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Re: VinCrypt
by Clark Reynard 04 Jun '93

04 Jun '93

Even as a former 'hacker' myself, the second to last person I would trust not to install a backdoor (next to the NSA) is a hacker. In addition, merely having been a systems hacker hardly qualifies one for writing complex crypto software. Without any assurance as to the authors' qualifications for writing a crypto package, or their integrity. Even if I could trust their integrity, I'm very leery of black-box software. ---- Robert W. Clark Just Say No! to the rclark(a)nyx.cs.du.edu Big Brother Chip

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Term software, disk driver encryption
by greg＠ideath.goldenbear.com 04 Jun '93

04 Jun '93

Am suprised no-one's mentioned DISKREET, the encrypted disk driver software included with the Norton Utilities. It does DES, though the manual doesn't mention which flavor of DES it uses. I have been using it for roughly 2 years now without any trouble. It's been well-behaved and is probably already on lots of folks' disks, by virtue of being included with the rest of the Norton stuff. I think "TPU" refers to Turbo Pascal Units. "Async Pro" is, if I remember right, the name of an add-on async communications library for Turbo Pascal. Telix is not free, but is freely distributable, as it's shareware. -- Greg Broiles greg(a)goldenbear.com Golden Bear Computer Consulting +1 503 465 0325 Box 12005 Eugene OR 97440 BBS: +1 503 687 7764

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subscribe
by bei＠dogface.austin.tx.us 04 Jun '93

04 Jun '93

subscribe l-cpunks(a)dogface.austin.tx.us

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DOS disk encryptor
by Eric Blossom 04 Jun '93

04 Jun '93

Ryan, Good luck on building the DOS disk encryptor. I belive that what you need to do is write a standard DOS disk driver (that can be installed in CONFIG.SYS) that implements the READ and WRITE primitives. I belive that they use the same entry point (the STRATEGY entry) in the driver. You would basically just call the BIOS routines to do the actual i/o. You don't have to worry about the FAT etc, just encrypt everything. You will probably want to use DES or IDEA and run it in CBC mode or Counter Mode. You would use the DISK BLOCK NUMBER as a piece of the key material (or part of the Initialization Vector), hence, even if the same data appeared multiple places on the drive, it would appear different on the surface. There is a good description of operation modes in "Modern Cryptology: a Tutorial" by Gilles Brassard (Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science #325, 1988). Denning's book covers it too. I'd probably start out getting it running on a floppy. After that, just use a separate partition to make life easier. The driver is handed physical (or logical) block numbers, and these map directly to the physical drive block number by adding the offset of the beginning of partition. At driver init time, you read the partition table on the hard disk, looking for a "system type" that identifies the partition as one of your encrypted ones. Prompt for the pass phrase, and store it in the driver. I assume that your concern is somebody physically grabbing the disk drive. I don't have a problem with the pass phrase in memory, as long I have physical control of the system. In some of the DOS references, there used to be a sample RAM DISK device driver. You could use it as the skeleton to get the entry points right, and then just encrypt the block and call the BIOS to do the i/o. Have fun, Eric Blossom

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good day
by Timothy Newsham 04 Jun '93

04 Jun '93

Ahh.. what a good day it was today! I am currently logged in to my UNIX account from home. I am sitting here mailing you guys, and everything I type is being sent over the modem in encrypted form. I worked out some very irritating bugs in my software and have my link protocol up and running pretty reliably. It still needs some cleaning up. I will be cleaning it up a little and running it on a few different platforms to test it out. The code is basically the same as the unix end I mailed out to several people earlier (with just 3 or 4 lines changed), but I now have a good, functional VT100 end for my amiga. I will post here after I clean up and test the code a little and get it ready for "release". So if you're interested, basically just wait. But I am looking for people who are willing to port to other platforms. The common code should need no porting, what needs to be done really is to find a good P.D. term program in source form and modify it (this is what I have done). The common code was written with this in mind and it shouldnt be terribly hard (simply replacing writes to screen and serial with encoding/decoding routines and then outputting the results, and small things like providing the user a way to turn on and off the encryption). Tim

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(fwd) [comp.os.linux.announce] New loop devices, even with DES encryption
by kelly＠netcom.com 04 Jun '93

04 Jun '93

Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest) Path: netcom.com!netcomsv!decwrl!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!usenet From: almesber(a)nessie.cs.id.ethz.ch (Werner Almesberger) Newsgroups: comp.archives Subject: [comp.os.linux.announce] New loop devices, even with DES encryption Followup-To: comp.os.linux.announce Date: 4 Jun 1993 01:35:22 GMT Organization: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, CH Lines: 42 Sender: adam@soda Approved: adam@soda Distribution: world Message-ID: <1um8sq$86e(a)agate.berkeley.edu> References: <1993Jun1.201347.7433(a)klaava.Helsinki.FI> NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.berkeley.edu X-Original-Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce X-Original-Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1993 20:13:47 GMT Archive-name: auto/comp.os.linux.announce/New-loop-devices-even-with-DES-encryption Version 0 of the new loop devices patch is in tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/BETA/loop and nic.funet.fi:/pub/OS/Linux/BETA/loop The files are: lo.0.tar.z The loop devices patch des.0.tar.z DES-encryption for the kernel Note: If you're FTPing from outside the U.S. or Canada, please get the DES patch from nic.funet.fi, because of the well-known US export restrictions. (DES encryption is optional. The loop devices also work without it.) Loop devices give you the ability to mount file systems from regular files. Additionally, you can use them to have more than one file system on one partition and to have transparent on-line encryption of all your data. The loop devices patch is relative to ALPHA 0.99pl10, but it'll probably work with 0.99pl9 and 0.99pl10 too. The DES patch should work with any recent kernel. This is a new implementation of loop devices by Theodore Ts'o, I'm just maintaining the code. Unlike my old loop devices, which are also in some versions of SLS, the new loop devices will continue to work after variable block sizes are added to the kernel. The DES code is derived from Eric Young's DES library. I originally wanted to use UFC crypt, but its memory requirements make it a bit difficult to handle. Maybe later. - Werner -- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, ETH Zuerich, CH almesber(a)nessie.cs.id.ethz.ch / /_IFW_A44__Tel._+41_1_254_7213__________________almesber(a)bernina.ethz.ch_/

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Re: CryptoStacker, long term vision
by Mark 04 Jun '93

04 Jun '93

>A related topic to encrypted disk drives. Anybody who has a desire to >see their data around long term makes backups of their drives. At >least one of these backups is usually physically near the drive in >question. > >What good it is to have an encrypted disk if the backups are not also >encrypted? > >Backups occur at the file system level, where an encrypted file system >does not appear encrypted, so that work here does not directly >leverage to encrypted backups. This problem is most easily solved by copying the entire partion/file that is encrypted as blocks. These blocks are size according to the destination media. If you use floppies you break the encrypted fs/file into (e.g.) 1.44 meg chunks, if you use tape you can throw the whole block at the media, similarly with another hardisk. The unix/linux/386bsd 'dd' program is especially useful for this purpose and I assume there are similar utils for dos. For replacement you simply dump the whole lot back as one encrypted file system. This method should be faster than grabbing individual files and backing them up as the program just has to seek to a specified place and start reading a defined amount of [encrypted] data. Mark mark(a)coombs.anu.edu.au

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Secure transport layer paper
by fnerd＠smds.com 04 Jun '93

04 Jun '93

There's a paper in the Feb. '93 _IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering_: "Trust Requirements and Performance of a Fast Subtransport-Level Protocol for Secure Communication" by P. Venkat Rangan It's about a protocol called Authenticated Datagram Protocol, and issues about using it in a "subtransport level." He's tried it on Suns. The work was done at Berkeley in 1990, the guy's at UCSD now. -fnerd

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the right platform for these projects
by Stanton McCandlish 04 Jun '93

04 Jun '93

I agree wholeheartedly that a commandline, portable, version should come first. Porting that separately to X, Win, Mac, etc will not be nearly the chore that porting a Windows app to Unix will be. Re: the ubiquity of Windows: LOTS of people have Windows. But... The idea that new machine sales are mostly Windows machines is given the lie somewhat by the fact that they are also all DOS machines, and that Windows is just bundled. Many people don't install it due to the disk space leeching. And a LOT of people with Windows don't use it for comm stuff because Windows + comm = nightmare. So yes, make a Windows version. NO don't start with a windows version. One of your biggest markets will be the BBS crowd, 90+% of whom use DOS, not Windows, for comm apps. And I still heartily recommend tackling this from several different angles. Sure make a new term, but also get Telix, et all to go along with it. Get Fido-tech mailer makers to support the ^ENC "standard", etc. -- When marriage is outlawed only outlaws will be inlaws! Stanton McCandlish, SysOp: Noise in the Void DataCenter Library BBS Internet anton(a)hydra.unm.edu IndraNet: 369:1/1 FidoNet: 1:301/2 Snail: 1811-B Coal Pl. SE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87108 USA Data phone: +1-505-246-8515 (24hr, 1200-14400 v32bis, N-8-1) Vox phone: +1-505-247-3402 (bps rate varies, depends on if you woke me up...:)

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Clipper on CNN HN
by RYAN Alan Porter 04 Jun '93

04 Jun '93

The current CNN Headline News has a spot on the Clipper chip airing after the Sports section, I just barely caught it by accident. I have to leave now to do some consulting, but I have my VCR set up to record it the next time around. Summary of the tape: ____BEGIN SUMMARY____ The Clinton Administration is developing, along with the NSA and the NIST a chip which will ensure private communications between telephones and fax machines and such. Current plans are for the keys to be held in escrow by two seperate (unnamed) government agencies. Much was made about the objections made by people at the NIST hearings about the questionable constitutionality of the chip and a direct quote was aired by a woman saying during the hearings that 'the chip would expand the powers of the government to invade the privacy of citizens to even greater than what it already is' (paraphrase) and also about the objections of companies who are afraid of being blackballed and prevented from doing business unless they use the chip. There was a small hint of a fear that the 'voluntary' status of using the chip would not last for long. Also, AT&T (surprise) has apparantly announced that it is already developing a system using the chip and showed a prototype on the air. It seemed to be a lot larger than necessary, a huge black box with a little LCD display saying 'secure' and whatnot when you activated clipper security. There was an interview with a fed type who repeated all of the old stale arguments about making conversations secure for him but not for the criminals. ____END SUMMARY____ I think that the spot was definitely leaning toward exposing the objections that people have toward the chip, even if the people at CNN didn't really understand for sure what those objections are. The whole thing might have been a little unclear for the average Joe as to what the real problem is with this newfangled system, and I think that more uninformed coverage like this is likely to turn people against us; they may start to see us as the bad guys, a bunch of people who are against privacy by our objection to this thing. Anyway, now that it has hit CNN, it is officially mainstream and it may well become a hot, trendy news item. What we need now are hoardes of people who will volunteer to be consulted with as 'experts' on the issue for local news and such. Gotta go now, gotta write some code... Try to catch the spot. -Ryan the Bit Wallah

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