- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Apologies and Clarifications -
by cypher＠cyberstation.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

First of all, I would like to sincerely apologize for my personal attacks on Perry. It is the first time that I have ever done that and I apologize for wasting you time and mine in that regard. He is obviously going to try to pontificate and rehash the old forever. Accordingly, to paraphrase Chief Joseph, "from where the sun now sits, I will fight Perry Metzger no more, forever." I further apologize for any offense that you feel that I may have caused. As to other matters: Instead of replying to the attacks being fabricated by Perry and other I have opted to recapitulate the matter at hand as perspicaciously as my limited abilities permit. As we know, Shannon was not a prolific writer. We also know that IT has not advanced very far during the 50 years since Shannon's nascent ground breaking work. Why? Because of the very issues that are at the heart of this matter. The differences between black, white and all the multitude hues of grey in between. I am extremely skeptical, and believe many readers may be too, of people that go around flaunting their understanding of Shannon, entropy and its application in absolute unequivocal mathematical terms. I hold that such a position, except in terms of delimiters, does not reflect an understanding of Shannon's impartations but au contraire, it is evidential proof that they do not have any real appreciation of Shannon at all. That is in no way intended to denigrate Shannon's very important contribution to our endeavors. I embrace the predicate that Shannon in terms of mathematical certainty has only defined the boundary conditions of the playing field within which we must play our games. If we stray outside that field, we are errant in the absolute sense. If we however play within those mathematical certain boundaries, we may be in error for other reasons, but Shannon cannot be cited as the casual agent. The recondite "parti pris" hijacking of the definition of the term OTP on the basis of conflict with Shannon is ludicrous, when such usage is apodictically within Shannon's delimiters. I have witnessed several definitions of an OTP which I maintain are entirely consistent with Shannon. Among such are: An encryption where any ciphertext may in fact be an an encrypted expression of any plaintext of the same or lesser length; or an encryption where the only information obtainable from the ciphertext is the maximum plaintext length; and so forth. All of these definitions have the essential quality that at the bit level, they can be reduced down to the equation: Pb xor Ub = Cb where Pb is a Plaintext bit, Ub is an Unknown bit and Cb is the resultant Ciphertext bit. Of course the combining form is normally XOR, but could be table lookup, modulo additive, or other. The important thing is that so long as only Cb is known, it is impossible to determine either Pb or Ub. If somehow the Ubs can be subtracted or cancelled out, as for instance by any discoverable reusage of Ub, even in a derivative form, then you may be able to recover some or all of the Pbs. The assertion that an Ub must be an Rb, a truly Random bit, is irrelevant ideology unless there exists the means to convert the Unknown bit, Ub, into a Known bit, Kb. That is the sublime basis of the IPG algorithm, which is to generate a stream of "unknown bits" which cannot be analytically reconstituted in the absence of the OTP generator key, and possibly other related key like parameters. The additional caveat of course is that the key cannot be guessed, nor can it be derived from brute force methodologies, both of which are patently impossible with the IPG algorithm. You do not have to be a Stephen Hawking to comprehend why that is a fact; each of you, with possible minor exceptions, will be able to discern that because it quickly becomes self evident as you ply the algorithm. There are those who will advance the contention that the ciphertext cannot in fact represent any possible plain text. That is incontestably true. In fact with reasonably long ciphertexts, say for example an encrypted FAX, unlike a hardware sourced OTP, there will only be one meaningful plain text that can be derived from the resultant ciphertext. Does that mean that a given ciphertext might not represent any plain text of that same, or lesser, length? One would think so, since it obviously cannot. The problem being though, is exactly how do you go about proving that any given plain text cannot be represented by a known ciphertext. There are two prongs to such a proof, both of which must be substantiated in any specific case at hand:. 1. Inclusionary Proof - the one most frequently advanced alone, which simply stated says that since each encryptor stream may represent any possible encryptor stream of that same length, then the ciphertext may be the XOR product of any plaintext of same said length. Obviously, a hardware sourced OTP DOES meet that proof. Also. it is patently evident that the IPG software OTP DOES NOT meet the inclusionary proof test. 2. Exclusionary Proof - which is equally valid, and simply stated consists of two propositions: A. Can any plaintext be encrypted with the OTP? Obviously the answer is YES for BOTH both hardware sourced OTPs and the IPG software sourced OTPs. B. If 2.A is true, is it possible to exclude any plaintext possibility? Obviously in the case of hardware sourced OTPs, no plain text can possibly be excluded. What about the IPG software OTPs? . One method that you could theoretically be used to exclude a possible plaintext for the software OTP, would be to by brute force try all possible keys, until the correct one is obtained. That however, would be difficult to say the least, as a matter of fact it is impossible: If every subatomic particle in our known universe was a Googol, 1 with 100 zeroes after it, of Cray T3E computers - and each of them had been brute forcing a partition of the possibilities at the rate of 1 Googol of them per picosecond which could not be done - but assume that it could - and they had been doing so since the Big Bang say 20 billion years ago - and they were to continue to do so for the next 20 billion years, that is beyond the life expectancy of our solar system/galaxy, and perhaps the universe, then approximately 10^322 of the possible OTPs would have been tried. Thus it would still take 10^34000 times as long as that to try all of the possibilities - that is they would have tried only one part in 1 with 34000 zeroes after it - not theoretical infinity by any means, but a very, very large extra-astronomical number. Brute force is patently impossible. . Another possibility might be to guess it - anyone recognizes that would not be practical, and how would you know that you were right. All of the IPG OTP generator, aka Encryption, keys are themselves OTPs. . Another possibility would to be to analytically exclude the invalid possibilities. As stated previously, and as you can discover for yourself, this reduces itself back down to to the exact equivalent of the brute force method set out above. With the algorithm, there is no difference between analytically exclusion and brute forcing - they are one and the same. So in fact, any known ciphertext may indeed be an encryption of any plaintext of that same, or lesser, length, because you cannot prove that it is not a specific plaintext. Some will contentiously assert that the key and other parameters might be hacked. While we include within the system facilitators that reduce that risk to a minimum, and to near zero if you use simple precautions, it is true that the hacking possibility exists. However, that possibility exists for RSA, PGP, hardware sourced OTPs, or any other form of security or encryption. We are better positioned in that regard than others but in terms of the human element, as we all know, there is no such thing as perfection. With warmest regards, Don Wood

1 0

Alice in Cypherspace
by David Lesher 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I found my copy, if the person asking last week still needs it.... -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz(a)nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

1 0

Dimitri
by David Lesher 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM sez: > Sounds like a crontab job, or Timmy May, or both. THIS sounds like our friend SternFUD. {Who, BTW, is back attacking folks in the pgp groups..} -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz(a)nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

2 1

Re: Wrap Up: Conference on Law Enforcement and Intelligence
by frantz＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:13 PM 10/20/96 -0600, C Kuethe wrote: >On Sun, 20 Oct 1996, Bill Frantz wrote: >> (3) The devil is in the details. I still am not convinced that MacPGP has >> enough sources of entropy for its IDEA key generation. (But I am not >> convinced that it doesn't either.) I put integrating Jon Callas's entropy >> manager into MacPGP as a high priority. > >Tell me more... I use macpgp. I just built some new keys tonight, a 2048 >bit monster. PGP wanted 1496 bits of rand info... where is it's entropy >"Hole" > >And what is the "Entropy Manager"? When you build RSA keys in PGP it uses keyboard timings to acquire "true randomness" or entropy. This kind of randomness is related to quantum mechanical uncertainty. It probably has enough entropy to safely generate RSA keys by the keyboard technique it uses. In addition to RSA keys, it generates symmetric IDEA keys whenever you send a message. It uses keystrokes accumulated during normal operation and saved in a file called randpool (or something like that) to generate these keys. Since you almost never enter keystrokes during the normal operation of MacPGP, I am concerned that randpool does not have enough entropy. Entropy Manager is a program Jon Callas of Apple is working on. It uses well-known sources of entropy in the computer to build up a pool of entropy for use by programs that need it. The last I heard, it was nearly ready. I would trust it more than the ported PGP since Jon has examined sources available in the Macintosh specifically. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | Tired of Dole/Clinton? | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | Vote 3rd party. I'm | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz(a)netcom.com | Voting for Harry Browne | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

1 0

Re: Usenet and Re: extortion via digital cash
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> As an already existing, widely >disseminated and easily used message pool, Usenet is very valuable to us. >I'm concerned that it may not last though. Many people now complain about >how low the signal to noise ratio is [...] So, if it gets too bad, might it >just fade away? Or, if it remains but becomes unpopular, will it be easy to >restrict if we use it for anonymous messages? I haven't read all of Usenet in 10+ years :-) But it keeps growing, and if you're trying to piggyback anonymous messages on it, then it's great to have VOLUME, VOLUME, VOLUME, as the talk.bizarre folks put it. On the other hand, there are technical difficulties with using the current modes of Usenet for real applications, and volume may make it worse. Usenet used to work by flooding - every message goes to every machine, so it's not suspicious your machine receives an Anonymous Message. Most machines had multiple users (Unix, after all), and didn't log who accessed what files in the news spool (which you could do directly as well as through your newsreader.) Now, however, most users use NNTP to fetch news articles from their ISP, and the number of machines receiving the whole Nx100MB/day flood is probably smaller, though perhaps businesses and universities are putting up with it, and perhaps the usage patterns are different outside North America. Fetching material by NNTP is probably logged by many ISPs, and can also be detected by sniffers in the places where security is weak enough for them, which probably includes many major ISPs. So it's easier to detect who's reading alt.anonymous.messages, especially if some government agency subpoenas logfiles. azur(a)netcom.com (Steve Schear) wrote: >In the U.S., at least, attempts to enforce identification of Internet users >or anonymous posters to newgroups and such are likely to meet with stiff >legal resistance. The Supreme Court has ruled that anonymous use of >protected speech (e.g., political handbills) must be permitted. No legal resistance at all, if it's done by ISPs or businesses or individuals - only if the government tries it does it get into "protected speech" territory. There may be market resistance, and the Internet and Usenet are fundamentally worldwide cooperative efforts, so if the protocols support anonymity, then participants in the nets can choose to have their systems cooperate with or refuse to cooperate with anonymous messages, and you'll find some people doing each one. This may mean that small-ISP.net and xs4all.nl will permit anonymous users and aol.com, compuserve.com, and proxy.gov.sg will demand Internet Driver's Licenses to let your postings through, while nihilism.net won't allow any non-anomymous messages. Spontaneous order is like that. And the US government could probably get away with sponsoring Internet access for Real American Citizens and Green-Card Holders that requires positive identification because you can file your tax forms over it, as long as they don't prevent anonymous messages on _some_ part of the net. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk Imagine if three million people voted for somebody they _knew_, and the politicians had to count them all.

1 0

PLEASE take Mormon/LDS stuff to private mail.
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

While I realize that religious arguments, in the large sense, are a well-honed skill of many of the participants of this list, the current threads concerning the LDS/Mormon church are so far off-topic that it isn't funny, just annoying. PLEASE take this stuff to private mail. Most of us have little or no interest in it, and it's creating entirely unnecessary discord and hatred (not to mention using up bandwidth). Unless a group takes a stand on encryption, lets keep them out of it. Please! Peter Trei trei(a)process.com

2 1

RE: crypto cd once more
by JR＠ROCK.CNB.UAM.ES 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>1) is there a system that can handle unix, windows and mac filenames > Yes. Use Rock Ridge extensions. That will allow for long UNIX names. If you couple it with ISO9660 youget both worlds. Caveats: Macs don't accept RR. Hell! Solution: Use level 2 (32+32) names. Problem: that's OK for VMS and perhaps Macs, but not for PC's. Solution: Use level 1 (8+3) ISO. That's easily done with the tools for Liux/Unix. I used them when I created my personal Crypto-CD a year ago. You tell the program to use Rock Ridge and convert all names to 8+3. That gives you a double directory hierarchy, one that's compatible with everything (8+3) plus one that allows long names (RR). If only Macs supported RR... ObCrypto: Have you considered the possibility of filling the unused portion of the disk with random noise from a good source? Some people could find it useful even if it is only for trial/test purposes. And, is there any possibility of making an international version of it? jr

2 1

Recent Web site cracks
by pjb＠ny.ubs.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The recent cracks of the DOJ, CIA and Dole web sites have caused me to think about just what is going on here. Do you suppose that these entries were made via the httpd route, maybe via cgi-bin, or just a straight telnet-type entry to the server? I don't know what operating systems were involved with these three systems, or even if it was the same in all cases. I expect that there have been other such break-ins that we have not heard about. The speed with which the attacks are made, and the completeness of the hack seems to indicate that someone knows something. As a long-time Unix Sys Admin, I am aware that most security holes are due to piss-poor administration, with a few system holes that may be exploited by the reasonably sophisticated, but I am not aware of any glaring holes in the httpd code. I suppose it's stupid of me to think this, but I would have though that these three sites in particular, would have cleaned-up their act in this respect. I suppose that it is possible that there is a route back, through the browser, but this doesn't seem very likely, even with a thoroughly hacked, custom browser. Does anyone have any ideas about these attacks, how and where the entry was made, which operating systems were involved, etc? Cheers, -paul

1 0

Re: EUB - Pay attention next time guys.
by Peter Trei 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> Maryanto Tuan dan Puan <lamdn(a)idola.net.id> writes: > > Please unsubscibe lamdn(a)idola.net.id > Where the heck is 'id'? > Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM > Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps Indonesia, as you should have been able to find out for yourself. Peter Trei trei(a)process.com

1 0

Re: PGP
by pjb＠ny.ubs.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

this is recycling at it's best. (-: -paul > From cypherpunks-errors(a)toad.com Mon Oct 7 03:05:47 1996 > Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 21:35:02 -0400 > To: cypherpunks(a)toad.com > From: dustman(a)athensnet.com (Anonymous) > Comments: Please report misuse of this automated remailing service to <dustman(a)athensnet.com> > Subject: Re: PGP > Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com > Content-Length: 238 > > > From: nobody(a)cypherpunks.ca (John Anonymous MacDonald) > > > > There's a rumor that Timmy C. May sells his dead relatives as fertiliser as > > they constitute the best shit in California. > > Where can I buy some of this fertilizer? > > Thanks. > >

1 0