- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Good editorial in the Merc
by doug＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The Thursday Oct 7 San Jose Mercury News lead editorial contains a note acknowledging a sane point of view about cryptographic exports. (It's titled "Unshackled Tech -- Looser export rules will boost Silicon Valley Sales", and it discusses Clinton's decision last week to boost the speed limit for exportable computers.) The *good* part, though, is: " * Congress should update the Export Administration Act. A 1990 version would have lifted export controls on telecommunications and software with encryption codes, which give the software users a better way to keep data secret. President Bush vetoed it. His administration wanted to deprive the Chinese and Russians of the latest, hard-to-bug telecommunications equipment, and the latest encrypted software. Well, the Chinese already know how to make the new telecommunications equipment. The encryption software is in the hands of anyone who can find a pirated copy." Awareness is beginning to grow out there. Doug

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Re: Standard Headers for Anonymous Remailers
by peb＠PROCASE.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>From: pierre(a)shell.portal.com >Who qualifies whom, based on what info, and to eliminate whom? As the Internet becomes more diverse and less the domain of programmers and scientists, it is natural that other means of selection are needed for membership in a group. The traditional academic atmosphere of mailing lists will evolve away from total openenss. Here are some possibilities: 1. By invitation only--members sponsor new members. 2. By trial period--new members are lurkers on the main list and a subset of the members can see their postings or they must first be moderated. 3. Qualifications--could range widely. 4. Tests. 5. All of the above. >From: owen(a)autodesk.com >with authentication qualifications for *entry* or transaction The Extropians list already does this--not totally secure, to be sure, but you must let the list administrators know all your posting nodes. Paul E. Baclace peb(a)procase.com

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Weak Keys? explained
by charliemerritt＠BIX.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

No, I did not mean I can find the spares of a well constructed key. And yes, the best key has at least one spare. What I meant was, if I were the NSA and wrote the keygen for a crypto system I could guarantee that each key would have a huge number of spares. Enough, that if I were the NSA I could find them. How to generate a weak RSA key: Start with a prime R S=R*2 L1 If S+1 is prime then P=S+1 If S+1 Not prime S=S* next_odd_number (3,5,7,9,11...) Loop to L1 else L2 If S+1 is prime then Q=S+1 If S+1 Not prime S=S* next_odd_number Loop to L2 else N=P*Q #spare keys => 2*R In the example I gave R was 101 p=1+(101*2*3) q=1+(101*2*2*3) spare keys=606 There are many BETTER ways to make a keygen that will produce keys the author can break. RSA has no government trap door, but I, and certainly the NSA can write a keygen that makes trap-doored keys. Ones YOU can't break, but I can, knowing my secret. My example was a put-down of Denning's assurance that skipjack is good. RSA is good, skipjack MAY be good. Look out for booby trapped keys.

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Internet Security Scanner, description
by remail＠tamsun.tamu.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Just in case you think your machine on the Internet is secure enough for remailers, storing private files, etc. here's the author's description from the source code shell archive as posted to comp.sources.misc. It would be a big confidence booster if remailer sites demonstrate that they have passed ISS and other Internet security tests. ---------------------- Internet Security Scanner (ISS) is one of the first multi-level security scanners available to the public. It was designed to be flexible and easily portable to many unix platforms and do its job in a reasonable amount of time. It provides information to the administrator that will fix obvious security misconfigurations. ISS does a multi-level scan of security, not just searching for one weakness in the system. To provide this to the public or at least to the security conscious crowd may cause people to think that it is too dangerous for the public, but many of the (cr/h)ackers are already aware of these security holes and know how to exploit them. These security holes are not deep in some OS routines, but standard misconfigurations that many domains on Internet tend to show. Many of these holes are warned about in CERT and CIAC advisories. This is the first release of ISS and there is still much room for improvement. ISS is a project that I started as I became interested in security. As I heard about (cr/h)ackers breaking into NASA and universities around the world, I wanted to find out the deep secrets of security and how these people were able to gain access to expensive machines that I would think were secure. I searched Internet for relative information, such as Phrack and CERT advisories. Most information was vague and did not explain how intruders were able to gain access to most systems. At most the information told administrators to make password security tighter and to apply the vendor's security patches. They lacked real information on how an intruder would look at a site to try to gain access. Having talked with security experts and reading CERT advisories, I started trying to look for various security holes within my domain. To my surprise, I noticed that many of machines were adequately secured, but within a domain there remained enough machines with obvious holes that anyone wanted into any machine could attack the weak 'trusted' machine and from there could gain access to the rest of the domain. From this project, I have not learned any new deep secret to cracking systems, but with the right tools that most domains on Internet are insecure. These holes will not be a surprise to any advanced intruder, but with this tool administrators will be able to quickly search for obvious holes and prepare to fix them.

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Re: that internet security scanner
by smb＠research.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

anyone actually seen that thing? (to refresh: CERT posted some warning about a security scanner for Internet systems that might be the evil work of themthere hackers so you just better delete it, etc etc.) CERT isn't that stupid. What they said was that ISS has been posted, and that it was likely that some folks would try to use it to break into various systems. Do you disagree with that statement? They also said that you should consider running it yourself, so that you can close the holes first. They even gave the pointer to the directory on UUNET where it's stored. What good would it possibly do to delete it on your own machine, when many thousands of other machines around the world have copies? Again -- CERT isn't stupid. --Steve Bellovin

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second order homophonic substitution
by peter honeyman 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

a faq on this list (and other places) is whether it is possible to encipher a message in such a way that the resulting ciphertext can be deciphered into a different (harmless?) message. i mentioned on sci.crypt that a second-order homphonic substitution does just this, but it seems to have been missed by the cpunx readership. so, just to prove that i can read denning and still type, here is a brief explanation. (not brief enuf, sorry.) a homophonic substitution maps letters from the plaintext alphabet into sets of letters from the ciphertext alphabet. to encipher, you pick an arbitrary letter from the image of each plaintext letter. usually the intent is to disguise single letter frequency statistics. it's still not very strong, since it doesn't disguise digram or trigram statistics. (also, it seems to me that it would be vulnerable to the same sort of attack used on running key ciphers.) need an example? see denning, p. 70. to build a second order homophonic substitution cipher, you construct an n by n table, where n is the size of the plaintext alphabet. (say n = 26). initialize each entry in the table by a unique element from the ciphertext alphabet. (say, the integers from 0 to 26 * 26, permuted arbitrarily.) this table constitutes the key. to encipher a message, select a "dummy" message (say the itar regs). to encipher the i-th plaintext letter, say p sub i, grab the i-th dummy letter, say d sub i, and output table[d sub i, p sub i]. to decipher, find the ciphertext letter (or number, in this case) in the table at row i and column j. to recover the actual message, output the j-th plaintext alphabet letter. to recover the dummy message, output the i-th plaintext alphabet letter. i.e., the rows give the dummy message, while the columns give the actual message. simple stuff. here's an example. table: D E G I N O S T U D 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 E 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 G 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 I 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 N 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 O 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 S 55 56 57 58 58 60 61 62 63 T 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 U 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 here is some ciphertext: 64 11 05 32 49 77 57. it's clear how to extend this to n-th order. peter

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The death of the list as we know it (tm)
by Robert J Woodhead 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I've only been monitoring the list for a couple of days, but already it is clear to me that the traffic is _way_ too high to manage as a mailing list. Apart from the volume, the very structure of Email tends to dis-associate message from reply, and make it difficult to do any filtering before reading (one of the great joys of using _nn_ IMHO). A humble suggestion: someone undertake to create alt.cyperpunks and shadow the newsgroup and the mailing list (so that posts to one also go to the other). In my case this would cut my reading time in half and increase my "harvest" by a factor of two. The mailing list would still be available for those who cannot get the group. In addition, as the number of people getting the mailing list would decrease, it would probably delay the death of the net by bandwidth overload for a few hours (currently, it is scheduled for sometime in June 1997, last time I checked). Also, even an unmoderated alt group can be made moderated (and thus, filter out most of the forgery, etc) by appropriate use of technology described in this mailing list. +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Robert J. Woodhead, Biar Games / AnimEigo, Incs. trebor(a)forEtune.co.jp | | AnimEigo US Office Email (for general questions): 72447.37(a)compuserve.com |

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Re: FIDONet Mail filterin
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> > J >So how do I prevent what happened to SJG, killer, etc from happening > > J >to me? How do I prevent the LE types from showing up one day and > > J >saying 'hey, did you know there's a meg of kiddie porn on your > > J >machine and we're taking it all away'? Well, keeping things encrypted helps, especially backup disks - one site was being generally harassed and may be convicted because of possible child pornography that the sysop had deleted but was still on backup floppies in his re-use bin. (Police got a 15-year-old kid to log in for them and find some adult material, but dropped that attempt probably because it would have been thrown out as entrapment; the child-porn gave them a much nastier charge to use to steal the computer.) Perry> Censoring your users mail will not lower your risk, so why do it? On the other hand, making sure your users *have* email on the system, especially mail in transit to other systems, is good protection, since the ECPA limits what they can do with it.

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This just in..
by owen＠autodesk.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

What an incredible coincidence, this is excerpted from the RISKS digest. LUX ./. owen ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 Oct 93 08:40:21 -0700 >>From: Tom Hanrahan <hanrahan(a)sequent.com> Subject: Epitope suit uses computer bulletin board >>From The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon), October 7, 1993, by Vince Kohler Epitope Inc. used information subpoenaed from the computer bulletin- board service Prodigy to prepare a $5 million federal lawsuit against a Kidder, Peabody vice president in Kansas City, Mo. Lois Rosenbaum, a lawyer for Epitope, said the company used information from Prodigy Services Co. to track down A. Karl Kipke, who works for Kidder, Peabody in Kansas City, Mo. The lawsuit claims that Kipke used a false name, William Smith, to log onto a Prodigy electronic bulletin board on three occasions in August. Each time, the lawsuit contends, Kipke wrote lengthy commentaries he knew were false and defamatory about Epitope, the company's management practices and its attempts to gain federal approval of an oral device used to detect the AIDS virus. [...] "We certainly believe the price of the stock is lower than it would've been but for these false allegations, Rosenbaum said. "And I think it's clear that the articles were written for the purpose of negatively influencing the price of the stock." [...] Epitope's lawsuit says Kipke and his clients were holders of short positions in Epitope stock. [...] Epitope's lawsuit seeks $5 million in punitive damages from Kipke and alleges defamation, manipulation of security prices, securities fraud and intentional interference with business relations. Rosenbaum acknowledged that the lawsuit's electronic dimension is "a very unusual situation." Submitter note: The omitted sections of text basically say that Kipke was unavailable for comment and explain what holding a "short position" means. -- Tom Hanrahan, hanrahan(a)sequent.com ------------------------------

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Re: The death of the list as we know it (tm)
by Matthew B. Landry 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>We debate this issue every couple of months. Give it up. Or start your >own newsgroup. I'm strongly thinking of doing that. However, I think it would be a shame if we had to operate the newsgroup and the list in paralell, without connections. And frankly, I don't think it would be entirely a disadvantage to have wider exposure. Sure, we would get some more noise (but we're used to noise by now), but we would also get a much larger readership. We would still be preaching to the choir, but we would have a "choir" large enough that it would no longer be a disadvantage. As a compromise solution, perhaps we could have a one-way gateway to a general distribution newsgroup, where posts to the list would automatically go to the newsgroup as well, but posts to the group would only go to the group (unless the person also mailed to the list). The list.cypherpunks group at Msen (where my account was before) was set configured like a moderated group, so all posts got sent to the list, but there's no reason it _has_ to be that way. Really, I think there are ways to solve this so that everyone will get what he needs. -- Matthew B. Landry ml7694a(a)american.edu (Finally!) mbl(a)ml7694a.leonard.american.edu

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