December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: ANNOUNCE: December 9th: Bay Area Cypherpunks Meeting and Party
by Jonathan Zamick 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:32 PM 12/5/95, Eric Messick wrote: >Bay Area Cypherpunks Meeting and Party > >Saturday December 9th, 1995 > >What: Cypherpunks Meeting and Party >When: Saturday December 9th, 4pm - ??? >Who: You. >Where: Our dome in the Santa Cruz Mountains > >We'll be providing some drinks and snacks. Please feel free to bring >other consumables. Heh. I'm still sorry I'll be missing this. I'm sadly going to be up in Chicago that weekend getting ready for an internet security conference. Since, I'm CC:ing this to the list, is anyone else going to be at 'Securing Electronic Commerce on the Internet?' Thought it might be interesting to dive out for dinner some evening with a few other Cpunk. Jonathan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ..Jonathan Zamick Consensus Development Corporation.. ..<JonathanZ(a)consensus.com> 1563 Solano Ave, #355.. .. Berkeley, CA 94707-2116.. .. o510/559-1500 f510/559-1505.. ..Mosaic/WWW Home Page: .. .. Consensus Home Page ..

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Re: another fbi prosecution
by pcw＠access.digex.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:30 AM 12/5/95, Bob Bruen, MIT Lab for Nuclear Science wrote: > Dominick had his campus account taken away after other users complained > that he had been "advertising business proposals inappropriately on line." > The FBI alleges that he then sent 24,000 email messages in one day from a > commercial account (unamed) to Monmouth's system.. This denial of service > attack was successful for about 5 hours. He is facing six(6) years in prison > and a up to $350,000 in fines (1.20 years/hr and and $70,000/hr). > > His lawyer (Kenneth Weiner) claims that "even if his client sent the mail > bomb" since no damage was done to the system, he could not be convicted > under the computer fraud statute. He also claims that prosecutors are trying > to make an example of his client. The university is still trying to figure > out whether he can be punished under the university code of conduct. > If Monmouth college is like almost every other college I know, they routinely send out "mail bombs" to their alumni. That is, mass mailings sent through the postal service. Given that we've agreed to legitimize this behavior in the paper world, I can't see what's so wrong about doing it in the electronic world. Of course, he could have been spreading false advertising which would really be fraud. -Peter

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Clarinet News Articles #1 [POINTER]
by tallpaul＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The following news articles may be of interest to list subscribers: clari.news.censorship: Landmark First Amendment case 4 Dec 95, 12:00 clari.news.censorship: Donna Rice Fights Cybersmut 1 Dec 95, 21:01 clari.news.sex: Sponsor of cyberporn legislation 4 Dec 95, 14:20 clari.news.sex: Internet Smut Pact Reached 2 Dec 95, 07:10 --tallpaul(a)pipeline.com

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Re: towards a theory of reputation
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Scott Brickner <sjb(a)universe.digex.net> > > Hal writes: > >Changing the market conventions (say, by introducing escrow agencies) > >will change the weightings of the various factors that make up > >utility. If I no longer have to trust the honesty of the person I am > >trading with (because we have an escrow agency to help us make the > >exchange) then the importance of his reputation for honesty goes down. > >The result is that the "reputation" curves will change rather > >dynamically and unpredictably as we consider different possible > >structures in the market. This will make the analysis of them > >intractable, I would think. > > Analytically, using an escrow agent doesn't change the utility > function. It replaces the trading partner's honesty reputation > estimate with the escrow agent's (which is presumably higher, or why > use them?). This is just a parameter substitution. > > Whence comes the intractability? By the "utility function" I was referring to Wei's model in which each person has an idea of how much "utility" (a general summation of personal value and usefulness) they would get from another person, as a function of cost. The utility function takes cost as input and returns "utiles" (or whatever) as output. So, with this model, using an escrow agent would change the utility function; for a given cost, the utility of a person to me would change (say, if the person involved were thought to be dishonest, then the presence of escrow agents would make him more useful to me). The utility function in Wei's model is a curve where the Y axis is utility and the X axis is cost. Changing the importance of honesty will change the position and shape of this curve. I think it would be more tractable to have a model in which honesty played an explicit part. We might even make assumptions about the mathematical relationship between honesty and overall utility - for example, that utility to me would be monotonically increasing with increased honesty of the other guy. What I mean is something like this. Let t be the degree of trust necessary for a business relationship to be consummated. For t=0, no trust is needed, and the relationship is such that neither party takes any significant risk - a cash sale, perhaps. For t=1, in some sense total trust is needed, and a party can cheat the other with 100% safety. Now let h(t) be the honesty reputation of a person, so that the utility which people expect to receive from them gets multiplied by h(t). For a person with a repuation for honesty, h(t) is close to 1 for all t. For a person who seems dishonest, h(t) will go from 1 to 0 as t goes from 0 to 1. This is all pretty hand-wavy, but the idea would be to come up with good strategies to estimate h(t) from a person's behavior, and good ways to choose what kind of behavior one should follow given the value(s) of t which are prevalent in the market. This kind of analysis would lead you to focus on the importance of the amount of trust needed in a transaction. The underlying utility function is based on such traditional factors as productivity and reliability. It won't change as we consider the variables of our analysis, because we have factored out the honesty and trust issues so that they are more explicit. That's the kind of direction I was suggesting. Hal

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Re: The Newspaper sez J.Clark sez "Uncle Sam Needed for Net Security"
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:47 PM 12/5/95 MET, Andreas Bogk <andreas(a)artcom.de> wrote: > Bryce> To secure Net communications, the government will > Bryce> need to have access to private data exchanges using what is > Bryce> known as a key escrow security system, said Clark. He added > >Who was the guy who asked why "we" are mad at netscape? Well, I am >because of exactly this blatant lie. If you examine the grammar carefully, it's not a blatant lie, it's quite correct. If the government is going to "secure" (either using the definition of "obtain for oneself" or "tie down") Net communications, it will need to use some obnoxiously interfering technique, and so-called key-escrow is one way to do it. Alternatively, using the definition of "secure" as "protect", it will need to have access to private communications only through security systems such as _real_ escrow, in which some mutually trusted third party holds some assets until both parties have fulfilled the terms of the escrow contract. If you don't have a mutually trusted third party, or one party doesn't deliver an asset it's supposed to, or the other party doesn't play fair, then the transaction fails; making sure it succeeds or fails cleanly, and verifying the status of the transaction at any time, is the escrow agent's job. Government Access to Keys (GAK) is something radically different; the government agrees not to interfere with your communications if you deliver your keys to some other part of the government. There's no trusted third party (unless you trust the government), wiretap rules generally forbid verifying to the victim whether his communications are tapped or not, and the deal with the non-independent escrow agent allows the government to change the terms of the so-called escrow at any time, unlike a real escrow agreement. (In other words, it's a lie, a total crock, and absolutely UnAmerican, and there isn't even a House UnAmerican Activities Committee* to complain to :-) [ * Translation for you non-Americans; the term "UnAmerican" means "something the good honest people of this country disapprove of, like Communism and Socialism and maybe Communism and even occasionally Fascism in extreme cases and especially Communism (but certainly not things like racism or militarism or corrupt lying politicians)" The House UnAmerican Activities Committee was a committee of Congressmen who went around investigating anybody they didn't like and suspected of being Communist, or could accuse of being Communist if they didn't like them. They were most active during the 1950s and 1960s, and are fortunately gone by now.] #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0663 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 # Anybody notice that Microsoft's Wide Open Road ad has barbed-wire fences # on both sides of the road?

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Netscape Bug Bounty...
by Jeff Weinstein 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

FYI, since both the bounty and the particular bug have been discussed here... We are awarding Scott Weston $1000 for reporting the LiveScript history problem. The announcement should show up on our Bug Bounty winner's page by tomorrow. --Jeff Jeff Weinstein - Electronic Munitions Specialist Netscape Communication Corporation jsw(a)netscape.com - http://home.netscape.com/people/jsw Any opinions expressed above are mine.

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Re: NIST GAK export meeting, short version
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>_do control_. They hope that the pain of having multiple versions will be >so high that no vendor will bother, and all we'll have is crippled >software. >I think that the real key is for everyone, worldwide to insist on >both strong crypto and interoperability. Anything that uses cryptography absolutely and positively *must* support multiple cryptographic protocols. Tag every RPC, transaction, method invocation, what-have-you with some indicator that indicates not only "encrypted" but "encrypted via method 2". Allow customers to specify policy, at least via an environment variable such as NETSCAPE_SSL_PROTECTION=1,2,4 where the online documentation says 1 = 512bit RSA 2 = 256bit RSA 4 = Rot 13 Design open, extensible architectures with public registries and protocol descriptions. /r$

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[Political Noise?] Banking law changes proposed
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In regard to the following, I wonder if anyone knows if they're also proposing changes that will make banking secrecy more difficult? I know about the other proposals (Carribean treaty and all that), but this report isn't complete enough to tell if Greenspan and the other regulators are also suggesting things. -Allen -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (c) 1995 Copyright Nando.net (c) 1995 Associated Press WASHINGTON (Dec 5, 1995 - 16:57 EST) -- Foreign banks can expect greater scrutiny of their trading, auditing and other internal controls in the wake of the Daiwa and Barings Bank disasters, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and other regulators said Tuesday. Greenspan and others told a House Banking subcommittee that with the lightning quick movement of money around global computer networks, a breakdown in internal systems could cause losses that spill over into the broader financial system. [...] Greenspan and a top House Republican, Rep. Marge Roukema, R-N.J., supported stricter audit standards for banks. "We are considering a number of initiatives that may be implemented at an administrative level, especially with respect to internal and external controls," Greenspan told a House Banking subcommittee on financial institutions. [...] Roukema and the panel's leading Democrat, Rep. Bruce Vento, D-Minn., said they want the General Accounting Office to study the adequacy of a 1991 law aimed at improving U.S. supervision of foreign banks. Vento cited a string of international banking scandals in recent years, ranging from collapse of Barings Bank to the problems surrounding Bank of Credit and Commerce International, and said that the global supervision system suffers from "a serious problem." [...] Greenspan said international bank regulators are recognizing they must work together more closely to protect the integrity of the global banking system. Japan's Ministry of Finance drew heavy criticism in the Daiwa case for waiting six weeks before informing U.S. regulators about Daiwa's losses last summer.

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Secure versus ?
by solman＠MIT.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks to everybody who replied to my previous message. As most of you suspected, it turned out to be possible to break the permutations I was using. The reason why I have pursued this despite its non-intuitiveness is that the following well known protocol also seems to have the same property I claimed. Please tell me how a computationally unbounded adversary could defeat the following: (without active attack against which this immediatelly fails (i.e. it has to be combined with an authentication algorithm)). Please help me, this problem is totally driving me crazy! A VARIATION OF SHAMIR'S THREE PASS PROTOCOL SAFE FROM PASSIVE ATTACK BY A COMPUTATIONALLY UNBOUNDED ADVERSARY: Alice wants to send Bob a message. She is going to send her message a fraction of a bit of a time via the following protocol. Before hand: 1. Enumerate all the primes from 256 to 511. Call them N. 2. For each prime, enumerate all the numbers less than it that are also relatively prime to N-1. Call these E. 3. Number each pair of E and N. The algorithm can be divided into an inner loop and an outer loop. The outer loop calls the inner loop. Inner Loop: Alice wants to use the inner loop to send bit b. 1. Alice randomly chooses seven bits of salt, and prepends b to them creating an 8 bit M 2. Alice randomly chooses an (Na,Ea) pair from the list of possibilities. 3. Alice calculates D such that E*D mod (N-1) equals 1 4. Bob randomly chooses an (Nb,Eb) pair from the list of possibilities. 5. Bob calculates D 6. Alice sends Bob the nine bit number (M^Ea) mod Na = C1 7. Bob sends Alice (C1^Eb) mod Nb = C2 8. Alice sends Bob (C2^Da) mod Na = C3 9. Bob calculates (C3^Db) mod Nb = M, the bit being the MSB. The unbounded passive adversary calculates a probability (p) between 0.5 and one with which he/she can guess the bit. This is based on the facts that 1. only a fraction of all pairs of Na and Ea will map C2 to C3, 2. only a fraction of all pairs of Nb and Eb will map C1 to C2, 3. only a fraction of all Na are high enough to produce C1. With thousands of transform pairs, there are more bits of entropy in the transform and salt selection, than there is information in the three messages. Alice, Bob and Eve can thus know what p is. Outer Loop: 1. Alice sends Bob an initialization vector using the inner loop. 2. Alice uses the inner loop to send Bob a series of bits. Each bit is either a random bit or the next bit of the message depending what the value of p for the previous inner loop was. A simple proper (but VERY INEFFICIENT) outer loop algorithm would be the following: Alice: 1. If the p for the previous inner loop was 0.5, send the XOR of the message and the previously sent bit. 2. If the p for the previous message was not 0.5, send a random bit. Bob: 1. If the p for the previous message was 0.5, take the bit, XOR with the previous bit, and append it to the message. 2. Otherwise just save the bit for one more itteration. PLEASE help me. I CAN'T find how this fails to be information-theoretically secure, but I am convinced that it should not be possible to do this, and I have been absolutely unproductive at anything since I first started working on this. Cheers, Jason W. Solinsky

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Re: French crypto restricti
by Joe Tardo 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Reply to: RE>>French crypto restrictions - update ? Would this imply that Netscape supplied source code to SCSSI? From: Laurent Demailly > Yes Netscape got the authorisation to sell Netscape navigator in > France (40 bits) but there is no policy changes or whatever, it is > still a tedious product by product process to get auth for crypto and

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