- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: Scott Collins' comments
by mulivor＠orion.crc.monroecc.edu 23 Jun '93

23 Jun '93

Scott Collins writes: Remember, the government is not a single entity -- out to get us -- but a collection of individuals, some fraction of whom are covering their butts and looking for goats at any given moment (as has been revealed to us by the media). All of whom are interested in maintaining/improving their current status. What a superb observation. As a newspaper journalist who's seen government slime up close for a while, I can tell you that this is true, true, true. The _biggest_ threat to Clipper isn't cypherpunks or other patriots; it's a bureaucratic civil war. Phil mulivor(a)orion.crc.monroecc.edu

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FOIA request
by stub23 22 Jun '93

22 Jun '93

the FOIA request looks very interesting and im near positive that something is on me somewhere just becuase i have the wrong type of friends who keep me in their address books but how bad will it look if i actually make the request? and will it mean that i am more likely to have people pay attention to me? and how much info shoudl i include about myself?

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address chagne
by tribble＠memex.com 22 Jun '93

22 Jun '93

Please send mail to me now at `tribble(a)netcom.com` thanks, dean

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Re: gov. contracts for Clipper phones
by collins＠newton.apple.com 22 Jun '93

22 Jun '93

Jason Zions writes: >[...] I find it >highly unlikely that the contracts in question are for clipper-based phones; >we already know the government doesn't plan to use clipper technology >itself, since it can be suborned by LEO types. I think it *very* likely that the government would want to spy on itself just as much as it wants to spy on everybody else. Remember, the government is not a single entity -- out to get us -- but a collection of individuals, some fraction of whom are covering their butts and looking for goats at any given moment (as has been revealed to us by the media). All of whom are interested in maintaining/improving their current status. This is true at the level of the individual, the committee, the agency, the party... in fact at any identifiable organizational level, entities will engage in behavior that profits them even (or especially) at the expense of entities outside themselves. Scott Collins | "Few people realize what tremendous power | there is in one of these things." | -- Willy Wonka ...................................................................... Apple Computer, Inc. | phone: 408 862-0540(v), 974-6094(f) 1 Infinite Loop, MS 301-2C | AppleLink: SCOTTCOLLINS Cupertino, CA 95014 | internet: collins(a)newton.apple.com

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Re: comments on your recent post of FOIAed documents.
by Jason Zions 22 Jun '93

22 Jun '93

>1) The first document is particularly compelling, especially >considering the apparant references to the censored paragraph in the >un-censored paragraph... it makes it obvious that there are two sets >of reasons for clipper; the ones that they'll admit, and the ones >which are classified and which they won't admit in public. I also find it interesting that, while the President directed that the fact of access to keys by Law Enforcement Officials should not be hidden from the public, the fact of access to keys by ithe intelligence community (i.e. FBI/CIA/NSA) was not to be similarly disclosed. >> In one recent experiment it took three minutes and >> fourteen seconds to locate a source-code version of DES on the >> INTERNET. > >Hmm. It only took me under minute when I tried it (using the command >"archie -s des.tar"). Maybe they tried it when the archie servers >were overloaded :-), or maybe they counted the time needed to read the >archie man page.. They probably ran the client at the far end of a 9600-baud straw on a bad archie day. >5) What kind of a dork uses words like "incentivized"? A government dork. I find it more damning that the government basically bought-off AT&T by promising them contracts; whatever happened to competetive bid? I find it highly unlikely that the contracts in question are for clipper-based phones; we already know the government doesn't plan to use clipper technology itself, since it can be suborned by LEO types. Hi, Bill! Jason "Jazz" Zions

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Re: The Bizdos flap
by George A. Gleason 22 Jun '93

22 Jun '93

Quoting you, "If one wishes PKP to behave "ethically," it is necessary for us to make it unprofitable for PKP to behave in the manner in which it is. E. g. question their patents, bring suits against them, and otherwise make PKP's existence unprofitable. Suddenly, it will behave "ethically." That's like, if you want your kid to behave, beat him any time he misbehaves. Yeah, uh-huh. If we want PKP to behave ethically, we have to show them positive i.e. profitmaking incentives for doing so. For instance commitments to buy their products if they do (whatever). -gg

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Re: one reaction: early FOIA results
by George A. Gleason 22 Jun '93

22 Jun '93

Re AT&T being "incentivised;" again, I'd like to suggest it's time to dis-incentivise them like right now. If you're on AT&T long distance, change your carrier. If you're using an AT&T phone system, replace it with anything else. It would be interesting to find out that magic number of phones which AT&T were promised under the Federal contract. Then we can either a) set that as a target for business phone systems getting rid of AT&T, i.e. one for one; or b) figure out what the revenues would be and get an equivalent amount in disconnected AT&T long distance (this one could be done on a gross dollar equivalent amount, assuming one year's worth of service is the relevant gross dollar value of a given client), or c) *both.* Well....? -gg

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Re: OTP dual decryption
by George A. Gleason 22 Jun '93

22 Jun '93

Cyphertexts: I was thinking, you do your actual comms in a PKS and then decrypt on disc and then reencrypt same over to OTP with an innocuous covertext stored alongside... oh poo, now of course; I was mistaken. You take your PKS cyphertext and generate a spurious OTP covertext from there. Okay, my error. Sorry.... -gg

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hardware RNG
by Douglas Sinclair 22 Jun '93

22 Jun '93

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Cypherpunks, A while back there was lots of discussion in the list about hardware random number generation. The consensus was that diode white noise was the easiest thing to use. It probably is, but I havn't been able to persuade a single diode to be noisy yet. Anyhow, I turned to the simplest white noise source that I have, which happens to be a radio tuned to a dead channel. I hooked that up to a home made interface board that has previously served as a frame grabber, and wrote some software to grab random numbers. The hardware compares the signal to four known voltages, and sets the feedback pins on my printer port correspondingly. Thus, I get a nibble of information every cycle. However, it's fairly interrelated (if the high bit is set, the low ones must be set too, &c). So, this is the scheme I came up with to randomize it. Read two nibbles and concatenate them into a byte. Take the parity of this byte to give you one bit. Read eight bits this way, to make one byte. Read 128 bytes by this method, and take a MD5 hash of this data. Use the 16 byte message digest as the final random bitstream. Do this as many times as needed to get the desired number of bytes. Using the ENTROPY1 software submitted to the list by Peter Meyer, I determined that a 1000000 byte file had a relative entropy of 0.999980. This seems close enough to 1 for cryptographical use. For each bit of output, 64 bits have been read from the device. The MD5 transposition should eliminate all of the wave nature of the signal and make adjacent bytes unrelated. So, the question now is, is it safe? An obvious method of attack is to simply connect an identical device to a radio and grab identical data. However, I feel this is unfeasible. Radio noise is omnidirectional and thus (I think) should give you very different signals at different geographic locations due to the different phases of the various sources. There are too many variables in the hardware itself. What frequency is it at? What are the comparison values set to? What other method could be used to attack this except for the obvious tempest attack on the host computer? Doug -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3 iQCVAgUBLCZM4SEF9mfcHsd/AQGpYgP+OaJl7v7GO4SITR7nalpdU0wx6mdXHYwD CYP/u1f5BVrPfE85Thsi7beiZMp8o8aI+H5MK1uCMQ1X6pj7SOODuRXhRaXmbjnv jghthWkt19SH4AbpDz7wpV2X7BXmIO0zGBv1rZB84cBgsXQH7cmlgyUCNJP86EUq cCmt7bFSG+U= =tmPC -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- PGP 2.2 Key by finger

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The Bizdos flap
by rclark＠nyx.cs.du.edu 22 Jun '93

22 Jun '93

bout all the Bizdos flap: It is entirely possible that PKP has no sensible alternative but to capitulate to the NSA's offer. While Bizdos himself may oppose the Clipper chip, it is obviously in PKP's best interest to accept a virtual monopoly on the crypto industry. While Bizdos' title may be "President," it is very easy for a company to remove a "President" who makes unprofitable choices. As has been said before, corporations have no truck with ethics. To expect a corporate entity to behave ethically is the same as to expect a T-cell to cease absorbing phagocytes. It ain't in its nature. If one wishes PKP to behave "ethically," it is necessary for us to make it unprofitable for PKP to behave in the manner in which it is. E. g. question their patents, bring suits against them, and otherwise make PKP's existence unprofitable. Suddenly, it will behave "ethically." Any ideas, folks? Don't expect help from Bizdos on it, though. [P. S. Ever notice that the only two people who have automatic form-letter answers to their email are Billys? Billy Idol and Billy Clinton. Fitting, somehow.] ---- Robert W. F. Clark rclark(a)nyx.cs.du.edu clark(a)metal.psu.edu

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