December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Duress
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 2:14 PM 3/4/96 -0500, jf_avon(a)citenet.net (Jean-Francois Avon (JFA Technologies, QC, wrote: >The transponder analogy might not be very accurate. > >When you fly in a controled airspace, the *controller* asks you to >dial in certain digits on the transponder. The analogy may be reaching its elastic limit although you can use those transponder codes when flying VFR, not in radio contact. What I really wanted to suggest is that we try to design (when we can) to minimize the possibility of bad things happening to people who use duress codes. Regards - Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | dead teenagers | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

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Bombings, Surveillance, and Free Societies
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The recent bombings and similar events in public places in Israel (Hamas), England (IRA), Japan (subway gas attack), and the U.S. (Oklahoma City) are triggering calls for increased communications surveillance. Often the first bombing is insufficient to trigger increased steps...but later events push states to take stronger steps. (In the U.S., for example, the OKC bombing was headline news for more than a week, but resulted in no lasting changes affecting most of us, despite the hysteria about the need to outlaw "militias" and "white supremacist" groups. A second or third such bombing would likely produce new legislation of a serious sort. This is the thrust of my article.) Revolutionary theory says of course that this increased clampdown is a desired effect of terrorist bombings and attacks. Fear and doubt. Revolutionary ends rarely happen by slow, incremental movement. Hundreds of examples, from the original "bomb-throwing anarchists" to the modern mix of terrorist bands. The Red Brigade in Italy sought a fascist crackdown, and the "strategy of tension" is common. (And even revolutionists of crypto anarchist persuasion often think laws like the CDA are good in the long run, by undermining respect for authority and triggering more extreme reactions....) CNN is reporting that U.S. intelligence agencies will share technology for communications intercepts with the Israelis (more so than they already have been doing. Maybe the "U.S.S. Liberty" will be anchored off of Haifa on a permanent basis. The implications for cryptography? -- expect increased support for a "New World Order" to restrict non-governmental access to strong crypto (via key escrow measures) -- expect the various laws about "talking about explosives on the Net" to be used to clamp down on various fringe groups -- expect "national security" to become a bigger part of the political debate -- expect more and bigger bombings, as the groups thinking about bombings see how productive they are in accomplishing policy goals (such as ending peace talks, triggering police state actions, etc.) The inescapable fact is that free societies have numerous "soft targets" than cannot be defended against such bombing attacks. Various public places are "Schelling points" for attacks: crowded streets in Bogota, Tel Aviv, New York, London, Paris. Ditto for subways, buses, government buildings, sports arenas, etc. (The 99+% of us who are not in these areas at any given time are pretty safe, actually.) I predict that it will take about 5 more major bombings in European and American cities to trigger substantive changes in laws. If we look at how easily the Communiations Decency Act (and the Wiretap Act, and similar laws) sailed through Congress, I foresee serious terrorist activity as triggering far-reaching restrictions on communications privacy, on non-governmental use of encryption, and on what may be talked about openly on the Net. (Yes, I'm aware that there's a thing called the "First Amendment," lest you lawyers point out to me that such prior restraints will never fly. Well, how has the First Amendment stopped the government from restricting what I can say about medicine, what abortion advice I can give, the "dirty words" I choose to use, the supposedly libelous and slanderous things I can say, etc.? Granted, these are not cases of prior restraint, but of actions taken after the fact, via criminal and civil actions. Not much difference so far as I can see.) Personally, while I feel sorry for the dead in Israel, I think anyone who moves to a small desert state surrounded on all sides by Arabs who want their land back is asking for trouble. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" 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: Remailers run by spooks
by Just Rich 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Mon, 4 Mar 1996, Anonymous (or so he thinks!) wrote: > >Both presenters explicitly acknowledged that a number of anonymous > >remnailers in the US are run by government agencies scanning traffic. > >Marlow said that the government runs at least a dozen remailers and that > >the most popular remailers in France and Germany are run by the > >respective government agencies in these countries. In addition they > >mentioned that the NSA has successfully developed systems to break > >encrypted messages below 1000 bit of key length and strongly suggested > >to use at least 1024 bit keys. They said that they semselves use 1024 > >bit keys. > > I don't know about everyone else, but I consider this, if true, to be a > MAJOR worry. It never ceases to amaze me how lightly the government takes > lying to the people. Unfortunately I don't have the contacts or resources > to do any further investigation, I hope this thread is resolved one way or > another soon. Yeah, didn't you know that Sameer was on the CIA payroll? How do you think he paid for his new Ferrari? I have no doubt that the CIA can break 1000-bit keys on a case-by-case basis, *if they decide to allocate the resources*. I think it's possible that some remailers are run by spooks. However, I seriously doubt that anyone is breaking stuff routinely, and I think the web of trust is pretty good. Of course, the CIA had Ames... the reverse could easily be true. However, I also have no doubt that Strassmann and Marlow are spreading disinformation and exaggerating their capabilities in an attempt to break the web of trust and incite a witch hunt. It won't work. The answer in any case is more use of remailers, not less. Just turn up the noise level. You already know that nothing is 100% secure, but you do what you can. It's a war of attrition. - -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 iQBFAwUBMTp7ayoZzwIn1bdtAQFJXgGAg8I4+IwZYrDI46bMj2nED+Dh0AeoMJVs PP10Ui5u46sXDAUjpMzJSwv5EqdIOEKy =611k -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Report on Privacy Enhancing
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Does anyone how to get a copy of the report on "privacy enhancing technologies - the path to anonymity" cited in this paper from the Canberra/OECD conference on Feb 7-8: http://www.nla.gov.au/gii/oconnor.html Issues Facing Government : Meeting Public Concerns Kevin O'Connor Privacy Commissioner, Australia [Giant snip] In my own sphere of activity, there is some discussion taking place over the potential of new technologies and applications to assist with privacy protection. A recent report from the Dutch and Ontario Privacy Commissioners entitled Privacy enhancing technologies - the path to anonymity, offers some intriguing suggestions about the potential of public key cryptography for use in digital signatures to act as 'identity protectors' - allowing transactions to be completed and accounted for without the true identity of the participants needing to be known. While there are some obvious concerns about such technologies from a law enforcement perspective, which we have already heard about from the previous speaker, these should not be insuperable obstacles. On the other hand, the registration of digital signatures and public keys, with sufficient integrity to gain commercial and governmental confidence, itself raises additional privacy concerns. The complex issues involved are only just starting to be addressed. ... ----- Encouragingly, another paper by Matthew Bowcock http://www.nla.gov.au/gii/bowcock.html states: [Big snip] Controls on Encryption Technology There has been much heated debate worldwide about restrictions on the use of encryption technology, so that law enforcement and national security agencies can continue to intercept communications. Two questions are worth asking in this debate. Firstly, is interception of private communications a governmental right, which must therefore be protected in the face of technological change, or is it an accidental consequence of the weaknesses of the communication techniques that we have been using? I would argue that it is the latter and that there is no community obligation to protect it. Secondly, is a country better served by a vibrant, efficient, electronic economy, using trusted secure communication techniques for its day to day business, or by attempting to reduce organised crime by restricting use of technology? So far, much of the opposition to restrictions on the use of encryption technology has centred around a right to privacy and civil libertarian issues. Perhaps, instead, we need to quantify the opportunity cost, in economic terms, of delayed and lower levels of adoption of electronic commerce by the business community because the security mechanisms are not sufficiently trustworthy. It may be that the cost to the economy of restricting the use of encryption technology outweighs the benefits to the community. ...

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[NOISE] Re: Bombings, Surveillance, and Free Societies
by tbyfield＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[This post is 100% free of remarks defending actions of the state of Israel.] At 12:51 PM 3/4/96, Timothy C. May wrote: >Personally, while I feel sorry for the dead in Israel, I think anyone who >moves to a small desert state surrounded on all sides by Arabs who want ^^^^^^^^ >their land back is asking for trouble. Like someone who crosses the road without looking both ways is asking for trouble? O necessity, we worship at your altar. Some folks--in fact, most Israelis--were born in Israel. The rest of your remarks about "a...state surrounded on all sides by Arabs who want their land back" doesn't exactly describe the Palestinians' relations with denizens of neighboring territories prior to the rise of Zionism, or even since, for that matter. </thread> Ted

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Re: (Fwd) Gov't run anon servers
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 9:10 PM 3/4/96, jim bell wrote: >At 10:52 AM 3/4/96 -0800, Hal wrote: >>That is trivial. The passphrase is in PLAINTEXT in the script file >>which runs the remailer!. It has to be. That is true of all automated >>remailers. > >Maybe I just don't know much about automated remailers, but I don't >understand why you said that the passphrase "has to be" in plaintext in the >script file. I find this hard to believe. While I am far from an expert on >cryptographic matters, I would assume that any received attempt at a >password could be securely hashed (128 bits?) and compared with a pre-stored >hash value. If it's the same, it's assumed that the password was correct. The "passphrase" is not for access to the remailer, but so that the remailer can itself decrypt incoming messages encrypted to its public key. An automated remailer is like a little guy sitting at the machine, taking in incoming messages, decrypting the ones that are addressed to him, and taking furhter actions. In Chaum's hardware-based "digital mix," the scripts, etc., for this are stored in tamper-resistant hardware, making the attack Hal describes much harder. (Chaum was thinking that mixes needed hardware security about 15 years ago.) Unix-based remailers, and the like, don't rely on secure hardware. We've talked about possible hardware security measures, even those that only rely on physical box security. A box that does decryption, mixing, readdressing, etc., without being part of a Unix file system/network, could be a useful "Mom and Pop remailer" (the idea being that small shop owners, "Mom and Pop," could set this up, collect a little bit of spare change as a remailing fee, and not even have access to the internal state of the machine themselves. At a Cypherpunks meeting a couple of years ago we spent some time brainstorming this. It seemed plausible that a small outfit could make such "remailer boxes" and sell them cheaply. (Hardware prices have plunged even further.) --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" 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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new mixmaster remailer
by Alex Strasheim 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've set up a mixmaster remailer at nsa(a)omaha.com. Here's the key: =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= omaha nsa(a)omaha.com c20bfad8d66b43448ca3bdcfa794e244 2.0b11 -----Begin Mix Key----- c20bfad8d66b43448ca3bdcfa794e244 258 AATNlQZx/gSC34PBLJNNmrBzo3m8CE6/kvCTscQ7 ciuhKGUM7vPGtiAXQiueFyDSUqh24L5dWaX2CWrm +Z0dsmJTYSulrrtS6/kFO1Qnl5TPrPcWl+BgBT4M mBWQKip4rw+hn8gfXyS+b7gd0JqW/ajlKGAchGxw NsuDVbpEL3ncVwAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQAB -----End Mix Key----- -- Alex Strasheim, alex(a)proust.suba.com

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Re: art-stego
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:18 PM 03/04/96, Jim Miller wrote: >The recent discussion "Chaff in the Channel" got me thinking about an >alternative to hiding random bit streams in picture files. The goal of >steganography, as I see it, is to provide plausible deniability. The >problem with hiding bit streams is that you can never be sure if the >opponent has developed an analysis technique to prove a particular file >contains a suspicious bit pattern. The way I understand steganography working, you would use it to hide mathematically random data. Mainly encrypted data. Like a PGP encrypted message, but with all PGP headers and other non-random data removed. Photos are a great medium for steganography, since they already contain noise of various sorts. So a good steganography algorithm (which I understand exists) merely changes the values of the noise so that it now encodes your (random) message. So there's no way to look for "suspicious bit patterns", and even if you use a publically available stego program to encode your data, and they use the same program to unstego your data, all they wind up with is a random bit stream, and they have no way of telling if it's just noise in the picture or your PGP encrypted message. So you already have all the plausible deniability you need, and I don't see how Jim's method is an improvement. Of course, if they have methods to crack PGP encrypted messages, and they use it on yours even without being sure it is an encyrypted message, and eventually wind up with a clear text message, well, then they've got your clear text message. And you are unlikely to be able to claim that it's just a coincidence they managed to extract several paragraphs about laundering money in bermuda from the GIF or orca the killer whale. But this is true of any stego method--if they can manage to get a cleartext message out of it, plausible deniability is unlikely to get you far. Am I wrong about any of the above?

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Re: A brief comparison of email encryption protocols
by Adam Shostack 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Eric Murray wrote: | Adam Shostack writes: | > | > Leaving it out may be ok because we can define a standard location by | > key type: | > | > key://slack.lne.com/~ericm/key.asc | > key://slack.lne.com/~ericm/key.x509 | > | > key://slack.lne.com/~ericm/x509/key.cert | > key://slack.lne.com/~ericm/pgp/key.asc | > | > I have no objection to defining a shorter URL, but would want some | > indicator that we're in user space, not host/domain/realm space. A | > ~username serves that purpose as well as /u/ and is a more common | > usage. | | Ok. Sounds good, for user-maintained keys like PGP anyhow. | More hierarchical keys, like X.509, could be maintained | by a CA that also maintains the server... some people who | could use encryption don't know, and don't want to know, enough | about it to even be willing to hold their own certificates. They | want it to "just work". I think that this scheme should be flexable | enough to be able to support a CA maintaining user's certificates | for them. Note that this doesn't mean that the CA/key server | would know the keys, i.e. this should not support GAK*. Having keys placed in a namespace defiend by a user does not mean the user needs to make the key available, only that the key can be found there. Nothing says we can't have key://keys.verisign.com/~ericm if they issue keys in some space that maps into user names. | > My last comment is that if we define a URN scheme for keys, we should | > force a dependable structure on it, so that its predictable where to | > find a users PGP key from an email address, without having to check 6 | > locations. Nothing is there now, we should require order to make | > everyones life easier. | | Along those lines, I was envisioning adding a KEY RR type to | DNS, and using it to maintain pointers to keyservers. [...] | This sounds so obvious that I'm sure that I'm not the first | or even the tenth person to think of it, and in fact I | see a KEY RR type defined in the BIND 4.9.3BETA17 source. But | there's just a type there, nothing else to support it. | Anyone know what it's for? Donald Eastlake is writing the spec for storing keys in nameservers. Its in the process of moving to draft standard; there will probably be something about it after LA. I think its: ftp://ds.internic.net/draft-ietf-dnssec-secext-09.txt Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume

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Re: Remailers run by spooks
by tbyfield＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:11 AM 3/4/96, Just Rich wrote: >However, I also have no doubt that Strassmann and Marlow are spreading >disinformation and exaggerating their capabilities in an attempt to break >the web of trust and incite a witch hunt. It won't work. The answer in any >case is more use of remailers, not less. Just turn up the noise level. >You already know that nothing is 100% secure, but you do what you can. >It's a war of attrition. Only the shadow and a few bureaucrats know whether spooks have infiltrated the remailer operators' web of trust. I'd imagine the payoff in suggesting the possibility would lie in breeding mistrust not among operators but, rather, among potential users: diminishing the use and propagation of remailers would lower the overall noise level, making case-by-case interception and cracking that much more manageable. But this hall-of-mirrors speculation is really just misguided FUD: improving protocols, more remailers, and expanding webs of trust are the prize to keep our eyes on. Ted

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