December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

eternity economics (Re: (eternity) Eternity as a secure filesystem/backup medium (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 21:40:28 GMT > From: Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> > Subject: eternity economics (Re: (eternity) Eternity as a secure filesystem/backup medium > Eternity helps here in that it obscures the poster's identity, and > reduces their exposure in that they personally don't have to send as > many messages. Eternity also helps ensure continued availability, at > least while somebody is funding that availability. True enough, the question becomes who does that continued funding help the most? > Releasing the data themselves is problematic. They may not wish to > accept the risk. Eternity provides a way to pay someone else to take > the risks in ensuring availability. Really? What is the difference? Mallet attacks the server itself who has only the resources available from the source, which I believe can assume safely, which is obviously less than the resource set of those who could actualy act upon or impliment the data under discussion. > The users is getting value for money from the eternity servers -- the > eternity server is providing the service of risk taking. Yes, at bargain basement prices that allow, if not even promote, a daddy warbucks to walk in and up the ante above what the source can pay. No, the source payment mechanism does not promote either server honesty or long term existance of controversial data. We're going round and round here, as I said earlier the views are diametricaly opposite. I would suggest we drop this discussion and let us see what happens over the next few years as it is clear that many people are working on different implimentations. Let's let the market decide which works best. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Re: how to release code if the programmer is a target for (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 15:15:22 -0600 (CST) > From: "Uhh...this is Joe [Randall Farmer]" <rfarmer(a)HiWAAY.net> > Subject: Re: how to release code if the programmer is a target for (fwd) > > Where does this random user come from? > > Why does it matter? As long as she's competent enough to choose good verifiers > and verify that those verifiers verified the code in question, it all works out > in the end. Because whether she is a honest user or one who is intent on subverting the system is relevant and must be taken into account. > We don't. There is no way to operate without *some* trust; I disagree. I believe it is possible to create a system which is secure and provably so, irrespective of something as nebulous as 'trust'. > Might be, but this code has to be more than just understood -- it must be > painstakingly checked for subtle flaws and bugs. Welcome to the world of > adversarial quality control. Been there it's part of what I do for a living, it's fun. > > Which doesn't effect the ability of Mallet to resign that code at the users > > end in order to break the users local security. > > Unless you're exposing a new weakness in the trust model PGP uses, Mallet can't > do that, providing the user has done good key authentication and hasn't listed > one of Mallet's goons as a trusted code-verifier. This is true if Mallet is attacking the key system, it is not strictly true if Mallet is attacking a specific user. > Yup, that's why the user has to check it by hand. Then the Eternity model is doomed to fail. 90%+ of users who might want to use a data haven model don't have a clue as to how it works or how to actualy check it. > Well, if you can't verify it yourself and you can't trust other people to > verify it, my advice is to give up; you cannot be sure of *any* public keys I disagree, though I am not able to prove it at this time. > keys; any sig you check might be signed by one of Mallet's keys. My point exactly. As with Adam, it feels like we are beginning to go around and around with nothing new to add. I would suggest that we drop the issue for the moment and come back to it at a later time with a little more reflection. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Re: Signed document - a thought... (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 21:06:28 GMT > From: Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> > Subject: Re: Signed document - a thought... > Sounds like you are describing something which is a variant of an > interlock protocol. The idea of an interlock protocol is that you > send out first a hash of what you are intending to publish. > > The MITM has a problem in deciding what to publish, because they have > to publish _a_ hash, but they don't know what it should be of. Exactly. I hadn't heard of the term 'interlock protocol', thanks for the tip. I'll look into it some more. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Re: let's do it: NYT ad with hash of fingerprints (fwd)
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim Choate wrote: >This doesn't provide the same sort of protection the original full page ad >is supposed to provide. That full page ad will be accessible as a reference >a hundred years from now in just about every library in the country. The >link to a webpage won't be. Printed ads are sometimes not archived as widely as news articles, due to the cost of reproduction, distribution and storage. The same is true, though, of personals and other types of throwaways. One possibility is to buy an ad on the NYT Front Page which is often sent as an image around the world separately from the full paper, and on which one can buy a tiny ad for about $800 for two lines of text 32 characters long (ID must be included). That's the rate for a one-timer. Adam, could you reduce the requisite gob to fit 64 characters? Each extra line runs about $300. However, bear in mind that a news article is cheaper and will be archived for eternity (until Asteroid Endall); cheaper, that is, if you can pukedrunk a reviler.

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Re: let's do it: NYT ad with hash of fingerprints (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 20:04:40 -0500 > From: John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> > Subject: Re: let's do it: NYT ad with hash of fingerprints (fwd) > Printed ads are sometimes not archived as widely as news articles, due > to the cost of reproduction, distribution and storage. My experience with libraries is that they subscribe to the entire paper. Place it in their archives and then at some time in the future micro-fiche the whole paper. I have never seen a library that picked and chose what got archived in their paper morgue's. I have done research on newspapers going all the way back to the civil war, I have yet to find one that wasn't archived in toto, ads and all. > The same is true, though, of personals and other types of throwaways. True but the point was that the data these short ads point to is *not* archived by the same entity or necessarily any entity. Is your webpage being archived by your local library? I be the New York Times is. > Adam, could you reduce the requisite gob to fit 64 characters? Each extra > line runs about $300. Your going to compress 100 cypherpunks 64-bit keys (I prefer 128-bit) down to 64 characters without data loss? I wanna see *that* compression algorithm. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Onion routing
by ulf＠fitug.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To protect against timing analysis, Onion routing uses encrypted and padded links, and the connection between the user and his local onion router is assumed to be secure. Obviously, padding offers protection against external adversaries only. The onion routers themselves know when an anonymous connection is opened, how much data is transferred, and when it is closed. So in contrast to the mix net (where it is sufficient to use one honest mix in a chain), honest onion routers that are used between two cooperating onion routers do not offer additional protection. Onion routers have a fixed number of neighbours. If the first onion router does not have any honest neighbours, there is no anonymity. Generally, the maximal connected component of honest onion routers forms the anonymity set. Does that mean that every onion router needs to maintain many encrypted links, or is there a more efficient solution?

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NTY compression proposal
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, It has been proposed to compress the keys from 100 cypherpunks down to a 64 character add in the NYT. Let's consider the math a moment to determine if this is realizable. Each key will require some sort of identifier, to make it simple lets assume 8 characters to identify the cypherpunks and 8 bytes to represent their key (64-bits). This mean that each line will contain 16 bytes. With a hundred entries that is 1600 bytes or 12800 bits. Now 64 characters of text in a newspaper represents approx. 64 6-bit characters (we can't use a full 8-bit because the paper doesn't normaly support that many characters in normal text). This provides us with 384 bits. The proposal leads to a requirement for an algorithm with an average compression factor of: 12800/384 or 33.33:1 with no data loss. That's a pretty hefty compression factor for average responce. Is there a loss-less algorithm which provides this level? ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Barry Smith (FBI) to speak on encryption policy
by Dr. Alan Sherman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The UMBC Security Technology Research Group presents A Law-Enforcement Perspective on Encryption Policy Barry Smith Supervisory Special Agent, FBI moderated by journalist Peter Wayner 3:30pm - 5:00pm Friday, March 6, 1998 Lecture Hall V (LOCATION SUBJECT TO CHANGE) University of Maryland, Baltimore County http://www.cs.umbc.edu/events/spring98/crypto.shtml The second lecture and discussion in a two-part forum on encryption policy. Journalist Peter Wayner will introduce and moderate the event, which is free and open to the public. In Part I, freedom activist John Gilmore and Fritz Fielding (Ex-Associate General Councel, NSA) gave their divergent views, focusing on the Burnstein case. Barry Smith will articulate the needs of law enforcement to conduct lawful wiretaps; he will advocate the use of key-recovery techniques to achieve this end as a way that provides adequate privacy to law-abiding citizens. Schedule: The event will begin with a brief (10 minute) introduction by Peter Wayner. Following Barry Smith's talk, which will last approximately 45 minutes, there will be an opportunity to ask questions for approximately 20-30 minutes. Questions: Attendees are encouraged to ask questions in advance by sending email to sherman(a)cs.umbc.edu Directions: Take Exit #47B off interstate I-95 and follow signs to UMBC. LH V is on the 100-level of the Engineering Computer Science (ECS) Building, directly behind the University Center. There is a visitor's parking lot near the I-95 entrance to UMBC. Host: Dr. Alan T. Sherman Associate Professor, Computer Science sherman(a)cs.umbc.edu http://www.umbc.edu (410) 455-2666 This event is held in cooperation with the UMBC Intellectual Sports Council Honors College Phi Beta Kappa honors society CMSC Council of Majors IFSM Council of Majors

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movie "good will hunting"
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

highly recommend this movie, "good will hunting". excellent script that will leave you startled at times. plot is that a young kid from a very rough background who is a janitor at MIT seems to be a math genius possibly on the level of Ramanujan. reason I am posting here: there's a really great rant by the character at one point as he sits in an office with an NSA rep and a medal-laced general and insults them about a job offer in the agency to work under classified conditions. the NSA rep offers him math research into state of the art theory but requires that the work be classified. I think there is a line about how the NSA has 7 times the budget of the CIA but they don't like to make that well known. (one might say it was sort of a rant on the morality of confidentiality. <g>) if anyone would care to tape this and post a transcript I think it would be very interesting to other cpunks. its a rare reference to NSA in the popular media. of course not on the level of "sneakers" as far as crypto references, but an interesting snippet nonetheless, and I think that some people here might identify a lot with the protagonist.

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Re: CAD Stego (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 21:37:28 -0500 > From: John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> > Subject: Re: CAD Stego (fwd) > Why the focus on color, the easiest thing to avoid using, > or layers, ditto? Superfluous for serious CAD, these > dainty decorations from Martha Stewartville. The reason I addressed them is that they were what you brought up. Those dainty decorations are critical to every industrial use of CAD that I have ever been exposed to or used in an industrial setting. I'll have to disagree with your opinion on their utility. > Most messages could be concealed in "hatched" objects, > bit-bloated as they are, indistinguishable from the elements > used to hatch. All black and white; maybe a dot of red for > cashmere dupe. Ok, let's address hatching from the perspective of use as a means to encrypt data. Let's further use AutoCAD since it is by far the most used in industrial settings. I think you will find that most other CAD programs use one or more of the methods in AutoCAD. AutoCAD offers a standard set of hatching objects via the HATCH and BHATCH commands. In both cases the actual hatch patterns are 1-bit patterns meant to be tiled. The HATCH command itself is normaly used for gross backgrounds and such because it doesn't respect object boundaries. The BHATCH command does respect object boundaries and is used much more in industrial and machine drafting. In both cases the color of both the background and line color must be specified. The hatching pattern is then simply tiled across the appropriate area. It is possible to add other non-standard hatch patterns but again, they are 1-bit deep and tend to be regular so there isn't a lot of room to put data. It is possible to include AutoLisp routines to do such hashing but I fail to see how one would stego encrypted data in source code describing how to draw the pattern. There are two means to store reference to those patterns in a file. The first is simply to include a pointer to a standard table of hash patterns that every copy of the program will understand. I suspect that there isn't much room there for stego. Now if we extend the standard hash table we are required to include those hash patterns in our file and suitable coding to tell the foreign program to include them appropriately. I don't see a lot of room there for stego. The alternate is to include the actual hash pattern in the file specificaly not linked to the hash table, in other words an indpendant object we will manipulate through normal mechanisms. While I will agree that if you could guarantee that Mallet didn't actualy view the file as a graphic but rather as a file via some sort of character editor (eg od -c or od -h as the simplest) there isn't much room for getting caught. However, if you were to bring it up as a graphic and view it you find the actual hash pattern is limited because it can be of only a particular size for the hashing display and handling routines to handle. CAD programs at their basest level understand a limited set of objects; coordinate pairs, sets of such pairs for drawing lines, and color. Other geometric objects (eg circles or hatches) are usualy built up through some sort of algorithmic application of these basic objects. In the better CAD programs those objects are routines that are shared as standard functions in the program or through a cookie-cutter mechanism. The way new functions are added is to add some form of PDL (eg AutoLisp) function. The cookie-cutter mechanism usualy is limited by the 1-bit depth and the limited size of the patterns. Let's look at the mechanism that most CAD and graphics programs use for color manipulation. In very few programs that I have ever come across are the colors of each pixel actualy represented by some depth that allows the full range of colors for every pixel. In general some color map mechanism that takes a limited set of colors (usualy arrayed in a table) and allows the program to select a given color from that table. Such special effects as color cycling are created by writing a program that dynamicaly changes the color stored in each member of that table. This is very fast and allows every pixel for a given color to change in concert instead of the delay of having to go to every pixel and test its color and then change it; very slow. The way that most programs allow more colors than allowed by a given color table is they create some sort of interrupt for each line of the dispaly when the display gets a retrace pulse. When this pulse happens (on a 1024 x 768 it occurs every 1/768 seconds - a long time by computer standards) a routine changes the color map to the one appropriate for that line of the display. Some higher performance displays use a d/a mechanism so that each pixel on the display is addressible. These sorts of displays allow the color map to be changed for each pixel but they are very expensive in hardware and list price, both tend to limit the applicability to commen stego exchange outside a limited group. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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