December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Getting attention the old-fashioned way
by Timothy C. May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A second journalist has contacted me for reaction quotes for a story he's working on about the evolution of the Cypherpunks list, people leaving the list, and so forth. Presumably Vulis figures in a central way, though this second journalist did not mention him by name in his short request for comments. I sent him a note saying I would not give him such quotes. Many of you apparently received a letter from another journalist last week asking for comments for another story, with a mostly-similar theme. There, Vulis was the obvious focus. (I ignored his letter. The journalist who mailed me this morning I actually refused with a reply, as he's written some good pieces in the past. I just won't cater to assisting Vulis in disrupting the list by giving him more publicity.) Well, these "stories" prove that a disruptor can get the attention he craves by shitting all over the list, mailbombing it, referring to list members as pedophiles and "limp-wristed blonde bitches" (methinks Vulis has a pretty strong latent fixation, given his constant focus on certain topics and words). Sad that journalists cater to this kind of thing. I guess "personality pieces" are ever so much more popular than technical pieces, or even careful explications of things like crypto anarchy and the real implications of the tecnologies we are involved with. By the way, nothing in this post may be used by any journalist in any story. Rights are reserved. Readers of this list may read these comments, but reporters may not quote them. (I'm not sure of the legal status of such comments, but if they can assert their copyrights for their widely distributed stuff, why can't I?) --Tim May "The government announcement is disastrous," said Jim Bidzos,.."We warned IBM that the National Security Agency would try to twist their technology." [NYT, 1996-10-02] 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: another possible remailer attack
by anonymous＠miron.vip.best.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Steve Reid writes: > > >> You want to know if Dimitri is the person regularly posting these > >> messages. So, you use your powers as ISP to block his access to all > >> remailers. If the public messages suddenly stop then you can be > >> reasonably certain that Dimitri was sending them. > > I'm not following something...just how to your "powers as ISP" affect a > > remailer in, say, Holland, or one for that matter on another ISP? (As a > > Packet filtering at the ISP's router. If Dimitri can't connect to a > remailer, he can't send anonymous messages. Sure there are a lot of hacks > that could be done (like have sendmail on another system send it to a > remailer) but such things could be detected and blocked by clever filters. I disagree, it's easy to bounce mail through ANY Internet-connected host running sendmail and thence to a remailer. In fact this mail was sent that way, I bounced it through sun.com before hitting a remailer. > In fact, the ISP could just claim to be "going down for maintenance" and > completely block Dimitri from the internet for a while. Only if the Backbone Cabal (there is no Cabal) is re-formed (and given special SuperPowers!) with the sole purpose of blocking Dimitri from posting to cypherpunks. > > Just as the Nazis could isolate spy transmitters by selectively > > turning off electricity to different neigborhoods, so, too, can various > > Isolating spy transmitters by selectively cutting power is exactly > alalogous to what I have suggested. The spy transmitters couldn't bounce their transmissions off of regular radio transmissions, could they? Buck Satan

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[URGENT] Cryptoanarchy
by nobody＠replay.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy C. May will fuck anything that moves, but he'd rather be fucking his own mother's dead body.

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RE: Apology to Dale Thorn
by James A. Tunnicliffe 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dale Thorn writes (in part): >I'm tending to think that, instead of using PGP for all encoding (even >though it may have multiple facilities for all situations), a message >could be encrypted with a good trusted private-key system or whatever, >then the private key encrypted with the Public Key software and sent >either separately or with the message. But you've described exactly what PGP does. It encrypts the message with a "good, trusted private-key system" -- IDEA, which has undergone significant peer review, has a long-enough key (128 bits), and has exhibited no significant weaknesses or shortcuts to brute force (which is impossible, given the key length). It then encrypts the IDEA session key that was used with the recipient's public key, and bundles the the IDEA-encrypted message and the RSA-encrypted session key (and optionally, a signed hash of the message) for delivery to the recipient. Tunny ====================================================================== James A. Tunnicliffe | WWWeb: http://www.inference.com/~tunny Inference Corporation | PGP Fingerprint: CA 23 E2 F3 AC 2D 0C 77 tunny(a)Inference.com | 36 07 D9 33 3D 32 53 9C ======================================================================

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Re: WebTV a "munition"
by Pablo Calamera 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>Date: Fri, 08 Nov 1996 17:16:00 -0800 >>From: Tom Weinstein <tomw(a)netscape.com> >>Organization: Netscape Communications, Inc. >>MIME-Version: 1.0 >>To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com >>Subject: Re: WebTV a "munition" >>Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com >>Precedence: bulk >> >>Rich Graves wrote: >>> >>> Eric Murray wrote: >>> > >>> > Page 3 of the San Jose Mercury News has a small blurb >>> > about WebTV's browser/set-top box that "uses >>> > computer-security technology so powerful that the >>> > government is classifying it as a weapon >>> > that will require a special export license before >>> > it can be sold overseas".[...] >>> > shouldn't be too difficult. If they didn't use the "export" >>> > level SSL CipherTypes, then what're they up to? Are they >>> > fighting crypto export laws (for which they should be congratulated >>> > and supported) or are they just looking for free publicity? >>> >>> Based on the lack of public policy pronouncements from the WebTV >>> folks, I would answer C) They're clueless. I'm not sure that >>> management even understood, or wanted to understand, that they'd have >>> an export problem. >>> See http://www.webtv.net/ >> >>Since Pablo Calamera works there, they can't be too clueless. >> >>-- >>You should only break rules of style if you can | Tom Weinstein >>coherently explain what you gain by so doing. | tomw(a)netscape.com >> To clarify a bit, we're not talking about SSL here. Also, some how it was infered by some readers of the article that we were astonished about the munitions classification of our product. We were not. Oh... and yes, we are not the least bit clueless (thanks Tom). Below is a company statement we released: The WebTV Network is currently using a 128 bit encryption system that gives our U.S. subscribers the most sophisticated security protection of any online service today. It is our intent to offer our customers the most secure environment for transactions and transmission with their WebTV Network service. Our units, sold by Sony and Philips, include a sticker that states that the product is not to be exported outside of the United States. However, the government restriction does not prevent us from exporting our product outside of the United States. WebTV Networks has always intended to announce its expansion plans in early 1997, providing global communication using either 40 bits, now authorized by the government, or 56 bits which Bill Clinton recently endorsed. Pablo ----------------------------------------- | Pablo Calamera | Security Architect | WebTV Networks, Inc. http://webtv.net/ | 305 Lytton Avenue | Palo Alto, CA 94301 | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | mailto:pablo@corp.webtv.net | voice:(415) 614-2749 -----------------------------------------

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DC Net-politics reporter needed
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A political publication is looking for an experienced journalist to cover Net-happenings on Capitol Hill, in the White House, and in Federal agencies. Let me know if you're interested and I'll forward your contact info and clips to the right people. -Declan

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Re: Sliderules, Logs, and Prodigies
by Sean Roach 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:30 AM 11/9/96 -0800, Dale Thorn wrote: ... >FORTH has fallen out of favor for most PC users of the mid 1990's, but then >again, so have computer languages as a whole, since few persons write software >today as compared to the early 1980's. ... I was tinkering around in Basic back then, I wasn't writing much of my own, but I did know a few commands. I remember when using "canned" software had a certain stigma to it, like saying "you are not a true computer afficinado, you don't even type in your own code." I also remember that my dad taught computer programming out of the back of magazines, ones with names like TI/99er, Home Computing (is it still out there?), and K-Power. Heck, even 3-2-1 Contact, the PBS based magazine had a source code section for a while. I'm afraid I don't remember Forth, though I have heard of it, about as much as my friends have heard of PGP.

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Why Crypto Is Hard
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

See the final version of Bruce Schneier's essay "Why Cryptography Is Harder Than It Looks ... " at: http://www.counterpane.com/whycrypto.html

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Why Cryptography is Harder than it Looks (LONG)
by Bruce Schneier 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

WHY CRYPTOGRAPHY IS HARDER THAN IT LOOKS Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Systems ................................................................................ Copyright Nov 1996 by Bruce Schneier. All rights reserved. Permission is given to distribute this essay, providing that it is distributed in its entirety (including this copyright notice). For more information on Counterpane Systems's cryptography and security consulting, see http://www.counterpane.com. ................................................................................ >From e-mail to cellular communications, from secure Web access to digital cash, cryptography is an essential part of today's information systems. Cryptography helps provide accountability, fairness, accuracy, and confidentiality. It can prevent fraud in electronic commerce and assure the validity of financial transactions. It can prove your identity or protect your anonymity. It can keep vandals from altering your Web page and prevent industrial competitors from reading your confidential documents. And in the future, as commerce and communications continue to move to computer networks, cryptography will become more and more vital. But the cryptography now on the market doesn't provide the level of security it advertises. Most systems are not designed and implemented in concert with cryptographers, but by engineers who thought of cryptography as just another component. It's not. You can't make systems secure by tacking on cryptography as an afterthought. You have to know what you are doing every step of the way, from conception through installation. Billions of dollars are spent on computer security, and most of it is wasted on insecure products. After all, weak cryptography looks the same on the shelf as strong cryptography. Two e-mail encryption products may have almost the same user interface, yet one is secure while the other permits eavesdropping. A comparison chart may suggest that two programs have similar features, although one has gaping security holes that the other doesn't. An experienced cryptographer can tell the difference. So can a thief. Present-day computer security is a house of cards; it may stand for now, but it can't last. Many insecure products have not yet been broken because they are still in their infancy. But when these products are widely used, they will become tempting targets for criminals. The press will publicize the attacks, undermining public confidence in these systems. Ultimately, products will win or lose in the marketplace depending on the strength of their security. THREATS TO COMPUTER SYSTEMS Every form of commerce ever invented has been subject to fraud, from rigged scales in a farmers' market to counterfeit currency to phony invoices. Electronic commerce schemes will also face fraud, through forgery, misrepresentation, denial of service, and cheating. In fact, computerization makes the risks even greater, by allowing attacks that are impossible against non-automated systems. A thief can make a living skimming a penny from every Visa cardholder. You can't walk the streets wearing a mask of someone else's face, but in the digital world it is easy to impersonate others. Only strong cryptography can protect against these attacks. Privacy violations are another threat. Some attacks on privacy are targeted: a member of the press tries to read a public figure's e-mail, or a company tries to intercept a competitor's communications. Others are broad data-harvesting attacks, searching a sea of data for interesting information: a list of rich widows, AZT users, or people who view a particular Web page. Electronic vandalism is an increasingly serious problem. Computer vandals have already graffitied the CIA's web page, mail-bombed Internet providers, and canceled thousands of newsgroup messages. And of course, vandals and thieves routinely break into networked computer systems. When security safeguards aren't adequate, trespassers run little risk of getting caught. Attackers don't follow rules; they cheat. They can attack a system using techniques the designers never thought of. Art thieves have burgled homes by cutting through the walls with a chain saw. Home security systems, no matter how expensive and sophisticated, won't stand a chance against this attack. Computer thieves come through the walls too. They steal technical data, bribe insiders, modify software, and collude. They take advantage of technologies newer than the system, and even invent new mathematics to attack the system with. The odds favor the attacker. Bad guys have more to gain by examining a system than good guys. Defenders have to protect against every possible vulnerability, but an attacker only has to find one security flaw to compromise the whole system. WHAT CRYPTOGRAPHY CAN AND CAN'T DO No one can guarantee 100% security. But we can work toward 100% risk acceptance. Fraud exists in current commerce systems: cash can be counterfeited, checks altered, credit card numbers stolen. Yet these systems are still successful because the benefits and conveniences outweigh the losses. Privacy systems -- wall safes, door locks, curtains -- are not perfect, but they're often good enough. A good cryptographic system strikes a balance between what is possible and what is acceptable. Strong cryptography can withstand targeted attacks up to a point -- the point at which it becomes easier to get the information some other way. A computer encryption program, no matter how good, will not prevent an attacker from going through someone's garbage. But it can prevent data-harvesting attacks absolutely; no attacker can go through enough trash to find every AZT user in the country. And it can protect communications against non-invasive attacks: it's one thing to tap a phone line from the safety of the telephone central office, but quite another to break into someone's house to install a bug. The good news about cryptography is that we already have the algorithms and protocols we need to secure our systems. The bad news is that that was the easy part; implementing the protocols successfully requires considerable expertise. The areas of security that interact with people -- key management, human/computer interface security, access control -- often defy analysis. And the disciplines of public-key infrastructure, software security, computer security, network security, and tamper-resistant hardware design are very poorly understood. Companies often get the easy part wrong, and implement insecure algorithms and protocols. But even so, practical cryptography is rarely broken through the mathematics; other parts of systems are much easier to break. The best protocol ever invented can fall to an easy attack if no one pays attention to the more complex and subtle implementation issues. Netscape's security fell to a bug in the random-number generator. Flaws can be anywhere: the threat model, the system design, the software or hardware implementation, the system management. Security is a chain, and a single weak link can break the entire system. Fatal bugs may be far removed from the security portion of the software; a design decision that has nothing to do with security can nonetheless create a security flaw. Once you find a security flaw, you can fix it. But finding the flaws in a product can be incredibly difficult. Security is different from any other design requirement, because functionality does not equal quality. If a word processor prints successfully, you know that the print function works. Security is different; just because a safe recognizes the correct combination does not mean that its contents are secure from a safecracker. No amount of general beta testing will reveal a security flaw, and there's no test possible that can prove the absence of flaws. THREAT MODELS A good design starts with a threat model: what the system is designed to protect, from whom, and for how long. The threat model must take the entire system into account -- not just the data to be protected, but the people who will use the system and how they will use it. What motivates the attackers? Must attacks be prevented, or can they just be detected? If the worst happens and one of the fundamental security assumptions of a system is broken, what kind of disaster recovery is possible? The answers to these questions can't be standardized; they're different for every system. Too often, designers don't take the time to build accurate threat models or analyze the real risks. Threat models allow both product designers and consumers to determine what security measures they need. Does it makes sense to encrypt your hard drive if you don't put your files in a safe? How can someone inside the company defraud the commerce system? How much would it cost to defeat the tamper-resistance on the smart card? You can't design a secure system unless you understand what it has to be secure against. SYSTEM DESIGN Design work is the mainstay of the science of cryptography, and it is very specialized. Cryptography blends several areas of mathematics: number theory, complexity theory, information theory, probability theory, abstract algebra, and formal analysis, among others. Few can do the science properly, and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: inexperienced cryptographers almost always design flawed systems. Good cryptographers know that nothing substitutes for extensive peer review and years of analysis. Quality systems use published and well-understood algorithms and protocols; using unpublished or unproven elements in a design is risky at best. Cryptographic system design is also an art. A designer must strike a balance between security and accessibility, anonymity and accountability, privacy and availability. Science alone cannot prove security; only experience, and the intuition born of experience, can help the cryptographer design secure systems and find flaws in existing designs. IMPLEMENTATION There is an enormous difference between a mathematical algorithm and its concrete implementation in hardware or software. Cryptographic system designs are fragile. Just because a protocol is logically secure doesn't mean it will stay secure when a designer starts defining message structures and passing bits around. Close isn't close enough; these systems must be implemented exactly, perfectly, or they will fail. A poorly-designed user interface can make a hard-drive encryption program completely insecure. A false reliance on tamper-resistant hardware can render an electronic commerce system all but useless. Since these mistakes aren't apparent in testing, they end up in finished products. Many flaws in implementation cannot be studied in the scientific literature because they are not technically interesting. That's why they crop up in product after product. Under pressure from budgets and deadlines, implementers use bad random-number generators, don't check properly for error conditions, and leave secret information in swap files. The only way to learn how to prevent these flaws is to make and break systems, again and again. CRYPTOGRAPHY FOR PEOPLE In the end, many security systems are broken by the people who use them. Most fraud against commerce systems is perpetrated by insiders. Honest users cause problems because they usually don't care about security. They want simplicity, convenience, and compatibility with existing (insecure) systems. They choose bad passwords, write them down, give friends and relatives their private keys, leave computers logged in, and so on. It's hard to sell door locks to people who don't want to be bothered with keys. A well-designed system must take people into account. Often the hardest part of cryptography is getting people to use it. It's hard to convince consumers that their financial privacy is important when they are willing to leave a detailed purchase record in exchange for one thousandth of a free trip to Hawaii. It's hard to build a system that provides strong authentication on top of systems that can be penetrated by knowing someone's mother's maiden name. Security is routinely bypassed by store clerks, senior executives, and anyone else who just needs to get the job done. Only when cryptography is designed with careful consideration of users' needs and then smoothly integrated, can it protect their systems, resources, and data. THE STATE OF SECURITY Right now, users have no good way of comparing secure systems. Computer magazines compare security products by listing their features, not by evaluating their security. Marketing literature makes claims that are just not true; a competing product that is more secure and more expensive will only fare worse in the market. People rely on the government to look out for their safety and security in areas where they lack the knowledge to make evaluations -- food packaging, aviation, medicine. But for cryptography, the U.S. government is doing just the opposite. When an airplane crashes, there are inquiries, analyses, and reports. Information is widely disseminated, and everyone learns from the failure. You can read a complete record of airline accidents from the beginning of commercial aviation. When a bank's electronic commerce system is breached and defrauded, it's usually covered up. If it does make the newspapers, details are omitted. No one analyzes the attack; no one learns from the mistake. The bank tries to patch things in secret, hoping that the public won't lose confidence in a system that deserves no confidence. In the long run, secrecy paves the way for more serious breaches. Laws are no substitute for engineering. The U.S. cellular phone industry has lobbied for protective laws, instead of spending the money to fix what should have been designed corectly the first time. It's no longer good enough to install security patches in response to attacks. Computer systems move too quickly; a security flaw can be described on the Internet and exploited by thousands. Today's systems must anticipate future attacks. Any comprehensive system -- whether for authenticated communications, secure data storage, or electronic commerce -- is likely to remain in use for five years or more. It must be able to withstand the future: smarter attackers, more computational power, and greater incentives to subvert a widespread system. There won't be time to upgrade them in the field. History has taught us: never underestimate the amount of money, time, and effort someone will expend to thwart a security system. It's always better to assume the worst. Assume your adversaries are better than they are. Assume science and technology will soon be able to do things they cannot yet. Give yourself a margin for error. Give yourself more security than you need today. When the unexpected happens, you'll be glad you did. ****************************************************************************** Bruce Schneier schneier(a)counterpane.com http://www.counterpane.com ******************************************************************************

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RE: Returned mail: User Unknown
by Juriaan Massenza 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I love bots... >---------- >From: Open Net Postmaster[SMTP:postmaster@opennet.net.au] >Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 1996 7:13 AM >To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com; owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com; >cypherpunks-errors(a)toad.com >Subject: Returned mail: User Unknown > > >The address you mailed to is no longer valid. >This is probably because the user in question was an >old Open Net subscriber. Open Net is NO LONGER an ISP, >and has not been since May 1996. > >We have no redirection address for that user. Please >remove them from any mailing lists you might have. > >This response was generated automatically. > >

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