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On special objects, and Judy Miller's treason
by Major Variola (ret) 25 Oct '05

25 Oct '05

Its unfortunate that some posters had to be reminded that anyone calling for government-licensed "reporters" (and "religions", as one author included) deserves to have their carbon recycled, because of the treason to the BoR. Tim May used to call government licensed citizens "special objects". Search for it. If state violence is used against "unlicensed" practitioners, then the state controls the practice. Pharmacy provides another example of this --the state controlling what you ingest. It is also sad that no one pointed out that when compelled to go before the Inquisition (aka grand jury) one is not compelled to say anything. So long as the BoR holds. For instance, Dupe Miller could have kept her crudely painted mouth shut, because she could have worried that she would have incriminated herself, eg in not reporting the felony of broadcasting a spook's identity. Or worried about unknown charges that might be brought against her; you never know what prosecutors will dream up. Do not cooperate with fascists, occupying troops, etc. (Speaking of which, are any anonymous offshore betting establishments making odds on Ryan Lackey's lifespan?) --- Impeach or frag.

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Re: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
by leichter_jerrold＠emc.com 25 Oct '05

25 Oct '05

| U.S. law generally requires that stolen goods be returned to the | original owner without compensation to the current holder, even if | they had been purchased legitimately (from the thief or his agent) by | an innocent third party. This is incorrect. The law draws a distinction between recognized sellers of the good in question, and other sellers. If you buy a washer from a guy who comes up to you and offers you a great deal on something from the back of his truck, and it turns out to be stolen, you lose. If you go to an appliance store and buy a washer that turned out to be stolen, it's yours. Buy a gold ring from the salesman at the same store, and you better hope he didn't steal it. As in any real-world situation, there are fuzzy areas at the edges; and there are exceptions. (Some more expensive objects transfer by title - mainly houses and cars. You don't get any claim on the object unless you have a state-issued title.) But the general intent is clear and reasonable. | Likewise a payment system with traceable | money might find itself subject to legal orders to reverse subsequent | transactions, confiscate value held by third parties and return the | ill-gotten gains to the victim of theft or fraud. Depending on the | full operational details of the system, Daniel Nagy's epoints might be | vulnerable to such legal actions. This is no different from the case with cash today. If there is a way to prove - in the legal sense, not some abstract mathematical sense - that a transfer took place, the legal system may reverse it. This comes up in contexts like improper transfers of assets before a bankruptcy declaration, or when people try to hide money during a divorce. -- Jerry

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[dave@farber.net: [IP] Wiretapping innocent people on the Internet]
by Eugen Leitl 25 Oct '05

25 Oct '05

----- Forwarded message from David Farber <dave(a)farber.net> -----

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big bro in the car
by Major Variola (ret) 25 Oct '05

25 Oct '05

Nuclear Detection: Fixed detectors, portals, and NEST teams wont work for shielded HEU on a national scale; a distributed network of in-vehicle detectors is also necessary to deter nuclear terrorism http://iis-db.stanford.edu/evnts/4249/disarm.pdf Maybe the FCC will require rad detectors in cellphones as part of their 911-location finding / dissident-tracking system? ----- Go for the head shot, they're wearing puffy vests on the tube, mate.

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Private records scattered in the wind (FLA)
by Major Variola (ret) 25 Oct '05

25 Oct '05

We encourage the publication of the (paper) school records which the FLA hurricane reportedly distributed to locals, as part of an effort to show the sheeple how *well* the state guards their secrets. Particularly interested in offspring of state officials, not that their kids are likely go to public schools. [FLA is required to bus lower caste students within counties, to achieve a certain average complexion, so even in Jeb'$ neighborhood the schools suck.] --- Impeach or frag.

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On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
by R.A. Hettinga 25 Oct '05

25 Oct '05

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 3:57 PM -0400 10/24/05, John Kelsey wrote: >More to the point, an irreversible payment system raises big practical >problems in a world full of very hard-to-secure PCs running the >relevant software. One exploitable software bug, properly used, can >steal an enormous amount of money in an irreversible way. And if your >goal is to sow chaos, you don't even need to put most of the stolen >money in your own account--just randomly move it around in >irreversible, untraceable ways, making sure that your accounts are >among the ones that benefit from the random generosity of the attack. >The payment system operators will surely be sued for this, because >they're the only ones who will be reachable. They will go broke, and >the users will be out their money, and nobody will be silly enough to >make their mistake again. Though I agree with the notion that anonymity is orthogonal to market demand at the moment, I think you lost me at the word "account", above. :-). That is to say, your analysis conflicts with the whole trend towards T-0 trading, execution, clearing and settlement in the capital markets, and, frankly, with all payment in general as it gets increasingly granular and automated in nature. The faster you can trade or transact business with the surety that the asset in question is now irrevocably yours, the more trades and transactions you can do, which benefits not only the individual trader but markets as a whole. The whole foundation of modern finance, and several -- almost posthumous, so pervasive was the homeopathic socialism that we now call Keynesianism -- Nobel prizes in economics are based on that premise, and it has been proven empirically now for many decades: The entire history of the currency futures markets would be a good example, though now that I think of it, any derivative market, since the time of Thales himself, would prove the point. However "anonymous" irrevocability might offend one's senses and cause one to imagine the imminent heat-death of the financial universe (see Gibbon, below... :-)), I think that technology will instead step up to the challenge and become more secure as a result. And, since internet bearer transactions are, by their very design, more secure on public networks than book-entry transactions are in encrypted tunnels on private networks, they could even be said to be secure *in spite* of the fact that they're anonymous; that -- as it ever was in cryptography -- business can be transacted between two parties even though they don't know, or trust, each other. For instance, another "problem" with internet bearer transactions, besides their prima facie "anonymity" (they're only prima facie because, while the protocols don't *require* is-a-person and-then-you-go-to-jail identity, traffic analysis is still quite trivial for the time being, onion routers notwithstanding) is that the client is responsible not only for most of the computation, but also for the storage of notes or coins, instead of a central database in a clearinghouse or bank somewhere "storing" various offsetting book-entries in, as you noted above, "accounts". :-). Of course, simply backing up one's data off-site, much easier with internet bearer certificates than with whole databases, solves this problem, and, as we all know here, the safest way to do *that* is to use some kind of m-of-n hash, stored, someday, for even smaller bits of cash :-), in many places on the net at once. Obviously, we don't need small cash to store big assets, any more than we need big servers to distribute big files in BitTorrent, but it will only accelerate, if not complete, the process, when we get there. As I have said, too many times :-), about these things, transaction cost is always going to be the critical factor in any change from book-entries to chaumian-esque internet bearer transactions. And I believe that, hand-in-hand with increased security, reduced transaction cost is more a function of the collapsing cost and the ubiquity of distributed processing power and network access than anything else. So, anonymity is, in fact, orthogonal to market demand, primarily because it's an *effect*, and not a cause, of that demand. As we all do now with the current proctological state of book-entry finance, the anonymity of a proposed internet bearer transaction infrastructure will just be a "cost" that the market would have to bear. :-). To channel Schopenhauer a bit, like the emergence of industrialism and the abolition of slavery was before it, once anonymity becomes a "feature" of our transaction infrastructure, people will eventually declare it to be not only self-evident all along, but a moral *prerequisite* of any transaction as well. To put it another way, it's a pity for acrophobics that the fastest way to get anywhere these days is to fly, but it is still a physical fact, nonetheless. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP Desktop 9.0.2 (Build 2425) iQEVAwUBQ15P8cUCGwxmWcHhAQFpBQgAho3Tq+19xPsosyD0KLIfxrqUG2gQT9dM F0gOAr/+STjbT53JwqCm+ofucDYSwN3c339dCMTclPcI/5SPdWcrLg4/mtnfDqtd 8Pw6tTqtN9/qO01NyhmQmnYo070RC/cSmA3meAsHKrtUKoS1ypigX5ehHP2kNHS7 rPguFYeAuBDpfha9XCTg0qYEwJZvJUb+ph+kBs/fys1U+zzT4Dj3ibF6kMpSmrav rkhYnXUiFJ7DsMhwhVPmpwcQ4W2ghiqNFls+COULSAfTnWSZwLn6flLlM9YXQure F7Dnn4orOgAJFsnsEhk0skikb5XV+FlQrGTuWSHaM5mYVlpdQx5H+A== =aDV5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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25 Oct '05

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25 Oct '05

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[PracticalSecurity] Anonymity - great technology but hardly used
by R.A. Hettinga 24 Oct '05

24 Oct '05

--- begin forwarded text Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 23:31:34 +0200 To: practicalsecurity(a)hbarel.com From: Hagai Bar-El <info(a)hbarel.com> Subject: [PracticalSecurity] Anonymity - great technology but hardly used Sender: PracticalSecurity-bounces(a)hbarel.com Hello, I wrote a short essay about anonymity and pseudonymity being technologies that are well advanced but seldom used. Following are excerpts from the essay that can be found at: http://www.hbarel.com/Blog/entry0006.html In spite of our having the ability to establish anonymous surfing, have untraceable digital cash tokens, and carry out anonymous payments, we don't really use these abilities, at large. If you are not in the security business you are not even likely to be aware of these technical abilities. If I may take a shot at guessing the reason for the gap between what we know how to do and what we do, I would say it's due to the overall lack of interest of the stakeholders. Fact probably is, most people don't care that much about anonymity, and most of the ones who do, are not security geeks who appreciate the technology and thus trust it. So, we use what does not require mass adoption and do not use what does. Anonymous browsing is easy, because it does not need an expensive infrastructure that requires a viable business model behind it; fortunately. A few anonymity supporters run TOR servers on their already-existent machines, anonymity-aware users run TOR clients and proxy their browsers through them, and the anonymity need is met. The onion routing technology that TOR is based on is used; not too often, but is used. The problem starts with systems that require a complex infrastructure to run, such as anonymous payment systems. As much as some of us don't like to admit it, most consumers do not care about the credit card company compiling a profile of their money spending habits. Furthermore, of the ones who do, most are not security engineers and thus have no reason to trust anonymity schemes they don't see or feel intuitively (as one feels when paying with cash). The anonymous payment systems are left to be used primarily by the security-savvy guys who care; they do not form a mass market. I believe that for anonymity and pseudonymity technologies to survive they have to be applied to applications that require them by design, rather than to mass-market applications that can also do (cheaper) without. If anonymity mechanisms are deployed just to fulfill the wish of particular users then it may fail, because most users don't have that wish strong enough to pay for fulfilling it. An example for such an application (that requires anonymity by design) could be E-Voting, which, unfortunately, suffers from other difficulties. I am sure there are others, though. Regards, Hagai. _______________________________________________ PracticalSecurity mailing list PracticalSecurity(a)hbarel.com http://hbarel.com/mailman/listinfo/practicalsecurity_hbarel.com --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
by cyphrpunk 24 Oct '05

24 Oct '05

Let's take a look at Daniel Nagy's list of desirable features for an ecash system and see how simple, on-line Chaum ecash fares. > http://www.epointsystem.org/~nagydani/ICETE2005.pdf > > One of the reasons, in the author s opinion, is that payment systems > based on similar schemes lack some key characteristics of paper-based > cash, rendering them economically infeasible. Let us quickly enumerate > the most important properties of cash: > > 1. "Money doesn't smell." Cash payments are -- potentially -- > _anonymous_ and untraceable by third parties (including the issuer). This is of course the main selling point of Chaum's system, where it excels. I will point out that defining cash as merely "potentially" anonymous leaves a loophole whereby fully non-anonymous systems get to call themselves cash. This underplays the strength of Chaum's system. It is not just "potentially" anonymous, it has a strong degree of anonymity. > 2. Cash payments are final. After the fact, the paying party has no > means to reverse the payment. We call this property of cash > transactions _irreversibility_. Certainly Chaum ecash has this property. Because deposits are unlinkable to withdrawals, there is no way even in principle to reverse a transaction. > 3. Cash payments are _peer-to-peer_. There is no distinction between > merchants and customers; anyone can pay anyone. In particular, anybody > can receive cash payments without contracts with third parties. Again this is precisely how Chaum ecash works. Everyone can receive ecash and everyone can spend it. There is no distinction between buyers and vendors. Of course, transactions do need the aid of the issuer, but that is true of all online payment systems including Daniel's. > 4. Cash allows for "acts of faith" or _naive transactions_. Those who > are not familiar with all the antiforgery measures of a particular > banknote or do not have the necessary equipment to verify them, can > still transact with cash relying on the fact that what they do not > verify is nonetheless verifiable in principle. I have to admit, I don't understand this point, so I can't say to what extent Chaum ecash meets it. In most cases users will simply use their software to perform transactions and no familiarity is necessary with any antiforgery or other technical measures in the payment system. In this sense all users are "naive" and no one is expected to be a technical expert. Chaum ecash works just fine in this model. > 5. The amount of cash issued by the issuing authority is public > information that can be verified through an auditing process. This is the one aspect where Chaum ecash fails. It is a significant strength of Daniel Nagy's system that it allows public audits of the amount of cash outstanding. However note that if the ecash issuer stands ready to buy and sell ecash for "real money" then he has an incentive not to excessively inflate his currency as it would create liabilities which exceed his assets. Similarly, in a state of competition between multiple such ecash issuers, any currency which over-inflates will be at a disadvantage relative to others, as discussed in Dan Selgin's works on "free banking". Daniel Nagy also raised a related point about insider malfeasance, which is also a potential problem with Chaum ecash, but there do exist technologies such as hardware security modules which can protect keys in a highly secure manner and make sure they are used only via authorized protocols. Again, the operators of the ecash system have strong incentives to protect their keys against insider attacks. > The payment system proposed in (D. Chaum, 1988) focuses on the first > characteristic while partially or totally lacking all the others. In summary, I don't think this is true at all. At least the first three characteristics are met perfectly by Chaumian ecash, and possibly the fourth is met in practice as naive users can access the system without excessive complications. Only the fifth point, the ability for outsiders to monitor the amount of cash in circulation, is not satisfied. But even then, the ecash mint software, and procedures and controls followed by the issuer, could be designed to allow third party audits similarly to how paper money cash issuers might be audited today. There do exist technical proposals for ecash systems such as that from Sander and Ta-Shma which allow monitoring the amount of cash which has been issued and redeemed while retaining anonymity and unlinkability, but those are of questionable efficiency with current technology. Perhaps improved versions of such protocols could provide a payment system which would satisfy all of Daniel Nagy's desiderata while retaining the important feature of strong anonymity. CP

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