December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: credential "borrowing"
by A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Did anybody see the movie Demolition Man? Biometrics were "hacked" >there. I guess it's hard to be sure, but it seems something in your >brain is tougher to extract than a finger or an eyeball. The texts say a >combination is a good idea. Well, for a well funded adversary, the first step is to buy a duplicate to the system to be subverted and analyze it. Usually is nnot difficult. Problem with biometrics is the cost/speed. To do it right is going to be slow/expensive. Few are. However the traditional rule has been "something you have/something you know" two factors are good, three are better. In that line, along with one of my primary tasks (securing of notebooks) have been warning people that if the information is valuable enough to require that level of protection then the user is put at added risk the same way that better automobile locks spawned carjackings. Duress codes are not difficult to impliment. BTW voted for Ed Clark once since "none of the above" was not an option. Spent the next year getting beg letters from various libertarian groups. Warmly, Padgett

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Re: China -- the fragile glimmer of freedom
by Bruce Baugh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:46 AM 2/17/96 -0800, Timothy May wrote: >Well, where are the posts from outraged Cypherpunks living in the People's >Republic of China? In many cases, exercising the prudence appropriate to people whose friends have been run over by tanks in recent years. In other cases, doing things in venues that happen not to cross this list. In much of China the central government is already a dead letter, with effective power being wielded at the municipial and provincial level. Friends of my family who do business in China report that the major question at this point is making sure that local military authorities don't decide to confiscate all the assets of prospering businesses. Part of this is very strong security for sensitive transactions. I can't know for sure, obviously, but I'd be unsurprised to find as many copies of PGP running in regions like Shanghai, Shenzen, and Guangzhou as there are in the United States. A lot of these folks don't have good net connectively, and won't for a long time. Some of them have it but are leery of posting critical stuff that will attract hostile attention. Others are, for all I know, protesting in relevant soc.culture groups and such places. It's very easy to develop an inflated sense of the importance of the forums one happens to belong to - Cypherpunks isn't all that widely known, and even though it is, or at least has been, an outstanding gathering of folks making crypto happen, there are other vectors for these things. >are in the so-called "Western world." We have a chance to deploy strong >crypto, the residents of Nepal and Singapore do not. As it happens, I _do_ know for a fact of at least one copy of PGP running in Nepal, in the hands of a agricultural broker. Tim, you're beyond your knowledge here. -- Bruce Baugh bruce(a)aracnet.com http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce

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Monthly Remailer Perfs, Prelims
by Bruce Baugh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm in the process of running what I guess will be my monthly series of remailer tests, where I send posts through a given remailer to a nym at c2 and then back through the remailer to me. While it'll be most of a week before I'm done, some preliminary observations. - armadillo and hroller are sorely missed. - remailer(a)valhalla.phoenix.net is, so I'm told, not a valid address. And I get a failure to find the host name at wmono(a)spook.alias.net. Anyone want to shed light on this? - performance is noticeably slower throughout. In January I routinely got messages back in five to ten minutes. Now the shortest round trip is about fifty minutes. Is the load on the remailers that much higher, or are other factors at work? -- Bruce Baugh bruce(a)aracnet.com http://www.aracnet.com/~bruce

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Re: Computer unmasks Anonymous writer...
by um＠c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>in the Mathematics Department took part in a statistical analysis of the >Letters of Junius, which appeared anonyously in the Morning Advertiser in >London in the early 1760s. They were ascribed to almost every writer of You can find some more information by searching for "stylometry" or "forensic stylometry" on the net, and probably more in libraries.

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Denver area meeting today, 2/18, 2 pm
by awestrop＠crl.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- The Usual Suspects will congregate today at the Tivoli, and may visit Majordomo's Net Cafe or other sites of interest. Anyone who's not hanging out with Steve Jackson, Larry Niven, et al, at the Lakewood Sheraton is welcome to drop by; send me a note if you need directions. N. B. -- The Tivoli was built in 1890 to brew Denver beer, Aspen beer, Tivoli beer, etc., and is NOT affiliated with IBM!$%#&@! :-) Alan Westrope PGP public key: http://www.nyx.net/~awestrop <awestrop(a)nyx.net> <awestrop(a)crl.com> PGP 0xB8359639: D6 89 74 03 77 C8 2D 43 7C CA 6D 57 29 25 69 23 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMSc0hFRRFMq4NZY5AQEvvAQAqPy2YsGsbjiLz2vWvB0RPvdpcURCytRS hgCNlbNdMIA5upDzIjhRW4YlkM73cfwl/PQBRy+maXNrNM1QYXVh4wh3khcJoRh1 kVPUNYycz3HaDIH/PFGojgzJXUFhcDhRvEtTsywfhkK8OvifnkFCXAOST8rrygip n+FYY4taFTc= =OhuU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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PUF_fup
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

2-18-96. NYT: "Nerds' Revenge: A How-To Manual. Silicon Valley Is Paved with Paper Fortunes, And Quick Ways To Enjoy them." A long look at how Netscapers are able to quickly get around stock locks and gorge on roadkills while predatory Wall Street and vulture banks eat their guts. Fancy cars and tacky houses are lampooned. "Internet Dreams: from $.10 to $30." A squint at creating instant wealth in the Cybercash puff-up. PUF_fup

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Style Analyzer (was Re: Computer unmasks Anonymous writer)
by Mark M. 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Since I got more e-mails asking for the "style faking" program then I expected, I have decided to put it on my homepage (mentioned in my .sig). I will try to compile it for DOS, but I don't know how system dependant it is. - --Mark =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= markm(a)voicenet.com | finger -l for PGP key 0xf9b22ba5 http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/ | bd24d08e3cbb53472054fa56002258d5 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBMSdJnbZc+sv5siulAQEVEgQAj4/HEorDRAHl8ncOfEYekRWo0/3a5357 FMQZn7ABpqxOXnVSAxlYeb84Y6yKg73gEeZUfbnn2LVCxBLr3lW5EeIpUgjI9AMt fXTA6ExqcIEk+5249YKx9h+9eHbV+8iK/fAzVzV5oHoTyCV0K8B+Lmx2hCtYZPyG fW2WSyW+ML8= =iQO+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Numbers don't lie...
by A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Have finally gotten around to reading the Jersey Seven paper on keylengths. Is rather amazing since if anything they are being conservative with some of their numbers - are using 30 Mhz for the FPGA where I have been using 40 & using 200 Mhz for ASICs where I would use 300 (year and a half ago I used 150mhz based on what I knew *had* been built, not what I knew X-ray lithography is capable of. In their figures, they do seem to gloss over a couple of minor points: The most compelling to me is "how do you know when you broke it ?". Bruce has always used the "known plaintext" approach, however using modern techniques for messaging, *every* message has a different session key, negotiated using assymetric keying so the only message that will be broken is one that you already have - not terribly helpful. The second point is that their scalability seems to be based on costs per chip alone, cost for which the engineering cost has been recovered and for which the yeild is significant, hardly givens when you are talking pushing the state of the art, given this 200 Mhz Pentiums would be U$10.00 also (well, maybe U$25.00). Finally, no cost is allocated to the sustem required to program/evaluate the ponderings of these 100's of ASICs. As anyone who has ever programmed a massively parallel computer (which is what they are talking about in their brute force machine, it is the boundary communications that kill you. True, each machine could operate on a specific portion of the keyspace with bits fixed as a function of its address, but each will need to be loaded with the plaintext to match and have some means to communicate success. You also have to consider that dividing the keyspace may result in some processors running slower than others due to the values used. Another minor problem in parallel processors. The cost is given of U$300,000 to build a SOA machine that could break DES in 3 hours. Using the 200 Mhz (2*10^8) figure and assuming 1 trial per clock (being nice), a single chip will test 2.2*10^12 keys in that period. 2^55 is otoa 3.6*10^16 so will require 16,680 thingies running in parallel. If they can get the chips for U$10, they will be able to allocate another whole U$10.00 per chip to the support structure and basic programming to stay inside the budget. Since this will hardly be a production process, I suspect that the cost might be a tad higher. Now often banking and EDI (as opposed to EC) does make the mistake of using the same key for more than one message. Similarly a firewall<>firewall connection might beep a single keyed channel open for multiple sessions. This would be at risk. But for individual messages. The paper does make an appropriate observation: the cost is essentially fixed per key (scaling is not perfect but can ignore that for the moment - has to do with why Crays are circular and Grace's "nanosecond"). This means that the strength of cryptography should be appropriate to the value of the information protected. If less than U$10,000, the message is individually encrypted, and has value only today, then DES is probably "good enough". Strategic information of higher value arguably needs "more" but how much ? 64 bits is 256 times stronger than DES. This would indicate effective security up to say U$2.5 million. More is better but I would not be quite so alarmist nor would I dismiss the cost of engineering. Non-trivial. Do agree that 40 bits is the same as no crypto at all (reminds me of Bob Clampett's "No Bikini Atoll" but is another hobby entirely). Still, at what point is it simply easier/cheaper to buy someone who knows the secret ? Warmly, Padgett ps calculation made with a Sharp EL-5806 "scientific" calculator that is probably older than some readers. If I dropped a digit, please let me know.

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Re: Some thoughts on the Chinese Net
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:38 PM 2/14/96 -0500, Perry wrote: >Jon Lasser writes: >> The more complex portion (from my perspective, at any rate) is a >> modification of the standard TCP/IP protocol, requiring that each packet >> be signed by its originating user. This would require lots of software >> modification on the Chinese end, as well as a conversion process at the >> National firewall. > >They could use no stock software, and they would grind every machine >in the country to its knees doing the signatures. RSA signatures >aren't cheap. Could you use IPv6 / IPSP authentication to do the job? You'd obviously need to create network software for the various operating systems, but for most of them it's not a big change and various well-known people are working on implementations :-) You could get by with something cheap like an RSA-signed key used for a MAC with either RC4 or MD5, reducing the problem to one RSA signature per connection plus faster algorithms. For email, that's probably still one signature per mail message, but it's a manageable load... #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com / billstewart(a)attmail.com +1-415-442-2215 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs Pager +1-408-787-1281 ! Frank Zappa for President !

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Re: PING packets illegal?
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:20 PM 2/14/96 -0500, markm@gak [cute machine name :-] wrote: >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >> Concerning the ITAR ...... what would happen if some Evil Hacker Dude in, >> say, England, decided to ICMP-ping a host in America? Nothing wrong with >> that ...... but if those ping packets contained little pieces of something >> like PGP ...... would the host being pinged be breaking the law? Would >> all the hosts in the route between that host and the host in England that >> was doing the ping also be breaking the law? > >Exporting encryption to the U.S. from another country is not illegal, only >exporting from the U.S. is. The method of transmissioni is irrelevant. It >does not matter if TCP packets or ICMP-ping packets are used to transmit the >data. You missed the fun part of his post - it's that ping packets return the data they were pinged with, so the US-end host is re-exporting components of PGP. >From a legal perspective, it's tough to assert that the US user had scienter, given that it pings scarcely reach the machine's consciousness, much less the human users', since they're handled by ICMP rather than by a user-space TCP or UDP socket. (Obviously, if there's a sniffer around this is slightly different.) Is it possible to send out forged ping packets, pinging machine B with a From address of C (fake) instead of A (real), so that Alice can talk to China via Bob? If so, it might be an interesting method for traversing some firewalls, and also (if you write a ping-collector program) for back-channel communications. If you want to really abuse the protocols, 53 bytes probably fits into the 64 you can send in a ping, so you could implement ATM-over-ICMP :-) #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com / billstewart(a)attmail.com +1-415-442-2215 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs Pager +1-408-787-1281 ! Frank Zappa for President !

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