December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Shared secrets, virtual corporations
by Mike Ingle 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

< Collective holding of signer keys > There are protocols that allow a group of people to collectively hold a key. A message is passed down the line, each person in turn operating on it, and at the end it has been signed. In this way the board of directors can sign a message without any one person having the key. These protocols can probably be combined with a secret-sharing system, so that a message can be signed if a certain percentage of the key-share holders collaborate. This allows voting, with the object of the vote getting signed only if >50% vote for it. Taking a share away from someone is a bit of a problem. If someone needs to lose his voting privileges, you probably have to generate a new key and sign it with the old one, then revoke the old one. Mike

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Re: Subject: ANNOUNCE: 2nd SSL challenge - we need your compute!
by Stephan Somogyi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 15:16 23.8.95, aba(a)dcs.exeter.ac.uk wrote: > Any platforms you would like to see pre-compiled binaries for, send them > along, the source code is available from the ftp, and http addresses > above. A MAC binary would be nice also. I have a working version of BruteSSL 1.02 (without SKSP client) for Power Macintosh. However, as I don't want to run the risk of violating ITAR, I'm still investigating ways of making it available. Suggestions are welcome. Stephan ________________________________________________________________________ Stephan Somogyi Wer bremst hat Angst Digital Media

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Global Investing using Electronic Tools
by gjeffers＠socketis.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Business Week Guide to Global Investments using Electronic Tools. Dear Cypherpunks, While I was hunting around a Waldenbooks store, I found the above named book. Its by Robert Schwabach, published by Osborne McGraw-Hill. It retails at $39.95 and comes with 3 3 1/2" diskettes. I just glanced thru it. It may be of interest to some Cypherpunks. I don't know if it would be useful for PRIVATE foreign investing or not. Yours Truly, Gary Jeffers

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Re: (Fwd) 1995 Nanotechnology Conference
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Crypto relevance -- slight. At 09:47 AM 8/23/95 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: > Moore's Law is an observation of past behavior, not a law of > nature. Gordon thought the curve would "slow down" around > 1980 or so. It didn't, for various reasons. But many of us > expect it will. > > Consider that a new wafer fab capable of building these > "Moore's Law"devices has increased in price from about $50 > million a couple of decades ago to about $1.5 billion today. During the entire period that Moore's law has been in effect, we have used light to print the wafers. Now, with phase shifting masks in billion dollar fabs, we are reaching the absolute limits of light. If we go up to higher frequencies, we lose refraction, and phase shifting fails. Refractable light craps out at about .3 to .15 microns. Intel is currently at .35 microns. There will be a slight hiccup or a major hesitation in Moore's law as the fabs switch to a non optical printing process. Current contenders are: * Synchrotron radiation (twenty billion dollar fabs, or worse.) * ions (fab price jumps a few times higher than current fab price.) * electrons (no great escalation in fab price, but a radical drop in production rates) * flexible direct contact. (fab price goes way down, back to producing ICs in your garage.) The flexible direct contact method has enough horsepower to take us all the rest of the way down merge with biotech and to produce wires one atom thick -- assuming that people manage to get anything useful out of it at all. There have been very large investments in all of the above research projects, and so far non of them have worked as yet. (But they are all of them a hell of a lot closer to working than nanotech.) --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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OverRun Msgs Re: Denning questions/reverses her position?
by Attila T. Hun 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- on or about 970731:2245 it was expostulated: +:: +Anon-To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com +Attila T. Hun wrote: +> I'm too old for this! I never thought I would see the day that +> Dorothy Denning would terminate her star role as a shill for the +> Clinton/LEA encryption ban! + As a matter of fact, the mere thought of this happening has caused +Attila to go into a state of "brain-lock" wherein he sits at his +keyboard, sending the same message, over and over again, to the list. + It will be interesting to see what happens to Attila's brain if +Clinton ever vetos a bill because it subverts the Constitution. + BTW, Dorothy Denning's new spokesperson is a flying pig, and the +Weather Network reports that Hell froze over shortly before Denning's +new position statement. +TruthMonger dunno why the message was repeated at cyberpass --each of the 55 copies I received as of 20 minutes ago has exactly the same header date from cyberpass. that and one of them smoked the primary mailbox with a couple hundred null characters. hun.attila.org was offline so it could not have generated the extra messages --so where did they loop? only the shadow knows. If it is something by remote SMPT added on, I apologize for the inconvenience. the image of my brain in "brain-lock" is apt enough for the reaction; as for the flying pig and Hell freezes over --that too. Denning is still Denning, and maybe she's just angling for more shill money before she gets back on the track. yes, if Clinton ever vetos a bill just because it violats the Constitution, I probably would be gone.... ______________________________________________________________________ "attila" 1024/C20B6905/23 D0 FA 7F 6A 8F 60 66 BC AF AE 56 98 C0 D7 B0 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: latin1 Comment: No safety this side of the grave. Never was; never will be iQCUAwUBM+GAjL04kQrCC2kFAQFWYgP4zjFksiIN3VGn7TMozZYvfUM2EFLbCK6a hMz73MPptUAiV0baxNV806tcYGRyjjp4OuipgrZYdAflk9iv29zMb+JVYk9cmpHg EKHq0VtqjKcqpFPLJy1bcEGUCkUblqmdh28I8TnwVTnmmMB+3s87GQjJWWjsDL9q 5QnTMzalfg== =fM7N -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Random Hiss from Mac mike
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:09 PM 8/23/95 +0100, Andrew Spring wrote: >In the simplest case, where the microphone is not attached, the signal >consists of long runs of '0x80's alternating with '0x7f's. Now, I have no >problem transforming this into uniformly distributed RN's : just hash the >buffer with MD5. If you know that's what the signal looks like, you can improve it a lot by run-length encoding before doing the MD5, e.g. crunch the output down to a series of count1 value1 count2 value2 count3 value3 (if you stick to runs of 255, you can use 1 byte for each.) That gives you a much shorter input to the MD5, and a more realistic view of how much random data you have. (I suppose it may make it harder to do things like Fourier transforms on it...) #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

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Dorothy Denning changes Escrow position
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There was an article in today's San Jose Mercury News that Dorothy Denning, the leading academic supporter of the Administration's anti-crypto stance, has backed off from that position. She's put out a paper along with William Baugh of SAIC (!) which among other things includes a survey of law enforcement officers on how much they've encountered crypto and how much difference it's made, and the answer has been that it hasn't made much difference -- of the few criminals who use crypto, some use wimpy algorithms, some are careless with their password handling, some get fingered by stool pigeons, and some mainly use their crypto for information not relevant to the case they're being investigated for. She's now taking a much less certain, more neutral position. Way to go, Dorothy! It's especially important because Dr. Denning was the main independent supporter of encryption limitations, and has a lot of reputation invested in it, so changing her position is a big step. The FBI has a vested interest - without Communists to chase around, Director Freeh is off chasing drug dealers in the name of "national security". And the industrial support for key escrow has primarily been from companies that get to export their products in return for adding it, though there have been a few firms like TIS that have developed it for its own sake. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)

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Re: Subject: ANNOUNCE: 2nd SSL challenge - we need your compute!
by aba＠dcs.exeter.ac.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I have a working version of BruteSSL 1.02 (without SKSP client) for > Power Macintosh. However, as I don't want to run the risk of > violating ITAR, I'm still investigating ways of making it > available. Suggestions are welcome. Just send it along... several people have been shipping various DOS binaries out of the US, with out the source. The presumption taken was that as long as they didn't ship search.c or assembly.c, there is no crypto source, and the binary could not be used to encrypt anything. (Also it's for SSL with 40 bit keys which is export approved anyway). You can ship a diff for brutessl.c (which contains no crypto code) if you want the mods to be mixed back in (please include some kind of #ifdef __MAC or whatever the standard _i_am_a_mac macro is). Or if that makes you uncomfortable, well we'll do with out the source. Reckon you'd be safe enough. Anyone think otherwise? Adam

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Brute SSL Challenge
by David Neal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Just skip this silly little message if you know enough to optimize the brutessl code. Didn't know of a better place to put this, so please no flames. Hopefully everyone on here is accomplished enough to know optimizing the brutessl code helps immensely. If not, well I used gcc -O6 -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions -c search.c gcc -O6 -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions -o brutessl \ brutessl.c search.o To go from 5,000 keys per second to 10,100 keys per second.

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Linux brutessl client
by Sam Quigley 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi. I've been able to compile a working brutessl 1.02 cllient under linux and gcc 2.7.0, but I get abysmal search speeds. My system is a pentium 60, which, according to the docs, ought to have a speed of something over 14100 kps (that's what a 486dx2/66 with no rotate left macro gets). brutessl -t reports that my system can do 11200 keys per second. Is there any obvious reason this number is so much lower than expected? I'm reasonably certain gcc implemets a rotl macro, but I don't know how to make use of it -- has anyone out there gotten assembly.c to compile under gcc? Finally, are there any additional optimizations for pentium machines available? thanks, -sq

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