December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Cypherpunks Santa Cruz -- Great Party!
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I want to update the general list on how well our "Cypherpunks Santa Cruz" party/meeting went last Saturday. Apologies to those who get this twice, as I just sent it out to the folks on the mailing list of interested folks I keep. (Not all of them are readers of this list, so....) It was a great success, from all indications, and we'll be doing it on a regular basis. "Meet locally, communicate globally." --Tim >Date: Sat, 2 Sep 1995 11:03:33 -0700 >X-Sender: tcmay(a)mail.got.net >Mime-Version: 1.0 >To: (Recipient list suppressed) >From: tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) >Subject: Cypherpunks Santa Cruz -- Great Party! > > >This is a report on the Cypherpunks Santa Cruz party/meeting held last >Saturday at my house. For those of you on this list (52 at last count, >obviously not all locals) who missed it, it was considered by many who >commented to me to be a great success. > >Some highlights: > >- I counted 23 attendees, from as far away as Oregon (Greg Broiles) and San >Luis Obispo (Jeff Simmons), and with a bunch of folks from Marin and the >Greater Bay Area. > >- We got rolling around 5, when the first cars started filling up my >parking area. Things kept going 'til 5 in the morning (!), when the last >stragglers departed and those staying the night found their futons and >crashed. > >- Not too much was formally done. We had a round of introductions (and I >provided name tags, which were purely voluntary, in that anyone could >volunteer not to wear them and hence not be remembered by others...most >wore them). Later, after the barbecue, Bob Fleming and Cherie Kushner >described their work on micropower, ultrawideband radio "localizers." While >not strictly "crypto" related, there are overlapping themes (privacy, >surveillance, and even some of the math overlaps). > >- Mostly it was a chance for our local community of folks interested in >these issues to mingle and make contact. I expect we may have a larger >focus than just "crypto" (although Cypherpunks have always had a larger >focus than just cryptography, of course). Especially as there are folks >doing some neat stuff on the Web out here in Santa Cruz. > >- Two folks from my local ISP attended (Jay and Marc), and they have some >thoughts on possibly hosting the Cypherpunks archive site on their system, >and other ideas. They stayed until nearly 5 a.m., talking with us about >networking, Web pages, etc. > >(Santa Cruz has long been a hotbed of computer activity, especially of the >more independent sort. So the good turnout from local folks could be very >promising for Cypherpunks themes. Interestingly, Linus Torvaldis (sp?), of >Linux fame, had just been in town a couple of days before.) > >I want to avoid opening the meeting up too broadly, to, for example "anyone >interested in computers," as this would produce unpredictable turnouts and >lots of folks who want to learn to use Windows, or need help in dBase, etc. >Better to keep an ostensible focus on "Cypherpunks" themes, with forays >into related areas. > >Some people commented to me that they hope the meetings/parties are >monthly, but I suspect every other month may be more reasonable...after >all, a monthly meeting would mean another one only 3 weeks from today, and >I can't see this happening. > >Anyway, I expect to announce another one for sometime in October. I also >may be having a "PenSFA" party at my place in early November (11/11 is >being considered), and may merge the two. It's a good opportunity for >mingling. > >Another attendee offered the possibility of having a Cypherpunks Santa Cruz >meeting/party at her house, so some rotation to other venues may start to >happen. I think the notion of having these things at private houses is >better than trying to get space at a local company, for example. Parties in >houses are more intimate, less formal, and don't require the "corporate >approvals" that are sometimes needed. Besides, I'm offering my house and >have no contacts at local companies. > >I expect to be able to host a lot of these things, and if some others >volunteer as well, we'll be set. (I expect attendance will not equal the 23 >at this "first" meeting, for obvious reasons. This means meetings/parties >could even be held in apartments or condos. But I'm not suggesting this, >only noting it.) > >So, thanks for coming! > >--Tim May > ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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SET discused in Risks Forum
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Date: Tue, 19 Aug 1997 15:42:21 -0400 From: pj ponder <ponder(a)mail.irm.state.fl.us> Subject: SET discused in Risks Forum To: set-discuss(a)lists.Commerce.Net Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: set-discuss-owner(a)mail.irm.state.fl.us Precedence: bulk +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ This message was addressed to: set-discuss(a)lists.commerce.net +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Just got this on the Risks Forum (usenet comp.risks; html: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks) I apologize if this has been posted here already and I missed it. - ----------------------- from comp.risks: ------------------------------- Date: Sat, 16 Aug 1997 16:20:14 -0700 From: smartcard(a)sprynet.com Subject: SET risk The Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) process is proposed by the credit-card associations to secure credit-card usage on the Internet. It consists of a 28-step process using a standard digital certificate. It relies on vendor software to provide security. These include an electronic wallet program in the originator's PC, merchant review software at the merchant's bank, card transaction processing software at the card issuer bank and merchant software in the merchant's server. The SET process claims to be better than using a credit card on the Internet. However, the SET process has three serious exposures - confirmed with IBM and HP/Verifone. The process does NOT know who is presenting the certificate. The process does NOT know if merchant employees have redirected the certificate through another merchant. All of the critical software is directly accessible by the card users, merchant employees and bank employees. Historically, these individuals have been the prime source of fraud in credit card transaction systems. There are more than 50 other card security products available for Internet usage. They are generally simplier, faster, and avoid the SET exposures identified above. Internet transaction users might try the viable alternatives. jerome svigals, smartcard(a)sprynet.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM/n5lF4ZsVsZPDGdAQFdwgQAu8IZGp153xgyJs5km/ah7KYtMmwT8k4d Pqo1I5qV532thAIjL8y5uGwxraTTQjxOcWTwvP7Y+Z+wh1467nAElYY1t4VPEB1m K0nZ/3r7kDelj5Jp6H2fTPdBdHWrEj5m/XrTmhVYb0dkQSxW1gFN39y+7AGeBQsO ctgUfEJY2tU= =188u -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent by a majordomo-based automatic list manager. Subscriptions to and archives of this list are available to any person or organization. For further information send a mail message to 'set-discuss-request(a)lists.commerce.net' with 'help' (no quotations) contained in the body of your message. --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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No Subject
by dsc＠swcp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy May wrote concerning Cyphernomicon, >You list a Web site in your sig, so presumably you have the right tools to >browse the Web. And I listed two Web sites that have the Cyphernomicon. > >What am I missing? Thanks for the advice. Here are the two missing pieces. The first is financial, but might be really psychological. I buy PPP service locally and it is hard for me to casually browse with the meter runing in the corner of the screen even at less than a penny a minute. (And any document that mentions David Friedman probably needs study and that takes more time.) The second is that even at the wee hours of the morning I kept getting refusals from www.oberlin.edu and I couldn't get past the table of contents. I had hoped to collect these as I browse 'em to avoid delays (14.4), hicups and online time in later reading. (I didn't even try the large html--I suspect my browsers will gag on it.) The third of the two reasons is some vague notion of taking it to lunch or of anotating the file or the hard copy. In case it wasn't clear--I couldn't get a peep out of netcom. My plan is to try oberlin again and if that bogs down, try getting the copy at the location mentioned by Lou Poppler--or any other location mentioned this weekend. Or respond to advice on the best times to try netcom. I appologize for the implicit assumption in my question about alternate sites that people had your permission to copy the file to their ftp sites and am pleased that you explicitly gave that blessing in your recent mail. Thanks, Dar (list newbie) =========================================================== Dar Scott Home phone: +1 505 299 9497 Dar Scott Consulting Voice: +1 505 299 5790 <--- 8637 Horacio Place NE Email: darscott(a)aol.com Albuquerque, NM 87111 dsc(a)swcp.com Fax: +1 505 898 6525 http://www.swcp.com/~correspo/DSC/DarScott.html My preference for attached files are in this order: AOL, Mime, Binhex4, PGP, UUencode ===========================================================

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Cyphernomicon for ftp
by Jeff Simmons 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I remember the trouble I had finding a text copy of the Cyphernomicon ... So until someone posts it on a site with higher bandwidth, it's available at: ftp.goblin.punk.net/pub/docs/cypherpunk.faq.gz or cypherfq.zip We're talking 400K+ over a 28.8 modem, so don't expect much in the way of speed ... -- Jeff Simmons jsimmons(a)goblin.punk.net

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Crypto '95 report
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This was the first year I attended a Crypto conference (although for the last two years I have "crashed" the evening rump session, where less formal 5-10 minute presentations are given). A number of list members were present and it was good to meet a lot of new people. I was a bit disappointed that few of the technical sessions were in areas that I am interested in or that seem to have bearing on CP issues. I have read many of the Crypto proceedings and this year the pickings seemed to be unusually slim. Richard Schroeppel gave a very clear presentation on an implementation of elliptic curve cryptography for a diffie-hellman-like key exchange. This is a two-dimensional variation from the regular integers that are used in most of the number theory based crypto, and has some advantages. This new implementation is actually faster than regular DH for apparently the same security level. It looks like elliptic curve crypto is on the threshold of coming into widespread use. I believe the patent situation is one of the main reasons. There were several papers on secret sharing, something we have discussed here as an alternative to escrow for handling lost keys. Amir Herzberg et al had a method for "resharing" a shared secret periodically and securely, so that if an adversary was stealthily sneaking in and learning shares occasionally, he would be put back to square one when the secret resharing phase occured. Only the trustees are involved, not the original secret holder, and the secret does not have to be reconstructed during the resharing. Bruce Dodson presented some results on using the Number Field Sieve factoring algorithm. Their implementation looks to be the fastest available now, considerably better than the Quadratic Sieve that was used for RSA-129. I belive they estimated 1000 MIPS years would have been enough for NFS to do RSA-129 compared to the 6000 MIPS years for QS. They are now going to try another challenge number, RSA-130. (RSA has challenge numbers every 10 digits in size (or maybe it was 5): RSA-140, RSA-150, etc.) There was one paper on electronic cash, by Okamoto. His technology is distinguished by allowing divisibility - you can take a $10 and divide it into 2 $5's without going back to the bank. However he has always had a problem that your various pieces of cash are linkable, although not traceable to the user who withdrew them. His new method uses smaller amounts of data. I was encouraged to see some progress on the linkability issue: for the first time (that I have seen) he admits it as a problem; he now has it so that theoretically the linkability is only within a single divided piece of cash (so that if you didn't divide you wouldn't have linkability). Actually the overheads are too large for this to by quite true, but it is a step in the right direction. He also included elimination of linkability as a future goal. Unfortunately his oral presentation was extremely shallow, mostly describing what electronic cash was. There was also a paper on "fingerprinting", the encoding of hidden information into a document so that if the doc is leaked it can be traced to the leaker. The talk wasn't very clear but I was able to glean enough that I now believe that this is possible whereas I didn't before. I was discouraged to see a whole session on key escrow. One presenter described key escrow as a whole new area of cryptography, analogous to the discovery of public key crypto when all that was known previously was conventional key. Now there are three areas. The academic crypto community seems to be greeting key escrow enthusiastically as a new technical challenge. The rump session had some good stuff, I thought. Matt Blaze et al had a paper on "Master Key" cryptosystems, a variation on escrow where the government can read all the messages using a certain cryptosystem. They pointed out the similarity to the trap door concept used in public key cryptography and concluded that an efficient master key system would be an efficient public key system. If you believe that the latter can't exist then it follows that the master key versions can't exist either. Bruce Schneier gave a talk summarizing the sketchy information known about Skipjack (the cipher in Clipper), including some FOIA'd docs. These included some comments from design reviews by Mycotronix on earlier versions, which included references to F and G boxes or tables. This is the first I had heard of this and helps explain why people thought S-1 was Skipjack or a hoax, since it had F and G tables. (I hadn't felt that the number of rounds and key/block sizes were sufficient coincidence to preclude independent invention.) A new crypto library was announced from AT&T. It is written in C and has a bignum lib (arbitrary size) and the usual crypto suspects, although I think not RSA presuambly due to patent issues. On a reasonably modern PC it could do an RSA 1024 bit signature in 900 milliseconds. Email to lacy(a)research.att.com with subject CRYPTOLIB to be informed on when it will be released and how to get it. Dhem and Quisquiter described CASCADE, a smart card system with voice recognition for ID rather than the PIN usually used. http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/~dhem/cascade/. This talk was hard to understand due to the language differences. Eric Hughes, co-founder of the cypherpunks, announced the formation of Cypherpunk Laboratories, a California non-profit corporation. It is intended to be a common resource for people motivated by freely available strong cryptography tools. Among other things it will offer scholarships and prizes to students who create relevant work and papers, consider establishing an online journal focusing on implementations of crypto, and work on software development. One project Eric mentioned was to create a replacement for PGP. Ron Rivest proposed probabilisitic key escrow, which he described as "translucent" crypto. The idea is that with every message you send there is a Law Enforcement Access Field, but there is only some probability p that it is readable, and you can't tell if it will be readable or not. This way you don't lose as much privacy but criminals can't take the risk that maybe they'll be unlucky and this particular message will be readable. Shamir had an interesting paper on preventing "flooding" attacks. A server may check for signatures on incoming messages to reject bogus ones (only certain sigs are valid) but just doing a signature check may take too long if it is really being flooded. Shamir came up with a kind of signature which can be quickly probabilistically checked, based on a variation on the Rabin cryptosystem. You can do almost all the work using single precision and it should be very fast. I will write this up if anyone is interested. Our own Wei Dai, at 19 the youngest author, has spent his summer vacation developing with Josh Benaloh at Microsoft an improved modular reduction algorithm, which unfortunately will be patented (or at least they will try). BTW a number of people from Microsoft were in attendance at Crypto, including other list members. Obviously this crypto stuff is considered very important at MS. One of the more interesting talks I thought was from cypherpunk Doug Barnes, on "identity agnostic" electronic cash. This is basically an idea for creating a Magic-Money-type electronic cash server without violating Chaum's cash patent. What you do is to run the server and publish a spec it will follow. All the server does is do an RSA signature on the raw data it receives and decrement the user's account accordingly. The user has a choice of doing blinding or not on the signature. Chaum's patent covers the blinding, so if the user wants to do that he should be sure to license the patent or live somewhere it doesn't apply (or ignore it if he figures he's too small potatoes for them to care about). But the server isn't responsible for checking all this. It just does RSA sigs, which is prior art as far as Chaum's patent goes. Users can blind or not, it doesn't care. It is "identity agnostic" as Doug says. The implication is that with an RSA license you could run this kind of bank (online cash) and ignore Chaum's patents, while a horde of end users violate the patents but take safety in numbers and get anonymity. Lawyers like to go after big targets but the servers aren't violating anything. The other things I enjoyed in the conference were the non technical talks by Bob Morris (senior), retired NSA, and later Adi Shamir. Morris said, with what I thought was peculiar emphasis, "never underestimate the amount of time, money, and effort your opponent will put into breaking your encryption." He was supposedly speaking in the context of the German (and Allied) mistakes during WWII, but I got the impression he was talking about today, and in fact warning of NSA efforts to spy on people. He went on to describe the many ways mikes and antennas can be planted or used - he looks at a telephone and sees a microphone, and the hand cord is an antenna. All in all a rather chilling talk from someone who obviously can't say as much as he would like to. Shamir had some interesting anecdotes about the invention of RSA. He emphasized what amateurs the three of them were, claiming this was probably an advantage. Some of the other talks I enjoyed without following all the details were the cryptanalysis ones. A lot of systems were broken or weaknesses found. Most were not ones I was familiar with but it just emphasizes how hard it is to really come up with something strong. All those bozos on sci.crypt with their "break this" challenges would benefit from seeing some of these results. All in all there were several interesting results even if the percentage seemed smaller than usual. Hal Finney

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INFOTECH WEEKLY - August 18, 1997
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text X-Authentication-Warning: nickkean.ihug.co.nz: p46-chch2.chch.ihug.co.nz [207.214.13.46] didn't use HELO protocol Date: Wed, 20 Aug 1997 13:02:50 -0400 From: Blair Anderson <"Blair Anderson"@nickkean.ihug.co.nz> Organization: Techno Junk and Grey Matter [http://www.isdn.now.co.nz] MIME-Version: 1.0 To: dcsb(a)ai.mit.edu Subject: INFOTECH WEEKLY - August 18, 1997 Sender: bounce-dcsb(a)ai.mit.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Blair Anderson <"Blair Anderson"@nickkean.ihug.co.nz> Summary Report on New Zealand encryption export restrictions under Wassanar/COCOM international agreements... http://www.infotech.co.nz/spreports/asaint.html -- Blair Anderson mailto:blair@technologist.com "get a piece of the click" Electronic Commerce, Encryption and Electronic Rights Management Techno Junk and Grey Matter mailto:Benefit@isdn.now.co.nz Corporate Technology Consultants 50 Wainoni Road, Christchurch, New Zealand phone ++ 64 3 3894065 fax ++ 64 3 3894065 Web Page(s): http://www.isdn.now.co.nz/INDEX.HTM -------- Caught in the Net for 25 years ----------- For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "dcsb-request(a)ai.mit.edu" with one line of text: "help". --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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Nautilus 1.0 under OS/2 Warp?
by Mixmaster 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Has anyone run the Nautilus 1.0 secure telecom software in a DOS box under OS/2? When I've tried it, it starts up, audio saying "welcome to Nautilus" comes out of my speakers, and I'm prompted for a passphrase. The problem comes when it tries to connect to the modem. It comes back and says "Remote failed to connect" followed by "Resetting modem...". Then the software exits. It never even takes the phone line off the hook. Other DOS comm software works just fine in a DOS box, so why not Nautilus?

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RE: David Downey asks to be shot
by David Downey 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Wow, I'm really moving up in the world. Now I've officially been classified as an enemy of the people. Cool! Where's my award money? ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

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Re: anyone know what this "top secret" code does? Re: anyone know what this "top secret" code does?
by anon-remailer＠utopia.hacktic.nl 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

hallam(a)zorch.w3.org (Phillip M. Hallam-Baker) wrote: > The code looks more than a casual hoax. Its not Skipjack, but that > does not mean its not NSA originated. Its probable that many of the > people who designed skipjack don't know its skipjack. If you read > the code carefully it is obvious why its not skipjack, an S2 > algorithm is referenced explicitly. [...] > Regardless about whether or not it is skipjack it challenges one of > the basic assumptions of many cipher designers, namely that the > amount of diffussion should be maximized at each round. I am now > very much less than convinced that this is in fact an issue. The S1 > design with its narrow diffussion provides very strong guarantees > that one round cannot undo the work of the previous one. > S1 must therefore be considered to be a significant contribution to > the cryptographic community. It has challenged a fundamental tenet of > faith which has so far been accepted without argument. It is thus > paradigmatic in that it may lead to a new method of cipher design. Does anyone remember the scenario someone suggested awhile back that hypothesized a scheme by the NSA or other TLAs to encourage the use of WEAK crypto? It involved spreading a lot of F.U.D. about PGP and other strong crypto methods, followed by the discovery/leak of a supposedly "strong" crypto algorithm to replace it. This may not be it. It may just be a trial balloon to gauge the reaction of the crypto community to an anonymous, "gift from heaven" crypto algorithm. But at least be aware of what COULD happen. One tactic that might be tried is an intentional "leak", followed by a flurry of legal actions designed to make it look like the "leak" was going to cause some real damage to their cryptanalysis efforts, due to it being "unbreakable", or whatever. Of course, anything "leaked" would be crippled in some undetectable manner so as to provide a back door...

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VoicePGP Query
by Deranged Mutant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Due to some acct. problems I lost most of the mail snet to me betw. May and September. I saw a post in a newsgroup about VoicePGP betas being available, though only for Mac and WIn'95... is this true? And if so, will there be a Win 3.11 or OS/2 or DOS version out eventually? I don't intend to get Win '95 for as long as I can avoid it (and this is NOT the start of an OS flame war...) Also, what's the status of PGP 3.0? Thanks, Rob

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