December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

re: Joy of Java
by dp＠world.std.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Scott Brickner <sjb(a)universe.digex.net> wrote: > >And later: > > The Java bytecode is where the security properties must ultimately > be verified . . . . Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to verify > the bytecode. . . . The present type verifier cannot be proven > correct, because there is not a formal description of the type > system. Object-oriented type systems are a current research topic; > it seems unwise for the system's security to rely on such a > mechanism without a strong theoretical foundation. It is not > certain that an informally specified system as large and complicated > as Java bytecode is consistent. > >And in the conclusions: > > We conclude that the Java system in its current form cannot easily > be made secure. Significant redesign of the language, the bytecode > format, and the runtime system appear to be necessary steps toward > building a higher-assurance system. . . . Execution of remotely- > loaded code is a relatively new phenomenon, and more work is > required to make it safe. > >I do think that the ideas embodied in Java are very important, and will >significantly shape the future of computing, but Java itself may be just >a stepping stone on the way. Given the crowd here, this is likely stating the obvious, but it has never failed to provoke spluttering from the Sun employees I have tried it on. The thing not mentioned in this excerpt is that at best, the verification will have been done for the Sun implementation of the byte code engine. There have been announcements of competing implementations of the the engine, and any assumptions of safety are out the window in that case. Sun doesn't have any control over Java the byte code engine, anyone who wants can build one. (and at 40kb total size, it is a tractable thing for an undergrad that didn't manage to find a summer job). Sun does control Java the logo, and can deny a license to use it. That is likely to become a meaningless distinction -- If somone will install a disk recieved unsolicited in the mail, or handed to them at a trade show (how hard can it be to re-seal AOL packaging, such that a casual recipient won't notice), they aren't bright enough to insist on genuine Sun brand Java. If it becomes an expected thing, that all browsers/os's/toaster-ovens have a java byte code engine in them, there will be a sizable number sold without "benifit" of trademark (at the low end if nothing else, Sun does expect to be paid to use the steaming cup). Not all of them will have sufficient rigor applied to their development. Once common, then things get interesting. The press will (for lack of anything else to do, as all the engines are supposed to act identically) start to benchmark the competing implementations. At that point, under pressure to "get good numbers", some of the more "expensive" operations will be "tuned". Other restrictions might be sacrificed in order to have something ready for Comdex... Can't happen you say? I still remember when some of the PC video makers got caught special casing the strings in one of the big magazines benchmarks. Unfortunately, Sun has designed a fine example of a "Square Peg". As OAK, it was a moderately good fit for the intended use. With zillions of set top boxes, and a limited number of sources of product (national/regional controlled entry broadcaster model), you had to have remote execution, nobody could build a big enough set of servers. Since it was coming from a broadcaster, you could get away with trusting signed code -- not just any bozo can get video broadcast nationally (unless it is violent, and even then they time base correct it), the same would be true of set top code. Since it meant selling hardware (engine in rom), there would be a limited number of sources of system code -- the above mentioned undergrad would find it difficult to find enough capital to get a mass market hardware product to market. And when you get down to it, with only a few meg of ram, and no disk, there really wasn't a huge amount of data to compromise. Now lets examine what they are trying to do with it. It is a software only item currently, thus it has very low entry barriers. Code can be put up by any bozo with $10/month to pay a local web provider -- even if the code is signed, you may not be able to get at the author of an applet, either because of national boundries, or anonymity. And you get to run the stuff on a machine with a lot of state (all the dells and gateways sold today had at least a gig of state spinning there to browse), and a live net connection (back to the source if nothing else) to transmit interesting things back with. Looks like a bad fit to me. But the PR department does have a big hammer, and they are beating on it, and the hole is starting to give a bit -- they have it forced about halfway now... To get a round peg, they have to build a system at the A2 trust level. That means a verified design, and an implementation checked against that design. Sun hasn't done the design side of the game, if the comments made about the design by the Princeton group are accurate. Lacking a verifiable design, even Sun's implementation must be doubted. But it doesn't end there, the browser that surrounds the byte code engine can compromise even a good implementation (as netscape has demonstrated), and last, Sun has no way to ensure that everything that executes the byte codes is a "good" implementation. We don't even have to assume malicious intent on the engine builder, accidents have already supplied us with enough examples of how it can go wrong. (tho it is easier if you put the hole there -- you don't have to be skilled enough to find a hole to exploit, just good enough to add a hole to an existing implementation) <dp>

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Re: US law - World Law - Secret Banking
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:55 PM 4/26/96 -0400, Black Unicorn wrote: >First of all, and as one of the only western powers to do so, the United >States taxes its citizens on _worldwide income_. While this in itself, >with a proper foreign tax credit system, is not offensive, when the Unites >States adds to this a very wide scope of extraterratorial jurisdiction and >compelled process, it becomes more than tax. Further, the United States >implements policy it cannot directly legislate constiutionally through >taxation. Just to make it perfectly clear... The US (and the Philippines) are the only countries in the *civilized world* that tax non-resident citizens. This means, par example, that if you are born in the US and leave at the age of 2 days, never return, never get any services from any US government, you are subject to full US federal taxation. If you happen to reside in a country with no tax treaty with the US, you will owe local country taxes *plus* US federal taxes simply because of citizenship. In any of the European countries, you can eliminate your tax liability for foreign (out-of-country) source income simply by moving overseas. They tax all residents but only non-resident citizens who have domestic source income. The US grabs everything even if you've had virtually no US contacts. This is why some rich Americans have renounced their citizenship to avoid taxes on their non-US income, rich Brits don't have to renounce they can keep their citizenship and just move. >It is partly the arrogance of many U.S. citizens, and the view that their >government knows the one single way to conduct economic and foreign >affairs, that empowers the United States to impose her tax and >economic policy on unconnected sovereigns thousands of miles away. Note the other areas this has applied as well. Roosevelt's outlawry of private posession of gold by Americans made it a crime for Americans to own gold anywhere on earth. And the proposed regs on licensing of space launches prohibited Americans from committing unlicensed space launches anywhere on earth. DCF "Note that no woman has ever conquered Europe but several men have. No point, I just thought it was interesting."

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Re: WWW proxies?
by David Wagner 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

In article <Pine.SUN.3.93.960426191223.12146D-100000(a)polaris.mindport.net> you write: > > Has anyone developed such a beast yet? > > Will we have as extensive a WWW proxy network as remailer network? > Here's what I know of. You could get an anonymous www.c2.org account and websurf from it. You can also publish web pages anonymously from c2. See http://www.c2.org/anon.phtml It looks like there's an experimental anonymizing proxy up in France (if you can tolerate the link delay): http://hplyot.obspm.fr:6661/ http://hplyot.obspm.fr:80/~dl/anonproxy.txt I haven't tested it myself, though. CMU has a web anonymizer at http://anonymizer.cs.cmu.edu:8080/ Unfortunately, it's not useable by the public yet. (They promise to release it in early 1996.) Decense is a early prototype of a double-blind penet-style "re-webserver": http://www.clark.net/pub/rjc/decense.html Wei Dai has talked about PipeNet, a network of "re-routers" for general Internet traffic. Unfortunately, at this point, it's only a pipe dream on the whiteboard (as far as I know-- correct me if I'm wrong!). If I left any out, let me know. I hope to get a chance to play with these things (and possibly install one on my machine) during the summer, when I'll have some more free time. Whee!

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Re: RSAREF dos not give you access to RSA
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 05:48 PM 4/26/96 -0400, David Mazieres <dm(a)amsterdam.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: >> 5) the price of RSA is fairly low, once free RSAREF came out >RSAREF does not give you RSA. Do not think that you can write and >distribute free software that uses RSA encryption in the US just >because of the existence of RSAREF. If you don't believe me, let me >tell you a little story. [ really atrocious story of RSA's non-responsiveness, deleted] >The RSAREF license strictly requires that you only use the documented >RSAREF interface, which does not include direct access to the RSA functions. Yeah, that's a good point, and it'd slipped my mind since the PGP permission was eventually granted. For some applications of RSA, you can use RSAREF to do them; you may have to not mind an extra DES layer thrown in where you really don't need it, and the resulting ugliness. (But at least encrypting a random session key with a random DES key doesn't provide much hook for a DES-cracker.) # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215

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www.WhosWhere.com selling access to my employer's passwd file
by rich＠c2.org 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- If you are involved with the affairs of a large organization, I urge you to check www.whoswhere.com to see if they have a bunch of user email addresses that they shouldn't. Of course there is little that one can do about this kind of invasion of privacy. But they don't have to be so fucking blatant and stupid about it. They have the email addresses of DAEMONS from our password files in their database. There is no need for mailbombing, or anything like that. Our lawyers are simply going to nuke them from orbit. Please check them out before they go offline, so that you will have a shot at whatever is left. - -rich -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMYHku43DXUbM57SdAQGQpwP/U9TzWE2vEjHYZo4eniVctFe3pVe0KIQe FvdNOWTykqfgEyhagKuifmRwUgjjIcIZONzRDw1Hi7UrJbOghH3j9sW5wxsphbxU 3U0hHuKumAczUHn03IVkkF4JpobawEgHqqP1Y++PhNopAvqnVSu+hnf5aIS1R390 MlUiwpoo0OE= =+Mm2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: The Joy of Java
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From my perspective, the biggest win of Java isn't the security, though that's certainly important. It's that it's a reasonably powerful virtual machine that doesn't need to run on Microsoft operating systems, though it can (except Win3.1, of course.) That means that decent small application software can be written that doesn't have to be locked into the far less secure/reliable DOS/Windows/95 architectures, and can run on Macs and Linux and Unix, a bit slowly, but with a lot less baggage. (Maybe 16-bit code is gone from NT 4.0, but it's not going to run on 386s!?!) Yes, you may want to be careful with code that autoloads from web pages, but you don't have to be quite as paranoid with Java from ftp sites as you did with MS binaries, and you can be more comfortable with applets like word processors and data-crunchers knowing they won't be doing all the "helpful" things MSOffice likes to help you with. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215

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Re: trusting the processor chip
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> By NSA standards, it is simple. NSA has probably had its own >> semiconductor fabs for 30+ years. >Yep. Regardless of whether the fabs are government property or not, >it's a sure thing that some contractors have appropriately SCIFfed >fabs and appropriately cleared staffs. There's an interesting Moore's Law wrinkle to this. Not only does processor speed double every 18 months, but the cost of the chip fab plant for each generation of technology also doubles. Intel's building some $2B plants now, and who knows what the x886 CPU and 256MB memory fab plants will cost. While the costs are somewhat lower for a low-volume plant than a high-volume one, at some point it will be much harder (as a percentage of their total budget) for the NSA to stay ahead of the power curve, and they'll have to switch over to designs like highly-custom applications on commercial FPGAs and such. And "appropriately cleared staffs" are also harder to find as the chip business internationalizes. Back when I was a tool of the military-industrial complex, I was working on an RFP that had a heavy-duty "buy American" policy, not only for economic protectionism but to make sure that UnAmerican Foreigners didn't subvert the designs for critical components to add security leaks. For instance, the controller chips for disk drives, and raw EPROM. We eventually got them to let us use imported commercial products as long as any design and construction that was actually specific to the customer was done in the US, on the assumption that the Singaporean Espionage Service wasn't going to put back-doors in all the disk drives their city exported, and the Korean CIA wasn't going to put extra pins in their EPROMS that would replace the contents with hacked versions designed to steal US Secrets :-) # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215

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Re: WWW proxies?
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:13 PM 4/26/96 -0400, Black Unicorn <unicorn(a)schloss.li> wrote: >Has anyone developed such a beast yet? Good timing for the question! As Perry pointed out, the CERN httpd provides basic proxy functions, but it doesn't do the anonymizing job of deleting/replacing information your browser may output to a CGI script, so it's only a partial solution. The pre-beta-test anonymizer proxy Sameer mentioned does the main protocols, though doesn't anonymize https: yet; doing the job right is difficult or impossible without support in the browser for features such as double-encrypted SSL sessions (one layer of encryption between the browser and proxy, and an end-to-end connection between the browser and the destination server.) [Jeff - any chance of this unlikely feature being supported?] I tried doing an https: connection to the proxy, but something wasn't in the directory it expected; that's what betas are for :-) Alternatively, maybe an SSH connection could work? >Will we have as extensive a WWW proxy network as remailer network? That's partly a technical question, and partly a social/economic one. The technical parts are whether it's easy to install an anonymizer on your web server (at least for Unix and maybe NT users), and whether there's a big drawback if you do, like performance hit or extra charges from your ISP. There's also a technical issue of whether anon-proxies will be quiet underground things, or whether there'll be some convenient coordination mechanism, such as random.anonymizer.com being a DNS hack that picks a random anonymous server that can be temporarily registered by just starting an anonymizer application. The social parts of the question are how we get people to _want_ to install it, and how we get them to keep running it once it gets annoying. A good PR job can help, especially if installation+registration is a one-or-two-button thing; using one anonymizer nags you to install your own. Perhaps somebody will find a convenient way to add only-mildly-annoying advertising to the anonymizers, or to collect digicash without discouraging users, giving some tradeoff between social responsibiity and crass profit motives, and allowing a spectrum of anonymizers to operate. Of course, especially with some profit-making services (e.g. the Anonymous Porn Proxy or the Hemp Buyers' Privacy Connection) the server may have trouble convincing customers that the anonymity is really being preserved, whether from government subpoenas, junkmail and credit card fraud, or future resale to Blacknet. The other side of the propagation problem is keeping proxy providers willing to run their services after they have problems because of how their service is used. One problem is spammers and other abusers. Suppose somebody uses your anonymizer to connect to a web-posting page or mailto: and spams a big mailing list or newsgroup with objectionable material, like the <perjorative deleted> spammer who sent hate mail from my remailer to the various gay newsgroups signed with some innocent bystander's name. At best you get flamed; at worst your ISP drops your service. Or the spammer signs the guestbook at whitehouse.gov in an interesting manner. Another problem is users whose behaviour attracts attention. Maybe it's the highly legitimate user who checks out the tax forms on irs.gov for taxable activities the IRS didn't know were involved in, like overseas banking and stocks when _your_ tax returns all said "broke college student" (just _try_ explaining anonymizers to the compuer-illiterate IRS clerk.) Maybe it's the user who wants to avoid junk email when she checks out the Make.Money.Fast.multilevel.religious.technology stockbroker service. Guess who's now on Their lists. Maybe they used the anonymizer to view child pornography from kidporn.sting.postalinspector.memphis.usps.gov, and the Post Office Police come kick your door down. Or maybe they were checking out the schedule at the Cannabis Buyer's Club using your anonymizer just in case the FBI wiretappers wanted to enforce laws that the S.F. Police don't bother people about. Some of these problems can be helped by things like transient proxy servers, if we build a convenient way for them to hook in for a while and drop back out. On the other hand, if you're waiting for me to write all this code I'm suggesting we need, you'd be better off hacking some more easy partial solutions that can be deployed, tested, and replaced with the next edition :-) # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215

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Re: Click here to become an International Arms Trafficker
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 07:46 PM 4/26/96 -0700, Sandy wrote: >> Well, I'm ITAR violator # 6 :-) >I am #3. Who is #1? Gee, that sounds sorta familiar. I hope >we don't end up as Prisoners. You are in the Village. A low crawl leads off to the north.... I was #21 and #22, though the first one didn't actually export crypto, and the second one exported code for rot13 instead of perl. So there's now some rot13 hanging out in the Caribbean, waiting for Hostile Foreigners and NarcoTerrorist Tax Evaders to protect their privacy with it. (This is _illegal_??) # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215

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Cell Kill 2
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

4-27-96 NYT op-ed claims: On April 21, two Russian laser-guided missiles reportedly zeroed in on the cellular phone of Dzhokhar M. Dudayev, leader of the Chechen rebels, and killed him. According to the Russian newspaper Izvestia, Mr. Dudayev died while phoning an aide to King Hassan II of Morocco, who had been asked by President Yeltsin to help mediate an end to the war. Will any leader ever again be so gullible?

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