December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

[NOISE] Desubscribed (Was Re: [NOISE] Is this getting through?)
by Moltar Ramone 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Tue, 16 Apr 1996, Timothy C. May wrote: > At 10:45 PM 4/16/96, Moltar Ramone wrote: > >I seem to have stopped getting CP mail... is there a problem with the > >list, or is it just my machine? [ ... ] > You didn't say over what interval the mail has stopped for you, so this may > not help. It helped; thank you. It was several days before I figured out which list I was not receiving mail from :-) I'm forwarding this to the list because I would like to note that, after checking with majordomo (which I _should_ have done beforehand, but didn't think to) that I was unsubscribed from the list. I didn't ask to be unsubscribed from the list; if (which I doubt) the user list was restored from a backup, I would almost certainly have been on it, as I've been on the list for a while now. This leads me to believe that somebody else unsubscribed me. *sigh* Is there any way to find out for certain (ie does the majordomo(a)toad.com keep logs)? Jon Lasser ---------- Jon Lasser (410)494-3072 - Obscenity is a crutch for jlasser(a)rwd.goucher.edu inarticulate motherfuckers. http://www.goucher.edu/~jlasser/ Finger for PGP key (1024/EC001E4D) - Fuck the CDA.

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Re: rc4 speeds
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>That 164 mb/sec figure for RC4's speed better be a typo, because I >>can't even come close to that. I wrote an Assembler subroutine that >>encrypts a 32,768 byte block, and called it 65536 times on a >>486/DX2-66, without doing any disk reads or writes. First of all, is that megabytes, or megabits? I've forgotten how many instructions it takes to do RC4, but RC5 takes 8-10 per round per pair of words encrypted, so it should do about 1/2 bit per instruction for 16-round. Some processors can do more than one instruction per clock cycle, though loads and stores are usually a bit slower. But you only need to load two words every 128-160 clocks, which is easy on a pipelined machine. So maybe it's a typo, but it should be far faster than 164 kB/s. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215

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Re: why compression doesn't perfectly even out entropy
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 9:34 PM 4/16/96, Perry E. Metzger wrote: >True enough, but the claim was that a random string has no >representation which is smaller than itself. If by "the claim" you mean what I said, as I presume from context you do, then this is a serious misstatement of what I said. I already have elaborated on this, so I won't again here. 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: UNSUVSCRIVE Broken - Film last week (fwd)
by fulano＠usa.pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Mean? Heck I'm taking notes. Good to here from you {{{{{{{ --<-<-@ }}}}}}}}} -- German E. Hayles

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Re: Article on PGP flaws
by jf_avon＠citenet.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

David Lesher <wb8foz(a)nrk.com> Says if > someone gets your randseed.bin they can infer the PRNG output sequence > and your IDEA key. Doesn't develop in any detail. Says the IDEA key > should be chosen from _truly_ random numbers. I fed the result of pgp +makerandom=2000 rnd.pgp into noisesphere.exe Every times, it gives a distribution that looks like a zebra from the top view. Any comments? JFA

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Re: Bernstein case decisision (fwd)
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks much , Michael. Shows what a scary cpunk-packed courtroom can do to tip the scales of blind justice.

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That All.net loon...
by Rich Graves 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Think of this as an interesting experiment in reputation building, where the bad guys won, and got a lot of business from the ignorant. Remember Fred Cohen, the lunatic who had his telnet port booby-trapped to fire off complaints to root and postmaster? http://www.atria.com/People/dawson/tbtf/archive/04-14-96.html http://www.dhp.com/amusement.html http://all.net/journal/netsec/top.html http://all.net/journal/netsec/9603.html http://all.net/journal/netsec/9604.html I feel so sorry for Keith. He was trolled in a big way. I also found this AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH in preventing IP spoofing very amusing: http://all.net/journal/netsec/9606.html -rich

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The Electronic Freedom March needs YOUR Help !!!
by Keith A. Glass 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Friends of Free Speech on the Net: On June 30th, 1996, a large anti-CDA rally, the Electronic Freedom March, is planned for the Ellipse, in front of the White House. But without your help, it won't happen. We need volunteers to help us plan the EFM and the logistics required for it, people to help us raise funds to pay the expenses (the Park Service has required us to provide 80 porta-potties, at a cost of nearly $4500.00 alone, and that's not our only requirement. . .), and people to help us run the March on June 30th. Not to mention publicity, etc. We need your help. **I** need your help. I've posted this to the DC area groups, as well as to a few groups that I feel might be useful in gathering more volunteers and interested people. But I need your committment to help NOW, or we won't be able to run the EFM, or as it's been called, the "Million Geek March". Come on, out there: help us out !!! -- * Keith A. Glass, Annandale, Virginia, USA, Filker/punster at large * * Washington Coordinator, Electronic Freedom March * * 30 June 1996, Washington DC URL: http://www.efm.org * * Note: the following line is an intentional act of Civil Disobedience: * * FUCK THE TELECOMMUNICATIONS DECENCY ACT--DEFEND THE FIRST AMENDMENT ! *

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Knowledge of TCP/IP
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:56 PM 4/16/96 -0400, Noel Yap wrote: >Knowledge about TCP/IP is alot easier to control than knowledge about the Berlin Wall (ie, how many Chinese will even know of the existence of TCP/IP -- in the US, where this is freely available, how many citizens know of it's existence)? > Applications software distributed commercially or on a "free" basis allows people who know nothing about TCP/IP or C++ or Visual Basic to use all of these things to get work done. They need not understand completely what they are doing. DCF

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Re: why compression doesn't perfectly even out entropy
by Perry E. Metzger 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

rick hoselton writes: > At 05:34 PM 4/16/96 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > > >> ...it is possible ... for Hamlet to appear out of a random number generato r, > > >> But even if it came from a completely random source, it would > >> still make a bad one-time pad. > > >No it wouldn't. > > Are you sure you want to claim that the text of Hamlet would make > a good key for a one-time pad? If the text of Hamlet were produced by a truly random number generator, then it would make a fine one time pad. A cryptanalyst seeing patterns in it would have no way of knowing that the patterns were caused by the input being "Hamlet" -- he would have no way to demonstrate that just because the first five hundred words of the key appear to have been "Hamlet" that the rest would be -- and indeed, there would be far more cases where the rest wouldn't be. If, on the other hand, what you are doing is using books as keys for ciphers, then "Hamlet" is a very poor one. > >There is a tiny but nonzero probability that xoring > >your one time pad with your text will result in a cyphertext equal to, > >say, the Bible. Big deal. > > Most unusual, and you're right, its inconsequential. But if you use the > text of Hamlet or the text of the Bible for your KEY to a one-time-pad, > you're very likely to get broken. IF you are using a one time pad system that truly has a random source of keying material, AND the 1 in 2^1460536 event of the key being Hamlet occurred, THEN no, you aren't likely to get broken. Note that the probability of having this happen is astronomically low, but then again, the probability of ANY given one time pad being generated is astronomically low. If you are just picking books off the shelf and playing one time pad with them, yes, you are correct, you will likely be broken. > >If the key is really random, the > >cryptanalyst has no way to tell what the underlying text was. > > But that silly cryptanalyst might not know that you got Hamlet from > your random number generator. He might think you copied it out of a > book! Then, Hamlet stops being a random number. The context changes. I don't think you are considering this clearly. It is far, far more probable for the cryptanalyst, thinking the key was "Hamlet", to get out a plausible but totally bogus text, than it is for the key to actually be "Hamlet". Of course, it is also far, far more probable for you to be stupid than for a random number generator to put out "Hamlet", but if you go around getting rid of RNGs that produce "Hamlet" or anything close, you have in theory given information to the attacker that gives them a slightly better chance of attacking you since your pads are no longer purely random. The reason all this isn't stupid to discuss and actually has some importance is just this fact. If you build a system that discards things that "don't look like they have enough entropy" (which certain people around here have proposed), you are giving the cryptanalyst a very strong piece of information about the key, so your key is no longer totally unpredictable. An irony, but something important to keep in mind. Every once in a while (once in every four billion bits, or so) your random number generator will put out 32 1's in a row if it is functioning properly. Any given small segment of the output of a good RNG might not look "random", but "random" isn't a property of a given number -- it is the property of the infinite sequence itself. Perry

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