December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

POC_ket
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

WaJo reports today on IBM's tiny pocket computer that transmits data through the body -- to another body or to a device such as a telephone. Invented by Tom Zimmerman, formerly of the Media Lab, it can tell "anything you touch who you are." Being shown at Comdex. The body as a token. How to crack a human? Grab and squeeze out a pass phrase. ----- http://jya.com/pocket.txt POC_ket

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Re: [REBUTTAL] Censorship on cypherpunks?, from The Netly N
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> If you do not send it to me by e-mail, I will never see it. > Why are you so paranoid that someone is reading your e-mail? > I never do anything criminal, so I could give a shit less if > everybody reads all of my fucking mail. I was trying hard not to get into this thread as it is basically just one long flamewar that is getting out of control but I have to comment here: There need be no reason for paranoia. I don`t call it paranoia, I call it constant vigilance, to demonize it is a statist position and tries to ostricise those who protect their privacy. Whether you do anything criminal or not is not the point. Indeed I would say that 90-95% of encryption usage is for perfectly legal purposes, and only about 0.1% of encrypted material is concerned with unethical acts rather than illegal acts. The point is you should retain the right to protect your privacy. Sure, it`s not illegal to put forward anarchist arguments in mail today, but do you really want your company boss knowing about it? I personally don`t work - I`m a student so it doesn`t matter to me, but whether it is right that your employement and political views should affect each other they do, so you should be able to protect yourself with technology... 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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RE: ideal secure personal computer system
by John Fricker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Bill Frantz (frantz(a)netcom.com) said something about RE: ideal secure personal computer system on or about 11/17/96 5:37 PM >(Note that even if it only runs with a user's privileges, a Trojan horse >will have no problem stealing e.g. that user's PGP secret key ring. Not >everything of value is in system files. True enough. >Question, can a user-level Trojan >horse insert itself as a keyboard monitor and get the PGP pass phrase as >well?) In the September 95 issue of NT Developer Richard Wright describes an NT Key Log Service (started as a challenge after his wife threatened to password protect the familiy accounting software <g>). Source code for such a trojan is provided. Note that the Login screen is *never* hooked. There must be a way to walk the chain of system hooks. I'll let you know when I find it as that would be the key to writing a detector. --j ----------------------------------- | John Fricker (jfricker(a)vertexgroup.com) | -random notes- | My PGP public key is available by sending mail with subject "send pgp key". | www.Program.com is a good programmer web site. -----------------------------------

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HP crypto-announcement and key recovery, from The Netly News
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 09:03:25 -0800 (PST) From: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> To: fight-censorship(a)vorlon.mit.edu Subject: HP crypto-announcement and key recovery, from The Netly News The Netly News http://netlynews.com/ November 18, 1996 Under Lock And Key Recovery By Declan McCullagh (declan(a)well.com) As a non-event, it was a rather well-attended one. This morning Hewlett-Packard Co. threw a press conference in Washington, DC to announce that it had vaulted the Federal government's export restriction hurdles by including "key recovery" technology in its encryption products. At least that's what the press release said. The reality is somewhat less exciting: HP's announcement is crypto-vaporware. "We're not making any specific announcements of products today," admitted Doug McGowan, HP development director. HP's move comes after competitors such as IBM and DEC stole the limelight last month by being the first to buy into the Clinton administration's latest key escrow scheme which would allow U.S. law enforcement agencies to locate copies of the private keys used to encode files and communications. The company's announcement follows a presidential executive order signed last Friday codifying the administration's "key recovery" proposal unveiled in October, which the White House hopes will splinter an industry previously united in opposition to Federal regulations governing encryption exports. HP responded by flying CEO Lew Platt into town today to announce a product using plug-in hardware or software "activation tokens" that can vary by country -- but Platt admitted that the tokens don't exist yet. Rather, he admitted, it's only a product with "a security framework built into it" that currently uses woefully-insecure 40-bit DES encryption. Eventually, HP hopes to export crypto that's stronger, but the company declined to discuss details. Dave Banisar, a policy analyst at EPIC, says such a system would be "worse" than current policy. "It's got this new detection system in it that requires monitoring of your crypto use and program use to determine what the national government says is correct," he says. The "key recovery" technology HP licensing is likely to come from Trusted Information Systems Inc., a company founded by former NSAers that still enjoys close ties to the spook community. TIS's Commercial Key Escrow uses the 56-bit Data Encryption Standard and so was cleared for export on January 18, 1996. "This is the first step toward implementing key recovery. That's a policy that's just not going to solve the privacy problem for Internet users," says Alan Davidson, staff counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology. "This is the first step on that road toward building key recovery for the world. It's a very dangerous thing." Clinton's executive order is carefully crafted to counter the three strategies that crypto privacy proponents have devised to kill the export rules: the public relations, the judicial and the legislative approaches. Netizens, privacy advocates and high-tech firms rightfully blasted the old export policy, which classified crypto as a "munition," as a relic of the cold war -- a sentiment with which even The New York Times agreed. So Clinton has reclassified it as a non-munition, yet the change is in name only: Netscape browsers remain subject to export controls. Several lawsuits are challenging the constitutionality of the old export regulations. So Clinton's executive order contains language that EFF's John Gilmore says is designed "to evade the current lawsuits" by taking aim at some of the legal arguments. Administration officials spent an unhappy summer on Capitol Hill being grilled by senators who were considering legislation to lift the crypto export embargo. So Clinton carefully crafted his announcement to defuse some of the reasons to pass this legislation when Congress returns in January. In other words, the White House has been able to answer or deflect many issues that netizens have raised in favor of strong encryption. But another argument may not be as easy to counter. Patrick Ball is a senior program associate at the American Association for the Advancement of Science who has traveled the globe teaching human rights workers how to protect themselves from oppressive governments. The stamps on his passport read like a who's who of censor-happy regimes: El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Guatemala, South Africa and Turkey. "I have done PGP training in every country I've worked in," says Ball. To Ball, the debate over crypto isn't about civil rights or businesses losing export dollars, but over something much more fundamental: human rights. He says: "Why do security police grab people and torture them? To get their information. If you build an information management system that concentrates information from dozens of people, you've made that dozens of times more attractive. You've focused the repressive regime's attention on the hard disk. And hard disks put up no resistance to torture. You need to give the hard disk a way to resist. That's cryptography." And that's a winning argument. ###

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Re: Crypto Bounties: Another Thought that crossed my mind.
by Ian Grigg 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

snow(a)smoke.suba.com said: > Well, I was thinking, what if a "Crypto Software Bounty Server" > were set up, so that someone could propose a tool that they would like > to see, along with an initial bounty. Others could contribute toward that > bounty (anonymously if they wish) until either the tool was delivered. > > The original issuer sets standards for the software (i.e. "easy to > use interface to mixmaster remailers for Macintosh", then must define > easy to use; Software considered delivered when in [alpha beta late-beta > &etc.]). The first to present software meeting these qualifications gets > the bounty, with the caviate that the software must be either gnu-copylefted, > or some similar "free use" copyright, after all, "The Net" paid for it... Hmmm. This is a one shot game (is that the term?) whereas software generally has implications that escape a single sale scenario. For example, the more difficult the software, the more risk there is that someone else will beat you, thus lowering the real risk-adjusted payoff dramatically. For this reason, more complex stuff would need some sort of contract+reputation scenario that allows a repeating game to work. A contractual alternative could work like this. I (the initial desirer) write a contract specifying my requirements. I publish this as a market tender, where other desirers can contribute funds, and this becomes a cumulative sum that grows. Programmers can offer to supply by naming a price. The market clears when the pot of desire equals or exceeds the lowest offer to supply. In a simplistic scenario, the contract is now sealed and the work is done and paid for. In order to overcome project failure, I could write my contract as a multi-supplier seed project (often done by governments). That is, the pot gets shared around, say, the three best alternatives. Once supplied, all are free to pick from the alternatives. In order to overcome the low silly bid, somehow reputation would have to be built into the market. That is, your efforts in the past as programmer will cause your solution to be better valued than mine. So perhaps we should turn this around. Programmers would write contracts to supply the given requirements at clearance+T, also specifying the clearance price. Your price is 2000 for the widget, mine is 1000. (That makes three contracts, a widget spec, my work plan and your work plan.) The market (the desirers) would then push funds back and forth between the two until it became clear that one or the other cleared. As more pressure increases, more funds pour in. Then, deliverables could be phased, with monies similarly phased, so that the market has a chance to monitor. Now, if it is not delivered, reputation suffers, and you have to lower your price for the next job (or hide in shame). There's a lot of aspects of newbies and switching funds that I havn't really thought through here. However, I like this viewpoint because it eliminates the need for judges. History shows that a good market microstructure will beat an authority approach in the long run. Also note that if you drop the free software assumption, and make it, say, moneyware, then the market becomes much more workable - the asset being traded is a share of future revenues. This has more ramifications than might be obvious: Propose a market to write a GAK killer for e$10,000. If it clears and is built, is the Dept. of Justice forced to buy the rights out? > Has anything like this been proposed before? I don't know if this has been proposed before, but it is a logical conclusion of the CP world. If the Internet transaction costs make single-person economic entities the most efficient unit in the machine, and e$ in all its forms provides the oil, then we need some way to connect up the parts for grand projects where there are hard cash incentives. There has to be some mechanism to distribute that cash in the most efficient manner to produce the result. BTW, this is a here and now issue, not a hypothetical future. We have already found that there is too much work on our plate, and limited efficiency in farming it out. Others may have found the same. -- iang iang(a)systemics.com

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Re: Members of Parliament Problem
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I don't quite follow how this would work. If Trent issues a blind > signature, then that means (doesn't it?) that he doesn't see what he > is signing. So how can he confirm that the message is actually from > a member of the group when he doesn't see it? I should have elaborated a little on this. My idea was that trent should be able to decrypt the message and verify it was meaninful (at least probably so) by some form of frequency analysis, as he would be a computer program this would not be a significant time loss in a system with few users (such as parliament as suggested with the initial problem) if the resulting message didn`t have approximate frequency distributions of letters you would expect in natural langauge or source code or whatever the message would not be published as it is probably an invalid key being used thus decrypting to garbage. A better way to do all this would probably just be to have Bob sign the message then Trent strip the signature before signing it himself but I just dashed this off as a quick response without really thinking it through. A nicer protocol would be one where the key distribution is easier initially (isn`t this always the case ;-)) or even a protocol which isn`t arbitrated, like your reply said Chaum mentions protocols for this. 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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Re: Cypherpunks State of Emergency
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 06:51 PM 11/16/96 -0800, Tim May wrote: >And sabotaging the GAK scheme in more devious ways remains an option. I see several "leverage" points here: The cards can use either a "dongle" model, similar to that used in ordinary copy protection, which has to date been a big failure - or they can use an "on-card processor" model, where the card does the actual crypto processing. This will be tough to break using the traditional cracking techniques, but will also be expensive. And card distribution can be either weak or strict; if it's a weak model (e.g., cards are sold at Fry's or 7-11 :) or are otherwise easy to come by) it'll be tough to control their distribution and export. It's a little easier to control the export of chips than to control the export of software, but neither is easy. And strict distribution will cost an enormous amount of time and money as some agency or another is deputized or created to check credentials, keep records, issue keycards, charge fees, and so forth. If cards are easy to come by, requiring them won't be much of a deterrent to the use of strong crypto; the people the government is supposedly trying to keep from using crypto (terrorists, spies, etc) are already accustomed to keeping and purchasing things which are forbidden. If cards are difficult to come by, that's a big hole waiting for someone to fill with software crypto, or software tricks to get around the hardware requirements. One bug/feature I suspect we'll see will be the inclusion of the keycard's ID in every message that it signs, facilitating detection of unauthorized use and traffic analysis. Without this, the scheme seems entirely futile. (Which is not to say that the US Government hasn't done some futile things :), but ..) Another likely feature is an expiration date, such that the cards stop working after X months and the owner must go to the Bureau of Crypto Control and show his/her credentials and exchange the old card for a new one. Of course, if you've got outstanding warrants or haven't filed your taxes or are in arrears for child support or are a "foreign person" or have been saying illegal/controversial things with your crypto card, well, perhaps you won't feel like going down to the BCC after all. So they're going to have to find a way to make the cards easy/cheap enough to get that many people will adopt them; but they have to be expensive/difficult enough to get that people won't want to "lose" them, lest they fall into the hands of the wrong people. And that seems like a difficult task, especially if opponents of the scheme continue to provide cheap/free software-only solutions. And, as always, folks not subject to the US export regulations won't need to fuss with all of this regulatory bullshit, and can produce strong software-only crypto, or drop-in replacements for the "policy chips" which are distributed without government control. -- Greg Broiles | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: gbroiles(a)netbox.com | http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto. |

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Re: TIS + HP
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:18 AM 11/18/96 -0500, John Young wrote: >A blurb in the Wash Post today says that the HP roll-out >this morning will include TIS's "trusted third party" product. >"One essential ingredient in the equation: technology >developed by TIS. TIS is so far the only company that has >received permission to export encryption technology >overseas that exceeds the government's existing >threshold." > >Guess we'll know shortly who else in the System is to be >Trusted with Information -- other than Thirds, Fourths and >other Dots and Steves. With TIS bending over for the big GAK Monster in so many ways, it brings up a question... (A probibly off-topic one...) Does anyone know of intentional GAK-like holes put in their Firewall Toolkit? They distribute it for free and distribute source, but with their record i have little trust in the matter... (Better yet, does anyone have suggestions for Firewall code that will run under Linux or FreeBSD?) --- | "Remember: You can't have BSDM without BSD." - alan(a)ctrl-alt-del.com | |"The moral PGP Diffie taught Zimmermann unites all| Disclaimer: | | mankind free in one-key-steganography-privacy!" | Ignore the man | |`finger -l alano(a)teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key | behind the keyboard.| | http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ | alano(a)teleport.com |

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BIS_sez
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

11-18-96. FiTi: "Electronic money threat to central banks" A report issued today by the BIS says that innovations such as "electronic purses" or "digital cash" used over the Internet could erode central banks' income. "However, if issuance of e-money is limited to banks, the regulatory framework already in place can be extended to cover the new products, but competition and innovation might be more limited." ----- http://jya.com/bissez.txt BIS_sez

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HP proposal available
by Hal Finney 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

HP has put up info on its crypto proposal at http://www.hp.com/go/icf. You can also try http://www.dmo.hp.com/gsy/security/icf/main.html if that URL is slow. The basic idea is what we had been speculating, their old "International Cryptography Framework" based on hardware crypto cards. It has now been given government approval, which is no big surprise since the system looks like it's been designed by fed bootlickers. The claim of other companies signing on is less impressive than it sounds. They're using Microsoft's Crypto API, and of course Microsoft would like plenty of companies to use it. Intel offers to build some hardware, which is more business for them. "Netscape and VeriFone are exploring a wide range of uses for ICF technology." That's all they say about those companies. This is hardly a commitment; Netscape and other companies generally keep abreast of everything happening in the field to keep their options open. So this is not a resounding endorsement. The one good thing about the plan is that since it is very complicated and requires specialized hardware, we probably won't see any impact from it for years. Hopefully it will be obsolete before it can be deployed. The plan itself is an NSA wet dream. Not only do you need a token from Big Brother to activate the crypto in your computer (the token can be hardware or software, but the crypto card itself apparently must be hardware), it's also necessary for any application which wants to use crypto to supply an application specific certificate to the card. This lets the law enforcement bureaucrats not only determine who gets to use crypto, but which applications get access to it. If you want to build an app which will use crypto you'll have to get permission from the authorities in order for them to give you a certificate which you can compile in to let your app run. The one thing which was not clear was how much of these rules would apply within the U.S. In fact notably missing from the press release, white paper, overviews, slides, etc. on the web site was any discussion of civil liberties impact. It certainly was not listed as one of the considerations in the design of the system. Overall, I'd say this is just HP trumpeting the unsurprising government approval of their ICF system and turning it into a press event by providing some lukewarm "endorsements" from well known companies. This system looks to me like it's got a long way to go before it becomes a widely used standard. Hal

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