December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

setting up an ecash shop
by sameer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

If you'd like to setup an ecash shop as a merchant, you can do it this week and have the $300 setup fee waived. (This is for the $5/month 2% movement fee account-- the most expensive one they have.) I setup my eshop(a)c2.org thing using the promotion. Information is at http://www.marktwain.com/promo.html (The $300 setup fee I think is outrageous, but at least this week you don't have to worry about it.) -- sameer Voice: 510-601-9777 Community ConneXion FAX: 510-601-9734 The Internet Privacy Provider Dialin: 510-658-6376 http://www.c2.org/ (or login as "guest") sameer(a)c2.org

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Re: [NOISE] Credit Card security in the New York Times
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:50 11/14/95 -0800, anonymous-remailer(a)shell.portal.com wrote: >On Mon, 13 Nov 1995, Nelson Minar wrote: > >> Today's New York Times has a nice article in the business section >> about credit card security on the Internet. It's more of an editorial >> than an article, but it's an editorial with the (IMNSHO) right spin: >> shipping a credit card number over the Internet, even unencrypted, is >> no less secure than giving it out over the phone. > >I haven't picked up the paper and looked at the article... > >If someone in the Business Section of the New York Times is writing as you >say -- writing that shipping a credit card number UNENCRYPTED over the >Internet is no less secure than giving it out over the phone, then we have >a SERIOUS communications/understanding gap to overcome. I did read the article. It said, "The truth is that sending a credit card number to an electronic merchant over the Internet is probably the safest way to make such a transaction. "In the last week, for example, I handed my credit card to a waiter who disappeared with it for five minutes. I faxed my credit card information to a business in New Jersey, and the fax probably lay exposed to everone in that office for hours and perhaps to the cleaning crew than night. ... "Yes, there is a risk that someone was tapping my telephone when I read my credit card number aloud or faxed it. [reminder about cell phones deleted] A spy might have snapped a picture of my credit card with a hidden camera when I handed it to the waiter. A hacker might have intercepted my numbers as they passed through an Internet router in Hackensack, N.J. " But compared with the risk of handing my credit card to a stranger, which I do nearly every day, sending it over the Internet is pretty secure. "The real reisk of sending my unencrypted number is not that some cyberspace cowboy will intercept it en route to the electronic merchant, but rather that the receiving company will store my credit information in an insecure computer. ... "My credit card number was probably among the 30,000 or so that were lifted last year from unsecured computers of Netcom ... "Willy Sutton did not myug individuals for their wallets; he robbed banks, because, as he noted, that's where the money was... "... The people who should be really nervous about electronic commerce are the banks, brokerage houses and those who do business-to-business transactions." In context, a much more reasonable view than the anonymous poster suggests. I add, that with an insurance policy (that you are forced to pay for) which broadly limits your risk to $50, you don't have to be all that carefull. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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CSE gets flak on TV
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Responding to msg by s1113645(a)tesla.cc.uottawa.ca () on Tue, 14 Nov 4:47 PM >For those who care, the Communications Security >Establishment has been getting some flak for spying on >Mex. during NAFTA talks and on Korea to help us sell >Can. nuke reactors: Here's a facet of the burgeoning counterspying, oops, biz-intel blathering, oops, globally competing, oops, leveling the playing field, oops, securing the econo-nation, oops, downsizing spies and X-spies and XX-ing spies and putting to pasture cud-chomping nincompoops of the Chomsky-contra-CIA golden-asses era: --------- The Wall Street Journal, November 14, 1995, p. A15. This Is the CEO -- Get Me the CIA [Op-Ed, excerpts] By Ernest Brod. (Mr. Brod is executive managing director of Kroll Associates, an international investigation, business intelligence and security frim based in New York.) While government policy makers ponder and debate [economic espionage] issues, U.S. companies are fighting the global competitiveness battle. In the past year U.S. companies have rushed to level the playing field with foreign competitors who have long exploited the advantage of competitor intelligence. For years, foreign-based multinationals have had teams of people devoted to learning as much as they could about their U.S. competitors. The methods ranged from in-depth research and analysis of publicly available information to covert and sometimes clumsy attempts at industrial espionage, in some cases with the active support of their government's intelligence agencies. Today, having had their consciousness raised by the global business realities of the '90s, U.S. companies in all industries are scrambling to set up units devoted to gathering strategic information about the competition. Teams can be found at both corporate and division levels; they may be multi-department or reside within planning, development, marketing, finance or international units. They may have euphemistic labels and they increasingly draw upon burgeoning numbers of outside private resources. In recent months, for example, my firm was asked to help determine: + Whether an Asian competitor will take advantage of the North American Free Trade Agreement to establish facilities in Mexico in order to supply the U.S. market. + How an overseas competitor with an apparently comparable cost base can consistently produce lower bids. + Who controls an overseas private company and how deep are their pockets. While the controversy continues over whether U.S. companies should be favored with government-sponsored industrial intelligence, managers are already employing legal and ethical research and investigative techniques to learn more about the methods, resources and plans of their marketplace adversaries. These forays may not be exciting, risky or glamorous enough for our battle-hardened spy masters, but they help American strategists win hard-fought ground from their adversaries.

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Hardware-random-bits interface
by Peter Monta 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've been thinking about physically random bits recently, so I'd like to offer a simple, easily implementable interface to a source of such bits, along with a design sketch using a common radio receiver chip as the noise source. The interface consists of two bits in the standard PC parallel port, one serving as the data line and the other the sampling clock. The parallel port, while a bit less universal than RS-232, eliminates the complexity of UARTs and clock generation and offers higher speed and friendlier local power. For an ISA bus running at 8 MHz, bits can be sampled at about 2.5 Mb/s, i.e., about 300 kB/s. (The bandwidth of the noise source should of course be consistent with this.) Another advantage of a simple device is that it can be thoroughly inspected: there is no PLD or microcontroller code to vet/trust. Not all parallel ports have bidirectional data registers, so the most general path is to assign a status bit to the input and use a control bit for the clock output. I'm using bit 4 of the status register (pin 13 on the PC's DB-25) as the input and bit 0 of the control register (pin 1) as the clock. Specifically, the rising edge of pin 1 should sample the noise waveform and present the result on pin 13. (Pin 1 is inverted, so bit 0 should transition from 1 to 0.) I'd also like to suggest a device name for the Unix environment, /dev/prandom, for "physically random". The intention is that the bits returned be as raw as possible, as close to the physics as possible, leaving any debiasing/hashing to other software (for example, the /dev/random implementation in recent Linux kernels). (I have a Linux device driver that implements this interface; it is very simple, needing only to sample the bits, pack them into bytes, and manage mutual exclusion, filesystem housekeeping, and probing.) Here are the particulars of the "dongle" board I'm in the process of making. Noise source: an FM/IF radio receiver chip, with no input supplied, so that the IF amplifier chain produces wideband noise at its output. I'm looking at the Motorola MC13158 and the Philips SA626. Each provides about 20 MHz of IF bandwidth, and the Motorola part has an on-chip comparator, reducing the entire device to two chips: the receiver chip and an HCMOS flip-flop. Power: from the port data lines; >=3.5V at about 20 mA is available. Device probing: the device should somehow identify itself as a random bit generator. One way to do this is to wire one of the parallel port data bits to a status line; for example, data bit 0 (pin 2) could be wired to status bit 5 (pin 12). Software can then twiddle the data bit and watch for the response. Cost: around $10 in parts, I guess. A rate of 300 kB/s will make a 600 MB one-time pad in an hour (assuming software is similarly fast). I'm wondering if any of the mail systems have convenient hooks to use pads (though it would not be difficult to write up). Suggestions welcome. I'll put the design on the Web once it's finished; replicating it should be pretty easy. People can also grab the device driver if they wish. Cheers, Peter Monta pmonta(a)qualcomm.com Qualcomm, Inc./Globalstar

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world smartcards..
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Responding to msg by msew+(a)andrew.cmu.edu (Martin C Sweitzer) on Tue, 14 Nov 3:51 PM >Anyone know what kind of encryption they will be >using... HP's web site at <http://www.hp.com> has more info on the cards and the related "international cryptographic platform" being crippled and begged and groveled to USG for export. Try the site's search feature for "encryption" to poke around HP's various products, where some of the crypto to be employed is cited, if hypocryptically.

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Re: NSA, ITAR, NCSA and plug-in hooks.
by Rev. Mark Grant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Tue, 14 Nov 1995, Raph Levien wrote: > I move we file a CJR on some suitable software with crypto hooks. If you want to get really warped, feel free to file a CJR for Privtool, it's a mail program with crypto hooks but no crypto, and has the added advantage of being written outside the US but still illegal to export, as far as I can tell (certainly it's now on the export-controlled section of c2.org) In fact, maybe I should file one myself, as it's a real pain to have to tell non-US users to get it from a non-US site rather than the 'official' distribution site at c2.org. Can non-US citizens do these things ? Mark

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Re: NSA, ITAR, NCSA and plug-in hooks.
by jimbell＠pacifier.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Scott Brickner <sjb(a)universe.digex.net> writes: >Jeff Barber writes: >>Does anyone know the ostensible justification for this? What section of >>the ITARs do they point to when they say "this is illegal"? I've perused >>an online copy of ITAR (no, I haven't read all of it -- I have other >>things I want to do this year :-), but I can't find a section that could >>be construed to support this contention. > >I think it's 121.1, Category XIII paragraph (b) item (5): >"Ancillary equipment specifically designed or modified for paragraphs (b) >(1), (2), (3), (4) and (5) of this category;" Question: What makes computers in general NOT describable by such a paragraph?!?

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Cypherpunk FAQ
by cassiel＠alpha.c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, I'm new to the list, so please don't flame me too badly if this is a dumb question. At least restrict the flames to private email where no one else can hear me scream. :> I downloaded the Cypherpunk FAQ from the Cypherpunk Website. When I decompressed it, all it contained were the words "Yoo hoo, anybody home?" Has the FAQ been corrupted or is this an in-joke? Also, the Privacy FAQ states it was written by L. Detweiler. Is this THE L. Detweiler? If so, why is it in the archives? Thanks for helping me out. Cassiel

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Get your own ITAR
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

1 703 875 6644. The kindly administrative assistant there will take your name and address and send you a hardcopy of the ITAR regulations. I don't know about overseas mailings. I also imagine you will have to wait until the current US budget stale-mate is resolved. (Thanks to digest-reader walt(a)osf.org for the phone number.) /r$

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Re: credit card conventional wisdom
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Detweiler writes: > the argument goes like this: secure credit card number uploading > schemes (such as in Netscape) are not important on the internet because > credit card numbers are already insecure. you give them to low-wage > workers all the time who might steal the number from you anyway. > there are a lot of fallacies with this. I find this to be a key > cypherpunk issue, and I hope others will agree to the point of > trying to attack this fallacy through letters to the editor, > debates, etc., because it seems to rationalize weak security. You're only reproducing half of the debate, which goes like this: Businesses/customers won't trust the Internet for commerce, because it's not perfectly secure. And then others go on to point out that businesses and consumers do business every day using commerce tools whose security features are weak to nonexistent. So, no, we don't have to "get the Internet ready for business" because it's already at least as secure as ordinary consumer transactions. This doesn't mean that it's not important to work on security, just that it's a useful direction for improvement, not a baseline requirement. Most consumer-level transactions are based on a general sort of trust-in-human-nature sort of policy, backed up by the knowledge that a single failed transaction (or even a constant low level of failed transactions, where failed == "didn't get paid but gave the stuff away") isn't likely to kill off a business or even make it unprofitable. Loss by theft or fraud can be thought of like any other sort of overhead - and it doesn't make sense (financially) to spend more to eliminate it than you'll recover by that elimination. Pursuing criminal or civil charges against a non-performing party is expensive - most people do it out of a sense of moral outrage, or because they want to maintain a public perception of unforgiveness, not because they really think they'll get back what they've expended in time, money, and opportunities lost for other (more profitable) pursuits. (see Axelrod on the Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments for the arguable game-theory C-punks cryptoanarchy relevance.) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMKlcz33YhjZY3fMNAQEAlwP7B+cP/IB1wZ0TeWwwoL5j9z4m5irIO9yV O5599i6fiJ2X3+HbJKGY0/aENs1Zq6kNPHo1I/HcjBhN3fazwelv5BV1dFfmnfUp lPA8DOTraM7qGse6JEpG+tyJa7bL4wadjDAlFVe4uPSxokw1gppBMkZa6pcwd3cX zQ7ammmgeQI= =ZZi9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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