December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: German government press release on Wassenaar (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1998 15:33:10 +0100 > From: "Albert P. Franco, II" <apf2(a)apf2.com> > Subject: Re: German government press release on Wassenaar (fwd) > I think the key idea which allows Open Source to be exempted is based on > the availability to all eyes of the technology--not the legal rights > attached to the software. > > The fact that the knowledge contained in Open Source software is available > to all is the key. The legal right to use that knowledge is not quite the > issue. If the knowledge in the software becomes "common knowledge" then > defining its (illegal) export becomes extremely difficult. The problem I see with this is that the knowledge about the crypto system doesn't come from the source but rather from the mathematics that it is founded upon. If this line of reasoning is followed to its logical conclusion then publishing a paper on the algorithm also transmits that knowledge making particular knowledge of the software (ie whether I used a do-loop instead of a if statement) rather irrelevant. Now if it's not the particulars of the implimentation that we're protecting and it's not the mathematics itself then exactly what is it that we're protecting by imposing these closed source limitations? It looks to me like an unintentional(?) attempt to put commercial closed source crypto out of business. Under these regulations doesn't it mean that any business that isn't OS faces additional hurdles in its operation? Any business that is OS faces the problem of income stream which still isn't completely worked out for OS companies. This implies a longer time to market for OS crypto products. Also, since the source of PGP has always been avaiable doesn't this now make it permissible to export without restriction? ____________________________________________________________________ What raises the standard of living may well diminish the quality of life. The Club of Rome The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Echelon, Diana, Wassenaar
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Wash Post today has picked up the hot European story of NSA's file on Princess Diana and linked it to the NSA's Echelon program. http://jya.com/nsa-diana.htm This is the first US major media story on Echelon, and its connection to privacy invasion of a global celebrity icon may do more to get public attention for the vile program than any previous investigation and report. NSA claims Diana was not a "target" and that the 1,000 pages of data on her were gathered "incidental" to other activities. But, as with all the TLA snooping, it is this incidental surveillance of the innocent that all the calls for loosening of encrypton controls is about. After all the near-futile efforts of investigators to bring Echelon out into the open, and counterefforts of pols and spooks cloak it, the Diana hook may the "Gone With The Wind" popularizer that finally energizes a genuine borad-based opposition, and, may very well be the kickoff to global demand for encryption to protect privacy worldwide and maybe even in the US. What wonderful cloubreak to let sunshine into the dark halls of Wassenaar and FT Meade spookdoms.

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DigiCash Update
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text From: "Scott Loftesness" <scott(a)loftesness.com> To: <dbs(a)philodox.com> Subject: DigiCash Update Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 10:43:13 -0800 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-Msmail-Priority: Normal Importance: Normal X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3155.0 Sender: <dbs(a)philodox.com> Precedence: Bulk List-Subscribe: <mailto:requests@philodox.com?subject=subscribe%20dbs> X-Web-Archive: http://www.philodox.com/dbs-archive/ It's been a while since I've posted an update regarding DigiCash. As you know, DigiCash Incorporated filed Chapter 11 in early November. Since that time, over the course of the last several weeks, we've been engaged in discussions with a number of parties around the potential acquisition of the DigiCash assets. These discussions with potential acquirers are continuing. We are also exploring other options for DigiCash. One of these options involves establishing a more broadly based licensing structure for the DigiCash intellectual property. I would welcome those of you who are specifically interested in licensing the DigiCash IP for your own purposes to get in touch with me directly (Email is fine -- see below). Please specify your particular area of interest in the DigiCash IP when you contact me. (Please note that we are well aware of several recommendations for opening up the DigiCash IP. These recommendations have been posted on this list as well as having been discussed with me privately. We are primarily interested at this time, however, in ensuring that we are directly aware of those of you who have a direct licensing interest in the DigiCash IP specifically for your own purposes.) Best, Scott __________________________________________________________________ Interim CEO DigiCash Incorporated 2656 E. Bayshore Road Palo Alto, CA 94303 (650) 798-8183 work (650) 533-3142 cell Email: scott(a)loftesness.com or: sjl(a)digicash.com --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 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'

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Mathematician-to-silicon compilers and the Law
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> >publishing a paper on the algorithm also transmits that knowledge making 1. In the *best-case*, the published paper transmits some knowledge to the reader :-) 2. In ECAD, tools try to go from that published Paper to circuits. In SoftE, tools try to go from english specs to runnable prototypes. Meanwhile, the humans who do various steps of this translation get paid reasonably well. 2. But eventually normal english prose will be *mechanically translatable* to a machine-ready format. Which means that free speech law starts mixing with machine law (patents, export restrictions, posession restrictions). Because the Instructions become the Thing. You can sell instructions on converting your rifle to full auto, or stealing cable TV. They're protected speech. But suppose you could feed a properly formatted blueprint into a universal fabricator and get a full auto rifle out? Crypto source code fed to a universal computer gives you a regulated item; what happens to the law when regular english is just a few clicks away from being an executable? A chip? There is a fundamental issue that the law doesn't handle at all consistently, because it previously didn't matter much, but which every CS Ugrad knows: There is no difference between software, and hardware. Only such annoyances as cost, development time, throughput, flexibility, etc. (Not everyone can see machines as instantiations of ideas. Politicians have particular problems linking abstractions to atoms. Fortunately, those that can see machines as ideas can turn their ideas into machines.) I see two extrapolated futures. In one, the end result is restrictions on free speech in certain areas (e.g., crypto), for the benefit of national insecurity and the Children. In the other, the Law will have to allow you whatever posessions you like, and only punish *actions* after the fact. Given recent historical trends... ----------- Imagine biologists couldn't publish new enkephalin sequences because someone might put them into a programmable yeast and make unlicensed medicines..

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steganography detection hazard?
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Suppose you take your plaintext, encrypt it, then spread the bits across an image as the LSBs. The LSBs will, if you've used a decent cipher, have perfectly uniform distribution. The 'noise' LSBs in a chunk of *digitized* bits will show a *uniform* distribution. (As indeed will the cipher's blocks, or any bitchunk larger or smaller.) Therefore an entropy test (see Maurer) will discriminate between the two. Please prove me wrong. --Stegosaur

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passwords and hashes
by Alexander Kjeldaas 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm looking into how passwords should be transferred into keys for the loopback filesystem in Linux. Currently, what happens is that you take the SHA or RIPEMD-160 hash of the password string and use that as a key. If the cipher only uses a 128-bit key, the last 32 bits of the hash is unused. I have some questions about this scheme: o In the case of a 128-bit cipher, do I lose any information by not using the last 32 bits of information? Should the last 32 bits be xored with the first 128 in order to not lose any info? o Is there any advantage to _not_ using a 256-bit hash function? (i.e - use a 128-bit hash for 128-bit ciphers). Currently there are lots of AES ciphers that don't get fed a 256-bit key because we only have a 160-bit hash. o Is there a good 256-bit hash function? I don't know of any other than snefru. In this application, speed doesn't matter much. Should I use a 256-bit cipher instead maybe? o Is it safe to always take the hash of the password, or is it better to use the password directly as the key if it is less than 16 characters for 128-bit cipher? astor -- Alexander Kjeldaas, Guardian Networks AS, Trondheim, Norway http://www.guardian.no/

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cfs' ecb+ofb mode vs. interleaved cbc mode
by Alexander Kjeldaas 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

For fast file-system crypto, you really want to implement the ciphers so that you encrypt several blocks at a time. CFS does this by using a special mode (described as ecb+ofb by schneier). The CFS documentation explains: "At attach time, CFS derives from the passphrase into two DES keys, K1 and K2. K1 is used to create two (or three) DES pseudorandom stream ciphers, each 128KB long, S1 and S2. To encrypt a file block, it is first XORd against a unique bitstream derived from the inode number of the file. The result is then XORd against S1 based on its offset in the file. This is then DES ECB encrypted with K2, and the result of that is XORd against the appropriate position in S2. The resulting ciphertext is what is stored. The cipher is reversed in the obvious manner. Filenames are similarly encrypted. There does not appear to be a feasible attack that allows an independent search for the two subkeys K1 and K2; in a brute-force known-plaintext attack, an attacker would have to try all 2**112 key combinations. Note that in the single DES mode, the two keys may be vulnerable to independent exhaustive search under a so-called "linear" attack, but this attack appears to require a large number of chosen plaintexts encrypted under the same inode number. Under most conditions where the attacker cannot introduce large numbers of chosen plaintexts, I believe even the single-DES CFS encryption to be very strong in practice. Note that this is not the same as a "proof". In any event, CFS is always at least as secure as DES or triple DES (as selected when the directory is created). If want high security, select triple DES (now the default); for better performance, use the hybrid single-DES option." I'd like to know how this method compares to using an interleaved cbc mode - for example 8-way interleaved cbc. The n-way interlaved cbc-mode works by chaining each n'th block together instead of each block. This means you get n more messages. For a 512-byte block and a 128-bit block length, this means that each message will be 512/(8*16) = 4 blocks long. For a 4k block you get messages that are 32 blocks long. This might or might not be a problem. With CFS you need 2x the key material - something that is really hard to get by when you're using 256-bit keys. It seems to me you'll have to type in an extremely long password or each of the keys will in practice be weaker than what the theory tells you. Another point is that CFS requires a lot more nonswappable memory than interleaved cbc mode. This means that interleaved cbc mode initially seems more attractive for file-system use. Am I missing something? astor -- Alexander Kjeldaas, Guardian Networks AS, Trondheim, Norway http://www.guardian.no/

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Nation's Biggest Jewish Singles Event: Dec. 24 @ Webster Hall
by theball＠matzah.cc 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

******************************************************************* If you would like to continue to receive e-mail notifications regarding UTOPIA's events for Jewish Singles, please let us know by sending us an e-mail at theball(a)matzah.cc. Please note that this is a one-time mailing only. if we do not hear from you, we will never e-mail you again and we thank you for your time. ******************************************************************** "A high-end event," "awash in cocktail dresses," "attended by Cosmopolitan's Bachelor of the Month" and "3,000 guests who schmoozed their way over three vast floors." -- New York Magazine "Not a creature stirs on Christmas Eve . . . but that's not at this annual party for the city's young and Jewish where some 3,000 people turned out to dance, romance and kick back last year." -- New York Daily News "By midnight the nightclub was alive" with "4,000 partygoers" at this "holiday alternative for Jewish urbanites on their single most silent night of the year." -- The New York Times ******************************************************************** The Nation's BIGGEST Event for Jewish Singles Each Year Since 1995! Thursday, December 24, 8 p.m.- 4 a.m. THE BALL '98 at WEBSTER HALL (125 E. 11th St., between 3rd and 4th Aves, NYC) ************************************************ 4 FLOORS, 4 DJs, 7 UNIQUE ROOMS, 3000+ EXPECTED Grand Ballroom, Live Trapeze, Martini Bar, Jazz Club, Cigar Lounge, Coffee Bar, Flashback Disco, Sports Bar, BlackHole Lounge, more! Please dress with style ************************************************************ Hi, we have sent you this e-mail because we thought you might have interest in "The Ball '98" -- the Nation's Largest Party for Jewish Singles in their 20's and 30's. "The Ball '98" is sponsored by UTOPIA Events. UTOPIA also sponsors the annual "Turkey Ball" on Thanksgiving Eve and other events for Jewish Singles. If you would like to continue to receive e-mail notifications regarding UTOPIA's events for Jewish Singles, please let us know by sending us an e-mail to theball(a)matzah.cc. Please note that this is a one-time mailing only. if we do not hear from you, we will never e-mail you again and we thank you for your time. THE BALL '98 THE NATION'S BIGGEST EVENT FOR JEWISH SINGLES! Our annual Ball is the nation's biggest event for Jewish Singles in their 20's and 30's. In 1995, over 3000 young Jewish singles attended the Ball when we held it at the Palladium. In 1996, over 3,500 attended at Webster Hall. Last year, over 4000 people attended this event when we held it at The Tunnel and the party was covered by The New York Post, The Daily News, The New York Times, and more. THE BALL '98 4 FLOORS 4 DJs, 7 UNIQUE ROOMS The Ball '98 offers something for everyone: GRAND BALLROOM: For the Ball '98, Webster Hall's Grand Ballroom will be the site of the Main Party -- the place to meet and mingle with thousands of young Jewish singles, featuring dance music from a legendary DJ. We will work to ensure that the atmosphere in the Grand Ballroom (and The Ball '98 generally) is conducive to meeting and mingling. THE MARTINI BAR & JAZZ CLUB: Make this your place for intimate conversation. TTHE TRAPEZE SHOW: At 11:45 p.m., a trapeze artist defies death and gravity high above the Grand Ballroom -- without a net! Not for the faint-hearted. AND THERE'S SO MUCH MORE TO EXPLORE: The Coffee Bar, The Sports Bar, the Cigar Lounge, The Flashback Disco featuring music from the 70's and 80's, the Black Hole Lounge, and more! FOUR ENTRANCES, HUGE COAT CHECK: So that you can quickly enter and enjoy the Nation's Largest Jewish Singles Event, we have made arrangements to use four entrances to Webster Hall and to expand Webster Hall's already large coat check. ADMISSION Admission to The Ball '98 is $20 in advance and $25 at the door (we have added more cashiers this year to make entry easy). For information on purchasing tickets in advance, please call Utopia at 212.459.4321 or e-mail us at theball(a)matzah.cc. QUESTIONS? If you have any questions about The Ball '98 or any other matter, please feel free to e-mail us (theball(a)matzah.cc) or call Utopia directly at 212.459.4321 Thanks and we look forward to seeing you on December 24 at Webster Hall for The Ball '98.

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17 Dec '03

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by Zebra911＠usa.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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