December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: What the NSA is patenting
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Fri, 06 Sep 1996 11:59:18 -0500, John Deters wrote: >I hope some hardware hacker who knows their low-level stuff will be able to >write a secure disk wiper. They have: it's called a bulk tape eraser. <g> I'd just store everything sensitive on a floppy. Those are easy to erase with a heavy duty magnet (not a wimpy refrigerator magnet). I understand slagging one in the microwave is also effective <g>. - "'Anonymity is bad,' says a source who wishes to remain anonymous." - Nuff' said. * Home: Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp * Autoresponder: send email w/subject of "send resume" or "send PGPKEY" * Work: cadams(a)acucobol.com | V.M. (619)515-4894 | (619)689-6579 * Member in good standing of the GNU whirled hors d'oeuvre

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Re: What the NSA is patenting
by Adamsc＠io-online.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Fri, 6 Sep 1996 14:03:43 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >>A maybe usefull program would be a little tsr that constantly >>overwrite unused sectors of the entire drive with random patterns >>(maybe seeded with a fast keyboard interval timer). Like at the very >>moment I am writing this, my HD has been idle for several minutes... >The NSA STM method is related to reading _very subtle_ variations in >magnetic domain modifications. Jitter in read-write head positions can be >thought of as a noise (N) added to some signal (S)l. Extraction of signals >in low S/N ration environments is a well-developed science. > >Not to start another round of "thermite bomb" posts, but I would not trust >n-pass erasures. It's still likely that if you left it running after a month or so it would be next to impossible to do (assuming the NSA didn't get lucky - you still have to worry!) >Of course, this is about the least of my concerns. If the Feds are planning >to use STM probes on your seized drives, you've got more serious problems. Such as asking why you didn't use some very strong crypto software? Work out some sort of parallel port dongle that could be connected, the software generates a random key, the parallel port device is written and then removed. Further access would involve connecting. The code & chips needed have been provided in many places; DDJ for one. Allows a very convincing "Well it was encrypted and your goon stepped on the key!" >(The oft-discussed possibility of more secure dongles, or secret decoder >rings. is still off in the future. Most of us just enter our various >passwords, and our local disk drives reveal all.) This is too true. - "'Anonymity is bad,' says a source who wishes to remain anonymous." - Nuff' said. * Home: Chris Adams <adamsc(a)io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp * Autoresponder: send email w/subject of "send resume" or "send PGPKEY" * Work: cadams(a)acucobol.com | V.M. (619)515-4894 | (619)689-6579 * Member in good standing of the GNU whirled hors d'oeuvre

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[NOISE] Propaganda Bit: C
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:50 AM 9/6/96 -0800, Jim Bell wrote: >Since red liquid running in the streets is generally so reviled, one of the >things which mystifies me is why there aren't more simulation-type programs >used to test out hypotheticals, for example a "SimEconomy." For example, As someone else pointed out recently, this depends _so_ strongly on the assumptions built into your model, both explicit and implicit. SimHealth, for instance, was a propaganda piece put out for the last election so people could play with different approaches to managing other peoples' health care. If Duncan were to write something like that, anybody who tinkered with the economy would make it go downhill. If Ross Perot wrote it, anybody who started making the deficit larger would find his picture at the bottom of the screen having the ears grow larger. I assume that if Jim wrote it, anybody who did anything to the economy other than decrease government involvement would find a bunch of nasty little dwarves throwing stone knives at them.... # 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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IDC_ard
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

9-8-96. NYP Mag: "The True Terror Is In the Card." Faced with rising crime, illegal immigration, welfare fraud and absentee parents, many bureaucrats and members of Congress insist that the nation would run more smoothly if we all had counterfeit-proof plastic identity cards. Let's be clear that this is a one-way street. Once having established a requirement to carry photo ID, it will be difficult if not impossible to reverse. Don't we realize the dangers of allowing the Government to establish identity and legitimacy? Isn't it, in fact, the responsibility of the citizenry to establish the legitimacy of the Government? ----- http://jya.com/idcard.txt (11 kb) IDC_ard

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Re: What is the EFF doing exactly?
by Duncan Frissell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:20 PM 9/6/96 -0400, David Lesher / hated by RBOC's in 5 states wrote: >> >> So switch to Fedex. The P.O. gives lousy service anyway. Privitize. >> > >Try & mail an anonymous FedEx package. >Try and pay cash in most Fedex offices. Buy money order. Slip it into the plastic pouch with the airbill. Drop it into collection box. Works. DCF

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ASP_oil
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

9-7-96. FiTi: "Indian herb trick turns water into kerosene." A young, unemployed south Indian has flummoxed India's top government scientists by demonstrating an apparently simple recipe for producing a kerosene-like fuel by boiling a "mystery" herb in water: prospectively, he hopes, revolutionising the world energy industry. "We have no doubt we are sitting on something very big," said Mr Valangiman Ramamurthi, India's top science bureaucrat. Watching scientists professed little idea how or why the process worked, but said it conclusively produced "a clear oil separation in substantial quantities" which tests have identified as a hydrocarbon similar to kerosene. "Its properties make it better than petrol," said one. "Apparently the herb can grow widely in all types of soil -- it is very exciting." 9-7-96. WaPo: "More in the Pipeline." In the 1970s fear gripped the Western world that Earth was running out of oil. Since then, vast new reserves have been discovered that can be extracted with current technology. The known crude oil reserve now amounts to one trillion barrels -- enough for 45 to 50 years at current world production rates, and estimated reserves are at least one trillion barrels more. ----- http://jya.com/aspoil.txt (6 kb for 2) ASP_oil

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Re: What the NSA is patenting
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:18 AM 9/7/96 -0800, Adamsc wrote: >On Fri, 06 Sep 1996 11:59:18 -0500, John Deters wrote: > >>I hope some hardware hacker who knows their low-level stuff will be able to >>write a secure disk wiper. > >They have: it's called a bulk tape eraser. <g> > > >I'd just store everything sensitive on a floppy. Those are easy to erase with a >heavy duty magnet (not a wimpy refrigerator magnet). I understand slagging one >in the microwave is also effective <g>. Just remember that an AC-driven bulk eraser will be far more effective than a permanent magnet at erasing data securely. An oscillating magnet field re-magnetizes the floppy 120 times per second, as opposed to the single magnetization done by the permanent magnet. Each pass through the hysteresis curve brings down residual signals somewhat, maybe 10 db. With the AC field, it's hard NOT to have a good erase. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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forward secrecy in mixmaster
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Since Peter Allen's discussion of mixmaster, I started doing something I'd been thinking of for a while, since noticing that it was on the mixmaster to-do list months ago (ie there is unfinished source to do this): direct socket connections and diffie-hellman key exchange for forward secrecy. I wrote the socket stuff yesterday evening, didn't take too long as socket programming is something I've done lots of. Now comes what do you actually send down the sockets. Question for Lance, and any others who were involved in mixmasters implementation: what did you have in mind as a way of negotiating the DH keys? I notice that mixmaster generates a DH key and stores it in file `DH.mix', but that this is not (as far as I can see from the source) included in the remailers public key block. (A couple of comments as an aside: I think that you should be able to have a much smaller generator without loss of security, this should reduce the overhead of a DH key exchange. Using 3 even I think is safe, without any extra precautions on prime generation. You can even go to 2, with a few precautions (PGPfone does this). Comment #2 I think 1024 may be a bit small, I don't have any figures handy for relative security of DH key lengths, but PGPfone offers 4096 bit DH for instance. Does rsaref have limits on prime lengths for DH, the same as it does for RSA?). There are lots of options for DH public key negotiation. First option is whether you have a common prime and generator for all remailers or not. If you have a common prime, accusations of the prime being `cooked' (chosen to have a weakness) can be mitigated by using a deterministic generation method based on the hash of a known phrase (a Jefferson quote perhaps), or PI or whatever. A common modulus may offer a fatter target for attack (for some precomputation attacks), but with large enough keys this probably isn't that bad, as there aren't that many mixmasters anyway. With a common modulus there is DH key negotiation needed, just include it with the source. For different modulii for each remailer, there are more options: a) include the DH key signed by the RSA key in the remailers public key (may break backwards compatibility with existing versions of mixmaster) b) send the DH public key at the start of each session c) send the DH public key on request There is also a question of which key do you use, the sender remailers or the recipient remailers. Negotiating DH public keys during execution also opens the possibility for periodic re-keying. Thats the end of my thoughts on direct socket mixmaster. Next message is some thoughts on non-interactive forward secrecy protocols. Adam -- #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)

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non-interactive forward secrecy
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[This discussion is driven by the desirability of having forward secrecy in mixmaster for the mix packets delivered by email where the interactive nature of normal DH is incovenient] Anyone have any ideas for a non-interactive forward secrecy protocol? Aside from actually doing the DH key exchange via email (painful), I have one suggestion for a protocol, perhaps people can improve on this: Assuming common prime p, and generator g: Two remailers A and B. A wants to send messages to B without having to wait for replies from B. B generates ys (y0,y1,...,yn), where y(i+1) = hash(y(i)) then computes Ys (Y0,Y1,...,Yn) where Y(i) = g ^ y(i) mod p B sends A Ys, and discards ys. Now A can send B n consecutive packets with forward secrecy before receiving any more packets from B. (B keeps y0, and overwrites it with y1 = hash(y0), etc, so that all B ever has to hand is the current y(i), and y(i-1) is hard to compute from y(i) because of the hash functions properties.) This isn't truly non-interactive, it just reduces the number of interactions, to an interactive exchange in 1 out of n cases. (you could randomly chose ys rather than having related ys, and delete y(i) after use, but this has higher storage requirements (n rather than 1 on the recipient)). Heres the obvious construction for a truly non-interactive forward secrecy protocol based on DH. (That is it only requires 1 interactive exchange). Aside from the obvious of having a huge n, and the above protocol, which would have large space requirements, what we're after is a way to do this with negligable space requirements. Say that we have the two parties Alice and Bob. Bob doesn't loose much by having his secret (x) related as above. 1. x(i+1) = f1( x(i) ) 2. X(i+1) = f2( X(i) ) 3. f1 is non reversible f1 should have hash-like properties (it should be non-reversible). Do functions f1 and f2 satisfying 1, 2 and 3 exist? Is there another way to achieve this? (My closest attempt so far, based on the hardness of discrete square roots: f1(x) = x^2 (mod p) f2(X) = X^2 (mod p) doesn't work because g^(x^2 mod p) mod p != g^(x^2) mod p) Adam -- #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)

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Re: MUD anyone?
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:06 AM 9/1/96 +0000, Rev. Mark Grant wrote: >On Tue, 27 Aug 1996, Jon Leonard wrote: >Protection Agencies >Escrow Agencies >Private Law Courts (probably controlled by players rather than the computer) >Reputation Agencies > >> What am I missing? Should there be direct support for Jim Bell's >> assasination markets? It'd provide a means of demonstrating its >> ineffectiveness as a means of social control. > >I think it should be incorporated, but I think that people can set them up >easily themselves. Perhaps we should have an NPC-run 'Assasins Inc' which >would run the lottery, and then players could do the actual 'wet work'. > >But yes, I'd really like to see how this would work in the game. As I >said I'm thinking of this more as a semi-scientific experiment than a >pure game. We have some idea of how this stuff should work in theory, but >little of how it works in practice. > >I do think though that we'd have to enforce some kind of rule against >'disposable characters', otherwise people could simply create a new >character every time they were killed trying to assasinate someone. There >would need to be some disadvantage to just going in guns-blazing and being >killed ten times in a row. Wouldn't it be more realistic if instead of representing individual characters, you created composites which had a "weight" based on how many of them exist in the country/world? For example, the character "buggy-whip maker" in 1900 would be weighted in the thousands, while his number would be drastically reduced a few decades later. This would avoid the "going in with guns blazing" scenario, or at least it would put it into perspective: the number of assassins would drop by "1" (or some proportion) if that happened, although correspondingly the number of targets would also drop. With this system, a character would never die, but his number would simply drop to an insignificant quantity. ("Government-thugs" comes to mind...) And that's not the only reason the number of characters would drop: If it suddenly became "unhealthy" to accept a public paycheck, and thus the risk wasn't matched by the rewards, presumably people would shift professions. Again, this would all be part of the simulation. Jim Bell jimbell(a)pacifier.com

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