December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Fwd: Internet security (VERY LONG)
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Subject: Fwd: Internet security (VERY LONG) Date: Sun, 18 Jan 98 12:34:36 -0500 From: Somebody To: "Robert Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 ---------------- Begin Forwarded Message ---------------- Date: 01/17 3:25 PM Received: 01/17 5:24 PM From: Richard Fairfax, richard_fairfax(a)compuserve.com Reply-To: CSA Talk, csa(a)blueworld.com To: CSA Talk, csa(a)blueworld.com The following forwarded mail may have implications for clients with sensitive data. The field encription features in Troi FM Plug-in could prove to be a valuable asset. Richard Fairfax Oakwood Designs ---forwarded mail START--- From: gp-uk(a)mailbase.ac.uk,Net ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Aus: z-netz.datenschutz.spionage: A GLOBAL electronic spy network that can eavesdrop on every telephone, email and telex communication around the world will be officially acknowledged for the first time in a European Commission report to be delivered this week. The report - Assessing the Technologies of Political Control - was commissioned last year by the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament. It contains details of a network of American-controlled intelligence stations on British soil and around the world, that "routinely and indiscriminately" monitor countless phone, fax and email messages. It states: "Within Europe all email telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency transfering all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London then by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill in the North York moors in the UK." The report confirms for the first time the existence of the secretive ECHELON system. Until now, evidence of such astounding technology has been patchy and anecdotal. But the report - to be discussed on Thursday by the commit- tee of the office of Science and Technology Assessment in Luxembourg - confirms that the citizens of Britain and other European states are subject to an intensity of surveillance far in excess of that imagined by most parliaments. Its findings are certain to excite the concern of MEPs. "The ECHELON system forms part of the UKUSA system (see 'Cooking up a charter for snooping') but unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non- military targets: governments, organizations and businesses in vir- tually every country. "The ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and then siphoning out what is valuable using artificial intelligence aids like MEMEX to find key words". According to the report, ECHELON uses a number of national dictionaries containing key words of interest to each country. For more than a decade, former agents of US, British, Canadian and New Zealand national security agencies have claimed that the monitoring of electronic communications has become endemic throughout the world. Rumours have circulated that new technologies have been developed which have the capability to search most of the world's telex, fax and email networks for "key words". Phone calls, they claim, can be automatically analysed for key words. Former signals intelligence operatives have claimed that spy bases controlled by America have the ability to search nearly all data communications for key words. They claim that ECHELON automatically analyses most email messaging for "precursor" data which assists in- telligence agencies to determine targets. According to former Canadian Security Establishment agent Mike Frost, a voice recognition system called Oratory has been used for some years to intercept diplomatic calls. The driving force behind the report is Glyn Ford, Labour MEP for Greater Manchester East. He believes that the report is crucial to the future of civil liberties in Europe. "In the civil liberties committee we spend a great deal of time debating issues such as free movement, immigration and drugs. Technology always sits at the centre of these discussions. There are times in history when technology helps democratise, and times when it helps centralise. This is a time of centralisation. The justice and home affairs pillar of Europe has become more powerful without a corresponding strengthening of civil liberties." The report recommends a variety of measures for dealing with the increasing power of the technologies of surveillance being used at Menwith Hill and other centres. It bluntly advises: "The European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States for making private messages via the global communications network (Internet) a ccessible to US intelligence agencies." The report also urges a fundamental review of the involvement of the American NSA (National Security Agency) in Europe, suggesting that their activities be either scaled down, or become more open and accountable. Such concerns have been privately expressed by governments and MEPs since the Cold War, but surveillance has continued to expand. US intel- ligence activity in Britain has enjoyed a steady growth throughout the past two decades. The principal motivation for this rush of development is the US interest in commercial espionage. In the Fifties, during the development of the "special relationship" between America and Britain, one US institution was singled out for special attention. The NSA, the world's biggest and most powerful signals intelligence organisation, received approval to set up a network of spy stations throughout Britain. Their role was to provide military, diplomatic and economic intelligence by intercepting communications from throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The NSA is one of the shadowiest of the US intelligence agencies. Until a few years ago, it existence was a secret and its charter and any mention of its duties are still classified. However, it does have a Web site (www.nsa.gov:8080) in which it describes itself as being respon- sible for the signals intelligence and communications security activ- ities of the US government. One of its bases, Menwith Hill, was to become the biggest spy station in the world. Its ears - known as radomes - are capable of listening in to vast chunks of the communications spectrum throughout Europe and the old Soviet Union. In its first decade the base sucked data from cables and microwave links running through a nearby Post Office tower, but the communi- cations revolutions of the Seventies and Eighties gave the base a capability that even its architects could scarcely have been able to imagine. With the creation of Intelsat and digital telecommunications, Menwith and other stations developed the capability to eavesdrop on an extensive scale on fax, telex and voice messages. Then, with the development of the Internet, electronic mail and electronic commerce, the listening posts were able to increase their monitoring capability to eavesdrop on an unprecedented spectrum of personal and business communications. This activity has been all but ignored by the UK Parliament. When Labour MPs raised questions about the activities of the NSA, the Government invoked secrecy rules. It has been the same for 40 years. Glyn Ford hopes that his report may be the first step in a long road to more openness. "Some democratically elected body should surely have a right to know at some level. At the moment that's nowhere". See also in this week's issue: Pretty good Phil bounces back (a report on the consolidation of the reputation of Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP). 14 October 1997: Europe's private parts to expand * * * * * ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hilfe zu den BvD Mailinglisten? An- oder Abmelden? Mail an bvd-majordomo(a)ibh.tfu.uni-ulm.de, Subject: egal, Text: help ODER: http://www.fh-ulm.de/bvd ---forwarded mail END--- ----------------- End Forwarded Message ----------------- <Somebody's .sig> --- 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/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>

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CAD Stego (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 19:31:38 -0500 > From: John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> > Subject: CAD Stego > This repeats a suggestion from 1994 about using computer > assisted design programs to conceal text or other data: > 3. The scale feature is useful to reduce, say, a text > of any length, or any digital object, to the size of a pixel. Assuming your color palate is deep enough to support the compression. > 4. Or, the text can be distorted by scale and dimension > to appear to be a line serving another function. Don't you think they are going to wonder why *that* line is so varied in color? Or assuming deep color pallettes, why so many colors are selected when only a few dozen are actualy used in the drawing? > Then the message could be distorted or hidden as > described above, for piggy-backing on an innocent- > looking document issued, I suspect they'll wonder why that particular file is so much larger than the other graphics files with the same number of layers. > 7. Big shortcoming: how to securely transmit the location > (virtual coordinates) of the hidden message and what Look for the pixel that has the unique color mapped onto it. > 8. Medium shortcoming: Full-featured CAD programs are > expensive, however, the popular lite versions are cheap > and can usually read the pricier output. And can't handle more than a few dozen colors and limited layering. This suggestion is unworkable in application. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ 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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Voice Coding Controls
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

DM notes of the BXA Wassenaar rule for voice coding: After looking at some of the Wassenaar docs, I was surprised to see that the CCL wants to regulate speech encoders that operate at less than 2400 bps. Surprising because it was encoding, not encryption, that was being regulated. This is disturbing. This at first seemed to put some of the Nautilus development team's software in jeopardy, but I believe that by the letter of the law (or regulation) that all coders in Nautilus are not subject to the CCL, as they only go as low as 2400 bps and not less than. For citations of voice coding in Category 5 - Telecommunications: http://jya.com/bxa-wa-cat5.htm#5A001b10 http://jya.com/bxa-wa-cat5.htm#5A991b6a

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Re: non-transferable signatures (Re: Crypto Kong penetration.)
by James A. Donald 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-- At 10:48 PM 1/16/98 +0000, Steve Mynott wrote: > SMIME of course despite bad cypherpunk karma is easy and > maybe even works between mailers. Easy indeed, if all the keys from Verisign are correct and secured. It is indeed very easy to use SMIME. To use it so that it actually accomplishes the intended result is not so easy. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Np4QfrajG+6u2ZHUc2AFBH0uTX9nCJxCUi7E2bpk 3CGDysj2FaqaZYBM4bRe6dvLCkbb0ltwLns5aFPQ9 --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the state. http://www.jim.com/jamesd/

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Re: CAD Stego (fwd)
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jim Choate wrote: >This suggestion is unworkable in application. Why the focus on color, the easiest thing to avoid using, or layers, ditto? Superfluous for serious CAD, these dainty decorations from Martha Stewartville. Most messages could be concealed in "hatched" objects, bit-bloated as they are, indistinguishable from the elements used to hatch. All black and white; maybe a dot of red for cashmere dupe. In fact, CAD is so bloated with dumb cad-jockey features, and sleazebag work-monitoring logs, it puts most ordinary programs (even air-boss MS) to shame, and could hide a herd of rustled Mex longhorns as easily as the Bush family hides dryhole oil reserves, without any more trickery than sandpapering new boots to look worn. Anyway, Jim, I gather from your remarks that you've not fiddled for endless low-paid months and years to figure out how to cheat the evil bosses and automatic work-snoop feature, while onion-siphoning the Net for horny fare under guise of urgent file transfer to foam-mouth ne'erpays. Underground (so to speak) swapping of digital work avoidance tips is a huge use of global bandwidth riding on the backs of big fat docs for globular structures for maggoty thugs. (Although not nearly as gigantic as the porn trade stego-supporting Net infrastructre growth -- over 50% of Net traffic and rocketing.) Who knows how much illicit info is riding the porn river in and out of the most secure sanctums of tyrants?

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let's do it: NYT ad with hash of fingerprints (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 23:21:38 GMT > From: Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> > Subject: let's do it: NYT ad with hash of fingerprints > I would have thought you would take out a cheap personals section > advertisement and print one hash output and a URL. The hash ouput > would be the hash of the hashes of a chosen set of public key > fingerprints. This doesn't provide the same sort of protection the original full page ad is supposed to provide. That full page ad will be accessible as a referenc a hundred years from now in just about every library in the country. The link to a webpage won't be. Distinctly different security animals. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ 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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No Subject
by wabe 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This is an e-mail which I am intentionally muddling by making it have very long lines and stuff. I plan on saving this too, to analyze later and try to recreate using some sort of silly "delete the misplaced carriage return" later. I'm not going to sign it though. So Bill Payne has the black box to sneakers but he won't publish it for fear the NSA will use it to read his e-mail and also because they pissed him off by trying to silence his critisisms of the way they handled something with Iran or something? I don't read legaleze very well.... -wabe

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eternity economics (Re: (eternity) Eternity as a secure filesystem/backup medium (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 21:40:28 GMT > From: Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> > Subject: eternity economics (Re: (eternity) Eternity as a secure filesystem/backup medium > Eternity helps here in that it obscures the poster's identity, and > reduces their exposure in that they personally don't have to send as > many messages. Eternity also helps ensure continued availability, at > least while somebody is funding that availability. True enough, the question becomes who does that continued funding help the most? > Releasing the data themselves is problematic. They may not wish to > accept the risk. Eternity provides a way to pay someone else to take > the risks in ensuring availability. Really? What is the difference? Mallet attacks the server itself who has only the resources available from the source, which I believe can assume safely, which is obviously less than the resource set of those who could actualy act upon or impliment the data under discussion. > The users is getting value for money from the eternity servers -- the > eternity server is providing the service of risk taking. Yes, at bargain basement prices that allow, if not even promote, a daddy warbucks to walk in and up the ante above what the source can pay. No, the source payment mechanism does not promote either server honesty or long term existance of controversial data. We're going round and round here, as I said earlier the views are diametricaly opposite. I would suggest we drop this discussion and let us see what happens over the next few years as it is clear that many people are working on different implimentations. Let's let the market decide which works best. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ 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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Re: how to release code if the programmer is a target for (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 15:15:22 -0600 (CST) > From: "Uhh...this is Joe [Randall Farmer]" <rfarmer(a)HiWAAY.net> > Subject: Re: how to release code if the programmer is a target for (fwd) > > Where does this random user come from? > > Why does it matter? As long as she's competent enough to choose good verifiers > and verify that those verifiers verified the code in question, it all works out > in the end. Because whether she is a honest user or one who is intent on subverting the system is relevant and must be taken into account. > We don't. There is no way to operate without *some* trust; I disagree. I believe it is possible to create a system which is secure and provably so, irrespective of something as nebulous as 'trust'. > Might be, but this code has to be more than just understood -- it must be > painstakingly checked for subtle flaws and bugs. Welcome to the world of > adversarial quality control. Been there it's part of what I do for a living, it's fun. > > Which doesn't effect the ability of Mallet to resign that code at the users > > end in order to break the users local security. > > Unless you're exposing a new weakness in the trust model PGP uses, Mallet can't > do that, providing the user has done good key authentication and hasn't listed > one of Mallet's goons as a trusted code-verifier. This is true if Mallet is attacking the key system, it is not strictly true if Mallet is attacking a specific user. > Yup, that's why the user has to check it by hand. Then the Eternity model is doomed to fail. 90%+ of users who might want to use a data haven model don't have a clue as to how it works or how to actualy check it. > Well, if you can't verify it yourself and you can't trust other people to > verify it, my advice is to give up; you cannot be sure of *any* public keys I disagree, though I am not able to prove it at this time. > keys; any sig you check might be signed by one of Mallet's keys. My point exactly. As with Adam, it feels like we are beginning to go around and around with nothing new to add. I would suggest that we drop the issue for the moment and come back to it at a later time with a little more reflection. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ 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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Re: Signed document - a thought... (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 21:06:28 GMT > From: Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> > Subject: Re: Signed document - a thought... > Sounds like you are describing something which is a variant of an > interlock protocol. The idea of an interlock protocol is that you > send out first a hash of what you are intending to publish. > > The MITM has a problem in deciding what to publish, because they have > to publish _a_ hash, but they don't know what it should be of. Exactly. I hadn't heard of the term 'interlock protocol', thanks for the tip. I'll look into it some more. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, | | but the desire to edit somebody elses words. | | | | Sign in Ed Barsis' office | | | | _____ 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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