December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: The Petaflops Boondoggle Computer (was PET_ard)
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 29 Sep 1996 12:16:27 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote: >Symmetric multiprocessing is available, but it's often much less hassle to >have a single CPU running at 200 MHz than to try games with multiple >processors (which means more PCB real estate, more sockets, more of other >things). As far as SMP goes, it's actually not all that expensive. People in the linux-smp list have reported differences of as little as $50 for a uniprocessor vs. dual pentium system. Of course, every so often we'll get a message about a $30,000 system that can handle up to <drool>64 Pentium Pros</drool>! # Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp # <cadams(a)acucobol.com> | send mail with subject "send PGPKEY" "That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them." --- Karen Hargrove, Microsoft (quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial)

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PRNG discussions
by scottb＠aca.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, I was wondering if anyone has kept an archive of old disscusions on PRNG's. I am playing around with a few ideas, and don't want to re-invent the wheel. Does anyone know of any FTP sites containg this sort of thing?? /sb

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Re: [RANT] Re: Workers, Public Schools, Tradesmen, and Justice
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Sun, 29 Sep 1996 13:26:08 -0400 (EDT), Rabid Wombat wrote: >> The old way was that your HS provided what the mythical average person needed >> to go about life. College was for the more "complex" careers. >Perhaps "high school" should end at age 16, with two years of publicly >funded "junior college" or "technical school" available to those who >select one or the other, and qualify. This would bring an adult-level >decision earlier in life, and students would need to start thinking about >which path to chose at about 14. Perhaps this would allow reality to set >in at an earlier age. A high school diploma has become meaningless anyway >- it is viewed as a "right." How about a real simple rule: if you don't pass a standardized test (Call it the SATs w/800 of 1600 minimum) you repeat the grade - no maximum age! Might end some of those "easy A" classes I took. >This wouldn't leave anyone condemned to a life of menial labor for a >decision made at age 16 - there are plenty of successful people who have >obtained a G.E.D. later in life, and then gone on to college. It would, >however, give some measure of responsibility to the near-adult. Yeah. I'd still say that you'd want to make it pretty easy to switch over - I've known a few people who were massively flip-flopping. Also, some kids may have hard times (parents divorce, etc) that might screw up their judgement for awhile. . . >fiance did drop out of high school at age 16 and started college, with her >parent's blessing. All her high school guidence counselor could come up >with was "But she'll miss her prom"! <g> That seemed to be the general focus last year... "We may be idiots but we have school spirit!" In CA, isn't there the option of taking CHSPE (sp?) that is like a GED but instead of sending the "I don't want this" message is more like "I don't want to waste my time"? # Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp # <cadams(a)acucobol.com> | send mail with subject "send PGPKEY" "That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them." --- Karen Hargrove, Microsoft (quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial)

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Re: [CRYPTO] Does any body know anything about this?
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:38 PM 9/29/96 -0700, some nobody wrote: >Is this just more snakeoil or is this real? Neither Matt Blaze nor Ross Anderson are particularly on the pro-snake-oil side.... Sounds like an interesting talk and I'd enjoy being there for a variety of reasons, including being able to time-travel back to Last Monday :-) One difference between snake oil salesmen and mathematical cryptographers is that the latter talk about what they're doing, why it's as strong as it is, and how it relates back to other known hard problems or attack techniques. If this is sufficiently hard, cool. Most of the symmetric-key attacks these days are based on being sufficiently messy to be hard to attack, and on resisting known attacks, but there's no particular way to prove how hard they are - you can just show that they're messier than any currently known techniques can untangle. On the other hand, the experience with most public-key techniques is that it's hard to adapt NP-hard problems to crypto in ways that don't introduce special forms that can fall apart when handled right - the knapsack problem was a good example. Factoring and discrete-log still appear to be hard problems, but it would be nice to have other known-hard public-key systems. It would also be nice to have private-key systems that use NP-hard problems in strong ways, especially if it doesn't make them appallingly slow :-) >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. # 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: Cryptography..
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:03 AM 9/29/96 -0700, Erp <erp(a)digiforest.com> wrote: >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... The laws of nature don't appear to provide any maximum strength, assuming you run out of atoms to store your data before you run out of capacity for your computer, and _you'll_ be out of cash long before that :-) For mathematically strong algorithms, you can make the work a cracker has to do be exponentially larger than the amount of work you have to do to decrypt, so you win. Different governments have different rules, and many have no rules. Bert-Jaap Koops has a summary that (last time I looked) was at http://cwis.kub.nl/~frw/CRI/projects/bjk/lawsurvy.htm about different governments' crypto use and export rules. For the US, you can export cryptography software if you get permission, and you can usually get permission if you're using up to 40-bit symmetric-key keys and 512-bit public keys, or if you're writing software that's strictly for banking. You usually can't get permission for stronger crypto than that, unless you're a registered international arms dealer and are only selling your crypto gear to Friends Of The Pentagon. There aren't any restrictions on the strength of crypto you can use for messages you're exporting, only on software you export. And there are somewhat bizarre interpretations of "export", including telling foreigners inside US borders if they're not US subjects. Domestically, there are no restrictions on crypto you can write and use inside the US, subject of course to the bizarre interpretations of "domestically" that accompany "export". # 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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Tools for Rendering Censorship Firewalls Ineffective
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've been trying to categorize the web censorship techniques available to governments, such as Singapore and China's Firewall Curtains, Germany's ISP Threats, etc. The objective is to make information widely and conveniently available to subjects of the censoring country by building tools that will provide multiple paths to data that are easy to find and hard to block because they're too pervasive. I'm assuming that email is difficult to block, in-country public websites are blockable (through business licenses, lawsuits, rubber-hoses, or confiscation), in-country private websites are difficult to block but not very relevant, authors can afford and post to foreign web sites without effective blocking, and that the real "threat" to the government is foreign websites making banned information conveniently available to its subjects. I'm also assuming that the government can use humans to discover a moderate quantity of banned info, but that blocking will mostly be done by bots rather than human readers. In particular, I'm ignoring the approach of in-country hidden websites, since it's too vulnerable in some countries, and focussing on the web rather than email because it's mass-market and easier to use, and email is harder to stop, especially given crypto and remailers. Notation: "Attack" is the Censors trying to stop data; "defend" and "evade" are the Good Guys trying to not get censored. The obvious techniques I can see include 1) Filter on IP address (e.g. German attack on XS4ALL) 2) Filter on DNS Name 3) Filter on Patterns in URL 4) Filter on Patterns in PUT/GET Requests 5) Filter on Patterns in Response. 6) Traffic Analysis on reading patterns Defenses - The most important defenses to these attacks depend on ubiquity and volume - they can block one or two of anything, they might be able to block a thousand, and it's not possible to block millions of things everywhere. So building bridges between systems and increasing multiplicity is a win. 1) It's easy to evade the crude version of this attack - use rolling IP addresses, and use DNS to publish the new ones. For the German model, where the government has to tell the ISPs who to block, this wins. They can counter by blocking your whole IP network, not just a single machine, which you can counter by hopping IP networks as well as hosts, though that's more trouble (and blocking routes is probably easier than blocking hosts, since you do it at the routers, and harder to get people to turn back on.) They can also enforce boycotts on the ISP, as they did with XS4ALL - blocking most of the traffic to a site can affect its other traffic enough to be economically annoying. The attackers can counter by also tracking the address with a bot - if you change addresses hourly, they can change blocking addresses hourly, which may workable for somewhere high-tech like Singapore or very focussed like China, but isn't very effective for somewhere porous like Germany that has a system of laws that move at the speed of bureaucracy. A very effective defense against this method is to deploy relay servers, either anonymizers or simple non-anonymizing cgi scripts that take URLs like http://foo.bar.com/cgi-bin/relay.pl/http://banned.site.org/ and fetch and return the real URL (perhaps modifying any URLs in it to connect through the relay.) This works if there are lots of easy-to-find relay servers. An obvious approach would be to package the relay program with Apache or other popular web server, so anybody who didn't bother turning it off would have a relay named "relay.pl"; the attackers can't realistically block everybody who's got one. Another effective defense is to use web servers that gateway to AFS (Andrew File System) or other distributed file systems. This lets /stanford.edu/censored-mirrors/banned.html be accessible from any site supporting AFS, such as http://www.cmu.edu/afs/stanford.edu/censored-mirrors/banned.html This has the great advantage that AFS sites are usually at major universities, which are important enough that lots of people would complain if you blocked them. This works better if there's an easy way to insert things into the AFS tree - volunteers are fine, but if there are servers that can automatically import material it becomes easier, either by copying or by various kinds of indirection. (On the other hand, if you allow automated import, attackers can turn your site into the Child Pornography NarcoTerrorist Bomb Info Mart and ban you...) Do the major web crawlers index AFS? Or do the sites use robots.txt to prevent multiple crawls, e.g. by only allowing searching on the local file systems and not on the remote ones? 2) Filtering on DNS names is an attack that proxy servers can use - the HTTP spec [RFC1945] says that requests to proxies need to send an Absolute URI (method://machine[:port][abs_path]) rather than just the absolute path (/etc.), so the proxy servers can filter on DNS names, defeating the rolling-IP-address defense. Doesn't stop relays. Non-proxy attacks don't have access to this method. However, governments that use full-scale firewalls and not just http proxies can also restrict what DNS queries the National DNS Servers will pass. How to defend against it for non-proxy attackers? One way is to make it easy to find the IP address of a server with banned material - web indexers can find everything, so putting the IP form of the URL in a file that the popular indexers, along with useful keywords, is one way to make sure you get found. Another would be to deploy DNS servers widely (done:-) and maybe form-based interfaces for users that will run Dig or whatever. 3) Filtering on patterns in URLs - as with DNS filters, a proxy server run by an attacker can block access based on patterns in the URL, such as relay.pl. This makes it tougher to use relays as a defense, because they either need to have different names on different machines (harder for users to find and for administrators to implement without having to pay attention), or else to not need a name (either modify the protocols or at least the servers so that http://foo.bar.com/http://banned.site.org/stuff.html gets handled properly.) The latter is doable, but probably requires more administrator support? Pattern matching on URLs can make it easier to attack AFS - you don't need to kill the whole AFS tree, just the banned parts. Pattern matching on URLs already starts to have heavy volume issues - can a proxy server take the extra time to search an ever-larger banned list on every web hit? Having used overloaded proxy servers at work (:-), I'd expect the population to start acting like disgruntled postal workers if the mandatory national firewall is underpowered. On the other hand, I suppose a government could partially solve scale problems by requiring a license fee for use of the proxy server; a few bucks per user could pay for increasing numbers of servers as well as tracking who's reading what. 4) Filter on Patterns in PUT/GET Requests As a defense against blocking URLs by patterns, defenders can send requests as message-body in PUT/GET requests; this is also useful for submitting banned material to cooperative sites. Attackers can filter on this material, though they can't easily filter out SSL or S-HTTP requests by content, depending on how much the protocols pass material end-to-end rather than link-by-link where the proxy can see it. 5) Filter on Patterns in Responses. Similarly, attackers could just grep for banned material in HTTP responses, though SSL/S-HTTP both interfere with this. Defenders can also structure banned writing in ways that don't trigger patterns easily (e.g. don't refer to Lee Kwan Yew, just refer to That Bum or Mr. Big, etc.) Filtering on picture content is obviously difficult, so including text in graphics can help prevent attacks. In general, I'd expect filtering attacks to be extremely susceptible to volume. On the other hand, attackers don't have to filter in real-time; they could scan material as a background activity, and go arrest the people who have received contraband after the fact, or just block their National Firewall Passports if they're reading too much. In general, this attack is probably more useful for overall study of what their subjects are reading than for real-time. 6) Traffic Analysis - who's reading what? Where? Who's reading a lot of contraband? What's popular foreign material? Which of the attackers' subjects are possible fellow travellers, based on what they're reading? This kind of material is useful for marketing as well as for identifying malcontents - businesses aren't always pro-privacy either, though they want their own secrets kept secret. Many of the attacks above can work as after-the-fact analysis more effectively than they can as real-time blocking, and volume is less of a problem for crunching a sample of firewall logs than for active blocking; this may be the hardest attack to counter, though it's repression rather than censorship. If you can't police everybody, you can at least encourage the policeman in everybody's head. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ What other kinds of attacks are there? What other defenses? What kinds of holes are there in these defenses? # 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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GCHQ releases Venona files (from UK Telegraph)
by Sherry Mayo 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi all, A couple of articles from the UK Daily Telegraph may be of interest. The earlier one "Codebreakers come clean" is about the upcoming congference on cold war intelligence & mentions the continued release of the NSA's Venona files (see http://www.nsa.gov:8080/docs/venona/venona.html) The article is at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et/access?ac=116192744309&pg=//96/9/29/wspy29.ht… The second is about the GCHQ (UK equivalent of NSA) releasing its own Venona files in response to the NSA release. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et/access?ac=116192744309&pg=//96/9/30/ngch30.ht… These are being released into the public records office, but there is no indication that they will appear on the net for the time being. Sherry

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A periodic alert regarding Tim May
by Bovine Remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May styles his facial hair to look more like pubic hair.

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crypto cd
by Remo Pini 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com Date: Mon Sep 30 07:21:49 1996 Still looking for material... especially: sci.crypt archives (10.1994 until now... Mark Riordan???) sci.crypt.research archives (all) other releavant news groups has anybody anybody got anything? remo - ------< fate favors the prepared mind >------ Remo Pini rp(a)rpini.com PGP: http://www.rpini.com/crypto/crypto.html - ----< words are what reality is made of >---- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv Comment: http://www.rpini.com/crypto/crypto.html iQEVAwUBMk9Y7hFhy5sz+bTpAQHz3wf/VD175Mf8ShQ0drqvwH4m5Yf7N9iE0ZeG V5Nv80Um3ofnhZvFscgijgPf54+25a8ogWJcEB3k+SEROvkeQkA49QmEYPIlotYi 2U6+xb5bgjQ5NvRMe09o+3cBSd7y3HabWpNPBtCX4cLxKWm3DOw+xOa+CWf8Kmuu nuaFaJhKG1RYkr/3QNPFlDSbh7PPi1Rg7go0LdVMkQUzMgWizkAOJJlg0cl5ZdVE ZV6JdiQD6o9JBWKEOX1Y4mqxQ9tRRDagfADa3S8wPOpT3WxWKVgKgbjLtvUsXrgZ miokoDGNSs2Cxlw+wk9kxKAbRrsCfoEAAPygvCHEDp0WGxA445iRZA== =NT66 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Looking for Codebreaker's by David Kahn
by Hendrik Reh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Im looking for Codebreakers by David Kahn !! Can anybody give me a hint where i can get this book thanx -- ,,,, Gruss, /'^'\ Hendrik ( o o ) -oOOO--(_)--OOOo------------------------------------------------ Hendrik Reh, Tel. : +49 0681 48362 .oooO WWW: http://fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de/~garetjax/ ( ) Oooo. eMail: hereh(a)stud.uni-sb.de ---\ (----( )------------------------------------------------- \_) ) / (_/

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