December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

17 Dec '03

The Campaign for Radical Truth in History http://www.hoffman-info.com PO Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816 .Visit our Bookstore ZOG Advances Control over Information with Clinton's Executive Order 13010 for "Information Warfare" by Michael A. Hoffman II Copyright©1997. All Rights Reserved Excerpt: "Managing the new risks inherent in an information-based society requires a different type of information exchange within the industry and between industry and government...Key to its success will be protecting the privileged information from both government and the private sector from unauthorized disclosure." -- Robert T. Marsh, Chairman, President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection The Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG) further advanced Communist-like controls over American infrastructure, and underscored the cooperation between the Communist and Capitalist mentalities, when U.S. President Bill Clinton, with virutally no scrutiny from the Establishment news media, signed totalitarian Executive Order 13010 last July (1997). This Order established a new wing of the secret, banker-controlled government of the United States. While Clinton's Executive Order itself is written in the lingo of the bureaucrat and hence is largely insipid, its "fruits" are not. Executive Order 13010 is concerned with cyberspace "threats" to the power structure; with computer hackers who have the ability to interefere with government, business and industry operations. Well, that's the cover story anyway. In practice, the Executive Order authorizes a commission of bankers, industrialists and secret policemen (and police women) to gather intelligence on dissidents, government critics and anyone who is a potential threat to the continuing hegemony of the Aryan-Zionist ruling class. Here is a portion of the remarks delivered at a meeting (chaired by Janet "The Witch of Waco" Reno), by Robert T. Marsh, Chairman, President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, at the Bankers Roundtable, Washington, DC on September 11, 1997: "One of our toughest problems -- across all infrastructures -- is the sharing of information. There is already a heavy volume of information passed by industry -- especially banks, as you well know -- to government as part of the regulatory process and through law enforcement. "Managing the new risks inherent in an information-based society requires a different type of information exchange within the industry and between industry and government. Furthermore, managing these new risks calls for partnership at many different levels, from policy-making aimed at preventing a crisis to responding if such a crisis occurs. The Commission has some specific proposals in this regard: "We will recommend the establishment of an Information Sharing, Analysis, and Warning "Organization" -- a public-private organization that embodies the trust essential for the partnership between government and the owners/operators for successful infrastructure assurance. "We envision an 'information clearinghouse' staffed by up-and-comers from both government and industry who will receive relevant information from all sources -- public and private, anonymous or attributable -- analyze this information to assess what is happening in the infrastructures, decide on the necessary protective measures to be taken, then disseminate needed information to both government and the private sector. Key to its success will be protecting the privileged information from both government and the private sector from unauthorized disclosure. "Would you be willing to take turns providing a talented young banker from your company to represent the banking and finance sector inside such an organization? "Enhance industry's information sharing capability by creating Sector Information Assurance Coordinators that best suit each infrastructure's information-sharing needs -- either through an existing association or by creating a new entity. In essence, we are proposing that each industry designate a representative to be the channel for exchanging information with the government. Your reaction? "Create a National Infrastructure Assurance Council -- a very high level council comprised of senior CEOs from throughout the critical infrastructures, meeting regularly with selected Cabinet Officers... "These recommendations lay the foundation for the 'trusted environment' to achieving the public-private partnership essential for protection into the next century." What we are seeing here is the establishment of a thought police agency within the Federal government with links to law enforcement, concealed under weasel words such as "Information Clearinghouse" and "Sector Information Assurance." This recalls the Pentagon term for the slaughter of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. Air Force-- "collateral damage." Dr. Goebbels at least had the relative honesty to call his agency the Ministry of Propaganda. The Zionist Occupation Government refers to their propaganda and secret police functions with the bland title of "National Information Assurance Council." They're not propagandists, they're "Sector Information Assurance Coordinators." Mr. Marsh's reference to the gathering of "anonymous" information is of interest. Here is the keystone of all totalitarian powers--the anonymous snitch who turns in the hated old lady next door as a witch only because he can do so without attribution. Our Anglo-Saxon Common Law requires two witnesses and the U.S. Constitution insures the right to face one's accusers, but ZOG is operating on other principles. Chairman Marsh: "The objective is to achieve voluntary participation of all players within each infrastructure and to assemble and exchange information without fear of attribution to specific sources." That is the chairman of a government commission speaking. This is not conspiracy theory. These remarks are on the record. They constitute the Revelation of the Method (cf. my book, "Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare"). The System is becoming increasingly vulnerable, especially the banking system which is the biggest con-game of all, since it is based entirely on the confidence of the public in a commodity which in itself has zero value--paper notes referred to as "money." Wealth is created and dynastic families within the Aryan-Zionist ruling class are maintained, by the circulation or withdrawal of worthless Federal Reserve paper to which the public is taught to attribute value. In a similar fashion, the worthless mandates and orders of the Federal government, promoting a gigantic military-industrial complex in the service of War-Zionism and the Novus Odo Seclorum of Satan, sodomy and aborticide, are advanced almost entirely through the value of the fear and awe the public is taught to have for the Federal government. As both our funny-money and our funny-government become more and more obviously worthless in the eyes of even some of the masses of goyim, the confidence game can no longer be manintained on the basis of psychological warfare principles alone. The risk factor inherent in the System's "Truth or Consequences" gambit (discussed at length in my book) has reached the point where the risk must be "managed" by the function of cyber police. This is what Clinton's Executive Order 13010 establishes-- a gigiantic listening post for the secret police through the auspices of business and industry. Banks having been informing on their customers for years--since the administration of Ronald ("Super Patriot") Reagan who rubber-stamped the most onerous bank-reporting rules in our nation's history. Chairman Marsh admits this: "There is already a heavy volume of information passed by industry -- especially banks, as you well know--to government as part of the regulatory process and through law enforcement." Now the "turn in your neighbor" ethic of the banks is being mandated for all levels of U.S. commerce through the recruitment, in Mr. Marsh's words, of "elite CEOS." The whole point is to shore up flagging confidence in the Federal government's con-game, as Marsh admits: "Both the financial service industry and government require strong public confidence -- the industry in order to derive growth, and the government in order to derive political viability. Each is central to the daily lives of virtually every American, and the degree of trust the public is willing to place in them depends directly on the reliability of the services provided. Infrastructure, as the carrier of the communications and transactions which deliver those services, is, therefore, critical to the performance of both. With the retention of public confidence as a common bond, how might the industry and government better cooperate to assure that critical financial services are secured in the information age?" The chairman of the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection is saying that bankers have an interest in deceiving the people just as government has. The bankers' interest is in continuing to reap profits and the government's interest is to maintain itself in power against populist opposition forces. Chariman Marsh says that the public will only continue to be deceived ("trust"), if the shylocks can keep the game running smoothly. Of course, that's quite a hat trick in view of the fact that the public is becoming increasingly aware that the objective of ZOG's game is their own enslavement. The focus of ZOG in this regard is the "information age." ZOG's desire is to redouble their spying on us and to further institutionalize that spying at all sectors of business and commerce and then link it to the secret police ("law enforcement") for various sorts of economic, political and career reprisals and penal sanctions. Here is Mr. Marsh, this time in a speech to the New York Federal Reserve bankers, September 24, 1997 on what they fear most: "But, as you well know, major trends of change -- globalization, industry restructuring, Internet banking, and cyber cash --combine to create new risks. This is true within the financial services industry as well as the telecommunications and electric power industries upon which financial services heavily depend...it is the vulnerability to a possible coordinated attack on physical operations centers, or on the complex 'system of systems' which enables this industry to function world-wide, that is of rising concern." Marsh before a meeting of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Sept. 20, 1997, speaking about "illegal" government activity in connection with "information warfare": "Let me talk briefly about a recent Joint Staff exercise with which some of you are probably familiar. This was just one in a series of no-notice exercises, but this one focused specifically on information warfare. Some of the issues raised were quite troubling -- including the fact that the Joint Staff ended up fighting this war, which was not only bad but illegal. They include many of the questions that the Commission has been grappling with for the past year: Who should take the lead in responding to a cyber attack on the United States? Should there be a Commander In Chief for information warfare? Where are the borders in the cyber age? What are the jurisdictions? Is this a law enforcement or a defense problem?" Chairman Robert Marsh's ties are to the military-industrial complex. He is the former CEO of Morton-Thiokol Corporation, a notorious polluter and builder of components for nuclear warhead-laden missiles. Mr. Marsh currently is a trustee of the MITRE Corporation. According to investigative reporter Stephen Knight in his book, "Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution," London's Mitre Square was a dumping ground for the Ripper's victims. Knight states: "Mitre Square has strong Masonic significance. In fact it is fair to say it was the most Masonic of all places in London, except for the Great Hall of the Grand Lodge itself." (London: Grafton Books, 1977, p. 175). I am not here implying that Mr. Marsh is necessarily a murderer or in league with Jack the Ripper, only that his relationship with the Mitre name is a synchronicity worth noting. (For the significance of "synchronicity" to the ruling class cf. the predictive modeling of the commodities markets and the "catastrophe theory" studies of Prof. Christopher Zeeman of Warwick University). Stephen D. Mitchell of the US Justice Dept. is a member of the Marsh commission. Here he discusses the "insider threat"--the fear the government has of patriots and dissidents being hired in "critical infastructure" areas such as banks and of how to screen these "insiders" out of employment. He also expresses the government's frustration with state privacy laws: "Privacy is trickier. Our outreach revealed a degree of frustration among infrastructure owners and operators, some of whom wanted to take greater employee security precautions than some laws might otherwise allow....The importance of individual privacy has made obtaining background information on a potential or current employee a fertile area for strong state laws. Though grounded in best intentions, this has resulted in unpredictable disparities of approaches across state lines. The bottom line: a critical infrastructure owner and operator may in some instances be discouraged if not prevented from asking many of the types of questions that could help identify and prevent a growing insider threat to our infrastructures." --Department of Defense, Worldwide Anti-Terrorism Conference, Aug. 21, 1997. Other members of the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection: Merritt Adams, ATT Corporation. Richard P. Case, IBM. Dr. Mary Culnan, Georgetown University. Peter Daly, U.S. Treasury. John C. Davis, National Security Agency. Brenton Greene, Dept. of Defense. William B. Joyce, CIA. Stephan D. Mitchell, Dept. of Justice. Irwin Pikus, Dept. of Commerce. John R. Powers, FEMA. Susan Siemans, FBI. Frederic Struble, Board of Governors, Federal Reserve bank. Nancy Wong, Pacific Gas and Electric. Relevant Links: President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection: http://www.pccip.gov/index.html Executive Order 13010: http://www.pccip.gov/eo13010.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- archives / bookstore / news bureau / home

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Re: Information Warfare
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

ZOG translated from the Talmud: > Stephen D. Mitchell of the US Justice Dept. is a member of the Marsh > commission. Here he discusses the "insider threat"--the fear the government > has of patriots and dissidents being hired in "critical infastructure" areas > such as banks and of how to screen these "insiders" out of employment. Too late... > He also expresses the government's frustration with state privacy laws: > "Privacy is trickier. Our outreach revealed a degree of frustration among > infrastructure owners and operators, some of whom wanted to take greater > employee security precautions than some laws might otherwise allow.... Yep, Corporate America is crying out for GAK and the right to keep their employees interned in Government Work Camps. > The bottom line: a critical > infrastructure owner and operator may in some instances be discouraged if > not prevented from asking many of the types of questions that could help > identify and prevent a growing insider threat to our infrastructures." "Before I send you for your drug-test and prostrate exam, I'm going to need to know your bra/condom size." > --Department of Defense, Worldwide Anti-Terrorism Conference, Aug. 21, 1997. Shit! I thought I was at the Cypherpunks physical meeting. I mean, Kent Crispin and Hallam-Baker were there... Say, you don't think... YellowWireMonger

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Building the Surveillance State
by Tim May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I predict that nearly every company which enforces the PGP 5.5 corporate snoopware will in fact routinely convert every incoming and outgoing message to plaintext for searching by keywords, topics, etc. This would be analogous to every phone call, incoming and outgoing, being recorded. Except that instead of having security people _listen_ to each recording, the messages can be glanced at quickly, marked for further review, compiled into dossiers, or searched for the keywords of interest to the security people. (Please note that I am not saying such phone call or e-mail monitoring is illegal, or should be illegal. A property owner is free to define his own policies for how he uses his own property. This includes company phones, company computers, and even the time of employees while they are on his premises. The issues are not the legality or ethicality of such recordings and monitorings, but the dangers. And whether people such as ourselves should help build or deploy such surveillance capabilitities. Or work for companies with such surveillance policies.) I further predict that this will actually _increase_ the amount of e-mail surveillance being done. Whereas today it is of course easy for companies to surveil unencrypted employee mail, I doubt that most of them do. But the adoption of snoopware like PGP 5.5 will raise the consciousness of company security people. "Hmmhh, maybe we ought to buy some of those e-mail keyword analyzers and combine them with our new purchase of PGP 5.5? If our employees are encrypting, we'd better keep tabs on them." By building in such easily-enforceable snooping capabilities, and by building in such things as the ability to reject even _incoming_ e-mail which has failed to encrypt to the corporate key (as I understand the product), this greatly moves us toward a surveillance era. Is this what "Pretty Good Privacy" really stands for? - --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography - ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway." -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQA/AwUBND+11FK3AvrfAt9qEQKOZQCdFRS6Ogl3da7TDFxmFF7E9kE16RsAoPaG iFjXzww6H5c1no3iYGvL6BGD =wt4J -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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More dangers of corporate snoopware
by Tim May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Suppose I want to send a private message to Andy Grove at Intel. With current systems, I would encrypt to his public key and send it to him. Only he, or those with access to his private key, could read the message. But suppose CAK becomes common, and suppose Intel has adopted PGP 5.5. I presume I have to also encrypt to Intel's corporate key...or one of them. (I assume different users in different departments may have different CAK keys.) So, who can read my message besides Andy? The Security Operations department? The Key Compliance Officer? Or, perhaps, only those _higher_ than Andy Grove, e.g., no one. And suppose I send a communication to a lower-level person? How many higher-level persons will be able to read the message? Will companies really accept that lower-level security people will have access to the communications about business deals, technology deals, etc.? The prospects for abuse are obvious. Or will there be provisions for overriding the PGP 5.5 snoopware features? Will it become a status symbol to have reached the level of trust where one's private e-mail is not subject to snoopware encryption? I suppose it's up to companies to figure out all of these troublesome issues. I just hope the architecture of PGP 5.5 is pliable enough to allow the market to decide which options to turn on, which to turn off, and which to take out completely. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Citizen Foils Armed Home Invasion
by Eric Cordian 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

RAINBOW CITY, Ala. (AP) -- Officers who went to a house with a warrant to search for drugs were met at the door by a couple in bulletproof vests and a surprise gunfight. A blast from an assault weapon, apparently fired through the front door, killed Chris McCurley, 46, the recently appointed chief of Etowah Country's drug task force, authorities said. Etowah County Sheriff James Hayes said a man and woman came to the door wearing bulletproof vests when law officers arrived Friday at their new house in a quiet neighborhood near the Coosa River about 65 miles northeast of Birmingham. After McCurley was shot, the man walked outside and continued firing, striking three more officers before he was finally shot down by police hiding behind trees, said Minnie Bellew, who lives across the street. Ezra George Petersen, 50, was hospitalized with minor gunshot wounds to his extremities, Hayes said. He was under guard at Gadsden Regional Medical Center. The woman, Connie Stozzie, 30, was taken to jail and was on investigative hold. Petersen shot at officers with an AK-47 assault weapon with a 100-round drum of ammunition, Hayes said. Officer Gary Lee Entrekin, 34, was in serious condition with a gunshot wound to the back, said M.D. Garmon, a spokesman at Riverview Regional Medical Center in Gadsden. Altoona police officer Khris Yancey, 26, was shot in the back, but his wounds were not thought to be serious. Reserve officer Rick Correll, 46, was in fair condition with wounds to an arm and foot. ``The law enforcement community and its supporters will not rest in this county until Petersen gets what he justly deserves -- and that's the electric chair,'' Hayes said. Neighbors said the tall, tattooed Petersen was a friendly man frequently seen riding a motorcycle. He had bought $20 worth of oranges Wednesday from Mrs. Bellow's grandson, who was selling fruit for a school fund-raiser. ``He was real nice. I talked to him about his motorcycles, all the stuff he did to them,'' 14-year-old Jake Bellew said. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

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No Subject
by bureau42 Anonymous Remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

So many things I would have done, but clouds got in the way.

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anonymous informer quality up
by Cyberdog 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

U.S. News Online October 20, 1997 Sinister obstruction? Or just incompetence? ... Thompson staffers were tipped off about the tapes by an anonymous E-mail message in early September. Last Wednesday night, almost a month after the initial tip, a Clinton lawyer called Thompson's committee with a message that began, "You're not going to believe this, but . . ."

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Auto-archiving cleartext is GAK
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Advocates of the model where software is automatically archived on receipt, either in cleartext or re-encrypted with a corporate key, need to be aware that there are problems with it: No notification to sender about the policy. Imagine encrypting this mail to your friend sue(a)microsoft.com: "Hey Sue - it's been a while. Is your boss still being such a wiener? That was a great imitation you did of the jerk at the party last month. He still doesn't know you're shopping your resume around, right? What a luser." You might have thought you had a certain level of privacy when you encrypted it to your friend's personal key, but you didn't. This is going to cause embarrassment and misunderstandings. People should know if their mail is going to be automatically saved in the clear to a company archive. The best way to make sure of that is to have the sender be the one to do it, or not. No way to prevent third-party access. With the corporate message recovery feature, the sender has the option of simply ignoring the recovery key and sending it encrypted just to the recipient. Some corporations won't let it through, others will. Some companies will want mail to be made recoverable by default, while still allowing an escape clause for personal mail and special purposes (like for "sensitive" mail which needs protection against subpoena and discovery). They can use the "optional" CMR mode. Again, senders are always notified as to which mode is being used by a given company, and senders can be confident that if they don't use the third-party key, no access will be possible. With automatic encryption and archival on receipt, all mail will be archived, and senders have no notice and no guarantee that stated policies will be followed. No escape via super-encryption. Even if the company is mandating a recovery key and filtering out messages which aren't encrypted to it, the sender still has the option to super-encrypt with the recipient key alone, before sending the message encrypted to the corporate recovery key. This ensures that only the recipient's personal key can read the message. With software which automatically saves the cleartext of the message, once the user reads the data it is available to the corporation via the snoopware. Facilitates GAK! Suppose this solution is adopted, and software is developed which automatically re-encrypts received email and sends it to a secure archive. It's robust and works with a wide variety of email packages. Now the government could simply mandate this to be used for all mail reading software. The secure archive would be a remote archive maintained by the FBI to protect public safety. All plaintext would be sent there, encrypted by the FBI key. The business software would already support this. This is GAKware! Unlike with a CMR system, the sender would have no way to prevent access. Can't handle forgotten passphrases. People forget passphrases all the time. With re-encryption on receipt, there is no way to recover gracefully from this error. All the incoming encrypted data is lost until you can notify everyone who has sent mail to resend it, and get your new key out to all of them. These may be purchase orders, sales leads and other important documents which represent lost business if they can't be recovered. This is going to invite people to use poor security practices like writing down passphrases or choosing ones which are easy to guess. Worse, it... Invites key escrow. In order to prevent this problem, employees may be forced to share their secret keys with corporate management. Software will be written to facilitate this process. Crypto companies are already doing this. Nortel Entrust allows key generation by management, where employees are given the keys and management keeps a copy. Shades of Clipper! This also fails the notification requirement. Don't believe me? Take a look at this description of the Nortel Entrust product: > Recovering Lost Keys > > Many data security systems require that users have passwords to access > their keys. However, with some information security systems, disaster > strikes when users forget their passwords. When users of such systems > forget their passwords, not only do they lose their keys -- they also > lose all the information encrypted with those lost keys (forever). > Entrust, however, provides an easy way to securely recover keys. > > If users forget their Entrust passwords, they call their Entrust > Administrator to request that their encryption key pairs be recovered. > After setting up the users for key recovery using Entrust/Admin, the > Entrust Administrator provides each recovered user with a new > reference number and authorization code. Users then enter this > information as part of the Recover User operation in Entrust/Client. > This operation sets up a protected communication session between > Entrust/Client and Entrust/Manager for encryption key pair recovery. > When Entrust/Client recovers a user's encryption key pair, it > automatically creates a new signing key pair. > > Updating Keys > > While users can recover their key pairs if they forget their > passwords, there are some situations in which users may want to get > new key pairs altogether. For instance, the security policy of an > organization may dictate that users get new key pairs every two years. > In this case, a Security Officer uses Entrust/Officer to specify that > key update occurs every 24 months. The term key update refers to the > automatic creation of new encryption key pairs and signing key pairs > at specified times. Any Security Officer can specify the frequency of > key updates. > > Every time users log on to Entrust, the software checks to see if key > update is required. If this is the case, Entrust/Client makes a > request to Entrust/Manager for a new encryption key pair. Once the new > encryption key pair is generated, Entrust/Manager delivers the new key > pair in a protected communications session. Delivery of the new > encryption key pair is completely transparent to the user. No system is ideal. Before pushing this re-encryption model as a panacea, think about the implications. No system which provides automatic access to business data is going to be privacy friendly. Any such system can be perverted into supporting GAK. Load it up with all the disclaimers you like, but if you advocate software which contains key escrow and which automatically provides cleartext to third parties, you are not advocating software which protects privacy. Be prepared to be called an advocate of GAK next time you push for software which automatically archives cleartext, because if it can save it for business, it can save it for government.

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PolicyMaker & GAK compliance
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hal Finney <hal(a)rain.org> writes: > Adam Back writes: > > I would be nice to see the topic of the recipient refusing email based > > on policies relating to third party access to messages in transit > > being addressed in the standard when and if PGP gets to that stage. > > > > [ecash processing] > > This is a good example of a possible future kind of key assertion. > Are you confident that you can decide which kinds of recipient refusal > are morally correct and which kinds are not? Not automatically, no, I doubt it would work. > Is it the role of the IETF and the Open-PGP process to make this > determination? I would say not. Rather, we should standardize data > structures and conventions which allow people to express those > conditions and assertions which are useful to them. Yes. I agree. > There are a whole range of possible assertions which you might object to: > > [examples of PolicyMaker style policies] > > You can take these case by case and decide for yourself whether each > one is acceptable or not by your own standards. But I don't think it's > going to be possible to come up with a set of objective rules which will > decide whether any given assertion is allowed. > > Fundamentally, you are asking to make it illegal for a key to request > encryption to an additional recipient. That's what it comes down to. > You want to forbid this class of assertions. Yes. I was getting carried away. It would be too complex, most likely. The thrust of your argument seems to be that there would be little use making pgp 5.5 non-GAK compliant, because PolicyMaker style statements will be so flexible that they will be GAK compliant anyway. So, when are PGP starting work on PolicyMaker? Is it intended to introduce this functionality in this first round standardisation? It seems to me that adding PolicyMaker functionality could take some considerable time due to the huge complexity of the task. Also, just because GAK compliance will become possible if and when PolicyMaker style extensions are implemented, doesn't mean that PGP can expect popular support for actually going ahead and implementing GAK compliancy in pgp5.5; nor can it expect to gain popular support for the uncharacteristic big brotherish mentality displayed by those working at PGP in implementing the SMTP policy enforcer behind closed doors to enforce other people to modify their behaviour to honour third parties GAK or CAK requests. I think the whole thing is a huge PR fluff up. I'm suprised that those at PGP were all able to agree to do it without arguments being expressed by employees, and without those arguments leaking out of the company (given the picture Jon Callas painted of strong privacy and freedom biases at PGP). If there had been open discussion of the product's design prior to development, this feed back could have been obtained earlier. I presume the PGP PR person (who ought to get the sack in my opinion) thought that a sudden press release of such marvelous new feature as PGP snoopware and a snoopware enforcer for third parties would go down well. It doesn't. The enforcer is rudely enforcing the companise opinions on people who have no connection with the companies snoopware policies. You should keep such matters within the company by using escrowed storage keys to acheive snoopware. For these reasons I still argue that we should: - add storage keys to the standard It's more secure to do this. That should be argument enough in itself. It also is much cleaner separating key functionality out into separate keys where those keys have vastly different recovery, life time, and security requirements. - use storage key escrow to implement PGP snoopware instead of burdening the OpenPGP standard with the stigma of GAK compliancy This method ties in with the use of storage keys. It is nearly as effective a snoopware design. It also isn't GAK compliant. It also doesn't result in cypherpunks shouting at you. - don't use the special sub-packet type to flag GAK compliancy I think the above shows that the neither the standard, nor PGP Inc needs the GAK compliant sub-packet, so scrap it, and save the argument up for the much more defensible position of a generalised PolicyMaker style key usage restriction assertions - scrap the controversial SMTP snoopware policy enforcement app Use storage key escrow to implement PGP snoopware instead of burdening the OpenPGP standard with the stigma of GAK compliancy It's difficult to get standards which don't reflect big brotherish aims when the good reputation of PGP Inc and Phil Zimmermann is apparently behind it. Something weird is going on at PGP headquarters. PRZ is also silent. Are all the people at PGP Inc in accord in thinking that the snoopware policy enforcer is a really cool pro-privacy app? Some of the usually more vocal PGPers have remained silent throughout the entire episode. Also as Tim note's the lack of a Zimmermann Telegram (tm) getting suspiciously overdue. Is he dragging his feet of snoopware and GAK compliancy? Adam -- Now officially an EAR violation... Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

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new "communication key" semantics & PFS
by Adam Back 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Now that we're considering (within the IETF OpenPGP standardisation framework) the prospect of having a separate communications key, and storage key, there are some aspects of communications keys which are currently less than ideal because of their current misuse to also function as storage keys. This argues for a new functionality to be given to communication only keys. This is all tied up with the idea of Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS), which is basically the statement of the fact that communications keys are more sensitive than storage keys, because your attacker by definition has a copy of the encrypted communication. (You're sending over an open network where copying all traffic is a low cost exercise for a savvy system cracker, or spook, or industrial espionage). In contrast an attacker often will have to break into your premises to obtain the data protected by your storage keys. Another aditional vulnerability of communication keys is that the US government is very interested in obtaining copies of them via their "key escrow"/"key recovery"/GAK initiative. The strongest anti-GAK statement you can make is to use forward secrecy. I've raised this point before, but the meme doesn't seem to have penetrated yet. Hal Finney <hal(a)rain.org> wrote: > Adam mentioned the idea of forward secrecy in email communications. > I'm not sure how that would work technically, but it sounds like > an interesting possibility. It ties in quite well with what is in my view proper handling of communication keys. If we can break the tie with one key being used for both storage and communication, we can start to reflect in the protocol better security practice in the handling of communication keys. Forward secrecy is one way of looking at it. It doesn't have to be real interactive forward secrecy as you might get in an SSH session, or an SSL session, or some of the IPSEC standards, though these are other examples which could server as examples showing that forward secrecy is a good idea, for anyone who would like to argue against it. The basic principle is that you want to have communication keys which don't live for a long time. So one form of weak forward secrecy you could have would be to mark your El Gamal or RSA communications for much more frequent update, by giving it a short expiry date. Say once per week. Some people currently do this manually anyway. For example see Dave Wagner's web page (www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/) where he describes what he does with keys. (He has a long term signature only key which he uses to sign short lived "communication only" keys which he discards after expiry). What I am arguing for essentially is building this kind of improved communication key handling into the OpenPGP spec for keys marked as "communication only". In addition I think it would be nice to enable a new kind of communications key which is based on discrete log so that people who choose to use PGP protocols for more interactive email transfer protocols than SMTP can generate keys very quickly. I was originally thinking that this would have to be DH, but perhaps you can simulate DH PFS with El Gamal by securely wiping the private parameters of expired communications keys, and keeping the public modulus and g value. (This has similarities with the quick method in PGP5.x of generating El Gamal keys with precomputed shipped primes that you already have). The advantage being that you may be trying to generate keys frequently, so you may not want to wait for a full new 4096 bit El Gamal or 2048 bit RSA key generation, when you are not anticipating the sudden delay in sending messages. I was originally thinking it would be done by having a new DH key type (in addition to RSA, El Gamal, DSA). (Incidentally Hal, you may recognise in this the reason for some of my annoyance that PGP Inc is mislabelling El Gamal as "DH" -- with my earlier ideas on this proposal there would have been a _real_ DH. It also gets around objections to do with not being able to decide what DH keys are (as they are negotiated not randomly generated directly) which Hal raised as a reason why PFS (at least with DH) would disallow functionality where key capabilities are included in the public communications key encrypted packet, the last time this was discussed. Clearly you could work around this restriction if you had to -- just include the information in an extra packet encrypted with the contained key and some symmetric algoirthm for example, though this may limit algorithm choice at least for that packet). You can use PFS in an asynchronous "where possible" mode for non-interactive email transport situations. That is you would perhaps send new communications keys parameters with each message that defines in it's key sub-packet preferrences that it is capable of using communications only keys, and will be able to handle "recipients comms key as part of message". This might make sense where comms keys are being updated too quickly to burden a key server with, or where comms keys are not public (an aditional use for Hal's described no-export flag for signatures, but here applied to communications keys), but are specific to that communicating pair. (For paranoid people who are changing comms keys on each receipt, you would need to do this). As soon as one party has replied to a mail from the other, you can switch to forward secrecy. This would lead to emails such as "hi, can you reply to this message please". These are kind of similar to the "hi can you send me your public key" you get back from people when you haven't included your public key in your mail to them, and they don't have access to a keyserver. You can also then use this new "communications only" key setup to cope with fully interactive email delivery for systems using email transports other than standard SMTP. You should probably overlap sending communications keys if you aren't relying on keyservers due to frequency of key update, or for convenience for people without access to keyservers, so that the person sending you email is less likely to have no current communications key for you if you are using keys sent in the message. So towards the end of the month (if you had a policy of using communications only keys with monthly updates) replacing keys monthly start sending the next months communications key also, marked as not for use until it's starting date. (The use of very transient communications keys I think would imply a need for two communications keys: you'll need a long term communications key which is used for initial non-PFS mail in order to set up PFS.) With the separation of storage and communications keys all the architecture has much better security decisions: - We are able to treat communications with variable amounts of sensitivity, by giving different key expiry time periods to comms only keys. - We are also able to secure and escrow our long term data storage in mail box folders, or PGP encrypted files without having to live with a GAKware compliant implementation of snoopware. We can storage escrow keys appropriately without all the name calling and bad PR caused by enraged crypto anarchists, and crypto consultants. You _know_ it makes sense :-) Adam -- Now officially an EAR violation... Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

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