July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

Abuse resistant anonymous publishing
by George Danezis 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

Hi or-talk (and Ben), I am sorry to be jumping in the middle of the wikipedia-Tor debate, but Steven Murdoch just made me aware of it. A while back I had a short discussion with Roger about a possible way of mitigating abuse through anonymity systems like Tor on open publishing systems like wikipedia (and with additional precautions Indymedia). I have further discussed this with Ben Laurie at PET 2005. The basic idea is quite simple: anonymity allows users to avoid being associated with a persistent identifier that could be used to filter out abuse cheaply. It is in fact a Sybil attack, ie. one user can pretend to be multiple users. Note that this can also happen if one controls many nodes (through a bot net for example). The aim of our protocol is to be able to associate persistent identifiers, with posts that are controversial (through a process that is defined), to be used to filter abuse (note that these do not have to be an identity, but only be useful to filter abuse). We should also try to maintain the user's anonymity, and at least plausible deniability. My favorite approach in solving these problems is using and assuming the existence of social networks. In the case of Indymedia, I know they exist (people get teargassed together in the streets quite routinely -- this creates solid bonds), in the case of wikipedia it might be the case that they will have to be cultivated (through better flagging up who is the responsible editors for sections, who has been contributing so far to an article, and on-line chat forums where people can discuss). Thus I will assume that getting introduced in to someone that is involved in wikipedia is not hard, but getting introduced to all/many people as having different identities is hard! (gmail and orkut has proved that it is posible to have an invite only system with a small seed ending up being quite inclusive). As a result we can have a graph that describes who has been introduced by whom (lets call it the wikipedia introduction graph, or just intro graph). Furthermore this graph has a couple of 'roots' ie the people who are 'in-charge' of wikipedia, or multiple roots (by section for example -- if we chose the people that magame sections of the site). Example path from Root to User Charlie to be used in examples...: Root -> Alice -> Bob -> Charlie The protocol has three phases: 1) Introduction -- someone that is already in the intro graph 'introduces' a new user into the graph. They do this because they know the user or have chatted to him... From a technical point of view this provides the new user with the necessary (anonymous?) credentials to post to/modify the site. 2) Each action of the user is 'authenticated' using the credentials, and a 'signature' is generated. This signature provides any third parties with the Root that the user is attached. 3) Responsibility allocation: If the action is deemed abusive by the Root (or a collective mechanism like voting / veto / ...), then the Responsibility allocation mechanism is started by the Root. This means that step by step the path lining the user Charlie to the Root is walked (starting at the Root, then Alice, then Bob then Charlie) until someone 'takes responsibility for the post. This process can depend on Alice and Bob (ie it must not be possible to trace without their consent) but if they do not collaborate in the tracing they accept to take responsibility. The article is tagged with the full traced path from the Root to the principal that has taken responsibility. Mini-FAQ: Why is this helping at all against abuse? Assuming that it is hard to get multiple connections to the intro graph, persistent offenders can be identified, either by their own username or the username of the person who consistently introduces them. This is incentives compatible: you do not want to introduce people that may abuse the system otherwise abusive messages will be tagged with (and possible filtered on the bases of) your name! The chain from the Root to the user assuming responsibility for the article can them be used (very much like IPs or user names today) to implement filtering policies. Furthermore these policies can be specified by the users and do not need to be centralized and applied by the server. What about anonymity? No real IDs ever need to be traced! The design does not require step 1 to provide a real name at all, and in any case the design can ensure (through the use of crypto-fu?) that authentication only reveals the first hop (ie Alice). Others need to collaborate to ask further down the chain for someone to take responsibility. In any case the final user is no certain as we will see... Wait a sec, a bad user can connect other abusive users easily!? Yes as soon as an abuse user connects to the intro graph they can introduce as many of their friends as they like! This is the reason why filtering policies need to make use of the full path from the Root to the user that ultimately takes responsibility: a user that consistently introduces many other abusers will always be on the path, and can be used to filter stuff out! As a side effect of this one cannot (and should not) trust that the user that finally took responsibility is indeed the initiator of the abusive action. They could be a Sybil or another person up the chain that disagrees with the fact that this action constitutes abuse! Why are you calling it 'taking responsibility' instead of tracing? The point of the protocol is for someone to say 'I stand by this action' -- his path to the root can then be used for filtering such action out, by users that do consider it as abuse. Note that there is always contention in online communities about what constitutes abuse and this mechanism allows for differing opinions. Then there can be different policies filtering out different users in the chain. Possibly anyone (not just people on the Path between Root and Charlie) should be able to take responsibility and have the item tagged with their path. What about abusing the anti-abuse system? There is a risk that trolls will abuse the action of requesting tracing/taking responsibility for all actions, trying to get as much information as possible/wasting time/undermining confidence in the system. The conditions under which this mechanism is initiated is really not clear, (Root decides, voting, veto, ...). In any case it is a good idea for someone to take responsibility of the initiation of this process by tagging the request with their path to the Root. This way Root, Alice and Bob can filter out persistent abusers of the anti-abuse system :-). There is no contradiction there: anonymous political speech is a right (hence this complex system), but moderation (censorship?) has to be done transparently, and those doing it must come forward by tagging their action with their path to Root. It seems that Root has a lot of power in all this (== your system embodies fascist values!)? Yes, this is a problem. At the same time there is nothing stopping (aside from efficiency and the appropriate crypto-fu) full decentralization. Each person can be their own Root, and apply custom filtering according to the paths relative to them. Note that taking responsibility cannot be abused any more than before (since either you connect directly to the abuser, at which point you should know better, or you are still connected through nodes that will not consider your action abusive and will take responsibility for it!). Ok, so how do we do all this magic? It is clear that a trusted third party can do all this efficiently. Can we find a variant of certificate systems that allow delegation in an anonymous way to decentralize all this, and make sure that no one party can screw any other? Open research problem -- I am working on it! Any feedback is welcome! George ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 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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Echelon papers leaked
by Peter Gutmann 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

In 1996, New Zealander Nicky Hager wrote a book "Secret Power" containing a great deal of information on Echelon, with a particular NZ perspective. A few days ago, papers held by the Prime Minister of the time were accidentally released and appeared in the Sunday Star Times. Some quotes from the story at http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/sundaystartimes/0,2106,3540743a6005,00.html: The top-secret intelligence report found among David Lange's papers shows New Zealand had been spying on friendly countries throughout the region. Targets included Japanese and Philippines diplomatic cables and the government communications of Fiji, the Solomons, Tonga and "international organisations operating in the Pacific". The Government Communications Security Bureau's 1985/86 annual report also reveals that one of New Zealand's main targets was "UN diplomatic" cables, but which agencies of the United Nations were targeted is not stated. [...] "A total of 171 reports were published, covering the Solomons, Fiji, Tonga and international organisations operating in the Pacific. The raw traffic for this reporting provided by NSA the US National Security Agency)." The GCSB also produced 238 intelligence reports on Japanese diplomatic cables, using "raw traffic from GCHQ/NSA sources". This was down from the previous year: "The Japanese government implementation of a new high grade cypher system seriously reduced the bureau's output." For French government communications, the GCSB "relied heavily on (British) GCHQ acquisition and forwarding of French Pacific satellite intercept". [...] Each page of the 31-page report that mentioned eavesdropping operations was headed "TOP SECRET UMBRA HANDLE VIA COMINT CHANNELS ONLY". COMINT stands for "communications intelligence". There's also a second story at http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/sundaystartimes/0,2106,3540733a6005,00.html covering US pressure on NZ over its anti-nuclear policy. Peter. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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[silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
by Gautam John 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

Do stories such as this affect your thinking or actual living/working/studying in the US? ___________________ IN a recent morning interview in a Midtown Manhattan office Ramak Fazel came across as the quintessential world citizen: tall, slim and elegant, his English tinged with an untraceable accent and peppered here and there with an Italian phrase. He also exuded the weariness of a frequent flier, having arrived the afternoon before at Newark Liberty Airport, where he was delayed for nearly three hours while United States Customs and Border Protection agents questioned him about the purpose of his trip, searched his baggage and photocopied the pages of his personal agenda. That routine is something that Mr. Fazel, a 42-year-old freelance photographer who lives in Milan, Italy, has come to know well, and he takes pains to come across as favorably as possible. For starters, he makes sure his face is always immaculately cleanshaven. "I have become the poster boy for Gillette," he said, somewhat ruefully. Shaving was one of the last things on Mr. Fazel's mind when, on Aug. 7, 2006, he set out on a photographic and philatelic odyssey from his mother's home in Fort Wayne, Ind. His mission was to photograph each of the nation's 50 state capitol buildings and dispatch a postcard from each city, using postage stamps from a childhood collection. Each postcard would be mailed to the next state on his journey, where he would pick it up, continuing until he had gone full circle back to Indiana. But there was a problem. On a flight from Sacramento, Calif., to Honolulu, Mr. Fazel described his project to a fellow passenger. He later discovered that she had reported him as suspicious b perhaps to the pilot or the Transportation Security Administration b and taken a picture of him as he slept. Maybe it was because he was vaguely foreign looking, he reasoned, and his photographic endeavor seemed menacing in a post-9/11 landscape. He also had a three-day growth of beard, he recalled. And, although Mr. Fazel grew up mostly in the United States and is an American citizen, there was his Iranian name. In his view that woman's report began a chain reaction, turning him into a person of interest for officials from local law enforcement agencies on up to the F.B.I. On a stop in Annapolis, Md., for example, he was interrogated about his activities and read his Miranda rights. Today, he said, his name lingers on what he thinks of simply as the "the list." (He doesn't know where it originated or who controls it.) He believes it has prevented him from receiving a visa to India and caused him be questioned at the border of Poland, both of which he had visited in the past. He said he has been interrogated the last four times he has entered the United States. That sense of stigmatization b and the pursuit of life, liberty and art b is a steady undercurrent in "49 State Capitols," an exhibition of postcards, photographs and ephemera from Mr. Fazel's 2006 trip that is to open on Wednesday at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo. (He ran out of money before he made it to Alaska.) "I wanted to learn about America," Mr. Fazel said. "Visiting the capitols b I don't want to say it's a dream, but we're led as children to believe that it's kind of an obligation, that you need to see up close the country you call home. "I may live abroad, but my sense of being an American, of loving my country, has never changed." Mr. Fazel, who moved to Italy in 1994, conceived of the trip in 2006 while visiting his mother in Fort Wayne, where she called his attention to his stamp collection in the attic. "Do something with these,' " he remembered her saying. He went to a collector who offered him less than he believed his stamps were worth. "I thought, what a shame to just sell these for $1,000," Mr. Fazel said. "I felt they needed to be released from that static state, needed to be released for their original purpose to be postage." What specifically inspired his trip was a page of stamps of the flags of the 50 states, in the order of their admission to the union, issued for the nation's bicentennial in 1976. That was the year he began collecting, shortly after moving to Fort Wayne, where the Fazels were the only Iranian family. Mr. Fazel was born in Iran but moved to the United States when he was 2 months old. His father, who was then working on his doctorate in psychology, and his mother, who eventually became a potter, settled in Logan, Utah, and then in Fort Wayne. In 1970 the family briefly moved back to Iran, where his father taught in a satellite campus of Harvard Business School in Tehran; in 1976 they returned to Fort Wayne. Mr. Fazel, feeling something of an outsider in a community divided into white and black, athletically gifted and not, turned to stamp collecting at his father's urging. "Through stamps I had the chance to learn about America and American culture," he said. He collected enthusiastically, using money he earned from mowing lawns and shoveling snow. But with a driver's license came adult freedom, and Mr. Fazel tucked his collection away. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering at Purdue University, then went to New York to study graphic design and photography. In 1994 he moved to Milan b "to enrich myself, invest in myself," he said b and to overcome a sense of his cultural limitations. He feels that he succeeded, he said, yet he never stopped pondering what it meant for him to be American. So in the spring of 2006, stamps in hand, he began to plot his road trip, researching the shortest distances from state capital to state capital and the locations of post offices and Y.M.C.A.'s (where he could shower and swim). He spent $1,500 on a used Chevy van in which he would live and another $2,000 to refurbish it. At night he would often seek out Wal-Mart parking lots, where security was tight, to park his van and sleep. In each capital Mr. Fazel would research the state's history in a library and then design a 10-by-14-inch postcard on white stock, adorned with mosaics he concocted from stamps related to the state. The postcard he sent from Florida to Georgia honors space flight; the one from Hawaii to Arizona pays tribute to Pearl Harbor. The postcard sent from New York to Pennsylvania bears 11-cent stamps from 1965 that Mr. Fazel arranged in the shape of the twin towers b one toppling over, the other being pierced by a commercial aviation stamp b and with fire truck and ambulance stamps and a commemorative stamp of St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan. Mr. Fazel drove 17,345 miles in 78 days, mailing a postcard from each city and picking it up in the next one, with the speed of the mail dictating the pace of his trip. "It was such a nice surprise to discover how reliable the postal system was," he said, adding that some of the cards arrived within 12 hours. But in Jackson, Miss., his journey took its bizarre twist. One night, as he sat in his van, a beam of light pierced his reverie. He heard his name over a loudspeaker and a command to step out of the vehicle with his hands held high. Suddenly, Mr. Fazel said, he was forced to the ground, face to the concrete, and handcuffed by a city police officer. His vehicle was searched, and when the officers determined that nothing was amiss, Mr. Fazel was ordered to leave the parking lot and continue down the road. He said the officers told him that they had received a report that he was aiming an automatic weapon at passing traffic. Lee D. Vance, assistant chief of the Jackson city police, said he could not confirm the incident because it had not resulted in an arrest and because Mr. Fazel has not filed a complaint. As Mr. Fazel continued his travels, he slowly began to perceive that he was on some kind of watch list. In Atlanta he was prohibited from entering the Capitol, he said, even as others did. In Columbia, S.C., he was questioned on the grounds of the Capitol by a police officer who mentioned that he knew Mr. Fazel lived in Italy. On the morning of Oct. 3, he entered the Maryland Capitol in Annapolis, where he presented identification and signed his name on a visitors' sheet. A guard asked him to wait. Suddenly, Mr. Fazel said, he was handcuffed and rushed through corridors into a police station, where a man he later learned was a member of the Maryland Joint Terrorism Task Force with the F.B.I. started speaking to him in Farsi. As Mr. Fazel related it, the experience went as follows: "I'm American," Mr. Fazel said. "I speak English." Another officer asked, "Where are you really from?" Mr. Fazel produced his Indiana driver's license. "I can tell by looking at you that you're not from Fort Wayne," the officer replied. After a four-hour encounter in which he was asked about a recent trip to Iran for an Italian design magazine and about who was financing his trip to state capitols, he was released without being charged. But he was also warned by an F.B.I. official that he was now in the system and would have troubles if he continued his trip. Richard Wolf, a media coordinator with the F.B.I. in Baltimore, said he had no knowledge of the incident. He added, "We don't normally respond or comment on any sort of leads we've conducted with the Joint Terrorism Task Force." Asked whether Mr. Fazel was on the government's terrorist watch list, Bill Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman in Washington, said that as a matter of policy, "we can't verify whether an individual is on a watch list or not." After the incident in Maryland Mr. Fazel called Brett R. Fleitz, a lawyer in Indianapolis and a childhood friend. Mr. Fleitz said he immediately sought to reassure him. "I implored him to continue because he was very, very doubtful about the prospects for going on and the dangers that might lie ahead," Mr. Fleitz said. "I said, 'Dude, you're an American.' And Ramak said, 'No, I'm a naturalized American.' And I said: 'It doesn't matter. There aren't two tiers of citizenship here. You have nothing to hide.' " He advised Mr. Fazel to greet law enforcement officers cheerfully and "lay it all out," as well as to ask for and photocopy the business cards of the authorities he encountered. Mr. Fazel forged toward the last half of his destinations with his camera, a 1964 Rolleiflex. Despite being questioned at or denied entrance to the remaining capitols, he got every one of his pictures: sometimes an image of gilded rotundas or historic murals, other times pictures of the everyday, the mundane. He photographed visitors in House chambers; a funeral procession for Ann Richards, a onetime Texas governor; a portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, in the waiting room of the California governor's office. And as the mood of his trip changed from joy to disquiet, he photographed police officers at one capitol, and, at another, a "caution" tape blocking an entrance. In Albany, Mr. Fazel was asked to wait at the entrance of the Capitol until investigators talked with him. One gave him a big slap on the back, Mr. Fazel recalled, and said, "I know everything about you, and I know you've been getting a lot of attention." Thomas M. Peters, a senior investigator with the New York State Police, confirmed that Mr. Fazel's journey from capitol to capitol had raised suspicion. "We were notified in advance that he was making his way up the East Coast from his stops at other capitols, where he was challenged by law enforcement agents," he said. "They indicated that at some times he seemed agitated and seemed to be giving evasive answers to their questions, but we don't know for sure because we were basically getting this information thirdhand." Mr. Peters added: "He was fine with us. And if he was agitated, it was probably because he got tired of being questioned." Looking back on his travels, Mr. Fazel said: "Notwithstanding the intense scrutiny, the trip was a positive experience. I'm neither rancorous, nor do I feel offended." Still, he said, he would like to see his name removed from "the list," or whatever it is that caused him to be repeatedly stopped and questioned. The journey ultimately left him wondering what it means to be American b and, more fundamentally, who he really was. "What I thought would be an exercise in self-betterment turned out to be something a little bigger," he said dryly. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/arts/design/20shat.html?_r=1%26sq=photogr… ----- 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: [tor-talk] Anonymous Publishing Is Dead.
by antispam06＠sent.at 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

On Sun, Jul 1, 2012, at 14:20, Edward Thompson wrote: > 2. Email. I signed up for mailoo.org through Tor, I believe. But for all > practical purposes, you could easily get a disposable e-mail address > through a Firefox plugin called Bloody Vikings. Otherwise, pretty much > any web mail will do... just war drive and sign up through the first > open wi-fi connection you find ;) Hmm... I already do something like that. And I tell you that most free providers are a pain to work with. And that includes all the major players. They are all going to punish you with a long annoying reidentification which will prove zero security just because you change location. And they do have the time and computing power just to try to locate you any other possible way as their business model is tightly integrated with tracking and selling private data. Disposable email is good for accessing some resource once. Otherwise is a pain in the rear. > 3. Bitcoins. Yes, block chains are not that anonymous, especially > considering the difficulty of buying them legitimately in the first > place. How about a coin mixing service like www.bitcoinfog.com? Their > methodology is very interesting, and it seems like you'd be able to > 'launder' ordinary coins, bought legitimately through an exchange... > There are a few other sites like this one: > http://vzpzbfwsrvhfuzop.onion.to I spent some time reading about bitcoin. It's a miracle discovery. It's a proof about non conventional methods being able to compete with the conventional financial transaction type. But I fail to see the anonimity side of things. It's so nice. It's sooo geeky. It employs silly terms to scare the layman like mining. Or worse, it has terms with a clear equivalent in conventional finance like wallet. My grandma knows she can watch over her wallet and things would be all right. And if someone forces her she can go to the police station and declare the theft. Till version 0.6 there was no protection from theft with BC. Crap concept with junk application from the point of view of annonimity. Each time some conspiracy theorist starts making sense I remind myself that people (programmers are people, aren't they?) are above all stupid followed closely by lazy. Just take a look at the way FF is developed: in the era of Facebook developers are doing their best to shed MORE data instead of patching up the holes. By holes I don't mean Secunia security holes, but privacy holes. > 4. Do you really need your own dedicated VPS?! And only in developed > Western countries? Have you checked out this list of BTC-friendly > servers: Actually any service should be checked for its origin or place of doing business. Always remember the case of Hide My Ass which proved to be full of Holes if you allow such a gross joke. They weren't keeping logs till pressured. Than they said everybody is obliged under law to keep logs. And to prove the indolence of their users: they are still in business, trapping flies for the government. On the other hand, servers hosted outside the reach of certain totalitarian governments are blocked on the crime of spam or copyright infringement. If these were anything but hassle (see the problems with the free webmail above) yahoo and google would have offered email only between their users. > Anyway, my point is that there are ways to acquire BTC, randomised > enough not to be a concern, after which you can buy all the hosting (and > related) services your heart desires. And if your threat model > encompasses an organisation with vast resources, like the NSA for > example, consider that they haven't yet managed to track down the guys > running the Silk Road drug site (http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion) ;) Usually this kind of trafic is tolerated because they want to catch a bigger fish. Sometimes services like that are set up by the investigating authorities. And some other times they set it up independently just for the sake of compensating the budget restrictions (those drones are mighty expensive, mind you). Cheers _______________________________________________ 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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Abuse resistant anonymous publishing
by George Danezis 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

Hi or-talk (and Ben), I am sorry to be jumping in the middle of the wikipedia-Tor debate, but Steven Murdoch just made me aware of it. A while back I had a short discussion with Roger about a possible way of mitigating abuse through anonymity systems like Tor on open publishing systems like wikipedia (and with additional precautions Indymedia). I have further discussed this with Ben Laurie at PET 2005. The basic idea is quite simple: anonymity allows users to avoid being associated with a persistent identifier that could be used to filter out abuse cheaply. It is in fact a Sybil attack, ie. one user can pretend to be multiple users. Note that this can also happen if one controls many nodes (through a bot net for example). The aim of our protocol is to be able to associate persistent identifiers, with posts that are controversial (through a process that is defined), to be used to filter abuse (note that these do not have to be an identity, but only be useful to filter abuse). We should also try to maintain the user's anonymity, and at least plausible deniability. My favorite approach in solving these problems is using and assuming the existence of social networks. In the case of Indymedia, I know they exist (people get teargassed together in the streets quite routinely -- this creates solid bonds), in the case of wikipedia it might be the case that they will have to be cultivated (through better flagging up who is the responsible editors for sections, who has been contributing so far to an article, and on-line chat forums where people can discuss). Thus I will assume that getting introduced in to someone that is involved in wikipedia is not hard, but getting introduced to all/many people as having different identities is hard! (gmail and orkut has proved that it is posible to have an invite only system with a small seed ending up being quite inclusive). As a result we can have a graph that describes who has been introduced by whom (lets call it the wikipedia introduction graph, or just intro graph). Furthermore this graph has a couple of 'roots' ie the people who are 'in-charge' of wikipedia, or multiple roots (by section for example -- if we chose the people that magame sections of the site). Example path from Root to User Charlie to be used in examples...: Root -> Alice -> Bob -> Charlie The protocol has three phases: 1) Introduction -- someone that is already in the intro graph 'introduces' a new user into the graph. They do this because they know the user or have chatted to him... From a technical point of view this provides the new user with the necessary (anonymous?) credentials to post to/modify the site. 2) Each action of the user is 'authenticated' using the credentials, and a 'signature' is generated. This signature provides any third parties with the Root that the user is attached. 3) Responsibility allocation: If the action is deemed abusive by the Root (or a collective mechanism like voting / veto / ...), then the Responsibility allocation mechanism is started by the Root. This means that step by step the path lining the user Charlie to the Root is walked (starting at the Root, then Alice, then Bob then Charlie) until someone 'takes responsibility for the post. This process can depend on Alice and Bob (ie it must not be possible to trace without their consent) but if they do not collaborate in the tracing they accept to take responsibility. The article is tagged with the full traced path from the Root to the principal that has taken responsibility. Mini-FAQ: Why is this helping at all against abuse? Assuming that it is hard to get multiple connections to the intro graph, persistent offenders can be identified, either by their own username or the username of the person who consistently introduces them. This is incentives compatible: you do not want to introduce people that may abuse the system otherwise abusive messages will be tagged with (and possible filtered on the bases of) your name! The chain from the Root to the user assuming responsibility for the article can them be used (very much like IPs or user names today) to implement filtering policies. Furthermore these policies can be specified by the users and do not need to be centralized and applied by the server. What about anonymity? No real IDs ever need to be traced! The design does not require step 1 to provide a real name at all, and in any case the design can ensure (through the use of crypto-fu?) that authentication only reveals the first hop (ie Alice). Others need to collaborate to ask further down the chain for someone to take responsibility. In any case the final user is no certain as we will see... Wait a sec, a bad user can connect other abusive users easily!? Yes as soon as an abuse user connects to the intro graph they can introduce as many of their friends as they like! This is the reason why filtering policies need to make use of the full path from the Root to the user that ultimately takes responsibility: a user that consistently introduces many other abusers will always be on the path, and can be used to filter stuff out! As a side effect of this one cannot (and should not) trust that the user that finally took responsibility is indeed the initiator of the abusive action. They could be a Sybil or another person up the chain that disagrees with the fact that this action constitutes abuse! Why are you calling it 'taking responsibility' instead of tracing? The point of the protocol is for someone to say 'I stand by this action' -- his path to the root can then be used for filtering such action out, by users that do consider it as abuse. Note that there is always contention in online communities about what constitutes abuse and this mechanism allows for differing opinions. Then there can be different policies filtering out different users in the chain. Possibly anyone (not just people on the Path between Root and Charlie) should be able to take responsibility and have the item tagged with their path. What about abusing the anti-abuse system? There is a risk that trolls will abuse the action of requesting tracing/taking responsibility for all actions, trying to get as much information as possible/wasting time/undermining confidence in the system. The conditions under which this mechanism is initiated is really not clear, (Root decides, voting, veto, ...). In any case it is a good idea for someone to take responsibility of the initiation of this process by tagging the request with their path to the Root. This way Root, Alice and Bob can filter out persistent abusers of the anti-abuse system :-). There is no contradiction there: anonymous political speech is a right (hence this complex system), but moderation (censorship?) has to be done transparently, and those doing it must come forward by tagging their action with their path to Root. It seems that Root has a lot of power in all this (== your system embodies fascist values!)? Yes, this is a problem. At the same time there is nothing stopping (aside from efficiency and the appropriate crypto-fu) full decentralization. Each person can be their own Root, and apply custom filtering according to the paths relative to them. Note that taking responsibility cannot be abused any more than before (since either you connect directly to the abuser, at which point you should know better, or you are still connected through nodes that will not consider your action abusive and will take responsibility for it!). Ok, so how do we do all this magic? It is clear that a trusted third party can do all this efficiently. Can we find a variant of certificate systems that allow delegation in an anonymous way to decentralize all this, and make sure that no one party can screw any other? Open research problem -- I am working on it! Any feedback is welcome! George ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 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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Echelon papers leaked
by Peter Gutmann 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

In 1996, New Zealander Nicky Hager wrote a book "Secret Power" containing a great deal of information on Echelon, with a particular NZ perspective. A few days ago, papers held by the Prime Minister of the time were accidentally released and appeared in the Sunday Star Times. Some quotes from the story at http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/sundaystartimes/0,2106,3540743a6005,00.html: The top-secret intelligence report found among David Lange's papers shows New Zealand had been spying on friendly countries throughout the region. Targets included Japanese and Philippines diplomatic cables and the government communications of Fiji, the Solomons, Tonga and "international organisations operating in the Pacific". The Government Communications Security Bureau's 1985/86 annual report also reveals that one of New Zealand's main targets was "UN diplomatic" cables, but which agencies of the United Nations were targeted is not stated. [...] "A total of 171 reports were published, covering the Solomons, Fiji, Tonga and international organisations operating in the Pacific. The raw traffic for this reporting provided by NSA the US National Security Agency)." The GCSB also produced 238 intelligence reports on Japanese diplomatic cables, using "raw traffic from GCHQ/NSA sources". This was down from the previous year: "The Japanese government implementation of a new high grade cypher system seriously reduced the bureau's output." For French government communications, the GCSB "relied heavily on (British) GCHQ acquisition and forwarding of French Pacific satellite intercept". [...] Each page of the 31-page report that mentioned eavesdropping operations was headed "TOP SECRET UMBRA HANDLE VIA COMINT CHANNELS ONLY". COMINT stands for "communications intelligence". There's also a second story at http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/sundaystartimes/0,2106,3540733a6005,00.html covering US pressure on NZ over its anti-nuclear policy. Peter. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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] Anonymous Publishing Is Dead.
by antispam06＠sent.at 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

On Sun, Jul 1, 2012, at 14:20, Edward Thompson wrote: > 2. Email. I signed up for mailoo.org through Tor, I believe. But for all > practical purposes, you could easily get a disposable e-mail address > through a Firefox plugin called Bloody Vikings. Otherwise, pretty much > any web mail will do... just war drive and sign up through the first > open wi-fi connection you find ;) Hmm... I already do something like that. And I tell you that most free providers are a pain to work with. And that includes all the major players. They are all going to punish you with a long annoying reidentification which will prove zero security just because you change location. And they do have the time and computing power just to try to locate you any other possible way as their business model is tightly integrated with tracking and selling private data. Disposable email is good for accessing some resource once. Otherwise is a pain in the rear. > 3. Bitcoins. Yes, block chains are not that anonymous, especially > considering the difficulty of buying them legitimately in the first > place. How about a coin mixing service like www.bitcoinfog.com? Their > methodology is very interesting, and it seems like you'd be able to > 'launder' ordinary coins, bought legitimately through an exchange... > There are a few other sites like this one: > http://vzpzbfwsrvhfuzop.onion.to I spent some time reading about bitcoin. It's a miracle discovery. It's a proof about non conventional methods being able to compete with the conventional financial transaction type. But I fail to see the anonimity side of things. It's so nice. It's sooo geeky. It employs silly terms to scare the layman like mining. Or worse, it has terms with a clear equivalent in conventional finance like wallet. My grandma knows she can watch over her wallet and things would be all right. And if someone forces her she can go to the police station and declare the theft. Till version 0.6 there was no protection from theft with BC. Crap concept with junk application from the point of view of annonimity. Each time some conspiracy theorist starts making sense I remind myself that people (programmers are people, aren't they?) are above all stupid followed closely by lazy. Just take a look at the way FF is developed: in the era of Facebook developers are doing their best to shed MORE data instead of patching up the holes. By holes I don't mean Secunia security holes, but privacy holes. > 4. Do you really need your own dedicated VPS?! And only in developed > Western countries? Have you checked out this list of BTC-friendly > servers: Actually any service should be checked for its origin or place of doing business. Always remember the case of Hide My Ass which proved to be full of Holes if you allow such a gross joke. They weren't keeping logs till pressured. Than they said everybody is obliged under law to keep logs. And to prove the indolence of their users: they are still in business, trapping flies for the government. On the other hand, servers hosted outside the reach of certain totalitarian governments are blocked on the crime of spam or copyright infringement. If these were anything but hassle (see the problems with the free webmail above) yahoo and google would have offered email only between their users. > Anyway, my point is that there are ways to acquire BTC, randomised > enough not to be a concern, after which you can buy all the hosting (and > related) services your heart desires. And if your threat model > encompasses an organisation with vast resources, like the NSA for > example, consider that they haven't yet managed to track down the guys > running the Silk Road drug site (http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion) ;) Usually this kind of trafic is tolerated because they want to catch a bigger fish. Sometimes services like that are set up by the investigating authorities. And some other times they set it up independently just for the sake of compensating the budget restrictions (those drones are mighty expensive, mind you). Cheers _______________________________________________ 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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Re: Publicizing Hidden Services
by Roger Dingledine 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 11:17:56PM -0400, phobos(a)rootme.org wrote: > On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 10:37:54PM -0300, mlthorne(a)gmail.com wrote 2.3K bytes in 57 lines about: > : It would probably work (publishing of hidden services I mean) if it was a > : voluntary thing. Like having a central place for people to leave a link and > : general desc. would be nice... > > http://4ha7nlx3shi5gcty.onion/ And the more canonical one is http://6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion/tor/ which is linked from http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-hidden-service.html but could also be helpfully linked from overview.html and documentation.html (which was why this thread started). I've just linked them more loudly from both of these places. Let me know if you think that helps. I couldn't actually access the one phobos provided. Which leads to the more important point -- we need to work on speed and reliability of hidden services before we try to make them more popular. That's on the todo list, but it's pretty far down the list at this point, at least until somebody with funding decides that this is important to them. --Roger ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 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: Publicizing Hidden Services
by Roger Dingledine 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 11:17:56PM -0400, phobos(a)rootme.org wrote: > On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 10:37:54PM -0300, mlthorne(a)gmail.com wrote 2.3K bytes in 57 lines about: > : It would probably work (publishing of hidden services I mean) if it was a > : voluntary thing. Like having a central place for people to leave a link and > : general desc. would be nice... > > http://4ha7nlx3shi5gcty.onion/ And the more canonical one is http://6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion/tor/ which is linked from http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-hidden-service.html but could also be helpfully linked from overview.html and documentation.html (which was why this thread started). I've just linked them more loudly from both of these places. Let me know if you think that helps. I couldn't actually access the one phobos provided. Which leads to the more important point -- we need to work on speed and reliability of hidden services before we try to make them more popular. That's on the todo list, but it's pretty far down the list at this point, at least until somebody with funding decides that this is important to them. --Roger ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 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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[hackerspaces] Byzantium Linux v0.3a is out!
by The Doctor 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 http://project-byzantium.org/announcing-the-release-of-v0-3a-codename-beach… ANNOUNCING BYZANTIUM LINUX V0.3a (Beach Cat) Approved for: GENERAL RELEASE, DISTRIBUTION UNLIMITED NOTE: This is Byzantium Linux for x86-compatible laptops and desktops. This release is not compatible with the Raspberry Pi. We just started work on that port. Project Byzantium, a working group of HacDC (http://hacdc.org/) is proud to announce the release of v0.3 alpha of Byzantium Linux, a live distribution of Linux which makes it fast and easy to construct an ad-hoc wireless mesh network which can augment or replace the current telecommunications infrastructure in the event that it is knocked offline (for example, due to a natural disaster) or rendered untrustworthy (through widespread surveillance or disconnection by hostile entities). Byzantium Linux is designed to run on any x86 computer with at least one 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless interface. Byzantium can be burned to a CD- or DVD-ROM (the .iso image is around 372 megabytes in size), booted from an external hard drive, or can even be installed in parallel with an existing operating system without risk to the user's data and software. Byzantium Linux will act as a node of the mesh and will automatically connect to other mesh nodes and act as an access point for wifi-enabled mobile devices. This release is unique because it is based upon the work we did in New York City in the weeks following Hurricane Sandy in late 2012. We were asked by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) to help restore the telecommunications network in the neighborhood of Red Hook, and the design requirements were dictated by the needs of the community as described by leaders and elders. v0.3a constitutes a formalization of those requirements rather than the ad-hoc build we deployed in Red Hook. THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE! Do NOT expect Byzantium to be perfect. Some features are not ready yet, others need work. Things are going to break in weird ways and we need to know what those ways are so we can fix them. Please, for the love of LOLcats, do not deploy Byzantium in situations where lives are at stake. FEATURES: - - Binary compatible with Slackware-CURRENT. Existing Slackware packages can be converted with a single command. - - Automatically configures itself on boot. There is no longer a need for a control panel. - - Can act as a gateway to the Internet if a link is available (via Ethernet or tethered smartphone). - - Linux kernel v3.4.4 - - Drivers for dozens of wireless chipsets - - KDE Trinity r14.0.0 (Development) - - LXDE (2011 release of all components) - - Mplayer v4.5.1 - - GCC v4.5.2 - - Perl v5.14 - - Python v2.7.3 - - Firefox v13.0.1 - - X.org SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (to use) - - Minimum of 1GB of RAM (512MB without copy2ram boot option) - - i586 CPU or better - - CD- or DVD-ROM drive - - BIOS must boot removable media - - At least one (1) 802.11 a/b/g/n interface SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (for persistent changes) - - The above requirements to use Byzantium - - 2+GB of free space on thumbdrive or harddrive WHAT WE NEED: - - Developers. - - Developers! - - DEVELOPERS! - - No more Bill Ballmer impersonations. - - People running Byzantium to find bugs. - - People reporting bugs on our Github page (https://github.com/Byzantium/Byzantium/issues) We can't fix what we don't know about! - - Patches. - - People booting Byzantium and setting up small meshes (2-5 clients) to tell us how well it works for you with your hardware. We have a hardware compatibility list on our wiki that needs to be expanded. - - Help translating the user interface. We especially need people fluent in dialects of Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu. - - Help us write and translate documentation. Homepage: http://project-byzantium.org/ Download sites: http://project-byzantium.org/download/ This announcement is published under a Creative Commons By Attribution / Noncommercial / Share Alike v3.0 License. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) - -- The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS] Developer, Project Byzantium: http://project-byzantium.org/ PGP: 0x807B17C1 / 7960 1CDC 85C9 0B63 8D9F DD89 3BD8 FF2B 807B 17C1 WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ The future belongs to the brave. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with undefined - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlFTEP0ACgkQO9j/K4B7F8Fs4ACdH0Uk9NjQvzMaV+fvuLxDwRwY bLcAoMSVALO+m12AyK4Zz0SOddn++Ibt =XdgM -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss(a)lists.hackerspaces.org http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ----- 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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