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Command confirmation request (057CCA)
by L-Soft list server at CCI (1.8b) 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Your command: SIGNOFF NEWSLETTER has been received. For security reasons, you are now required to reply to this message, as explained below, to confirm the execution of your command. If you have problems with this procedure, you can contact the list owner directly (NEWSLETTER-request(a)MAIL.COMPCURR.COM) and ask to be manually removed from the list. To confirm the execution of your command, simply reply to the present message and type "ok" (without the quotes) as the text of your message. Just the word "ok" - do not retype the command. This procedure will work with any mail program that fully conforms to the Internet standards for electronic mail. If you receive an error message, try sending a new message to LISTSERV(a)MAIL.COMPCURR.COM (without using the "reply" function - this is very important) and type "ok 057CCA" as the text of your message. Finally, your command will be cancelled automatically if you do not confirm it within 48h. After that time, you must start over and resend the command to get a new confirmation code. If you change your mind and decide that you do NOT want to confirm the command, simply discard the present message and let the command expire on its own.

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[POLITICS] Re: Members of Parliament Problem
by ph＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 9:32 AM 11/15/1996, Adam Shostack wrote: > Most of the usual arguments about disallowing anonymity > actually apply to a Parliment. There is a responsibility involved in > the execution of power. > This is not to condone attacking children, or killing ones > political opponents. For an MP to imply that something he wants to > say will likely get him/his kids killed probably means that he wants > to use the power of the state in some way likely to quite upset at > least a few people. If this is the case, then allowing him to > anonymously, and without responsibility, direct the power of the state > is congruent to tyranny. Please allow me to respectfully disagree. Let's consider another issue: recreational drugs. We can be pretty sure that a sizeable number of Congressmen use marijuana and see no reason for it to be illegal. Yet, to speak about it would be understood to be political suicide with possible legal repercussions. Were Congressmen able to speak anonymously, such an issue could be discussed. It is more likely that good policy results from discussion. Or, consider homosexuality. We can be pretty sure that a significant number of Congressmen are homosexual. Yet, to discuss it would be, for many, political suicide. Many other Congressmen support anti-discrimination laws for homosexuals, but are afraid to discuss it. Or, consider spending bills. The Congress is spending our money for us faster than they can collect it. Nobody seems to really want this to be happening, but they can't help it. Discussion of the issue may require alienating certain constituents or stating unpleasant truths which would affect a Congressman's relationship with other Congressmen. Speaking anonymously would allow Congressmen to simply speak the truth without fear of retribution, just like anyone else. If a small group of people are upset enough to kill somebody for what they say, I have difficulty immediately describing them as oppressed. I am making no statement regarding any particular group. What is more, I believe that political leaders should be subjected to the same laws as everyone else. Like many on this list, I do not believe the citizens have any sort of responsibility to speak non-anonymously. Peter Hendrickson ph(a)netcom.com

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Re: Members of Parliament Problem
by ph＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 9:32 AM 11/15/1996, Adam Shostack wrote: > To answer the technical end of your question, you could build > a DC net where joining required a signed key, or build a mix which > will only accept messages signed by a member of the group. If the > mixmasters all agree to only accept messages signed by the group, then > each mixmaster can be made a member of the group, and sign its > outbound messages as being recieved with a signature, allowing > anonymous chaining. I'll have to research this. Thank you for the idea. What I would really like to see is a way in which the "shields" are not required to participate at all, other than by publishing their public key. If terrorists are involved, they may not wish to be on the suspect list. I've been toying with schemes that multiply the Ns from everybody's public key to create a new semi-anonymous public key. The only problem is that in each case either identity is revealed or the person seeking semi-anonymously reveals their secret key. So, I am not quite there. ;-) Peter Hendrickson ph(a)netcom.com

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Playing Cards
by ph＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(My apologies to those who are seeing this twice. I sent it yesterday but it does not seem to have made it through.) A number of us have been concerned about how PGP generates entropy. Striking the keyboard beats using time as a source of random numbers, but the degree of entropy is not well understood. Are there machines where - for some reason - the keyboard strikes fall into some sort of pattern? And that's just when you are generating your public/private key pair. What happens when you are just generating 128-bit keys for individual messages? Where is the entropy coming from? I don't understand completely, but somehow PGP collects entropy from the system and then runs it into IDEA and then uses the numbers from the output. When the program is not running, a pool of this data is kept in randseed.bin. We already know it's a problem because it is hard to understand what it is even doing, much less determine if it is consistent with sound engineering practice. This problem is certainly not confined to PGP. A lot of people have worked hard to make computers deterministic. What do you do when you need entropy? Yes, you can buy a chip which generates random numbers at nearly any bandwidth you like. But, right there you have a problem. How do you know the output is really random? The answer is that you do not. Playing cards are a nice source of randomness because they are widely available and their behavior has been under study for a long time by people with strong financial reasons for finding flaws. I slightly prefer cards to dice because dice may be slightly predictable or even loaded. It would be nice if cryptography software would allow you to enter randomly selected playing cards from time to time to increase the entropy of keys. Careful people (Black Unicorn?) would enter the cards prior to sending each message. A well shuffled deck of 54 cards has about 237 bits of entropy. This is easy to use: the program asks the order of the cards, converts this to a string, and runs it through a one-way hash. (Entering the cards is a bit of a nuisance. Is there an easy way to have them read automatically?) The Economist reports that seven riffle shuffles bring a deck "very close to being random". ("Science and Technology: How to win at poker and other science lessons" The Economist, October 12, 1996, pp:88-89.) Cards have other uses. You can assign a (large) number to each configuration of the deck. This allows you to use a deck of cards to represent numbers. That is certainly convenient for generating large random numbers. I have included some Lisp code below which converts both ways between shuffled decks of cards and unique numbers. This could be quite useful for strong steganography. Let's say you have 230 bits you want to deliver across a border. It is unlikely that anybody will study a deck of cards very carefully. Of course, you need not limit yourself to cards. Any set of objects which can be ordered will do the trick. For instance, a shelf with 100 books may be used to store 524 bits. One thousand books may store 8529 bits. How many bits can you store in that database which is in apparently random order? You can hide your data in two decks. There is a natural order to cards: pick your favorite ordering of the suits and then do the rest numerically. However, if you shuffle one deck of cards and lay them in a row, you could use that ordering to define the mapping of the second deck of cards to numbers. The Enemy may seize one deck or the other, but without both, the number will not be revealed. While I hesitate to use the term, this is a one-time pad. The first deck can be thought of as the key and the second deck is the message. How the Lisp Code Works ----------------------- Let's use as an example a deck of five cards numbered from 0 to 4. There are 5! = 120 combinations of these cards. We can think of each card as a "digit" in a slightly odd numbering system. In decimal arithmetic, we have columns whose value increments by 10^0, 10^1, 10^2, etc. In our numbering system of five cards, columns increment by 0, 1, 2!, 3!, and 4!. Consider the card sequence of (4 3 2 1 0). We wish to compute the value stored in the leftmost column. Since there are five choices of cards, this divides the number of possible combinations into five pieces of 4! combinations each. So, in this example, the value in the first column will be 4*4! = 96. This leaves us with cards (3 2 1 0). We can look at this as a smaller number represented by a deck of four cards. This smaller number is added later to the larger number to get the final total number for our original deck. The first column of our smaller deck is 3*3! = 18. The next one is 2*2! = 4, the one after that is 1*1! = 1, and the last card never matters because there is only one card to choose (0*0!). The total is 96 + 18 + 4 + 1 = 119. This is the highest number we can represent with a deck of five cards. Consider the card sequence (0 1 2 3 4). This is the smallest value we can represent, 0. The value of the first column is 0*4! = 0. This leaves us with (1 2 3 4). But what has happened here? We can't treat this as a normal smaller deck because it is missing a card. Besides, 1*1! = 1, which is not the zero we expected. We must renumber the cards so that it is a reasonable deck again. The sequence of cards we should really be looking at is (0 1 2 3). This means the value of the next column should be 0*3!. Then we renumber the deck and continue until we run out of cards. The answer is 0. For an exercise, what is the value of (4 2 1 3 0)? (Answer at end.) Now, how do we construct the deck given only the number defining its combination? The code below is recursive. It computes the first digit and then calls itself to recursively find the remaining cards. The cards returned are always an internally consistent deck of cards; that is, if sorted they will be consecutively numbered starting from 0. When a new card is inserted, the cards have to be renumbered to accomodate the new one by incrementing every card which has the same or greater face value as the card being inserted. (Insertion is slightly misleading here because you place the card at the head of the list. Insertion refers to the conceptual process of inserting the card into the pre-existing order and adjusting the other values to allow it.) In other languages, this might be a little more complicated to implement. Lisp provides a nice bignum package and also (I believe) a compiler which knows how to convert the recursive routines below into iterative routines. This code performs quite well even on a small slow machine. ;;;-*- Mode: Lisp; Package: COMMON-LISP-USER -*- (defun compute-combination-number (cards) "Converts list of numbered cards into a unique number representing their order." (cond ((> (length cards) 1) (+ (* (car cards) (factorial (1- (length cards)))) (compute-combination-number (renumber-cards cards)))) (t 0))) (defun renumber-cards (cards) "Removes lead card from deck, decrements higher numbered cards by one so there are no gaps." (let ((renumbered-cards-reversed) (lead-card (car cards))) (dolist (card (cdr cards)) (cond ((> card lead-card) (push (1- card) renumbered-cards-reversed)) (t (push card renumbered-cards-reversed)))) (reverse renumbered-cards-reversed))) (defun reconstruct-deck (combination-number deck-size) "Converts unique number representing order of a deck of cards and returns a list of numbers representing the deck." (cond ((not (<= deck-size 1)) (multiple-value-bind (digit remaining-combination-number) (floor combination-number (factorial (1- deck-size))) (insert-card digit (reconstruct-deck remaining-combination-number (1- deck-size))))) (t (list 0)))) (defun insert-card (new-card card-list) "Inserts a card into a deck, increasing by one every card which is of higher or equal number so there are no duplicate cards." (let ((new-deck-reversed)) (push new-card new-deck-reversed) (dolist (card card-list) (cond ((>= card new-card) (push (1+ card) new-deck-reversed)) (t (push card new-deck-reversed)))) (reverse new-deck-reversed))) (defun factorial (number) (cond ((or (= number 1) (= number 0)) 1) (t (* number (factorial (1- number)))))) ;;; Testing routines (defun shuffle-deck (deck-size) (randomize-list (build-card-list deck-size))) (defun randomize-list (some-list) (do ((randomized-list nil)) ((null some-list) randomized-list) (let ((item-number (random (length some-list)))) (push (elt some-list item-number) randomized-list) (setf some-list (remove (elt some-list item-number) some-list))))) (defun build-card-list (deck-size) "Returns a list of consecutive numbers representing a deck of cards." (do ((card-list nil) (count 0 (1+ count))) ((= deck-size count) card-list) (push count card-list))) (defun identicalp (list-one list-two) "Returns non-nil if the two lists are identical." (eval (cons 'and (map 'list #'equal list-one list-two)))) (defun exhaustively-test-card-combinations (deck-size) "Verifies that the correct deck is reconstructed from the unique order number for every combination of a small deck of cards." (let ((combinations (factorial deck-size))) (do ((combo-number 0 (1+ combo-number))) ((= combinations combo-number) t) (cond ((not (= (compute-combination-number (reconstruct-deck combo-number deck-size)) combo-number)) (warn "Test failed for ~D" combo-number)))))) (defun test-one-deck (deck-size) "Shuffles a deck of cards and verifies that it may be reconstructed from the unique number representing its order." (let* ((original-deck (shuffle-deck deck-size)) (reconstructed-deck (reconstruct-deck (compute-combination-number original-deck) deck-size))) (cond ((not (identicalp original-deck reconstructed-deck)) (warn "Test failed for ~A" original-deck))))) (defun test-many-decks (trials max-deck-size) "Shuffles trials decks of maximum size max-deck-size and verifies that their order may be reconstructed from the unique number we compute." (do ((trial-number 0 (1+ trial-number))) ((= trials trial-number) t) (test-one-deck (1+ (random max-deck-size))))) (defun complete-combination-test () "Good test of all the card combination routines." (format t "Performing exhaustive test.~%") (exhaustively-test-card-combinations 6) (format t "Performing random test on large decks.~%") (test-many-decks 10 100)) ;; (Exercise Answer: (4 2 1 3 0) = 111)

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ABI_tch
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

11-15-96. WaJo: "History of Software Begins With the Work Of Some Brainy Women" The Army called the women "computers." One day word spread that the brightest "computers" were needed to work on a new machine called the Eniac, setting dozens of dials and plugging a ganglia of heavy black cables into the face of the machine, a different configuration for every problem -- "programming," they came to call it. "The Eniac," says one woman, now 71, "was a son of a bitch to program." ----- http://jya.com/abitch.txt (6 kb) ABI_tch

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Re: Cryptoanarchy in the field
by nobody＠cypherpunks.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 7:35 PM 11/14/1996, Sandy Sandfort wrote: >On Thu, 14 Nov 1996, yet another John Anonymous MacDonald wrote: ^^^^^^^^^^^ Problem?

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Copyright violations
by alzheimer＠juno.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Financial Times: Tuesday, November 9, 1996 Visa Set to Test 'Electronic Purse' By George Graham Visa, the international payments card consortium, has picked Leeds for a trial next year of its electronic purse, a plastic card with an embedded computer chip which can be loaded with cash and used for small purchases. The Visa Cash card was launched last year in the US and widely promoted this summer in Atlanta during the Olympic Games. Other pilots have been launched in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Spain. The card will clash directly with the UK-developed Mondex card, another electronic purse about to be taken over by MasterCard. Mondex is currently on trial in Swindon, and at the universities of Exeter and York, and a Hong Kong trial was launched this week. Visa Cash will be launched by Abbey National, Barclays Bank, the Co-operative Bank, Halifax Building Society, Lloyds TSB and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Visa said it did not expect banks to charge customers for the empty card during the pilot. It hopes that 2,000-3,000 merchants will accept the card. Electronic purses are designed to act as a substitute for cash for regular purchases such as newspapers or bus tickets. Because the money is already loaded on the card, a shop can accept it immediately without a signature or a personal identification number, and without a telephone call to the bank's computer for authorisation. That makes them economical for much smaller transactions than a credit or debit card would be used for. But ordinary bank cards will soon also contain a computer chip. The Association for Payment Clearing Services, which runs the UK's payment systems, plans to start chip card trials next October in Bristol, Edinburgh and Northampton. Banks could start replacing the UK's 90m magnetic strip cards with chip cards by next summer. The initial purpose is to produce a card that is harder to counterfeit than today's magnetic strip cards. But extra security features such as electronic signature recognition or even biometric keys -- retina scans or palm prints -- could also be loaded on to the chip. Plastic card fraud losses have halved in the last four years to #83.3m last year, and many banks now doubt whether chip cards will cut fraud by enough to justify their extra cost. But bankers are also intrigued by the potential for using the chip to add extra services to their payment cards. American Banker: Wednesday, November 13, 1996 Mellon Starts Internet-Based Corporate Service By STEVEN MARJANOVIC Mellon Bank Corp. has launched an Internet-based electronic commerce service for its corporate customers. The service, which uses encryption and authentication software from Premenos Technology Corp. of Concord, Calif., lets corporate customers send payments and related information to the bank over the Internet using standard electronic data interchange formats. The deal is a new example of how banks are slowly growing more confident about the security of sending sensitive payment and business information over the public network. Mellon says it is confident it can conduct secure transactions over the open medium after a six-month "testing" phase of Premenos' security features. The goal of the pilot was to "try to kill the software," by cracking its public key-private key data encryption features, said Mauro DeFelice, manager of security and technical services at Pittsburgh-based Mellon. "We wanted to make sure we knew what our risk was," he said. A rising number of banks are looking to use the Internet as a channel for corporate banking transactions. The attraction, according to Lawrence Forman, cash management analyst at Ernst & Young, is that the Internet is much cheaper than alternatives, like the automated clearing house network or value-added private networks. But he said not all banks are comfortable with the Internet yet. Further, he questioned whether Internet security issues have been adequately addressed, and noted that many institutions, like Citicorp, remained "very wary of it." Encryption measures are still relatively new technologies, Mr. Foreman noted, and "as volume picks up, the incentive for criminals to break these algorithms will grow," he said. Several banks send and receive EDI payment transmissions over the Internet, including BankAmerica Corp., and Banc One Corp. Chase Manhattan Corp. recently struck a deal with Premenos to conduct EDI transactions with Diamond Shamrock Inc., an oil refinery based in San Antonio, Texas. Mellon's first customer for its new service is Bell Atlantic Corp. Mellon now issues as many as 10,000 payment and payment-related transmissions daily. The bank receives files via the Internet, processes them with its EDI translation system, and initiates ACH transactions, Fed Wire electronic funds transfers, or issues checks. Mellon has offered customers EDI services using payment formats found on the ACH network for five years. The Internet's advantage, aside from its ubiquity, is cheaper transmission rates. The deal between Mellon and Premenos is mutually beneficial. Mr. DeFelice said the bank, which licensed Premenos' software at a discount, can offer competitive EDI services to a larger market of business customers. Premenos gets access to Mellon's extensive corporate customer base. Bell Atlantic at one point wanted to develop EDI software for the Internet with Mellon. But it scrapped those plans, opting instead to use software Premenos had already developed. Financial Times: Tuesday, November 12, 1996 US Lawyers Turn to Fraud-Busting In murder mysteries, getting rid of the body is the biggest problem. Fraudsters face a different dilemma: they need to lay their hands on the spoils once the hue and cry has calmed. Two American lawyers have set up a company to prevent them doing just that. Mr Irving Cohen and Mr Martin Kennedy believe there are enormous opportunities for recovering money taken illegally. "The US Treasury has estimated that $ 500bn of off-shore funds are assets protected from creditors," says Mr Kennedy, who has worked on bad debt recovery with banks such as CIBC and Bank of Tokyo. The reason the money is not recovered, he says, is because "there is no understanding that deliberately hidden assets can be recovered." Interclaim plans to take advantage of that with a form of global factoring. It is looking for debts worth at least $ 5m, and with an average value of $ 20m. "This is a completely new kind of company," Mr Kennedy says, "but it is going to open up a field where there is going to be competition in five to 10 years." The reasons large sums lie unrecovered are a combination of financial services regulations and psychology. A bank faced with a probable bad debt is legally required to make provisions, but that act moves the debt from a profit centre to the bank's recovery or special loans department. More crucially, once the provision has been made, the bank and its shareholders have already accepted the loss; it is written into the accounts and the impetus to pursue it is lost. "Institutions have lost their faith in traditional methods of recovery," Mr Kennedy say. According to KPMG, the accountants, such methods usually recover 2-4 per cent of the debt; Interclaim believes its recovery rates will be closer to 20 per cent. Part of that success will come from its "find, freeze and settle" philosophy. It aims to find the money and freeze the assets, thus immobilising the fraudster and bringing him to the settle ment table quickly. "These individuals are not interested in complying with the rule of law," Mr Irving says. "And we are not interested in grinding through the legislation for five or 10 years. If we find someone whose 12-year-old daughter has $ 10m in her bank account, we can be sure she didn't get that from a paper round." The philosophy relies on an understanding of the fraudster and his assumptions. He is, says Mr Kennedy, not only cunning but arrogant; he regards his victims with derision. But criminals are also usually pragmatic. So when faced with an adversary who outwits them, they capitulate quickly. Interclaim either buys claims outright for between 0.5 per cent to 6 per cent of their value, or works with the institution in a joint venture. It will spend between $ 250,000 and $ 500,000 to enforce and prosecute a claim, though the cost of recovery bears no relation to the size of the claim.

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Re: ??????????????????????
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 3:57 PM 11/14/1996, newtonm(a)papa.uncp.edu wrote: >I have a breif question for all you folks out there.... >Does anyone know the email address and procedure for sending your mail via >"cypherpunks" so that it changes your e-mail address so that the person >recieving your e-mail message sees on the mesage that its only from >an anonymous source? A customer! You came to the right place, sir. We are glad you asked us for assistance and we will do our best to get you involved in the use of anonymous remailers. The more people who know how to use this technology, the better. An anonymous remailer takes mail and forwards it after removing identifying information. However, this is not done by "sending your mail via "cypherpunks" ". The cypherpunks is just a mailing list. Instead, you send your message to one of the 20 or so volunteer-run anonymous remailers. Here are some URLs you may find helpful: http://www.replay.com/remailer/anon.html http://www.seattle-webworks.com/pgp/ http://www.stack.urc.tue.nl/~galactus/remailers/ http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~raph/remailer-list.html BTW, your subject line "??????????????????????" is likely to generate hostility. It is generally considered to be a breach of etiquette to send a message to a large mailing list without indicating the subject. For instance, a good topic for this message would have been "Help with Anonymous Remailers". Since you are clearly new to the net, I am sure you did not intend rudeness. Santa's Little Helper

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Re: The Key for the IPG 200 Megabytes at NETPRIVACY.COM
by paul＠fatmans.demon.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> In response to the numerous requests for us to post the key that we used > to produce the almost 200 megabytes of raw encryptor stream at our web > site, we are pleased to provide the ASCII values of same as follows: Numerous requests? - I was right, he is halucinating... > In order for those few who have not had the opportunity to check it out, > we will leave it up another week and then take it down and put up a > new shorter one, maybe a 2,560,000 byte one permanently and a monthly > 2,560,000 byte one where we publish the key each month. No-one wants to... > Of course, no university, coderpunk( no offense intended please), or > cypherpunk , or any collection of same has broken the system, nor will > they ever. As most of you now know, it is unbreakable. We have had over > 100 universities, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, several dozen different > government agencies, and thousands of others to download the data and > look at the algorithm. Of course, like everyone else, they have been > benighted. Oh do be quiet you self satisfied smug little man. Every single member of this list and indeed of other forums in which you post (I don`t know of any but I assume it is not just us you annoy) knows you are a fool. Some while ago I seem to recall you offering to sell your company for one dollar if anyone could break your last algorithm, it was sumarily broken - why are you still owner of the company? - Oh I get it, they wouldn`t pay a dollar for it, neither would I. But seriously, was this you, and why didn`t you sell the company, and how are people to trust you now knowing this past debacle... Go away, you are like an unpopular bore at a party who doesn`t seem to realise that everyone wants him to leave.... Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security Paul Bradley, Paul(a)fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul(a)crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul(a)cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: 5BBFAEB1 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

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Water supplies
by nobody＠cypherpunks.ca 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

It should be easy to poison a water supply and kill many people. Yet, this never happens. Why would this be? Surely, there are malicious folks who want to do it.

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