December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

BOOK: "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach"
by tcmay＠sensemedia.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On a lighter note, I've recently gotten a new book, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach," by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, 1995, Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-103805-2. In 900 pages of well laid-out text, with excellent use of typography to make finding topics easy, it seems to be a great compendium of methods loosely called "AI." AI has gotten a bad rap, perhaps deservedly after the hype of the mid-80s, but the methods are useful for various purposes. This book is focussed on "agents," and lots of code fragments are available (in Common Lisp) for actual construction of agents. Topics that relate to Cypherpunks are scattered throughout the text, including stuff on planning, provably correct designs, game theory, simulations, neural nets, belief, and ontology. Lots more stuff, too. (If I were writing a formal book review, I'd say more. But this is just a pointer, so that interested folks can check it out at their local technical bookstore or university library.) Not a lot to do with getting PGP 3.0 out the door, and not a lot to do with building remailers, but stuff I find interesting. Let a thousand flowers bloom. --Tim May .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)sensemedia.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: Pat Robertson Fears E-cash?
by tcmay＠sensemedia.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:31 AM 8/2/95, John Young wrote: > A Foxhole-atheist swears Pat Robertson said last night that >his > new book warns of a "digital cash society" and massive > theft by cyber-criminals. Did any believer hear this, or >know if > this is what he prognosticates for e-cash bedevilment? I didn't see this, but even if I did it's not likely the subtleties of digital cash societies would be explored. There is the "digital cash society" we fear as an Orwellian surveillance society, with all transactions recorded. This is perhaps the future Robertson fears. There is the "digital cash society" based on Chaumian schemes and untraceability, similar to a "hard cash" society without proofs of identity at every stage, and I suspect Robertson would find much to like about this. (There are also the implications which Robertson might recoil at, too. :-}) So, hearing that "Pat Robertson is warning against a digital cash society" is not too worrisome to me. I suspect he means the stuff about Big Brother tracking us and the Number of the Beast, and so on. Don't forget he came out strongly against Clipper, early on. --Tim May .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)sensemedia.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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Attacks on PGP
by tcmay＠sensemedia.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Things are heating up between Fred Cohen and some of the rest of the list. I don't believe MIT is in collusion with the NSA or any other government agency to deliberately weaken or cripple PGP. I base this on having dealt with some of the MIT folks, with the various source code analyses folks have done, etc. However, I think it's a perfectly *fine* idea for some group to launch a cryptanalytic attack on PGP, or an attack based on any other approaches. This is the "tiger team," or "Team B" approach to finding flaws and weaknesses. I don't take the security of PGP only on faith, though analyzing it is not my bag, as they say. Rather, I use the Popper/Bartley notions of falsifiabilty and see truth as a process, not a state. Seeing lots of source code available, independent compilations on various machines, and believing neither Zimmermann nor Atkins nor Schiller, etc., would consent to inserting back doors into PGP, I am thus led to _believe_ that PGP is probably not so affected. Doesn't mean it isn't so, but I'm not overly worried about it. Still, more studies and technical attacks (technical, not verbal) would be welcome. One of the problems we in the "civilian cryptography" sector face is that we don't have much activity in cryptanalysis. (We've talked about this several times before, before Fred Cohen joined the list, for example.) The NSA and other intelligence agencies have not only code makers, they also have code _breakers_ (such as modern ciphers are breakable, which hasn't been the case much lately, if Bamford and Kahn are to be believed). Probably entire groups whose only job is to try to break the systems devised by others. (Modern ciphers are not as prone to breakage as earlier ciphers were, for technical reasons, so I suspect the number of cryptanalysts has shrunk since the good old days when they had more successes...there may only be a small contingent left...) The lack of cryptanalysis papers at "Crypto" has been striking...I was told that the program committee considers cryptanalysis to be less important than original research. (I can see the rationale in this, as Crypto is an academic/research conference, and there are really no "engineering" crypto conferences. And cryptanalysis might not even fit into an engineering conference very well, as cryptanalysis is traditionally a sort of "hobbyist" activity--if you've read Kahn you'll know what I mean.) Crypto comes in various flavors, from hardware implementations, to number theory, to Unix/IETF sorts of standards, to digital cash, and even to statistical analysis. It is dangerous to have a "monoculture" in which one topic is the trendy one and everyone is urged to work on that (whether the "that" is PGP or Java or anything else equally trendy). Most of the activity has been on adding hooks to PGP to make it usable in other programs, or on remailers. Not as much effort has gone into proofs of validity, systems analysis, etc. (Eric Hughes and I talked about this several years ago, before the Cypherpunks group was formed...the need for "Viper"-like systems with provably correct components, especially for digital money, etc.) If folks think PGP is flawed, or deserves an independent and critical look, then this is a good project for someone. (I think several such analyses have been made, however...this doesn't make it impossible for a flaw or backdoor to exist, but at least the code has been examined by various folks. I'm personally not too worried, though this has little suasive value.) (The Monoculture of Trendy Projects. My own programming mini-project, while proceeding slowly, is of a pattern extractor and "entropy estimator" for text. Stuff like measuring patterns, examining clusterings and author-specific patterns. I'm writing it as a bunch of "critic agents" who are responsible for different areas of analysis. In SmalltalkAgents. My point? There will be those who cite the "monoculture" and scoff at anything not written in C++ for Unix boxes, or not built to be Net-aware from the gitgo, or not written as applets in Java....oh well, in Digital Walden, one marches to a different drummer. Better to program the thing I _want_ to program rather than the things I _don't_ want to program, and hence _won't_. Final note: it'll be ready for use and maybe demonstration when it's ready. And ready when it's finished, finished when it's ready.) I've long appreciated Fred Cohen's work on viruses, so it's nice to have him on the Cypherpunks list. Maybe Fred can tell us if it's really true that he was stopped by U.S. Customs and held for many hours at the Canadian border when going to or returning from a conference where he described computer viruses.... --Tim May .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)sensemedia.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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Cypherpunks Santa Cruz (CSC)
by tcmay＠sensemedia.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

About a month ago I sent out a notice suggesting that we in the greater Santa Cruz area (Monterey, Carmel, Watsonville, Soquel, Boulder Creek, even parts of Santa Clara Valley, etc.) have a get-together occasionally, as the Bay Area meetings are quite far away (and possibly getting further away if they continue meeting in San Francisco). Response was better than I'd expected, with 17 people sending me notes asking to be kept informed of the thing. I just sent out a notice to them, partly to make sure my mail addresses are accurate and well-formed, and partly to update them on the meeting time (which will be Saturday, August 26th, the last Saturday of the month, at my house in Corralitos, CA). If you got my "CSC MEETING..." message, then you need do nothing further. If you did not get it, and wish to, send me a message. If you know of others in the area who may be interested, forward them this message. This mailing list is maintained manually, in Eudora Pro, so send me English messages, or the best approximation of English you can manage. --Tim May .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)sensemedia.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: The Net (short movie review)
by cwalton＠earthlink.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 8:11 AM 7/31/95, Sandy Sandfort wrote: > >I hope the movie is very popular. It helps us by inducing >healthy cynicism with a dash of paranoia. I've been talking with a friend for years about PGP and crypto stuff. He wasn't interested. Yesterday, he saw The Net. Now he can't wait to learn how to use it. This is a good thing. I hope it's a popular movie too. Conrad Walton | cwalton(a)earthlink.net | http://XXX.XXXXXXXXX.XXX/~XXXXXXX/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Without JOY, there is no STRENGTH. Without STRENGTH, all other virtues are worthless. Edward Abbey

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Re: a hole in PGP
by danisch＠ira.uka.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Clever back doors are not accomplished by an obvious program > change, but rather by the subtle use of some technique that appears to > do one thing when it actually does something else. As a good example, a > subtle interation with the rest of the environment could modify the key > generation algorithm after it is loaded. Unfortunately, PGP is too > large to verify against such back doors, so I ask again: > > Why (specifically) do you think the MIT version of PGP has no > backdoors and is not subject to attacks such as the one outlined in my > previous posting? This is a good question. Subtle backdoors hidden in such a program may be difficult to find out. It might be more effective to use the PGP file format, to understand pgp as a reference implementation, and to write you own pgp compatible program where you can generate your keys etc. in the way you prefer. Hadmut

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hunting for no hole in PGP
by hoz＠univel.telescan.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>How do you propose that a user's keystrokes can be analyzed? I have an idea. (many voices groaning...) The "reduced keyspace" and the "subliminal channels" fear both come from the mysterious process of choosing the 128-bit IDEA key. The other bogeyman that I hear the most about in PGP is the public/private key generation. Random numbers scare people, including me. Could PGP use and IDEA key that is the MD5 hash of the "random number" (the way it is currently calculated) concatenated with the message itself? It would be easy to verify that the correct key had been selected. It would be impossible for some "ghost" in the random number routines to use a predictably reduced keyspace, or to send subliminal data, because its output never (directly) gets sent. Something similar could be done during public/private key generation. Have the PGP folks considered doing something similar? Sometimes this seems like a good idea to me, and other times it looks like useless effort and one more opportunity for something to go wrong. Rick F. Hoselton (who doesn't claim to present opinions for others)

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Re: Attacks on PGP
by tcmay＠sensemedia.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:51 AM 8/1/95, Matt Blaze wrote: >Tim, > >My impression (based on reviewing papers for the last few CRYPTOs and >EUROCRYPTs) is that the reason for the lack of "practical" papers is >primarily that not very many of them get submitted. In fact, I think Right, but it's a kind of vicious circle. What I meant about cryptanalysis not really be "academic" is that not much status attaches to having broken a specific message. >there actually are a fair number of cryptanalysis papers at CRYPTO, >at least compared with the even smaller number of papers there that >describe new ciphers. Anyway, cryptanalysis IS part of the mainstream >of the academic crypto world these days (consider differential >cryptanalysis, linear cryptanalysis, etc.) I guess this is my bias, as I think of the "differential cryptanalysis" as not really being cryptanalysis :-}. In the sense that it's basic research unto itself, not the grungy cracking of an actual cipher. But you're right that the stuff on Wiener's estimates for a DES-cracking machine, on the differential cryptanalysis work, etc., _does_ make it into Crypto. Ditto for breaking ciphers (showing them to be flawed). I just never see papers describing actual attacks on specific systems...maybe those who do such things are talking? I guess the bottom line of what I'm saying is that if some person or group wants to be a "tiger team" to try to find flaws in PGP, to try to break it, this would be a nifty thing. I doubt anyone on this list disagrees. --Tim May .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)sensemedia.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: a hole in PGP
by danisch＠ira.uka.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> This is where you are very wrong. I am not saying that "if you can't > find any holes it must be secure". What I am saying is that the > source is available, and thousands of people have looked at the > source, and none of them have found any holes in it. It is definitely much more difficult to implant a backdoor into a program which is available as source code than into a black box. BTW: Has anyone ever found a modified and weakened version of pgp ? Hadmut

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There's a hole in your crypto, dear Eliza dear Eliza...
by Robert A. Hayden 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Alright, here's my 2 cents worth for this petty flamewar... Once upon a time, there was PGP 2.3. MIT had nothing to do with it. The population of the net that used the program was fairly small. In addition to being small, they were all (mostly) computer literate people. These people were confident in the security of PGP because the had read and understood the source code. It was checked and declared good. Then, in stepped MIT. I, and a few others, raised concerns about a possible conflict of interest with MIT distributing the code, and encouraged everyone to double check the code for back doors and other NSA nasties. It was checked and declared good. Now, we are in the present. MIT is still part of the equation. However, the demographics of the net have chaged. Fewer people are here that (by percentage) are computer literate to the level to do source code investigations. A few question why they shoudl trust PGP when they don't know it's secure. We, those who have grown up with PGP, point out that it is good, yet that really isn't a great reason to trust it. So the question is, why shoudl non-technical people believe that PGP is good? They don't have the skills to check it for themselves, and you have to admit that the associations of MIT with various TLAs are at the very least concerning. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: PGP Signed with PineSign 2.2 iQCVAwUBMB2F0DokqlyVGmCFAQGhpgP9EIaGx3cHG78pFic0poPsgI/Yo1UNn6SY gRG9kfx3M1XzWITND5m2ywUx1B9n48hGoPfgP9ISvGoXDd5/yHgsY6uEjzZCGaLU tXzace1PvdjL5htH9prvh5GMoghCi34B9cDh01d1U2hKXEypj1pTRA+z+xWUfnGT teMJ9uEaOu0= =2aWA -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ____ Robert A. Hayden <=> hayden(a)krypton.mankato.msus.edu \ /__ Finger for Geek Code Info <=> Finger for PGP Public Key \/ / -=-=-=-=-=- -=-=-=-=-=- \/ http://krypton.mankato.msus.edu/~hayden/Welcome.html -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.0 GED/J d-- s:++>: a-- C++(++++) ULU++ P+! L++ E---- W+(-) N++++ K+++ w--- O- M+ V-- PS++>$ PE++>$ Y++ PGP++ t- 5+++ X++ R+++>$ tv+ b+ DI+++ D+++ G++++>$ e++ h r-- y++** ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

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