December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Announcing CryptaPix 1.0
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:20 PM 5/24/96 CDT, Daniel R. Oelke wrote: >> NEW GRAPHICS VIEWER FOR WINDOWS RELEASED > >> What sets CryptaPix apart from ordinary viewers is its secure >> encryption feature utilizing the same technology found in Puffer >> 2.0. The encryption feature prevents unauthorized use of your >> personal image collection by requiring a password for access. >> Images are decrypted directly into memory for viewing. A secure >> wipe feature will permanently remove unwanted images from your >> disk drive. >> >[...more stuff deleted...] > >Expect to be hearing about this being a problem >with some child porn case real soon now... <sigh> > >However - I can see this becoming VERY popular with the >teenage crowd wanting to keep mom & dad out of their stash ;-) > >That being said - Thumbs up to Kent for another crypto program >that pushes the "genie" even farther out of the bottle. What they ought to do is to "stegofy" this system by binding a picture with a lower-quality, non-suspicious picture which can be brought up with a "duress code." Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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Re: An alternative to remailer shutdowns
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"unicorn(a)schloss.li" "Black Unicorn" 24-MAY-1996 22:52:03.64 >Remailers on the attack points (first in chain, last in chain) simply MUST >be disposable as tissue. They must be run as anonymously as possible, >with as little connection to the ISP's assets as possible and immediately >disposable. They must be easy to set up, runable without root and there >must be a much more efficent tracking mechanism. (Mr. Levin has done a >terrific job, but even more needs to be done). Why the first in chain? If the anti-traffic-analysis provisions are working properly, it should be impossible to prove that a given first remailer was the first remailer for any particular message. I had thought that even civil courts required that you be the person who committed some act, not the person who _might_ have committed some act. Otherwise, all the remailers are in danger. This is even if someone tries an entrapment by sending through some illegal material - if the courts accept that they should be allowed to do this, then all the remailers they chained are going to be hit. >This wanton suing, as I think we all know, is an abuse of the copyright >protections and their intent. The only way to really deal with it is make >remailers unassailable. Doing that with tricky dick type legal arguments >will, in my view, eventually fail. Ultimately, I have to agree. Protect the remailers as much as possible with the legal arguments... but don't depend on them. The government in general has no motivation to protect the remailers. They've got a motivation to protect ISPs, and thus may put in protections for them regarding liability. >It only takes ONE operator to get a tiny ($2500-$10,000) fine or judgement >and that will be the end of most of the mailers. Poof. What, pray tell, is the result of a judgement in which the person manifestedly doesn't have the money to pay? I couldn't pay a 10,000 dollar judgement; I don't have that much money. I would guess it'd be some form of attachment of income; this wouldn't get them much... >This we cannot allow. Quite. >I wouldn't go this far. It is an excellent argument for picking juries >that are experts with regard to the subject at hand. One step in this direction would be requiring some level of education from juries. If the defendant is someone with a college degree, require the jurors to have a college degree. If the defendant is someone with a Ph.D., require the jurors to have a Ph.D. or similarly high equivalent (J.D., M.D., etcetera). While this doesn't mean that the jury will necessarily know what's being talked about (I've given presentations to _graduate_ school seminars in which I went well over the heads of everyone in the class - including the professor - after spending maybe four weeks working on the project), it does increase the chance that they're at least teachable. >In my view trying to balance bias rather than eliminate it is much more >effective. Modification of jury selection? Removal of some of the preemptory challenges? Hmm... some challenges are for cause, as I recall. Unless it's a particulary egregious case of such, I'd suggest allowing the other side to override such with expenditure of a preemptory challenge. >If harassing mail is the issue, I can see how this might help in terms of >image. I don't think its a complete solution however. >Again, I think the attack points have to be protected. Agreed. -Allen

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Re: Runtime info flow in Java
by norm＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 9:09 AM 5/24/96, Lucky Green wrote: .... >I walked away from your presentation of KeyKOS with the impression that a >capability system to be secure it would have to be implemented at the OS >level. >Can you build a such a system on top of an insecure OS, as Java would have >to do? .... I agree with everything that Bill Frantz said. I certainly didn't mean to imply that a system such as Java could not be secure. I can't think about a whole system at once. We developed KeyKOS over a span of several years and we were able to convince the NCSC it had a firm security foundation. The NCSC convinced us to do some formal descriptions of our system to articulate some of our previously undescribed programming patterns. These said in a somewhat mathematical way how capabilities work. (Like you can't do something to zot unless you have a capability to zot. etc.) Object references in C++ and Java pretty much conform to these capability patterns. In Java you can get an object reference only when you create the object or some one passes it to you (or you get it thru a shared variable). In C++ you can also get an object reference by casting and other chicanery. None of these formalities seemed the least bit surprising. There was no deep mathematical insight here. It was merely restating the familiar in very different terms. The exercise did lead us over some old territory with new eyes and we saw some easily eliminated covert channels that we had been unaware of. We do not have a complete map between capabilities and Java. There are things about Java that we have not mapped to capabilities yet. For instance any piece of code in a Java program that can declare a reference to an object of classs Zot is also able to invoke any of the public constructors for Zot. This may be too strong an ability. (In KeyKos you could create a zot just in case you held the capability to the zot creator.) Perhaps you put all of the constructing code in static methods for Zot and make all constructors private. It is important that some code be able to construct Zot instances that other code is unable to construct. Java's security manager classes are not capability like. They seem to us too much like merely a series of plausible decisions for which we can see no general principles. Each decision makes sense but we have no feeling that they are complete. I suppose that the above sounds as if I am saying "Trust us. We know all about security.". Unless the end user is able to understand just what the lattitude that the applets in his machine have, he has no security. Java will not be secure until the security principles can be understood by the intelligent end-user. I think that you must make graphically explicit which agents in the computer have access to the phone. You may be keeping secrets because untrusted agents can't phone home, or because they can't see the secrets. Current user interface design is predicated on the idea that such issues should not concern the end user. I dearly wish that when some application in my Mac complains that it can't get the phone, there were a way for me to find out who was using the phone and take it away from him. I would also like to easily deny applications access to the phone. Even more I would like to explicitly grant phone access to an application just as I must plug my modem into the phone line before it can transmit bits from my house. In such a system I could begin to reason about where the secrets were going or why things didn't work. Access to the phone should be via a capability. The same goes for TCP connections, the ability to send a user data gram to a given IP address. Access to a random stream of bits should be via a capability. Access to a particular file or directory should be a capability. etc. etc. Everything should be a capability!!!

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Re: [SCARE]: "If you only knew what we know..."
by thad＠hammerhead.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I asked Peter Neumann, of the NRC commission whose report is due very very soon, and they did indeed get "The Briefing". He was very keen to have all appendices of the final report be public, we may get to see the story there. I am just on pins and needles waiting for the report. I thought, when it was announced, that in the year-and-a-half that it would take to write that the war would be won. It hasn't, of course. I think that the NRC report will define the landscape of the debate for the next year or so. We'll see. thad -- Thaddeus Beier thad(a)hammerhead.com Visual Effects Supervisor 408) 286-3376 Hammerhead Productions http://www.got.net/~thad

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RE: Truth is equivalent to law?
by blanc 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Jim Choate What you and others offer is a bipolar anthropocentic example of the schism our rapid technology has generated in our lives. ...................................................................... Well you may be right and this may be The Absolute Truth, but I'm not saying anymore because it's hurting my brain to think about it. .. Blanc

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Re: Alternic.net (was domain zapping)
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:42 PM 6/26/96 -0700, jfricker(a)vertexgroup.com (John F. Fricker) wrote: >Well, Karl's IETF draft is certainly serious. A Karl is a bit more than a >kid with a linux box having started one of the largest ISPs in Chicago and >being a component in the anti CIX fiasco. > >I still fail to see why decentralizing control of namespace is a bad idea. Decentralizing control is a good thing; after all, that's what the domain name hierarchy is _for_. One cost of decentralized control is the need for coordination between different parts of the namespace. Another cost is the need to move between namespaces if the namespace owners either fail or implement policies you dislike. Having one namespace owner per country plus a couple extra for non-nationalist namespaces is a convenient approach for accomplishing it, and worked well when the number of users was small enough that managing namespaces was a low-volume non-political effort. That's no longer true. And as long as the namespace management is coupled with nameserver administration, which it probably needs to be, the number of toplevel domains will need to remain small, and the namespace managers will be motivated to charge money for names as a way to pay for the nameservers and administration. Opening up the top-level namespace lets you out of NSI's control, if you can coordinate with them and the country-based namespace owners, but doesn't solve the basic problem. If you don't do it carefully, you'll end up needing a bunch of Above-Top-Level nameservers that serve the names of the tens of thousands of top-level domains. Karl's draft is an interesting approach; don't know if it'll work. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs # Distract Authority!

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The National Research Council Study of National...
by Herb Lin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Subject: The National Research Council Study of National Cryptography Policy The NRC report entitled Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society was released on May 30, 1996. A public briefing on the report will be held in New York City: Wednesday, July 10, 1996, 10:00 am to noon. It will be presented at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (ABCNY) under the aegis of its Committee on Science and Law. Mr. Kenneth Dam, study chair and Max Pam Professor of American and Foreign Law at the University of Chicago, Mr. Colin Crook, committee member and senior technology officer at Citicorp, and Dr. Herbert Lin, study director and senior staff officer of CSTB, will be present. The briefing will take place in the Stimson Room, 42 W. 44th Street, New York, New York, from 10:00 a.m. to Noon. Committee members will respond to questions from attendees, and a limited number of pre-publication copies of the report will be available at that time. For further information, please contact Michael Schiffres of the ABCNY Committee on Science and Law at (718) 248-5708 for further information. The event is open to the press and the public. If you have suggestions about other places that the committee should offer a public briefing, please send e-mail to crypto(a)nas.edu.

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Re: Ga Law/No False Identity
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>: It shall be unlawful for any person, ... to transmit any data >>: through a computer network ... if such data uses any individual >>: name, ... to falsely identify the person, ... You don't have to falsely identify yourself to do spam canceling - in addition to the header saying From: Spammer <president(a)whitehouse.gov> you can put in a header with your real name Really-From: Mario Greymist <mario(a)luigi.com> or put your real name in the body, or a nym you use (e.g. Cancelpoodle) with an explanation that you're cancelling the spam posted by the spammer. >>Spamming aside, this strikes at my privacy and choice of anonymity. Well, of course - it's an offensively bogus law for a variety of reasons :-) # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs # Distract Authority!

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News: NEC has encrypted networks ...
by Ernest Hua 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Japanese companies catching up and passing American companies should scare those Congressional critters into action: Ern -------- 06/27/96 VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORKING ADVANCES PAGE: 1C NEC Technologies' Internet Business Unit has successfully demonstrated country-to-country virtual private networking during several tests performed in early June between the San Jose unit and its counterpart in Tokyo. Virtual private networking promises a secure and cost-effective alternative to privately leased lines. Most connections across the Internet are not encrypted and information exchanged is vulnerable to snoopers. In a virtual private network, encryption is used to scramble the data. (From SJ Mercury NewsLibrary)

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INFO: Photos, testimony, and audio transcripts of 6/26 crypto hearing, get it now!
by Voters Telecommunications Watch 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

============================================================================= ____ _ _ _ / ___|_ __ _ _ _ __ | |_ ___ | \ | | _____ _____ | | | '__| | | | '_ \| __/ _ \ _____| \| |/ _ \ \ /\ / / __| | |___| | | |_| | |_) | || (_) |_____| |\ | __/\ V V /\__ \ \____|_| \__, | .__/ \__\___/ |_| \_|\___| \_/\_/ |___/ |___/|_| MISSED THE CRYPTO HEARINGS? HEAR THE TRANSCRIPT WITH REALAUDIO, READ THE TESTIMONY WITH ANY BROWSER, VIEW THE FUZZY PHOTOS Date: June 28, 1996 URL:http://www.crypto.com/ crypto-news(a)panix.com If you redistribute this, please do so in its entirety, with the banner intact. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table of Contents News Security And Freedom through Encryption forum: July 1, 1996 (that's MONDAY!) How to receive crypto-news Press contacts ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- NEWS The second hearing on the Burns/Leahy Pro-CODE bill (S.1726) brought down the house in the Senate this past Wednesday. With a number of firsts (first cyber-simulcast of a Senate hearing, first time testimony was submitted purely through a WWW page) this is a monumental event. But wait! If you missed this standing room only event, you can still attend virtually by visiting the hearing wrapup page at http://www.crypto.com/ There you will find the two hour RealAudio transcripts of the audio portion of the day, links to online copies of many witnesses written testimony, and some photos taken at the hearing. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ATTEND THE SAFE FORUM - JULY 1, 1996 STANFORD CALIFORNIA On July 1, 1996, in the heart of California's Silicon Valley at Stanford University, members of Congress, prominent computer industry leaders and privacy advocates will meet to discuss the need to reform U.S. encryption policy. The event is FREE and open to the public, but space is limited and is going fast. To find out more, and to reserve your free ticket, visit the SAFE Forum Web Page at: http://www.crypto.com/safe CONFIRMED SPEAKERS INCLUDE: Among other prominent industry leaders, cryptographers, privacy advocates and members of Congress, confirmed speakers include" Industry Leaders and Cryptographers Members of Congress * Marc Andreeson, Netscape * Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) * Jim Bidzos, RSA * Rep. Tom Campbell (R-CA) * Eric Schmidt, Sun Microsystems * Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) * Brad Silverberg, Microsoft * Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) * Phil Zimmermann, PGP Inc * Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) * Matt Blaze, AT&T * Sen. Larry Pressler (R-SD) * Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Systems Privacy Advocates and Legal Experts: * Michael Froomkin, U. of Miami Law School * Jerry Berman, Center for Democracy and Technology * Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform (invited) * Ken Dam, U. of Chicago Law School (invited) This event will be "cybercast", with full audio and still video clips, live online with the help of MediaCast. Details on the cybercast are available at http://www.crypto.com/safe/ SAFE FORUM SPONSORS This important discussion on the need for an alterative policy to protect privacy and security and promote commerce on the Global Information Infrastructure is being made possible by the generous support of the following companies and public interest organizations: America Online Americans for Tax Reform AT&T Business Software Alliance Center for Democracy and Technology Center for National Security Studies Commercial Internet eXchange CompuServe Incorporated Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Cylink Corporation EDS Electronic Frontier Foundation Electronic Messaging Association Electronic Privacy Information Center Information Technology Association of America IEEE - USA MediaCast Media Institute Microsoft Corporation Netcom Online Communication Services Netscape Communications Corporation Novell, Inc. Oracle Corporation Pacific Telesis PGP Inc. Prodigy, Inc. Progress and Freedom Foundation Securities Industry Association Software Publishers Association Sybase, Inc. Voters Telecommunications Watch Wired Magazine Please visit the SAFE Forum Home Page for more information (http://www.crypto.com/safe/) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- HOW TO RECEIVE CRYPTO-NEWS To subscribe to crypto-news, sign up from our WWW page (http://www.crypto.com) or send mail to majordomo(a)panix.com with "subscribe crypto-news" in the body of the message. To unsubscribe, send a letter to majordomo(a)panix.com with "unsubscribe crypto-news" in the body. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- PRESS CONTACT INFORMATION Press inquiries on Crypto-News should be directed to Shabbir J. Safdar (VTW) at +1.718.596.2851 or shabbir(a)vtw.org Jonah Seiger (CDT) at +1.202.637.9800 or jseiger(a)cdt.org ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- End crypto-news =============================================================================

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