December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Keyword scanning/speech recognition
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I was talking to someone recently about the feasibilty of keyword-scanning phone conversations. He thought it was probably still beyond the reach of current technology, I thought it wasn't (I gave a couple of references in a recent paper on government attitudes to crypto which indicate that it's being used right now by a number of governments). Anyway, I've got bits and pieces of one or two papers here which people might find interesting. The first one is: "Digital Circuit Techniques for Speech Analysis" by G.L.Clapper, presented at the AIEE Winter General Meeting in January 1962. I've only got the first two pages of the paper here, I think the full thing might have been published in the IEEE Trans.Communications in about 1963. This paper mentions a "digit recognizer" built at Bell Labs in 1952, and a Japanese voice-operated typewriter using 3,000 transistors and 6,000 diodes. The paper goes on to describe a means of producing a "compact digital code expressing significant qualities of speech in a form suitable for machine utilization". This was in 1962! A more recent paper is: "Discrete Utterance Speech Recognition without Time Alignment", John Shore and David Burton, IEEE Trans.Information Theory, Vol.29, No.4 (July 1983), p.473. This generates a feature vector every 10-30ms from input speech which is compared to pre-generated reference sequences. It also has references to many other papers covering the same area. Certainly it appears that by the early 1980's it was possible to scan speech for keywords and/or speakers and use this to target the surrounding conversation, and that early work on this had been done since about 1960. This is all from public sources, since certain organisations have a *far* greater interest in this particular area than anyone performing public research it's likely that equivalent classified research was some way ahead of this. Peter.

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One time pads, Next question?
by AaronH4321＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Okay, with the intel I have gotten from the responses let me modify and clarify. So, I now know that you can't use a PRNG to create a OTP. If I did have a RNG that could create a "cryptographically" random, million character OTP and I physically loaded the data onto each computer I wanted to communicate with(e.i. group of laptops all loaded at the same location, same time), how cryptographically secure would the data be. I know that physical security would be a nessescary to the system. If I add some type of error checking to make sure someone that knows the plaintext doesn't modify specific characters, an attacker knows what the message is (e.g. "Send $10 to Bob") the message can be altered (to "Send $99 to Bob") even though it is encrypted. So, lets recap. If the keyig material is kept secure, and if the OTP is cryptographically random, and if error checking is implemented then would this be considered a secure(however encumbering it may be) system. Aaron.....

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Re: Keyword scanning/speech recognition
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 03:34 AM 1/19/97, pgut001(a)cs.auckland.ac.nz wrote: >I was talking to someone recently about the feasibilty of keyword-scanning >phone conversations. He thought it was probably still beyond the reach of >current technology, I thought it wasn't. I once met a fellow who's company makes high performance key word scanning and speaker recognition products for use by governmental entities in analyzing voice communications. Unfortunately, I lost his business card. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred Make your mark in the history of mathematics. Use the spare cycles of your PC/PPC/UNIX box to help find a new prime. http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm

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No Subject
by Bovine Remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy May's obsessive masturbation has lead to advanced degree of blindness and hairy palms. ___ \/ \/ |_O O_| Timothy May | ^ | / UUU \

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Concerned about Pretty Safe Mail for Mac
by nobody＠replay.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm concerned about the product "Pretty Safe Mail" for the Macintosh, by a company called Highware. I was wondering whether anyone here had tried evaluating it at all. It is a complete PGP implementation (not a front-end). They claim to have licensed some of PRZ's code from PGP. However, as far as I can tell, they are not making any of the source code available. As someone on the comp.security.pgp newsgroups pointed out, writing a wonderful user interface on a PGP trojan horse that either crippled the session key generator or used the session key to leak random portions of secret key primes would be a perfect tactic for a government wishing to penetrate PGP security. With such a great interface, compared to the original PGP, it can't help but become widely used. I realize that without the source code, it's a major hassle, but has anyone looked at Pretty Safe Mail (previously called Safemail) at all for suspicious behavior? For example: 1) non-random session key generation? 2) non-random key pair generation? 3) unnecessary disk access to secret keys? 4) anything else? Any findings, positive or negative, would be appreciated.

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Repeal the 9th Amendment?
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A challenge on the ignored Ninth Amendment: 1-14-97. Washington Times, p. A14: Why not just repeal the forgotten Ninth Amendment Your Jan. 9 article on the "assisted suicide" issue argued before the U.S. Supreme Court does not mention the Ninth Amendment once ("High court wrestles with assisted suicide"). I was not surprised. Democrats and Republicans consistently ignore the Ninth (and appoint judges who likewise ignore it). The Ninth Amendment states: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." By ignoring this plain wording, the judiciary displays a reluctance to "create new constitutional rights," an admirable sentiment. Considering that no one seems to take it seriously, perhaps we should consider repealing the "forgotten" Ninth Amendment. After all, it seems to be written in invisible ink on just about every copy of the Bill of Rights owned by journalists and the judiciary. It is never the basis if deciding cases. Instead, it just clutters up the Bill of Rights and causes libertarians to prattle on endlessly about individual rights. I believe it would be healthy for this country to debate repealing the Ninth Amendment. Although I am opposed to the idea of repealing it, I am just as opposed to the idea of ignoring parts of the Bill of Rights. Perhaps my proposed debate will cause some lawyers, journalists, judges and Supreme Court justices to reconsider their present positions. Jim Ray Miami, Fla. Mr. Ray is chairman of the Dade County Libertarian Party Organization.

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RE: One time pads and randomness?
by Blake Coverett 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> I want to use a one time pad pased crypto system. I understand that the > randomness of the pad genorator is key to security(other than lossing the > keys). What I want to know is if I use a psuedo-RNG that maybe repeats its > self every 1000 characters and use it to only encrypt messagase that are > 100's of charaters long, will this be a major security risk? I'm afraid you've fallen into one of the standard traps. A PRNG can *not* make a OTP no matter how you use it. The total amount of entropy in a PRNG is the amount of entropy in the seed you use to key it. All the other bits are directly derived from that seed. A true OTP is completely secure from an information-theory point of view because every byte has a full eight bits of entropy. A PRNG can never have this. Having said all this, it is possible to make a good cipher from a PRNG. RC4, for example, is exactly that and the variable sized key is the seed for the PRNG. It is however very difficult to come up with a good algorithm for that cryptographically sound PRNG and you would be much further ahead to use an existing one rather that trying to roll your own. > Say I create a 1 million character one time pad that passes all of the > randomness tests. It is "truely random". I place it on two computers. Now > when these two computers want to send email computer "A" grabs a chunk of the > one time pad starting at a random point and encrypts it. It labels the email > with the random starting point and sends it to "B". There "B" moves to the > random point and begins decryption. During to process both computers mark > that section of the OTP used so that they don't retransmit with it. I realize > this has a limited amount of messages before it is used up. But would this be > secure? Any suggestions, complaints, big gapping holes I missed? I don't see anything wrong as such, but there is nothing to be gained either. If your random data is real OTP material there is no need to skip to a random byte within it, just start at the beginning and use it in sequence. If your random data is the output of a PRNG like the above then random starting point doesn't buy you much additional security because the entire set of keying material can be recreated from the seed. It may increase the work-factor of searching for the key, but it also imposes the practical problem of keeping all that keying material secure. More importantly don't confuse statistically random with cryptographically random. Just because a bunch of bits passes all the randomness test you can think of doesn't mean it contains 100% entropy. Consider the digits of an irrational number like sqrt(2) or pi, the digits appear statistically random but they can be recreated from just a tiny bit of knowledge. A good litmus test is to ask yourself if there is any way you can reproduce those bits. If there is, they aren't a one time pad. (Of course even if you can't it doesn't mean they are good. :-) regards, -Blake

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mailing list
by roamer.fau 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Please place me on your mailing list. Thank You, Mark

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Re: [Fwd: Re: Victory Party]
by dlv＠bwalk.dm.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dale Thorn <dthorn(a)gte.net> writes: > aga wrote: > > Date: Sat, 18 Jan 1997 13:34:37 GMT > > On Sat, 18 Jan 1997, SB wrote: > > From: J Durbin <slothrop(a)poisson.com> > > > Forward on the good Dr. Vulis from ne.internet.services. > > > Newsgroups: ne.internet.services, alt.fan.speedbump, alt.god.grubor > > > Steve Subject: Re: Victory Party > > > hannigan(a)shore.net (Martin Hannigan) wrote: > > >Steve/Grubby/Vulis/Aga: You can come too. Of course. > > > The Cypherpunks mailing list people invited Vulis to come speak > > at one of their CA meetings. They even offered to pay for his airfare > > and lodging, but he was too afraid to show up. > > What a coward, just like Boursy and Grubor. > > > Hey you fucker; you pay my expenses and I will come. > > You get a one hour lecture and one hour of questions and > > answers afterward. Everybody gets frisked for guns at the door, > > since we do not trust some of those cypherpunks. > > Picture the typical cypherpunk (especially Sandfort, who organized the > whole thing): Old, out of shape, ignorant, lonely, perverted, ugly, > etc. etc. Dr. Vulis actually brightened up their "life" for a few > moments, then, when he didn't take the bait for the roast, they felt > rejected, like a love spurned. It's so transparent. It just wasn't worth the time. I found F2F contact with the likes of Hughes and Gilmore pretty boring and unproductive. But if Dr. Grubor wishes to address a Cypherpunks meating, and expose them as a bunch of homosexual censors, I think it would be a neat idea. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

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Re: microcurrency: Netscape vs. Microsoft
by Hal Finney 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri(a)netcom.com> > I predict that microcurrency will not catch on in a big way > until it is integrated with browsers, and when it is, it > will be adopted in an insanely large rush like the way > the web itself caught on with the GUI (and was mostly comatose > before it). > [...] > notice how much crypto really caught on when Netscape > incorporated it, and how this action alone did more for > the proliferation of crypto in cyberspace, almost, than > all prior efforts combined. I think that microcurrency > will be unleashed in a very similar way. I assume you are referring to secure web connections via SSL in talking about crypto. In that case there was a very strong pent up demand for the service. Customers were afraid to send credit card numbers and other personal information across the web. Sellers were pressuring the net server companies to do something to quell these concerns so on-line selling could succeed. Netscape did it, and in the grand tradition of the net, implementation beat design and SSL defeated SHTTP. In its early versions SSL had a lot of problems but it was a good enough solution for what it needed to be. The question is whether there is similar market demand for pay per view web pages. Do web service operators think they can offer value added services which will motivate customers to click through the for-pay link? Maybe porn would be a good initial market. There are so many sites where you've got to sign up ahead of time for $20 or so for a month's membership. This is a considerable barrier. But if you could just take a peek for $.50 there would be a lot of people interested. Porn is what started the VCR market before it later "went respectable", so maybe the same thing could happen here. I know that a lot of the initial vendors with First Virtual were selling racy pictures, although I think the company has taken steps to reduce their association with that market. This is not exactly the microcurrency that Vladimir is talking about but it would be a good model for integrating some payment system with a browser and it could serve as the foundation for other for-pay pages with lower fees. There is also the issue of sellers learning to use the various payment systems which are out there. Here again if Netscape and Microsoft would just pick one then everyone could standardize on it, which would increase acceptance a great deal. Ecash as it is implemented now has the problem that the customer has to open a special bank account. What you need is a payment system where you can use your existing VISA card and withdraw cash against it into your electronic wallet. This is pretty close to the FV model but their payment system is somewhat clumsy. I haven't followed the electronic payment market closely for the last couple of years. Are there any payment systems which look like good candidates for integration with browsers? Hal

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