December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: [NOT NOISE] Jena Remailer
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 04:10 PM 9/28/96 -0700, anonymous wrote: >My first thought was to have them sent to a non-autopinging *.test ng >via a well-tested parsing mail2news gate, but some autopingers ping ALL >*.test traffic passing through a site. If these ping messages didn't >get automatically bitbucketed at the remailer site, this could be a >problem for the operator. Most of the autopingers will ignore messages with "ignore" in the Subject: line. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto

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Cryptography..
by Erp 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

What is the maximum encryption allowed to be created. With export restrictions in mind, and without export restrictiosn in mind... Thanks... By WORLD and US standards please... much appreciated.. export from the US to elsewhere that is also.. reply asap is much appreciated

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Re: Mousepad RNG's?
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> At 8:13 PM -0700 9/27/96, James A. Donald wrote: > >Some time ago, at a cypherpunks conference, people were making >all sorts of ridiculous proposals for being really, really, >really, sure that you had real entropy, and a prominent >cypherpunk, possibly Tim May, said, "This is ridiculous: >Nobody ever broke good crypto through weakness in the >source of truly random numbers". Sometime after that >Netscape was broken through weakness in the source of >truly random numbers. This is correct only in the first part, it is true that good cryptography has never been documentably broken through weaknesses in a real random source. The netscape attack was on the PRNG used in netscape, the proverbial state of sin. I don`t know what PRNG netscape used in the broken version, can anyone tell me what they used, and whether it was the PRNG or the seed that was weak, also I would be interested to know what they are using now in terms of the algorithm and seed... Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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Does any body know anything about this?
by nobody＠cypherpunks.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Is this just more snakeoil or is this real? <<<<<<<< FORWARDED MESSAGE >>>>>>>> From: Ross Anderson <Ross.Anderson(a)cl.cam.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 09:05:28 +0100 Subject: Seminar in Cryptology and Computer Security *** *** *** *** *** University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory EXTRA SEMINAR SPEAKER: Matt Blaze AT&T Research DATE: Monday 23rd September 1996 at 11.30 am PLACE: Room TP4, Computer Laboratory TITLE: SYMMETRIC-KEY CIPHERS BASED ON HARD PROBLEMS A useful principle in cipher design is to reduce or at least relate closely the cryptanalysis of the cipher to some long-studied problem that is believed to be difficult. Most public-key ciphers follow this principle fairly closely (e.g., RSA is at least similar to factoring). Modern symmetric-key ciphers, on the other hand, can rarely be reduced in this way and so are frequently designed specifically to resist the various known cryptanalytic attacks. In this informal talk, we examine a simple cipher primitive, based on Feistel networks, for which recovery of its internal state given its inputs and outputs is NP-complete. We outline simple and efficient block- and stream- cipher constructions based on this primitive. * * * The regular Michaelmas term seminar series will resume on the 8th October with a series of talks on Tuesday afternoons at 4.15 PM in room TP4, Computer Laboratory, Pembroke Street, Cambridge. A list of speakers will be circulated shortly. * * *

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Re: Making Remailers Widespread [REMAILERS]
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There have been several good replies - thanks! >> Doing two-way remailers would be better, but that's still a hard problem, >> and I don't want to widely deploy shoddy two-way-remailers. >Unfortunately, one-way remailers have much fewer uses than two-way remailers, >any many of these uses are abusive. I agree, it's a problem; the return address seems to reduce abuse. But one-way remailers can be used to simulate many of the uses of two-way, especially with message-pool return methods (e.g. alt.anonymous.messages.) Doing two-way remailers well is hard - most of the methods around are ok for passive attacks, but may not resist subpoenas, rubber-hose, or crackers. It's especially hard if you want the remailer to be a no-brainer to install and operate, rather than one that requires expert support. Snow's one-shot reply block method is interesting, whether you do a public-key or secret-key approach (if you do public key, you obviously use the public half for the part that stays at the remailer.) It has the real advantage that compromising the remailer doesn't give you the reply information for past or current messages, so you can only compromise one message at a time, which is a big win over the one-key-per-remailer reply blocks. I think I like it. On the other hand, there are a host of potential problems: - Chaining is probably more difficult, at least return-chaining. - Individual True Believer remailer operators would usually resist cooperating with authorities to decrypt the reply block, but ad-hoc remailer operators who are just running a remailer because they haven't turned off the default feature that came with their Web Server will probably reveal the key, especially for Politically Incorrect material (definition depends on their individual politics, of course.) - A web form interface, filled out from a web anonymizer, doesn't give you a useful return address, so spammers can still abuse it. - You have to decide how much persistence to use for the reply block. One-shots are more secure, but aren't helpful for replies to web postings or other multiple-recipient communication, but timeouts have their own problems. >> - A centralized block list (e.g. http://www.remailer.net/block.txt) >> which all of the form-based remailers could load and reference would >> allow non-picky operators not to have to handle it themselves >A single centralized point of failure is bad. Maybe 4 or 5 redundant ones. >A blocking request sent to one will be replicated in the other automatically. Good point. A bit tough to implement in a no-brainer out-of-the-box remailer; you gain a bit by having the block list point to an address that's really a round-robin DNS spinner of some sort, but that still leaves you with centralization. >> [centralized blocking list; handshake with cookies ] >> - this is a bit messier for mailing lists, but we can ignore... > >We can't quite ignore... In the scheme you've just described, someone can >enter a blocking request via a Web page and give a submission request for >some mailing list, and the cookie will be e-mailed to the mailing list. Yeah. This makes it easy to block anonymous remailer input to (say) the cypherpunks mailing list, since _any_ mailing list user can block. Putting a never-block list at the blocking server is a possibility, and would require some announced policy for implementing it. >> - special-case for "postmaster", who may want to block >> all of foo.domain instead of just postmaster(a)foo.domain >> - special-special-case for postmasters of big sites, e.g. aol, netcom >> who we may want to ignore? >I don't think it's a good idea to suport blocking receivers in an entire >domain, like *(a)aol.com. Just say it's not supported. Blocking an entire domain like *(a)aol.com is mostly bad. Blocking an entire domain like *(a)myconsultingfirm.com is fine. Deciding the boundary between the two is, um, amusing :-) I'd probably set it such that ISPs don't get blocked, but non-ISPs do, though that might change if the administrator of aol.com asks five million users to submit individual blocking request. I suppose this means there's a volume question here :-) Having a don't-block list that individuals can subscribe to would help. >> - A sender-blocking list is harder, and may still take human attention >I don't think it's a good idea to support sender blocking at all. There are some spammers you'd like to stop quickly when a Spam Event is happening. There are broken email gateways that may need blocking. There are known abusers you might want stopped. And there are folks like president(a)whitehouse.gov who can be presumed to be forgeries :-) A sender-blocking list administered by the Remailer Cabal* would be a reasonable default for no-brainer remailers, and obviously it should be possible for remailer-admins to override or ignore if they want. >Would the receiver blocking list be available to everyone to view? That >sounds like a violation of privacy. Someone suggested on this list that >(assuming that the entires are addresses that match exactly, not regular >expressions), one can store hashes of addresses. That's worth doing, or at least thinking about seriously. The most interesting regular expressions are *@domain (which you can handle by keeping separate block lists for domains and full addresses (or a merged list that the using remailer checks both)) and *(a)*.domain and user(a)*.domain - e.g. alice(a)mailserver17.big-isp.com, which would successfully deliver mail to alice(a)big-isp.com. Perhaps the system needs to keep two hashes - hash(alice),hash(big-isp.com) and check subsets of the domain name? This is creeping featurism, but it may be the right way to go to set a good precedent. One unfortunate result of only using hashed names and not readable names is that it doesn't help the current remailer operators, since their existing code doesn't work that way. Keeping the file of real names encrypted and only distributing it to the Remailer Cabal seems leaky at best :-) - I'd expect to see it remailed to some public place just on principle. snow wrote: > Off the top of my head, the biggest problem is that you can't send > email to a web site (page). You can easily send it to a procmail program at a web site, though, which can take care of doing the right thing with it. Mark M.'s pointer to netcat is especially relevant for this. > Netcat can be used pretty easily to fetch URLs > (e.g. echo "GET /foobar.html HTTP/1.0" | nc www.webserver.com 80). [*The existence of the Remailer Cabal, viewed by some as a shadowy subversive conspiracy, and by others as Dedicated Public Servants has been repeatedly denied by anyone in a position to know. :-) ] # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto

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Re: "Confessing to a felony"
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:30 PM 9/27/96 -0800, Tim May wrote: > >Hearing me say I "exported crypto," a hearsay claim, and happening to find >one or more laptops at my home, weeks or months later, implies nothing. >Legal proof is still needed. Given only a nebulous statement like "I >exported crypto in violation of the ITARs," or "I shipped PGP to Europe," >is not enough for a case even to be brought to trial. > >(If it reached trial, I would expect a defense attorney to move for >dismissal. Absent any evidence that a crime occurred, absent any proof >beyond the nebulous hearsay statement of a "braggart," there is simply no >basis for criminal action.) > >"Stupid bragging criminals" may be common, but bragging is not in and of >itself illegal. There still has to be evidence of a crime. > >"Produce the body." I mostly agree re the "corpus delicti" rule (a confession must be corroborated by independent evidence that a crime has been committed, common law federally, statutory in Oregon (ORS 136.425(1)) but disagree with your use of "hearsay" - statements of a defendant in a criminal proceeding are not hearsay because they're the statements of a party opponent. (In federal court and in Oregon, anyway - in California they're hearsay but admissible as an exception. FRE 801(d)(2), ORE 801(4)(b), Cal Evid Code 1220.) This quote from _US v. Singleterry_ (CA1, 1994) (sorry no F2 cite, found it on a net database of slip opinions) does a nice job of addressing the question at hand: "To begin with, we note that a defendant's own statements are never considered to be hearsay when offered by the government; they are treated as admissions, competent as evidence of guilt without any special guarantee of their trustworthiness. See Fed. R. Evid. 801(d)(2) & advisory committee's note; see also United States v. Barletta, 652 F.2d 218, 219 (1st Cir. 1981). Nevertheless, there is a danger that the jury will rush to credit a confession without seriously considering whether the defendant confessed to a crime he did not commit. As a result, the federal courts have adopted common law rules designed to prevent a jury from convicting the defendant solely on the basis of an untrustworthy confession. The general rule is that a jury cannot rely on an extrajudicial, post-offense confession, even when voluntary, in the absence of "substantial independent evidence which would tend to establish the trustworthiness of [the] statement." Opper v. United States, 348 U.S. 84, 93 (1954). See also Smith v. United States, 348 U.S. 147 (1954); Warszower v. United States, 312 U.S. 342 (1941); United States v. O'Connell, 703 F.2d 645 (1st Cir. 1983). The Court has explained that independent proof of the commission of the charged offense is not the only means of establishing the trustworthiness of the defendant's confession; another "available mode of corroboration is for the independent evidence to bolster the confession itself and thereby prove the offense `through' the statements of the accused." Smith, 348 U.S. at 156." (footnotes omitted) I think the question of what *would* constitute the corpus delicti is interesting; the mere presence of PGP overseas shouldn't be enough. And evidence like PGP's presence on a laptop which had once been overseas, or airline ticket stubs or passport stamps or testimony from a security officer who remembered making the defendant turn on the laptop at the metal detector, or even surveillance camera footage would corroborate the defendant's confession but not establish that a crime was committed. Such evidence would seem to get us closer to the latter test mentioned in _Singleterry_ but wouldn't meet Oregon's test of "some other proof that the crime has been committed" (ORS 136.425) nor California's "the charged crime actually happened" (People v. Jennings (1991) 53 Cal.3d 334, 368) standard. But an ITAR prosecution would occur in Federal court, where evidence which merely corroborates the confession (instead of proving a crime) may be sufficient. (And, of course, this is all just so much jawboning. Not legal advice. I'm inclined to avoid confessing to crimes via the Internet whether or not it seems likely to lead to prosecution or conviction. I've already been to one job interview where the employer had seen (and was unnerved) by my vocal presence on the net.(!?!) Which is OK with me because if I make someone nervous when they read Alta Vista, just wait until they meet me. :) It's time to get used to the idea that whatever we write may come back in 20 or 30 or 40 years, whether we like it or not. I think it'll teach us both a sense of forgiveness and a sense of discretion, but that may take awhile.) -- Greg Broiles | "We pretend to be their friends, gbroiles(a)netbox.com | but they fuck with our heads." http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | |

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Re: Utah as a Religious Police State
by Timothy C. May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(I received this message, with "cypherpunks(a)sybase.com" as well as "tcmay(a)sybase.com" (???) cc:ed, so I assume this message was intended for the Cypherpunks list, with some sybase domain name weirdness, or reflector, going on.) At 12:30 PM -0400 9/29/96, Ryan Russell/SYBASE wrote: >I guess that depends on your definition of liberty. The Mormons >originally moved there to have a place to practice their religion, >and have freedom from persecution. I suppose one could extend that >to wanting a place to have the freedom to have a set of rules consistant >with their beliefs. Should that include freedom from interferance from >folks such as yourself who want to change their rules, even though >you're not presently effected? Well, if Utah can rig a way to _secede_ from the Union, your arguments would make more sense. But so long as they are part of these United States, their religious beliefs about when children should be at home cannot supersede basic liberties. (There are some thorny issues about whether _minors_ have full civil rights. But I certainly know that _my_ civil rights are being affected when my children are not allowed on the streets after some hour. If my child is out, this is my problem. I neither want cops to stop-and-detain my children, nor do I want my tax monies to be used to control the behavior of other people's children. Providing no crimes are being committed, curfews for the sake of controlling the behavior of children are no more just than would be a bunch of related behavior control laws, e.g., a ban on comic books, a mandate that all children join after-school youth leagues, etc.) As for "changing their rules," you're missing the point. There are presumably many in Utah who believe as I do (maybe even some Mormons). Those who are living in Utah, as renters, owners, whatever, should not be bound by unconstitutional rules, no matter how many Mormon Elders favor them. Unless the Mormons own _all_ of the property (and maybe not even then, as renters have civil rights), they cannot impose their own notions of morality on the rest of the population, except in compelling cases (e.g., involving the well-known actual _crimes_). I don't mean to pick on Mormons, as other communities have also attempted to impose curfews and other restricitions on the children of others. My ire was raised by Attila's enthusiastic support for laws which no freedom-loving person should be enthusiastic about. Again, I have no problem with Attila restricting his own children's movements, or joining with other parents to control the behavior of their _own_ children, via religious camps, religious schools, youth leagues, etc. He can even make his own kids wear funny uniforms, funny religious hats, whatever. But, for example, tellling _me_ when _my_ children may be out on public streets (doing nothing illegal, neither robbing nor spray-painting nor committing any other real crimes) is unacceptable. I urge Attila (and others) to rethink enthusiastic support for curfews. --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I 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: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Utah as a Religious Police State
by Ryan Russell/SYBASE 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I guess that depends on your definition of liberty. The Mormons originally moved there to have a place to practice their religion, and have freedom from persecution. I suppose one could extend that to wanting a place to have the freedom to have a set of rules consistant with their beliefs. Should that include freedom from interferance from folks such as yourself who want to change their rules, even though you're not presently effected? Ryan ---------- Previous Message ---------- To: cypherpunks cc: From: tcmay @ got.net ("Timothy C. May") @ smtp Date: 09/28/96 10:35:42 PM Subject: Utah as a Religious Police State Hey, Attila, let me know where you folks live...I may want to move there! At 2:56 AM +0000 9/29/96, attila wrote: > the population base is changing with an influx of non-Mormons > in town, so R rated are showing up at the theatres and video > rentals in town. Just so long as my DSS dish still works in Utah--hey, I'll invite all the jack Mormons over for tomorrow night's showing of "Inside Janine," on the "Playboy Channel." (The "Playboy Channel" is kind of tame by video rental standards, but more crotch shots than we used to see a couple of years ago.) > the police visible prescence is effective --a force of 50+ for > a population base < 25,000, plus the county sherrif cars and the > state police. Curfew is 10pm weekdays for minors --and they > enforce it, big time. midnight Fri/Sat. They enforce the "curfew" big time? Looks like some Mormon pigs need to be zapped. (My kids don't cotton to no cop telling them when they can be out in public and when they can't. Any cop who tries to stop my kids from being out has earned severe retaliation. Any councilmember or state legislator who voted for such a curfew needs to be hog-tied, covered with tar, then torched.) I guess this is why I wouldn't last very long in Mormon Country. A fascist encampment, it sounds like. (I have no problem with Mormons, or Catholics, or Muslims, or Satanists keeping _their own_ children indoors after 7, or 5, or whatever their Holy Hour or Curfew Hour is, but no fucking religious nuts are going to tell _me_ when _my_ children must be indoors. I determine where my children may be, and I don't need the State's permission for them to be out. I would think anyone with an iota of libertarian sentiment would understand this.) > ...idle hands are the devil's workshop. you want good solid > kids, you start from the gate and keep 'em busy: home, neighbors, > school, church, etc. Do Utah's cops also enforce this law, too? > they do not date until they are 16 --in groups. boys and > girls --the same rules. With the Utah State Police enforcing this "dating curfew"? (I may sound harsh here, but "curfew" means one and only one thing to me: somebody restricting my freedom of those of my children to be a public place. Should one of my children be picked up by cops for doing nothing illegal, save for being "out past curfew," I'd consider violent response to be justified. It sounds to me--not that I ever thought otherwise--that Utah is not a land that favors liberty.) --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I 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: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Clipper III on the table
by stewarts＠ix.netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hip Hip Hooray! Clinton will finally let us use _some_ 20+year-old encryption code, which has been known to be relatively weak for 15 years, as long as we give them all our keys! What a guy! I assume he's partly doing this to make a big "See, I'm in favor of high-tech trade and crime-fighting" push in time for the election, and unlike RC4/40, cracking DES on general-purpose processors _is_ a big enough job that probably can't do a distributed crack in two weeks. But still, get real - the NBS/NIST kept recertifying DES every 5 years only because it was in widespread use and there weren't good fast alternatives for the first couple of years (except triple-DES, which on the computers of the time was annoyingly slow.) There were far more powerful systems like Diffie-Hellman and later RSA that were too slow for general use and are now fairly practical, but they're not letting us use them.... >>Here we go again...from today's NYTimes...Clipper III ... >That URL is http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/1001code.html # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto

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Re: How might new GAK be enforced?
by azur＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Richard Coleman writes: > >: I've always wondered why large companies just don't write some type of >: standards document for crypto to interoperate, and then have each >: foreign branch write (or contract out) their own version. I don't see how >: this violates export laws in any way. > >The definition of ``software'' in the ITAR includes ``algortihms'' and >``logic flow'', so I suspect that the ODTC wouuld claim that the >standards are software that cannot be ``exported'' without a licnese. No, I don't think they'd be able to stretch things that far. If designs for software merely defined a plug-in interface (not specifically referencing crypto) it would be very difficult to prevent. PGP Fingerprint: FE 90 1A 95 9D EA 8D 61 81 2E CC A9 A4 4A FB A9 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Snoop Daty Data | Internet: azur(a)netcom.com Grinder | Voice: 1-702-655-2877 Sacred Cow Meat Co. | Fax: 1-702-658-2673 7075 W. Gowan Road, #2148 | Las Vegas, NV 89129 | --------------------------------------------------------------------- Just say NO to prescription DRUGS. "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." -- C.S. Lewis "Surveillence is ultimately just another form of media, and thus, potential entertainment." -- G. Beato

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