December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

"where would you find"
by succuba97＠hotmail.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The latest virtual XXX entertainment that is as good...well ALMOST as good as the REAL THING? HERE http://www.succuba.com WARNING: 1. YOU MUST BE OVER 18 YEARS OF AGE 2. YOU MUST HAVE A STRONG HEART ;) 3. IT'S HOTTTTTTTT ;}

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Re: Identity, Persistence, Anonymity, and Accountability--Part I of II (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Subject: Re: Identity, Persistence, Anonymity, and Accountability--Part I of II > Date: Mon, 15 Dec 97 23:47:07 -0500 > From: "Brian B. Riley" <brianbr(a)together.net> > >identification. It is constitutional for the police to ask you what your > >name is, under certain circumstances - and you can face criminal charges if > >you lie. Where in the Constitution is the relevant sentence(s)? There is no mention of police rights in the Constitution and therefor they have no more rights than you do. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | | | We built your fort. We will not have it used against us. | | | | John Wayne - Allegheny Uprising | | | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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A gauntlet thrown down by PC-Magic?
by Alex Woolfson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hey guys Just FYI here is the response I got from PC-Magic. -----Original Message----- From: Scott Chaney <scott(a)pc-magic.com> To: Alex Woolfson <abdiel(a)worldnet.att.net> Date: Monday, December 15, 1997 4:02 PM Subject: Re: Encrypted Magic Folders >Thanks for the feedback. We are considering an established standard. > >BTW, for all the "crap" we get from supposed crypto experts no one has >come close to breaking our method. It does make for humorous reading >tho. > >Scott > > Anyone care to take him up on his challenge? Please say yes. :-) Alex

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Could you please PGP sign this MD5 sum?
by ichudov＠Algebra.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I would like to kindly ask you to sign this md5 sum with your PGP keys, and return it to me signed. I would also appreciate a copy of your PGP key. Thank you very much. ``I testify that I did see this MD5 checksum around Dec 16, 1997. f3bffc327bf88846bc1d790c56da0ffb caleidoscope.fixed.txt. '' Signed, -

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UK spooks invent RSA, DH in 1973
by pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

There's an interesting paper at http://www.cesg.gov.uk/ellisint.htm which claims that UK spooks invented both RSA and DH in 1973 and 1974 respectively. The summary info is: >This paper by James Ellis was written in 1987. It was commissioned shortly >after his retirement to provide a first-hand historical account of the early >work by James and others in CESG, discovering the techniques that were later >to become known as Public Key Cryptography. Although there would have been >some academic interest in the paper back in 1987, it was decided on balance >to keep the record internal and accordingly the paper was given a low >classification and retained within CESG. > >Since 1987 there have been three aspects which have created enormous changes >for CESG. First, the growth in the need for secure communications for >confidentiality and authentication has vastly increased key management >requirements. Second, the increase in processing speed has enabled large >arithmetical computations to be practicable. Third, the 1994 RPS gave CESG >responsibility for the communications security of the entire UK government >market. PKC is now seen as the best if not the only method for allowing wide >area many-user secure communications. With this increase in CESG's external >visibility there has been a growing desire for greater openness. > >During the past 11 years there had been no urgency to publish the paper, but >the necessary spark came when Clifford Cocks solved an important problem that >had been highlighted at a recent 'RSA' conference. Cliff is presenting this >solution in a paper at the IMA Conference on Cryptography and Coding in >Cirencester. Since he was one of the main contributors to our early work it >was clearly the right opportunity to set the record straight. As the paper >was being prepared for publication we heard that James had become very ill. >He died before the paper was published. We now publish it as a testament to >his imaginative and ground-breaking work. (The paper was mentioned on a UK crypto list, but I've lost the original reference). Peter.

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http://www.nuyenta.com
by NuYenta 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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The Joys of Being Canadian
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Phone Company Rep: "What's your Social Security number? >Answer: "I don't have one. I'm Canadian." > >Power Company Rep: "What's your Social Security number? >Answer: "I don't have one. I'm Canadian." > >Cable Company Rep: "What's your Social Security number? >Answer: "I don't have one. I'm Canadian." > >Doctor to Seasoned Citizen: "I can't treat you privately or I'll be barred >from taking Medicare patients for two years." >Answer: "Sure you can. I'm Canadian." Now the question is: When they find out you lied will they care?

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Re: Comparing PGP to Symantec's Secret Stuff
by Vin McLellan 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(I just posted this in a discussion on alt.security.pgp, and thought it might also be of interest to the List. _Vin) ALCO Jakarta <alcojkt(a)bit.net.id> queried the Newsgroup: > Could anyone give me a quick trun-down on the difference between these two > programs and which one is more secure? Is the latter more practical to use > than PGP 2.6.2? That's comparing real crypto vs a sophisticated version of the Captain Crunch crypto ring. PGP in all of its forms uses strong crypto, which is why it is difficult to legally export it from the US to any overseas entity, except branches and subsidiaries of US firms. (Thus, the effort to sustain the international version of PGP, and PhilZ's long travail while the US govt tried to investigate how those sneaky non-Yanks got their hands on this oh-so-useful RSA/IDEA utility.) Norton Secret Stuff secures the data using the 32-bit Blowfish encryption algorithm -- which is why it's approved for unrestricted export outside the US by the U.S. government. It's far better than, say, ROT13 -- but it would not provide meaningful confidentiality or security for anything of any worth, or anything which might otherwise spur a curious and clever grad student to spend somewhere between a couple hours (with a college computer lab at his proposal) to a few days (on a fast PC) doing a brute force search of all possible 32-bit keys. A more complex comparison would put PGP against Norton's YEO, but that too is an apples to oranges matchup, albiet with strong crypto on both sides. PGP was designed to be a mail encyptor. YEO -- with RSA + RC4, RC5, DES, DES3, and Blowfish too, I think -- was designed as a file and disk encryptor. Each is optimized for its primary function. The lack of published source code is an issue, but if you see such a product being purchased by multinationals or US defense contractors you can be certain the implementation -- which is the real arena of vulnerability, once the algorithm is chosen -- has been carefully studied by informed cryptographers. (For non-American product, look for similar purchases by government-connected agencies in the vendor's nation.) You don't sound like the source code is going to do _you_ any good, right? Like most buyers, you have to trust the judgement of talented pros somewhere. > > I use PGP and don't find it's use so difficult to master even as a rookie > in cryptographic matters. But this Secret Stuff program is commerical so I > don't trust it's degree of security to gov't snooping based on my suspicion > of corporate submission to gov't will. Is that a reasonable assumption? Actually, corporate or commercial products are better than that. Secret Stuff is overtly weak crypto. It's also free from Symantec. Norton YEO from Symantec, or any competitive heavy-duty product like RSA SecurPC, will be clearly labelled as to the relative strength (key length) of their crypto -- strong for domestic user; weak for the intl mass market -- in terms anyone with a basic understanding of crypto and crypto export regs can understand. Export permits for the strong domestic versions of products like these will be all but impossible to obtain for mass market sales to non-American individuals. (Neither of these firms probably sells or even tries to sell the export version overseas; the weaker products exist largely because US corporate buyers demand an interoperable product that _can_ be shipped to overseas associates.) Export permits to ship the strong-crypto version of these products American corporations will require that the vendor have a key recovery mechanism -- no big deal, since we are dealing with stored files, so backup access is a standard requirement for disaster recovery -- which is to be held by the US firm in a location which makes it accessible to legal US court orders. Any and all US firms will respond to a legal court order to provide information. (Commercial firms in other nations will provide any info they hold when confronted with a court order too, right?) It is always rash to expect any commercial firm in any nation to be either a martyr or an arbiter of moral or political issues. Corporate officers have fiduciary responsibilities and they can be replaced. Corporations get a set of rules from the society in which they operate, and then -- within the context of those rules -- they seek to maximize their profit and their stockholders' return on investment with a certain degree of ruthless intensity. That's the nature of the beast. When corporate self-interest and some corporate executive's personal philosophy line up, we get some interesting fireworks -- sometimes even heroic moments which dramatically change the course of a government's industrial policy, as in the US banks vehement rejection of the NSA's CCEP and Clipper programs. The apparent exception really validates the rule. It's really rare for the US govt to try to overtly challenge or crush an American firm like they did with RSADSI for a decade. The NSA tried to bully the US banking industry and got handed its collective head -- and got branded as naive and turned into something of a laughingstock as well. On the other hand, commercial vendors which provide a product for sale have to describe and warranty that product as having certain properties. If those products are used by individuals or commercial customers and fail to measure up to their advance billing, the vendor is thereafter liable for significant (even company-threatening) losses, in both recompense and punitive damages. That's commercial law in the US -- no matter what sort of mealy-mouth language might be in the shrink-wrap license. US lawyers get a blueprint of an altar upon which they can sacrifice such firms when they get their law degree. Corporate "submission to gov't will" is a real issue, particularly for vendors of privacy and security tech -- but for US firms, it is far more likely to play out formally (as with a court order for a message recovery key) or in some negotiated backroom deal where the government demands some feature added, or asks for some feature to be removed from free-market product, before the vendor is given some commercial advantage like a government contract, or GSA approval, or an export permit. You see the whole American IT industry being put through this sort of blackmail in the current US crypto export policy. Only vendors which have or agree to design key/message "recovery" mechanisms in file or communications crypto apps get export permits to ship their 56-bit versions of their crypto products -- or (among other vendors,) crypto-enhanced applications like RDBSs and operating systems -- to the international market. Nothing subtle or secret about that -- and historically, the model has probably been pretty much the same, if less blatent. US export controls in crypto exist to bludgeon the vendors, so that the US govt can obtain something it wants in that company's domestic or overseas product lines. (It certainly does not restrict the international bad guy's access to strong crypto, no matter what the latest Four Horseman propaganda is.) Today, I think this leverage is probably being applied more on the big US vendors of operating systems and networking software and major applications -- all of which require crypto for their commercial products today -- than it is upon the puny crypto vendors (who are, relatively speaking, small potatos and aren't allowed to sell strong versions of their products -- even with message-recovery -- to anyone interesting, anyway;-) In commercial encryption products, the hidden backdoors of myth and legend are far less likely, given the liability issue and US commercial law. Overt and well-labelled backdoors are a different story. <sigh> Surete, _Vin "Cryptography is like literacy in the Dark Ages. Infinitely potent, for good and ill... yet basically an intellectual construct, an idea, which by its nature will resist efforts to restrict it to bureaucrats and others who deem only themselves worthy of such Privilege." _ A thinking man's Creed for Crypto/ vbm. * Vin McLellan + The Privacy Guild + <vin(a)shore.net> * 53 Nichols St., Chelsea, MA 02150 USA <617> 884-5548

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Re: UCENET II and Peter duh Silva
by Charlie Comsec 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Information Security <The(a)NSA.sucks> wrote: > : While that's technically true, it's even more true of non-anonymous e-mail > : addresses. Usenet posts are much easier to forge than PGP signatures, and > : it's quite simple to sign up for a throwaway e-mail account under an assumed > : name. It's not very secure from a privacy standpoint, but it's even less > : secure from a "positive ID" POV. > : > : At least with a PGP-signed anonymous post, readers are alerted up front that > : they are reading the work of an author who is withholding his/her identity. > : But if you read a post from "john_smith(a)hotmail.com", is it really someone > : named "John Smith" or not? > > I'm not following this...anyone can generate PGP keys, and digital signatures > are not necessary to indentify an account... Sure, anyone can generate a PGP key. It's almost as easy as generating a throwaway e-mail address. And what does posting from a certain e-mail address or signing one's post with a certain PGP key prove? It proves that the poster KNEW a certain piece of INFORMATION, either an account password or a PGP secret key. It's usually inferred that the person who possesses that information is the person who generated it. Of the two, guessing a PGP secret key is orders of magnitude harder than guessing someone's password, logging on, and impersonating them. In addition, PGP signing is "portable". No matter where I post from, if I sign my post with the same key, you can assume it's me who posted it. It's more difficult to do that with an e-mail address. Let's say that you have a common name like "John Smith" and you post as jsmith(a)someisp.com. Are you saying that's your "identity"? What if Someisp, Inc. suddenly files for bankruptcy and shuts down without warning? Did you lose your identity? You could open a new account as "jsmith" somewhere else and claim you are the same person who previously posted as jsmith(a)someisp.com, but so could anyone else who desired to impersonate you. If you were signing your posts with a PGP key, then all you'd have to do is make a post from your new ISP, sign it with the same key, and your "identity" is "transferred". - --- Finger <comsec(a)nym.alias.net> for PGP public key (Key ID=19BE8B0D) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQEVAwUBNJahmQbp0h8ZvosNAQEqmAf+IG/gtP4flSv/RPP7530NuD5MeMgH8WGo 75E/o+3GkN5Ksl0hL0bdpUhDvqeHnwsdc2xO5j0UEzqIZGKapa1YvJGK0wrUU/FB UrUzcrHkvtXAdJD8GRTaA/Xgzjh2eJGOImzaIHbPOZBa4MPxYm7bEZaroHR2G2IP AkNFbJzBETP9nLmePupRSqmhN8GwC5BLRLjkXLDDXJ/9s04vNoBGUEsv4aA0iRad cdkHjHSs9FfOOTJPPG+GdDA+Z1LuyjnugcoTfYPtsu7PwgWE/tAxOCVPI6sHrhze I1a4KZSVn1AoNd0ii7Mcw4Fp73SUcuZ74+EJovToOyBu++bqZdOYsA== =jF0X -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: UCENET II and Peter duh Silva
by Charlie Comsec 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- politas(a)dynamite.com.au (Politas) wrote: > Surely that isn't the important thing. More important is that the > person really has an email address of "john_smith(a)hotmail.com". Then > it's up to Hotmail to be able to trace that email address back to the > previous step, assuming that they are being forced to do so by a > warrant or some other legal reason. > > Personally, I think that all messages should be able to be traced to a > real person, although this tracing should not be possible without > legal action. Are you saying that Hotmail should be made a guarantor of the identity of its accountholders, or merely that they could be required, under certain circumstances, to divulge what information (if any) it possesses, regardless of its accuracy? AFAIK, the latter case is currently operative, since Hotmail's records are presumably already subject to subpoena (in the USA, at least -- I just realized you're posting from an Aussie domain). IOW, when you sign up for a hotmail.com account, you're presumably required to give them a "name". If I signed up as "John Smith", should they be required to verify that I'm really John Smith, or merely disclose that the account belongs to someone who identified him/herself as "John Smith"? If you're saying what I hope you're NOT saying, it would amount to a form of "identity escrow", and I suspect that Hotmail would probably choose to discontinue offering free e-mail accounts rather than take on that sort of responsibility. - --- Finger <comsec(a)nym.alias.net> for PGP public key (Key ID=19BE8B0D) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQEVAwUBNJaaXwbp0h8ZvosNAQHqtQf+LGGPWLQFPGfGgwKIHKOTAXQ74S08rGqt i8yiuSY2RgC+CXzbXJaMmDQ9gAcPMmCKJqzc2O4bkresg+hz6/Cl6d+m+3FO4Nz+ HKeaEMlg3EXHuxTnhsx4vSAWubdbpC+OfkU6kQHf1YU1zWZnIV9c7SbWmSNeaYhq sXLl6+YlPFwwZ0N5bUBqNkOsAQQveNFd/91mYGAZBi2R6P95F+RDV3/Jv3elhXgu egBb2Igf7imK/U6zFhgm6+jCdFdpGOfJ030UAMulezFi/czaiNdLNR3jE4nnfrwQ 4qexxqUkwzNrNWX0M9T/YQ7wl+jIWi3KKj4s4QLHTKXhoHNDY7hPsw== =W6Zl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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