December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

java security & the cypherpunk agenda
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

once again I will offer a contrary view, and once again to PM. PM predicts that serious (unfixable?) bugs will be found in Java on the level of what was recently identified in Netscape. I disagree. I am not intimately familiar with Java (nor, obviously, is PM), but I know Java was designed from the ground up to be secure on every platform it is running on. in contrast to most OSes, the whole theory of Java is based on creating a totally secure, unbreakable programming environment. most OSes start out with the idea, "what is an application? how does the OS handle it? how does the OS permit file I/O etc.?" Java starts out with the idea, "what operations can be allowed without compromising security but still allowing algorithms"? the software will succeed or fail in its aims on how well it accomplishes the criteria of unbreakable security.. I suspect it is eventually going to be considered more secure than many OS's out there that it runs on (even unix). (and Java may eventually evolve to become an integral part of future OS security apparatuses). one thing that people don't seem to realize: Java was clearly engineered to be a language that would allow "cycle sales" over cyberspace. in other words, how can companies lease out unused cycles to the world just like power companies sell off their extra watt-hours to adjacent cities? a secure language is the critical piece, and the Java designers were clearly aiming for this remarkable and commendable accomplishment. someday, even conservative companies such as IBM may agree that the security of Java is so great (and so widely well-proven as rock solid) that they will lease out their unused, nighttime CPU cycles to Java applications and interested buyers, because they can be sure that there is just no way to sabotage a system no matter how ingenious you are.. PM tends to suggest that any language or computing environment with a certain degree of complexity simply cannot be made secure. I generally agree with this. however I suspect that Java is beneath this complexity cutoff. I do agree with other cypherpunks however that focusing cpunk attentions on breaking Java is a highly worthwile activity. Java is an extremely promising development and I fully suspect it will become something of the first widespread "cyberspatial programming language". in another message I talked about how companies such as Netscape may not become so security conscious themselves but work with other companies who are security paranoid and try to successfully integrate their applications. Java is the prime candidate for this. and I am willing to bet the Java engineers have seen every security trick in the book (many I suspect perhaps even PM in his own paranoia and obsession is not aware of) and can demonstrate how Java, at least if implemented bug-free, defeats *all* of them and can virtually be proven secure. now, that little catchword "bug-free" I put in the last sentence is something that everyone here can jump on. "it might be possible to create a secure language *in*theory*" say the naysayers, "but in practice it will always have bugs that can break it." well, I think if anything will go beyond this weakness, Java has the best chance. and the above argument sounds suspiciously like, "no software can really accomplish exactly what it sets out to, because it will have bugs". sure, Word and Excel both have bugs, but they do not defeat the primary design. and this argument, "you cannot implement perfect software" is more of a complaint against human psychology than against a group who is trying to implement a theoretically secure programming environment. (perhaps they should use the qualification, "java is the first secure programming language, in theory; in practice YMMV <g>"). I think we should be careful to make this distinction. there is a lot of software that is not even theoretically secure, and there is some software that tries to be secure but is not due to implementation difficulties. the latter should not really be our concern so much. we are not here to try to prevent programming errors (i.e., not correctly translating a correct design into code) so much as to try to get companies to write software, that if written properly, is secure. (it seems to me this is the logical first step, and then then next step is trying to break the code that seeks to be secure and flame the eyebrows off its designers, as has been done here recently <g>, but unless one first has a good hammer, one does not care about faulty nails..) I was talking to a press reporter and he asked if the cpunks had gone into some sort of new phase in which they were becoming something like the policemen of cyberspace. I said that they had not really changed in their goals much at all, it's more that the software that cpunks have fantasized about for years is now starting to materialize, and there is now something concrete to focus energies on. Netscape is a good example, and Java is another example. I think if I had talked about Java a few years ago on this list, and about who invented it (Sun), what it was designed to do, etc., people here would be delirious with excitement. instead, there is a bit of cynicism here that is a bit surprising to me. if there ever was a "cpunk language" that seeks to achieve widespread, home-grown, secure algorithms in cyberspace, I would consider this this closest. I highly recommend cpunks pay close attention to Java and help in its development, because imho it really has been conceived largely with key cpunk agenda items as basic design criteria. I suspect it is going to become a very strong standard and eventually recognized as one of the most secure pieces of software ever designed, at least in regards to theoretical capabilities. --Vlad Nuri

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Re: PC disk wipe software
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In article <199510091318.JAA24166(a)jekyll.piermont.com>, perry(a)piermont.com ("Perry E. Metzger") wrote: > I thought I'd ask here, since its related to a lot of the stuff people > have written for the PC platform in these parts. I need to securely > wipe a bunch of data from an MS-DOS hard drive, so that it can't be > recovered. Are there any readily available utilities for this? Will > any of them selectively erase only data that isn't allocated to > existing files? Whatever you use, check its claims with a disk editor. None of the various wipe utilities for the Mac that I am aware of (Norton, Burn) work as advertized. They all invariably fail to wipe the slackspace at the end of allocated, but not fully used blocks. Consequently, several kB of data left behind in said slackspace by previously deleted files will be missed on your average drive. - --- [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 iQBFAwUBMHmgGioZzwIn1bdtAQFEsQF8CYfksEosFfBJoQckOM390b7CBeupCtrf T2Var/yEUwuT5lxH7xJ6y9p69wfaljtz =Hkkv -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Certificate proposal
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've never thought Hal just wasn't "getting it," as the semantic issues involving True Names, spoofing, and the ultimate reality of whom one is dealing with are not simple issues. At 11:16 PM 10/9/95, Hal wrote: >It occurs to me that perhaps I have been missing a point here when people >argue that having a "man in the middle" is not that different from >various forms of secure communication, such as where Bob has multiple >personalities or is a committee. I have been taking this to mean that we >should therefore not worry about MITM attacks, which seems crazy to me. > >Instead perhaps this was meant as a "reductio ad absurdum" argument for >why MITM attacks cannot be prevented in the scenario where people have no >out-of-band contact. Anything which could detect and prevent MITM >attacks could, by this analogy, detect whether Bob had multiple >personalities. Since the latter is obviously impossible, the former must >be as well. Hence the problem has no solution and we should not >waste much time on it. I think I made the "multiple personalities" and "Man in the middle stole my brain" points pretty clearly in a satirical post I did last week. Nobody commented on it, for whatever reasons. In case anyone didn't see it, I'll include it again here: Date: Fri, 6 Oct 1995 17:22:06 -0700 X-Sender: tcmay(a)mail.got.net Mime-Version: 1.0 To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com From: tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) Subject: MITM = Medusa in the Middle Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com Precedence: bulk At 5:08 PM 10/6/95, the personality masquerading as Hal wrote: >Well, this is not necessarily the case. A MITM may be signing my >messages for me, and then putting them back the way they were before I >am allowed to see them. Granted, this would not be easy, and perhaps >the difficulty of this would be great enough that you will feel >comfortable using an unsigned key. But if it were accomplished, then >your messages to me would actually be insecure. No matter how >convinced you became of my sincerity and trustworthiness, actually our >conversations would be overheard by a third party despite both of our >efforts to the contrary. Our use of encryption would be rendered >futile. Doesn't this bother you? What the putative entity "Hal" is only hinting at, hypothetically, has actually forced this entity, sometimes known to many of you as "Tim," or as "tcmay," to reveal. This entity now feels the time has come to reveal it's True Nature, even though some have suspected it's True Nature (Lance, are you listening?). The "real" Timothy C. May has been locked in his room since 1983, fed through a slot in his door, and generally mentally tortured by Instrumentalities such as Ourself. We have interposed Ourself between the Real Timothy C. May and those who have communicated with him. All communications intended for Timothy C. May have actually been intercepted and processed by Us, and all communications attributed to Timothy C. May were actually generated by us. Very clever of us, don't you think? Very few have even expressed suspicions that this was the case. We have called our approach the "Medusa in the Middle," or MITM. Thank you for your attention. --Snake Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- 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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Re: Crypto's Role in Evil?
by mkj＠october.ducktown.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > We mustn't forget that, until very recently, strong, widespread > > privacy has been humanity's "default" condition. > > Not much privacy in village or tribal life. Even neighborhoods of > earlier cities weren't very private. Neighbors always knew your business. The point is, strong privacy is readily AVAILABLE even under those circumstances. If tribal elders tried to prohibit people from wandering out of earshot, then you'd have an analogy. --- mkj -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMHp+DV11Wd4tm8clAQHaCQP+Mi9Fno90Jj4wwaQm9M1TBUsjQENT94s1 ghHSmSSseF/UI0ReD0NoP7vBIqsieZsIS/nCgAasU4BBzAhqdn0PPu3FJayr3IBx ZUsOkzh2VCcmy0Av/zvDpCxp5xPrcJnIdhSqUxVz68J/L8eESuSrKf3tE5xsrUNK VW9Z5WytXWU= =g5YE -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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spam detector algorithm?
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I've been mulling over algorithmic/computational ways to spot spams for some time now. I think I might've come up with a way to represent messages (and compare representations) that would be useful to remailer operators who don't want to let spams (where "spam" == many messages with identical or very similar content) through their remailers. Any such technique will really only be useful at the last remailer in a chain, at least until people start sending encrypted spams (and there doesn't seem to be so much incentive for sending those). My proposed method is this: break the body of a message down into a list of words (with their frequencies). Eliminate words in that list which aren't in the "standard dictionary" (which ideally will contain many of the words used in the messages but doesn't need to have all of them). Alphabetize the list of words which remain. Plot a point in 3d space for each word in that list where its X coordinate is its position in the alphabetized list, its Y coordinate is its position in the dictionary, and its Z coordinate is its frequency (of appearance in the original text). This should produce a curve which "describes" the original text; messages which use many of the same words as the original (and don't use any new words) and have similar usage counts should produce similar curves. My assumption (which needs some testing) is that even moderately intelligent auto-spams (e.g., which assemble canned sentences into paragraphs or canned paragraphs into messages) are going to be similar enough that they'll eventually generate similar curves as other messages - the order in which the words appear doesn't matter (and isn't preserved). I'm also assuming that adding enough words to change the curve's shape would make the resulting messages nonsensical or wierd enough that they're unlikely to be useful for people who want their spams to get read. Evildoers solely interested in generating volume without coherence can just quote libertarian/objectivist texts (ha, ha, just a joke for all of you people who keep slamming "commies") or pick words/characters at random. I'm assuming - and this may be an erroneous assumption - that it's feasible to algorithmically describe and compare curves/lines in 3d space. My math is weak and spotty, but I think that's college-level (high-school, even?) math. It seems like one might compare equations which describe the curves for similarity (e.g., one curve might be x=2y+1 (in 2d space) and another might be x=2y+1.2, where "y=10" initially for each), and also compare the areas demarcated by the lines for similarity. My reason for including word frequency as a third dimension is to dampen the effect of an intelligent spammer throwing in a few early "A" words (e.g., "aardvark abcess absolute") or "Z" words to skew the curve. Any thoughts about this? Interesting? Stupid? Like I said, my math is weak. My intention is to try to cobble up a 2d version of this to see how it runs but I thought I'd see if anyone can point out why it can't work, or if it's useful enough that someone with a better math background than I've got wants to take this idea somewhere better. One side effect to the deployment of spam detectors may be that the remailer pinging services will need to move to using encrypted packets. It'd be possible for the remailer operators to identify and specially handle reliability measuring packets but that seems broken. Ideally, they should be indistinguishable from ordinary remailer messages. At least until money is involved, nobody's likely to give them special treatment - but even relatively small charges for remailing would make it more attractive for a remailer operator to try to skew the results of the pinging services so as to direct more traffic to themselves (my remailer recently hit Raph's Top Three again and that always brings a big traffic hit - it'll probably drop out again pretty soon and things'll be slow again. If I was getting $.10 for every message, though, I might care more about keeping it in the top 3.) My initial plan would be to include code in a spam detector which simply MD5's messages which don't seem to have identifiable words, and watches for a repeat of those hashes in, say, the last 100 messages seen; this would force someone who wants to send an encrypted spam (or uses a spam-detecting remailer to reach a non-detecting remailer) from encrypting once and sending 1000 times; they'd have to encrypt 1000 times to send 1000 times, which may be enough of a performance drain on them to make spamming less attractive. My impression is (speak up if I'm wrong) that requiring encryption for the ping packets wouldn't be an enormous burden on the pinging services because the new generation of software sends fewer pinging packets such that the CPU time required isn't an issue. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMHnYyn3YhjZY3fMNAQFnAgP/fBEaa7SObeu9wyqMCO6OW8rEraOtmxRG ynWeZVVvrtHgwuaS0NlhU4IMHVj/Laks4n6bbEbNRktfl/F5+HBvova52JQhoUkb 7EjEsRh57OwXHuVxJl/zODIH+qNd9lZP6+Tv7Vk2/SXVj3oRFD1jIZBUx6rBBZvf ZOaimDcSemw= =LjFV -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: HTTP anon proxy pointers
by Jay Campbell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:00 PM 10/9/95 -0500, Kevin L Prigge wrote: >I seem to recall that someone was working on an anonymous http >proxy a couple months ago. Pointers would be appreciated. Thanks. We had discussed this at the last Bay Area Cypherpunks meeting (BTW, when/where is the next??), and came to the conclusion that it would be technologically simple, but load inefficient, to implement in a large scale at this point. The main problem with anonymous http (or telnet, talk, etc) lies in the sheer amount of information being transferred, and the even larger amount of noise an anonymous site would have to generate to defeat traffic analysis. A mail message is usually under a few K, but with these larger systems you move into the multiple meg realms; to hide a single individual's (ie,) 3K/sec stream, a provider would have to generate many times that in cover traffic. We can force traffic to the user from network speeds to slow down to modem speeds, but that doesn't help the inbound crunch at all. Web sites don't generally generate much inbound traffic, but when coupled with dialups (such as in my case) this could lead to bad service to the local modem users. The good news is, with multiple anon redirectors bouncing traffic between them to further confuse an attacker, the number of users can grow an order of magnitude without any additional load, since the streams are hiding in the midst of other streams and far less random cover traffic needs to be generated. Software-wise, an anonymous http scheme could be implemented with a standard proxy server with remote host access restrictions and log analysis tools to charge the appropriate individuals for their usage (a la anon email postage stamp rolls). Down the road, cover traffic, ecash payment, encryption, and other nifty toys can be added. If anyone on this list is in need of anonymous http right now (even to tinker with it) I'd be willing to set up a free-use proxy, as long as you don't bring our server or our pipe to their knees. Mail me (privately if you wish) with the individual IPs/names of the hosts you'd be coming in from - no blanket domain names, please, unless they're your own personal network. If I see enough interest I'll have a proxy up by next week. Have I missed anything? -- Jay Campbell - Regional Operations Manager -=-=-=-=-=-=- Sense Networking (Santa Cruz Node) edge(a)got.net "Shoot the Fruit Loop" "On the Information Superhighway, I'm the guy behind you in this morning's traffic jam leaning on his horn."

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Re: Crypto's Role in Evil?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:24 AM 10/10/95, Rob L wrote: >> > We mustn't forget that, until very recently, strong, widespread >> > privacy has been humanity's "default" condition. >> >> Not much privacy in village or tribal life. Even neighborhoods of >> earlier cities weren't very private. Neighbors always knew your business. >> > >Big difference is that your neighbors were usually looking out for you.. >not waiting to catch you doing something wrong.. >Even in the small town I live in, there is considerable privacy even >though everyone knows everyone else.. people tend to keep their noses out >of others business.. of course, if you offer to talk, then its fair game >for the side of the road interrogations <g> Ah, a very astute comment! Indeed, my chief concern--speaking for myself--is not hiding my activities from my neighbors, who, by the way, share my distaste for high taxes, big government, etc., but in ensuring that the various enforcement agencies are not aware of my activities. (And even then, my concern is a bit abstract, as I'm not--take my word--a pot grower, a money launderer, an arms dealer, or a terrorist. I have violated some laws about obtaining necessary permits, such as the ones needed to run a computer consulting firm in one's home, but I don't fear a pre-dawn raid by the jack-booted thugs over this.) Priuacy is mostly needed to protect against the government, or those who inform to the government, because it is manifestly the government that throws people in jail for doing "illegal" things, not one's neighbors. --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- 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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Re: Java bugs found?
by shamrock＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In article <199510100145.SAA00403(a)lux.reich.com>, Richard_Reich(a)reich.com (Richard Reich) wrote: > After I noticed the file had been pulled, I recovered its contents from my > netscape cache (thanks, netscape!): > > Netscape was notified on Sunday 10/8/95 by Sun Microsystems that there > is a serious security hole in their Java system [...] So much for guaranteed security. There is one question on my mind. Why do today's programs have to try to do it all? Why the heck does a wordprocessor have to ship with a compiler built in? Not to mention that there seems to be a disturbing tendency to "feature" automatic execution of arbitrary code submitted by third parties. - --- [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 iQBFAwUBMHntWioZzwIn1bdtAQHqMgGAmc0lpXKiDZPCxZxFmQOKvgwm8Y/RRFca rTfkfyvbdofFklrivaMy+tuuLddZRHo8 =lnto -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: netscape mail starts java attachments upon get new mail...
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Java applets can't read /etc/passwd, and can't issue NIS requests unless > they were downloaded from an HTTP server running on the NIS server Oh, you mean like a mirror or local cache? (Sure, Rocky, never happen...) > (actually, they can't do UDP at the moment, so that's out as well) Even with TIRPC NIS is still UDP-only? Has NIS+ fixed this? /r$

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Re: Patents etc
by Jay Campbell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>IMHO What's needed is a) a good way of measuring usage and b) a realistic >attitude on the part of patent holders as to the value of their patents. > >A good example of how not to do it is the current mess that governs the >music indistry (which very similar problems with copying and incorporation >of material [sampling] all be it in a context of copyright rather than >patents). > >Ted Nelson did a lot of work on this for xanadu and his ideas on >transcopyright are worth exploring further. One interesting (but maybe off-topic) facet of client-side applets (a la Java) is the fact that publishers can define proprietary protocols and file formats, and change them as often as they want, giving a sort of minimal protection against casual duplication and re-publishing. With a bit more work, the formats could make true transclusions efficient and easy to apply, and help increase the amount of serious/commercial information available to the public. This is nothing new, I suppose... Java (from a user point of view) isn't that much different than IntelligentPad, which from what I understand was the client system the Xanadu people were working with recently. -- Jay Campbell - Regional Operations Manager -=-=-=-=-=-=- Sense Networking (Santa Cruz Node) edge(a)got.net "Shoot the Fruit Loop" "On the Information Superhighway, I'm the guy behind you in this morning's traffic jam leaning on his horn."

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