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Re: FCPUNX:PGP Key Escrow and Congress
by Eli Brandt 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bruce Schneier wrote: > From: "Barbara Simons" <simons(a)VNET.IBM.COM> > > Some of these are old arguments that we've been hearing for a while, > but some are newer. In particular, points 4 and 6 are difficult to > refute without getting into some technical details. Both points also > undercut the argument that a key recovery infrastructure potentially > weakens security. After all, the NSA thinks it's secure enough that it > can be used by the government. Non-technical point: the NSA (reportedly) has no intention of using GAK for classified information. They know that it weakens security. Do the privacy of the nation's data and the security of its information infrastructure deserve the same consideration as the Pentagon's "Confidential" memos? When you're planning to build in a single point of failure, this is a question you have to ask. -- Eli Brandt | eli+(a)cs.cmu.edu | http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/

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consensus on pgp? can we consolidate for action?
by Attila T. Hun 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- two of the things I was trying to do in my rant "GET WITH IT" on the issues may not have been clear: 1. as Tim says, let's make sure the OpenPGP standard (which in itself I did not address) is for PGP by itself, none of the peripheral issues or means of implementing GAK/CAK/CMR or the rest of the faloderol. now, if PGP, under market pressure wishes to allow hooks for each of the sins from the necessary to the unpardonable GAK --that is a business decision. 2. as far as the proposed SNMP "enforcer" --that is also a business consideration. however, the more PGP is willing to listen to some of our voices of reason[1], the more likely PGP is going to be in the rather enviable position which at least permits companies to make a choice. [1] by and large, despite the polarity of the arguments, this issue with PGP has been one of our memorably sane and polite debates with so many threads I may need to establish a separate text retrievable database! and it involves one of our most emotional issues: privacy. the second point is critical to our interests as well as for PGP's stand in the industry as a whole. if the SNMP enforcer product is carefully designed, it can not only provide warnings for each level of security but even more importantly, it does not necessarily need to provide GAK functionally in the standard product: browsers use plugins --so why not security level plugins for the "Bad Daddy" SNMP enforcer? essentially, the SNMP is a network connected, ie- communication system, supervisor to one or more "clients" scattered anywhere in the network which recognizes Bad Daddy. some of the PGP control functions are basic, but the rest should go on plugin, each relating to a different level of sin, forgivable to abominable. likewise, the local PGP crypto engine should be built around plugins. in this manner, anyone concerned with privacy can easily check for the presence of the dirty little black boxes, or hopefully PGP will display a panel of "features" (if you can ever call invasion of absolute privacy that). plugins today are a nobrainer. personally, I would not be willing to endorse a system which gives the SNMP Bad Daddy the ability to retrieve my secret keys and PGP should permit holding my secret keys on a flop of some type -in other words specify a separate location for the secring which we can not do now unless we move the rest of PGP environment (at least as far as I have read). however, if I am stupid enough to put them in a network accessible position for the superuser to scarf -- that's my problem. for use on network machines, I have a c program which is effectively a one time pad to make the ring accessible for as short a time as possible. I was writing a c code supervisor which took care of this task rather neatly with an out of place checksum passwd for the pad keys but have been sidetracked. I think we have all pretty much agreed on the necessity of separate signature, communication, and storage keys; Adam Back convinced me rather quickly (I was using only a separate storage key). there is less agreement on the effectiveness of GAKing the communications key since some form of DH session keys could be deployed and mail is transient; eg: GAK only serves the Fed in this case, which, of course, is what they want. I have not seen any further discussion on my suggestion to create a sendmail type daemon which implements DH between mail clients. this, of course, is on the presumption that DH is a wrapper for an already encrypted packet, I also agree with Adam's design on isolating the recovery aspect from possible GAK outreach. although I will cop a plea to sometimes in the back and forth Adam was grasping for something which was never going to be there <g> bottom line: I think the consensus has already formed that PGP is not going to be the pristine voice crying in the wilderness we all hoped to hear; now the issue is, how can we shape the product to have a) the most flexibility, realizing full well there will be brain dead organizations who will insist on ordering GAK; and b) have the fewest potholes unknowingly enabling some level of pseudoGAK, etc.] again, that means focusing the pressure on PGP to keep the basic crypto engine pristine, and do the dirty work in Bad Daddy --and use "visible" plugins. I can only presume PGP 5.5 is a fair ways down the pipe to delivery, complete with its Big Daddy SNMP enforcer; this will make it all the harder to influence changes as PGP, Inc. appears to have grown enough in size to contain too many non-caring v/v real privacy (I have nothing to hide type ignorance), and even more disappointing, not only technically ignorant, but distrustful of technology bureaucrats that arrive with corporate growth -focused on a) closing off the design cycle; b) stifling the debate over methods; c) shipping product (oh, hell, we can listen to their complaints and make changes later...); and, d) recover the vulture capital investors money. if the foregoing is true, I hope PRZ has the good sense to take a walk, selling his stock (to do otherwise would be complicit in the deception of PGP's reputation capital). regardless of the above, if we as a group, with reasonable consensus, are willing to make an assault on the powers that be at PGP, Inc. including whatever relevant public publicity to heat the fire, there may be action. hell, if we could afford it (or Tim feels _real_ generous <g>), buy a NYTimes page and all of us sign the "selling out our the constitution" with cute little graphics of children being tortured for their keys. another point to consider: if a majority of cypherpunks as a group are willing to "endorse" the pgp product, that may be an issue worth discussing with pgp. the only problem may be the level of the outside managers and bean counters which hold down the front offices, totally ignorant of anything but feeelthy money; or, more probable, some cp subset who have been the primary contributors historically on these issues, and I think most of us know who the primary thinkers are on this issue are. obviously we must be fully informed and our opinions assessed --even with divergences. in the end, I would like to think decisions could be settled by consensus, rather than Supreme Court style. <g> if we (and I say this as: "who's this we...").... despite the cynical contempt with which the mass media often displays to our attitudes, even resorting to name calling, reputation capital is not necessarily gained from main line press popularity, and certainly not from government "popularity" in this issue [particularly cogent to those of us "fortunate" to have received the IRS spam]. FWIW of course, I may be presumptuous PGP would even want to hear from us, let alone have any form of "Cypherpunks Inside" (yuk) label on the box! particularly with the round robin multi-teaming of the sleepless Jon Callas. this has been an attila rant... attila, out, one more time.... and: it aint over 'til the fat lady sings, vahalla burning! "attila" sig: 1024/C20B6905/23D0 FA7F 6A8F 6066 BCAF AE56 98C0 D7B0 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: latin1 Comment: No safety this side of the grave. Never was; never will be iQCVAwUBNEXXkb04kQrCC2kFAQHD1wQAiAMt4qP+GX0SXpF9XSuWbJc38tBWFD+U ErAn5iAhrWkzl1/HpkmxDb8qUS9fh1fTsUjTihTOCSU8RwvtkBuzkhMm02MXxxyK eJndaYgdpt+pluGYfrDIj9Vd3QDQVlJ0gf+o+CQ+pwQUJxYjmI/oELb0jBDnOwek EUl1MAszW90= =EulT -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Personal use crypto export
by Jim Gillogly 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm moved to repeat Matt Blaze's exercise of a couple of years ago, where he went through the rigamarole to get an Official Paper from Customs or State or whoever was in charge to take his laptop out of the country with crypto on it for his personal use overseas. His experiences finding the right person to talk to to get a form, then his inability to find a Customs official to look at it on the way back, were semi-hilarious. However, now that crypto exports in general have moved from ITAR to EAR and BXA is in charge of general crypto exports, I can't find out how to get the right form to take out a laptop with PGP (or anything else) on it. Can anybody give me a pointer to whoever thinks they're in charge of this stuff? Or have they given up on this phase? Thanks... -- Jim Gillogly 24 Winterfilth S.R. 1997, 18:38 12.19.4.10.12, 7 Eb 10 Yax, Fifth Lord of Night

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Security flaws introduced by "other readers" in CMR
by Tim May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:10 AM -0700 10/15/97, Eli Brandt wrote: >Non-technical point: the NSA (reportedly) has no intention of using >GAK for classified information. They know that it weakens security. > >Do the privacy of the nation's data and the security of its >information infrastructure deserve the same consideration as the >Pentagon's "Confidential" memos? When you're planning to build in a >single point of failure, this is a question you have to ask. This also applies to CMR as well. Whatever the perceived business reasons for CMR, the fact is that it introduces additional failure points. No longer will Alice and Bob be secure that at least there are no "other readers" in the channel between them (what they do with the plaintext after decryption is of course solvable by no technology). And, contrary to some of what we've been hearing, even corporations have continuing needs to know that a communication between Alice and Bob, within a corporation or crossing the corporate boundary, is not being listened to by any other person. Merger negotiations are one obvious example. (There are workarounds, I suppose. CMR could have a "override" switch to turn off the CMR to a second key. But who decides on this? Maybe a signed message from a suitable higher-up? Ah, the complexity. And executives wanting to bypass CMR can and will use other channels. So many of the goals of CMR are out of reach....) Instead of choosing an example where CMR apparently "works," such as Crispin's example of a corporation using CMR to detect (as if it weren't detectable in other ways!) that an employee is operating a porn ftp site from company computers, let me throw out some examples where CMR introduces flaws into a security system. * Andy Grove sends a PGP 5.5-encrypted message to T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, outlining the plans for Cypress to be acquired by Intel. However, Cypress has implemented CMR, and one of the "second readers" of Andy's message is the cryptically-named (no pun intended) "CCCP" (Corporate Crypto Compliance Police), staffed by security guards and personnel management droids. Major security flaw. (Sure, one can imagine various levels of "second readers." But I rather doubt that most of them will be _offices_, with changing staffs. While one could, for example, designate "Gordon Moore" to be the second reader of all files encrypted to Andy Grove's key, I rather doubt this is the way CMR will play out.) * Craig Livingstone, at whitehouse.gov, is the Key Compliance Officer for all communications entering or leaving the White House. Enough said? * Sheep-dipped cutouts in defense companies await their orders from DoD, but find that other readers in their companies are monitoring them. And so on. "Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." (Ben Franklin) What will of course happen is that these "security flaws" will be plugged by subterfuge. People will stop using the corporate mail for many such tasks, and will use nonwork accounts. With some loss of efficiency, and even more opportunities for leaks. (If firewalls are in place, on outside net connections, employees can just dial out. Or use Metricom Ricochet modems, if conditions are favorable for reception. Or wait until they go home.) In fact, CMR will mostly just mean bland, interdepartmental messages get "recovered." As I said before, this is a pretty crude way to implement a kind of corporate archiving of information. Truly sensitive stuff--stuff about takeovers, foreign production plans, new products, etc.--will be encrypted with channels having no nosy security guards or Corporate Crypto Compliance Police silently listening in. Which means we're back to square one. So why does PGP, Inc. bother? And why should OpenPGP squander efforts worrying about this? --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: FCPUNX:PGP Key Escrow and Congress
by goddesshera＠juno.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Wed, Oct 15, 1997 at 02:10:54PM -0400, Eli Brandt wrote: > Bruce Schneier wrote: > > From: "Barbara Simons" <simons(a)VNET.IBM.COM> > > > > Some of these are old arguments that we've been hearing for a while, > > but some are newer. In particular, points 4 and 6 are difficult to > > refute without getting into some technical details. Both points also > > undercut the argument that a key recovery infrastructure potentially > > weakens security. After all, the NSA thinks it's secure enough that it > > can be used by the government. > > Non-technical point: the NSA (reportedly) has no intention of using > GAK for classified information. They know that it weakens security. You have this wrong. In fact, NSA *supplies* keys for classified encryption equipment. They never told me whether they "escrowed" copies of the keys they supply -- what do you think? > Do the privacy of the nation's data and the security of its > information infrastructure deserve the same consideration as the > Pentagon's "Confidential" memos? When you're planning to build in a > single point of failure, this is a question you have to ask. In fact, it's much more complex. People with real classified data don't trust encryption at all, and they only use it if they absolutely have to. They, unlike many cypherpunks, remember well that there are other ways to get information besides running big computers, and if you have protections against those in place already, crypto doesn't buy much. But classified data isn't really interesting. Though by any measure there are huge amounts of it, it is dwarfed by the amount of government data that is not classified. To protect that data government agencies will use comercial crypto, and "key recovery" *will* be required in any commercial product purchased by a government agency. As use of crypto becomes commonplace business practice, the government market will be huge, and consequently, commercial products with key recovery *will* be prevelant. Any company that doesn't supply it will be relegated to niche markets, and, if legal winds blow the wrong way, eliminated. Crow This message was automatically remailed. The sender is unknown, unlogged, and nonreplyable. Send complaints and blocking requests to <goddesshera(a)juno.com>.

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Hello!
by Hangman37＠aol.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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New Mac68k snapshot available
by Hans Guenter Weigand 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The second snapshot for mac68k is available at the usual locations. This time the newest installation tools are included. The errata of the first snapshot have been fixed. Please report all errors, problems, failure, and (of course:) success to Theo de Raadt or at least to the appropriate mailing list. Thanks to Allen, Rodney and Thomas for the last-minute-help! hgw

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Re: FCPUNX:PGP Key Escrow and Congress
by goddesshera＠juno.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Wed, Oct 15, 1997 at 02:10:54PM -0400, Eli Brandt wrote: > Bruce Schneier wrote: > > From: "Barbara Simons" <simons(a)VNET.IBM.COM> > > > > Some of these are old arguments that we've been hearing for a while, > > but some are newer. In particular, points 4 and 6 are difficult to > > refute without getting into some technical details. Both points also > > undercut the argument that a key recovery infrastructure potentially > > weakens security. After all, the NSA thinks it's secure enough that it > > can be used by the government. > > Non-technical point: the NSA (reportedly) has no intention of using > GAK for classified information. They know that it weakens security. You have this wrong. In fact, NSA *supplies* keys for classified encryption equipment. They never told me whether they "escrowed" copies of the keys they supply -- what do you think? > Do the privacy of the nation's data and the security of its > information infrastructure deserve the same consideration as the > Pentagon's "Confidential" memos? When you're planning to build in a > single point of failure, this is a question you have to ask. In fact, it's much more complex. People with real classified data don't trust encryption at all, and they only use it if they absolutely have to. They, unlike many cypherpunks, remember well that there are other ways to get information besides running big computers, and if you have protections against those in place already, crypto doesn't buy much. But classified data isn't really interesting. Though by any measure there are huge amounts of it, it is dwarfed by the amount of government data that is not classified. To protect that data government agencies will use comercial crypto, and "key recovery" *will* be required in any commercial product purchased by a government agency. As use of crypto becomes commonplace business practice, the government market will be huge, and consequently, commercial products with key recovery *will* be prevelant. Any company that doesn't supply it will be relegated to niche markets, and, if legal winds blow the wrong way, eliminated. Crow This message was automatically remailed. The sender is unknown, unlogged, and nonreplyable. Send complaints and blocking requests to <goddesshera(a)juno.com>.

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No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim May <tcmay(a)got.net> writes: > This also applies to CMR as well. Whatever the perceived business reasons > for CMR, the fact is that it introduces additional failure points. No > longer will Alice and Bob be secure that at least there are no "other > readers" in the channel between them (what they do with the plaintext after > decryption is of course solvable by no technology). I thought that was the whole point of the PGP design. It makes the presence of third parties clear and visible to all participants. This seems to be the fundamental principle. PGP is designed to allow Alice and Bob to be informed if third party access is built in. Key escrow and re-encryption are inherently less visible forms of message access.

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Web Biz Universal Remove List Update
by postmaster＠thehitman.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dear Cypherpunks MAILING LIST, Thank you for adding your address to the Universal Remove list This email is simply a notification that you have been added to or updated in our Universal Remove list(s). As a reminder, you submitted the following details to: www.thehitman.com Cypherpunks MAILING LIST at cypherpunks(a)toad.com Responsible Direct Email DOES exist at Web Biz!

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