July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[IP] EFF: Court Protects Email from Secret Government Searches
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release For Immediate Release: Monday, June 18, 2007 Contact: Kevin Bankston Staff Attorney Electronic Frontier Foundation bankston(a)eff.org +1 415 436-9333 x126 Court Protects Email from Secret Government Searches Landmark Ruling Gives Email Same Constitutional Protections as Phone Calls San Francisco - The government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers, according to a landmark ruling Monday in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their telephone calls -- the first circuit court ever to make that finding. Over the last 20 years, the government has routinely used the federal Stored Communications Act (SCA) to secretly obtain stored email from email service providers without a warrant. But today's ruling -- closely following the reasoning in an amicus brief filed the by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other civil liberties groups -- found that the SCA violates the Fourth Amendment. "Email users expect that their Hotmail and Gmail inboxes are just as private as their postal mail and their telephone calls," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "The government tried to get around this common-sense conclusion, but the Constitution applies online as well as offline, as the court correctly found. That means that the government can't secretly seize your emails without a warrant." Warshak v. United States was brought in the Southern District of Ohio federal court by Steven Warshak to stop the government's repeated secret searches and seizures of his stored email using the SCA. The district court ruled that the government cannot use the SCA to obtain stored email without a warrant or prior notice to the email account holder, but the government appealed that ruling to the 6th Circuit. EFF served as an amicus in the case, joined by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy & Technology. Law professors Susan Freiwald and Patricia Bellia also submitted an amicus brief, and the case was successfully argued at the 6th Circuit by Warshak's counsel Martin Weinberg. For the full ruling in Warshak v. United States: http://eff.org/legal/cases/warshak_v_usa/ 6th_circuit_decision_upholding_injunction.pdf For EFF's resources on the case, including its amicus brief: http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/warshak_v_usa/ For this release: http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_06.php#005321 About EFF The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to support free expression and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most linked-to websites in the world at http://www.eff.org/ -end- _______________________________________________ presslist mailing list https://falcon.eff.org/mailman/listinfo/presslist ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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End of ROCKate soon
by Benjamin Schieder 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hi people. In response to a law that passed the german legislative today, I will cease production, development and distribution of ROCKate binaries and - maybe - even source code soon. The reasen is '202c StGB which states (IANAL translation): "Producing, acquiring, selling, giving, distributing or making-accessible of passwords or other access codes as well as computer programs whose aim it is to commi a crime ... will be punished with up to one year in jail or a fine." See also: http://www.phenoelit.de/202/202.html Basically, these waters are too hot for me to tread in. Though the official reading of the wall - reading from politicians that is - says that they only target 'criminals' and there is no need to worry with the wording, nobody knows when some underworked lawyer thinks he might go on to sue the ass off of everyone in IT. If someone wants to mirror/host/develop ROCKate further, be my guest. If you need technical assistance, I can offer guidance, but I probably won't write a single line of code anymore. Sorry. Greetings, Benjamin -- The Nethack IdleRPG! Idle to your favorite Nethack messages! http://pallas.crash-override.net/nethackidle/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[cryptography] Gregory Perry's follow-up to the FBI OpenBSD / OCF backdoors thread (was: Fwd: [gsc] Fwd: OpenBSD IPSEC backdoor(s))
by Alfonso De Gregorio 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Back in December 2010, we discussed the OpenBSD IPSec backdoor allegations. Two days ago, Cryptome.org published the Gregory Perry's follow-up to the this story. FBI OpenBSD Backdoors and RSA Cipher Vulnerability http://cryptome.org/2012/01/0032.htm Cheers, -- alfonso blogs at http://Plaintext.crypto.lo.gy tweets @secYOUre _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [ExI] battle tanks to a five yr old
by ddraig 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hi weird synchronicity, I started reading this book yesterday: http://www.amazon.com/New-Model-Army-Adam-Roberts/dp/0575083638/ref=sr_1_1?… "A giant has brought war to the fields and towns of England's heartland. When the British army brings in air support and deploys heavy weapons he simply melts away, only to form again somewhere else and deliver another devastating blow. He is called Pantegrel, and he is a New Model Armyba giant whose thoughts flow through countless wireless connections, whose intelligence comes from the internet and real-time camera updates, whose mind is made up of thousands of minds, each deciding what he will choose to do. He has chosen the joy of the fight, and his fury is truly democraticbhe is me and you. This is a terrifying vision of a near future war as new technologies allow the world's first truly democratic army to wrest control from the powers that be. Taking advances in modern communication and the new eagerness for power from the bottom upwards, Adam Roberts has produced at once an exciting war novel and a philosophical examination of war and democracy. It shows an exciting and innovative literary voices working at the height of his powers and investing SF with the literary significance that is its due." Dwayne -- B ddraig(a)pobox.com irc.bluesphereweb.com #dna B B B B B ...r.e.t.u.r.n....t.o....t.h.e....s.o.u.r.c.e... B B B B http://tinyurl.com/he-is-right-you-know-jpg our aim is wakefulness,B our enemy is dreamless sleep _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat(a)lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [IP] more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push
by Jon Callas 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Brian Randell said: > >Just because the government *claims* it can't break a given >code ... :-) > I realize that there was a smiley face at the end of this, and I might be showing humorlessness about this, but this concerns my profession in general, and my software in particular. Consequently, I have no choice but to comment on this remark. Modern cryptographic systems are essentially unbreakable, particularly if an adversary is restricted to intercepts. We have argued for, designed, and built systems with 128 bits of security precisely because they are essentially unbreakable. It is very easy to underestimate the power of exponentials. 2^128 is a very big number. Burt Kaliski first came up with this characterization, and if he had a nickel for every time I tell it, he could buy a latte or three. Imagine a computer that is the size of a grain of sand that can test keys against some encrypted data. Also imagine that it can test a key in the amount of time it takes light to cross it. Then consider a cluster of these computers, so many that if you covered the earth with them, they would cover the whole planet to the height of 1 meter. The cluster of computers would crack a 128-bit key on average in 1,000 years. If you want to brute-force a key, it literally takes a planet-ful of computers. And of course, there are always 256-bit keys, if you worry about the possibility that government has a spare planet that they want to devote to key-cracking. Now of course, there are other ways to break the system. They could know something we don't. They could know some fundamental truth about mathematics (like how to factor really fast), some effective form of symmetric cryptanalysis, or something else. They could know about quantum computers, DNA computers, systems based upon non-Einsteinian physics, and so on. Yes, it's possible. But this quickly gets into true paranoid thought. There isn't a lot of difference between the *presumption* that they have such things and the presumption that they have aliens in a vault in Nevada. It isn't falsifiable. It gets irrational quickly. The evidence that we have about this suggests quite the opposite, but more on that later. They could have something we don't. For example, they could know about software flaws in my or other people's computer systems. Yes, that's possible, too. At PGP Corporation, we guard against this by making our software available to people for their examination. Approximately 2,000 people per month do that. If you want to be one of them, go to <http://www.pgp.com/downloads/> and look at it yourself. While you're at it, take a look at our quality assurance letter at <http://www.pgp.com/company/pgpassurance.html>. They could be hacking people's systems. This is a much more reasonable worry. If I were going to be doing this, it's what I would do. The state of computer operational security is such that it makes much more sense to invest time, money, and effort into rootkits than into cryptanalysis. However, there are things that we know that they *are* doing. One of them is relevant to this particular case. That is work on cracking the passphrases that people use to protect their keys. The cryptography we're using is itself uncrackable, but about 2/3 of the people in the world use a password (not even a passphrase) that directly relates to a pet or loved one. The order of frequency seems to be pets (living or dead), then children, then ex-loves. We know that at least one government has a password cracker that is based upon building a psychometric model of person who owns the key and constructing passphrases on that model. If you're a Hollywood private eye and they seize your computer and find on it that you're a basketball fan from your browser cache, then "Lak3rz 4 Teh w1n!" is actually a very bad passphrase. Don't blame me when they find it in about two minutes. It isn't just government that does this, either. Companies such as Access Data and Elcomsoft have distributed password crackers. These things aren't hacking the crypto, they're hacking the mind using the crypto. My old friend and colleague, Drew Gross, who is a forensics expert, has said, "I love crypto; it tells me what part of the system not to bother attacking." The last bit of evidence we have that suggests that they can't break the crypto is that they are apparently devoting a lot of effort to traffic analysis. Look at what we've learned in the last few months. Listening for keywords is so twentieth century. They're looking at call patterns, message flow, and so on. I could go on about this for a long time, but it's a tangent from this. If you're interested in more, I am going to be leading a panel at Defcon this August on traffic analysis. Come liven up the discussion. Jon -- Jon Callas CTO, CSO PGP Corporation Tel: +1 (650) 319-9016 3460 West Bayshore Fax: +1 (650) 319-9001 Palo Alto, CA 94303 PGP: ed15 5bdf cd41 adfc 00f3 USA 28b6 52bf 5a46 bc98 e63d ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[IP] on crypto systems from CTO PGP
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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Re: [IP] more on FBI plans new Net-tapping push
by Jon Callas 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Brian Randell said: > >Just because the government *claims* it can't break a given >code ... :-) > I realize that there was a smiley face at the end of this, and I might be showing humorlessness about this, but this concerns my profession in general, and my software in particular. Consequently, I have no choice but to comment on this remark. Modern cryptographic systems are essentially unbreakable, particularly if an adversary is restricted to intercepts. We have argued for, designed, and built systems with 128 bits of security precisely because they are essentially unbreakable. It is very easy to underestimate the power of exponentials. 2^128 is a very big number. Burt Kaliski first came up with this characterization, and if he had a nickel for every time I tell it, he could buy a latte or three. Imagine a computer that is the size of a grain of sand that can test keys against some encrypted data. Also imagine that it can test a key in the amount of time it takes light to cross it. Then consider a cluster of these computers, so many that if you covered the earth with them, they would cover the whole planet to the height of 1 meter. The cluster of computers would crack a 128-bit key on average in 1,000 years. If you want to brute-force a key, it literally takes a planet-ful of computers. And of course, there are always 256-bit keys, if you worry about the possibility that government has a spare planet that they want to devote to key-cracking. Now of course, there are other ways to break the system. They could know something we don't. They could know some fundamental truth about mathematics (like how to factor really fast), some effective form of symmetric cryptanalysis, or something else. They could know about quantum computers, DNA computers, systems based upon non-Einsteinian physics, and so on. Yes, it's possible. But this quickly gets into true paranoid thought. There isn't a lot of difference between the *presumption* that they have such things and the presumption that they have aliens in a vault in Nevada. It isn't falsifiable. It gets irrational quickly. The evidence that we have about this suggests quite the opposite, but more on that later. They could have something we don't. For example, they could know about software flaws in my or other people's computer systems. Yes, that's possible, too. At PGP Corporation, we guard against this by making our software available to people for their examination. Approximately 2,000 people per month do that. If you want to be one of them, go to <http://www.pgp.com/downloads/> and look at it yourself. While you're at it, take a look at our quality assurance letter at <http://www.pgp.com/company/pgpassurance.html>. They could be hacking people's systems. This is a much more reasonable worry. If I were going to be doing this, it's what I would do. The state of computer operational security is such that it makes much more sense to invest time, money, and effort into rootkits than into cryptanalysis. However, there are things that we know that they *are* doing. One of them is relevant to this particular case. That is work on cracking the passphrases that people use to protect their keys. The cryptography we're using is itself uncrackable, but about 2/3 of the people in the world use a password (not even a passphrase) that directly relates to a pet or loved one. The order of frequency seems to be pets (living or dead), then children, then ex-loves. We know that at least one government has a password cracker that is based upon building a psychometric model of person who owns the key and constructing passphrases on that model. If you're a Hollywood private eye and they seize your computer and find on it that you're a basketball fan from your browser cache, then "Lak3rz 4 Teh w1n!" is actually a very bad passphrase. Don't blame me when they find it in about two minutes. It isn't just government that does this, either. Companies such as Access Data and Elcomsoft have distributed password crackers. These things aren't hacking the crypto, they're hacking the mind using the crypto. My old friend and colleague, Drew Gross, who is a forensics expert, has said, "I love crypto; it tells me what part of the system not to bother attacking." The last bit of evidence we have that suggests that they can't break the crypto is that they are apparently devoting a lot of effort to traffic analysis. Look at what we've learned in the last few months. Listening for keywords is so twentieth century. They're looking at call patterns, message flow, and so on. I could go on about this for a long time, but it's a tangent from this. If you're interested in more, I am going to be leading a panel at Defcon this August on traffic analysis. Come liven up the discussion. Jon -- Jon Callas CTO, CSO PGP Corporation Tel: +1 (650) 319-9016 3460 West Bayshore Fax: +1 (650) 319-9001 Palo Alto, CA 94303 PGP: ed15 5bdf cd41 adfc 00f3 USA 28b6 52bf 5a46 bc98 e63d ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[IP] on crypto systems from CTO PGP
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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MD5 collisions in one minute
by Weger, B.M.M. de 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hi all, You might be interested in knowing that my MSc student Marc Stevens has found a considerable speedup of MD5 collision generation. His improvements of Wang's method enables one to make MD5 collisions typically in one minute on a PC; sometimes it takes a few minutes, and sometimes only a few seconds. His paper (shortly to appear on the Cryptology ePrint Archive) can be found on http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/, where we've also made his software available (source code and a Win32 executable). Grtz, Benne de Weger --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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Re: [tor-talk] Automatic vulnerability scanning of Tor Network?
by andrew＠torproject.org 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 04:50:57AM +0000, case(a)SDF.ORG wrote 1.4K bytes in 38 lines about: : Either way your name is not attached to it, and your home address, : etc., isn't either. It's trivial for law enforcement to make the one hop from your company to you and then to your house. Stupid criminals use a front company all the time. While this may provide some legal protection after you're raided and talking to a lawyer, you still get the swat team if your local police are prone to overreaction. : The list may not appreciate my criticism, but the reality is we get : about one post every six months from someone who literally has their : door kicked in and their property stolen by the state. So what? Just because there are overzealous police forces doesn't mean running a Tor relay isn't legal and not your right to use the banwidth for which you pay monthly. The vast majority of people will never experience the exception to the rule; the SWAT team at 5 AM. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/five-years-exit-node-operator is my experience. This is still the case four years later. One raided relay out of 3000 relays every six months is a fantastic ratio. I wish it were zero, but running Tor is not illegal, nor is relaying traffic for others. The vast majority of Tor traffic is benign, normal traffic from people who need Tor. I'm going to trust the probability that says I'm very unlikely to get raided for a Tor exit node at home. We also have the start of a legal directory for relay operators, https://blog.torproject.org/blog/start-tor-legal-support-directory. At the worst, call me, I'll try to help. I've helped many over the past few years, some of them as the police were in the house asking questions. I'm not a lawyer, but I'll try to help you find one, if needed. -- Andrew http://tpo.is/contact pgp 0x74ED336B _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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