December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

uh,
by wabe 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--What is that weird lawsuit all about wheresome director of the NSA is getting sued forsomething? Does anyone know?-wabe --digsig EojdyErVslc/s6aQeIHwnOlMw3lUKJhdZc/ZeCNfe7H L4ctAUj8gI6C830BTXaeFrhHME7aCeT3ev4HKbeT 4HICjjQYriAdlICrERT+zrSEtB1bkK+b6iRoC6a0y

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No Subject
by Mix 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Timothy C. May sits at his terminal dressed in five-inch stiletto heels, fishnet stockings, a gold-lame mini-skirt, a purple halter with girdle underneath to keep in his flabby gut, a Fredericks of Hollywood padded bra also underneath the halter, a cheap Naomi Sims pink afro wig, waiting to yank his crank whenever a black man responds to one of his inane rants. \ o/\_ Timothy C. May <\__,\ '\, |

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Re: RSA hardware
by Ryan Lackey 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Lucky Green: > The more I think about it, the less sense it makes to me to use a dedicated > hardware accelerator. I have seen $3,000 hardware accelerators that are > outperformed by a PP200. The nCipher device is excellent. 100 1024 bit RSA > signing a minute for $5,000. How much would be a nice multi-processor Alpha > that does about the same number of signings? Or just a stack 10 of Pentiums? > > Before buying an accelerator, make sure to do the math. Eric Young posted > timings for various common CPU's a while back. Keep in mind that there are metrics other than just keys per second for comparison. Often, hardware devices are certified RED/BLACK isolation devices, TEMPEST certified, tamper-resistant, etc. They are also usually easier to maintain than software systems on GP hardware. Also, the major consumers of such devices, the government/military, spend a *lot* more on hardware/software/user maintenance than any cypherpunk. Their computers are usually TEMPEST certified, etc., so their curve is a lot higher up. Assuming efficient markets, the reason so few of these devices are sold outside the military is that they're overpriced except for those in the same situation as the military. though :) I've been thinking of buying a wicked-fast FPGA prototyping board and making my own coprocessor. There are some really nice gate arrays, and David Honig has some fairly wonderful plans for how to use them for things like Blowfish, etc. I've mainly concentrated on high-speed symmetric ciphers, but they'd be applicable to RSA/DH, I believe. For one blowfish implementation, the limiting factor (assuming key setup can be done efficiently) is the PCI bus, I think. - -- Ryan Lackey rdl(a)mit.edu http://mit.edu/rdl/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNMMyzKwefxtEUY69AQGruwgAgsJTym5TsaFLVGgBXQQpUYwd8Ar2lquU SFM9F1LYLTQjcBIlzh9h3cQdfE2sOkpjENmVGqUvPhyZLwRAC5eWfHL8H/y0giIW 9Y+1xYY1pY3t/O7w5WgYDwye1fzbL5KDz4XEYKX830LWjShfAZhQxahzLbZd+qnd Z6KpjSnylTb9YSp+i5rafgk/i8GnjqFdv5925reexzFBhy/FQi3xwweJWxeRWa+o tNX4G/D7W2r1Lq4Z6Yxbk3dTDddif26UTE12M8EENhhlr/6VCO0zGI59VePUC55w ZeqgUDGviqe/il1EUMIKUfNdSYBJ0Ur5T4TL2lVYDPrZ6q4KjnHPjA== =9ejF -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Barry Smith (FBI) to speak on encryption policy
by William H. Geiger III 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anyone going to this? ------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following message is forwarded to you by "William H. Geiger III" <whgiii(a)invweb.net> (listed as the From user of this message). The original sender (see the header, below) was "Dr. Alan Sherman" <sherman(a)gl.umbc.edu> and has been set as the "Reply-To" field of this message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- >From: "Dr. Alan Sherman" <sherman(a)gl.umbc.edu> >Newsgroups: sci.crypt >Subject: Barry Smith (FBI) to speak on encryption policy >Date: 19 Jan 1998 01:54:28 -0000 >Organization: University of Maryland, Baltimore County Campus >Lines: 55 >Message-ID: <69ubok$lkn(a)news.umbc.edu> >NNTP-Posting-Host: news.umbc.edu >NNTP-Posting-User: sherman >Path: edison.dotstar.net!pull-feed.internetmci.com!news-out.internetmci.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!204.59.152.222!news-peer.gip.net!news.gsl.net!gip.net!feeder.qis.net!news.umbc.edu!not-for-mail The UMBC Security Technology Research Group presents A Law-Enforcement Perspective on Encryption Policy Barry Smith Supervisory Special Agent, FBI moderated by journalist Peter Wayner 3:30pm - 5:00pm Friday, March 6, 1998 Lecture Hall V (LOCATION SUBJECT TO CHANGE) University of Maryland, Baltimore County http://www.cs.umbc.edu/events/spring98/crypto.shtml The second lecture and discussion in a two-part forum on encryption policy. Journalist Peter Wayner will introduce and moderate the event, which is free and open to the public. In Part I, freedom activist John Gilmore and Fritz Fielding (Ex-Associate General Councel, NSA) gave their divergent views, focusing on the Burnstein case. Barry Smith will articulate the needs of law enforcement to conduct lawful wiretaps; he will advocate the use of key-recovery techniques to achieve this end as a way that provides adequate privacy to law-abiding citizens. Schedule: The event will begin with a brief (10 minute) introduction by Peter Wayner. Following Barry Smith's talk, which will last approximately 45 minutes, there will be an opportunity to ask questions for approximately 20-30 minutes. Questions: Attendees are encouraged to ask questions in advance by sending email to sherman(a)cs.umbc.edu Directions: Take Exit #47B off interstate I-95 and follow signs to UMBC. LH V is on the 100-level of the Engineering Computer Science (ECS) Building, directly behind the University Center. There is a visitor's parking lot near the I-95 entrance to UMBC. Host: Dr. Alan T. Sherman Associate Professor, Computer Science sherman(a)cs.umbc.edu http://www.umbc.edu (410) 455-2666 This event is held in cooperation with the UMBC Intellectual Sports Council Honors College Phi Beta Kappa honors society CMSC Council of Majors IFSM Council of Majors ----------------------------------------------------- -- End of forwarded message ----------------------------------------------------- -- --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://users.invweb.net/~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. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html --------------------------------------------------------------- Tag-O-Matic: One man's Windows are another man's walls.

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Onion routing
by ulf＠fitug.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To protect against timing analysis, Onion routing uses encrypted and padded links, and the connection between the user and his local onion router is assumed to be secure. Obviously, padding offers protection against external adversaries only. The onion routers themselves know when an anonymous connection is opened, how much data is transferred, and when it is closed. So in contrast to the mix net (where it is sufficient to use one honest mix in a chain), honest onion routers that are used between two cooperating onion routers do not offer additional protection. Onion routers have a fixed number of neighbours. If the first onion router does not have any honest neighbours, there is no anonymity. Generally, the maximal connected component of honest onion routers forms the anonymity set. Does that mean that every onion router needs to maintain many encrypted links, or is there a more efficient solution?

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Re: let's do it: NYT ad with hash of fingerprints (fwd)
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Adam Back wrote: >What do you mean that you must include ID? Someone must give an email >address, or phone number? Should be ok to fit one of those in the >remaining 24 - 32 chars. ID once meant name, address and telephone number, now a name, tel num and e-mail is okay (along with "Advt"). The NYT claims it owes this to its readers to show who's not who. The "ads" are called "reader notices" by the NYT, which calls to verify the bona fides of the purchaser. And they will not publish everything requested (no vitriol, darn it). There's vetting but mawky pleas swing the censor, indeed, the vetter seems to boost haywire to keep the mad buying. Is that not a Brit legacy, too? Here's the poop for arrangements (as of 1/96): Reader Notice The New York Times 226 West 43rd Street New York, NY 10036 Vox: 1-800-421-4571 Fax: 201-343-6703

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Eternity - an alternative approach
by Kay Ping 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In one of the messages on the eternity thread someone suggested using radio signals. This is an interesting approach which certainly deserves further attention but digital radio requires special hardware which I prefer to avoid. However, some of the characteristics of radio signals can be emulated on the internet. Radio links are perfect for hiding the location of receivers. The equivalent for this is of course services like usenet and IRC. Both are already used for providing anonymity. Radio is also quite good at hiding the location of the transmitter - you tune your radio and the signals are just there, coming down your antenna. It takes special equipment to locate where they originated. It occured to me that the equivalent on the net would be to receive packets with invalid source addresses. They are just there, coming dowm the phone line to your modem. It takes significant resources and snooping on a massive scale to locate where they are coming from.. All this is assuming you can find some way to send a request with your address to the server. For eternity this means that the location of servers where documents are stored can be kept secret if they transmit the documents using packets with invalid source addresses. Receivers of eternity documents will not be able to tell where they are coming from. Since there is no bidirectional link between transmitter and receiver the protocol must be implemented over UDP. To protect against packet loss the data may be encoded with redundancy. The correction code can be similar to that used on RAID disk arrays - adding redundant blocks consisting of XOR of other blocks. Missing blocks can be reconstructed by XORing together other blocks received. To provide even better anonymity the transmitter may send the messages through one or more onion routers which decrypt one layer of encryption. These routers do not store information, do not know what information passes through them and do not know where it's coming from. Any packets they forward are sent without a valid source address. This should make them less vulnerable to attacks of all kinds. Can anyone speculate about their liability under US law? Putting caches on the routers will help both performance and security. Will it affect their liability in any way? If encryption is implemented properly all packets will look identical: blocks of random data of the same size and no source address. This will make traffic analysis difficult. The distance to the transmitter can be hidden by initializing the packet's time-to-live field to a value with random variations. That was the easy part. The hard part is to get the requests to the document servers without knowing their addresses. This can be done through the equivalent of remailer reply blocks or some kind of broadcast medium. The reply blocks would be implemented by the onion routers. Each hop could generate several copies, both for redundancy and as decoys. Packets used in reply blocks can look identical to packets with document data, including the use of invalid source addresses. In the broadcast version clients and servers subscribe to channels with many participants to hide their identity in the crowd. The system could use an existing service like IRC or a dedicated network, possibly based on modified IRC server code. Sympathizers with bandwidth to spare can subscribe too to provide better cover for the actual document servers. Servers could listen using trusted proxies or chains of semi-trusted proxies. The division into channels allows growth of the system if the total bandwidth of requests becomes too high. Using the public IRC networks has the advantages of being less suspicious and not requiring the deployment of new infrastructure. Requests could even be hidden steganographically in IRC traffic. Unfortunately, IRC server operators are touchy about abuse of their systems. Requests should be small. This allows replicating them to a large number of receivers without taking too much bandwidth. They can also be made to be of fixed size and contain no controversial information. Requests contain the document index as a compact one-way hash, the requester's IP address and the server's ID code. It may also contain hashcash or ecash payment. Requests should be encrypted to the server's public key. To keep them small, elliptic curve encryption may be used. A server may send random cover packets to hide the correlation between a request and its response. It may also add random delay before responding to the request. Delay will also help limit the bandwidth. Users of eternity need to be more patient that the average web surfer and the protocol should use generous timeouts. Since UDP has no flow control the server should always assume the client is using a modem connection and limit its transmission speed accordingly. Security has a price. The client software may be implemented as a local web proxy (in Java?) which identifies requests to eternityspace and converts them to this protocol. Public gateways may be set up to allow anyone to read eternity URLs. These public may also be used to protect the anonymity of the reader like the Anonymizer. Document servers and routers must be located on networks where there is no spoofed packet filtering. Since the common use of spoofed packets is in denial-of-service attacks more and more filters are being installed. It may become harder in the future to find places to put the servers and routers. I believe it should always be possible since it is not practical to implement filtering in places where there is a lot of traffic from different sources. In cases where the document server is located on a filtered network it may have to trust the routers to hide its location. This system is far from perfect: it has too many components and the weakest link is the transmission of requests to servers. I still believe it has some interesting sides which deserve further discussion. Your ideas are welcome. - ----------------- Kay Ping nop 'til you drop finger kping(a)nym.alias.net for key DF 6D 91 18 A6 59 41 96 - 89 01 69 B7 9D0 4 AE 53 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: cp850 iQEPAwUBNL26txHPAso8Qp7tAQGLEAfPeRgIL3OqiG67CLBO9TCe/oV5lmw66Pz1 Wl17ajHeSCX6qjACSZ3La73drUjIftL0G/18PkLd48VGmsF6izCnXB4fh8MAB6Ve QWjhRTvRSkKkwXK4t2tx6CUCdxOaJ9Phd6J02Z+MdjEGJ3jAdUdaHWo5zM5i6Ris wkgATEhGMpw8tjlnvR4erwu51iSrt62huPWJXl1pjyPfQbl0iyQtcGdQ1spIWLJC oaOI7QchHK3LjSuzN54MVCjRdz8fiI6JHAUnlqqsW29LBOZQkSnQedORCuIALwqe qOhSxMKbciLdVde3BBtpILpz5y91ulAecxOOwcnc7m5Pjw== =iLP5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Deriving economic profits from writing FREE software?
by igor＠Algebra.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, At my leisure, I write free software. One of these programs is the usenet moderation bot STUMP. Right now I am writing another free program. I feel perfectly comfortable with the idea that I will not CHARGE money for these programs; for one, I am a beneficiary of a multitude of excellent free programs written by others, and just as well i realize that selling them would be more of a hassle than it is worth. My another pet idea is that programming is poetry, and therefore a person who only writes commercial software is almost surely going to lose whatever gift in programming that he had from God. However, aside from the psychic benefits, I would like to somehow derive an economic profit from being a freeware author. So far, I feel that the status of the author of a popular package does sound good on a resume, but it is as far as I could get. Does anyone else feel the same way? Has anybody come up with a way to cash in on the free programs that he writes? Thank you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- char*p="char*p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);} \=/, _-===-_-====-_-===-_-==========-_-====-_ | @___oo ( )_ /\ /\ / (___,,,}_--= ) ) /^\) ^\/ _) =__ Anything is good and useful if ) ) /^\/ _) (_ ) ) _ / / _) ( ) /\ )/\/ || | )_) (_ it's made of chocolate. ) < > |(,,) )__) ( ) || / \)___)\ (_ __) | \____( )___) )___ -==-_____-=====-_____-=====-___== \______(_______;;; __;;;

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CyberSitter to the rescue.
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Resent-Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 17:19:45 -0500 X-Authentication-Warning: qnx.com: localhost [127.0.0.1] didn't use HELO protocol To: 0xdeadbeef(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org Cc: bostic(a)bsdi.com Subject: CyberSitter to the rescue. Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 16:08:19 -0500 From: glen mccready <glen(a)qnx.com> Resent-From: 0xdeadbeef(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org X-Mailing-List: <0xdeadbeef(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org> archive/latest/2639 X-Loop: 0xdeadbeef(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org Precedence: list Resent-Sender: 0xdeadbeef-request(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org Status: U Forwarded-by: Faried Nawaz <fn(a)LISP-READER.Hungry.COM> Forwarded-by: acb(a)zikzak.net (Andrew C. Bulhak) Forwarded-by: Matt Curtis <mattc(a)beam.com.au> This is from the PerForce mailing list, PerForce is a source code control system that doesn't use mounted drives, but instead uses TCP/IP socket communications to check code in and out. ----- Well, I just spent several hours tracking something down that I think is SO braindead that it must be called evil. I hope this will save someone else some hassle. There's an NT box on my desk that someone else uses every now and then. This machine is otherwise used as my programming box and backup server. All of a sudden, my programming files were being corrupted in odd places. I thought "hmm, my copy must be corrupt". So I refreshed the files. No change. "hmm, the code depot copy must be corrupt".. Checked from other machines. No problem there. Viewed the file from a web based change browser in Internet Explorer. Same corruption in the file. Telnet'd to the server machine and just cat'd the file to the terminal. Same problem. What's going on? The lines that were corrupted were of the form #define one 1 /* foo menu */ #define two 2 /* bar baz */ What I always saw ON THIS MACHINE ONLY was: #define one 1 /* foo */ # fine two 2 /* bar baz */ Can you guess what was happening? Turns out, someone had inadvertly installed this piece of garbage called CyberSitter, which purports to protect you from nasty internet content. Turns out that it does this by patching the TCP drivers and watching the data flow over EVERY TCP STREAM. Can you spot the offense word in my example? It's "NUDE". Seems that cybersitter doesn't care if there are other characters in between. So it blanks out "nu */ #de" without blanking out the punctuation and line breaks. Very strange and stupid. It also didn't like the method name "RefreshItems" in another file, since there is obviously a swear word embedded in there. Sheesh. It's so bad it's almost funny. Hope this brightens your day as much as it brighted mine :-). ---- +----------------------+---+ | Ross Johnson | | E-Mail: rpj(a)ise.canberra.edu.au | Info Sciences and Eng|___| | University of Canberra | FAX: +61 6 2015227 | PO Box 1 | | Belconnen ACT 2616 | WWW: http://willow.canberra.edu.au/~rpj/ | AUSTRALIA | +--------------------------+ --- 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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Spies Like Us.
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Resent-Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 12:33:35 -0500 X-Authentication-Warning: qnx.com: localhost [127.0.0.1] didn't use HELO protocol To: 0xdeadbeef(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org Subject: Spies Like Us. Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 11:21:56 -0500 From: glen mccready <glen(a)qnx.com> Resent-From: 0xdeadbeef(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org X-Mailing-List: <0xdeadbeef(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org> archive/latest/2642 X-Loop: 0xdeadbeef(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org Precedence: list Resent-Sender: 0xdeadbeef-request(a)substance.abuse.blackdown.org Forwarded-by: Nev Dull <nev(a)bostic.com> Forwarded-by: chuck <Chuck(a)Yerkes.com> Forwarded-by: David HM Spector <spector(a)zeitgeist.com> Forwarded-by: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 13:42:26 -0800 (PST) From: Dan Tsang <dtsang(a)sun1.lib.uci.edu> To: Declan McCullagh <declan(a)well.com> Subject: CIA changes Web FAQ: concedes spying on Americans Last month, the CIA had to change its Web FAQ page because of my case, Tsang v. CIA, which was settled when the CIA promised not to spy on me again. But it refused to make the same promise to cover other Americans. The original FAQ page had said "No" to a question whether or not it spies on Americans. Now it concedes it spies on Americans. The new CIA FAQ is at: http://www.odci.gov/cia/public_affairs/faq.html See my account in Sunday's (Jan. 18) Los Angeles Times Opinion page: A CIA Target at Home in America. It can be found at: http://www.latimes.com/sbin/my_iarecord.pl?NS-doc-path=/httpd/docs/HOME/NEW… OPINION/t000005584.html&NS-doc-offset=1&NS-collection=DailyNews&NS-search-set=/ var/tmp/34c3e/aaaa001wBc3eacf& Daniel C. Tsang Bibliographer for Asian American Studies & Social Sciences (Economics, Politics) Machine-Readable Data Files Librarian Lecturer, School of Social Sciences 380 Main Library University of California PO Box 19557 Irvine CA 92623-9557 USA dtsang(a)uci.edu (714) 824-4978 (714) 824-5740 fax homepage: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~dtsang add suffix for news: /netnews1.htm politics: /pol.htm economics: /econ.htm asian american studies: /aas.htm soc sci data archives: /ssda.htm public opinion: /pod.htm AWARE: awarefs/htm host, "Subversity" on KUCI, 88.9 FM in Orange County each Tuesday from 5-6 p.m.; selected shows w/ audio online: http://www.kuci.uci.edu/~dtsang/subversity N.B.: This is NOT official University of California correspondence. --- 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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