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My recent flame at Stanton
by fnerd＠smds.com 18 Jun '93

18 Jun '93

Stanton McCandlish <anton(a)hydra.unm.edu> recently quoted a rant of mine directed at him. I really thought directed it to him literally--that I mailed it to his address, not the list's. Stanton, I didn't mean to flame you in public. I apologize. This is the second time this has happened this week. I'm starting to think that when I created this "fnerd" mail account I accidentally created an alter ego--my evil twin who posts personal insults to mailing lists... I will try to be triply, not just doubly sure of what I'm doing and put lots of warnings on any such personal grouch mail: "I DIDN'T POST THIS; BETWEEN YOU AND ME; PLEASE DON'T QUOTE ME," etc. in control now--SEIG HEIL!--down! down!... --Steve Witham (aka fnerd) quote me, this WAS posted

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Re: Contempt of court
by Duncan Frissell 18 Jun '93

18 Jun '93

("Perry E. Metzger") >>>It seems like its only a matter of time before other than >>>stopping the government from quartering soldiers in your home >>>except in time of war, there will be nothing more the courts >>>will prevent. That's the answer to the question: "The US Government violates 9 of the 10 amendments of the Bill of Rights every second of every day. What is the one Amendment of the 10 that they hold inviolate?" The Third: 3rd Amendment No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner; nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law. Say, maybe that's an argument against the Clipper Chip! Aren't the NSA types sort of soldiers who want to be quartered in our telephones at our expense? Duncan Frissell Who possesses the worlds longest list of flaky legal arguments which will be an enormous source of entertainment to a federal judge some day. "Did you know that Federal Reserve Notes are not money?" ******************************************************************** * DUNCAN FRISSELL Attorney at Law, Writer, and Privacy * * CIS 76630,3577 Consultant since the Nixon * * Internet: Administration * * 76630.3577(a)compuserve.com * * or frissell(a)panix.com * * Easylink 62853962 * * Attmail !dfrissell * * TLX: 402231 FRISSELL NYK * * * * Privacy Checkup still only $29.95. Get yours today to * * find out how to dodge federal child registration. * * * * "Register Communists Not Kids. Fight SB 732 & 733 for * * national computer registration and tracking of every * * child in America." * * * ********************************************************************

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Re: RRe: Blasting Bidzos Blather
by Fred Heutte 18 Jun '93

18 Jun '93

I beg to differ. I know about federal procurement regs a little, having been employed by a federal contractor for a decade and being one my own personal self now. They greased this process bigtime, and it has the ugly smell of politics all over it.

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RRe: Blasting Bidzos Blather
by smb＠research.att.com 18 Jun '93

18 Jun '93

> > PKP is not going to go away when a few of its patents expire. > Right. Contracts and licensing arrangements can last much longer > than patents. > That's why it's so important to see the exact details of this latest > deal and find out why someone in the federal bureaucracy was greasing > the procurement skids. I repeat -- NIST had no choice, because PKP held all the patent cards. Even if you don't believe PKP's claim to all of public-key cryptography, both the Diffie-Hellman and Schnorr patents would most likely be infringed by DSA. You can argue with the specifics of the deal -- and with what NIST gave away in order to get the Clipper exemption through -- but they had to reach some settlement. Btw -- the deal is *not* final; the announcement is just the start of a 60-day comment period. --Steve Bellovin

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Re: Blasting Bidzos Blather
by Fred Heutte 18 Jun '93

18 Jun '93

> PKP is not going to go away when a few of its patents expire. Right. Contracts and licensing arrangements can last much longer than patents. That's why it's so important to see the exact details of this latest deal and find out why someone in the federal bureaucracy was greasing the procurement skids.

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Re: "RSA sells out" hue and cry (fwd)
by dmandl＠lehman.com 18 Jun '93

18 Jun '93

> From: "George A. Gleason" <gg(a)well.sf.ca.us> > > I'm not so sure that all this Bidzos Biz is as evil as it may sound. > Consider the management have an obligation to the stockholders to make > money. Now here is a huge market. Do they turn it down on the basis of > political rectitude...? I don't run my life based on a spreadsheet. There are plenty of very profitable things I could do that I don't because I think they're scummy. The makers of napalm didn't take "political rectitude" into account either; nor did those bastards (Dow Corning?) who knew the truth about breast implants but hid it to protect their bottom line. Sorry, but I find this attitude extremely disturbing. > Are we seriously expecting that Bidzos will refrain from tapping into this > market, and refrain from charging a cent for an RSA-PGP thing...? Oh, okay, > so he's supposed to go into poverty to prove his ethics. Oh, I see. Gee > whiz, I thought I was the most socialistic of anyone on this list. > > -gg I'm not expecting anything of the kind. I'm not a capitalist, so it's not my job to work out these contradictions. --Dave.

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Re: "RSA sells out" hue and cry (fwd)
by George A. Gleason 18 Jun '93

18 Jun '93

I'm not so sure that all this Bidzos Biz is as evil as it may sound. Consider the management have an obligation to the stockholders to make money. Now here is a huge market. Do they turn it down on the basis of political rectitude...? Are we seriously expecting that Bidzos will refrain from tapping into this market, and refrain from charging a cent for an RSA-PGP thing...? Oh, okay, so he's supposed to go into poverty to prove his ethics. Oh, I see. Gee whiz, I thought I was the most socialistic of anyone on this list. -gg

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Re: Contempt of court
by George A. Gleason 18 Jun '93

18 Jun '93

One-time pads for coerced confessions: Consider that the cyphertext of an OTP could come from *any* combination of plaintext and keystream. Okay, now you have in hand your cyphertext of an original file having to do with your lawsuit against the govt. Take that cyphertext, and get another file of equal or longer length which is completely innocuous, for instance some mild-sounding diary entries or some such. Now XOR these together, and what pops out is the *keystream* which *would have been used for encyphering the innocuous plaintext into the cyphertext you have there. Okay, now you have five files: 1) your original plaintext re your lawsuit against the govt. 2) the keystream which converted that into the cyphertext below. 3) the cyphertext. 4) the innocuous text file for instance edited journal entries. 5) the "keystream" which resulted from XORing (3) and (4), which can be claimed to be the keystream which was used to encypher (4) into (3). Okay, now Big Brother comes to get you and coerce you to decypher your file, but you don't want your attorney-client confidentiality violated, so you hand over items (3) and (5), and when Big Bro "decrypts" (3), out pops (4) thereby proving that you aren't the dastardly subversive who is trying to sue the govt...! "Dear diary..." -gg

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Shorter PGP keys
by remail＠tamsun.tamu.edu 18 Jun '93

18 Jun '93

I was thinking of trying to come up with a short form of my PGP key. Very few people put their PGP keys into their .sig's any more because they are so lengthy. Here is my key, 1024 bits, as it would normally appear: -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.0 mQCNAiqsNkwAAAEEAMKWM52m5EWi0ocK4u1cC2PPyHT6tavk9PC3TB5XBYDegf3d sldRpnjJj1r+aO08FFO+QLEI9wtBqvf1PPP5iLX7sD2uIVlJH14MPtyVtjm9ZKb8 JMtCW74045BgtHBC9yQ3V7vXNV5jM6dE2ocnH4AI/pBFrGLJPKgTA69YIUw3AAUR tCZIYWwgRmlubmV5IDw3NDA3Ni4xMDQxQGNvbXB1c2VydmUuY29tPokAlQIFECqu M1Tidd4O/2f3CwEByrUD/3uoV2y+Fuicrrd2oDawgOw9Ejcx6E+Ty9PVPqKvflLs 0zYyGfeFVSgBbTSDP3X91N3F68nydl9J9VA6QRCGelHM1cZRukCJ0AYbKYfpwUN0 xjEGHsDrd2gT5iWlB3vBZvi+6Ybs4rSq+gyZzVm1/+oRrMen32fz2r0CLgUtHok2 =fF6Z -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- This has a couple of signatures on it and is pretty long. I stripped the signatures, figuring that people can get them from a key server, and that helped quite a bit. Also, the "Version: 2.x" line is not currently used, and if you eliminate it you don't need the blank line after it. Also, the last line is a checksum for the key and in today's internet environment you don't have to worry about noise that much. Stripping all these gives: -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- mQCNAiqsNkwAAAEEAMKWM52m5EWi0ocK4u1cC2PPyHT6tavk9PC3TB5XBYDegf3d sldRpnjJj1r+aO08FFO+QLEI9wtBqvf1PPP5iLX7sD2uIVlJH14MPtyVtjm9ZKb8 JMtCW74045BgtHBC9yQ3V7vXNV5jM6dE2ocnH4AI/pBFrGLJPKgTA69YIUw3AAUR tCZIYWwgRmlubmV5IDw3NDA3Ni4xMDQxQGNvbXB1c2VydmUuY29tPg== -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- This is pretty compact and wouldn't be bad in a .sig. We've gone from 12 to 6 lines. I wish there were a mode in which PGP would scan a file looking not for "-----BEGIN PGP" but rather for lines which are exactly 64 lines long and contain just the RFC1113 (or whatever it's called now) character set. I realize it would get fooled by PEM but maybe the user would only run it if he knew it was a PGP file. Then you could reduce the key to four lines. If you were willing to use a 512 bit key, good enough for casual use, you could get it down to 3 lines. This is probably an appropriate level of privacy for people on multi-user workstations (i.e. as much privacy as they can expect). Hal Finney -- 74076.1041(a)compuserve.com -- Stripped PGP key: mQCNAiqsNkwAAAEEAMKWM52m5EWi0ocK4u1cC2PPyHT6tavk9PC3TB5XBYDegf3d sldRpnjJj1r+aO08FFO+QLEI9wtBqvf1PPP5iLX7sD2uIVlJH14MPtyVtjm9ZKb8 JMtCW74045BgtHBC9yQ3V7vXNV5jM6dE2ocnH4AI/pBFrGLJPKgTA69YIUw3AAUR tCZIYWwgRmlubmV5IDw3NDA3Ni4xMDQxQGNvbXB1c2VydmUuY29tPg==

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Computer Shopper encryption
by nobody＠alumni.cco.caltech.edu 18 Jun '93

18 Jun '93

If Kragen's RNG from Computer Shopper is called repeatedly with range=256, so that the resulting values are in the range 0-255 for xor'ing, it is very weak. That will mean that the RNG will repeat with period of at most 256, and so the only question is which of the 256 possible starting points was used. In other words you only need to do 256 trial decryptions (just try seeds from 0-255) and you've got it. Using the low-order bits of an LCM RNG like this one is a bad idea. You should use the high order bits, or use a range which is not a power of 2 so you end up using all the bits. Even then LCM RNG's aren't crypto- graphically strong, although from what I have seen the techniques of breaking them are what a layman would call complicated. Compared to breaking, say, DES, though, they are no doubt trivial. Hal Finney 74076.1041(a)compuserve.com

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