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Re: "Show me an example of terrorists using the Internet or crypto" (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 16:47:32 -0400 > From: Anonymous <anon(a)anon.efga.org> > Subject: Re: "Show me an example of terrorists using the Internet or crypto" > The only conclusion that can be drawn is that civilians, even armed > civilians with combat experience, are so overwhelmingly peace loving > that they will bend very far backwards to avoid trouble, even if it > means thousands of hours of work. Can the same be said of career > military or government people? A D E C L A R A T I O N By the REPRESENTATIVES of the U N I T E D S T A T E S O F A M E R I C A, In GENERAL CONGRESS assembled. [deleted material] Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. [deleted material] ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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RE: counter-intuitive -- spam is good for you. anonymous assholes are your friend
by Phillip Hallam-Baker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Thursday, October 02, 1997 11:54 AM, Attila T. Hun [SMTP:attila@hun.org] wrote: > if Phill is secure, what difference does it make if you assault > him? my guess is he is not secure, and probably has no clue how > to get from there to secure. Because when you ring the alarm bell on my system it is answered by law enforcement and it costs about $10,000 a time to deal with the issue. Setting off fire alarms costs real money. Incidentally the security line you are pushing is a crock. To get real security I believe you have to have feedback and monitoring. This is especially important in an institutional setting where you may not have complete control of critical infrastructure. For my application simply hoping the guys with the white hats find security holes before those in the black ones do is simply not enough. In any case I'm not as complacent as Attila seems to think the security model has been amply reviewed by the best in the field. Threatening to catch the malefactor and put him behind bars is a valuable additional security tool. The more bad guys there are behind bars the less time I have to spend worrying. Phill

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Re: Remailers and ecash (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 11:33:00 -0400 > From: Anonymous <anon(a)anon.efga.org> > Subject: Re: Remailers and ecash (fwd) > Jim Choate: > > >For the sender to chain from remailer to remailer to destination the > >destination has to be in the header info somewhere. Now in the most secure > >system each packet header will only contain the address of the next hop. When > >the next site gets it the packet contents are de-crypted (otherwise reading > >the chaining info is trivial) and the contents are uncovered to reveal another > >packet with the next hop header and another encrypted block. And on and on > >we go. > > > ><Question: Are there any remailer sets that impliment the encrypted nested > > packet system?> > > Jim Choate has been amazingly clueless throughout this discussion, but > this takes the cake. Does he really not know about encrypted nested > chaining? My God! Of course remailers work this way, Jim. They've > worked this way practically from the beginning. All remailers work this > way. No they don't, all remailers do not encrypt their outgoing as a matter of course (do any currently do it as a matter of course? I would bet not if I were a gambler). The remailer you used to send this didn't use encryption on its outgoing or else I wouldn't be able to read it. The last time I looked about a year ago the vast majority of remailers didn't encrypt their outgoing traffic as a matter of course, it required the user to do it (I suspect this is still true). Furthermore I specificaly used the word 'set' to mean a group of remailers acting in concert such that this encryption happened automaticaly - I know the answer already - No, there are no sets (ie a cooperative network) of remailers (Mixmaster operaters included) implimenting this unless the user goes to extreme and does it all themselves. As a matter of fact there appears to be little to no cooperation between remailer operators. There are no remailer key servers to manage the server and user keys so the user must contact each remailer and obtain the key which is itself open to traffic analysis, note that such first contacts by definition have to be in the clear. Hope that Mallet starts their analysis AFTER you get your keys or else. If this process can't occur automagicaly there is little commercial utility for the system - it's too cumbersome. > The mixmaster remailers are built around this idea, making each > packet a constant size and adding dummy packets as new ones are stripped > off, so outgoing messages look just like incoming ones. First off, the size of the packets in no way effects the succes of a traffic analysis, only a cryptanalysis of their contents. Traffic analysis looks at four things: the incoming packet header, the outgoing packet header, and the times of receipt and transmission. The idea behind latency is that if it is chosen correctly and the packet re-transmission falls outside the analysis window there is no way to correlate the incoming and outgoing traffic. From the analysis engines perspective the events are distinct and non-related. Simply re-ordering the packets at re-transmission time does nothing if I set the window larger than the time it takes to resend the original traffic and the cover traffic. Setting the analysis window to infinity also causes the analysis overhead to grow quickly though this means that re-ordering and latency are irrelevant. A party implimenting traffic analysis is probably not going to look at the contents until they have a clear understanding of the traffic flow between the surveiled parties. At that point it is cheaper to look at the involved parties and see if one of them has a weakness that can be exploited (ie offer immunity to a herion addict) over doing actual expensive cryptanalysis. If you can subvert a member you are in the classic man-in-the-middle position. When the Austin Cpunks looked at Mixmaster about 1.5 years ago for several months it became clear that as implimented currently Mixmaster can't easily support public remailer key servers or automated non-user-involved chaining and processing (encryption & decryption). Shure the packets look the same, but unless you as the sender go in and manage that material you are shit out of luck. The remailers can't do it themselves without user intervention, that's economicly not viable. > ><speculation: an encrypted chain could be made stronger if the next > > hop header depended on which key was used to decode it. > > In other words, remailer A's key will produce one next hop > > address while remailer B's key will send it elsewhere. This > > is a subset of the different plaintext - same cyphertext > > problem - a hard problem as I understand it. Find two > > distinct texts that encrypt with different keys to the > > same cyphertext> > > That won't help. There would be no point in doing this. I'd ask you > to explain, but that would just prolong the agony. It is actualy quite simple why you would want to do this. You could then in effect send the same packet (identical in every bit) to a set of remailers. Each remailer would then decode the packet and send it on. All but one would go to bogus addresses and the one remailer with the right key would get to resend to the next remailer(s). Plus none of the outgoing traffic would be to the same server, further complicating analysis. This also gives the user some control over how much cover traffic gets generated. However Mallet doesn't know which packets are which and therefore must follow every packet. This multiplies the number of hops in the traffic analysis that need to be analyzed. As mentioned in one of my previous posts, in this situation the complexity goes up by a power causing the required computing resources to trace the traffic to quickly become excessive. Sine this is so painful for you, I assume this is the end of this discussion. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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None (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 3 Oct 1997 04:05:48 +0200 (MET DST) > Subject: Re: Remailers and ecash > From: nobody(a)REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) > A pinging system can be set up to verify that all the remailers are > operating correctly. It will certaily tell you if the system is network aware, as to internal operation and its validity it says nothing. If you want to test it you must send each remailer in the network a message with a final destination of the source. If you don't get it back you know the remailer is not online. This is called a 'loopback'. > Thus forwarding within the remailer network is free, So as long as I only send traffic to other remailers the electricity and such are not charged? How does my local electric company measure this? If the remailer is turned on there is a cost. Unless you are getting charged by the packet the cost of operating is indipenant of the traffic until you have to increase your clogged pipe. Commercialy irrelevant approach. > insert new messages. This scheme is a little more flexible than attaching > ecash to each message because you can arrange any type of fee schedule you > like, such as a flat rate per month. But it doesn't pay for the cover traffic. It also short changes the man-in-the-middle remailers since they have to spend resources without getting recompensed. This would indicate that there is little financial motive to operate a remailer that deals only with other remailers. > There's also the reverse of this, where remailers accept from anyone, but > only send to other remailers. Thus you have to pay to get your messages > out of the remailer network. This is more restrictive because the payment > must be anonymous. So what keeps me from submitting message after message and never pulling them out? I guess you just keep paying the bills to pay for the increasing traffic and the need to increase your pipe to carry it. Commercialy irrelevant. Also, consider the exponential expansion from cover traffic. > Sign up with an ISP that offers alt.anonymous.messages. This one is a > no-brainer. (and profitable for the ISP) > > This results in a system where sending messages is essentially free (since > free remailers exist) but it costs money to receive them. So far it seems > to be successful, at least for those who pay a flat fee for usenet access. So what if I use a free-net or perhaps one of the free machines at the public library or at the local college? Or the system at work? ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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And with the money you save on rent, you can...
by The Same Guy 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

* A Washington Post report in March on prison corruption in Mexico revealed that drug traffickers supposedly under maximum security actually have "spacious rooms, cooks and maids, cellular phones, a gymnasium, a sauna, and manicured gardens where they host barbecues," among other things. And in May, the New York Times revealed that a federal jail in Brooklyn has been run as a "Mafia social club," where family business "sit-downs" featured smuggled-in meatballs, manicotti, vodka, and wine. And in May, imprisoned Gangster Disciple leader Larry Hoover was convicted in Chicago of running a vast prison drug operation in which he typically issued memos and gave orders by cellular phone while wearing $400 alligator boots and eating specially prepared food in his cell. To read these News of the Weird newspaper columns from the past six months, go to http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html (That site contains no graphics, no photos, no video clips, no audio. Just text. Deal with it.)

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Kitsch!
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- - From the "Unberable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera. Part Six, "The Grand March" Section 6 Sabina's initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear - in other words, Communist kitsch. The model of Communist kitsch is the ceremony called May Day. She had seen May Day parades during the time when people were still enthusiastic or still did their best to feign enthusiasnm. The women all wore red, white, adn blue blouses, and the public, looking on from balconies and windows, could make out various five-pointed stars, hearts, and letters when the marchers went into formation. Small brass bands accompanied the individual groups, keeping everyone in step. As a group approached the reviewing stand, even the most blase faces would beam with dazzling smiles, as if trying to prove they were properly joyful or, to be more precise, in proper agreement. Nor were they merely expressing political agreement with Communism; no, theirs was an agreement with being as such. The May Day ceremony drew its inspiration from the deep well of the categorical agreement with being. The unwritten, unsung motto of the parade was not "Long live Communism!" but "Long live life!" The power and cunning of Communist politics lay in the fact that it appropriated this slogan. For it was this idiotic tautology ("Long live life!") which attracted people indifferent to the theses of Communism to the Communist parade. Section 7 Ten years later (by which time she was living in America), a friend of some friends, an American senator, took Sabina for a drive in his gigantic car, his four children bouncing up and down in the back. The senator stopped the car in front of a stadium with an artificial skating rink, and the children jumped out and started running along the large expanse of grass surrounding it. Sitting behind the wheel and gazing dreamily after the four little bounding figures, he said to Sabina, "Just look at them." And describing a circle with his arm, a circle that was meant to take in stadium, grass, and children, he added, "Now, that's what I call happiness." Behind his words there was more than joy at seeing children run and grass grow; there was a deep understanding of the plight of a refugee from a Communist country where, the senator was convinced, no grass grew and no children ran. At that moment an image of the senator standing on a reviewing stand in a Prague square flashed through Sabina's mind. The smile on his face was the smile Communist statesmen beamed from the height of their reviewing stand to the identically smiling citizens in the parade below. Section 8 How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if, the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up? The senator had only one argument in his favor: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme. The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love. Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch. Section 9 And no one knows this better than politicians. Whenever a camera is in the offing, they immediately run to the nearest child, lift it in the air, kiss it on the cheek. Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements. Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say "totalitarian," what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree "Be fruitful and multiply." In this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse. Section 10 The decade immediately following the Second World War was a time of the most horrible Stalinist terror. It was the time when Tereza's father was arrested on some piddling charge and ten-year-old Tereza was thrown out of their flat. It was also the time when twenty-year-old Sabina was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. There, her professor of Marxism expounded on the following theory of socialist art: Soviet society had made such progress that the basic conflict was no longer between good and evil but between good and better. So shit (that is, whatever is essentially unacceptable) could exist only "on the other side" (in America, for instance), and only from there, from the outside, as something alien (a spy, for instance), could it penetrate the world of "good and better." And in fact, Soviet films, which flooded the cinemas of all Communist countries in that cruelest of times, were saturated with incredible innocence and chastity. The greatest conflict that could occur between two Russians was a lovers' misunderstanding: he thought she no longer loved him; she thought he no longer loved her. But in the final scene they would fall into each other's arms, tears of happiness trickling down their cheeks. The current conventional interpretation of these films is this: that they showed the Communist ideal, whereas Communist reality was worse. Sabina always rebelled against that interpretation. Whenever she imagined the world of Soviet kitsch becoming a reality, she felt a shiver run down her back. She would unhesitatingly prefer life in a real Communist regime with all its persecution and meat queues. Life in the real Communist world was still livable. In the world of the Communist ideal made real, in that world of grinning idiots, she would have nothing to say, she would die of horror within a week. The feeling Soviet kitsch evoked in Sabina strikes me as very much like the horror Tereza experienced in her dream of being marched around a swimming pool with a group of naked women and forced to sing cheerful songs with them while corpses floated just below the surface of the pool. Tereza could not address a single question, a single word, to any of the women; the only response she would have got was the next stanza of the current song. She could not even give any of them a secret wink; they would immediately have pointed her out to the man standing in the basket above the pool, and he would have shot her dead. Tereza's dream reveals the true function of kitsch: kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNDRQjT7jyGKQlFZpAQFY2wf+OVzGMbHNobPuwJERYJm5NWVUicscI+8I k+6GI7tHbj+g5XnKU8xCjB6k69AFTWTP9YOC4M6+WUsQx17BrbKd6rlZIQ95xh8o aleWPsdsESFgarGO6PV7496I8xl6BXixqiySHCkUlZ7YQXsTMFknGO/81ndrJqMU UgZLGIem6CMkc8qAOvwa6bd3N8qvv8ShBFnkYZ+8SFWC3I5EhCARLYjlijhVYqcK EPnBZVmKcpP6ojOxCWiKzARh1Z66y1Xf+GBdsRCYrHU7NoUfqqo9quMyNFX6eM7u AehRJZ7rOG30mhWcRfuCrT++uGKOFfKUsWLDJIzG/4mkEmhU9801GQ== =qoeS -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Traffic Analysis
by Robert A. Costner 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'm curious about traffic analysis capability. While I don't know the exact figures involved, I'd say that Cracker throws away about 10% of the messages it receives. Admittedly, these are probably not encrypted messages (I don't know. Humans do not get to read the messages.) Does this make traffic analysis more difficult? On the other side, if Cracker were to send out more messages that it takes in, or just replace these thrown away messages with random noise messages, perhaps encrypted, would this foil traffic analysis? Or suppose Redneck sent each nym an encrypted message each day, or more often? This would be a pure nonsense message just sent out to foil traffic analysis. Since the server generated the nonsense message internally, there would be no matching incoming message for Redneck. -- Robert Costner Phone: (770) 512-8746 Electronic Frontiers Georgia mailto:pooh@efga.org http://www.efga.org/ run PGP 5.0 for my public key

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Not that I'm a troublemaker...
by Tim W. May 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

THE CLASSIC MIDDLE NAME (continued) * In Alabama, murderer Billy Wayne Waldrop was executed in January, and the next month, murderer Dudley Wayne Kyzer was turned down for parole. Two weeks later, murderer Coleman Wayne Gray was executed in Virginia. In May, murderer Larry Wayne White was executed in Texas. In July, Maryland inmate Richard Wayne Willoughby was sentenced to life in prison for killing another inmate. And once again this April 19, the nation was reminded that the Oklahoma City bombing date commemorated not only the seige at Waco, but the 1995 Arkansas execution of murderer and militia hero Richard Wayne Snell. AUTHENTICITY: All news stories mentioned in News of the Weird are from news stories appearing in daily newspapers in the U. S. and Canada (or occasionally, reputable daily newspapers in other countries or other reputable magazines and journals). No so-called supermarket tabloid, and no story that was not intended to be "news," is ever the source of a News of the Weird story.

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Re: Remailer advertising (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Thu, 02 Oct 1997 10:31:37 -0400 > From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh(a)efga.org> > Subject: Re: Remailer advertising > this, and decided that users would be bothered by getting return email when > they send the remailer a message. We considered sending a return message > not with each message, but say only once per month, or only once every two > weeks. Feedback I got on this was that users would not like the remailer > acknowledging them. Of course not: - it provides even more non-covered traffic for Mallet to analyze - it proves that the remailer is keeping long-term records of its activity, further prompting Mallet to use rubber-hose crypto or a covert break-in to recover the data. A commercial remailers should keep no records and this means that each submission must include some form of token for immediate payment of access fees. Further, a secure remailer should NEVER send traffic to a subscriber as the result of anything other than normal traffic handling. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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Traffic Analysis (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Thu, 02 Oct 1997 23:28:10 -0400 > From: "Robert A. Costner" <pooh(a)efga.org> > Subject: Traffic Analysis > I'm curious about traffic analysis capability. While I don't know the > exact figures involved, I'd say that Cracker throws away about 10% of the > messages it receives. Admittedly, these are probably not encrypted > messages (I don't know. Humans do not get to read the messages.) Does > this make traffic analysis more difficult? Why/how does it decide to throw them away? Does the incoming produce cover traffic even if its thrown away? Traffic analysis generaly does not look at the contents of the packets, encrypted or not is irrelevant. I suspect it would lower the estimated ratio of cover traffic if nothing gets sent out. This would in general lower the cost to analyse the traffic. I would set it up to send bogus outgoing even if the message was dropped. That way the analysis would correlate the dropped message to the outgoing and produce a cover ratio closer to the actual value. Also remember to send n+1 bogus traffic to make up for the dropped outgoing. > Or suppose Redneck sent each nym an encrypted message each day, or more > often? By 'nym' you mean each subscribed address or to each address used in the outgoing? I would say it is bad to send to subscribers. It provides non-covered traffic that identifies your subscribers specificaly (really not a threat since Mallet already has their original incoming and therefore their source address) as well as demonstrating that you are keeping long-term traffic records. The long-term records represent a clear threat to the security and stability of the remailer. If you send out this cover traffic regularly then be shure to use some mechanism to select email addresses randomly or else Mallet will get a list of your bogus addresses and begins to filter them immediately. A commercial remailer should not keep records of its use. However, I suspect that eventualy remailers will be required to keep usage records by law. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage(a)ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|

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