about 4 days of spare time on the MasPar. Last time I looked, a MasPar was selling for about $150K, though I don't know how big the one used on SSL was. At that price, you could have your own for ~$500/day, and ripping off $2000 on a credit card isn't tough in today's automated world. Next year - computer time costs half as much. Yes, it's still cheaper to get good credit card numbers by scamming carbons at a mall clothing store or yuppie restaurant, but computer networks let criminals run their scams wholesale, putting the public at risk both from organized criminals with their own equipment and any dishonest college student or office worker who's got a roomful of idle computers to use at night. Trading off the cost of breaking security vs. the value to be gained is a good start - lots of people have $2000 of credit limit left on their cards, and most people have more than $0 left. > This level of security has been available in the >U.S. versions of our products since last April. Because of export controls >it has not been available outside the U.S. We would appreciate your support >in lobbying the U.S. government to lift the export controls on encryption. >If you'd like to help us lobby the government send email to >export(a)netscape.com. Thanks for working on this! Bill Stewart ==================== The list of computers =========================== type speed (keys/s) number notes - -------------------------------------------------------- DEC (alpha) 18000-33000 34 DEC (MIPS) 2500-7500 11 SPARC 2000-13000 57 HP (HPPA/snake) 15000 3 Sony (R3000) 1100-4000 3 Sun 3 600 2 Sequent B8000 100 x 10 1 (1) Multimax (NS532) 600 x 14 1 (1) KSR 3200 x 64 1 (1) (2) Notes: 1. These are multiprocessor machines 2. The KSR spent only about 2 days on this computation. The total average searching speed was about 850000 keys/s, with a maximum of 1350000 keys/s (1150000 without the KSR). ==================================================================== #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #--- "The fat man rocks out Hinges fall off Heaven's door "Come on in," says Bill" Wavy Gravy's haiku for Jerry

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Re: (event 8/17) panel on the Net:Privacy, Security, and Parental Control
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:10 PM 8/14/95 -0700, you wrote: >Perhaps some of us should be here to keep things in perspective. Thanks; it was an interesting panel. I missed the first half hour, since traffic was appalling :-), but got to the rest; maybe an hour of panel discussion and 15 minutes of organized q&a, then wine&cheese. Just about everybody was concerned about pornography on the net, and thought that the government had no clue what they were doing and shouldn't be regulating it; most thought that the whole issue was really a smokescreen for the government wanting to regulate the nets and especially interstate commerce ("Hmm, we tried scaring everybody about terrorists on the net, that fizzled, let's scare them about porn and their kids - that always works!"). About half the panel had kids between 4 and 15. Lots of concern about media concentration and how this is currently the only widely accessible medium for 1:N communications so it's a target. Some interesting discussions about changes in society and our relationships with other people that come from net-style communications and artificiality - Mark Slouka was mainly taking the side of "this is different and I'm not sure I like it, and the fact that people are desperately seeking community through this virtual stuff says our communities out in the real world are probably having some real crises", with interesting thought behind it. PGN brought in some RISKS stuff, including the how-rumors-spread dynamics; he also talked a bit about cryptography (he's on that national policy review), somewhat from the perspective of "it's an international problem and trying to do things within national borders is ineffective" - I'm not sure he's on our side here though he's at least clueful. Dan Gillmor had some good perspectives on objectivity in reporting - the news business knows it's not objective, and he's at least concerned with trying to be fair and balanced and as quick as possible about correcting mistakes, but then he edits the SJMerc business page so it's a lot clearer what "mistakes" are than in, say, political reporting. >> * George Baldwin, California State University, Monterey Bay George Baldwin is involved with the IndianNet project, putting things like Native American artwork on the Web, including for sale. He brought up some cultural perspectives - a lot of people have been viewing it, but Native Americans don't actually _buy_ much of it because they tend to view artwork as personal and want to know the artist and what it means to him/her, and the net doesn't do that very well. If you haven't heard of CSU Monterey Bay, it's opening RSN. >> * Bill Bauriedel,Stanford University He's on an inter-university study to address things like how to do on-line registration while preserving privacy (doesn't like export laws at all.) >> * Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News >> * Richard Gingras, Apple Manages E-World and some network things. >> * Peter Neumann, SRI >> * Craig Newmark, Digital Threads Used to wear plastic pocket protectors when he was younger :-) Consults to big companies that need clues. >> * Mark Slouka, University of California, San Diego One of the liberal arts types on the panel. Either he or George Baldwin was talking about college students learning creative writing on MUDs and MOOs. #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #--- "The fat man rocks out Hinges fall off Heaven's door "Come on in," says Bill" Wavy Gravy's haiku for Jerry

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