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Re: "wisecrackers" by Levy in March Wired
by dmandl＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:16 PM 2/27/96, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote: >I sent this to <steven(a)echoync.com> but the address bounced. ^^^ Hmmm...When did Echo move to York New City? -- Dave Mandl dmandl(a)panix.com http://www.wfmu.org/~davem

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Re: Strassmann's Anonymous Remailers Paper
by tbyfield＠panix.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A few observations on Paul Strassman's response to John R. Levine; I've rearranged it a bit for clarity, edited out a handful of lines, and whittled down the CCs. At 4:01 PM 2/28/96, Paul A. Strassmann wrote: John R. Levine: > >It's been possible for at least a century to mail letters with no > >return address. It's equally possible to use post office boxes and > >mail drops, or even a chain of mail drops, to have two-way exchanges > >of messages between people who don't know each other's identities. > > > >As far as I can tell, the existence of anonymous postal mail hasn't > >caused any great trouble over the past century. Can you explain why > >the appearance of similar facilities for on-line mail presents a > >greater problem? Paul Strassmann: >Since the idea that Internet remailers are not much different than >anonymous letters sent by mail is an often repeated theme, it warrants a >comment: > >1. Your statement that anonymous post mail hasn't caused any "great >trouble" over the past century does not stand up well. I have not done a >statistical sampling of incidents, but I wish to note that all my exposures >(personal and otherwise) to anonymous post have been associated with >extortion, spreading of unwarranted rumors and unsubstantiated accusations. >Most ransom notes in kidnapping cases have been conveyed by this means. Obviously, kidnapping and extortion demands sent anonymously through the post would attract far more attention than innocuous uses would--as did the recent incident in which someone donated (by anonymous mail) a million-dollar McDonald's sweepstakes ticket to a children's hospital. I daresay that for every such criminal instance you could cite, there are hundreds or even thousands of instances of completely benign "secret santas" and anonymous valentines from teenage "secret admirers," for example--which would hardly bear out your claim that >In civilized society the receipt of anonymous post has been always >associated with unacceptable social behavior. That reputation persists. Valentines and gifts sent anonymously will no doubt strike some people as trivial in the face of "information warfare" and other such gothic notions, and perhaps they are; but I can only wonder what exactly these valiant strategists think they're protecting and from whom they're protecting it. >2. Your assertion that one can be equally anonymous by post as with e-mail >does not stand up. > >First, anonymous mail is likely to carry stamp cancellation marks, which >provides an important clue as to the origin of the message. > >Second, criminal forensic techniques have been used very successfully in >tracing identifying marks, such as typewriter characteristics, Xerox copy >drum defects and other tricks such as genetic identifications of saliva >remnants left from licking a stamp or sealing the envelope. There are many >others. Anonymous e-mail does not convey such clues. > >Third, anonymous mail operates on a totally different scale and with a >different technology than post. The fact that automobiles were originally >called "horseless carriages" does not make them possess the attributes of >horse-carriages. When technology scales up from thousands to hundred >millions, the potential consequences are not subject to simple >extrapolation. By the same token, the fact that law enforcement agencies have, over the last two centuries, developed the forms of forensic analysis you mention doesn't mean that these techniques are a god-given right whose shortcomings in the face of new technologies need to be compensated for. These techniques are, as you point out, contingent on the traits peculiar to the objects being examined. Postal mail consists of integral physical objects which can bear these kinds of traces; email does not. Nor does shouting--yet I've never heard anyone suggest that fans at a football game should preface what they yell with their name and their address, or that their failure to do so constitutes a threat to national security. >3. Anonymous remailers have been conduits for misconduct ranging from >"spamming" - e.g. launching thousands of messages to saturate server >capacity - to massive distribution of "sniffers" that make a number of >software-based fire-walls inoperative. This objection remailers is a red herring: giveaway ten-hour accounts on AOL and other services, hacked accounts, accounts obtained under false names, and accounts obtained under a True Name are much more notorious sources of spam than are remailers. If spam is your objection, you're barking up the wrong tree. As for the "massive deployment of 'sniffers'," anyone capable of doing this or of using information gained by this means hardly needs remailers. >4. The most likely scenarios of an information assault on the information >infrastructure that performs essential social functions such as message >switching, transportation dispatching, public security communications, etc. >always commences with a saturation dispatch of a wide variety of >intelligent agent via anonymous remailers. "Most likely scenarios" are speculative: something that hasn't happened yet doesn't "always commence with" anything. >There is a long list of anti-social and criminal behavior that is greatly >facilitated by a guarantee of untraceability. The repertoire of such >malfeasances is sufficiently long that it does not warrant further elaboration. This chicken-or-egg formulation suggests that a milieu in which total traceability is possible would greatly diminish criminal behaviors and activity. Perhaps, but as you yourself have pointed out, such a milieu is utterly antithetical to anything remotely resembling a free democracy. Since the alternative to untraceability isn't viable, there's no point in bringing it up. >Now, I would like to repeat that I believe that anonymous remailers are >here to stay - at least in democratic societies. However, that does not >mean that one should continue insisting that anonymous remailes are not a >different phenomenon than an envelope containing a message that does not >have a return address. If you were the final arbiter on the question, your repeated claim that "remailers are here to stay" would be much more comforting. Unfortunately, the force of almost all your arguments is, in a nutshell, that remailers are associated with and facilitate criminal and/or terrorist activities--and that suggests to me that if you had your druthers, they would be illegalized. I'm curious: Do you or do you not support the continued existence of nonregulated, nonlicensed, and publicly accessible remailers? (Please note that this is a different question than "Are remailers here to stay?") regards Ted Byfield

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Re: Simpler solutions (was Re: Stealth PGP work)
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:45 AM 2/28/96 +0000, "Deranged Mutant" <WlkngOwl(a)UNiX.asb.com> wrote: >Adam Back <aba(a)dcs.ex.ac.uk> wrote: > >[lots of stuff about stealth PGP snipped] > >This seems to be quite a lot of effort that complicates things. It >would be simpler for two stealth communicators to use other means of >hiding the fact that a message is PGP'd... (1) stego, in various >forms, if done properly would make most attackers not suspect a PGP >message is inside something, One point of stealth-pgp is to make an encrypted message you _can_ safely hide with stego. Since the Bad Guys can take your stegofied picture, destego it, and see the string ------ BEGIN PGP CONTRABAND DATA, you can't get away with saying "no, that's just a picture of my cat, blurred a bit because he was moving", which you can if you use a true stealth version of PGP or other crypto program. Another major point is to make PGP messages that you can post in public, which the recipient can decode, but which _don't_ say "From 007 To 86 and 99" in the headers. That's easier, but still a bit of work. >(2) use another encryption program, with >a known key shared by two users, that turns the PGP message into pure >unmarked 'randomness', >[.... (3) a pad-based variant ...] You're down to key exchange; the big reason for public-key systems is to avoid it. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com / billstewart(a)attmail.com +1-415-442-2215 # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs Pager +1-408-787-1281

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[IMPORTANT] Mondex
by nobody＠huge.cajones.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Dr.Deceptive Vilest K[rud]OfTheMoment will fuck anything that moves, but he'd rather be fucking his own mother's dead body. /\_./o__ Dr.Deceptive Vilest K[rud]OfTheMoment (/^/(_^^' ._.(_.)_

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Re: The Collapse of Ideas in a Pop Culture
by Scott Staedeli 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>(If you don't know who Jules Bergmann was, you're a GenXer and > can't be held responsible for your ignorance :-}.) I _am_ a GEnXer, and I worshipped Jules Bergmann as a child. Some of my first memories is pressing my nose up to the tv, watching Saturn V's lifting off. If I ever win the lottery, I'm going to take the Saturn that's lying on it's side at Cape Kennedy, refurbish it, and launch that baby just to watch it go. ;-))) - --scottst(a)ionet.net---------------------Scott Staedeli-- >~<^xXx | "Information is the currency of xX # | democracy." (XXX) # | (XXXXXXX) | DON'T TREAD ON ME| --Thomas Jefferson ========================================================

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But liars sure can...
by A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I rote: >>Finally, no cost is allocated to the sustem required to program/evaluate >>the ponderings of these 100's of ASICs. As anyone who has ever programmed >>a massively parallel computer (which is what they are talking about in their >>brute force machine, it is the boundary communications that kill you. Bill wreplied: >And the Inmos Transputer, with its 4 communications channels, would do >just fine as well - you could either build the things into large grids >or build a large ternary tree, or get fancy and build cubes of 6 chips >that you make hypercubes out of, or whatever. A modern version of the same >chip, built out of FPGAs or ASICs with enough memory and program on chip, >would blaze just fine. Oh I agree it *can* be done (thouse who follow RISKS and SCI.CRYPT will note that I was talking about cascadable single bit boolean processors and DSPs for brute force engines several years ago. We seem to be miscommunicating a bit though. I agree that such an engine is easier to design than something like a MASPAR or Alliance since each set of kerchunkers can operate independantly once started and all that is necessary is to be able to signal success and pass the found code. Still, the logistics of initializing each processor set (and ones I have dealt with have primarily been matricies of single bit devices), providing communications, power, and control is a non-trivial task: once you have a general purpose ASIC, you are only half way there, particularly if it is to be usable for more than one fixed algorithm/key length. Will further stipulate that a single PC (8088 even) would probably be sufficient to load/start/retrieve data from such a beast but design of the I/O would still need to be accomplished. Not difficult, just necessary. My point was not that it couldn't be done, but that the costs mentioned were probably off by a factor of at least two and that for a 40 bit code, setup for each run would probably take longer than the cracking ( assuming a court order from Podunk could even get in the queue for a U$300 million device in an even more expensive facility - students in a University will *always* be able to do things faster/cheaper than a corporation/government). Doing something *once* is a lot different from putting it into production. Warmly, Padgett

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DES hooks in Linux kernel
by Ian Goldberg 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

(aeb(a)cwi.nl is included, as he seems to be the last person to have touched loop.c before it was put into the standard Linux kernel sources, but I may be wrong.) The file loop.c, included in recent Linux kernel sources, includes calls to DES routines, such as: #ifdef DES_AVAILABLE static int transfer_des(struct loop_device *lo, int cmd, char *raw_buf, char *loop_buf, int size) { <snip> des_ecb_encrypt((des_cblock *) tmp,(des_cblock*) loop_buf,lo->lo_des_key,DES_ENCRYPT); <snip> } #endif AFAIK, the presence of these hooks (even if surrounded by the ifdef's) makes this file illegal to export from the United States. Its presence on ftp sites in the US could get someone in trouble. - Ian "this ITAR thing is really silly..."

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Using PGP for pseudo random numbers?
by Sean A. Walberg 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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Eliminate your present phone bill......
by nokia＠mail.kmsp.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

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"wisecrackers" by Levy in March Wired
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I sent this to <steven(a)echoync.com> but the address bounced. in any case I thougt I would cc: the list. this is a fun article to read, and I encourage everyone here to check it out. ------- Forwarded Message To: steven(a)echoync.com Subject: wisecrackers feedback Date: Tue, 27 Feb 96 18:12:02 -0800 From: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri(a)netcom.com> hello, I'm a cypherpunk subscriber. I liked your wired article on the cpunks ("wisecrackers") a lot. I thought I would mention some things: 1. you didn't seem to address the issue that factoring has not been proven to be difficult. a fast factoring algorithm is not ruled out by any existing mathematical theories, although no one expects that one exists. in other words, it is purely mathematician consensus that insists that factoring is a hard problem. hence RSA has not actually been proven to be a secure way of encoding information. its only secure because no one knows how to factor numbers quickly, and everyone is pretty confident that such a capability does not exist, although no one has proven it (yet). RSA rests on the difficulty of undoing a "trapdoor function" and as far as I know, there is no proof that any operation used for cryptography is intrinsically difficult to undo. (there are proofs that some functions are "intrinsically difficult" but they can't be used for crypto, because what you need in crypto is some operation that "is difficult when you don't have secret information, but is easy when you do."-- that is, not "always difficult". that's a trapdoor function, such as that used in RSA-- the secret knowledge makes the operation possible, whereas without it, it is "computationally impossible", i.e. possible in theory but not practice.) in fact there have been very incremental improvements in factoring algorithms. but no one can say, "factoring number [x] takes exactly [y] years" because no one knows what is the optimal factoring algorithm-- they only know the best one that has been *found* to date. (which is the quadratic sieve you mention). the question of whether factoring really is difficult is interesting to study. there is a whole class of computer problems called "NP" that can be shown to be "difficult" in an equivalent way. whether they are truly "difficult" is an open question. surprisingly, factoring has not yet been proven to be in this "NP" class, despite that many other problems have been. also, some mathematicians say that people have been trying to factor numbers since the dawn of time (well, at least since the greeks) so that if there was a good algorithm, we would probably have found it by now. I would argue against this position, saying that computers are a very recent invention on the horizon of human knowledge. the study of algorithmic complexity did not really begin in earnest until the 70's or so, again an extremely recent blip of time in regards to the history of human mathematical thought. 2. I think you were overplaying what Morris said to Zimmermann at the end. it made for good drama but I suspect the truth is more mundane. the fact that he asked "how much would the NSA spend for [x]" (where here [x] is "break PGP keys"). does not imply that they can actually do [x]. rather, what it implies is that their first inclination is to assume that something is theoretically possible, and then determine how much it would cost to do [x]. then, they determine whether the stategic results of obtaining [x] are worth its cost. in other words, the NSA has to approach all cryptoanalysis from this basic point: can we justify the cost based on the stategic value of the intelligence. they have to make this choice all the time as to where they invest their resources based on the payoff. their first question is, "what is the strategic value of cracking [x] code". I believe that they are run internally such that projects that are feasible and that they have the money are not actually carried out just because they are possible-- the strategic value has to be determined. what Morris was asking Zimmerman was, "how much would it be worth to an attacker to be able to read PGP messages". the NSA might well come to the conclusion that nobody important is using PGP and therefore trying to break it to read their messages is a waste of time. my opinion is that what was implied by Morris's position. frankly, I think the threat of prosecution against Zimmermann suggests the NSA may not be able to break the RSA cypher at certain key lengths no matter how much of our tax money they burn trying. 3. a group broke a 384 bit PGP key a little while ago. I was surprised how little coverage this got. perhaps it was due to the choice of keys. some are more "respectable" than others. <g> Paul Leyland and Jim Gillogly (Derek Atkins maybe?) were involved as well as some cpunks. anyway, keep up the good work. (heh. loved the description of the media outlets as "bottom feeders"). bye ------- End of Forwarded Message

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