- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: [NOISE] Re: Easter Eggs
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:35 AM 9/27/95 -0400, you wrote: > Date: Tue, 26 Sep 1995 12:59:54 -0700 > From: Alan Olsen <alano(a)teleport.com> > > You also need X windows to find the Mozilla animated icon hack on > Jammie Zawinski's page. > ^^^^^^ > >Just for the record, that's Jamie. Hey! I never said I could type at 1am! Yes, I know. #%#$#%ing spelling flames. Grumble. Grumble. (BTW, the compass egg will show up in any page with /jwz/ in the url. The "anim" tag on his page is bogus.) > obNetscapeHack: There is a feature called a "cookie file" in > Netscape that is ripe for exploitation as a security leak. If you > are using a Netscape server (and you may not even need that), you > can feed all sorts of information into it without the user's > knowlege. I have heard of one page that overloads the cookie file > until the machine runs out of drive space. I am sure that there > are other exploitable holes there... Any takers? > >Yikes! That sounds really bad. Do you have any more information on >this? For example, can the server write to anything other than >$HOME/.netscape-cookies? If I write protect that file, but it's still >owned by me, will Netscape still modify it? The url for the spec is: http://home.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html. The cookie overload probibly only worked under 1.1 and before. The spec claims to have limits on the number of cookies you can have. But between this and the server API, I am sure that a hole or two has to exist. This is an area not explored by many. (For good reason. It is usually poorly documented...) OBParanoia: Want something to really make you worried. Imagine this for a web page... A local law enforcement agency decides that it wants to nab a few of those "computer preverts". They create a web site that has a cgi script that looks for providers from a list. It then has a link that shows up only for people at one of those sites to "get hot porn pics". They then collect enough machine names and other info, then use the collected information to obtain a warrent to seize the ISP's logs to match users with machines. (Most browsers to not report e-mail address.) In the current hysteria I do not see this scenerio too far off. Makes you wonder what constitutes entrapment anymore? | Minister of Forced Caffinization in the DNRC | alano(a)teleport.com | |"The moral PGP Diffie taught Zimmerman unites all| Disclaimer: | | mankind free in one-key-steganography-privacy!" | Ignore the man | | -- PGP 2.6.2 key available on request -- | behind the keyboard.| | http://www.teleport.com/~alano | <fnord> |

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Schnorr patent
by peace＠BIX.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Now that PKP is dead, does anyone know how to contact C. Schnorr about his patent? Peace ..Tom

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Re: Europe
by Mats Bergstrom 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Perry M. wrote: > I was wondering if the Europeans had an equivalent of EPIC or EFF > lobbying against crypto restrictions there, given the disturbing news > a week or so ago. Europe, in this regard, is still mostly every country on it's own. Lobbying in Brussels is not for mortals, and decisions are in closed chambers anyway (the Commission; inter-governmental level). Sweden: The authorities have not yet said anything at all about where they stand in the GAK controversy. Probably very few have heard about it. A national IT-Commission was formed by the former government a year and a half ago, then they lost the elections a year ago and the new IT-Commission (yes, very partisan) has just settled down. The only thing that has come up on a public (television) level is demands from the police of access to decoded GSM traffic, which I believe is under implementation now (the obstacle has mainly been who is going to pay for the software updates of the GSM nodes). Sweden has rather strict rules for wiretapping (at least officially) and their is no public pressure for any change in this. On the local networks (the swnet.* newsgroups and Fidonet meetings) there is some discussion of crypto vs computer networking but only in obscure niches. If/when GAK will be proposed this might hopefylly change. I think the basic difference USA vs Sweden in this regard is a time delay of some years. We have lots of Internet nodes per capita (more than in the US, they say) but the net is still largly run by engineers (if only that could last!) and net awareness is rare above the age of 30 (i.e. among those who have a say). The European Council document (posted here in full by Dave Banisar) is certainly worrying. Of course, I've tried to spread it on the Swedish speaking networks For information on Swedish net cencorship there is a 'mini-CAF' at: http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d1dd/censorship/ PS Perry, what was your impression of the Swedes you met at the IETF meeting in Stockholm last July? I guess they were so happy about the new 34 Mbit/s connection to the New World that they forgot about the rest? Mats ********************************************************* For a searchable list of products in the Swedish national monopoly liquor-shops, see: http://lupus.physchem.kth.se/systemet.html

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X.509, S/MIME, and evolution of PGP
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I'd always heard X.509 public key certificates were a hierarchical, evil, anti-WebOfTrust ISOism. But Netscape is now doing them, and talking S/MIME, so I sat down to read the specs, and they're really not all that bad. (Technically, I've only read PKCS#6 and RFC 1422, and not the real ISOisms...) Yeah, they've got lots of clunky ASN.1 Ambiguous Encoding Rules and X.500 Silly Name Format, but those can be lived with, and the X.500 may be possible to simply ignore in most cases. Steve Kent, author of RFC1422, envisions that a hierarchical world with government certification authorities would be the most convenient implementation, and with the X.500 directory service serving certificates, but that's primarily editorial and not required by the technology. Since a zillion and a half people are about to acquire Netscape 2.0, which supports non-Verisign-signed X.509 certificates and DES, we can definitely extend the Web of Trust concept to that world; can we also extend secure user-to-user messaging? It's time for PGP to mutate and take over the world... An X.509 certificate has the following components 1. version 2. serial number 3. signature (algorithm ID and parameters) 4. issuer name 5. validity period 6. subject name 7. subject public key (and associated algorithm ID) expressed as ASN.1 and signed with the issuer's public key. The issuer and subject names are expressed as X.500 addresses (big deal). The CA's public key is expected to be obtained out of band, or as a chain of signatures from some other CA that you got a signature for out of band; there's no policy implementation that says who can be one. The primary requirements on CAs are to never issue the same serial number twice, maintain uniqueness on signatures for subjects, and maintain a Certificate Revocation List which is accessible somehow. Unfortunately, the data format doesn't support multiple signatures, but the documentation _does_ explicitly indicate that you can _have_ multiple certifications; you just have to drag around a bunch of separate certificates, leading to some obvious implementation opportunities. CRLs are less well-specified, though the PEM RFCs suggest a PEM format; the main requirement is that they be keyed off the serial number, which is why that has to be unique. RFC 1422 proposes a rooted hierarchy of CAs - a root called the Internet Policy Registration Authority, which would certify a bunch of Policy Certification Authorities, which would each have different requirements on what their CAs require from people who want to be certified, ranging from anonymous personas to heavily identified Official People, and would do a certain amount of coordination to preserve uniqueness. Becoming a PCA would require paying money to the IPRA. However, there's no requirement that a _specific_ organization become the _one_ _official_ IPRA; if somebody were to volunteer and announce themselves as the IPRA, there's no particular conflict-resolution mechanism. [ maybe it's time for a Cypherpunks Press Release? No - I didn't say it. Not me! ] But rootedness only really matters to software that cares... and as long as your software accommodates N levels of certification, you can have a Web of Trust getting back to a key you signed yourself, and either get an official personna certificate or plug your public key into your software as the IPRA (and sign the real IPRA's certificate yourself :-) Problems: 1) ITAR - shouldn't be a big deal, because all of this is building a signature/authentication mechanism, it's not doing any encryption. The encryption, if any, is a user agent issue, and that's Netscape's problem; the Web of Trust tool is an add-on. 2) RSA patent - can this be built with RSAREF? Or RSAREF with permission for a couple extra activities? Or built out of RIPEM or RIPEM-SIG? The latter has the benefit of already being exportable. 3) Netscape compliance - the Netscape folks have been real friendly, and I hope they'll leave their format for getting certificates open. 4) Other software and CA policy-makers - getting out first is worth something; then you're the standard that they have to follow instead of the other way around. For some issues, like X.500 name vs. DNS name, there are probably people in the IETF or community in general working on it, or alternatively you can do an ugly hack abusing the organization and address fields. 5) S/MIME - real S/MIME compliance requires support for RC2 as well as publicly available algorithms, though this is really just an X.509 handler. 6) It's a lot of work - well, yeah, it is. And I'm lazy. Is there enough related code in SSLeay to steal to help implement it? #--- # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

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Re: Time Keys, Some Secure Ideas (by Alias: Jay Hyden)
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jay - you wrote: > >> Time Keys, Some Secure Ideas << > The weakest attack on a time key based system is to spoof the >computer that keeps track of time into releasing encryption >keys i.e. change the clock. No, the weakest link is that you have to trust the person _running_ the time key system. Spoofing the clock only matters to a system you trust. Even a system running on a satellite isn't trustable unless you're running it yourself; your good friend and business partner who launched it may have put in a backdoor because the KGB threatened to kill his grandmother if he didn't. #--- # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

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Re: "Notes" to be Eclipsed by "Netscape"
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> I've never even _seen_ a copy of Notes running on any machine, nor do I >> know directly of _any_ of my colleagues who has. (Not saying nobody has, of >> course, just that I can't find anyone I know well who has.) Notes was a PC network reimplementation of PLATO, the system that also inspired notesfiles, a distant cousin of Netnews (though I'm not sure if netnews was originally inspired by PLATO or not...) Netnews assumes that articles are going to propagate for a while and then be trashed; notesfiles assumes you're building a knowledge bases that sticks around. (This transitoriness has allowed netnews to scale to its current N*100MB/day of trash :-) Notes is oriented more toward business kinds of collaboration, though it would work fine with university research projects. It's got all the PCish things you'd expect, with GUIs and menus and icons that let you include various sorts of documents and pictures as well as text; it seemed to be done reasonably well, and there's a growing market for Notes administrators. One definition of "business" is "customers who want this stuff enough that we can charge them big bucks for the servers"; client software has come down in price due to market resistance. One difficulty with Notes is that the earlier versions liked to run on Novell IPX instead of TCP/IP, so it didn't immediately jump onto companies' internal IP nets, or onto the global net for those brave souls willing to expose their business communications systems to the world. I do know companies who run multiple Notes systems so that Project X can communicate with its teaming partners at Company Y; I don't know how much integration they have with their internal Notes systems. AT&T Network Notes is a joint AT&T/Lotus project that uses AT&T's public IPX network to support Notes on; I think it's now rolled out an accepting customers, but it was mostly in press-release stage while I was at AT&T. Notes does have encryption, using RSA and I think RC4; I'm not sure if they do the 40 bits exportable/ 128 domestic bit or just use 40 bits. Don't know about overflow kinds of bugs; the bugs I've heard about were more problems integrating with Cc:Mail :-) #--- # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---

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re: chaos cryptography
by Sherry Mayo 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Duh! As someone pointed out to me in email I wrote "stenography" when I meant "steganography" in the intro to the New Scientist article. (Well I'm sure ou all knew what I meant) Sherry

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Re: First Payments WG Meeting Announcement
by todd＠lgt.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

FYI- the FSTC E-payment Working Group meeting is happening at the W3 meeting on the day before the meeting itself. The meeting is being held at the OSF facilities. >The World Wide Web Consortium is holding a Workshop on payments. The workshop >is intended to be a small, technically oriented meeting of its payments working >group. Although it is a members only event I am willing to listen to special >pleading, alternatively companies may wish to join the consortium at our >extreemely reasonable rates. See http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Consortium/ for >details. > >-- >Phillip M. Hallam-Baker Not speaking for anoyone else >hallam(a)w3.org http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/People/hallam.html >Information Superhighway -----> Hi-ho! Yow! I'm surfing Arpanet! > >ANNOUNCE: First W3C Payments WG Meeting, October 11 > >---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > >What: 1st W3C Payment WG Meeting > >Where: MIT EECS, Grier Room 34-401 (subject to change) > >When: Wednesday October 11, 9am - 5pm > >Who: W3C Member Representatives ONLY > >URL: First W3C Payments WG Meeting > >W3C is making progress on supporting electronic payments on the web. This WG >Meeting has been called to foster discussion and feedback between W3C and >its members. Discussion will focus on proposals to the W3C for payment >protocols, interfaces, and e-commerce support. > >The agenda for the electronic payment workshop is still being settled. At >the current time we have confirmed presentations by VISA, IBM, W3C, and the >Financial Services Technical Consortium (FSTC). Additional invitations have >been issued, and suggestions for additional presentations would be welcome. >Contact Phillip Hallam-Baker (hallam(a)w3.org) or Jim Miller (JMiller(a)w3.org) >with suggestions. > >There is a separate W3C Security WG Meeting at MIT on Tuesday, October 10th. >Contact Rohit Khare for details (khare(a)w3.org) > >To RSVP for the Payments WG Meeting, email the coordinator, Phillip >Hallam-Baker (hallam(a)w3.org) or call 617/258-5967 by 5 October. This >workshop is aimed at technologists; please include a brief description of >any relevant payments work you or your organization are involved in. > >This is a preliminary announcement of the date and time only. We have >arranged for hotel rooms at the Kendall Square Mariott. To qualify for the >MIT discount, notify Susan Hardy (susan(a)w3.org) > >For a review of the Consortium's plans, see W3C's report on Electronic >Payment Schemes and the Third W3C Security Workshop. Regards, T. S. Glassey Chief Technologist Looking Glass Technologies todd(a)lgt.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQB1AwUBMFu5E6gNRnWhagU5AQHI+gL+Mwpcd3lAWd8FF06qcG6rnLhIYveHW71a XC7xh1T0uu8qnYX31yMp17OG28jWpKUbWec1IM9/eXOi+gInA7rKICWczV8zo9Z0 0puxjRRN7yO4KfRb3cPpk+r0p6pDg01Y =bTYb -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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weak links in the cyberbucks demo (was: weak links in DigiCash system)
by Bryce Wilcox 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Originally to Marcel van der Peijl at DigiCash. - ------- Forwarded Message To: "Marcel van der Peijl" <bigmac(a)digicash.com> Subject: weak links in the cyberbucks demo (was: weak links in DigiCash system) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 19:20:16 -0600 From: Bryce Wilcox <bryce(a)colorado.edu> - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Marcel-- I'm sorry that my comments upset you so much, but I do not believe that they were unwarranted. It is true that the cyberbucks demo is insecure in some ways, such as using insecure e-mail. On the other hand your response that the demo is not about e-mail, it is about E-cash, and that you don't have the manpower to invest in making those extraneous things secure, is a good one and I am satisfied. The only thing I wish I had done differently was to make the title of the message "weak links in cyberbucks demo". There are, as far as I am aware, no weak links in the DigiCash system. I sincerely wish your company the best success, although I fear that MicroSoft and Visa and the like will successfully market inferior systems by use of their money and mindshare. In fact, a large part of the reason that I chose to sell BAP via a cybershop was to draw more attention to Ecash. I hope it is working. I guess if you have about a two-week queue for free cyberbucks, then maybe in a week I will get a whole lot of BAP purchases. :-) Regards, Bryce signatures follow To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. bryce(a)colorado.edu http://ugrad-www.cs.colorado.edu/~wilcoxb/Niche.html - -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Automatic PGP clearsigning under Unix with Bryce's Auto-PGP v1.0 iQCVAwUBMGn3/fWZSllhfG25AQEZegP/XMmoGuATQpfhBtNuIT/yUwFv9IL0+OXe auH1eMJ8d1PoWPJthrou7THpxkkOzJ0iV+GrTKS0n1dSQ2REbwk27SHsXce3LAEX JIy3rsKywTYuswH6aS361uaymPWusMr6ZhAeaegxnoSWnY3/Z2RlPCxDnhpROBsk vKgIf1mt8ww= =TRMS - -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- - ------- End of Forwarded Message -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Automatic PGP clearsigning under Unix with Bryce's Auto-PGP v1.0 iQCVAwUBMGn6PfWZSllhfG25AQHuUQQAtwozCJKKxq4dlOn6SpDHs5tGbhxRWozd NUjDxffgCL2FAINsrfKR9hOXqXztYD1hQGJ4jBE+uw6sD5gGYrGct5RVuG9X51Ua HTceFbqJHd6mc3ISTMusQwQDt9kJ2DmGXqV8nt4yI20uiPKZKDVizhAqg900xqGs 78NeZuvZ5cg= =3SxM -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Information, We want information
by todd＠lgt.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I an immediate need of info on the liabilities of BSD type systems, and in particular the BorderWare products. I heard that in the BorderWare product itself, there are several recently discovered potential "holes"... I have a particular interest in both the Attack MO against the BSD platforms in general and the Border products in particular... Please do not send the reply to the lists but to me personally (todd(a)lgt.com) I will summarize if I get enough info to be worth the effort. Any comments? Thanks In Advance... Todd Glassey todd(a)lgt.com

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