December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Political Prisoner of Intel
by Mike Duvos 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

http://www.rahul.net/jeffrey/ovs -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ enoch(a)zipcon.com $ via Finger $

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Re: Comparing Cryptographic Key Sizes
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks, Adam, for sending this along. As it turns out, I'm working on an article about encryption and privacy that will appear in Time Magazine next month. Yesterday I photocopied a few pages of Applied Crypto and printed out the (I believe) February 1996 paper on recommended key lengths and passed them around the office. Your summary is even more handy. -Declan ------------------------- Declan McCullagh Time Inc. The Netly News Network Washington Correspondent http://netlynews.com/

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Re: New PGP signatures (fwd)
by Mark Grant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Mon, 23 Jun 1997, William H. Geiger III wrote: > You really need to modify your mail-processing code as you are going to > see more and more of these. You should also start work on implementing the > PGP/MIME RFC as you will be seeing more of these messages. It's kind of hard to modify the code when I'm still waiting for the PGP 5.0 code to be made available. I can't do a lot until people finish OCR-ing it. > Nothing personal but your code should not "break" on any data that is sent > to it. PGP 2.6.x doen't have a problem with these signatures it just > returns a error code and goes on it's way. Precisely; it returns an error and drops out. It *does not* output the signed message to stdout as it would do if it were an RSA-signed message, so it just looks like an empty message. At the moment I have better things to do, but I guess if people are going to use non-standard message formats they don't want us to read what they write anyway. Mark

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by TruthMailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Re: Hettinga's e$yllogism
by Secret Squirrel 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>1. Government has copy of keys >2. Government misuses keys. > >Simple enough for you? Too simple. Escrow for ecash isn't to allow forging cash, or stealing it. It allows tracing it. If you tell financial experts that making ecash traceable under court order is goint to make electronic commerce impossible, they'll laugh. They already use systems which are even less private than that. Anon

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Re: Hettinga's e$yllogism
by winsock＠rigel.cyberpass.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>1. Government has copy of keys >2. Government misuses keys. > >Simple enough for you? Too simple. Escrow for ecash isn't to allow forging cash, or stealing it. It allows tracing it. If you tell financial experts that making ecash traceable under court order is goint to make electronic commerce impossible, they'll laugh. They already use systems which are even less private than that. Anon

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digital signature software
by chewp＠pacific.net.sg 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi Besides PGP and RIPEM/SIG, is anyone aware of other US-exportable digital signature software? Thanks Lip Ping chewp(a)pacific.net.sg

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Re: spook pressure on crypto exports (was Re: cypherpunks coding challenge)
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Death rays from Mars made Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> write: >Bill Stewart <stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com> writes: >>(Though actually SSLeay has been very useful to a lot of the >>world's free cryptography, and has prompted the US spooks >>to pressure the Australian spooks into restricting crypto exports, >>just as they've pressured the NZs into restricting them for >>Peter Gutman, and have been trying to work on the Irish...) >Could you elaborate on these. I caught Peter Gutmann's comments on the >hassles a company he did some work for were having with the NZ spooks. (The >spooks intercepted their mailed disk, plus some other cloak and dagger >spookish stuff). Nothing was intercepted. They (the GCSB, NZ subsidiary of the NSA) came up with some phony story about NZ customs intercepting a shipment of military-grade encryption (or something similar) which they fed to the Australian spooks (DSD). NZ Customs knew nothing of this, and the DSD were apparently also considerably surprised by it. As far as I can tell it was a very amateurish attempt to intimidate one of the companies involved (frighteningly amateurish in fact - a single phonecall was enough to confirm that they'd invented the whole incident themselves, the only real effect it had was to get them a front-page story in the National Business Review and (presumably) piss off the DSD for sending them on a wild goose chase and risking media exposure). >Is this still going on, was it ever resolved? Can the next version of >cryptlib be exported legally? Or are we relying on Peters bravery? It can be legally exported. Although the people pulling the strings are the GCSB, the group enforcing it is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT)'s export control group, who are idiots (I can elaborate on this in great detail at some point, preferably over a beer). I have several written statements from them that I can freely export it electronically (along with all sorts of bogosities such as a letter signed by the minister in which the first sentence of the second paragraph says exactly the opposite of the last sentence in the paragraph, and other, similar gems). At one point I was firing off one letter after another to them just to see how silly they would get, but it got boring after awhile. I'll put these letters online at some point for people to have a laugh at. I should also clarify a point about the online writeup of my experiences, which imply that the NSA was active in directing the GCSB over export controls. I'd had some feedback from a high-level US spook source that this wasn't quite the case, but the source has some rather unusual opinions on spooks and their activities (something along the lines of "Civilization would collapse tomorrow if it wasn't for the fine efforts of the CIA and NSA") which made me somewhat suspicious about the accuracy of the information. Anyway, what this source said (and this bit I can believe) was that NZ was completely out of its depth with this (which was obvious from the way it was handled) and was terrified of offending the US. According to the source, the NSA was exerting a *moderating* influence on the whole thing, and that any progress made was because the NSA told the GCSB to back off. This would indicate an interesting case of the NSA exerting very strong indirect influence on determining crypto policy. The GCSB knew the NSA didn't want crypto being distributed, and when they heard of the export they went into overdrive to show the NSA what good boys they could be and how keen they were to help the US by enforcing US policy for NZ crypto. This interpretation is believable, NZ is very much a junior member of the UKUSA alliance and really doesn't want to do anything which might offend the other partners. They knew the US didn't want crypto being made available, so they went out of their way to try to show the NSA that they could be trusted to do their bit in restricting crypto (I'm certain that something as amateurish as the NZ Customs story didn't come from the NSA, even the DSD seemed unaware of it). This means that it doesn't actually require any direct intervention from the USG to control crypto policy, the mere knowledge that the NSA doesn't like something is enough to make the local spooks (who, in NZ's case, rely on the NSA for much of their hardware and training) do whatever they think will keep the NSA happy. It's perfect for the NSA I guess, because they get complete deniability (Just yell "Will noone rid me of this troublesome crypto" and sit back and wait). Peter. BTW, what's happened to taz.nceye.net? The cypherpunks mail->news doesn't seem to have been updated for more than a week.

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Who is going to HIP'97?
by Lucky Green 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Who on this list intends to go to HIP'97? http://www.hip97.nl I would like to organize a C*punks meeting there. Thanks, --Lucky --Lucky Green <shamrock(a)netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. DES is dead! Please join in breaking RC5-56. http://rc5.distributed.net/

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Re: Comparing Cryptographic Key Sizes
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Peter Trei <trei(a)process.com> writes: > Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> writes. > > 56 bit DES is probably roughly similar to 512 bit RSA in hardness to > > break. > > This is way off. We used ~457,000 MIPS years to search half of the > DES keyspace. Factoring a 512 bit modulus using the General Number > Field Sieve (GNFS) would take about 28,000 MIPS years (see Schneier > for the exact number - I don't have AC2 at hand) > > Lenstra has estimated that with 500,000 MIPS years, you should be > able to factor a 600 bit modulus using GNFS, if your workstations > had enough memory. Ah yes. Well I did read your post on coderpunks where you described the results of asking Lenstra and looking for ideas for what to break next, how hard 512 bits was etc. So... 28,000 MIPs years you say... but that neglects memory. Lenstra's conclusion was that even 512 bits couldn't be done, from your post. So by that measure it is harder (due to memory overhead) than DES even though theoretically taking less MIPS with 64 mb workstations. Also he was unsure about the availability of a large enough supercomputer to reduce the final matrix. So any suggestetions of how to summarise the "hardness" of a problem when it includes memory and cpu costs in as simple terms as possible. (Bearing in mind the reader in most cases hasn't grasped the difference between public key crypto and symmetric key, and is comparing 1024 bit keys to 56 bit keys and probably thinks that it is 1024/56 times harder.) > > About 10 years ago now Michael Wiener made a design for such a DES > > breaking machine. He estimated it would cost $10,000,000 to build a > > machine which would break a 56 bit DES encrypted message a few hours. > > His machine was scalable, pay more money, break the key faster, pay > > less take longer. The estimate was that could build one with enough > > DES key searching units to break it in a day for $1,000,000. That was > > 10 years ago. 10 years is a long time in the computer industry. > > Nowadays you build the machine more cheaply as chip technology has > > progressed, and computers are much faster per $. Estimates are around > > $100,000 to build the machine (neglecting hardware engineers > > consultancy fees). > > Go back and check the numbers - if you don't the journalists will. > (I don't have this paper to hand either :-( ) The Wiener paper is > much more recent (93?) , and the cost much lower (I think it was > about $1M for HW and $500K for development costs, for a 3.5 hour > machine). I think I have his paper as a postscript file, will look. But what do you think of the extrapolation to todays prices? $100k? (Ignoring consultancy fees). Thanks for the criticisms, more please on readability and understandability to neophytes! Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

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