April 2004 - cypherpunks-legacy

[>Htech] The Courier-Mail: China launches web 'big brother' (fwd from checker@panix.com)
by Eugen Leitl 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

----- Forwarded message from Premise Checker <checker(a)panix.com> -----

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Mask secures personal displays
by R. A. Hettinga 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

Sounds like something out of a Gibson novel... Cheers, RAH ------- <http://optics.org/articles/news/10/4/20/1> optics.org - News - Mask secures personal displays 26 April 2004 A mask that decodes encrypted pixels ensures that sensitive information can be viewed securely. When you view secure information on a screen, there is always the risk that someone is peering over your shoulder and taking notes. To remove this worry, scientists in Japan have been experimenting with a technique known as visual cryptography. The team believes this approach could ensure the security of information displayed on PDAs, computer screens or bank terminals. (Optics Express 12 1258) Secure display In a visual cryptography system, the image containing the sensitive information is encrypted and appears as a random pattern. The only way to view the information is to place a decoding mask over the encrypted image. Hirotsugu Yamamoto and colleagues from the University of Tokushima have developed a decoding mask that has two functions: to decrypt the display and limit the viewing zone of the decrypted image. Key to the technique is an algorithm that generates the pixels in both the encrypted image and the mask. The team's paper describes its algorithm to encrypt images containing 8 colours. To test their algorithm, the researchers printed the mask out on an overhead transparency and placed it in front of an LCD showing an encrypted image. Secret images were only perceived when the viewer stood in front of the LCD. "The viewing zone covers about 10 cm to the right and 10 cm to the left of the center at the designated viewing distance of 1.5 m," Yamamoto explained. Improving both the security of the decoding mask and the image quality are now Yamamoto's priorities. "In the next version, I'm making the mask pattern on a plastic plate," he told OLE. "The mask pattern has some layers and prevents someone from copying it. The number of encrypted colours has also been increased to 216 and 343." The team is also working on a decoding goggle similar to the glasses that cinema audiences have to wear to see movies in 3D. Yamamoto is also optimistic that this technique will find commercial applications. "Display of secret information on PDA and computer screens are practical applications," he explained. "Other business applications include: securing the screen of a terminal at a bank; an operator screen that shows personal information; and a touch panel screen of a safe." This work was funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; the Mazda Foundation; and the Secom Science and Technology Foundation. Author Jacqueline Hewett is technology editor on Optics.org and Opto & Laser Europe magazine. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.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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The Oppenheimer Riddle: New evidence of Communist membership debated by scholars of Berkeley scientist
by R. A. Hettinga 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

Gee. I'm crushed. Alger Hiss *was* a Spy. The Rosenbergs *were* spies. Oppenheimer *was* a Communist. Gosh. Who'da thunk it? ;-) Cheers, RAH --------- <http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/23/MN…> THE OPPENHEIMER RIDDLE New evidence of Communist membership debated by scholars of Berkeley scientist Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, April 23, 2004 A UC professor says he's solved one of the darkest mysteries in U.S. history: Was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant Berkeley scientist known as "the father of the atomic bomb," a secret member of the Communist Party? Recently uncovered documents show that Oppenheimer belonged to a hidden Communist Party cell of professionals in Berkeley, according to UC Merced history Professor Gregg Herken. Charges of Communist associations led to Oppenheimer's downfall during the McCarthyist hysteria of the early 1950s, and he became, in the words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, "the victim of a witch hunt." In 1954, he was stripped of his security clearance and his position as a high-level U.S. government adviser. Many colleagues leapt to his defense, saying he was ostracized because of his post-World War II advocacy of arms control and opposition to the hydrogen bomb. Historians ever since have clashed over Oppenheimer's puzzling links to the party. Herken's findings will face public scrutiny today when a critical mass of Oppenheimer scholars convenes at UC Berkeley. The campus is celebrating the centennial of Oppenheimer's birth with special exhibits and a two-day conference today and Saturday. "The evidence is pretty compelling," Herken said of two unpublished memoirs that recently came to light -- one by a Berkeley professor and one by the wife of a close associate of Oppenheimer's. The two documents offer details about a small group of professionals that met regularly, sometimes at Oppenheimer's home, in the far-left milieu of 1930s Berkeley. One manuscript calls it "a secret unit of the Communist Party" with six to eight members. The other says that the three UC faculty members of the group, including Oppenheimer, all saw themselves as Communist and produced a Communist newsletter. "Oppenheimer had always denied membership in the Communist Party," said Herken, who was a senior historian at the Smithsonian Institution before joining the new Merced faculty. "Now, it's pretty clear he wasn't telling the truth." Still, Herken stressed that he didn't believe that Oppenheimer, who guided the birth of the atomic bomb in the top-secret Manhattan Project, had betrayed his government. "While he was a Communist, he was also a patriot," said Herken, adding that he rejects FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's argument "that communism was synonymous with treason." Even with the new evidence, historians dispute Oppenheimer's relationship to the Communist Party. "We disagree with Herken," said Tufts University history Professor Martin Sherwin, co-author with historian Kai Bird of an upcoming Oppenheimer biography. It's true that Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, belonged to a loose-knit group of like-minded professionals who shared some Communist views and had links to Communist Party members, but not all members of such groups were party members, Sherwin said. Yale historian Daniel Kevles, who delivered a preconference lecture Thursday at Cal, said in an e-mail that he believed, "based on the available evidence, that Oppenheimer didn't think of it (the Berkeley group) as a secret unit of the CP and that he didn't think his participation in it constituted membership in the CP." But Stanford historian Barton Bernstein, another Oppenheimer expert who will join Herken, Sherwin and Bird to dissect the issue on a panel this afternoon, leans toward Herken's view. "On a jury, one could find the evidence not meeting a reasonable doubt," Bernstein said, "but in the court of historical opinion, it seems to me far more likely than not from the amalgam of evidence that Oppenheimer was a member, at least covert, for a few years." An unpublished manuscript by the late Professor Gordon Griffiths, who was a UC Berkeley grad student at the time, said Griffiths had been the Communist liaison to the group, bringing party literature to the twice-a-month meetings and collecting dues. "Nobody carried a party card," he wrote, but "all three (UC professors in the group) considered themselves to be Communists." He said he had not collected dues from Oppenheimer, having been "given to understand that Oppenheimer ... made his contribution through some special channel." "The most important activity of the faculty group," said Griffiths, who died in 2001, "was the publication of an occasional 'Report to Our Colleagues' " signed by unnamed Communist members of the faculty and "no doubt paid for by 'Oppie' (Oppenheimer)." "The time has come to set the record straight," Griffiths wrote in the manuscript, which Herken learned about in January after Griffiths' family turned it over to the Library of Congress. Griffiths stressed, however, that the key question was not whether Oppenheimer was a Communist "but whether such membership should, in itself, constitute an impediment to his service in a position of trust." In the other manuscript, the late Barbara Chevalier, wife of Oppenheimer friend Haakon Chevalier, wrote of the group, saying her husband and Oppenheimer "joined a secret unit of the Communist Party. There must have been only six or eight members." The new evidence buttresses Haakon Chevalier's description of the group included in Herken's 2002 book, "Brotherhood of the Bomb," about Oppenheimer and fellow A-bomb scientists Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller. "Oppenheimer would later characterize the group as an innocent and rather naive political coffee klatch," Herken wrote in his book, which cites Haakon Chevalier's characterization of the assemblage as "a 'closed unit' of the Communist Party." But Haakon Chevalier, before he died, gave a more ambiguous answer when Sherwin asked him whether he and Oppenheimer had been Communist Party members. "We both were and were not, anyway you want to look at it," Chevalier replied, according to Sherwin. Oppenheimer's grandson, Charles Oppenheimer of Reno, said he preferred to focus on what had happened to his grandfather in the 1950s rather than the Communist issue. During the Red Scare, Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., announced that he had lists of suspected Communists, including Oppenheimer. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated suspected Communists and blacklisted those who refused to cooperate. "Whether he was a member or not, it's not against the law to be a Communist," the grandson said at a preconference reception Thursday night. "I think it's insulting what happened in the '50s. I wish people would concentrate on that. He served his country in every way possible." Herken rejects the claim that Oppenheimer was a spy and Soviet agent, a charge levied in "Sacred Secrets," a 2002 book by the journalist-historian team of Jerrold and Leona Schecter that, according to Bernstein and Sherwin, is not highly regarded by most Oppenheimer scholars. "In a way, it's really like 'Rashomon,' " said Bird, referring to the famous Akira Kurosawa film on the elusiveness of truth based on conflicting accounts. Information about the conference and other Oppenheimer Centennial events at Berkeley can be found on the Web at http://ohst.berkeley.edu/oppenheimer/. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.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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[ISN] Hackers: Under the hood - Peiter Mudge Zatko
by R. A. Hettinga 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

--- begin forwarded text

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[ISN] Hackers: Under the hood - Peiter Mudge Zatko
by InfoSec News 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/security/0,39023764,39116620-6,00.htm Name: Peiter Mudge Zatko Handle(s): Mudge, PeiterZ Marital status: Single Current residence: New England, USA Job: Chief Scientist, Intrusic First computer: Tektronix 4051 Best known for: Creating L0phtCrack Area(s) of expertise: "Thinking outside of the box" It's hard to tell if Peiter Mudge Zatko was born eccentric or whether he's just a stickler for privacy. Take the response to ZDNet Australia's request for his age as an example: "[I'm] not trying to be coy, but my age, race, religion, etcetera, are always items I try not to divulge. The rationale is probably quite different than what most people infer. It is as follows: without irrelevant information such as skin colour and the aforementioned items, people are stripped of data that normally would encourage functional fixation." It seems Zatko's brain has been over-clocking from a very young age. "When I was growing up, around the age of five or so, I couldn't wrap my head around 'life'. "The notion of death being an accepted unknown without any further details drove me bonkers," he told ZDNet Australia. Some may argue that existentialist dilemmas such as these belong to adults, or at the very least in the adolescent domain. But Zatko was introduced to a myriad of advanced concepts at an extremely tender age. "In my crib, as an infant, my father sanded down the edges of early 60s-type computer components ... like the face plates of systems with glowing [amber] numeric 'vacuum tube style' readouts," he recalled. The way Zatko speaks of him suggests that his father was his mentor in life. "I asked my father what he believed in -- what his religious beliefs were. He refused to tell me. Instead, he started taking me to churches of different denominations each Sunday and would ask me what my interpretations were. "Several years later I came up with my own 'codified' religious beliefs," Zatko said. And he's fanatical about getting the job done. "Anything that I do, I must engross myself in totally," he said. To Zatko, there's no distinction between work and personal life, and readily admits that his life knows no balance. "There's also no difference between business and personal relationships. When I decided to get into Golden Gloves Boxing and Muay Thai [boxing] it was to master them. When I deal with computers it is to entirely comprehend the socio-psychological interactions and weaknesses they introduce," he revealed. His parents, while educated, came from fairly blue-collar backgrounds. He said his mother "experienced the depression" while his father grew up working on a farm. As a child, Zatko was given musical training, and was taught science and mathematics while maintaining a "respect for manual labour and living off the land". He still holds dear to his heart the values his parents instilled in him while growing up. "I was intentionally given freedom and a feeling of independence at a young age. In looking back the rationale was obvious: learn decision making and life choices while you are still able to be protected paternally," he explained. "I watched people self destruct at the tail-end of high school and in college -- where it was obvious that that was their first taste of freedom." In 2000, Zatko was invited to participate in a security summit chaired by former US President Bill Clinton. "I was afforded the rare opportunity to hang out with him afterwards and engage in some private conversations," he said. "I have tons of stories but they're too long." As one of the founding members of grey hat outfit L0pht Heavy Industries -- which later became the foundation for security firm @Stake -- he was responsible for the creation of L0phtCrack, a product still sold by @Stake. L0pht Crack is a simple product and a remarkably affective password cracker for Windows-based systems. Zatko insists he wrote it to prove a point and not for commercial reasons. "When I first created and wrote it, one of the goals was to show that the Microsoft systems being deployed could not embody 'secure' encrypted passwords ... not that there were some passwords that were stronger than others. "This didn't mean that people should not use Microsoft technology but rather they should understand where their security perimeters needed to be in order to take advantage of the [Microsoft] platform without exposing undue risk to infrastructures," he said. "Is something like L0phtCrack still useful? Yes. Is this an example of people misinterpreting what a tool is showing them and potentially having a false sense of security because of it? Unfortunately, the answer is again yes," he added. Zatko believes that example -- the misuse of a tool like L0phtCrack -- applies to many security products. He has some advice to help improve the situation, though: "Share, be open, communicate, ask questions to all, share the answers that help you with [everyone], do not think in black and white, do not hurt others or yourself. Improve the world, not your own self image -- the former is possible, and the latter is not accomplished without being a part of the former." -- Patrick Gray _________________________________________ ISN mailing list Sponsored by: OSVDB.org --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.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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[ISN] Hackers: Under the hood - Peiter Mudge Zatko
by InfoSec News 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/security/0,39023764,39116620-6,00.htm Name: Peiter Mudge Zatko Handle(s): Mudge, PeiterZ Marital status: Single Current residence: New England, USA Job: Chief Scientist, Intrusic First computer: Tektronix 4051 Best known for: Creating L0phtCrack Area(s) of expertise: "Thinking outside of the box" It's hard to tell if Peiter Mudge Zatko was born eccentric or whether he's just a stickler for privacy. Take the response to ZDNet Australia's request for his age as an example: "[I'm] not trying to be coy, but my age, race, religion, etcetera, are always items I try not to divulge. The rationale is probably quite different than what most people infer. It is as follows: without irrelevant information such as skin colour and the aforementioned items, people are stripped of data that normally would encourage functional fixation." It seems Zatko's brain has been over-clocking from a very young age. "When I was growing up, around the age of five or so, I couldn't wrap my head around 'life'. "The notion of death being an accepted unknown without any further details drove me bonkers," he told ZDNet Australia. Some may argue that existentialist dilemmas such as these belong to adults, or at the very least in the adolescent domain. But Zatko was introduced to a myriad of advanced concepts at an extremely tender age. "In my crib, as an infant, my father sanded down the edges of early 60s-type computer components ... like the face plates of systems with glowing [amber] numeric 'vacuum tube style' readouts," he recalled. The way Zatko speaks of him suggests that his father was his mentor in life. "I asked my father what he believed in -- what his religious beliefs were. He refused to tell me. Instead, he started taking me to churches of different denominations each Sunday and would ask me what my interpretations were. "Several years later I came up with my own 'codified' religious beliefs," Zatko said. And he's fanatical about getting the job done. "Anything that I do, I must engross myself in totally," he said. To Zatko, there's no distinction between work and personal life, and readily admits that his life knows no balance. "There's also no difference between business and personal relationships. When I decided to get into Golden Gloves Boxing and Muay Thai [boxing] it was to master them. When I deal with computers it is to entirely comprehend the socio-psychological interactions and weaknesses they introduce," he revealed. His parents, while educated, came from fairly blue-collar backgrounds. He said his mother "experienced the depression" while his father grew up working on a farm. As a child, Zatko was given musical training, and was taught science and mathematics while maintaining a "respect for manual labour and living off the land". He still holds dear to his heart the values his parents instilled in him while growing up. "I was intentionally given freedom and a feeling of independence at a young age. In looking back the rationale was obvious: learn decision making and life choices while you are still able to be protected paternally," he explained. "I watched people self destruct at the tail-end of high school and in college -- where it was obvious that that was their first taste of freedom." In 2000, Zatko was invited to participate in a security summit chaired by former US President Bill Clinton. "I was afforded the rare opportunity to hang out with him afterwards and engage in some private conversations," he said. "I have tons of stories but they're too long." As one of the founding members of grey hat outfit L0pht Heavy Industries -- which later became the foundation for security firm @Stake -- he was responsible for the creation of L0phtCrack, a product still sold by @Stake. L0pht Crack is a simple product and a remarkably affective password cracker for Windows-based systems. Zatko insists he wrote it to prove a point and not for commercial reasons. "When I first created and wrote it, one of the goals was to show that the Microsoft systems being deployed could not embody 'secure' encrypted passwords ... not that there were some passwords that were stronger than others. "This didn't mean that people should not use Microsoft technology but rather they should understand where their security perimeters needed to be in order to take advantage of the [Microsoft] platform without exposing undue risk to infrastructures," he said. "Is something like L0phtCrack still useful? Yes. Is this an example of people misinterpreting what a tool is showing them and potentially having a false sense of security because of it? Unfortunately, the answer is again yes," he added. Zatko believes that example -- the misuse of a tool like L0phtCrack -- applies to many security products. He has some advice to help improve the situation, though: "Share, be open, communicate, ask questions to all, share the answers that help you with [everyone], do not think in black and white, do not hurt others or yourself. Improve the world, not your own self image -- the former is possible, and the latter is not accomplished without being a part of the former." -- Patrick Gray _________________________________________ ISN mailing list Sponsored by: OSVDB.org --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.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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Re: Is there a Brands certificate reference implementation?
by An Metet 26 Apr '04

26 Apr '04

Steve Furlong writes: > Does anyone know of a reference implementation for Stefan Brands's > digital certificate scheme? Alternatively, does anyone have an email > address for Brands so I can ask him myself? (I haven't gotten anything > back from ZKS's "contact us" address. But I don't know if Brands is > still at ZKS.) I will give you some pointers, but in exchange, Steve Furlong, you are commanded to fix your cypherpunks archive at http://archives.abditum.com/cypherpunks/index.html. Despite your comments on the web page as of February 13, none of the year 2004 links work. You were already pointed to www.credentica.com, but it's not a very informative page, is it? Just a logo and a mailto. Well, there is at least some "hidden" content, at http://www.credentica.com/technology/technology.html. This has a paper on Brands' technology and some information on his book. In late 2002 I saw email from Brands with two return addresses, brands(a)credentica.com and sbrands(a)videotron.ca. As for implementations, there was library called NCash created by Swedish student Niels MC6ller, described briefly at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/hacks.html: "For my master of science thesis, I implemented an offline digital cash system invented by Stefan Brands. I haven't done anything about it since I got my MSc degree, but the information about it is still available." Well, the information isn't available, not there, anyway. But if you hunt around, you can find an announcement about NCash at http://www.privacy.nb.ca/cryptography/archives/coderpunks/new/1998-02/0008.… and the source code plus a technical paper are at http://munitions.vipul.net/dolphin.cgi?action=render&category=09. The good news is that the source code is available; the bad news is that it is written in Pike. No, I'd never heard of it, either. Apparently it is some Swedish language that was all the rage back in 1997. However it seems to be a pretty straightforward language, kind of Pythonish with a C like syntax, so it might be feasible to port it to something more modern, probably Python. Or you could get the latest Pike interpreter and see how well they've maintained backwards compatibility all these years. According to the announcement, you'll also need the Pike crypto library, but my guess is that it's been incorporated into the Pike package by this time. I'm sure you're aware that Brands credentials are patented up the wazoo. Like Chaum, Brands prefers to publish his work in the pages of the U.S. Patent Office. That's why they're both so rich.

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How to WASTE and want not
by R. A. Hettinga 25 Apr '04

25 Apr '04

<http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/04/25/8454965> Infoshop News - How to WASTE and want not posted by j1o2n3a4s5 on Sunday April 25 2004 @ 05:14PM PDT WASTE would have to be pretty close to what you'd come up with. WASTE provides a way for you to create secure ad hoc p2p mesh networks with little technical setup and iron clad communications via link level Blowfish encryption and authentication via RSA public key cryptography. It allows secure instant messaging, group chat, file sharing, browsing and transfer. Everything you need to get some substantive work done, not to mention students or corporate techies just needing to communicate without interference. From the software itself, "WASTE is a tool that is designed to permit secure distributed collaboration and communications for small trusted groups of users." And it's back - resurrected like Lazarus in January - even after the assembled might of AOL tried to shut it down. This is how it was: Jonathan Frankel, the coding wunderkind, grunge poster child and "Benevolent Dictator" of Nullsoft, acquired in 1999, was behind its wildly popular free music player WinAMP (because it "really whips the llama's ass"). For an encore, he came up with Gnutella the p2p network of choice for quite some time. AOL ordered him to kill of the project so he came up with something even better. In a flurry of coding as artistic self expression and self-respecting hacker protest, he came up with WASTE. He GPLed it, put it online, sat back - and watched the fur fly. WASTE was an instant hit. Downloaded, dissected and analyzed across the Internet, all reports were favourable. AOL was not, however, amused, claiming it its intellectual property rights were being infringed, shut down the site, chastised Frankel and posted an online page demanding that all code downloaded from the site should be destroyed because of IP violations. Frankel left AOL over the whole issue. You have to respect the guy. But they were too late. WASTE was out in the wild, as well as example clients for windows and limited servers for BSD and OSX. It was only a short amount of time until the project re-emerged, re-implemented on sourceforge. Already a Mac OSX version 1.0 has been ported and has been available for download since September of last year. WASTE 1.4 alpha 3 hit the air April 15th. New documentation was added soon after that and 1.4 is shaping up nicely with new features. Why call it WASTE Yet another nod to coolness. WASTE is taken from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 where WASTE is a renegade underground postal system operating in plain sight of the status quo undetected. The acronym itself is "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire." Even the horn on a stamp icon used in the application is a nod to the stamps used by WASTE in the Pynchon story. Defiant yells from the underground are all over the program, making you wonder whether software can't be reclassified as the new legitimate form of popular dissent. Even the port WASTE uses for communications is a slap in the face of a growing repressiveness in the corporate monoculture. Port 1337 is hacker do0D speak for "Leet" or elite. An awful lot of subtext for a piece of software. While the project hasn't produced a huge volume of code lately, the authors state "We have been experimenting with technologies to create a more feature rich program instead of releasing betas." Even now, the WASTE clients to date are eminently usable and are providing even non-technical users who understand the basic concepts a way to create secure mesh P2P networks. There's a clear wizard for key creation and a simple interface for connecting and interacting with the other members of your mesh. Version 1.4 promises even more features. If you're worried too much bandwidth might give away file trading activities you can even throttle down the bandwidth to make your traffic indistinguishable from normal encrypted network traffic. Students that have been beaten over the head by the RIAA and university administrators are now creating darknets - encrypted file sharing mesh network between themselves. Because the communications are secure, no one can tell what sort of files they're trading, or even if it is files they're trading even if they are RIAA or DMCA bloodhounds. But that's not where WASTE's true value lies. The real potential is for activist groups, not-for-profits and people who need privacy in a world becoming increasingly more hostile to their activities. Like Zimmerman's PGP before it, WASTE is another example of one of those empowering grassroots tools which provides a direct affirmation of personal freedoms, rights and the sanctity of individual privacy: a simple way for the technically unsophisticated to self-service ad hoc secure networks without a huge IT overhead and expensive hardware or software. Activists can collaborate online in a secure manner in real time without fear of eavesdropping. WASTE is a holy grail for a number of organizations working hard to trying and make things better for everyone. Make security transparent and easy to use, and everyone will be using it. In a modern atmosphere that' is growing increasingly hostile to individual privacy and tending towards the criminalization of legitimate dissent and protest, WASTE has the potential to be the next tool that levels the playing field for individuals and activists alike. Want to get started You can download the latest binaries for Windows and Mac OSX or take a look at the source from sourceforge. A great documentation guide - in case you have trouble with WASTE - is also available from hummus and pita. Source: http://p2pnet.net/story/1295 -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.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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Cracking secrets
by R. A. Hettinga 25 Apr '04

25 Apr '04

<http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=2004042600110200.h…> <snip...> Cracking secrets A WHOLE book of secrets is what S.C. Coutinho gives in The Mathematics of Ciphers, published by Universities Press (www.orientlongman.com) . "A leisurely journey, with many stops to appreciate the scenery and contemplate sites of historical interest", the author promises to reach the final destination - RSA system of cryptography. Since the work has grown out of lectures to first-year students of computer science, there is no presumption of mathematics knowledge. "Cryptography is the art of disguising a message so that only its legitimate recipient can understand it." That should explain why we don't understand many election speeches. Perhaps the `twin sister' of cryptography could help, cryptoanalysis: `the art of breaking a cipher'. The most widely used public key cryptosystems is RSA, invented in 1978 by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman. Put simply, "every user has a personal pair of primes that must be kept secret" though the product of these primes is made public. What's the big deal, you might ask; factor the product and you would get the two prime numbers, won't you? "However, if the primes have more than 100 digits each, the time and resources required to factor `n' are such that the system becomes very hard to break." This is the trapdoor of RSA - computing product is easy, not factoring. For this, the `exact computation' of computer comes handy. Greeks distinguished between logistics (the science that deals with numbered things, not numbers) and arithmetic (nature of numbers with the mind only). The book is full of stories that would make you like math and computing too. For instance, geometry originated in Egypt where the pharaoh distributed land to people in rectangular plots on which he levied an annual tax. "If the Nile swept away part of the plot, the surveyors had to be called in to calculate how much land had been lost." Because the owner would be eligible for a reduced tax, proportional to the land lost. To find primes from the ocean of numbers, you can use the `sieve of Erathostenes', named after a Greek mathematician born around 284 BC. He was nicknamed `Beta' because his contemporaries believed that he hadn't reached a truly eminent position. When you apply the sieve to a list of positive integers, composite numbers pass through but primes get retained. Good read for the vacation to sharpen your numbers. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.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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Is there a Brands certificate reference implementation?
by Steve Furlong 25 Apr '04

25 Apr '04

Does anyone know of a reference implementation for Stefan Brands's digital certificate scheme? Alternatively, does anyone have an email address for Brands so I can ask him myself? (I haven't gotten anything back from ZKS's "contact us" address. But I don't know if Brands is still at ZKS.)

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