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Liechtenstein Prince Hands Power to Son Alois
by Bill Stewart 20 Aug '04

20 Aug '04

.... the article also has pictures http://apnews.myway.com//article/20040815/D84FU6700.html Liechtenstein Prince Hands Power to Son Aug 15, 6:26 PM (ET) By HARRY ROSENBAUM (AP) Prince Alois and Prince Hans-Adam II, right, of Liechtenstein toast each other in the park... VADUZ, Liechtenstein (AP) - Prince Hans-Adam II formally handed over day-to-day governing powers to his son Crown Prince Alois on Sunday - and then invited all 33,000 of Liechtenstein's people to a garden party. Hans-Adam, 59, retains overall authority over Liechtenstein, the tiny nation - one of Europe's smallest - wedged between Austria and Switzerland. After an open-air Mass, Alois gave his first speech as head of state. "Many people might ask ... 'Why should we change something that's working so well?'" said Alois, 36. But the country, which owes much of its wealth to being a financial center in the heart of Europe, is under pressure to crack down on global money laundering, he said. "The crisis in the financial center as well as the crisis in many European states show us how dangerous it can be if necessary, but perhaps unpleasant, reforms are not tackled promptly," Alois said. Like Switzerland, Liechtenstein has kept itself apart from Europe, remaining neutral in World War II and staying out of the European Union. Under constitutional changes made last year, the powers delegated to Alois include dismissing governments, vetoing new laws and casting the deciding vote on naming judges. The electorate has some checks on royal prerogative - it can force a referendum on any issue by gathering at least 1,500 signatures. But the Council of Europe, the continent's top human rights watchdog, has called last year's constitutional changes "a serious step backward" and says it is monitoring Liechtenstein's commitment to democracy because the prince has acquired such extensive powers. "Hans-Adam has been a provocateur," says Mario Frick, a former prime minister who opposed the prince's constitutional changes. "He liked to be in the middle of a quarrel. Many people hope Prince Alois ... will want to calm things down." Alois' spokeswoman Edith Schaedler told The Associated Press there were no plans to change Liechtenstein's foreign policy. "Prince Alois will focus initially more on internal affairs ... to secure pensions and health care for the long-term, and to ensure the best possible education," she said. The handover took place on the national holiday, celebrating Hans-Adam's father and coinciding with the Catholic feast of the Assumption.

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First quantum crypto bank transfer
by Andrew Thomas 20 Aug '04

20 Aug '04

Cryptography system goes underground (Aug 19) http://physicsweb.org/article/news/8/8/13 A group of scientists in Austria and Germany has installed an optical fibre quantum cryptography system under the streets of Vienna and used it to perform the first quantum secure bank wire transfer (A Poppe et al. 2004 Optics Express 12 3865). The quantum cryptography system consisted of a transmitter (Alice) at Vienna's City Hall and a receiver (Bob) at the headquarters of an Austrian bank. The sites were linked by 1.45 kilometres of single-mode optical fibre. -- Andrew G. Thomas

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Excerpts from Rudy Rucker's new Book
by Sunder 19 Aug '04

19 Aug '04

>From Rudy Rucker's new book: "The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul." (The interesting bits to which Tim fantasizes to.) As seen on: http://www.boingboing.net/text/guestbar.html <SNIP> Rant at Start of Chapter on Society I write this book during a dark time. America.s government is in the hands of criminals and morons. I.d like to break through to a radically different way of talking about society, to throw a bucket of ice-water in the face of the sleep-walking sheep who think that history is about presidents and kings. A baby filling a diaper is infinitely more significant than a congress placing a movement on the floor. <SNIP> Twin Towers Facts: The twin towers fell. The terrorists were Saudis. Bush invaded Iraq. .Ah,. someone might say, .if nobody wanted to fight, we.d be invaded. Look at the twin towers. The world.s not safe... And I would submit that the administration.s reaction to the twin towers was exactly the wrong one. Instead of jumping into the repetitive tit-for-tat class two Israelis-versus-Palestinians mode, the government should have gone class four. What would make men kill themselves while destroying a part of our lovely New York City? What system produced them? Isn.t there a way to get in and jolt it in some totally unexpected way, something more original than rocket fire vs. car bombs? Emigration Before virtually every American presidential election, I.ve heard people say, .If so and so wins, I.m leaving the country.. But they never do. The only time my friends eve remigrated was during the Viet Nam war, a time when the hive mind was undertaking the wholesale slaughter of a generation. But most of the time, for most of us, things aren.t bad enough to make emigration seem reasonable. If the election is stolen again in Fall, 2004, the answer could be armed revolution, not emigration. If the Bush faction tries to retain power, a significant number of people may feel compelled to go to D.C. and fight in the streets until the tyrant is deposed. However long it takes, however dearly it costs. Would it be worth it? Hopefully he'll lose the election by too great a margin to fudge. But for that to happen, we have to vote. The popular vote margin matters, if not in the electoral college, then in the hearts and minds of our oppressed populace. If the margin were big enough, the house of cards could collapse. <SNIP> ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. /|\ \|/ :They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country /\|/\ <--*-->:and our people, and neither do we." -G. W. Bush, 2004.08.05 \/|\/ /|\ : \|/ + v + : War is Peace, freedom is slavery, Bush is President. -------------------------------------------------------------------------

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hash attacks and hashcash (SHA1 partial preimage of 0^160)
by Adam Back 18 Aug '04

18 Aug '04

(This discussion from hashcash list is Cc'd to cryptography and cypherpunks.) Hashcash uses SHA1 and computes a partial pre-image of the all 0bit string (0^160). Following is a discussion of what the recent results from Joux, Wang et al, and Biham et al on SHA0, MD5, SHA1 etc might imply for hashcash SHA1 (and for hypothetical hashcash SHA0, MD5 etc by way of seeing what it will mean if SHA1 eventually suffers similar fate to SHA0). (All as far as I understand so far). Hashcash stresses the SHA1 function in a different direction than sigantures and MACs -- in assuming partial pre-images are hard (ie an k-bit partial pre-image should take about 2^k operations). (Partial 2nd pre-images are also "interesting" against hashcash -- see below). (As a security argument if partial pre-images say up to m<n bits were to turn out to be easy (take much less than 2^m work effort) then this could be used to find full pre-images with < 2^n effort, and full birthday collisions with < 2^(n/2) effort -- where n is the hash output size). Hashcash is computing partial preimages (of the all 0 bit string). The original hashcash (alpha format) computed partial 2nd-preimages as follows: H( time || resource ) =partial H( time || resource || random ) so the image is H( time || resource ), the pre-image is time || resource, and the (partial) 2nd pre-image is time || resource || random, and the images H( time || resource ) and H( time || resource || random ) partially match. Then several people independently (Hal Finney, Thomas Boschloo) suggested using a fixed image (0^160, ie all 0 bits) instead of the image H( time || resource ). (Hashcash version 0 and version 1 formats use the all 0 bits approach.) ie so one is looking for: H( time || resource || random ) =partial 0^160 As long as SHA1 is a good hash function this should be just as "fair" a string to find partial pre-images of. So with the last days news: as I read it the MD5 attack can find relatively arbitrary pairs of pre-images (which differ in a few well-chosen bits). As a birthday attack, or perhaps with some more work as a 2nd pre-image attack (2nd pre-image unclear). Birthday style attacks don't help against hashcash as the atacker has limited control over the H( time || resource ) in the alpha format and no control over the 0^160 in v0 and v1 format hashcash. So the way to apply a 2nd pre-image attack (if general 2nd pre-image is possible with the approach) is to find one partial hash collision the usual way (brute force), then re-use the work a bit and use it to get subsequent collisions. As far as hashcash is concerned these will be of approximately the same value as the original (and not full collisions) because they are against 0^n and the partial hash collision (which a full collision was found against) only has 0^k bits of leading 0s. So I think if hashcash were using SHA-0, the following attack should work: spend lots of work create eg a 50-bit hashcash token, use the SHA-0 attack (Wang et al attack has work order 2^40 hash operations) to find another (and maybe a small family of) hashcash stamps which are full collisions with the 40-bit partial collision we just created. I have not seen any indication if there is a family of collisions that come more cheaply after the initial 2^40 operations of the Wang et al approach. As long as the work to create each 2nd pre-image in the family that can be derived from one starting stamp is less than the value of the stamp, the spammer wins in some way. He can get some economies of scale (up to the family size) in creating multiple stamps for the same recipient. However this is not so interesting to the spammer he would sooner have economies of scale in sending to _everyone_ not DoSing one user. Also until we know the family size we do not know how bad even a DoS advantage there would be. For SHA-1 so far none of the above holds. If someone manages to extend the Biham attack to the full 80 rounds then the similar argument to the SHA-0 based hashcash would presumably hold. But this is based on what has been said so far about how the attacks work. Perhpas the same or related techniques now people have seen how they work could be adapted to provide partial pre-images more efficiently than brute force directly. Adam On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 02:03:09PM -0400, Jean-Luc Cooke wrote: > To be clear: > MD5 is borken. The whole thing: > http://www.md5crk.com/md5col.zip > SHA-0 is broken. The whole thing: > http://www.md5crk.com/sha0col > HAVAL-128 and RIPEMD-128 and MD4 are also broken using the same techniques. > > 56 round SHA-1 (out of a possible 80) is broken. > > The event of the pasat week cast heavy doubt on the current common techniques > used in hash algorithms. MD4 was the first to use this unblanced Fiezel > network. > > Wirlpool and Tiger are sometimes called "wide-trail" hashs. Different beasts > entirly. > > I suspect even SHA-256 and SHA-384/512 may be vulnerable to these attacks to > some extent. > > I expect there to be a flurry of new hashs proposed and adopted as > industry/government/international standards.

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Re: MD5 collisions?
by R. A. Hettinga 18 Aug '04

18 Aug '04

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Plonk this
by Major Variola (ret) 18 Aug '04

18 Aug '04

At 09:20 AM 8/18/04 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote: >>Hey, I have an idea! Why don't I write a script crossposting >>everything from sci.crypt to cypherpunks! How about a few dozen >>other "on-topic" newsgroups and mailing lists too? > >Go ahead. Are you going to reformat them for legibility first, if >necessary? Are you going to personally decide, in *your* opinion, >what's worth forwarding and what isn't? >In the meantime, remember that Declan's main purpose here is to sniff >around for stories. Which is fine, until he starts pretending he's >Tim May (I knew Tim May -- he wished I didn't -- and, Mr. McCullagh 1. Having a mainstream meme injector like DMcC is occasionally useful, RAH (Consider that DHS lameass document security made it to the big time and was reported here first.) 2. How the hell can we be reading about crossposting *and* Tim May and *not anywhere* in your flame see the word "plonk" ??? With all the implied discussion about consumer-end technological filtering vs. central censorship? 3. In all honesty I think Declan's partial-quote followed by a <snip> and a URL saves bandwidth and also does positively reinforce the folks feeding the authors of the partially quoted content. Of course, subscription-only (or even registration-only) services don't get such caring treatment, they get fair-used 'with prejudice'. And you are free to abuse street-performer-protocols of course, such is the nature of things; and they are free to post their words as .GIFs.

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Suggestion
by Thomas Shaddack 18 Aug '04

18 Aug '04

I hereby suggest to postpone the flamewars for the winter, when the weather brings the need of some spare waste heat. I thought we're above name-calling here. But perhaps it was just a quiet period and the current situation will rectify on its own in couple days, as it usually does. Besides, the recent development around the hash functions is quite important to know about.

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Re: MD5 collisions?
by R. A. Hettinga 18 Aug '04

18 Aug '04

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Re: SHA-1 rumors
by R. A. Hettinga 18 Aug '04

18 Aug '04

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crypto '04 rump webcast
by R. A. Hettinga 17 Aug '04

17 Aug '04

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