December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

[NOISE] FIG_newt/on CIA
by Dave Del Torto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[ This came to me from someone at Apple, through our pal Stephan Somogyi ] [ ...another "your tax dollars hard at work" story... heh. --dave ] ................................. cut here ................................. There's an easter egg in the 2.0 Newton (MessagePad 120) which was "censored" by, yes, the CIA. Back in '94, one of the Newton software types make a trek to the (very) small town of Rachel, Nevada, which is located at the edge of a secret government airbase. The base, called "Area 51," is thought by UFO-enthusiasts to be filled with alien technology which the government is in the process of reverse engineering. Meanwhile, the government denies the very existence of the base, in spite of widespread media coverage ("Larry King Live from Area 51", etc.). We figured it'd be funny to put a reference to Area 51 in the Newton -- especially given the substantial overlap between conspiracy buffs and computer nerds. So, in the "Time Zones" application, contains a world map, we put an entry for Area 51 in its correct location. Later, we added a twist -- if the user picks Area 51 from the map, the icons in the datebook application take on an alien theme. Normally, meetings are represented by an icon of two people face-to-face, events are represented by a flag, etc., etc. But when Area 51 has been chosen, the icon for a meeting is a person facing an alien, the icon for an event is a flying saucer, a to-do task is represented by a robot, an so on. Okay, cute enough. Now cut to August 1995, when the 2.0 ROM has been declared final, seed units have been in customers' hands for a little while, and the release is just about ready to go. One of the seed units, it turns out, was sent to a cryptographer working for the CIA. When he found that Area 51 was listed at the correct latitude/longitude, he complained to Apple, demanding the removal of the easter egg and threatening to have his superiors take the issue to Spindler if necessary. In the end, Newton management caved in to the demand, and decided to pull the joke out of the system. But the ROM was already done -- so the feature was hidden by a software patch ("System Update") -- but this part of the patch can itself be removed, and "Area 51" returned to its rightful glory. Here's how to get the easter egg back: 1) Open the Extras drawer. 2) Switch the folder of the Extras drawer to "Storage". 3) Tap on the icon "Time Zones" and press the "Delete" button. Warning -- any cities you've added to your Newton will be lost. 4) Switch the folder of the extras drawer back to "Unfiled icons." 5) Tap on "Time Zones." You'll find that Area 51 is on the map -- just tap near Las Vegas and choose Area 51 from the popup. Now look at the icons in Dates. (To purge the aliens from your PDA, open the back and press reset).

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DC area cypherpunks physical meeting, January 27
by Pat Farrell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The next DC-area cypherpunks meeting will be Satyurday, January 27 at Digex Headquarters offices in Greenbelt MD from 3PM until 6PM. There was talk of obtaining a cypherpunk-related video to show as a social event after the meeting. More on that as details become available. For more information, agenda, directions, etc. see URL: http://www.isse.gmu.edu/~pfarrell/dccp/index.html Pat Pat Farrell Grad Student http://www.isse.gmu.edu/students/pfarrell Info. Systems & Software Engineering, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA PGP key available on homepage #include <standard.disclaimer>

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DES in real life
by Michael Froomkin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Recognizing that DES is not the best thing out there, but that it is better than RC40 and life is a series of cost/benefit tradeoffs and that there is a large installed base to interoperate with, I'd like your opinions on the following: 1) Suppose you are approached by a corporate client who believes that they can get export permission for DES (but nothing stronger, i.e. no 3DES). What kind of real-world, non-banking, applications is DES just too weak for today? In answering keep in mind that most US corporate clients are not too worried about the US government reading their email. Some do worry about foreign governments and many worry about competitors. [I've limited this to "non-banking" because banks seem to be gearing up for 3DES.] 2) How long before DES becomes generally unsuitable for (A) corporate (B) personal use [please keep the threat model on which this question is based in mind -- threats *other than* the US government wiretapping you]? 3) Do you have a view as to whether DES (A) will and (B) should be recertified next time the issue arises? A. Michael Froomkin | +1 (305) 284-4285; +1 (305) 284-6506 (fax) Associate Professor of Law | U. Miami School of Law | froomkin(a)law.miami.edu P.O. Box 248087 | http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin Coral Gables, FL 33124 USA | It's warm here.

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Re: Encryption and the 2nd Amendment
by Michael Froomkin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

IMHO the 2nd amendment argument is bunk. [I haven't seen the Wired article BTW, so this is just a general point.] The definition of crypto as arms was accomplished as an administrative convenience by an agency of the US govt. It is not a definition of constitutional significance. To oversimplify only a little bit, agencies don't get to define terms in the constitution -- and a good thing too, or they might try to define e.g. "speech" in some funny way. The issue is whether under any fair reading of the 2nd Am. you can read "arms" to include encryption. You might try to do this by "original intent" (except that I've never seen a shred of evidence for this). Or you might try to do it by arguing that the meaning of the term "arms" should change with the times and crypto fits the purposes (defending your home?) of the amendment. But this is a very tough argument to make, and I've never seen anyone try it. I suspect it is also bound to fail; indeed any interpretive system that would stretch the constitutional use of the word "arms" so wide as to fit crypto could equally well be used to exclude anything more advanced than muskets and early rifles... which probably explains why I know of no such arguments either. I must be posting some version of this every nine months or so. Each time I get hate mail. Let's make this an exception shall we? A. Michael Froomkin | +1 (305) 284-4285; +1 (305) 284-6506 (fax) Associate Professor of Law | U. Miami School of Law | froomkin(a)law.miami.edu P.O. Box 248087 | http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin Coral Gables, FL 33124 USA | It's warm here.

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re: CAPI signing
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:40 PM 1/18/96 -0600, Mike McNally wrote: > > A Microsoft person just responded via direct e-mail that they'll do > CAPI signing in the United States (the word "only" wasn't in there, > but that certainly was the implication). In order to get government approval of CAPI, Microsoft made concessions that we will doubtless find offensive. But once CAPI is in place and working, then those concessions can be taken back. CAPI is a good thing: It is sound design and it will open another front in the conflict. Once software is around that has crypto hooks in it, we can then deal with restrictions on CAPI modules using technical and political means. I expect that technical means will be effective and successful. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd(a)echeque.com

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Re: You want to read MY e-mail?
by llurch＠networking.stanford.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- bdavis(a)thepoint.net (Brian Davis) shared with the world: >On Sat, 20 Jan 1996, Scott Staedeli wrote: > >> from the Nando Times- >> >> DENVER (Jan 20, 1996 01:16 a.m. EST) -- A college student's request to look >> at the electronic mail of several high-profile state politicians got >> lawmakers' attention Friday. >> >> ... >> OK, if _I_ can't read your e-mail Mr. Legislator, why should you >> be able to read _mine_? > >The Colorado state legislature has nothing to do with federal wiretapping >laws and with federal laws relating to encryption. Mostly true. But state governments and state politicians have been naughty as well. Certain southern governors in the 50's and 60's spring immediately to mind. However, I think "an eye for an eye" is the wrong approach in the first place. There's an opportunity for education here, and progress. >Rather than the "government is inconsistent and bad" spin, why not >"Colorado legislators and the Colorado governor agree that privacy is >paramount in electronic communications. In opposing a request for >blanket access to their private electronic mail, they necessarily oppose >federal attempts to have access to all electronic mail, once again >showing that Washington is out of touch with the rest of the country. This is clever, but I don't think it works. There is a legitimate public interest here. Even if there's nothing incriminating in the email messages themselves, the questions of how much government business is conducted electronically, and how much non-government business (personal matters, political fund-raising) is conducted on publicly funded computers on government time are legitimate. Pertsonally, I'd be reluctant to peep into every message ever sent on a government computer -- it's too voyeuristic for my tastes. I'm especially thinking about that poor staffer who was grilled by the Whitewater Committee about one use of the word "bastard" in an unrelated email message to a friend that had been deleted years before. It doesn't seem right to grep for out-of-context soundbytes. Not that the new book "White House Email" isn't good for hours of entertainment. I'd like to see politicians put on official notice that all email on publicly owned computers is public property, though it would be hard to draw the line where politicians and political appointees end and the innocent line employee begins. If the politicians end up using crypto on government computers, great -- maybe they'd start to "get it." If the politicians want to open accounts with outside ISPs on their own (or their political party's) dime, great -- that's what a lot of other people on this list have had to do. Of course if some politician starts using an outside account for official business (and only then), then that account becomes fair game for public disclosure as well. It's a matter of ethics and accountability. Because politicians have not yet been put on official notice that this is the policy, though, I would not endorse making this policy retroactive and grepping all their email for dirt, unless the public has something like probable cause to do so. Next year, sure, it's all public record. Politicians should be educated that privacy without strong encryption is illusory anyway. Making a law that the public can't read their email simply isn't going to work. It's unenforceable. Sure it'll slow down the rate of public disclosure a bit. Still, some disgruntled ex-employee, or some Woodward & Bernstein type, or Jim Bell :-), is bound to get through. Scandals long to be free. >Parts of the federal government are catching on, however. The U.S. Commerce >Department recently agreed that federal attempts to >eavesdrop on electronic transmissions counterproductive in that they are >causing problems for U.S. companies which create computer programs >designed to allow secure use of the Internet to engage in private >discussions and secure commerce. Estimates the dollar value of exports >lost range up to $xxx, and continued chilling of U.S. programmers will >give foreign programmers the chance to catch up in a field where U.S. >expertise presently leads the world. ...." > >Needs to be re-written and juiced up, but you get the idea. Might play to the right crowd (for example, preaching to the choir here), but sounds like a non sequitur to me. Not that clever non sequiturs aren't useful. By the way, I read something about something similar happening in California. The new Republican Assembly "leadership" was trying to hold the computers of the previous Democtatic "leadership" in escrow so that they could look for dirt. Anyone know the outcome of that? - -rich - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBMQH7yioZzwIn1bdtAQHC/wF8DHUhQpWkNAE8bVHeB9zUbXG7ju2Y1+Bo LHsVK6M4Qwd8Q2HMbaMe2/y5xBpryyVh =A+29 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Encryption and the 2nd Amendment
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:39 PM 1/20/96, Michael Froomkin wrote: >IMHO the 2nd amendment argument is bunk. [I haven't seen the Wired >article BTW, so this is just a general point.] I haven't seen the "Wired" article either, as I no longer read it. I agree with Michael that an association of crypto with arms is a long reach, unsupported in anything I've seen in the Constitution or related papers. Moreover, any successful link made could be disastrous. After all, it is well-established--whether we like it or not--that the government can regulate and control access to hydrogen bombs, bazookas, nerve gases, grenades, fully-automatic weapons, and even various kinds of rifles and handguns. I would hate to see crypto truly classified as an armament (beyond what the ITARs say) and thus be subject to the same kinds of regulations as above. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. A much stronger claim can be made, I think, that crypto is a form of language or speech, clearly protected by the First Amendment. Thus, writing one's diary in an encrypted form (a common practice in colonial days, interestingly) is a form of language one uses. Thus, "Congress shall make no law..." about this speech or writing. That two people choose to converse in ROT-13 or in RSA or in their own private code is not something the government is authorized to interfere with. Ikewiselay, itingwray inlay igpay atinlay islay otectedpray. --Imtay Aymay 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: Wipe Swap File
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:38 PM 1/20/96, Dr. Dimitri Vulis wrote: >tallpaul(a)pipeline.com (tallpaul) writes: >> Remember that one simple wipe is *not* secure. Current Department of >> Defense security regs call for wiping the same space something like 8 or 9 >> times. Even then the wipe is not secure enough for higher level DofD >> classified material. There the regs call for the physical destruction of >> the medium after it has been wiped. > >Degaussing the media (running a household magnet over it :-) may be an option. Ordinary household magnets fail for a couple of reasons: 1. Their field strength is not high enough to affect modern media, due to the extremely high coercivity of modern media. (Try it out, you'll be surprised at hard it is to really change a lot of bits with a household magnet.) 2. Most "swap files," as used above, are of course on hard drives. Encased in metal. In any case, the nearest a household magnet can get to the surface is several centimeters. Unless the magnet is very large (such as the 20-pounder I have from my childhood days), the field strength will drop drastically in several centimeters. (Modern disk drives, and even modern videotape machines, use very high-coercivity coatings, including pure metal, and the heads must ride very close to the media to flip the domains. A magnet several centimeters away is effectively at infinity.) 3. A time-varying field is preferred. Bulk erasers work this way, by plugging into an a.c. socket and generating a time-varying field. And even these are getting harder to use to erase video tapes, for example, due to the high coercivity of modern media. Most folks I know no longer even try to bulk erase tapes. >1. Does anyone know a cheap way to recover the traces of the previous >(overwritten) recordings on the media? There are custom drives for various media which have multiple heads, and heads that can be "jogged" a little bit. This allows, I have read, the subtle variations of multiple writes to be extracted. Much more expensive would be various electron microscope-based imaging methods to directly image the domains and extract subtle signs of past write cycles. --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: A weakness in PGP signatures, and a suggested solution
by Brian C. Lane 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > In article <Pine.ULT.3.91.960110182255.18692H-100000@xdm011>, Jeffrey Goldberg <cc047(a)Cranfield.ac.uk> says: > > But then the recipient has a PGP-signed message from you which > isn't encrypted (using pgp -d). That person could then impersonate > you. Eg Alice the jilted lover could resend the goodbye message > with forged headers to Bob's new girlfriend to get back at him. Ah ha! Now I understand what this argument has been all about. This is not a flaw with PGP, but with the software doing the signing. It should/could add a line with a time and date stamp inside the signature envelope, or Bob could add more information, making the message more specific. I don't think PGP needs to be 'fixed', but the signing software does. Brian -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQB1AwUBMP0gGHIWObr6ZnuNAQFqpQMAhEDxcClXzwqS5QLSYgbGC0SdPwOSppgG cbEcHEamA+C/fzlCRl1FoCkvA/SPHoZB29FNJSH8hnP6s5OZQfFf3LZXPL+/UFiL 64i7dlt6Ajtg58eDiMj/+qPsHd8hbAuV =jj8n -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --- <blane(a)eskimo.com> -------------------- <http://www.eskimo.com/~blane> --- Embedded System Programmer, EET Student, Interactive Fiction author (RSN!) ============== 11 99 3D DB 63 4D 0B 22 15 DC 5A 12 71 DE EE 36 ============

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Re: Espionage-enabled Lotus notes.
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:38 AM 1/18/96 -0500, hallam(a)w3.org wrote: >The problem with this system is that it is quite likely to suceed. Unlike >Clipper which made unfettered access to encrypted material possible the escrowed >key strength reduction means that the FBI can tap a significant number of >locations, just not all of them. 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.) >It will be very hard to argue effectively against this idea in Congress. >Much harder than the Clipper chip which was dead on arrival. You may be right. They keep making outrageous demands, and "compromising" on less outrageous ones. Something prominently not mentioned in the article was "escrow agents" for the 24 bits of wiretap-support key; apparently foreigners don't get even that much due process. Nor was there a clarification of whether all the software has the same wiretap key (probable) or each copy has a different wiretap key (the Clipper model.) If it's just one key, then nobody's mail is safe. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 # # "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" used to mean us watching # the government, not the other way around....

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