December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Over-reacting?
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 11:22 PM 1/28/96 -0800, Alan Olsen wrote: >The reason for the killfiling is your habit of adding multiple additional >mailing list into the To: and cc: list. I have seen more than one post >where you have added a Libritarian list and the "Democracy Now Channel 2' >list into the fray, not to mention other individuals. THAT is why you are >getting the golden killfile, not your association with Jack "Acid" Hammer. >(Though that may help...) Hmmm.. It's odd that nobody has ever warned me of this before. (Another spoof?) That's why I'm using the term, "over-reacting." -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMQyDUvqHVDBboB2dAQFduAQAlas9DMaiatiYd51WKepEzLGPBWl4I9+2 FNOUzoQoy3OQ+wdk7lT1FFqvrDqSqviIj8MZ6j7/7ENO55W6D8AiN2fFXBbd3iY5 7krA13rTlx6N8ztvqE2+QY0/0RMtHZV6mLOR0SdbedOahUMc6/8qxF1auvJTxtJq 5qU3zS+71IQ= =9edM -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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CONTEST: Name That Program!
by Nathaniel Borenstein 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As you may have read in my previous message, First Virtual has developed and demonstrated a program that completely undermines all known schemes for using software-encrypted credit cards on the Internet. More details are avialable at http://www.fv.com/ccdanger. That was the easy part. The hard part, it turns out, is deciding what to call this program. We've kicked around a variety of names: -- Card Shark (because we call the general kind of program a "shark") -- Four Solutions (because we believe that FV is one of four known approaches to Internet commerce which avoid this attack) -- Predator (because a program like this is scary to think about!) -- Pickpocket (because that's vaguely analogous to what it does) -- Snoopy (because we thought it was cute) -- CyberCrash (no special reason, it just had a nice ring to it) In the end, we just couldn't decide. But we knew it needed a name, so we've decided to leave it up to the citizens of the Internet. For that reason, we're sponsoring a contest. We invite you to send your vote "nameit(a)fv.com". First Virtual will have sole discretion in selecting a winning name. If we select a name that is submitted by someone on the net, the FIRST person to submit it will be the winner. If we select one of the names given above, we will select at random from all the people who "vote" for that name. The winner will receive $1000 (US). Yes, we're really paying $1000 for the winning name! (If you have or want a First Virtual seller's account, we'll pay you through First Virtual, otherwise we'll mail you a check.) Twenty-five runners-up will be selected to receive First Virtual sweatshirts and other memorabilia. CONTEST RULES: All entries must be received by email to nameit(a)fv.com, on or before February 14, 1996. Please include all of the following: -- Your suggested name for our program. -- Your own name and postal mailing address -- Your shirt size (in case you're a runner-up) CONTEST DEADLINE: February 14, 1996 -------- Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb(a)fv.com> Chief Scientist, First Virtual Holdings FAQ & PGP key: nsb+faq(a)nsb.fv.com

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BAI_bcg
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

1-29-96. FinTim: "High street dinosaurs wake up. Online prospects are making the banking industry restive." Covers a new Bank Administration Institute/Boston Consulting Group report, "The Information Highway and Retail Banking." BAI_bcg ----- An FT reviewer of the KDM/TSU books writes that "Littman reveals how little divides the sheriffs of cyberspace from its outlaws. Shimomura resembles Mitnick more than he would like to admit. The big difference is that the computer expert on the right side of the law becomes a media celebrity, earns consultancy fees telling companies how to defend themselves, and has others pay his expenses and buy his equipment. The expert who does not inhabits a prison cell with six other men, and is reduced to writing pleas for help with a stub pencil."

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FV's Borenstein discovers keystroke capture programs! (pictures at 11!)
by dmacfarlane＠zip.sbi.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Is this the most transparent media attention grab or what? FV's "Chief Scientist" writes a killer application to destroy Internet commerce and it is really only a keystroke capture program with a bit of credit card number recognition code tacked on. I don't think this has any "implications for Internet commerce". If you run any number of virus protection programs on your computer, and you get your software from reliable sources, you never need worry about clandestine number snarfing. I readily admit that there is a larger issue about viruses and being able to trust your software, but the presentation from FV of this announcement as a "fatal flaw" in internet commerce is remarkably disingenuous. They are really saying, "We have the only safe approach" quietly between the lines. And before pm. says it, this has very little to do with cryptography. Skeptically yours, David Macfarlane.

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Re: The French do some things right...
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:01 PM 1/26/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote: >One thing I have been hoping for as America's scandal-fixated society asks >whether Bill inhaled, whether Rush has a mistress, whether Madonna's >grandmother is really shacked up with a 19-year-old musician...one thing I >have been hoping for is that the American public will say "Enough!" This is one I've never worried about. As I look around at work and see the disorderd personal lives and body piercings of my fellow workers, it is obvious that the amount of that sort of social control that is being applied is way down. And since fewer and fewer of us will have to (be able to) work for large soulless bureacracies as these things are ruthlessly downsized by the market, we will have much greater choice of employers. One would have to be really way out on one of the unfortunate tails of a bell curve distribution to be unable to find someone to work with. DCF

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The Lotus Position
by Timothy C. May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:03 AM 1/20/96, Bill Stewart wrote: >40-unknown-bit RC4 may take a week for an ICE workstation or a herd of >net-coordinated workstations, but it would be much faster to crack on >a specialized machine actually designed for RC4. I think Eric's estimate >was $25-50K for a machine that could do it in 15 minutes, built out of >programmable gate arrays. That's not $10,000/crack, or $584, but $0.25-.50. >Would they crack all the keys they wanted for a quarter each? Sure; >at that rate it's probably cheaper to crack them than read them >(though in reality they'd feed most of them to keyword scanners.) I take it as self-evidently true that NSA would spend the relatively small amount of money to build a dedicated key cracker...probably at least several for each major cipher. "In this room, where we used to have the famed acre of Crays, now we have tenth of an acre of superfast custom key crackers." (Yes, I know the Crays are used for other things besides key cracking. In fact, their main use probably is not for crypanalysis. Also, I'm not talking about cracking ciphers that are essentially uncrackable with any amount of compute power, I'm talking about cracking specific instances of ciphers with NSA-approved key lengths.) To consider just how _cheap_ such a dedicated machine is to them, consider that in the late 50s and early 60s they built the "Harvest" machine, in conjunction with IBM and based to some extent on IBM's "Stretch" machine, as I recall. (Bamford has a bunch of stuff on it, and our own Norm Hardy worked on it for IBM in the early 60s...he gave a good talk at a Cypherpunks meeting on how big it was, how much it cost, its capabilities, etc.) The Harvest machine, and its ancillary units, such as the world's largest and fastest tractor tape drive, cost something like $100 million in today's dollars, according to Norm and others. And Harvest was still running in 1975-6, when it was finally replaced by the Cray 1. NSA also funded the early efforts that later became Control Data Corporation (CDC), and NSA was a major customer of Seymour Cray's CDC 6600, and the later 7600 (and maybe even the ill-fated Star). NSA and AEC were also the early customers for the Cray-1, of course. This gives you some feel for what kind of expenditures "the Fort" is prepared to make when it sees the need. And the black budgets of other intelligence agencies, as described in Richelson's excellent books and other books (such as "Deep Black," an unauthorized history of the National Reconnaissance Organization), can only be described as "stupefyingly large." A surveillance satellite can run upwards of $1.5 billion, so spending a tiny fraction of that to decrypt what you've sniffed out of the airwaves is a gimme. The deep black budget is estimated to be something like $25 billion a year. Recall that the Wiretap Bill _alone_ provided for up to $500 million for compliance measures. Clearly the FBI somehow view their surveillance capabilities as being worth at least this much to them, and probably a lot more. Throw in the budgets for the DEA, IRS, FinCen, FBI, BATF, and all the other agencies fighting the Four Horsemen and the citizen-units who stray outside the drawn lines, and it's clear that NSA could budget several hundred million dollars *each and every year* for breaking its "approved ciphers." Like many, I take it for granted that 40-bit RC4 can be broken for "small change." Moreover, my guess is that foreign traffic is routinely cracked if it is encrypted. After all, it's the encrypted traffic that is likeliest to be interesting. (Sure, some dumbos like Pablo Escobar speak in the clear on cellphones, but the correlation is definitely in the direction of encrypted traffic being likelier than unencrypted traffic to contain interesting stuff. This will become even more the case as more people become educated and as crypto gets built into more things...this is the intelligence and law enforcement communities' worse nightmare.) A $25,000 machine. 4 cracks per hour, 100 per day, and 36,000 per year. Running for an active life of several years (before being replaced, of course, by something several times faster/cheaper), there you have the $0.25 per crack that Bill cites above. Even at 100 times this estimate, it's cheap. (Not for random vacuuming, but for anything targetted, even casually.) And think of what just a few percent of the "Harvest" budget buys you: 100 of these machines. Several million cracks per year. And from these cracks, think of the correlations, the contact lists, and the further targetting that can be done. [Sidebar: One thing that bothers me about any of these LEAF-related schemes--and I don't know if and how the Lotus scheme checks both ends for compliance, etc.--is that they are fundamentally at odds with remailers which hide the origin. If remailers are allowed to continue to exist, schemes involving LEAF fields won't work. Unless I've forgotten how these things work in the couple of years since I last looked at Clipper et. al. in depth. So, I expect a move against remailers as part of the campaign. And with no remailers, if this could ever be enforced, the ability to make contact lists based on random decryption is frightening.] Back to their 100 machines.... My guess is that they haven't even bothered to buy this many machines, that the intelligence they get from a few tens of thousands of cracks is more than enough to point to further leads, to trigger additional HUMINT, etc. But even if the estimates are off by orders of magnitude, we know that a 40-bit RC4 can be cracked in ~hours with ~hundreds of Sun-class machines. (Personally, I think it obvious the NSA has at least speeded up this work factor by at least a factor of ten.) This is also essentially a minor consideration compared to the amount of work done in ordinary wiretaps. And in a few years, 40-bit RC4 will be even more ludicrously weak. The Lotus position is untenable. --Tim May Boycott espionage-enabled software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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RE: FV Demonstrates Fatal Flaw in Software Encryption of Credi tCards
by David Van Wie 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This announcement describes a rather sophisticated technology that delivers nthe same information that any retail clerk can capture today. Using stolen credit card numbers is a risky business, and the ability of the credit card companies in detecting fraud and locating criminals is quite real. Of course, since Federal law requires the credit card companies, not the user, to pay the costs of fraud, First Virtual's entire premise is a red herring. If the credit card companies are willing to take the risk, they will (and are). Scare tactics are nothing new in the PR business, but I would recommend that the principals at FV learn about "cutouts" for this type of gimmickry if they wish to preserve their reputations.... dvw

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Re: FV Demonstrates Fatal Flaw in Software Encryption of Credit
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>There are many ways to spread it besides a virus. Zillions of 'em. And There are zillions (what, more than one thousand?) ways to get someone to run a random piece of software that will capture their keystrokes? I don't believe you. Name six. /r$

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Re: FV Demonstrates Fatal Flaw in Software Encryption of Credit Cards
by Rich Salz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>It's considerably more than that. Please read on. No, Nathaniel, it is not. You watch keystrokes and record the ones you're interested in. This technique has interesting possibilities, but all your PR screaming won't make it anything more than what it is. How interesting are these possibilities? It's hard to say. Don't run software you don't trust. Well, most of the people on this list probably already know that. I betcha a good-sized portion of the computer-using populace knows this, but actively (or passively) defers the choice to someone else. You must trust something. You folks trust the telephone (never gets tapped, right) the postal service (of course mail never gets stolen) banks or credit card companies (which never have problems). And then, on top of that foundation of sand you build a commerce system with MIME and SMTP (sendmail is the most bugfree program ever written). I used to think you were aggressive techies, now you're just greedy bastards who will seemingly stop at nothing; Stef's blatant attempts to ensure MIME's use in IETF-PAY was not an exception, but the first salvo. You make me sorry I invented safe-tcl and made FV possible. /r$

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Here's how you put your key on the keyservers...
by Ted Garrett 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I got a message in response to a request I made to someone for their public key. I wanted to check the signatures that they included with their posts to cypherpunks, but their key was not on the keyservers. The key they included was completely unsigned, and when I use it to validate their previous posts as well as the message they sent which included the key, the signatures come back as bad, the contents of the file changed. Names are appropriately withheld (I hope). As I understand the bcc: definition, only I and the first smtp server this message hits should know who it's to. I don't know if anyone else reading this mailing list needs this info, but just in case... here's my reply to the message. At 10:03 PM 1/28/96 -0800, you wrote: >Sorry, I'm a newbie to Internet, and also the Internet usage of PGP. I just >participated in a local keysigning meeting, so maybe my key will find its >way to a server. Don't worry about being a 'newbie'. Everyone starts somewhere. However, your key will usually not 'find its way' to a server without you specifically sending it. The keyserver I usually use is accessed by sending a mail message which fits the following format. As far as I know, all the keyservers use this format to add or update keys in their databases. You only have to send it to one keyserver, and it will propagate to all the others. I have indented the text so that no handlers decide to interpret it as a new message. - - To: pgp-public-keys(a)pgp.iastate.edu - - Subject: ADD - - - - -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- - - Version: 2.6.2 - - - - [key deleted to protect the innocent] - - - - -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- >I'm sorry to have to admit that I don't even know how to do this! Newbie >alert! If you don't admit you don't know something, nobody will usually tell you how to do it. Also, you should sign your own key. That will make it harder to forge, I think. The reasons were spelled out in a couple of the web pages I read, but I've forgotten them. It has something to do with either a denial of service attack or a man in the middle attack, or both. The command to do this is: pgp -ks 0xHEXKEYID Honestly, I've only just begun to use pgp myself. Also, you should add your e-mail address to the user-id of your key. The command to do so is: pgp -ke 0xHEXKEYID You will be asked if you wish to add a user id to the key. Say yes, and give it your e-mail address. What this does is it allows people who are using pgp-enabled mailers to directly encrypt messages to you without choosing your key manually. The reason that I have not encrypted this message to you using the key you provided is that when I extracted the key and re-checked your message, the signature was no good. I've found that (using eudora) I must turn off the word wrap feature of my mailer to allow for good signed messages out. Of course, having said this, I'll probably not get a good signature on this message. Let me know if it signs ok. Now, I have a question. Which attack(s) is/are a person vulnerable to when distributing an unsigned public key in the open? Could this actually be a complex man-in-the-middle attack? Am I paranoid? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBMQy/ds1+l8EKBK5FAQER8Af/SE1lTj3zcpm3ildFGO75zjZiJByZQi+3 LAkYgcHyBmtvhCTvyYCP2aMF4RjayrR3OHB85XthIA4sPmU0NDCVZYv7riSPjslp iBxUk92dO+BkP8nrTFgqCzR4qPqbOSmZxeovZI0PfQvbm99fG6Fc2kjhdKP7Aq+G cw4r0vvJY8JbqAuXftgZgndL9iGR/+xjfrpl+EWL3xtWzpIRfwMS5KMsR1UOf1ZA g9mlMEGLXy5KC/BwaupgTTwlSA/NOTv5mAY8+UWt9ydMWXBqNVt/yiGFsjg5UR1M CaT2D23pLAnWZ8M7yrjMamadkn2iLBqq4nhBNOGYHfZrGcbm/mhmxQ== =jGo3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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