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Re: Selection key crypto protocol trial balloon
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

wcs(a)anchor.ho.att.com writes: > > Um no. The main thing is that what is extracted with the selection key is > > _different_ from what was put in... > > But the only things the selectioon key can extract are what the senders > put in plus what the system did to it once it was there, which is not > informationally different than what the senders put there. True, just as ciphertext is not different, informationally, from plaintext. It's just a pair of transformations, both by the system, one in response to the sender and the other in response to the receiver. A bit like an airlock - if the two transformations are the right ones, extraneous information such as the identity should not pass through. > I suppose you could play some games by sending the message in > multiple parts, with parts sent by 1-way anonymous remailer, > but there's still a certain amount of traffic analysis you can do. > > Bill ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "In between the breaths is rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in the space where we live" rishab(a)arbornet.org - Lawrence Durrell Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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Re: Selection key crypto protocol trial balloon
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hal <hfinney(a)shell.portal.com>: > Let me get straight where we are. Rishab's concrete proposal was not an > implementation, but rather a set of requirements. There was no > suggestion about any specific algorithms that would meet those > requirements, right? The question is whether any such algorithm could > exist. Right. > It is hard for me to see how this could possibly work. The message > receiver sends this "selection key" to the intermediary, and that somehow > pulls out the saved message, but in a form such that the intermediary > doesn't recognize it. And the intermediary himself can't tell exactly > which message is produced. But it is nevertheless exactly the message > which was meant for this particular receiver. It need not be the same information - i.e. if the encryption process adds enough noise to the message, the extraction process might by lossy, without any total loss for the receiver. This may be possible particularly if Fourier-style transforms are used, as the "selection key" could pick up less "frequencies" of a message than are stored at the intermediary. > The thing is, the receiver does not have much more information than the > intermediary. The same could be said of a private/public key pair. What is crucial is the association between the keys. This said, while I can imagine separate systems for the intermediary loosing correlation between incoming and outgoing messages (eg - it's _really_ tough, without fancy pattern recognition, to associate a JPEG with the original), and for generating three associated keys (secret splitting? something to do with Brands' blind signatures?), I really can't imagine a way of putting it all together. Someone will have to be inspired, as Diffie was... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- For Electric Dreams subscriptions and back issues, send a mail to rishab(a)arbornet.org with 'get help' as the message Subject. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in rishab(a)arbornet.org Vox +91 11 6853410 Voxmail 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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stupid legislation in Oregon
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Ugh. This has been a stupid week. Oregon House bill 2319 was introduced by Rep. (Kevin?) Mannix on 1/16/95, and referred to the House committee on Commerce on 1/18/95. Rep. Mannix has also introduced another bill, HB 2310, which "Creates the crime of electronically furnishing obscene material to minors; punishes by maximum one year imprisonment, $10,000 fine, or both." HB 2310 was introduced 1/13/95, and referred to the House Judiciary committee on 1/16/95. He's introduced 38 bills so far this session - including others re mandatory minimum sentencing for felony convictions, one which appears to bar surrogate-pregnancy agreements, and another (HB2303) which prohibits physicians from performing artificial insemination on an unmarried woman. Damn this fucking state. I'll be on the phone with my representative in the morning to see if I can find out more. Westlaw's legislative tracking database doesn't have much information. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLzsecH3YhjZY3fMNAQH9DwP9GA1oai9JA2ftMSCLKH+jnfqxD/svI0ZD N1yWpHwStmoZ3x6fr9MRpqFIwAfsTzfj+P0B07HBy1V53pVhKw+bFyCZZ+/ZmA7u lAXR/eR6xr53ZMZJt2SSsFElE8VB8syjJRWe48a37q+3Ma9iGhvlfLx5IuX+qZR7 E9de+WMg/Pw= =rOtS -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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a draft petition against S.314
by slowdog 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[A draft petition, comment, but do it QUICKLY.] In united voice, we sign this petition against passage of S.314 ("The Communications Decency Act of 1995") for these reasons: S.314 would prohibit not only individual speech that is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent", but would prohibit any provider of telecommunications service from carrying such traffic, under threat of stiff penalty. Even aside from the implications for free speech, this would cause an undue - and quite possibly unjust - burden upon operators of various telecommunications services. In a time where the citizenry and their lawmakers alike are calling for and passing "no unfunded mandates" laws, it is unfortunate that Congress might seek to impose unfunded mandates upon businesses that provide the framework for the information age. The threat of such penalty alone might result in a chilling effect in the telecommunications service community, again creating an environment contrary to the principles of free speech, press, and assembly - principles which entities such as the internet embody as nothing has before. We ask that the Senate halt any further progress of this bill. We ask that the Senate be an example to Congress as a whole, and to the nation at large - to promote the general welfare as stated in the Preamble to the Constitution by protecting the free flow of information and ideas across all of our telecommunications services. - dog

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Re: MIME based remailing commands
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb(a)nsb.fv.com> writes: >Excerpts from junk.interesting: 7-Feb-95 Re: MIME based remailing co.. >"Perry E. Metzger"@imsi. (2553) >> > > It is being remailed via a MIME-based structure where two new content types >> > > are defined: multipart/remail and application/remail-commands. The >> > > multipart/remail type is supposed to be composed of two parts, the >> > > application/remail-commands part which has remailer commands, and the >> > > other part which is the "payload" to be remailed. >Perhaps you might consider writing up an informational RFC to define >these types? I think that would be very useful. -- Nathaniel Well, that was just an example; I was making those names up off the top of my head in order to concretize what I understood Perry was suggesting. I can see that putting remailer commands into a specific part of a MIME multipart message has some advantages. Right now we are basically having the remailing commands be mail header fields. But really people aren't supposed to just make up new fields like that. I think the "name space" of these fields is protected somewhat more than many other aspects of communication protocols on the net. Is there precedent for adding service-by-mail functionality in this way? I am not completely comfortable with it. And as we think of new functionality and new commands they all have to get added at this top level, the same visibility and name space as "Subject", "From", and "To". OTOH it does have the advantage that it is easy to do, at least with the "::" pasting token idea (which perhaps would need to be documented in its own right). If we did use a separate message part we'd have our own little name space to use, with no fears of conflicting with someone else. (Maybe "Latency" might be used in a future extension of RFC822 for some other meaning than what we are using it for.) I am not sure what has to be done to get an RFC approved but I suspect that adding mail header fields would be much more likely to hit opposition than adding yet another MIME type. What does Mixmaster use for its commands? Does it use "::" followed by Anon-Send-To: and such? Or some other format? Maybe it should be made MIME compliant from the beginning. This way we are moving with the current, the flow of the net, rather than across it. Hal

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PSI Gulps Pipeline
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarding mail by: gleick(a)pipeline.com (James Gleick) on Fri, 10 Feb 0:12 AM ------------------- Dear Pipeliners, I'm pleased to be able to tell you that the Pipeline has become part of a larger enterprise: Performance Systems International (PSINet), the nation's leading Internet access provider. That means two things immediately. First, PSINet has a state-of-the-art dialup network in many cities across the nation, and these will shortly be available to our users at a cost much less than our current out-of-town SprintNet surcharges. Second, PSINet plans to use our Internaut software as the basis for a national service--not to replace the New York-based Pipeline but to provide an alternative for out-of-towners who don't especially care about New York information and services. PSINet is a company a lot like ours--small (though not so small anymore), enthusiastic, fast-moving, and steeped in Internet history. The people there care about the Internet as an environment worth preserving even as it grows so explosively. And they admire what we've accomplished here at the Pipeline in forming a model online service. That's enough for now--there will be more information following along behind, but I wanted you to hear it here first. As for me--this isn't goodbye, exactly, but I have gotten a little behind on a book I was supposed to be writing . . . I am deeply grateful to all of you--staff and customers--for making the Pipeline what it is and for letting me get to know you a little bit. Jim -- James Gleick The Pipeline

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Fun with numbers: Payment Switches
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Saw this on buyinfo. At first blush it reminds me of the old CMU "Billing Server" without the gopher... >From: treese(a)OpenMarket.com >To: www-buyinfo(a)allegra.att.com >Subject: technical paper: Payment Switches for Open Networks >Date: Mon, 13 Feb 1995 13:24:48 -0500 >Original-From: Win Treese <treese(a)OpenMarket.com> > > >"Payment Switches for Open Networks" by David K. Gifford, Lawrence >C. Stewart, Andrew C. Payne, and G. Winfield Treese is a technical >paper describing Open Market's Internet payment switch. It will be >presented at IEEE COMPCON '95 (San Francisco, March 5-9). A preprint >is available from http://www.openmarket.com/about/technical/. > >Here is the abstract from the paper: > > We describe the first operational Internet payment switch that > provides real-time authorization suitable for direct use by merchant > servers. A payment switch is a server that creates digital > representations of conventional financial instruments, and forwards > authentic payment orders on these instruments to their corresponding > conventional financial networks and institutions. Our payment switch > provides support for time-based and item-based pricing, implements > switch based authorization and settlement aggregation for > micro-payments, and includes an extensive customer support system in > order to provide a high level of customer confidence in electronic > commerce. Fraud control is based on a transaction-specific > multi-level security model that accommodates existing Internet > browsers. Multiple authentication technologies are applied to every > transaction. > >More information about COMPCON '95 can be found at > http://www.hal.com:80/compcon/ > >Win Treese >Open Market, Inc. >treese(a)OpenMarket.com > ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923

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Does PGP scale well?
by A5113643667＠attpls.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Perry has repeated a litany here that I have been hearing for years on the pem-dev list with never a hint of a justification. That is that PGP does not scale well. One of the reasons that I consider this to be untrue is my empirical experience with two groups that are constantly interested in exactly who I am: the government and the credit bureaus. They both chose to use my SSN even though that has all the same attributes of a KeyID, except that it is somewhat denser. Now if this is what happens when the real world tries to identify me, why is the KeyID such a bad way to identify keys? Please note that I do understand that identifying me and finding me are separate issues. I'm not sure that the pem-dev folk clearly discriminate these. Peace. Tom

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Fwd: Re: West (just a minute)
by Alan Pugh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

the most reasonable and easiest to implement solution to eliminating the need for west's page number system is to just number each paragraph. anyone can do this. ----------------- Forwarded Message Date: Sat Feb 11, 1995 5:57 am EST Source-Date: Sat, 11 Feb 1995 05:49:47 -0500 (EST) From: Craig Hubley EMS: INTERNET / MCI ID: 376-5414 MBX: craig(a)passport.ca TO: * Alan Pugh / MCI ID: 370-1548 Subject: Re: West (just a minute) Message-Id: 81950211105718/0003765414DC2EM Source-Msg-Id: <m0rdFOe-0002IhC(a)forged.passport.ca> U-Mime-Version: 1.0 U-Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Hmm, how hard could it be to eliminate West page numbers? There couldn't be more than a couple of cases on each page, if each page number were replaced by links to each case, a lawyer could tell on the first glance which of the three was right and mark it, assuming a reasonable HTML/SGML editor or something. Seems like it could be done as a part of daily work and the results accreted somewhere. -- Craig Hubley Business that runs on knowledge Craig Hubley & Associates needs software that runs on the Web craig(a)passport.ca 416-778-6136 416-778-1965 FAX

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Laws, Feds, & the Internet
by Richard F. Dutcher 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The following was in today's San Francisco Chronicle. BTW, quoting the entire article as I have done is probably a violation of "fair use" - but de minimis ... All under *current* law, folks. [hmmm -- encryption doesn't do much for exhibitionists and braggarts, does it? ;-] ============================== MAN JAILED FOR INTERNET MESSAGES Associated Press Detroit A college student was charged yesterday with posting computer messages describing the imaginary binding, rape, torture and murder of a woman who used to be in his Japanese class. "Torture is foreplay, rape is romance, snuff (killing) is climax," prosecutors say one of Jake Baker's messages read. The student, 20, was charged with the federal crime of transmitting a threat to injure. He was jailed pending a bond hearing today. Baker, who was suspended from the University of Michigan last week, told reporters he was within his rights to post the messages on the Internet. By posting the messages, he gave other Internet users access to them. If convicted, Baker could be sentenced to up to five years in prison. The name of the woman was not released. ================================== =================================== Rich Dutcher, San Francisco Greens P.O. Box 77005, San Francisco, California 94107 USA "That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves." Kim Stanley Robinson, "Green Mars" Greens, of course, only enslave plants - so weed-whackers work better than cops ... ====================================

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