- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Detailed Scenario of Dongle Usage
by yanek＠novavax.nova.edu 29 Nov '92

29 Nov '92

So, you walk up to ANY terminal directly connected to a host, or to a terminal server, or a personal computer of any kind connected through a modem, or borrow someone's laptop connected to a cellular modem. You connect your dongle in between the terminal/computer and the communications line, and punch in your secret code on the keypad (which, like phones, also has letters so you can remember fairly long ID-s). Call up, or telnet, dial up a bbs, or connect through any other means, to your host, and log in. Run your favorite mail reader, let's say _elm_. Start reading your mail as you usually would. Any time an encrypted message is displayed whose public key ID matches one of the private keys on your keyring, the dongle temporarily buffers the message it into its RAM, flashes the "decrypt" LED, while decrypting the message. Then you can view the plaintext using a simple, terminal-independent pager that lets you go forward/back one page, and search for a key word. When you are done, you press Q, and the plaintext is immediately deleted from the memory. Note that during all this, the plaintext did not appear anywhere on the host or any of the communication links connecting you to it. Let's say you want to reply to a message. Press 'r' or whatever key is used to reply in your particular mail reader. Or if you want to send a message, press 'm' and fill in the address. Then, if your editor is something like vi or ed that requires you to do something before you can input text (like press 'a') then do that. If you use an editor like EMACS or SMiLE or jove or cat or anything that lets you just type in text, you skip this step. Now, press the "encrypt" button on the dongle. It presents you with a simple line editor, that works with any terminal or terminal emulation, but is reasonably easy to use (something like most bbs-es use for composing messages). You type your message, or if it was prepared ahead of time on the local equipment, you transmit the text. NOTE: this is the simpler of the several different approaches to plaintext handling that I am considering. When you are done, you pick the public key to encrypt it with (or it can be automatically determined based on the address you typed in to your mail program previously). If you have lots of public keys, you could use a search to quickly find the one you want. Then you have the option of signing the message with any one of the private keys that you have. Finally, the dongle transmits the cyphertext to the host, and you type the _exit_ key sequence for the editor (:wq, or C-x C-c, or /done, etc). The message is sent by the mailer software on the host. Then you may want to scan a newsgroup like alt.w.a.s.t.e for any mail that may be for you. Put your dongle into "WASTE SCAN" mode (for example by pressing *WS on the keypad) and tell your newsreader something like "display all new messages". The dongle will detect a message whose key-id matches one of the keys on your key-ring decrypts and displays it, while ignoring all the other messages that are not for you. You must retrieve all the messages, so that anyone monitoring your activity has no way of knowing which one, if any, was actually addressed to you. Then you receive a "talk" request (or a chat call on a bbs, or you may be on irc or a MUD with "chat mode") from someone you know has a similar device (or software that emulates it). If you both know each other's public keys, the two devices both generate a random session key and encrypt it with the others' public key. If not, a key-exchange protocol may be used to generate a key both of you know, but that can not be later recovered by someone recording the data. Now the dongles encrypt any text (one line at at time) that you type, and decrypt anything received. Many other applications for a portable, trusted crypto engine could be thought of, given time. -- Yanek Martinson mthvax.cs.miami.edu!safe0!yanek uunet!medexam!yanek this address preferred -->> yanek(a)novavax.nova.edu <<-- this address preferred Phone (305) 765-6300 daytime FAX: (305) 765-6708 1321 N 65 Way/Hollywood (305) 963-1931 evenings (305) 981-9812 Florida, 33024-5819

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George Gleason speaks out about cryptography: Today 2PM Berkeley.
by gnu 29 Nov '92

29 Nov '92

BMUG, Inc. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility . . . . . . . Berkeley Chapter _______________________________________________________________ FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Judi Clark, 549-2684 (BMUG), 261-1869 (direct), fax: 261-4836 (direct), or e-mail judic(a)netcom.com November 27, 1992 Special Interest Group on Freedom, Privacy and Technology A public forum co-sponsored by BMUG and CPSR/Berkeley For those that need a brief break from Thanksgiving, the CPSR/BMUG Special Interest Group will explore cryptography with a brief overview and discussion lead by George Gleason. Gleason is founder of a telecommunications contracting firm in Berkeley. He is also professionally involved in psychological research on interpersonal communication and state variables (i.e. perception, cognition, etc.). Gleason's overview will be followed by a video taken from the Second Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy in Washington DC last March. The video is entitled: "Who Holds the Keys? Cryptography & Control: National Security vs. Personal Privacy." You are encouraged to join us on November 29, 1992 at 2:00 pm for a look into cryptography and personal privacy. The Special Interest Group's next meeting is Sunday, Nov. 29, 1992, at 2:00 pm. The monthly meetings are free and open to the public. The group meets on the last Sunday of the month at the BMUG office, 2055 Center Street, Berkeley -- a half block from the Berkeley Bart station.

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Re: Electronic Banking
by Richard Childers 29 Nov '92

29 Nov '92

"On a related note, I noticed an article on electronic money in a recent issue of _the_Futurist_. It kept on coming back to the big advantage of cryptomoney: it is completely traceable. The main point was that cryptomoney would eliminate black marketeering (including the drug trade)." I don't think cash will _ever_ be eliminated. If it is, someone will make their own ( banks did this for many decades in North America ) and these will fill the role. There will always be transactions which will not justify the cost of the overhead in hardware and transaction processing, and market pressures will reward those whom develop a way to avoid this overhead, IMHO. -- richard

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Re: Electronic Banking
by George A. Gleason 29 Nov '92

29 Nov '92

Tim and others write with concern about the possible legal consequences of setting up a model digital economy. I would like to suggest that there may be very little to worry about here. This entire project constitutes a research exercise which will no doubt be written up for publication (at least online publication, which makes sense culturally given the nature of the community of interest). It's research and education. The amounts of "digital money" involved can be utterly miniscule: pennies. This is a "token economy" in the same sense as when psychiatric hospital inmates work on the ward for tokens they can trade in for snacks and so on, or a highschool economics class does a similar exercise using Monopoly-type play money. This is not illegal any more than any other social science project would be illegal if all the subjects were adults giving informed consent. Pennies are not a controlled substance nor are they a weapon (unless dropped on people from high places... :-). By analogy I'm thinking of the laws against bigamy/polygamy, and a group of adults getting together to study the question of the effects of different kinds of marital arrangements. So they have a group where they "pretend" to carry out different arrangements and then examine the social dynamics resulting from each. It's quite obvious we're all concerned about the larger social impacts of the possibility of a transition to a cashless economy; and we're hypothesising possible negative consequences and trying to work out solutions. That is entirely admirable, and can be presented as such to anyone who cares to listen to the case. If this needs any further work to develop research angles, I'll gladly come up with a bunch of surveys and other measures, and we can put them into use and harvest some nifty statistical results which might be publishable in the academic literature. -gg

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credibility & pseudonyms
by efrem＠informix.com 28 Nov '92

28 Nov '92

I have this persistent image of what a great boon all these encrypted networks will be for undercover work. Currently when some species of cop or spy goes undercover they take on a nearly full time acting job. They have to work for a long time to establish their credentials and throughout the process are usually in significant physical danger. I vaguely remember (the details are probably wrong) some Isreali spy got as far as the position of Minister of Defense in Jordan before he got hung. With digital signatures a dozen secretaries could run a hundred or more pseudoagents, build a solid reputation for each over years. The same approach would work for a patient con man. Real credibility has to be tied to a physical body. Some thing at risk. --efrem

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MIME
by rebma!rebma!wmo＠kksys.mn.org 28 Nov '92

28 Nov '92

I got the metamail stuff running on my machine. I think it's a good way to get the multimedia mail job done. Does anyone on the list have a better .mailcap entry for pgp than the following....? application/pgp ; pgp < %s ; label="PGP encrypted text" ; compose="pgpcompose %s" where pgpcompose is a quick hack that looks like: #!/usr/bin/ksh rm /tmp/pgpcompose vi /tmp/pgpcompose echo What key? read key pgp -mae /tmp/pgpcompose $key mv /tmp/pgpcompose.asc $1 exit 0 I've just been fooling around with metamail for a couple days, and I don't know what the best way to include PGP is... This seems to work, but I'm guessing I'm missing something more elegant. -Bill -- Bill O'Hanlon wmo(a)rebma.mn.org

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Re: An easy-to-reply anonymous mail scheme
by ghsvax!hal＠uunet.UU.NET 28 Nov '92

28 Nov '92

The problem with the idea of posting anonymous mail to a newsgroup is sheer volume. Remember, we aim at a system where a large fraction of mail is potentially being done this way. Imagine if almost all email was done today by posting to newsgroups! There is probably thousands of times as much email traffic as news traffic now. It would totally swamp the system. You'd literally have to send every email message sent by any user in the world to _every_ user in the world, in effect. As Yanek says: > You are guaranteed anonymity because no-one can find out who decrypted > the alt.w.a.s.t.e message, since everyone received it. This really won't scale to large numbers of users. Yanek also writes: > > Here is an example of how to use the cryptographic remailer at > > <hal(a)alumni.caltech.edu> to implement an anonymous return address. > > > But the again do you trust hal(a)alumni.caltech.edu... > > With conventional remailer schemes such as this one, you are announcing > your True Name (or at least your True Internet Mailbox) to someone you > must trust. With my scheme (posted earlier today) you don't need to trust > anybody except yourself (to not make a dumb mistake like including a > signature). This is why you would want to use a chain of remailers as your return address, what Chaum calls a "cascade". No single remailer sees the correspondance between your anonymous address and your real address. Only by breaking all of them can the bad guys find out who you are. Ideally, remailers would operate in a variety of countries with different laws, making it difficult to crack them all. Remailers could be designed to periodically flush themselves, deleting old keys and/or pseudonym maps. This way anonymous addresses would have a limited lifetime if desired, and the attackers would have only a finite time window to break all the remailers involved. (Different keys/pseudonyms could have different lifetimes as needed.) We could also imagine that there are lots of remailers - not just dozens, or hundreds, but millions of them. Maybe almost everyone runs a "cheap" remailer on the side, collecting a few cents in digital cash for each message they pass, enough to pay for their own messages. Putting all this together, you could have an anonymous address which passes through, say, 10 remailers which might be any of the millions of remailers in the world. It could have a limited lifetime of only a few hours for some ultra-sensitive applications, with the remailers involved flushing their databases after that time. To break this, the enemy would have to sequentially break into machines all over the world, one after another, defeat any physical barriers (locks, men with guns), overcome tamper-resistance in the computers, break the encrypted files, and find out what the next step is in the address cascade, all in a couple of hours. This doesn't seem possible. Hal 74076.1041(a)compuserve.com

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Re: Crypto Dongle...
by yanek＠novavax.nova.edu 28 Nov '92

28 Nov '92

> Yanek - I do think your dongle idea is promising, but there are a > couple of other problems I haven't seen you mention. The concept is by no means complete. I will continue to add improvements as people suggest them. > One problem with this is that the terminal programs I use tend not to > just blast the whole mail message out in literal form, especially > since it is likely to be longer than one screenful. Instead, it > pauses after each screen, prompting with something like "type space > for next page", It would be transparent the other way, so that you would press space or 'n' or 'return' or anything you want. > or such. Also, it may insert VT100 control sequences as it goes from > page to page in order to clear the screen, etc. It should not be too difficult to ignore any codes that are not part of the data stream. If the message is coded with something like uuencode or base64 then the uniform-length lines of data should be clearly disinguishable from any other text such as "Press N for next screen" or an escape sequence. Also, overlapping display (some pagers show you a couple of lines from the previous screenful) could be dealt with by detecting duplicate lines. >> When you are done, you press Q, and the plaintext is immediately >> deleted from the memory. > Well, I'd think you'd want the option of saving the plaintext to a > file on your PC, not always deleting it from memory. By memory I meant the RAM in the dongle. If you wanted to save it, you could have just used to "logifile" function of your communication software. > What if you wanted to do what I'm doing here, which is to quote the > message you are replying to? I have not thought about that. Right away I see several possibilities: one, if the message you are replying to is the one you just decrypted, it could have been stored in the buffer, and you can delete the irrelevant lines, and insert your comments. The other would be that as you read a message, you could write and encrypt your reply. In that case it would also be simple to automatically use the public key that was used to verify the signature. I am sure there are other ways. There is essentially no limit on possibilities once you have a CPU. I will think about it some more. Thanks for bringing this up. >> simple line editor, that works with any terminal or terminal > I think this is OK, although I'm not sure how happy I'd be with > your line editor, not being accustomed to using BBS's. You could probably download an editor of your choice into it. There could be several editors available. Maybe even a simple screen editor that recognizes several most common terminals like vt100 and ansi. > like I can always compose on my PC, so that's OK. If your comm software supperted such a feature, the dongle could transmit a magic sequence which would make the pc to automatically go into an editor and then transmit the text. I would imagine eventually the most popular communication programs would have this feature. Some might already. The point is that if you happen to be using a dumb terminal or some machine or software WITHOUT this capability you could still receive and send secure messages. >> Then you may want to scan a newsgroup like alt.w.a.s.t.e for any mail >> message whose key-id matches one of the keys on your key-ring, >> decrypts and displays it, while ignoring all the other messages > You might have a buffering problem here. A decryption takes 30 > seconds They would not be decrypted "on-the-fly". Each Subject: line would contain the MD5 hash of the public key. It would take a fraction of a second to determine if that hash matches one of your keys for which the hash values would be precomputed and stored. Then the message would be captured. Later, when the scan is complete, it would be decrypted and displayed. > reasons; first, you don't know what flow control the host uses (if > any), and second, it would expose the fact that you had found a > message you wanted to decrypt). That is true. It should not be a problem though, if there are not too many messages for you. I plan for the device to have 256k of ram, so it could hold a few messages. The ram could be expanded if necessary. > You can't really anticipate how big the buffer might need to be, > especially if this method of anonymous communication became popular. > As I said in a previous post, you could easily have thousands of > messages to sort through, with perhaps dozens for you. I envision that this method would only be used for short and important messages, mostly of the form: "Contact me by sending mail to xyzzy(a)anon-r-us.com, key: dfgSDFgds34DF" So they would be short, easy to buffer, quick to decrypt and hopefully not too many of them. If there WAS too many messages, more than you were able to buffer, then it would just ignore the rest, process the ones it did get, and then you would request a second scan during which the first ones (that have already been processed) would be ignored, and the rest would be received. The problem with this is that the host would know that if you scan twice you have a lot of messages. They dont know which ones though. Or maybe you just had a transmission error... > solution than just encouraging people to buy laptops and use them? Most people that use e-mail already have a computer, They may not want to buy another one. They may use the computer or terminal on their desk for other things too, and would not want the inconvenience of having to use a separate screen/keyboard anytime they receive or want to send a private message. Laptop will cost more. Why buy a screen, keyboard, disk drive if you already have it. Hopefully my device will be cheap. It should be cheaper than any laptop. All I have is two serial ports, a cpu, some RAM and support cirquitry. I don't have a full-fledged keyboard, display, disk (or card) drive, and all the other stuff that goes in a laptop. Laptops are bigger. Or if they are small, they have lousy screens/keyboards. I hope to make my device smaller than even the so-called "palmtops". It would be easier to carry with you, in your pocket. It would be easier to hide if necessary. You can't make a laptop. You cant easily open it up, or if you can, it is complex enough that you can not completely understand its design. You can make a dongle from a kit, testing each part before you assemble it. You could make one from scratch. You can design one if you don't trust the schematics. Or you could show it to a competent electronics engineer and he could tell you if it does what it says it will. A laptop is not designed with security in mind. If you find that someone has just learned your secret code (that you used to encrypt your private key) and are going to seize your laptop in 15 seconds, you can't immediately destroy the key (you need to turn it on, boot or resume, exit from whatever program you were running or create a new window, CD to the directory where you store your private key, delete the file, run some program that makes sure the sectors are cleared.) And you still can't be sure that the key is not stored in some buffer or disk or cpu cache or a temporary file. Compare this with punching in a short "DESTRUCT" sequence on the keypad; if you have the device in your pocket, you can even do it without taking it out of your pocket, if you know the keypad well; And be absolutely sure that all information is completely gone. > Despite my negative comments here, I think there is room for plenty > of different approaches to making crypto easier to use. Absolutely. I am not saying that a hardware device designed specifically for cryptography is the ONLY way to go, what I do believe is that it is just a very good way to make easy access to cryptography widespread. A person that does not even know enough to be able to download, uncompress and install a software package could get one of these devices and make use of it. And there is no limit as to what a knowledgeable person could do with such a device. >If the dongle really could be made available at the price level you >mentioned, there might be some interest ... and if there was one for >$200 or less that would definately be interesting to me. Right now I hope to make it available for about $100. I don't know if I can yet, but will find out soon. -- Yanek Martinson mthvax.cs.miami.edu!safe0!yanek uunet!medexam!yanek this address preferred -->> yanek(a)novavax.nova.edu <<-- this address preferred Phone (305) 765-6300 daytime FAX: (305) 765-6708 1321 N 65 Way/Hollywood (305) 963-1931 evenings (305) 981-9812 Florida, 33024-5819

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Paranoia and Cypherpunks
by tcmay＠netcom.com 28 Nov '92

28 Nov '92

PARANOIA, THIS LIST, AND APPROPRIATE TOPICS It is inevitable that a group such as ours should have varying opinions about the nature of the group, its role in society, its approach to outsiders and journalists, and its basic attitude. Recently, several people have expressed concern that the proper message is not being conveyed, even that a subversive and seditious message is often presented on this list. Some have cited discussion of military cipher systems as being too dangerous for us to discuss, while others have expressed some discomfort at the "anarchist" flavor of some postings. Well, folks, we all have different axes to grind. Since this is an open, unmoderated list, little control of content can be expected. * Some want "cryptography" downplayed, to be replaced with "privacy" as an emphasis. Privacy is seen as more palatable to Americans, less likely to upset them into cracking down on crypto methods. In other words, privacy is an easier "sell" than secrecy. Perhaps, but why dilute our focus just to make a more digestable pill for the masses of America, who typically don't think much about abstractions anyway? Those who want to sell "privacy" are free to. (BTW, the die was mostly cast when the name "Cypherpunks" was adopted. That's already raised red flags, just by the name! If we want to downplay this "crypto-cyber-punks outlaw" image, then a name change to something more like the "Electronic Frontier Foundation" or the CPSR, nice, safe-sounding names.) * Others have expressed some concern that some minor details of how U.S. cipher machines send out padded traffic were mentioned on this list--the fear being that discussion of military matters will invite the scrutiny of the government. Well, check out sci.military some time and see the debate on such issues! Also, many details of the KG-36, KWR-37, and Autodin cipher systems--just to cite the specific military cipher machines that the posting on this list was probably referring to--have already been published, and the Walker spy ring delivered the complete specs to these and other machines in the early 1980s. It's typically only the public who lacks knowledge on these matters. The Soviets (May They Rest in Pieces) usually got the salient details fairly quickly. Since ours is a crypto education group--amongst other things--what's wrong with discussing any of the gadgets and techniques that numerous books and other postings have already dealt with? (Surely John Gilmore's lawsuit to get some critical crypto papers declassified has already "angered" the folks at NSA. Are we to censure John for stirring up trouble? Of course not. We're free individuals, able to say what we wish, meet in secret meetings without the permission of the government, and learn anything we wish to. This, at least, is the theory. Until told otherwise, I intend to act on this theory.) * Some have argued persuasively for concentrating efforts on the more palatable (to the public at large) aspects of crypto techniques, such as authentication to reduce forgeries, privacy protection against illegal eavesdroppers, and so on. This is the "selling our vision to the public" point of view. Fine, it is good for some folks to do this, to concentrate on the areas that are unlikely to upset Middle America. But some of us--and you've seen my postings--believe the _selling_ of these ideas of authentication and privacy is a lost cause, or at least is not our main interest (e.g, it's not _my_ interest). * I favor technological solutions over political solutions. Don't call it sedition, call it the natural trend of new technologies. The printing press broke the power of medieval guilds in ways a political approach could never have done. Same with steam engines, electric motors, incandescent light, copying machines, computers, modems...well, you get the point. The things we talk about on this list, the things being developed and deployed, will have revolutionary effects. I've written about these effects over the past several years, and this wonderful list is pursuing them all with gusto! The anonymous remailers alone will set off alarms throughout the law enforcement community--you're kidding yourself if you think otherwise. Are we to stop working on anonymous remailers? What about digital cash? Face it, what we're doing will have major implications. To not talk about these effects, to not speculate on the possible consequences, is to bury our heads in the sand for fear that someone reading this list will order this list shut down or have us arrested! Yes, it's true some journalists are reading this list. Yes, it's fairly likely someone is forwarding this list to various agencies (this isn't paranoia...they'd be fools to not know about this list by now, given the publicity, the reputations of some of us, etc.). I know that some of the recipients of the list are gatewaying to other systems, or are forwarding specific articles to much wider audiences (I know this partly from e-mail I get). But these are all consequences of having a public list. Anyone uncomfortable with the free discussion of ideas and technologies on this list, anyone who fears personal or professional liability for views expressed by _others_ on this list, should probably unsubscribe from the list. I certainly don't intend to stop writing about the areas that interest me. Cheers. --Tim -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP Public Key: by arrangement.

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John Gilmore & NSA
by norm＠xanadu.com 28 Nov '92

28 Nov '92

This Saturday's NewYork Times has a nice article on page 7 regarding NSA's declassification of some of the Friedmann works under legal pressure from John Gilmore.

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