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NYT on $GIF
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Peter Lewis writes today on Compuserve and Unisys grub for royalties on GIF. Perry has noted its sty, java-eyely. For email copy send blank message with subject: GIF_nip

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Re: Are 2048-bit pgp keys really secure ?
by danisch＠ira.uka.de 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> A somewhat disturbing trend has appeared in the low-end cost-sensitive PC > SIMM market. Some supposedly 9-bit SIMMs are actually 8-bit SIMMs plus > a parity generator. This means that the parity checking is essentially > subverted, because the parity bit is generated from the stored contents > of memory at read time, rather than the stored contents when it was > written to. As such, NO bit errors are detected. So why not do a cheap trick: After the small primes check calculate a CRC checksum over the number. Then do the primality check. If it is a prime, store it together with the CRC. The CRC can be checked for every use of the number. (PGP encrypts the secret key and therefore it generates a CRC for the encrypted packet. But this CRC is generate after the primality check.) We already had some SIMM modules with bit errors. They were detected by a parity check. If cheap pc simms don't have a real parity bit, the probability of having such a bug isn't as low as 10^-40. If cheap parity-less simms are available they get sold (cheap and expensive). Hadmut BTW: Some weeks ago they found motherbords with falsified cache rams: They had just the normal DIL-ICs and the normal pins, but the plastic of the ICs didn't contain a chip. The BIOS was modified to give out a message about a good cache ram check at boot time.

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Re: Remailer Abuse
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Russ Nelson writes: > Heh. An anonymous remailer paid for by credit card... > Sure, I'll know who used it, but I'm not going to keep that > information. (Yes, yes, FV says that I have to keep records of who > bought what, but I'll label all my information with a random number, > that simply says that X bought information worth Y, not *what* > information.) And if you don't trust a remailer operator, then you > won't use it. I'd be worried about a couple of issues - one is just the transaction cost - can you successfully market remailer use at a buck a shot or whatever you'd be charging beyond FV's 29c stamp, or would you have some convenient way to aggregate bill? Beyond that, though, are some traffic analysis problems - remailers require a fair bit of traffic to be useful, and unless you receive a reasonable amount of encrypted traffic, and support encrypted email for purchasing remailer service and other merchandise, an eavesdropper would have a fairly good source of traffic data on your remailer users, especially since buying and using remailer service requires two messages within an hour or so. An alternative billing mechanism, which wouldn't use Chaum-patented cash, would be to sell a bunch of one-shot random-number tokens. When you sell the tokens, you add them to the database of valid tokens, and when one comes in on a message you delete it. This allows you to sell more than one message or service-period per FV transaction, and separates the purchase and use by a longer time, without adding the need for record-keeping based on the user's ID. It obviously does require encrypted reply messages. Another variant is for the user to send you a bunch of tokens along with the purchase, which you store. Blind signatures would improve the security of this process, but require more computation and may involve Chaum's patents. In this case, the message from the client to you would be encrypted, but you wouldn't have to send a reply, so the request could come in anonymously. Bill

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Vinge reference in Moving Mars
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Greg Bear's novel Moving Mars, now out in paperback, has a cute reference to Vernor Vinge's ideas from True Names. p.208: "'Don't stick on the names,' Orianna said, shaping the living room into more Regency. 'All my friends are into Vernoring. They work and play with fake names. I don't know their true ones. Not even their parents know.' "'Why?' "'It's a game. Two rules - nobody knows what you're doing, and you do nothing illegal.' "'Doesn't that take the fun out of doin crypto?' I asked. "'Wow - crypto! Hide in the tomb. Sorry. I shy from two-edged words. We call it Vernoring.' "'Doesn't it?' I persisted. "'No,' Oriana said thoughtfully. 'Illegal is harm. Harm is stupid. Stupid is its own game, and none of my friends play it. Here's Kite.'" The book is pretty good, lots of nano and other hot tech, but not much crypto (sorry, Vernoring)... A little slow in places, though. Hal

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for-pay remailers and FV (Was Re: Remailer Abuse)
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 4:10 PM 01/06/95, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote: >I hate to say it, because I generally tend to take the pro-FV side of >most arguments :-), but I think Jonathan's closer to the mark in this >case. If mail goes through ten remailers, and they ALL charge via First >Virtual, then the last one in the chain won't have to know who you are, >but it will have to know your FV billing account. Thus it, together >with FV, have enough information to break anonymity. > >This is NOT the same as saying that ANY one operator, together with FV, >can burst anonymity; it means that the last one + FV can do so. I Hmm. Maybe I don't completely understand how this is going to work, but won't _every_ remailer in the chain need to know your FV billing account? How would the rest of them charge via FV without knowing your billing account? What Russell was suggesting (I think), was that only the first would bill via FV directly, so only the first would need to know your billing account, and then he'd settle up with the others at the end of the month. (A particular variation of that scheme is what you mentioned later in your message, and I'll get to that). But assuming that every remailer along the chain _was_ charging via FV, I fail to see how only the last one would need your billing account; seems to me they all would, and thus any one could collude with FV to violate your anonimity. [...] >Personally, for my taste this is sufficiently anonymous for any >reasonable purpose. HOWEVER, I can imagine how to make it even more >anonymous. Imagine that there are ten for-profit anonymous remailer >operators who form an "anonymous remailers consortium". Each of them >operates TWO remailers, a for-pay one and a free one, but the free one >will only take things that have come directly via some consortium >member's anonymous remailer, so your message has to be paid for once, at >the entry point to the overall system. Now you can build up a chain >that STARTS with a payment, but then threads its way through a bunch of >less traceable systems. where the operators can't give tracing >information even under court order. The consortium members would >probably have to agree to some revenue sharing arrangements, but you >could make this work. Yeah, that's a specific instance of the type of thing Russel was proposing in the message you were replying to. An instance which avoids many of the critisisms I made directly after Russell's message, but not all. The remailer operators still have to have an organization and remain in close contact, which I am uncomfortable with because it seems to make collusion more likely. And it's still dificult to intermix for-pay and free remailers within your chain, or even just for-pay remailers from several different consortiums. And there are a variety of problems in that inability. [The consortium, as far as I can tell, would also find it rather dificult to charge more for a longer chain, I can't think of any way for them to charge anything excpet a uniform amount regardless of length of chain, unless you give the first remailer a way to tell the length of your chain, which is undesirable. I'm not sure if this is a problem.] >I think this level of engineering is overkill -- for my personal level >of paranoia, I would settle for a single for-pay anonymous remailer >located in a country with very different laws than those that governed >the payment system. Such a system would probably be "breakable" for And this level of paranoia would be perfectly well surved by a Julf/penet style remailer, which _would_ work well with an FV-payment system, as I agreed before. The cypherpunks chained remailernet system as a whole is overkill for your paranoia needs, but appearantly not for the needs of those who use it over Julf's. It appears to me, that an FV-style payment scheme can't be added to the cypherpunks chained remailer system without dropping it's security to the level of Julf's. Which might be good enough for you, but not good enough for me, or presumably for anyone else that uses cypherpunks remailers. [Do you understand how cypherpunks remailers work, and the difference between them and a julf/penet style remailer? Do you understand how encryption is used in a cypherpunks-style remailer chain to make it so each individual remailer only knows the next remailer along the chain, and not the entire rest of the chain?]

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Re: ecash trial issues explained
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> From: Wolfgang Roeckelein <wolfgang(a)wi.WHU-Koblenz.de> > > >-> Digital cash should not be "anonymous" -- paper currency isn't. Serial > > There seems to be a misconception here what is meant with anonymous. Paper cash > is anonymous: I can't derive the person I got the note from from the note > itself. So if I meet a guy in the street, he gives me a pack of cigarettes and > I give him cash, this transaction is anonymous. It isn't difficult to make paper cash less anonymous, though, by tracking serial numbers. This is occasionally done in "law enforcement" situations - recording the notes used to pay ransom or bribes. It wouldn't be difficult to add serial-number recording equipment/mechanisms to automatic bank-teller machines, to record what serial numbers would be given out to whom. (This can be done either by adding scanners to the ATMs themselves, or by scanning the money before putting it into the ATM, and having the ATM record that transaction #43 dispensed the 105th-110th bills in the stack. Scanning can either be done by OCRs, or by replacing the human-readable numbers with bar-codes, as some of the paranoids periodically suggest the US Treasury is about to do as part of some heinous plan. However, the original posters' assertion that digital cash should not be anonymous is not a technical statement, it's a value judgement, and in my opinion it's a bad one. There are a lot of genuine social needs that anonymity can support, and a lot of bad things that can be done with traceable money. Aside from that, traceability costs money. Original gold and silver money didn't need to be traceable, though coiner's and assayer's marks were useful, and it is easier to keep track of your pile of gold bars if they're numbered. But paper money has serial numbers largely to prevent easy copying; gold is a lot harder to counterfeit, unless you've got a king who insists that coins with his face on them should be worth N times as much as anonymous coins. Bill

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floating point crypto?
by rah＠shipwright.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm incensed. I casually mentioned somewhere else that I saw something on this list about floating-point math being used in crypto, contrary to popular belief, and somebody had the *timerity* to call me on it. ;-). I think it had to do with factoring, but maybe even in key-generation, though that doesn't sound right at all... So, are there c-punk archives I could look in? I remember hearing something about that, too. However, if someone remembers off the top of their head, or if they have an actual copy of the posting, that would be great, too. Please send me whatever it is by e-mail. No point cluttering the list more than I already have... Of all the nerve.... Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- 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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sniff passwords on PC (DOS)
by m00012＠KANGA.STCLOUD.MSUS.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As a demonstration of concept, I wrote a small, simple program that replaces the keyboard interrupt and stores all keystrokes in a buffer. It was very very easy to write. It works while using pgp and windows\net. It does not work after starting windows. Not sure, but it seems obvious that MS windows installs it's own keyboard interrupt. I suppose it would be easy to enhance this simple program (I bet it's been done by others) to store passwords into a secret file on a hard drive unbeknownest to the user. I first suspected that such a program already existed after hearing, two days after his arrest, that the CIA had cracked Aldrich Aim's encrypted files. (sorry if I spelled his name incorrectly.) Think about it, the govt. could spend 50,000 to 100,000 to create a freeware gif viewer, for example, that installed such a tsr. Mike P.S. If the guy who wanted to see his gf's files writes me, I'll send you this keyboard sniffer program.

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Re: sniff passwords on PC (DOS)
by L. McCarthy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Mike writes: > days after his arrest, that the CIA had cracked Aldrich Aim's encrypted > files. (sorry if I spelled his name incorrectly.) FYI, I'm fairly sure it's "Aldrich Ames". > Think about it, the govt. could spend 50,000 to 100,000 to create a > freeware gif viewer, for example, that installed such a tsr. ...most of that going to Compu$erve/Uni$y$... > P.S. If the guy who wanted to see his gf's files writes me, I'll send you > this keyboard sniffer program. Just to clarify slightly, the person who originally asked the question (Adam Gerstein aka THE MAC GURU) said he had a _friend_ who wanted to see his (the friend's) gf's files. - - -L. Futplex McCarthy - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.1 iQCVAwUBLw0I8mf7YYibNzjpAQEF/wP9GPKLX7KifBFRenzmbvsCdbOQ7Narlm8/ qiW/nSLRr7jZUtjAyhYM71eI9GsQbO6lADfV9ncoPIATNB/eJNCqa2O0cmNa67O/ KuUSQl0NQPiUQyevkLRldllEb9hSuTNeHyJZ4SFDpMbFrGYXX4Iu/w9RYcn9ssNS 29qFs0vNK30= =Z0ZM - -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBLw0J9ioZzwIn1bdtAQHXVgF8CVyuTHInzoYDUZmZZXwksIosAuiP4TSh pfZJLbRcoPPP9sJ63CTfnexZXenEzhLf =zrNo -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: True Names
by frissell＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >--Mike, still looking for a copy himself > Boy, for people who can make the World's Governments tremble with the click of a keyboard some of you seem a bit print disabled. How to buy an Out of Print Book (c) 1995 Offshore Enterprises 1) Find an OP book search specialist 2) Ask he/she to find it for you 3) Pay for it To accomplish 1), ask at (independent) bookstores in your vicinity (those are places you may have seen around town full of processed tree carcasses), libraries, etc. DCF -- Correlation between (40 years of pack-a-day)second-hand smoke and cancer: +1.19 Correlation between having had an abortion and cancer: +1.50 Correlation generally accepted as significant for disease studies: +3.00

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