December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: [NOISE] Credit Card security in the New York Times
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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. Once in a blue moon, I might pick up the International Herald Tribune, but only on the rarest of rare circumstances, but this worries me. And it really should worry everyone who might have some interest in harm reduction. 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. It seems like not only the NY Times, but the "You Will" folk at AT&T don't quite "get" it. (The AT&T swipe, is for the idjit that sent me email on postcard via bucket brigade, and then asked me to please keep it "private".) A simple understanding is necessary if we're going to use this snazzy new technology, and not kill the goose that lays the golden egg. An understanding that the NY Times, or its *experts* don't seem to have. A telephone connection goes from one point to another. It's like a football pass. An internet connection is different, it's like an old fashioned bucket brigade. Now, if you were to write a message on a football, and throw it, while their is a "risk" of inteception you can be reasonably certain that the message on the ball will be "reasonably" safe while flying through the air. This is the phone call "football" analogy.. The net however does not establish a direct connection like a telephone call. It works like the old "bucket brigade" of volunteer fire departments. Your message is handed off -- handed to the next person in a chain, who then hands it to the next, and so on. Your "message" (or credit card number) is effectively written on a postcard and passed around from person to person, before it gets to your final destination. This makes it completely different than the telephone call. Orders of magnitude different. So here's the question ... and here's the comparison. Would you, if you were in New York, buy something with your credit card using the following payment method. Would you, write your credit card number on the back of a postcard, and leave it with your neighbour, with instructions to give to the doorman, who's supposed to flag a cabbie and tell him to take it to a building, to then give it to another doorman, who will leave it with the business next door to give to the person or business that you want to have your credit card number?? Why not?? Does this strike any reader as something really silly?? Because, this is actually the way the Internet works. This is exactly how any message, whether its your email, or your credit card number gets from Point A to Point B. A message that is going from one computer, even to one just down the block, might end up going through twenty or third "hands" before being delivered. This is what makes the Internet rather unsafe, far more unsafe than a telephone call. And this lack of understanding, the lack of understanding in the press is what makes the Internet even unsafer. It is people being very cavalier. Many people trust the NY Times to "get it right", then again, the investor also trusts that these companies actually know what they're doing. The public deserves better. > The NYT has been doing a nice job covering computer issues in the past > few months, in the Monday's business section. Worth reading if you > want to keep an eye on intelligent media coverage of the net. If this is the "intelligent media coverage", then how on earth are they going to be able to cover "taking down" the Internet for some repairs?? And how are they gonna cover the inevitable, Internet crime of the century? Alice de 'nonymous ... ...just another one of those... ...hunters... P.S. This post is in the public domain. C. S. U. M. O. C. L. U. N. E.

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Re: NSA, ITAR, NCSA and plug-in hooks.
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As I said in my original message about Pegasus: The NSA consider this kind of thing "crypto with a hole" It's stupid, the hole is the crypto. But, the rest of the code is considered by the Agency to be an "ancilliary device" as defined under ITAR.

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Repeated Words/characters in Password/Phrase
by Ted Cabeen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Do repeated words in a PGP passphrase make the pass phrase less secure than a passphrase without any repeated words? And on the same note, do repeated letters in a UNIX password make that password easier to break? I can't seem to find anything in my books on cryptography that mention this. Thanks. _____________________________________________________________________________ Ted Cabeen cabeen(a)netcom.com Finger for PGP Public Key secabeen(a)midway.uchicago.edu "I have taken all knowledge to be my province." cococabeen(a)aol.com

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Good Enough?
by Kevin L Prigge 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

We're looking at providing good tools for digital signatures on e-mail here, for users that are interested. We plan to make available PGP public keys in the student/staff X.500 directory, with suitable tools for retrieving keys, etc. A couple questions have come up that make me wonder what would be an acceptable service, at least given the environment that we have to work with. The first question has to do with key generation. One of the managers was of the opinion that we could do the key generation for the user, and either email or otherwise make the private key available to the user. The idea is to make it easy for the user to create their keys by providing a web interface, etc. BTW, we're running Netscapes Commerce server so we could expect at least 40 bits of protection (big deal, I know) on the passphrase transmission. The good enough part is due to the idea that we're running a couple of large multi- user machines, with all the risks those entail. Note also that we would not be keeping logs or otherwise compromising the keys ourselves, this would strictly be a user-friendly way to get people using signatures. We would also accept keys that users create themselves, this would only be one option. Second, the web of trust might also be useful, so we could sign users keys to certify them. Has anyone worked in an organization of some sort that has a structured approach to key certification using PGP? This is just in the preliminary talking stages at this point, but I thought I'd toss these 2 ideas out for comments to see what people here think. -- Kevin L. Prigge |"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster UofM Central Computing | than any invention in human history--with the email: klp(a)cis.umn.edu | possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." 01001101100010110010111|- Mitch Ratcliffe

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data compression
by Dan Harmon 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Does any one have any information about or pointers to the data compression alogrithms used by Colorado Systems and/or any other QIC backup vendors? Thanks, Dan

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unsuscribe
by charles＠europages.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

unsuscribe

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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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