December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Stego-empty hard drives... (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1998 11:32:03 -0500 > From: Mark Hahn <mhahn(a)tcbtech.com> > Subject: Re: Stego-empty hard drives... (fwd) > If you need fast random access, then neither version of CD will be > suitable. Hence the PCMCIA Hard Disk. However, you may have > difficulty coming up with a cover story if, indeed, you do not want > to tell a customs officer, "Oh, yeah, that's a portable disk drive". It occured to me that it might be feasible to ship such devices seperately via Fed-Ex or whatever. The question becomes, what do such countries as Great Britian plan for materials crossing their borders in this manner? Are they going to search each package and examine its contents? What does this mean for Dell and their ilk? The ramifications of this aspect are of some interest... ____________________________________________________________________ The seeker is a finder. Ancient Persian Proverb The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

1 0

Re: Clinton's fake apologies (fwd)
by User of DOOM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Anonymous wrote: > On 20 Sep 1998, [I] wrote: [about lieing] > > I agree it's bad. I agree it undermines the justice system a little bit. > > But, ... impeachment? > > Yes. > > We have some jokester sitting in Washington with full authority over our > military forces. The people can't believe a word he says. Congress can't > believe a word he says. He rules by executive order. He ignores the > Constitution. > > There is argument over whether he ordered military strikes to divert > attention from his scandal and whether he sold the country out to the Red > Chinese. Now people like myself are thinking - totally justified - that > this guy will do absolutely anything to hold on to his presidency. > > I don't feel particularly secure with some guy who I can't trust running > the military and with his finger on the nuclear button. That itself is a > violation of national security. Understandable sentiments. The position I can't understand is Jim's, of being totally outraged by the lieing under oath regardless of anything else. [although I respect his right to that opinion]. Unfortunately, you now wear the mantle of wanting to put away Bill "Al Capone" Klinton not for tax evasion, but for "fibbing". -- an anonymous aol32 user.

2 1

Re: Clinton's fake apologies (fwd)
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

on 20 Sep 1998 at 09:52:24 Reeza! wrote: > > At 09:21 PM 9/19/98 -0000, Anonymous wrote: > > > >What? To tell a lie is one thing, but ...[etc] > It was prefaced with "...to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing > but the truth...". > Straighten out your head, you seem to be a few neurons short of a > functional synapse. > > Reeza! I understand you think this is persuasive, but I don't understand why. and then at Sun, 20 Sep 1998 15:26:05 Reeza! wrote: > At 03:24 AM 9/20/98 -0000, Anonymous wrote: > > > >I agree it's bad. I agree it undermines the justice system a little bit. > >But, ... impeachment? > > > > I could care less if he had an affair, personally. But he had an affair > with a subordinate in his direct employ. [more] > I congratulate you for your defense of a person who demonstrably has broken > his marriage vows, his oath of public office, and purjured himself while > under an additional oath in a court of law. You do remember from 6 hours earlier that we're talking about lieing? Your raising other issues is irrelevant. You're building up the bogey man. [Jim Choate recently described this method as a "Strawman".] I suggested there are things Bill's done that are worse. Are you sure you're disagreeing? Do you have anything worthwhile to bring to the discussion? > You, too, are a few neurons short of a functional synapse. > > I suggest you discuss it with the maker. The best way is large caliber > bullet at sufficient velocity to penetrate and exit the cranial cavity. > > God speed, you fucking idiot. > I guess not. > Reeza! -- an anonymous aol32 user.

2 1

Remove
by Matthew Mundy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

remove

1 0

IP: Dead Men Tell No Tales
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: ignition-point(a)majordomo.pobox.com Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1998 05:18:16 -0400 (EDT) To: ignition-point(a)majordomo.pobox.com From: softwar(a)us.net (CharlesSmith) Subject: IP: Dead Men Tell No Tales Sender: owner-ignition-point(a)majordomo.pobox.com Precedence: list Reply-To: softwar(a)us.net (CharlesSmith) http://www.worldnetdaily.com/smith/980922.comcs.html It is said, "dead men tell no tales." If that were true, then America would have never known of the real story behind the Clinton administration. Two dead men are calling from their graves for the last few years of their lives to be told. The ghosts of Vince Foster and Ron Brown hover over Bill Clinton. Vince Foster and Ron Brown were both involved in the Clinton - China encryption scandal. One known event took place in May 1993 when Vince Foster, Webster Hubbell and Bernard Nussbaum paid the National Security Administration (NSA) a visit. These three fine gentlemen, with close connections to Hillary Clinton and the Arkansas Rose Office Law Firm, were tasked by President Clinton to help develop policy for U.S. communications technology. According to Foster's secretary, the White House lawyer also had binders from the NSA in his office. Binders that were never turned over by the White House. White House officials denied that Foster had any connection with the NSA. However, documents forced from the NSA by Washington Weekly and an interview with former NSA Director Adm. McConnell both confirmed Foster's presence at Ft. Meade in 1993. Foster's attendance at Ft. Meade also confirmed that Attorney General Janet Reno tasked Hubbell to encryption policy. Hubbell had access to Top Secret material on U.S. encryption. This fact was confirmed by a series of 1997 interviews with Democratic and Republican staff members in the House. Congressman Dan Burton currently holds documents where Hubbell held long meetings with Foster and now CIA Director George Tenet inside the White House in 1993. Burton cannot release those documents because Democratic members have threatened to walk. Hubbell was convicted in 1994 for fraud at the same time he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Indonesian billionaire Moctar Riady. Riady and his Lippo group had a great deal of interest in advanced U.S. technology. Riady's man inside the Clinton administration was John Huang at the Brown Commerce Department. The Commerce Department asserted in writing in 1997 to this author that John Huang had no encryption documentation. Yet, the CIA briefed Huang 37 times on satellite encryption technology while at Commerce. Huang's co-worker, former DNC fundraiser Ira Sockowitz, walked out of the Commerce Department in 1996 with over 2,000 pages of top secret information on satellite encryption, space launch and earth imaging technology. Sockowitz was supposed to fly with Brown on the fatal trade trip but he took an advance flight ahead of the Secretary instead. Sockowitz identified Ron Brown's body at the crash scene. Sockowitz left Commerce with the secrets only days after Brown's death. He was never prosecuted nor investigated. One Sockowitz document was so classified that the NSA sent a representative to testify before Federal Judge Royce Lamberth in order to keep it secret. NSA testimony showed that Sockowitz took a highly classified report based on informants from inside other countries and inside the U.S. The list of nations and foreign intelligence services affected by the leaked report reads like a Rand McNally road map of secret services around the world. According to the testimony, release of the report would affect the "careers" of many foreign officials. The last U.S. official who had similar career problems was convicted spy Johnathan Pollard - now spending life in prison for passing U.S. encryption secrets to Israel. Other documents hidden among the Sockowitz files include a classified series of memos from the Commerce Undersecretary for Export Administration (BXA) William Reinsch. The memos detail a July 1996 Clinton waiver for Loral satellite exports to China and Russia. In July 1998, House National Security Committee Chairman Spence told BXA head Reinsch to produce that memo and other documents taken by Sockowitz. So far, the White House and Reinsch have been unable to comply. Loral attorneys also claimed to Chairman Rohrabacher of the House Space Sub-Committee that the million dollars Loral CEO Schwartz gave to the DNC bought no special favors, and that Loral passed no military technology to China. The Loral claims are ridiculous. Loral's own letters of complaint to Ron Brown clearly show both claims to be false. The claim that no military technology was exported is disputed by Loral's own 1994 briefing memo given to Ron Brown that states that satellites such as Globalstar were "commercial applications of DoD technology." Another example is when Loral DEFENSE President Jerald Lindfelt wrote Brown a letter in 1996 where he expressed his desire to sell advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology to China. Lindfelt wrote "We've worked hard trying to resolve these problems with the Department of State, the Department of Commerce and the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA), but someone in these organizations always manages to block our participation... Could you help us by identifying someone in the Commerce Department high enough in the organization to help us resolve these issues and open this marketplace to our participation." Thus, Loral "Defense" President Lindfelt asked Brown to over-ride the State Department, the Defense Department and the Commerce Department to ship a radar system that experts in all three agencies had objected to. Only Clinton could do that, and he took big dollars from Bernard Schwartz. The claim that Mr. Schwartz received no special favors is almost laughable. In 1996 Loral requested that President Clinton hold up his signature on the Globalstar export waiver so Loral could include an encrypted satellite telemetry control station for China. In 1994 President Clinton arranged for Schwartz to meet Shen Rong-Jun, Vice Minister of the Chinese Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND). Of course, Shen Rong-Jun usually goes by his better known title of Lt. General Shen Rong-Jun of the People's Liberation Army. COSTIND, according to the GAO, is "an agency of the Chinese military (which) oversees development of China's weapon systems and is responsible for identifying and acquiring telecommunications technology applicable for military use." Another example from the files of Ron Brown shows that the wife of Chinese General Ding Henggao, Madam Nie Li, obtained permission under a "commercial license" through the Commerce Department to export an advanced - encrypted - secure fiber optic communications system to China. According to the same documentation, General Ding Henggao is also the Director of COSTIND. The same 1996 document notes that Mr. Xie Zhichao, COSTIND Electronics Design Bureau Director, and communications expert Deng Changru were part of the executive management for the same Chinese front company. Mr. Xie and Mr. Deng also have other formal titles. They are both Lt. Colonels in the Chinese Red Army. These astonishing facts on Clinton - Chinese Army deals come directly from the U.S. Commerce Department. Yet, the Commerce Department claimed on September 1, 1998 that it cannot "confirm nor deny the existence of any records" in regard to a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request for information on "COSTIND". Furthermore, the Commerce Department claims "If records were to exist they would be exempt from disclosure... unless the release of such information is determined by the Secretary to be in the national interest." Obviously, I can confirm that documents on COSTIND exist inside the Commerce Department. There is still more evidence the Commerce Department is covering up crimes committed under Secretary Brown. For example, in response to two different FOIA requests, the Commerce Department returned one trade report twice in 1998. The first version of the trade report was heavily blacked out for "commercial" and "privacy" reasons. The second, a duplicate of the first, revealed that Indonesian dictator Suharto had cut his son-in-law in on a private powerplant deal built and financed by the U.S. government. Of course, the U.S. contractor that needed Brown advocacy to win the deal was also a big donor to the DNC. The accidentally released 1994 APEC Advocacy trade report spells out exactly the kind of data being withheld from the U.S. public. The report shows the Brown Commerce Department pushed the power plant despite known corruption and kickbacks. "ADB is skiddish about involvement of Indonesia's first family (a minority shareholder is married to Pres. Suharto's daughter)... Ambassador Barry has been working with Executive Director Linda Yang, at the ADB who is 'doing all she can.'" Another page from the 1994 trade report shows that Commerce officials were suspicious of Indonesian corruption with French space companies. The document notes the intense competition to win satellite launch contracts for Indonesia between the U.S. and France included "allegations that the French have paid 'incentive money' to the Indonesians, but this cannot be confirmed." Written evidence that American, Indonesian and French taxpayers were being swindled. Three governments, spanning three continents, all involved in one crime. A trail of evidence leading to the Commerce Department and to Bill Clinton, all blacked out in one hidden report from the late Ron Brown. The ghosts of dead men haunt this government, kept alive by fresh lies and hidden under blacked out reports. Evidence on the transfer of nuclear missile technology to communist China and kickbacks to the Clinton/Gore campaign. Despite the evidence of crimes - the cover-up continues at the Commerce Department, at Ft. Meade, and inside the White House. ============================================================ index of source documents - http://www.softwar.net/costind.html ================================================================ 1 if by land, 2 if by sea. Paul Revere - encryption 1775 Charles R. Smith SOFTWAR http://www.softwar.net softwar(a)softwar.net Pcyphered SIGNATURE: 2BCB1A1B6350FF06670487EF4EC39FA8539A8B6B2720FA81AFA3F989DE9212C9 0F35E078318ED643A042651B7D3AB98E1FFC6193C4BD66B6ECD09A7284497DD0 A830BB83F7E72248 ================================================================ SOFTWAR EMAIL NEWSLETTER 09/22/1998 *** to unsubscribe reply with "unsubscribe" as subject *** ================================================================ ********************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo(a)majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address ********************************************** www.telepath.com/believer ********************************************** --- 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'

1 0

Oh boy, some goodies today. Porn starr on our payroll/Spice girls go 69
by STUFFED NEWS DAILY 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

What's better than 10 free sexy pics a day? 30 free sexy pics a day. Stuffed has the pics, stories and nutty sexy news! It doesn't get any better than this, come on take a peek we dare you! IN TODAY'S ISSUE: SPURED LOVER SPREADS PIX! HOW TO BAG A BAR BABE THE BEST OF EUREKA NEW KIT LETS TEENAGE GIRLS CREATE IMAGINARY BOYFRIENDS MORE FUN WITH MS WORD LEWINSKY'S GOT THE BLUES IN ROME SURVEY - MOST FOLKS ONLY READ SEXY PARTS OF THE STARR REPORT SEX WITH CINDY-CRAWFORD ----> http://stuffed.net/98/9/22/ <---- Welcome to today's issue of Stuffed. To read it you should click on the URL above. If it is not made clickable by your email program you will need to use your mouse to highlight the URL, copy it and then paste it into your browser (then press Return). This email is never sent unsolicited. Stuffed is the supplement for the Eureka newsletter you subscribed to. Full instructions on unsubscribing are in every issue of Eureka! ----> http://stuffed.net/98/9/22/ <----

1 0

Re: Stego-empty hard drives... (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1998 11:07:34 -0500 > From: Petro <petro(a)playboy.com> > Subject: Re: Stego-empty hard drives... (fwd) > I don't know how hard this would be, but how about running a > seperate memory check, and while those numbers are flashing on the screen, > do the wait for imput? So hide the keyscan in the memory counter code. Would work externaly, would probably not show up on TEMPEST. Since both the keyscan and the memory scan are repetitive TEMPEST might have a problem telling them apart. Provided you could get the keyscan in the same footprint as the mem check the BIOS would not show up as anomolous in size. As long as they're not running around doing checksums you'd be ok (I suspect). ____________________________________________________________________ The seeker is a finder. Ancient Persian Proverb The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

2 1

Re: ArcotSign
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Greg Broiles writes: > I'm certainly not a cryptographer, but I'm somewhat at a loss in trying to > understand the purpose of using public-key (or asymmetric key) > cryptography within a policy/technology system which won't allow the use > of the strengths of asymmetric key crypto. As I understand the paper you > reference above, to implement this system the public key must be kept > confidential, and signed documents must also be kept confidential, or the > system of the security as a whole is at risk. With those constraints, why > bother with the overhead (computationally/technically/legally) of > asymmetric key crypto at all? Based on http://www.arcot.com/camo2.html, the idea is to defend against an attacker who manages to steal a copy of the secret key file, and who then tries to guess the passphrase which protects it. The file data is encrypted in an unstructured generic manner so that all decryptions look like random data, even the correct one. This gives the attacker no information about when he has guessed the correct passphrase. For this to work, the public key has to be kept secret(!). Otherwise the right passphrase could be discovered by testing the decrypted private key against the public key. Arcot suggests that this would be appropriate for an environment where only one or a few trusted servers need to authenticate users. These servers would be the only ones which have copies of the public keys. (It is not necessary that signed documents be kept confidential, however a randomized signing algorithm must be used.) As Greg points out, much the same could be accomplished simply by having the servers share secret 3DES keys with their users, each user having his own private 3DES key. The users could encrypt messages using their 3DES key and the server would decrypt using the appropriate key, which would also serve to authenticate the user. The Arcot people suggest that an advantage over this scheme is that servers don't have to store information on all clients. But much the same thing could be done with symmetric cryptography. In the Arcot system, the client sends his public key certificate, encrypted to the server, along with his request. The server receives the cert and uses it to verify/decrypt the message. With symmetric cryptography, the client could have the shared 3DES key encrypted using the server's public key, and send that along with his message in a similar way. The confusing thing about the Arcot system is this: how sensitive is the public key? Is it as sensitive as a shared secret key? Superficially not, since in order to exploit the public key you also have to steal the private key file and then guess the passphrase. But on the other hand, if this is more than security through obscurity, you have to treat it in many ways as equally sensitive. Users of the Arcot system, believing that they are safe because their public keys are secret, may become casual about revealing their private key files and choosing easy to guess passphrases. They might even send the files around via insecure channels. With this kind of usage, the public key does become just as sensitive as a shared secret key would be. In that case, not only the servers, but all parts of the PKI must be brought inside the trust boundary. They are all holding material which, if revealed, would compromise the security around which the system is built. You end up with trust relationships more similar to those in a system like Kerberos than in a normal PKI. > Is it really necessary/useful to call the scheme "software smart cards"? > If it were called "An improved system for user authentication", I don't > think it would make people nearly so suspicious. From my perspective, one > of the advantages of smart card technology is that I can carry my > authentication material with me; a system which puts it on my hard disk is > less attractive. Floppies are portable, but not durable. The analogy with smart cards is that these cards protect your private key. With a perfect smart card, an attacker can't do any better than chance guessing of your private key. With the Arcot system, the same is true. Decrypting the private key file gives no information about its content, because pure random data is encrypted. Therefore with their system the attacker also can't do better than chance guessing. However this ignores the cost of the system, discarding many of the advantages of public key cryptography. You don't have to do that if you use smart cards. > I didn't understand the relationship between this scheme and Rivest's > chaffing and winnowing which you note was cited as a reference in the SSC > paper - would you (or someone else) mind explaining the connection? Yes, this seems obscure.

2 1

Re: ArcotSign (was Re: Does security depend on hardware?)
by Mike Stay 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>>In that case please allow me to go back to a point raised by me >>previously. The user uses his 'remembered secret' (of fewer bits) >>through a public algorithm (including protocol) to retrieve from a >>pool the password (of more bits). If the attacker doesn't have the >>pool then everything looks fine. But if he manages to get the pool >>(a case someone mentioned in this thread) then he can obviously >>brute force offline, I believe, since he possesses now everything >>the legitimate user has, excepting the 'remembered secret'. Or is >>there anything wrong with my logic? > >Yes. There is something wrong with you logic. > >Bruce >********************************************************************** >Bruce Schneier, President, Counterpane Systems Phone: 612-823-1098 >101 E Minnehaha Parkway, Minneapolis, MN 55419 Fax: 612-823-1590 > Free crypto newsletter. See: http://www.counterpane.com According to the website, there's no pool of passwords. There's a truncated hash that will catch most mistakes, but is useless as a test criterion in a dictionary attack. If you get the user's "public" key, then you can do a dictionary attack. The user's "public" key isn't public, however; not even the user knows it. If I'm understanding it right, it's stored encrypted and the key is only given to a set of predefined servers. Prior relationship must exist; they admit that. -- Mike Stay Cryptographer / Programmer AccessData Corp. mailto:staym@accessdata.com

1 0

Arcot (fwd)
by Ryan Lackey 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(originally to a bunch of places, but I misspelled "cypherpunks" in the headers...) (operating on generator power after hurricane georges struck Anguilla...) The way I see it, there are n separate issues here, which should be addressed separately. The following are my summaries of the issues, using the information I have available -- I have never seen any confidential Arcot data, so I'm operating entirely from public sources. It's entirely possible my data or assumptions are incorrect -- I'd be very happy to have someone correct me. 1) The Arcot system uses "software smartcard" repeatedly throughout its marketing literature, and says that it provides similar security to smartcards. However, even in the technical paper recently posted to the web by Arcot, it admits it does not provide resistance to a wide class of attacks, including the two Stefan Brands mentioned: * Resistance to monitoring attacks on the CPU * End users reverse-engineering the system I have issues with this use of the term "smartcard". In fact, this system has *none* of the desirable properties of a smartcard, as users can freely copy the authenticator. It is, at best, equivalent to an encrypted certificate on disk which can only be checked for validity online (no local checksums, no structure to the cert, just a raw random string). The phrase "two factor authentication", used throughout the marketing literature, is being used improperly -- two passwords (one remembered and one stored on disk, since the ArcotSign authenticator is just a string of data) do not two-factor authentication make, if two passwords (one remembered and one stored as an encrypted certificate on disk) do not two-factor make. It's an open point whether both systems or neither are two-factor, but it's pretty clear that the two are equivalent. 2) Scott Loftesness, the new CEO of DigiCash, proposed this system as potentially a viable alternative to hardware tamper resistance for electronic finance systems (DBS systems). The threat model for real electronic finance systems (including and especially DBS) is in fact substantially more serious, as recent Rabobank windows client attack demonstrates. Once your customers *can* have money stolen by a third party, it's up to you to prove they *haven't*, at least according to US and other law, for small customers. This means only institutions capable of absorbing massive fraud (in absolute terms) can field real electronic cash systems. This is primarily a debate about threat models for a specific application, rather than a technical one. 3) The system appears to use PKC for no reason -- it is a closed system, like Kerberos, and only limits itself by using PKC. Kerberos, developed by some list participants *years* ago, appears to solve every problem Arcot claims to solve. Additionally, Kerberos (in some form) is now being integrated into MS Windows NT, so it is widely available. 4) Bruce Schneier, one of the firm's technical advisors, says "it's not [sufficient for] online real estate [presumably meaning high value transactions with no recourse]", but that it is for "ninny net users in chat rooms". The apps Bruce Schneier seems to propose the Arcot system for ("systems like AOL" (read: porn sites on the WWW)) are more concerned with their users not being able to share passwords than anything else. For that application, simple IP-based security in addition to passwords is sufficient, or other means of ensuring an authenticator is linked to an individual. The Arcot system does not provide security from this issue (even though it is intended for closed networks, where such functionality would be highly possible). However, the firm's marketing information seems to be selling this to corporate web sites, for protecting high value corporate data. I find it highly unlikely any board of directors would consider their proprietary corporate data closer to "ninny net users in chat rooms" than something requiring real security. (Even people without real security requirements often want high security, or at least systems with no known limitations -- I use high-grade encryption to protect my credit card information, even though my liability is limited to $50, and many other users are unwilling to use 40-bit crypto to protect their credit card numbers.) 5) The point was raised that in a smartcard system, you don't know what you're signing. I agree completely. However, in a smartcard system, you can protect the *keys* to a far higher level than protecting the *use* of the keys when the key is physically present. This is a substantially lower level of risk, particularly if a security policy is included in the smart card, such as only disbursing a limited amount of money per unit time, or monitoring suspicious transactions, or handling user authentication through a strong external channel, such as a PIN reader attached directly to the smartcard reader. The earlier debate on smartcards vs. tamper-resistant computers with I/O leads me to believe that for electronic cash in reasonable value ranges (>$1000), you most likely want to go with *more* than a smartcard (as in, a tamper resistant computer), but certainly you don't want to go with *less*. For many applications, a combination of trusted time (on the smartcard) and a trusted smartcard (and perhaps location) would be sufficient -- a user could then be made to prove they were not in a certain location at a certain time when a transaction were made to absolve themselves of responsibility for it. 6) "Hardware is expensive" So is software. The cost of implementing any authentication mechanism, particularly in a closed system, is relatively constant -- passwords through cheap hardware -- as most of the cost is in administrative overhead, user training, etc. I'd far rather go with an $8 Dallas Semiconductor iButton plus $0-$100 software plus $400/user training/etc. cost than $0 hardware plus $x software plus the same user training cost. In many systems, hardware is *cheaper* in the long run, as users understand it better, are better at doing their own key management, etc. It is exactly for closed systems where hardware solutions *shine* compared to software, even if they provide the *same* security in absolute terms -- the hardware solution has lower life-cycle costs. For an open system, or one where you have minimal control over the users (such as AOL, or a porn WWW site, or whatever), the requirement that software be added to the local machine is usually prohibitively expensive. In that kind of application, all of the intelligence needs to go on the server -- an online password checking system, coupled with standard browser features like client certificates, is about the most you can expect, and even that is pushing it (until MIT did cert support for Lynx, many of my machines were unable to use certificates at all). 7) "The system is patent-pending." I do not see how the system is provably higher in security or any other worthwhile features than the following widely deployable, standard, free system: * online password checking of user passwords, optionally changing in some kind of one-time-pad system, passed through an SSL-encrypted link to the server, such that if a password guess attempts were made, the account could be locked out. * encrypted local certificates, encrypted with optionally a different passphrase, which do *not* need to be kept secret. This provides "two factor" authentication to the same extent as the Arcot system, is easy to implement using standard systems, and is conceptually simple. In the event that the Arcot system is no better than the above (which I believe), which is *not* patentable, I fail to see why the issue of whether Arcot's system can be patented is important. The only parts which could be patented (as far as I can tell) are accidental, not the essential functionality of quasi-two factor authentication with online password checking to prevent off-line attacks. 8) The various IP/patent/etc. issues A company could implement open standards based authentication, in an open way, publish papers on every detail of their system, etc. and still make quite a bit of money. They do this through the quality of their *software engineering*, not the quality of their idea. Ideas are expensive to create, and impossible to keep secret, even with patents. Once you come up with an idea, most of what gives it value is the review process itself, not the initial idea. That's why the valuable ideas I can think of, at least in crypto, have mainly come from universities and open research labs -- they can more cheaply be reviewed. Only the NSA has the resources to make an idea valuable and also keep it closed (and if you believe Payne, even they don't...) I understand that Arcot is a commercial company, and that it's trying to make money, but I don't think that actually counters any of the points presented above -- if anything, it makes them stronger, as Arcot has a strong desire to increase the value of its assets (the deliverable authentication system) much more so than a random hacker working on this as a curiosity.

1 0