December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Embarrass a Marylander, go to jail
by Scottauge＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Think they are trying to expand the harrassment laws to directly effect the E world, but I would think the laws on harrassment would apply anyhow (provided your in their domain, but then again thats true for all governments...) --- How has the government interfered in your life today?

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DES keyspace
by Joel McNamara 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Is anyone coordinating (formally or informally) which chunks of the keyspace has been searched for the DES challenge? Yes, I know all the arguments about potential fraud and verification, but it would be nice to have a Web site that informally listed what had been scanned so far (verified or not). Did I perhaps miss something and this is already out there? URLs appreciated if so. If it doesn't exist, I'd be willing to host a site and play coordinator... Joel

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IBM's SecureWay Key Recovery technology
by Marshall Clow 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From <http://www.ibm.com/Security/html/prkeyrec.html>: >At the RSA Conference, IBM announced the details of its highly >anticipated SecureWay key recovery technology. IBM is developing this >technology in response to market demands for exportable strong >encryption required to advance the growth of global e-business. >[ yada yada yada snipped ] I attended this presentation. Basically, what they do is to add two packets to the "channel setup process", one that depends only on the coorespondents, the other that contains the information about this particular session. A problem with this, as I pointed out to the presenters, is that the first packet can be trivially used for traffic analysis. The eavesdropper may not be able to determine who is cooresponding, but they can tell if it is the same people as in a previous conversation. >From <http://www.ibm.com/security/html/wp_keyrec2.html> >In order to minimize the preparation overhead, the recovery information >is prepared in two phases: one phase is independent of the particular >session/archive key being prepared; the second phase is dependent on the >particular key and session parameters. The first phase, which uses >public-key encryption, can be shared across multiple invocations of key >recovery preparation, thus reducing overhead. The public-key encryptions >can be stored for repeated use. > As you can see, IBM suggests cacheing the contents of the first packet, so that you don't have to recalculate it each time. Imagine how easy traffic analysis would be if the identification packets were identical instead of just related. -- Marshall Marshall Clow Aladdin Systems <mailto:mclow@mailhost2.csusm.edu> Warning: Objects in calendar are closer than they appear.

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AltaVista Tunnel
by Rick Osborne 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Digital / Microsoft "Driving Force" tour is in our parking lot today and I got the opportunity to have a look around. One of the 'stations' inside the truck is on intranets. They were showing off a product called "AltaVista Tunnel" which I assume is their PPTP product. I say "I assume" because the guy showing it off had absolutely no clue what he was talking about. He triumphantly exclaimed that the encryption was 128-bit, but when I said "128-bit what?" he cowered and muttered that he didn't know and went on with his little speech. The rest of my crypto-specific questions met with equal dark stares. And these are the people setting industry standards... _________ o s b o r n e @ g a t e w a y . g r u m m a n . c o m _________ Real programmers programs never work right the first time. But if you throw them on the machine they can be patched into working in only a few 30-hours debugging sessions.

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Re: Embarrass a Marylander, go to jail
by Scottauge＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Think they are trying to expand the harrassment laws to directly effect the E world, but I would think the laws on harrassment would apply anyhow (provided your in their domain, but then again thats true for all governments...) --- How has the government interfered in your life today?

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Re: Dissolving Choke Points
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:36 PM 2/3/97 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote: >What I have seen is a pretty complete elimination of the signal that >was there. Some might argue that this is "just" because Tim stopped >posting. But so what? The result of moderation was the elimination >of signal. Nonsense. The signal had left long before the moderation began. The steepest drop in signal (not S/N ratio) was between shortly before Perry left and Vulis had completed his takeover. Signal is cause by signal generators. Most top signal generators, other than Tim, had left because of pollution caused by the likes of Vulis, aga, and his homophonic boyfriends. Moderation has nothing to do with the loss of signal other than that signal from Tim was lost. And while I appreciated Tim's essays, they were never the sole source of signal on the list. Tim did not even provide the majority of signal. "Best individual contributor", sure. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." Mahatma Gandhi

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Re: New X-Ray Imager
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:38 AM 2/4/97 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote: > >| A poll last week by the Los Angeles Times found that a majority of people -- >| 58 percent -- said they would curtail some civil liberties if it would help >| thwart terrorism. Thirteen percent said it would depend on what rights were >| at stake. The poll didn't ask people to single out any rights. > > Its worth noting the 'if it would help thwart terrorism.' It is irrelevant if terrorism is indeed be thwarted. The public does not require this to happen. All that matters is to generate the *perception* of increased security, not to increase security itself. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." Mahatma Gandhi

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Re: Moderation, Tim, Sandy, me, etc. * Strong crypto == DES?!
by E. Allen Smith 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"gnu(a)toad.com" "John Gilmore" 4-FEB-1997 12:20:22.10 >Tim, the Cypherpunks have chosen to follow Sandy's lead for this >month. I'll admit I made it easy for them, but the results are >conclusive. There are 1311 addresses in the cypherpunks list today; >42 in the unedited list; and 19 in the flames list. Forty people >cared enough to read every posting; the other thousand either wanted >to try the experiment -- or didn't care enough to send an email >message. Which, as we all know, is a very low threshold. You're making an invalid assumption... namely that people who stayed on the moderated list are neccessarily wanting it to be the main list. This isn't the case with me, for instance. I'd also point out that some of us - including me - were taking the time to take a look at what happened with the moderated list. On the one hand, it did result in a decrease in the trash messages... on the other hand, it also drove away 1+ good posters (TCMay for one). As I've said before, I might wind up going with Sandy's (or some other) filtered list. But changing the name (effectively, to cypherpunks-unedited) was a bad idea. >I'm definitely bugged by the community's attitude toward my >"censorship". Rather than being glad that someone, anyone, was doing >something about the major problem on the list, 99% of the reaction was >to create even more ill-considered, emotional flamage. *I* didn't >make the signal/noise get worse at that point -- *you-all* did. I can see how you might ignore objections from those who did make the signal/noise get worse... but from those who didn't? _I_ tried to help you by letting you & Sandy know when something was going wrong. >Perhaps at that point I should have shut down the list, as Lucky is >now suggesting. "Asking the list what to do" was clearly not a useful >option. Sandy cared enough about the community to make some concrete >suggestions to me about how to get the list back on track. They >involved a lot more work than the previous setup. I told him if he >was willing to do the work, we could try it. As Dale suggests, I >wasn't about to waste my time reading the whole list in real time and >passing judgement on the postings. Sandy was, for a month. I (and others, I believe) are gratified by y'all's attempts to help. I just think that you went about it the wrong way. >Start a mailing list on another site! Move this list to somewhere! [...] >The experiment will be over in a few weeks. Who's going to take over >deciding how to run the list, and running it? Would you be willing to help in starting up a distributed list? That would appear to solve at least some of the toad.com problems (keeping it running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) with which I am sympathetic. >If you want to help organize what I'll call the `progressive crypto >community', for lack of a better term, then please do. Otherwise, in >the immortal words of Lazarus Long, "PIPE DOWN!". I'm willing to help the _libertarian_ crypto community, to the limit allowed by my available resources (I'm a grad student). Organize? I'm not so sure to what degree that's helping. Progressive? I'm not a liberal. Slight but meaningful difference in terms. >PS: Can we talk about crypto too? It's clear from the last few days >of press releases that the pro-GAK forces are again working to confuse >novices into thinking that two very different things are the same >thing. Last time it was "public key infrastructure" and "key >recovery". This time it's "strong crypto" and "56-bit DES". What >should we do about this? Educate the public? The public won't listen until 56-bit DES is broken; then, they can be told that "somebody broke the cryptography used by banks" and they might listen. In other words, what can be done is supporting DES-breaking efforts (ideally, via the collection of different possible keys and their indicators, as someone had mentioned earlier - sorry, I'm a biologist, not a mathematician, so I've forgotten the actual terms. It was something that would essentially enable the near-instant breaking of _any_ DES code after the competion of the project. My apologies if I've gotten mixed up on this). -Allen

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Re: New X-Ray Imager
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:38 AM 2/4/97 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote: > >| A poll last week by the Los Angeles Times found that a majority of people -- >| 58 percent -- said they would curtail some civil liberties if it would help >| thwart terrorism. Thirteen percent said it would depend on what rights were >| at stake. The poll didn't ask people to single out any rights. > > Its worth noting the 'if it would help thwart terrorism.' It is irrelevant if terrorism is indeed be thwarted. The public does not require this to happen. All that matters is to generate the *perception* of increased security, not to increase security itself. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred "I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." Mahatma Gandhi

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Re: New X-Ray Imager
by ichudov＠algebra.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Lucky Green wrote: > At 10:38 AM 2/4/97 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote: > >| A poll last week by the Los Angeles Times found that a majority of > people -- > >| 58 percent -- said they would curtail some civil liberties if it would help > >| thwart terrorism. Thirteen percent said it would depend on what rights were > >| at stake. The poll didn't ask people to single out any rights. > > > > Its worth noting the 'if it would help thwart terrorism.' > > It is irrelevant if terrorism is indeed be thwarted. The public does not > require this to happen. All that matters is to generate the *perception* of > increased security, not to increase security itself. Let's remember though that perception of security applies not only to passengers, but also to potential terrorists. If they *think* that they would not be able to bring a bomb easily, they would be less inclined to do so. - Igor.

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