- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Igor@home = Secret Squirrel
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi all, I am motivated to post this, something I would normaly not do, because of the issue of trust of moderators that has arisen lately. Igor and myself were in a discussion about number theory last nite. We reached a point of impass. Igor made the suggestion that we bring the discussion to cpunks. I requested that we drop the issue and specificaly not bring it to cpunks. My reasoning had several facets. First, the position that I was in is probably wrong. My motivation was to examine the methodology of dis-proof (which I was disappointed with). Also, it is not a serious issue with me and whether my particular view is right or wrong is irrelevant. Cypherpunks is not the place for truly technical discussions (as is apparent with even a cursory glance). Traffic on this list practicaly drowns my ability to filter it and more drivel I (and probably you) don't need. And finaly, the discussion was fine for a Saturday afternoon discussion, I don't have the interest or time to carry it out over days or weeks, I have to work for a living. Igor agreed to drop the issue and not to bring it to the list. However, this morning I find Secret Squirrel posting some questions which are taken practicaly verbatin from my exchange w/ Igor. Seemed like a truly improbable event. Take it for what it's worth. "An appeal to authority is an appeal to a human being just like yourself who does not have your best interests at heart. What makes you believe they are able to resolve your problems better than yourself?" Jim Choate CyberTects ravage(a)ssz.com

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Re: [STEGO] Sphere packings
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim C. May will fuck anything that moves, but he'd rather be fucking his own mother's dead body. \|/ (*,*) Tim C. May _m_-_m_

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Re: Wow.
by i.am.not.a.number＠best.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

i have no doubt that a certain amount of the noise on this list is the work of agents provocateurs ... and we should just live with it because its entire intent is a certain kind of denial-of-service attack. just ket used to taking extra time and using the delete function a lot. there's still a lot on the list you don't get elsewhere. ah..... if i only had my natural lang. agent running! At 12:58 AM 1/19/97 -0500, Amanda Walker wrote: >Well, in the week or two since resubscribing to Cypherpunks, I've seen a >trickle of postings about cryptography, security, and privacy, and a flood >of insults, harangues, fighting words, and so on. Some of this reads more >like a script from a Jerry Falwell TV spot than anything I recognize as >"Cypherpunk" traffic. > >I don't care who's offended whom. I'm not interested in participating in a >forum where the supposed topic is submerged underneath a lot of adolescent >alpha primate chest-beating. > >I'm off to look for a mailing list where people are ACTUALLY DISCUSSING >CRYPTOGRAPHY AND IMPLEMENTING CRYPTOSYSTEMS. This list may still be >called "cypherpunks", but it doesn't have much cypherpunk left in it, as >far as I can tell. > >Disgusted, > >Amanda Walker >Senior Software Engineer >InterCon Systems Corporation > >

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Re: One time pads and randomness?
by i.am.not.a.number＠best.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

as i have writ before, the sources i have read say that digits of the transcendentals are THOUGHT to be uniformly and 'randomly' distributed --- in quotes because there are many criteria for randomness and i don't mean to imply a specific one. however, this supposision is no stronger than a conjecture. has not been proven, AFAIK. At 02:06 PM 1/18/97 -0600, Igor Chudov @ home wrote: >By the way, did anyone try to run "all randomness tests" on a sequence >of digits of, say, decimal representation of "e"? > >igor > >Blake Coverett wrote: >> >> > I want to use a one time pad pased crypto system. I understand that the >> > randomness of the pad genorator is key to security(other than lossing the >> > keys). What I want to know is if I use a psuedo-RNG that maybe repeats its >> > self every 1000 characters and use it to only encrypt messagase that are >> > 100's of charaters long, will this be a major security risk? >> >> I'm afraid you've fallen into one of the standard traps. A PRNG can *not* >> make a OTP no matter how you use it. >> >> The total amount of entropy in a PRNG is the amount of entropy in the seed >> you use to key it. All the other bits are directly derived from that seed. >> >> A true OTP is completely secure from an information-theory point of view >> because every byte has a full eight bits of entropy. A PRNG can never >> have this. >> >> Having said all this, it is possible to make a good cipher from a PRNG. >> RC4, for example, is exactly that and the variable sized key is the >> seed for the PRNG. It is however very difficult to come up with a >> good algorithm for that cryptographically sound PRNG and you would >> be much further ahead to use an existing one rather that trying to >> roll your own. >> >> > Say I create a 1 million character one time pad that passes all of the >> > randomness tests. It is "truely random". I place it on two computers. Now >> > when these two computers want to send email computer "A" grabs a chunk of the >> > one time pad starting at a random point and encrypts it. It labels the email >> > with the random starting point and sends it to "B". There "B" moves to the >> > random point and begins decryption. During to process both computers mark >> > that section of the OTP used so that they don't retransmit with it. I realize >> > this has a limited amount of messages before it is used up. But would this be >> > secure? Any suggestions, complaints, big gapping holes I missed? >> >> I don't see anything wrong as such, but there is nothing to be gained either. >> If your random data is real OTP material there is no need to skip to a random >> byte within it, just start at the beginning and use it in sequence. If your random >> data is the output of a PRNG like the above then random starting point doesn't >> buy you much additional security because the entire set of keying material can >> be recreated from the seed. It may increase the work-factor of searching for >> the key, but it also imposes the practical problem of keeping all that keying >> material secure. >> >> More importantly don't confuse statistically random with cryptographically >> random. Just because a bunch of bits passes all the randomness test >> you can think of doesn't mean it contains 100% entropy. Consider the >> digits of an irrational number like sqrt(2) or pi, the digits appear statistically >> random but they can be recreated from just a tiny bit of knowledge. >> >> A good litmus test is to ask yourself if there is any way you can >> reproduce those bits. If there is, they aren't a one time pad. >> (Of course even if you can't it doesn't mean they are good. :-) >> >> regards, >> -Blake >> > > > > - Igor. > >

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Re: I beg you, PLEASE prove that 0.123456789101112131415 is IRRATIONAL
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:20 PM 1/19/1997, Sir Robin of Locksley wrote: >>Is it possible to prove that number >>0.1234567891011121314151617181920... iz irrational? > >Most definately. All you need to do is prove that the set of this >number is uncountable, ergo is irrational. If you have friend who >have done math in real analysis they can explain more. The set of this number contains one member - the number. Therefore, this is a countable set. A rational number is a number which can be described as a fraction in which the numerator and the denominator are integers. Jim Choate implied that "infinity" is an integer. This is not correct. The set of integers is said to be infinite. Infiniteness is a property of the set, not a member of the set. All rational numbers are expressible in a decimal form of finite length or in a decimal form which ends in a repeatable string of digits. (Consider the process by which each successive digit is found. It is a fraction of the denominator and some remainder with a zero added. The remainder is less than the denominator multiplied by the base, 10 in this case. When a remainder repeats, the state of the algorithm repeats, and its output will therefore be repeated. Since the remainder is bounded, the algorithm must repeat a state. Note that this holds regardless of the base used.) If our number, 0.1234..., does not repeat then it is not rational. Let's show that it does not repeat. If it repeats, there is a sequence of digits which repeats indefinitely. Such a sequence must be longer than the longest integer. (Because if it was part of an integer, the other parts of the integer would not always be the same and it couldn't repeat.) But, there is no longest integer. Therefore there is no repeating sequence. Therefore our number, 0.1234..., is not a rational number. Math Man

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Numbers we cannot talk about
by lucifer＠dhp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 10:48 PM 1/18/1997, Secret Squirrel wrote: >Is it REALLY true that there are real numbers that cannot be >generated by any algorithm? Some guy said that since the set of >algorithms is countable, but the set of real numbers is more than >countable, there must be some numbers for which there is no >algorithms that generate them. There are sets of real numbers whose existence we can prove, but which we cannot otherwise describe. This is more extreme than being "generated by an algorithm". We can't even tell somebody which numbers to generate! (I take "to generate" here to mean "to compute a decimal approximation.") The set of real numbers is uncountable as is the set of subsets of the real numbers. Yet, we have only countably infinite ways to describe sets of numbers. All sets of numbers which we can describe can be described with a finite set of symbols. (Human beings are unable to distinguish between an infinite number of states.) The set of combinations of this finite set is infinite, but countable. "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, closing line of "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" See the early pages of "Godel's Incompleteness Theorems" by Raymond M. Smullyan for a better exposition. Math Man

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KeyKOS related system lecture at Stanford
by Bill Frantz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I received the following from Jonathan. Those of you who are interested in KeyKOS should know that his system, EROS, is an architectural descendent of KeyKOS. --------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 19 Jan 1997 15:13:11 -0500 From: "Jonathan S. Shapiro" <shap(a)eros.cis.upenn.edu> To: ... Subject: Talk info NOTE TIME CORRECTION I'll be giving a talk on Wednesday at Stanford in the EE380 seminar. Details on the seminar can be found at http://www-leland.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ under 'winter 1996'. The location and time are: Wednesday at 4:15pm Hewlett Packard Auditorium (Room B1) Gates Computer Science Building Stanford Univeristy The basic structure of the talk will be: explain what active networking means, and why confinement and fault isolation are required. (the problem) identify the properties needed for confinement and fault isolation proofs, what capabilities are, and why non-capability systems do not have these properties (why we need them) describe the objects named in EROS/KeyKOS, and why these are the right choices for high performance (how to get performance) show how this system might be used to construct an active networking router or endpoint. (how to use them for this problem) I'm still working on the talk, so the order may get rearranged. Hope to some or all of you there. Jonathan

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Re: Monitoring the monitors [Was: Gilmore and Sandfart suck big dicks]
by Dave Hayes 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> In other words, can I separate the censored email without having to > have two accounts? You can write a program to read both the censored and uncensored email, and do a diff. You wouldn't have to see it, and it could be done so that a "fake" address subscribes to the censored list. Maybe I should offer this as a service to the uncensored list? ;-) ------ Dave Hayes - Altadena CA, USA - dave(a)jetcafe.org Freedom Knight of Usenet - http://www.jetcafe.org/~dave/usenet None should say "I can trust" or "I cannot trust" until they are the master of the option of trusting or not trusting.

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infinity & set membership
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi all, "The least upper bound of a set of real numbers is often called the supremum, the greatest lower bound its infimum. In general the supremum and infimum of a set ARE MEMBERS OF THE SET or at least LIMITS OF SEQUENCES OF MEMBERS OF THE SET." [capitalization is mine] In this case the suprenum is infinity. Introduction to Calculus and Analysis Courant and John Vol. 1, pp. 97, Section e. 1965 Edition Library of Congress: 65-16403 Jim Choate CyberTects ravage(a)ssz.com

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'Monster' numbers
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hi, In reference to numbers which you can't describe, if you examine the work they are ALL in the Complex domain, none of them are Real's. Complex numbers deal with areas, not with lengths. If there existed a Real for which we could not describe this would imply that we could not draw a line of that length. Something which is clearly contrary to the axiomatic assumptions of lines and their construction (ie points have no dimension, only position, and lines are infinite sequences of points). A clear Complex example of a 'monster' is Sierpenski's Gasket. It fills an area but has no measurable surface area. Jim Choate CyberTects ravage(a)ssz.com

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