December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Death of Privacy / Was: Di Privacy, Die!
by TruthMonger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From the Not-ly News !Server: [Mainstream, Terra] -- "Huh?" by Defcom McCull'em Mainstream Media sources today denied rumors of news stories from real people, in the real world, finding their way into the bowels of the mainstream press before being burped out to make way for more of the same-old-same-old. Asked why the initial reports of eyewitnesses using words such as "explosion" were quickly buried in favor of the word "crash," sources replied, only one guy, somewhere in Canada, was awake at that hour, and he will soon be dead, so we can't really confirm the existence of those eyewitnesses, since no one wants to talk to them. Asked why initial accounts had "five" reporters being detained and why a rumor concerning the accidental death of "two" reporters, suddenly turned into "seven" reporters being detained, the sources would only comment, "These were only preliminary estimates, before we had a chance to talk to our media prisoners and explain the severity of what they would be facing if their stories were not 'politically correct'." Asked why statements by Fayed family members concerning their views that Dodi and Diana were 'offed' by the monarchy in a bid to thwart a gain in the political influence of sandnigger mobsters, mainstream media sources said, "We saw no need to cover old ground which had been dealt with on the Cypherpunks list, both before and after the event." Asked about the missing right wheel on the death vehicle, sources inferred that it was found on the stretcher that carried Diana to the hospital, next to the magic bullet that killed Kennedy. NotlyNewsMonger "All the news that gets you killed."

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Re: NYT on Netscape Crack
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>I take a long term view of security. Basically I don't trust security software >until it has been released in a stable condition for a few years. Really? So I assume you won't be using an ATM card to buy gasoline until the next millenium? >Visa and Mastercard will be comming out with a spec which will have very tight >requirements for implementations. I thought it was Visa and MC and Microsoft are coming out with an implementation, and then will get around to releasing the specs. One of V or MC also said that the only approved way to do Internet commerce with their card was to use this new system. /r$

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Re: SFChron
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>"Mike Homer, vice president of marketing for Netscpae, said that >recent breaches do not mean the products are flawed" Of course, it would have been better if the VP of Marketing said that they had a bug, but that the fundamental architecture is sound. /r$

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Re: PGP Keyservers and 5.0 DSS/D-H Keys...
by Feanor 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Sep 3, 17:07, Unicorn wrote: } Subject: PGP Keyservers and 5.0 DSS/D-H Keys... > Hi Guys (F/M), > > Just a quick question. > > Are the current (mostly PGP 2.6.x based) keyservers able to incorporate, > store and provide the new PGP 5.0 based DSS/Diffie-Hellman keys? And if Well, given that PGP 5 has a functionality just for sending and recieving keys with said keyservers... :-) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQBVAwUBNA3U0RkU7YRPCnEJAQGgRwH/fX99svPMi51o7NIJGwrC1k59QioStPsk A9jjBb3MX7JMaYEWg9ubwhZMg3RPpa6ASSnvnRMxkVgG3sELIGR1Sg== =xmXy -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: "Hackers"-- brief review and anecdote...
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> If it wasn't for ITAR the Net would already have secure encryption and >> authentication, and most such hacker attacks would be impossible (or at >> least impractical). >The non-responsive answer is stricken from the record. :-) >You mean "secure" as Netscape was secure from sameer et al.? I don't think it's non-response, I just think you don't understand yhour expert witness. If not for the ITAR then I could distribute my secure applications as a binary library with the security part as source. When you got Netscape you'd read the security code or ask local experts to do so. You'd verify that the code was correct (or at least not stupid). You'd then compile the security code and link it against the main object module and away you'd go. If you didn't have a C compiler, you'd get a binary from someone you trusted. Of course, all this would be going on in parallel at thousands of sites around the world. Everyone looking at the code, finding holes, reporting them, fixing security bugs, and so on. But ITAR won't let you do that. Or netscape would just make calls to the common open multiple-crypto API that existed in a shared library in your machine. But apparently the ITAR won't even let you do this. /r$

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http://www.osf.org/~rsalz/unabomber
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Snarfed from MIT. I'm sure it will soon be all over on many people's homepages. I don't know if I want this terrorist to appreciate the irony or be disgusted. /r$

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Re: Big Brother is watching
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Chip Mefford propelled us into the future by writing: >Fairfax County, In the Peoples Republic of Virginia It's Fairfax City, I think, which is an independent city wholly contained in Fairfax County. At least they were the only ones with this shit deployed. >Citizens in the PRV who have been travelling in Fairfax County will soon >be recieving summons to come pay their dues to the monster in the form of >traffic citations for running red lights issued by Big Brother. This was discussed a while ago. Buy a license plate cover ("Just protecting my plates against stones and vandalism, Officer!") that's virtually transparent from head-on, but opaque beyond a certain view angle. I think these things exist -- look in Car & Driver or some such. And if some peckerhead parks his SUV in your driveway to nail speeders, buy a "radar detector tester" (maybe C&D, or an electronic-hobbyist's magazine) and crank it up every now and again while he's trying to catch violators. Do it from the safety of your house so you don't wind up with a nightstick up your ass. <snip> >With this wonderful sucess, We can all look forward to this items being >placed in our domiciles in order to further protect us from crime. And I'll give my kids a can of spray paint and a ladder. Maybe I'll offer bonus prizes if they can figure out an inventive, undetectable way to disable the fucker. Shit, they're trying to nail Marv Albert for consensual sodomy, which is also a "crime" in the PRV, if they can't get him on the assault charges. So think twice before you and your SO get into acts of Hooverism down Virginia way. N.

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Re: AOL monitoring
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>How hard is it to record downloaded newsgroups/msgs from the news INN, probably the most popular NNTP news system, by default logs every time the client does a "group" command, typically sent by the newsreader when you enter a newsgroup. If you only fetch articles by messageid then you'll probably avoid anything other than connection logging. /r$

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Not Crypto: Referencing Electronic Texts
by Deranged Mutant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This has nothing to do with crypto, but it's a question I'm sure a few people on the list have had to deal with this as well... I'm doing a research project for a class on the problems of making scholarly references to electronic documents, mainly on the how-tos (for author writing document as well as one who cites an electronic document in footnotes and bibliographies), as well as some technical problems (sites change or go down, documents are modified by author or hacker who doesn't indicate a modification, etc..). Any information, URLs, references, personal anecdotes, methods, tips, etc. would be greatly appreciated. (Please reply to me and not the list unless you find some bizarre way of relating this to crypto...) Thanks, Rob

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FROM A FRIEND . . .
by Sandy Sandfort 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SANDY SANDFORT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C'punks, Here is a press release that Netscape has issued (is about to issue?) concerning their recent miscue. S a n d y ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- ********************************************************************* Potential Vulnerability in Netscape Products - Netscape Responding Immediately To Upgrade Customers and Minimize Risk of Future Threats Summary: During regular monitoring of Internet security newsgroups, Netscape has discovered a potential vulnerability in the current version of the Netscape Navigator. Late Sunday evening two UC-Berkeley students posted a message to the Internet detailing their efforts to reverse engineer some security capabilities of the Netscape Navigator. Their efforts revealed how the program generates session encryption keys, enabling them to replicate these keys with a moderate amount of computing power and decipher messages sent across the Internet. The potential vulnerability has since been confirmed by Netscape engineers. With this knowledge an experienced computer programmer could decrypt messages sent by Netscape Navigator to other computers in a few hours of computation time. Netscape secure software has been in use for almost a year on the Internet by millions of customers and no thefts of actual customer information protected by our security have been reported. This posting on the Internet reported a potential vulnerability, not the actual theft of customer information. Netscape plans to address this vulnerability quickly by providing updated software as soon as possible via the Internet. An updated version of Netscape Navigator 1.1 and 1.2 will be available for downloading on the Internet next week by existing customers. In addition, Netscape Navigator 2.0, which was announced yesterday and will be available next week in beta versions, includes this imporvement as well as a number of additional security features. Detailed Issue: Current versions of Netscape Navigator use random information to generate session encryption keys of either 40-bits or 128-bits in length. The random information is found through a variety of functions that look into a user's machine for information about how many processes are running, process ID numbers, the current time in microseconds, etc. The current vulnerability exists because the size of random input is less than the size of the subsequent keys. This means that instead of searching through all the 2^128 possible keys by brute force, a potential intruder only has to search through a significantly smaller key space by brute force. This is substantially easier problem to solve because it takes much less compute time and means 40-bit or 128-bit key strength is substantially reduced. Solution: Netscape is already implementing a fix to the specific portion of our software where this vulnerability exists. We plan to address the problem by significantly increasing the amount of random information that cannot be discovered by external sources from approximately 30-bits to approximately 300-bits. In addition, the random information will be made much more difficult to replicate because we will greatly expand the techniques and sources used to generate the random information. Once this improvement is made, protection of the random information will be as strong as the rest of the security built into Netscape. Netscape has also begun to engage an external group of world class security experts who will review our solution to this problem before it is sent to customers. These experts will validate Netscape's solution and insure that it is complete and effective in solving this vulnerability. The group will be used on an ongoing basis to work with Netscape's internal security experts to review the design and implementation of security in Netscape's products and to provide an additional measure of assurance that these products implement the highest levels of security possible. This discovery does not affect the strength or security of SSL, RC4, or any other portions of our security implementations. The fix will restore Netscape security across all products to the true 40-bit level for Export and true 128-bit level for U.S. Customers intended before this discovery. Current versions of Netscape Navigator should be replaced with updated versions that will be made available next week. In addition, the current version of the Netscape Commerce Server has a similar vulnerability during it's initial key-pair generation. Therefore, a patch will be made available from Netscape and should be applied by Commerce Server customers to generate a new key pair and server certificate. Updating Customers: Netscape will provide the fix for Export (40 bit) versions of Netscape Navigator later this week for downloading by customers on the Internet. Similarly, the Commerce Server patch for Export versions (40 bit) will be made available from our home page. Because downloading of 128 bit versions of the software is still not permitted by U.S. law, U.S. customers of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Navigator Personal Edition and Netscape Commerce Server using 128 bit versions can request the replacement from Netscape for delivery through the regular mail. For additional information or replacements for 128-bit versions of software that you have already purchased, please call the Netscape Replacement Desk at 415-528-3600, email replace(a)netscape.com, or contact your existing Netscape representative directly. We will inform you immediately when the updated software is available for download.

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