December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Software Patents are Freezing Evolution of Products
by Peter Williams 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>Thesis: Software patents are a bad idea because they freeze the evolution >>too early and payment metering schemes are too difficult to arrange, which >>also helps to freeze evolution. Software patents are bad because customers >>cannot freely and without entanglements incorporate the ideas into their >>own products. The situation has become much worse with software, because >>there is no physical object which can be used to meter usage of a patent. Its nice to see a carefully reasoned argument. Consider, also reading http://www.verisign.com/faqs/id_faq.html http://www.verisign.com/apple/cis.html Comment: The thesis is fundamentally flawed in the case of publickey applications which provide or exploit digital signatures, as its assumptions are false, patently. However, a gem of truth is revealed; however, possible outcomes may be unpalatable as "pay-per-view". Crypto metering for commercial-grade systems is easy. A number of companies, including those who are bantering about the latest batch of payment protocols, are beginning to really understand that to combat intruder-in-the middle attacks of the commercial end-systems' keying material, its necessary to authenticate the source of keying material used for all subsequent security services. Contrary to the thesis, there are an ever evolving number of practical ideas upon the nature of security services and secure applications. (In fact, its ever harder to track the explosion of innovation which is actually happening.) To combat the threat which intruder-in-the-middle represents to the key exchange/agreement crypto underlying most applications, a notion of public-key certificates was formulated. The certificate is a certified end-system key. The evaluation of the certificate requires users to consider trust models, as someone "trusted" digitally signs the key to assert that the key is certified for purpose X. The number of trust models being propounded is astounding; the innovation wonderful to behold; contrary to the thesis. Two models are prevalent - the Kent RFC 1422 model which uses third-parties to base non-repudiation services, and the Zimmermann PGP model which does not use third-parties, and accomplishes something other than non-repudiation. Other models are in heated discussion! There is a little truth in the thesis that asserting upfront to the licensor the nature of your idea does hamper innovation. However, a solution maybe at hand. Note, anyway, that (a) RSA is an excellent public-key scheme which is free of patent restrictions anywhere in the world except US territories (b) personal use of RSA in the US is effectively unlicensed (see PGP/PGPfone) (c) RSAREF is a free reference implementation available for developers to innovate with, before deciding how to make their ideas commercially available (d) there are lots of competitive providers of RSA stuff supporting many form-factors and packaging styles. So either all innovation occurs in the US, else free public availability is not the key to idea generation. Both these conclusions are patently wrong, in my view. Whats a solution? Well there is a solution which gets rid of the up-front, tell-all requirement. Its called controlled certificate issuance. Given the importance of the certificate role, if one meters certificate issuance such that a postage-stamp fee goes to the licensor for each key used in any idea, for any purpose, however often or valuable-a-transaction, then the developer is effectively freed up - in terms of innovation. The keying material can be Diffie-Helman, knapsack, anything the developer like. Whats the downside - well its like having a pay-per-view box on your company TV. Still, this is highly regarded by many industries and is the basis of much competition in the broadcasting & programming distribution industry. Some people, really object to pay-per-view. But then, some people object to inventors getting benefit from their discovery. One metering product is the BBN safekeyper. Metering certificates causes about as much hate mail, as MIT patent enforcement though. So beware about even thinking about reading the following pages for more information about the options and issues: http://www.verisign.com/faqs/id_faq.html - for digital ID material (lots of references) http://www.verisign.com/apple/cis.html - for metering and "simple" licensing How do we do away with the say-it-all-up-front restriction, which is currently the only means whereby the licensor can collect a negotiated fee? RSA DSI invested heavily in a hardware product for metering the issuance of those critical certificates. That is, any developer w

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Re: PC disk wipe software
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>There has been considerable discussion on the MCIP list about how most >*Mac* programs that purport to do this, like Burn, for example, leave stuff >over in disk blocks. My understanding is that this is not a trivial >problem, and it occurs in MUSH-DOS as well.... Doing it _right_ is not a trivial job. Consider disk controllers that map out bad blocks so the OS never needs to see them - if you're trying to remove highly classified data, the fact that Diskwipe won't ever see them might be a serious problem, even if it is close enough for government work. For a more realistic scenario, consider Stacker and other disk-compression software; you don't know what physical blocks the file was written on, or whether overwriting the logical blocks of the file will actually write to the same physical blocks. In some cases you can assume that it probably won't. You also can't expect to write large blocks of 1s or 0s over the disk, because disk compression will turn them into small blocks with run-lengths or equivalent. (Writing PRNG random noise will do, or you can generate counter-based patterns that may work, or do something cryptographically strong if you want to take the time.) #--- # 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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Re: Crypto's Role in Evil?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 5:01 PM 10/9/95, Lucky Green wrote: >Correct, Blanc. That's why I am saving my pennies to buy an AR-15. I know >the government of the near future will not be in a position to stand in >the way of my involuntary participation in organ transplant experiments. >It will be up to the individual and voluntary neighborhood associations, >etc. to provide our personal security. While I don't want to comment on AR-15s and the possible need for them, this being a strong cryptography group, this is a good time to mention to newcomers to the list that the book "Snow Crash," by Neal Stephenson, offers a wickedly satirical look at a possible future for America. (Other books of interest include: Vernor Vinge's "True Names," David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom," Hakim Bey's "TAZ," Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game," Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," and John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider.") One of the reasons I advocate having a minimal set of laws and then strongly enforcing them is that having too many laws makes enforcement of the _important_ laws very difficult. Having too many laws, such as the laws about what one can do with one's own money (chillingly recounted this morning by Doug Barnes in his trip report), also blurs the lines between what is really criminal and what it is not. It's clear that cops cannot protect people, only try to catch the perpetrators. In certain demographic groups, 30% of all males between the ages of 15 and 30 are either in jail, are awaiting trial, are on probabation, or have been in jail. California is on a massive prison-building campaign. (Many of these prisons would not be needed if essentially all behaviors except murder, rape, theft, etc., were legal, and if transfer payments into inner cities were cut off...the "criminal" gangs would not have much to do and would wither away in time.) Given the current trends, certain courses of action become clear. (Personal note: I'm amazed at the number of "punks" of various flavors who continue to live in crowded cities, given the capabilities of communications technology, and the race wars now accelerating in these rat cages. But then I'm not one of those dressed-in-black-with-noserings kind of "punk." To each their own.) --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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PC wipe utilities
by Brian D Williams 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

"Perry E. Metzger" <perry(a)piermont.com> asks: >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? >Perry Alan Penny's excellent freeware utility wipe.zip has been uuencoded and sent to you. I believe it fulfills your requirements. As recently as the last issue of WIRED an article by a data recovery company claimed they could recover data that had been overwritten nine times...... make it a bakers dozen to be safe. Brian D Williams

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Chaum's patents
by s1018954＠aix2.uottawa.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sorry if this has been stated before, but exactly when do Chaum's first set up e-cash related patents expire? I looked it up in applied crypto the last time I had my hands on it and couldn't find the dates. How many (and what) patents are there in this field anyway? (don't bother with that if it's too long to answer) TIA my visit to Dachau > Concentration Camp, I saw original lab notebooks of experiments designed > to increase the survial rate of pilots downed above the cold waters of the > North Sea. A noble cause. Well I don't think so. The pilots missions were to bomb the cities of England. This was in turn to further the meglomaniac plans of the Fuhrer to create a european police state under his personal rule with all objectors murdered. Analysis of the aims of the research must not simply stop at the immediate result but through to the wider goals towards which the research was intended to contribute. In this context we see that the objective was not to save lives but to destroy them in the furtherance of a plan to enslave the entire population of Europe. spread, > easy employment. I'm not a libertarian, or an anarcho-capitalist. I do, however, support rapid deployment, without restrictions, of strong crypto. Here's why: (1) It is impossible to stop these technologies; someone on the list recently reminded us that a bright fourteen year old could reproduce the basic functionality of PGP in a brief period of time. The mathematics of, say, RSA, are fairly basic. I think it's unreasonable to outlaw multiplication of prime numbers, don't you? (2) While these technologies allow people to violate the law, I have enough faith in humanity to believe that civilization won't collapse as a result. There have always been criminals, and there have always been revolutionaries. Only recently has "The State" been able to supress these forces without maintaining a physical presence. Crypto merely returns us to that default. An example of this is, for example, "What if terrorists are going to blow up a big important building, but we don't know which one?" Before wiretapping, and even today with groups which insist on physical presence in a secure location for planning, you had to infiltrate the group. This will still work. LEAs don't like this sort of activity because of the inherent risk for the infiltrator. That's not a good reason to limit these technologies. (3) These technologies also allow honest, law-abiding citizens to protect themselves from criminals, both within and outside the government. Industrial espionage can be defeated through strong crypto, for example. J. Edgar Hoover would have been powerless to harass Martin Luther King, jr. had MLK had access to strong crypto. Obviously, these aren't the only reasons to use strong crypto, and everybody will almost definitely disagree with them as I've described. But it's one answer, anyway. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jon Lasser <jlasser(a)rwd.goucher.edu> (410)494-3072 Visit my home page at http://www.goucher.edu/~jlasser/ You have a friend at the NSA: Big Brother is watching. Finger for PGP key.

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Patents etc
by John Pettitt 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hmmmm the argument about hardware companies paying 10% to intel 5% to the capacitor folks does not stand up. The reason is that hardware people do *exactly* that and in return they receive the physical token (chip, capacitor etc) that represents the intellectual property they just bought. Patents in the hardware world can slow evolution just as much as in software. A good example is the "cats eye" papent in the UK. Cats eyes are the reflective studs in the road, until the original UK patent ran out *nobody* did any work in the UK to improve on the orginal design because the royalty burden made it uneconomic. Whats make software different is the ability to freely copy it without special hardware. This lack of a physical token is what causes all the problems. 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. John Pettitt jpp(a)software.net VP Engineering, CyberSource Corp. +1 415 473 3065 (V) (fax 3066)

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Re: PC wipe utilities
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:52 PM 10/9/95, Brian D Williams wrote: >Alan Penny's excellent freeware utility wipe.zip has been >uuencoded and sent to you. I believe it fulfills your requirements. > > As recently as the last issue of WIRED an article by a data >recovery company claimed they could recover data that had been >overwritten nine times...... make it a bakers dozen to be safe. Better yet, wipe the disk/diskette on _more than one_ machine. It should be easy to just run the wipe on, say, 3 machines, 3 to 5 times each. A lot of the ability to recover putatively erased media lies in the fact that a given set of read-write heads has characteristics (especially with regard to positioning) that make repeated erase passes less than fully effective. The remnants of the recorded signal can be extracted with careful analysis of the analog signal (especially from special read heads). Using N erase machines increases the "jitter" to some extent. My hunch is that it would make the recovery process exponentially (in N) more difficult. But I have no lab experience in this, so this is just an idea. But crunching the media is a faster (and maybe cheaper) approach. --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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Man in the Middle Revisited (but not for the last time)
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:03 PM 10/9/95, Hal wrote: >tcmay(a)got.net (Timothy C. May) writes: >>For communication, the only credential Alice needs to ensure that only Bob >>can read her message is that she uses Bob's public key. If "Bob the Key" >>reads it, presumably it was "Bob the Person" who read it. > >>(Again, Bob the Key = Bob the Person to many of us. If Bob the Person has >>let his private key out, so that Chuck the Person is also able to read the >>Bob the Key stuff, etc., then of course cryptography cannot really handle >>this situtation.) > >OK, but again, what about the man in the middle attack? Suppose the >key that you found that claims to be from Bob is actually not his, but >another one created by a man in the middle, such as Bob's malicious >ISP? Then that ISP is decrypting the messages Alice sends to him using >that fake key, and re-encrypting them using Bob's real key. He is >reading all of the messages, and Alice and Bob do not in fact have >communications privacy. There are many, many people on the list that I know only from their posts and their public keys (not that I'm a heavy user of PGP as some of you are, though some of you I have dealt with via PGP messages). I don't know if "Carl Ellison the Key" is "really" the same Carl Ellison that Carl Ellison the Key claims to be...you see the semantic difficulties. What I know is that the Carl Ellison who sends me PGP message and who appears to be working at TIS is not publically disputing messages sent by an MITM attacker. (True, the MITM could be only targetting _me_, and so the "real" Carl Ellison could be unaware that the "fake" MITM Carl Ellison is masquerading as him.) But if I really care I can post a public channel (the CP list, for example) query, encrypted to the known public key (used in many past posts, for example) of "Carl Ellison the Key," asking if he sent the message to me. To put it bluntly, all I really care about is _persistent_ key-holding, i.e., that the person who began posting with a given key is still using the same key. Or, rather, I don't even care if the keyholder "Pr0duct Cypher" is actually a person, or a Bourbaki-style committee--I only care that messages purporting to be from Pr0duct Cypher or Black Unicorn or Carl Ellison are still using the same key. Who any of these entities "really" are is irrelevant to me. (I don't even know if Hal Finney, who I met once a few years ago, is the "real" Hal Finney, nor do I really care.) >I don't want to overstate the risk of this attack. It would not be an >easy one to mount and I believe there are countermeasures which could >detect it unless the MITM had nearly supernatural powers. But the MITM >attack is normally considered seriously in discussing crypto protocols. >It is a well known weakness in Diffie-Hellman, for example. That is why >authenticated Diffie Hellman is used in some of the newly proposed key >exchange protocols for IP. The risks of MITM attacks on public key >systems was recognized not long after those systems were proposed. The >problems with fake keys have been discussed for over a decade. > >Why is this all suddenly irrelevant? Were these attacks never realistic? >Is it just not a problem somehow? I am baffled by the fact that people >are just turning their backs on all these years of research and >experience. If this is some kind of paradigm shift in which the idea of >communicating with keys is seen as the key to the puzzle, then I am >afraid I don't share the enlightenment. To me the problem seems as real >as ever. Well, I'm not saying the work is unimportant. What I'm saying--and I think others are too--is that there is no crisis that calls for "certificate authorities" to provide "proof" that a keyholder is who he says he is. I'm happy continuing to trust that people are who I once they thought they were, by their signatures and their apparent ability to read messages encrypted to their public key. If in fact I am dealing with body-snatchers who actually infiltrated the identity of "Carl Ellison" and are able to act as him, so what? I never met the "real" Carl Ellison, so who cares if Carl Ellison the Key is really Carl Ellison the Biological Entity who Grew up in Foobar, Pennsylvania and Graduated from Bobby Ray Inman H.S. in 1975? That's all. If people want to work on credentials and similar certificate processes, that's great. But I'm saying I see no compelling need _for myself_ and will strongly argue against some of the reasoning we are hearing about why certificates need to be issued. (Because I have also read the Postal Service proposals that they get into the business of certification of e-mail in various ways, and because of the various other schemes being discussed which seem less than voluntary.) --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: PC disk wipe software
by J.E. Davidow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 9 Oct 95 at 13:59, dmandl(a)panix.com wrote regarding Re: PC disk wipe software: > On Mon, 9 Oct 1995, 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? > > > > Perry There are several file, directory and/or disk erasing utilities on the web and commercial area today. Shred is located on WEB in some of the Simtel Libraries. It will not only delete the file from the directory, but it writes zeros over the data itself, including all of the fragments left at the end of the file's cluster. It also will write over the free space left on the disk as well. It performs this operation only once per execution. Another "wipe" software is "Real Deal.zip". It's virtue is that is writes a series of patterns to the disk depending upon the level of security you request. It can remain memory resident, intercepting all DOS delete requests and write over at least 5 times with different patterns the data your deleting. Watch how much longer a delete takes if your at the" Real Dewd" level. There are a couple of utilities from Norton, etc. that will perform a higher level of wiping. Including the entire disk, directories, etc. The will write several more times that either RealDeal.zip (Real Delete) or Shred. The last time I saw, the government 'standard' for "wiping" its own sensitive data was at least fifteen times with different patterns. How secure your erased disk will stand up to a concerted effort by law enforcement, NSA or someone truly looking for what's on your disk remains questionable at best. But to the average person both Shred or RealDeal is good enough to keep your wife's attorney, your roommate, co-worker or your girl friend out of your personal communique's. Remember too, that word processors and other software write all over you disk and that its' probable that fragments of data that you wish to delete are attached to or in other files. J.E. Davidow jed(a)interaccess.com Signed JEDKEY.asc -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6.2 mQCNAzAvWekAAAEEAOASA2sxixXBIzn40bN/ybwZ6lOBAmLo06DqG8eh2VpnE0kp i0cSiOQARzOpx3REbJWCp4+XE3Dudg534V47JWoiH0VFgJTCG6yZ7kXJjxXwXeYf KD0zRlkoU1wYcjfDC2vEoBWh36I/7HX+GiSEnFQ5rJgm9X7spOMRupiV7141AAUR tCJKLkUuIERhdmlkb3cgPGplZEBpbnRlcmFjY2Vzcy5jb20+iQCVAwUQMGO82F2s KelIgrYVAQFT7AP/TjfpK4Zljs2RFUYGZuKPEJgMp+PC1jmtuAalaoufhv5Bdosk lixdahjJ1y5a2Nv/mId4xhT6/WJDN62solxdYBCyzZWAxg4X88igP23xeGreUhg+ A7u1Gx1Ebr5QPqiTV7B8AgJT9Y2xVZw76zQnFxZAGiZqk9IuRgVuldj3gv2JAJUD BRAwYgxV4xG6mJXvXjUBAWuqA/9h6AORiSqkNwrSTmm5z1CoNrS1q6L3LMSmnmgZ Xh3AbuqbbJum06gVRXo4QITR71iBx7HjKg3kMeK6+8+vIabXzL0T7TtdiLkhcCo5 FULB+0W5aUBiXVC0amMP+tJE4I8Splr5MfuDlGddMPqrbB3TplweTJ1muE3k+KWK RNspGw== =1Iv2 -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

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European Crypto
by T. Bruce Tober 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anyone with names and contact information for any of the Council of Europe representatives who deliberated and/or voted on the recent recommendations on crypto, e-mail me that information. Likewise any information on any further actions by the EU in this regard. Working on an article for a computer magazine. tbt -- |Bruce Tober - octobersdad(a)crecon.demon.co.uk - B'ham, Eng| | Publisher/Editor of The Write Byte monthly newsletter | | WebSite address to come shortly | | TWB - The computer newsletter specifically for Writers |

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