December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

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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Key escrow agent
by fc＠all.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Management Analytics is proud to announce it's key escrow agency. We will escrow keys for only US$1 per key. Please send your keys to us along with your $1 check or money order. -- -> See: Info-Sec Heaven at URL http://all.net Management Analytics - 216-686-0090 - PO Box 1480, Hudson, OH 44236

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

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Tim May writes: <beginning snipped> >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. You left out Mr. Perot, who has a pench nt for investigation [and even "operations" ] with his own family, business & money, and has not ruled out another run for the presidency this time. Imagine this authoritarian statist in charge of the whole alphabet of U.S. intelligence agencies run by *tax* money... Chilling! [I would ordinarily make an "all ears" joke now.] <g> ... On another subject, NPR announcement confirmed at 6:38AM today. Key "escrow" with a private company [exact qualifications undefined, but amenable to service of search warrants] but export of stronger crypto now permitted. No U.S. key escrow for unexported cryptography [yet]. <sigh> JMR -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Freedom isn't Freeh iQCVAwUBMDRvYm1lp8bpvW01AQFotwP+LITpSdGjRuyBdTqP7n70HrkmsMAPqeK0 MQgOVqbmDT4N8KwLP80UIkCIRqSBXFq4aOTEld+ImCRhN4ivfmAd332DaPbhCXS6 nvEJXfXli6KumaSMLQjmFRfIvcgAHz5Y7NELpHDnI+gjKgixWPEZd7/8r7eL3uhh UUovA9OLiWk= =LOEF -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Regards, Jim Ray "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structures of reality. It is enough if one merely tries to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity." -- Albert Einstein ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PGP key Fingerprint 51 5D A2 C3 92 2C 56 BE 53 2D 9C A1 B3 50 C9 C8 Key id. # E9BD6D35 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Support the Phil Zimmermann (Author of PGP) Legal Defense Fund! email: zldf(a)clark.net or visit http://www.netresponse.com/zldf ________________________________________________________________________

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NYT on Crypto Policy
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The New York Times, August 18, 1995, pp. D1, D6. U.S. to Urge A New Policy On Software Affempt at Compromise On Scrambling of Data By John Markoff The Clinton Administration broke a year of silence on its data-scrambling policy yesterday by saying it would soon propose an alternative to the Government's so-called Clipper Chip system, which has been widely criticized by makers and users of computer technology. The Administration announcement is an attempt to reach a compromise with American corporations on a software coding system that would protect the privacy of communication over computer networks while still permitting court-authorized wiretaps and eavesdropping by law enforcement officials. Critics of the Clipper Chip have opposed it because the Government refused to allow public examination of the underlying technology to make sure there were no secret backdoors that might allow unauthorized spying. Privacy-rights advocates attacked the policy because it called for a Government agency to hold a numeric key to each user's code. And technology executives have opposed the Government's data-scrambling policy because it restricts export of other types of data-security systems, which is seen as an impediment to sales of American computer products overseas. Officials of the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, which administers the data- scrambling standard, said yesterday that the Government would convene a workshop on Sept. 6 and 7 to discuss the new proposal. The topics include a proposal to relax the export policy and discussion of an alternative to Clipper technology that would be more palatable to industry executives. Industry officials had written two weeks ago to Vice President Al Gore, calling for resumption of talks that had broken off last year. In the talks last year industry leaders had met with Government officials to seek Clipper Chip alternatives. "I think that moving ahead with industry dialogue is positive," Robert W. Holleyman 2d, president of the Business Software Alliance, said yesterday. The alliance is a group of the industry's largest software companies, including Microsoft, Lotus and Novell. "But much more needs to be fleshed out," Mr. Holleyman said. One big criticism of the Clipper policy was the proviso that a Government agency would hold, in escrow, a decoding key that law-enforcement officials could obtain after receiving a court's authorization. The new proposal would still include a provision for holding keys in escrow, but Government officials said they were now willing to discuss letting non-Government escrow agents hold the keys. Later in September, the Government will hold a second workshop to discuss Federal standards for software coding systems that could then be used as an alternative to Clipper and a related technology called Capstone. In an attempt to establish Clipper and Capstone as de-facto industry standards, the original policy mandated that computer and communications systems sold to the Federal Government must contain Clipper or Capstone hardware. But the new approach might allow computer and communications companies to sell products to the Government that achieved the same privacy protection through software- only means. That would relieve companies doing business with the Government of the obligation to invest in Clipper and Capstone technologies that might not find buyers in the commercial marketplace. Another criticism of the Government s policy has been its longstanding export rules, which have put strict limits on the export of software containing data-encoding capabilities. The assumption has been that the Government's electronic spies, the National Security Agency, would be able to break codes with keys of 40 bits or shorter. But now the Government will consider allowing export of coding systems with keys up to 64 bits long -- on the condition that decoding keys be held in escrow for access by authorized law-enforcement officials. "This is definitely a compromise," said Ray Kammer, the deputy director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. "During the past year we've had a pretty spirited debate about the possibility of a 64-bit software key-escrow system. Law enforcement people had to get used to the notion it might be possible to do this." The vulnerability of 40-bit systems was underscored two days ago. A French student decoded a message that had been encoded using the 40-bit security feature in the European version of the Netscape Communications Corporation software for navigating the Internet's World Wide Web service. The student, Damien Doligez, at Ecole Polytechnique, a French engineering and sciences college, used 120 computers in a campus network to simultaneously test every key possible in a short period. It took him eight days, but he was able to decode a single encoded Netscape message. Mr. Doligez announced his achievement on the Internet. Yesterday, Netscape issued a statement saying that the version of its software distributed in the United States supports 128-bit keys, which the company said would require more than one trillion times the computing power the French student used to decode the message. Despite the industry's tentative willingness to accept a key-escrow coding plan, civil liberties organizations and other computer experts said that escrow techniques made little sense in light of the fact that private individuals might use any kind of coding system they wished to exchange information domestically. Encoding systems without escrow keys are also widely available overseas. "How does key escrow accomplish what the Government has set out to do?" asked David Sobel, legal counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington D.C. public interest group. "Nonescrowed encryption is out there," he said. "And for the concerns law and enforcement and intelligence have, the problem remains and it will remain under this policy." [End]

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Re: Export policy change
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:12 AM 8/18/95, Timothy C. May wrote: >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." You wouldn't want them to get *dusty*, Tim. Why not embed them in something like epoxy, better, Lexan, to protect them from the elements? Say about a foot thick in all directions... Should make sure the media itself is sufficiently coated too. Don't want the little electrons getting hurt, you know... I see a market opportunity here. Time to buy DuPont stock. I hear it's been depressed lately. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 323-7923 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell >>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf(a)clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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Exportable if Escrowed Changes Nothing!
by Joey Grasty 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

C-punks: This "change" that encryption software can be exported if the keys are escrowed means nothing. PGP still couldn't be exported, since it can generate its own keys. You can be sure that any program that generates its own keys couldn't be exported. How are you going to escrow 2^100 possible keys (or whatever it is that PGP can generate)? Thus, this regulatory change means diddly-squat. The only crypto that could be exported would be something like Clipper, and they already said that could be exported. Governments: can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em. Regards, -- Joey Grasty jgrasty(a)gate.net [home -- encryption, privacy, RKBA and other hopeless causes] jgrasty(a)pts.mot.com [work -- designing pagers] "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." -- John Von Neumann PGP = A7 CC 31 E4 7E A3 36 13 93 F4 C9 06 89 51 F5 A7

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