December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Crypto Publicity
by Dave Watson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Orange County Register, a somewhat conservative daily for the county just south of somewhat more liberal Los Angeles, provided a short plug for crypto in today's editorial page. Not that they're necessarily any better than the others, but positive publicity should be encouraged. "The Clinton administration has been trying to control cryptography completely. It doesn't care that its export controls on cryptography put U.S. companies at a disadvantage, unable to secure properly exports of electronic information. A new group has formed to fight against this censorship: the Internet Privacy Coalition. Concerned businesses and private citizens should check out its web site at: www.privacy.org/ipc/" The register is at www.ocregister.com.

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Pipeline Down
by jyy＠gnn.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Pipeline appears to be down. Maybe a SYN sin, maybe just a Sunday sin. If any unanswered messages to jya(a)pipeline.com, try jyy(a)gnn.com

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ISR on the web
by research＠isr.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Internet Security Review is now available on the web. Have a look at http://www.isr.net ==

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Re: 56 kbps modems
by craigw＠dg.ce.com.au 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

well here in Australia Telstra our national carrier only "garantees" 2400 baud to work. I live within 2km of the exchange and the best I have ever achieved was 22k/sec over the lines (usually about 18k). This is not what the modem tells you it is doing....but what you get as a result of testing the ACTUAL modem speed using a line analizer program. What a modem manufacturer says you get and what the line gives you are Totaly separate. > People who seemed to know used to say that 'the Shannon limit' >set an absolute upper limit around 40 kbps. Has Shannon been >proven wrong, or what? ,'~``. \|/ ,'``~. (-o=o-) (@ @) ,(-o=o-), +--.oooO--(_)--Ooo-----oOO-(_)-OOo-------oooO--(_)--Oooo.------+ | | | Soon, we may all be staring at our computers, wondering | | whether they're staring back. | | | | [Network Admin For WPA Business Products. aka doshai >;-) ] | | .oooO http://pip.com.au/~doshai/ Oooo. | | ( ) Oooo. .oooO ( ) | +-----\ (----( )-------oooO-Oooo--------( )--- ) /---------+ \_) ) / \ ( (_/ (_/ \_) Key fingerprint = 2D F4 54 BB B4 EA F1 E7 B6 DE 48 92 FC 8D FF 49 Send a message with the subject "send pgp-key" for a copy of my key. (if I want to give it to you)

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IBM_gak
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

9-15-96. PcWe: "IBM Boosts Encryption Initiative " IBM security initiatives next month will include a new way to build encryption into software and technology that could enable U.S. companies to export products with strong encryption algorithms. IBM also will introduce several "key-recovery" technologies that could enable businesses to satisfy the requirement imposed by the U.S. government that it be able to access encrypted data on demand. IBM is attempting to garner industry support for the new key-recovery technology and is expected to license the technology to Netscape and Sun. 9-13-96. BuWi: "Revolutionary Intranet security product to be demonstrated at Interop DotCom " DSN's NetFortress fully automates hardware-based authentication, encryption and key exchange into a plug and play solution. It completely eliminates the possibility of IP spoofing, eavesdropping and break-ins. "After installing it, I couldn't even tell which service a given packet was from - everything but the packet header itself was rendered undecipherable as it traversed the Internet." DSN Technology was founded by Dr. Aharon Friedman and Andy Savas. ----- http://jya.com/ibmgak.txt (6 kb for 2) IBM_gak

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Re: Juno Newbies are Great!
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com" "Bill Stewart" 14-SEP-1996 07:37:07.81 >- it's free. Anybody can get on it. Easily. Anonymously, more or less, > since they don't need to have your whole credit history > to be able to charge you money. At most you need a maildrop. As has been previously pointed out, this also makes it nice for disposable remailer front ends. Is anyone currently working on this project? -Allen

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Re: What is best policy paper on crypto?
by norm＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:18 PM 9/12/96, Gregg Cooke wrote: .... > > I'm gonna stick my neck out here and ask a naive question: where > can I find "the NAS report" mentioned in this thread? Note that > I'm new to this list (2 days) so please be kind if this paper is > extremely well known (it's not known to me but it sounds like > something I need to read). > > -Gregg I think that they meant the NRC (National Research Council) report. It is at: <http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/nrcindex.htm>.

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Mobile IP URL typo
by John Gilmore 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >locations. See http://www.ietf.org/html-charters/mobileip-charter.html, > >or search for "Mobile IP" in a web search engine. > That URL got 404-NotFound... s/-/. http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/mobileip-charter.html John

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Pipeline Up
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Cancel that poop about Pipeline being down. Seems only NYC is down. Access is OK through PSInet. jyy(a)gnn.com is for top secret black SIGINT only, okay?

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Cryptography of a sort - redux
by Dale Thorn 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

If anyone remembers my original postings from a couple weeks ago (my first-ever on The Net), I described a method to "shuffle" bits in a text-stream, using simple random-number generators, to insure that the text cannot be descrambled by brute-force methods. It has occurred to me only after this time that there was significant misinterpretation of what I proposed. I do not change any bits of text, I merely reposition them, therefore there is no applicability of standard analysis techniques (XOR masking, whatever) to the decoding process. The result file contains the same number of zero and one bits as it started with, through any number of encryption layers. The only way to recover the original text is to reposition the shuffled bits correctly, which requires brute-force guessing of the pseudo-random-number output. This guess is very simple for the first encoding layer, but compounds exponentially in subsequent encodings, so that after half a dozen or a dozen passes, where the executable program(s) is called from scratch for each pass, the shuffling rapidly approaches true randomness, and cannot be decrypted in practice except through the exact mirror-image reversal of the encryption passes. An example: How long would it take for you to guess the number (between 0 and 32000) I'm thinking of, if you could guess 16 billion numbers per second? Would it be .000001 second, on average? If you had to guess the ten different numbers I'm thinking of, and get all ten correct sequentially, it should take an essentially infinite amount of time, yes? And remember, since computer bits have such low differentiation (ones and zeros), looking for "patterns" and so forth just doesn't apply in this type of encryption. As to the Public Key part of the argument, once there is general understanding on the above points at large, it might then be worthwhile to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of how to make/distribute Private keys, etc. One gentleman on this forum made an argument recently, something to the effect that it wouldn't be worthwhile for Hacker X to try to break into datastream Y, assuming datastream Y is encoded with such-and-such a key, that datastream Y is sufficiently unimportant, and motive for such a breakin would not be great enough to justify the expected effort. To such arguments, all I can say is, this is the computer age, and enough mundane transactions can add up to something significant, or, one could lower the expected-effort ratio, you get the picture.

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