December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: El Gamal
by Hal Finney 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The next version of PGP will offer the combination of El Gamal for encryption and Digital Signature Standard (DSS) for signatures, as an alternative to RSA. These are based on the discrete log problem. El Gamal is really almost the same as Diffie-Hellman. You have a secret x, he has a secret y, and together you calculate g^(xy) which is your shared secret. With DH you then just use that shared secret as your message encryption key; with El Gamal you multiply (or xor, or add...) your key with the shared secret. PGP uses El Gamal so that we can send along not only key info but also which algorithm to use for the message body encryption, and also a checksum. It is true that El Gamal encrypted messages will be about 128 bytes bigger than RSA for 1024 bit keys. DSS on the other hand produces somewhat smaller signatures than RSA, by about 85-90 bytes. But neither of these is really significant in typical applications. The Diffie-Hellman patent expires September 6, 1997. I gather that it would also cover El Gamal since that is a variant. The Hellman-Merkle "knapsack" patent, which claims to cover all public key cryptography, expires October 6, 1997. After that date, at least some forms of public key cryptography will be unpatented in the U.S. The RSA patent expires September 20, 2000. It is possible that the next three years will see greater use of discrete log cryptography because of the patent state, although RSA has a significant "brand" advantage in the business market. (This patent info is from "Handbook of Applied Cryptography", from Menezes et al, which I recommend as a supplement to Schneier.) Hal

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Admin Feigns Back Off On Crypto Bill
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

News report today: Reinsch told reporters that strategy will be to follow advice he has been given and not to circulate Administration draft bill. Issue is so polarized, he said, that that bill would be dismissed quickly, and some of its content that lawmakers might want to adopt also would be rejected because it came from Administration. Reinsch said it's close call, and Administration is reevaluating its tactics constantly. This seems to coordinate with Kerrey's initiative to lump all crypto bills into one "acceptable to the leadership and the White House." http://jya.com/backoff.htm BTW, another report claims that proposed new regs will allow banks the special privilege of strong crypto if they come up with an acceptable KMI within two years. This seems to be what Kerrey means when he says NSA's Crowell is working with industry to develop an acceptable KMI along the lines of what government is preparing for its own use. All interests to be subservient to the Number One interest?

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"constructive" possession of a gun
by William H. Geiger III 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Senate Judiciary Committe -- 08 May 1997 Well the JackBoots are at it again. Under current Federal Law 5yrs can be tacked on to a criminal sentance if a gun is used in the commision of a crime. Now they have a new twist to add: "constructive" possession of a gun during the commision of a crime. Now what does "constructive" possession mean? Well according to those who testified from the various depts of the Excutive Branch it means that a gun happens to be in the area, or the potential to use a gun or if you recoment that someone else use a gun durring the commission of a crime even though the weapon was never used. Some examples given: If durring the planning of a bank robbery you recomend that a gun be used durring the robbery even though you did not use the weapon or was not even present durring the robbery you could still get the extra 5yrs. If durring a drug deal taking place in the back seat of a car there is a gun under the front seat of the car you would still get the extra 5yrs even though the the gun was never used. If durring a drug raid on your home and a gun is found anywhere in the house, yes you would be elegible for the extra 60 months. <sigh> why do they even pretend to be running a constitutional government? - -- - ----------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. Finger whgiii(a)amaranth.com for PGP Key and other info - ----------------------------------------------------------- Tag-O-Matic: "640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Registered User E-Secure v1.1 ES000000 iQCVAwUBM3KQGo9Co1n+aLhhAQEHkAQAtBlcEtyXzRNKKI7HtEx0H1glMGmlzN+8 cQD91dlgHhNbN24C5Ixq+hDBvBYWTs0yUY8fHOIgMo5HqQWRr4VMG2yrfcM42vyH LuhKuldAYem4mKWoEm4wl0LYTxn18r0w/4f5NCT3VN+7aTrrme6QjYkN7BXNr6lU Mxd1YGeAFzM= =ZpFe -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Tag-O-Matic: Windows is to OS/2 what Etch-a-Sketch is to art.

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Wine Politics Again!
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text X-Sender: mcooley(a)pop.tiac.net Date: Thu, 08 May 1997 22:25:28 To: dcsb(a)ai.mit.edu From: Marianne Cooley <mcooley(a)nethorizons.com> Subject: Wine Politics Again! Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: bounce-dcsb(a)ai.mit.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Marianne Cooley <mcooley(a)nethorizons.com> This one is not just an Internet message. In fact, I should probably take it to my marketing list ;)--but just to keep y'all up to date with the latest commerce developments. Marianne forwarded message: Hello friends of the Virtual Vineyards and family wineries. Remember the felony direct shipping law in Georgia I wrote about a few weeks ago? Well, Governor Miller signed it, unfortunately. Ship a bottle of wine, go to jail. Amazing. Here it is again, this time in Florida. The wholesale liquor lobby is pushing a bill through the state houses making it a felony to ship a bottle of wine to a Florida consumer. If you believe, as we do, that this is unreasonable restraint of legitimate commerce, please register your opposition directly with Governor Chiles. This is not just a Florida issue, as other states are watching the development of such laws very closely. If you have friends in Florida please pass this on to them and urge them to act quickly. The bill will soon be on the governor's desk. Here is a sample letter for Governor Chiles with several ways to contact him. Personalize it if you wish, or send it as is: E-Mail: chilesl(a)eog.state.fl.us Fax: 904-487-0801 Phone: 904-488-4441 Governor Lawton Chiles Office of the Governor Florida State Capitol, Talahassee, Florida 32399-0001 Dear Governor Chiles: I call upon you to veto HB 725 (SB336), the felony direct shipment bill. This bill is sponsored by the state's Liquor wholesalers in order to protect their monopoly on wine sold to Florida consumers. Out-of-state sellers of wine support Florida Attorney General Butterworth's counter-proposal, and are willing to register with Florida, pay state excise and sales taxes and assure that all Florida laws protecting minors are observed. If HB 725 becomes law, Florida wine consumers' choices of products will be narrowly limited to the few wines represented by the Liquor wholesalers and Florida itself will be making a statement that small family winegrape growers and wineries in over 40 states deserve to go to jail, and lose their farms and vineyards, if they ship a bottle of wine to a customer who happens to reside in Florida. HB 725 is hostile to consumers and agriculture. I urge you to use your veto. Sincerely yours, Peter D. Granoff, M.S./Virtual Vineyards http://www.virtualvin.com 800-289-1275 415-938-9463 415-919-1977 fax 3803 East Bayshore Rd., Suite 175 Palo Alto, CA 94303 ********************************************************************* Marianne Cooley Internet Special Interest Group NetHorizons Unlimited SigNet.org--where online users meet mcooley(a)nethorizons.com http://www.signet.org 617.433.0825 Join "Life at Internet Speed" on www.boston.com Wednesdays from 1-2pm! For a chat topic reminder, send an email to majordomo(a)signet.org and write "subscribe life" (no quotation marks) in the body of the message. ********************************************************************** ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To unsubscribe from the dcsb list, send a letter to: Majordomo(a)ai.mit.edu In the body of the message, write: unsubscribe dcsb Or, to subscribe, write: subscribe dcsb If you have questions, write to me at Owner-DCSB(a)ai.mit.edu --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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e$: In Vino Veritas
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I love this prohibition stuff. First recreational drugs, then guns, then cryptography, then tobbacco, and now, the grandaddy of all prohibitions, alcohol sales, on the net in Florida, with good old vino being retreaded as a brand new thin edge of the tired old wedge of government behavioral control. Once again, a whole generation of libertines now becomes moralistic in their old age. Same as it ever was. Remember that the Romantics (Beethoven, Chopin, the waltzing Strausses, etc.) grew up to become the Victorians (the temperance, missionary, conservation, and "indian school" movements). So, maybe it *is* time to move to a country where the average age is under 30. Fortunately, there are a lot of them, thanks to exploding life expectancy caused by advancing technological progress and Peale's "demographic transition". Maybe soon they'll have enough wealth (and technological creativity) of their own to ignore the increasing constrictions of what Tim May likes to call the "Terror State". I'd gladly exchange a moribund environment of backward-looking luddism for a cheerful attack on the problem of making the future happen, anytime. Unfortunately, that doesn't look like an option, not just yet, anyway. The other thing which comes to mind with all this is, of course, financial cryptography, which, contrary to the opinion of more than a few on the e-mail lists I'm on, I see as the thin edge of another kind of wedge. It is financial cryptography which will kill cryptographic prohibition, and, someday, prohibition of other technologies as well. Currently, the relaxation of export controls on cryptography is now merely a cudgel to make us submit to ubiquitous wiretapping, and not for national security, the original purpose of such controls. Former National Security Agency Chief Counsel Stewart Baker said at the Digital Commerce Society of Boston luncheon this Tuesday that the management of the NSA gave up on succeeding with cryptographic export controls in 1993, and that their only hope was to enlist Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Louis Freeh in their efforts by showing him threat of cryptography to his wiretap apparatus. It's now quite clear that the NSA is fighting a retreat on strong cryptography, and that they're using Louis Freeh and the FBI to do it for them. So, at this point, any residual attempts by the national security apparatus per se to control exports, beyond assisting Freeh in slowing down technological progress, is just regulatory inertia. Still real and very dangerous to anyone who believes in freedom and privacy, but lacking any further accelleration to move it forward, once the momentum it already has finally goes away. In my conversation last year with senior people there, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), responsible for catching money launderers and other financial criminals and another would-be cryptographic hoplaphobe, certainly seemed to understand that if blind-signature digital bearer certificates are proven to be as economically efficient as a few of us on the net think they will be, FinCEN's ability to monitor transactions on the net will just disappear. Not only because they can't see those transaction behind the Chaumian blind-signature algorithm, but because the sheer volume of transactions (the micromoney mitochondria, digital-cash-as-microprocessor-food idea I like to throw around, as an extreme example) will physically choke any monitoring effort they attempt to build. In yet another paraphrase of John Gilmore's law of internet censorship, the net sees surveillance as damage, and routes around it. Again, inertia is a problem here, and the powers-that-be at FinCEN haven't given up quite yet on ultimately controlling the impending explosion of internet financial cryptography, as NSA's management seems to have with crypto in general. Mostly because all the starry-eyed claims people like me make on behalf of digital bearer certificates are just that, claims, with no empirical evidence so far to back them up. Yet. :-). Finally, that leaves wiretaps, and the FBI's Louis Freeh, a man who got his law-enforcement bones because of bugs and wiretaps, and who has never seen a wiretap he didn't like. First of all, Freeh faces the same problem FinCEN faces. Even if it were economically possible for the FBI to get the monsterous wiretap capability that the freshly legislated CALEA now crams down the collective financial throat of every telecoms manufacturer and provider on earth. Even if he did get access to all cryptographic keys, which he can't physically do, because economics will require that most of those session keys be disposed of as fast as they're used. Even if, in spite of both of those flights of economic fantasy, he were able to do so, Freeh still can't physically monitor all that communication, in the same sense that FinCEN can't follow all those transactions on the internet. Gilmore's Law strikes again. But, the joke here, of course, is that surveillence technology in meatspace itself is going to continue to increase. The eventual prospect of ubiquitous videobugging both by government and private sources means that a lot of David Brin's surveillance society will probably come to pass, and physical crime will continue to diminish as a result. The law-enforcement need for tapped or "excrowed" communictions will probably disappear, because even when Freeh & Co. couldn't just subpoena some stored private video somewhere, planting a physical bug, Gotti-style, will be much easier than listening in to an "excrowed" communication with disposable session keys. Much in the same way, I might add, as if the NSA bunch had never mentioned the idea of key escrow at all to Louis Freeh. That's because the inherent need of corporations to secure their own data from the hostile or accidental behavior of their own people would have already created a market for encrypted data recovery anyway. All the law enforcement community would need to do to get access to that information is the same thing they use for anything else: a subpoena. Again, the "rational control" of government destroyed what would have been a much more efficient market driven technology. Like the filtering of offensive internet content was before the Communications Decency Act threatened to "require" it, some very creative people were thinking very hard about private key and cryptography data recovery schemes and now won't touch them because the government wants to mandate key escrow, er, "recovery", into existance. However, the last laugh in the upcoming surveillance society will eventually be had by privacy advocates on would-be totalitarians like Mr. Freeh, and, it seems, on Al Gore, who seems to be Freeh's chief cheerleader in the Clinton administration. Remember that Stalin, too, came to totalitarianism from the absolutism of the extreme left, and leftist absolutism is something Mr. Gore's book "Earth in the Balance" is chock full of. Somewhere, Freddy Hayek is laughing. Anyway, in the ultimate twist of fate, all those ubiquitous surveillance devices will be predominantly in *private* hands, and, as the cleptocracy of the modern nation state continues to implode from it's own greed and power-lust, those surveillance devices will, eventually, be linked to privately held security firms, and, maybe someday to autonomous *munitions*. See the "Mesh and the Net", <http://www.shipwright.com/meshnet.html>, for some hints to this kind of defensive military technology. I claim that as we will be able to allocate network resources with some kind of cash settled economy, so too will we someday be be able to directly "purchase" the services of these kinds of technologies, without the centralized economic distortion of a nation-state. In other words, we'll be much more physically secure without people like Mr. Freeh, than with them. While that's a long way off, it's probably not so far as freedom and privacy advocates fear. For instance, if, say, 10 years from now, as some people have predicted, your home security system had complete visual coverage of your property with a swarm of very cheap CCD videocameras, all streaming that encrypted video over the net to some secure (possibly anonymous) storage place, then not only do criminals have a tougher time comitting crimes against your person and property, but so too does government. In addition, with such a system, there's nothing to keep a private cop or detective from appearing at the scene of the crime, probably at much less cost than that of a government one. Heck, the purchase of the cop's or detective's time could occur on a cash-settled auction market, for that matter. Paid by private crime insurance, of course. :-). Once again, information technology reduces government to the functional equivalent of ceremony, following monarchy down the road to mere decoration and, lately, occassional entertainment. Now, I agree that just waiting around for all this to mysteriously appear won't make it happen any faster. The faster the technology is built, deployed, and most important, made profitable, the better. And, these days, all this statist encroachment on our freedom feels, very debatably, like being a Jew on Krystallnacht waiting for the Americans to win the war already. But, this technology *is* going to happen, and, while nation-states aren't going to go down without fighting for their institutional lives, they *have* lost. Hopefully, the sooner they know they've lost, the sooner they'll give up, join the human race, and get on with building the future. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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One-Time Pads as Attack Method
by 00043.an＠edtec.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

1. Agents of the Enemy wish to create the appearance of you possessing document A. 2. They obtain some artifact you have emailed, or posted, or possess on your private local storage. --- Possibly even signed. Call this message B. 3. They create the XOR of A and B, the result being a 'one time pad' C. which of course, gives: private message B XOR C = target bogus message A. This result is of course not a one time pad; the plan is to accuse you of possessing materials that prove you are trading with the enemy, exchanging kiddie-porn, any of the usual things. 4. This 'one time pad' file C. somehow finds its way into your possession: it is an email attachment, embedded in some binary --- it could even be stego'ed into a GIF/JPG. 5. The agents break down the door and seize all your effects. 6. They are able to prove that you possess B and C, the XOR of which is A., a fact that is impossible to have happened at random. 7. The jury doesn't know shit, and figures that if the chances of B ^ C = A by accident are 0, then you must be guilty. I'm only looking at the general schema of an attack like this: I'm sure there are many ways the right defense could be mounted about how the files got on the client's computer, etc.etc. The interesting part of this frame-job is using something you may have already publicly posted, making denial of its origin difficult, together with a surreptitious planting of the 'pad' data. Naturally the incriminating data payload could be delivered directly, without the OTP business. But I thought it might be worth examining the implications of this theme.

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Certified primes
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As `homo' as he might be, Timmy May is not of the species `Homo Sapiens', but rather `Papio Mephitis'. Unlike human beings, he has not descended from apes --- yet. o-:^>___? Timmy May `~~c--^c'

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Security flaw in key recovery -- you're looking at it
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[This is only a test. If I had been in a bad mood, this message would have contained the private key of the CEO of a major Entrust customer, obtained from an Entrust trusted "key safe" server. Who am I? Can Entrust or its customer's officers finger me?]

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How to get contact with Cypherpunks?
by aja.ub＠t-online.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, IŽm a user of internet technologies and interested to learn more about privacy and security in internets/intranets. How can I participate? Greetings from Nueremberg/Germany Andy

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FreeBSD 2.2.1 on CDROM is shipping out of the U.S.A. with full DES
by Loren James Rittle 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

FYI, I hope it is not premature but people are starting to take advantage of the wonderful Patel ruling in the Bernstein v U.S. Department of Justice case. Cool! Loren From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh(a)FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.2.1 on CDROM Date: Wed, 07 May 1997 17:48:51 -0700 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Message-ID: <337122F3.167EB0E7(a)FreeBSD.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-STABLE i386) To: tonyg(a)OntheNet.com.au Tony Griffiths wrote: > I just received the 2.2.1 disk yesterday and it contains the DES stuff > which has been missing on all previous disks I have received! That's because it's now legal for us to export it. An S.F. district judge recently ruled that exporting encryption is legal, at least within her jurisdiction, and so our lawyer has OK'd our taking advantage of this fact [that we fall geographically within her sphere of influence] to export crypto. I have always *wanted* to do this, since shipping "crippled" CDs in order that I might export them was abhorent to me, and now I can. This also means that the unpacked CVS repository on SNAPshot CDs contain full sources for des, kerberos etc and so forth and you can actually _use_ the repository to check out a complete, unadulterated version of FreeBSD at any release version from 2.0 onwards. -- - Jordan Hubbard FreeBSD core team / Walnut Creek CDROM.

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