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No Subject
by steven farr 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

unscribe sfarr.SAF(a)worldnet.com Steven A Farr

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RE: math patents
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 09:46 AM 4/16/96 -0800, jim bell <jimbell(a)pacifier.com> wrote various amusing paranoid conspiracy theory :-) about software patents. I tend to agree that the concept is bogus, and it's further aggavated by the Patent Office's technical incompetence in the area which has led to granting of patents for things that are well covered by prior art and obviousness to skilled practitioners. However. The first software patent, AFAIK, was Dennis Ritchie's setuid patent from Unix. I'm not sure when it was granted, but it must have been applied for a couple years before Diffie-Hellman was developed. Unlike RSA, where it's fun to talk about RSA/PKP/etc.'s evil conspiracy with the government (in spite of the foreign citizenship of one of them and some amusing uncooperativeness that's let them pull off when threatened) but it's way bogus to argue that in the case of Whit Diffie (I don't know Hellman.) While PKP did acquire the Stanford patents for a while, they weren't the ones who applied for them and didn't form for a while after they were granted. Remember that RSA was developed a couple of years after DH. >I am still mystified, however! If I understand the thrust of the legal >cases you cited, purely mathematical algorithms are still not patentable, >yet the patents on public-key cryptography are about the most purely >mathematical ones that could be imagined. They are not an element in the >process, they ARE the process. The patents are carefully written to make it clear that the process is "protecting private data" rather than "Crunching numbers in some mathematically interesting way." >Patents would not have prevented the Russians from using RSA, nor any other >foreigners, so as far as I can see the only group of people impaired by the >RSA patent were American citizens as a group. (Other than Canadians..) The reason that RSA isn't patentable in other countries isn't because the US is the only place that permits algorithm patents (many countries do, and even provide more than US; e.g. IDEA is patented in Switzerland.) It's because most other countries don't grant patents after publication, and because of the major FUD that the NSA cast over cryptographic research in the 70s and 80s, it's been necessary to publish the theory before applying for patents - if you do it the other way around, the NSA can slam patent secrecy orders on your patent applications, like they did even for a wimpy analog scrambler for CB radio in the late 70s (which _was_ clearly done to impair American access to crypto..) > # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215

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Re: why compression doesn't perfectly even out entropy
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: daw(a)cs.berkeley.edu (David Wagner) > My entropy cruncher takes in random noise from a number of diverse > sources (some possibly of dubious quality). I take *all* the noise > and run it through a hash function to distill entropy. > > Now I need to have some method to estimate when I have enough entropy > in the random noise I'm crunching. First rule: be conservative. > One can never have too much entropy in the input to the hash function. > > Therefore, I suggest making a *copy* of the input noise stream, > running it through Jon Wienke's "this shouldn't happen" filter, and > feeding the result to some entropy estimator. When the entropy > estimator says "I've got 1000 bits of entropy", I stop crunching. > > This is conservative design, folks. Using Wienke's filter in this manner > can't be any weaker than not using it at all. (agreed?) I see two problems with this. The first is whether this mysterious black box, the entropy estimator, is really possible. In practice the only way to know how much entropy you've gotten is to have a model for how the data is being generated, and to deduce from that an estimate of the entropy rate. So the entropy estimator can't be a general-purpose calcluation, but it must be one which is specifically chosen, developed and tuned for the specific source of entropy you are dealing with. Given this, what is the point of filtering? You already have a model. If you want to be conservative, why not just take 50% more bits than your model says you needed? The other problem is the functioning of this filter. I haven't followed Jon's proposals closely, but at one point he was talking about histogramming the input and throwing out data which he had seen too often. Now this is an implicit model as well - it assumes that the data is supposed to be uniformly distributed on a per-byte (or whatever the data elements are) basis. Suppose your random noise from dubious sources includes some timing values which vary in the range 90-110, roughly normally distributed. You have good reason to believe that it actually is a normal distribution, and that there are 2 or 3 good bits of entropy per sample. If you didn't use Jon's filter you could just collect data, hash it, and figure that each datum gave you this much entropy. But now if you throw Jon's filter in there, it may start throwing out all the values in the range 90-110. Where are the 0-80's?, it wonders. Where are the 120's and up? There are way too many 100's here! If the filter isn't smart about the data like your model is, it could end up throwing the whole data set out. Your entropy counter would be spinning its wheels waiting for more data, and you'd think you never got enough. So I think the lesson is that there is only one way to estimate entropy, and that is to study your source. I have to agree with Perry that this filtering concept is not the way to go. It is a red herring that lures you in the direction of automatic entropy estimation, and that is really not safe. Hal Finney

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RE: math patents
by jim bell 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:54 PM 4/18/96 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:

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GSM Interception
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Below is one of the most comprehensive and informative sites we've seen on telephonic snooping, with nation by nation accounting of technologies, laws, disinformation, deception, complicity, commerce and teletone opps for MH-moola ka-chinka chinka: From: "UT11" <ut11(a)techno.forem.be> To: <jya(a)pipeline.com> Date: Tue, 17 Mar 1998 15:07:50 +0100 Actually 100 Millions of GSM Are Geographically & Automatically Tapped and Stored 4 Months http://www.ii-mel.com/interception http://www.dejanews.com (keyword: location GSM, title: interception)

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Re: (Fwd) RE: Noise Sphere in Java
by Deranged Mutant 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On 18 Apr 96 at 11:13, Hal wrote: [..] > There was a post on cypherpunks a few days ago claiming that the output > of "pgp +makerandom=2000 rand.pgp", which uses the PGP internal RNG, > showed visible structure in the output of a noise sphere program. I > tried modifying Chuck's Java version and ran it with data from pgp > +makerandom, and it looked fine to me. Hm. I didn't see that post... (I wonder if he plotted an ASCII file... or I suspect a troll?) > However, that isn't very meaningful, because I find the that program > output looks fine even with Chuck's version, which is using the Java > internal RNG, a LCM from Knuth. Specifically the Java code is: [..] A lot of bad PRNGs look good with noise spheres.... but what I found while experimenting with them was data based on timer drift samplings that passed a variety of randomness tests but showed up with very clear patterns on a noise sphere... so I made the original post to the list and sci.crypt about it. Noise spheres will show certain correlations in the data. It doesn't mean that the RNG is crypto-usable if it looks good. But if it looks bad then you know to be suspicious.... a visual image makes a clear point better than analyzing a lot of numbers on a page. By no means should it be relied upon as a sole test. [..] > see it. Oh, sometimes I can almost convince myself I'm seeing structure, > but it is never repeatable from run to run. And I see as much with the > output of pgp. Particularly when the graph is sparse you can see some > clumping, but I think it is just random noise. > If the noise sphere can't even reject an LCM RNG, it doesn't sound > that useful to me for crypto purposes. If you see definite spirals and loops then it's more than random noise. It doesn't pass or reject anything. It plots data. If the data shows *definite* patterns, you can reject the RNG. If not, use more sophisticated tests. [..] > at right angles to this. Because polar coordinates are not uniform in > space, the points are clustered along the north-south axis inside the > globe. You can see this in the views, where the upper right view should [..] That's probably what the poster to c'punks wrote about... *sigh* Rob. --- Send a blank message with the subject "send pgp-key" to <WlkngOwl(a)unix.asb.com> for a copy of my PGP key.

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Data Fellows Lauches New Version of the Famous F-Secure SSH Products
by Mia Westerholm 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Data Fellows Ltd. Media Release For immediate release 17 March 1998 DATA FELLOWS LAUNCHES NEW VERSIONS OF THE FAMOUS F-SECURE SSH PRODUCTS The improved F-Secure SSH product family is a unique tool for secure remote systems administration ESPOO, FINLAND --- Data Fellows, a leading provider of Internet security solutions, has launched new versions of its famous F-Secure SSH products. F-Secure SSH Tunnel&Terminal and F-Secure SSH Server protect TCP/IP-based terminal connections in UNIX, Windows and Macintosh environments. They enable remote systems administrators and telecommuters to access corporate networks via any Internet Service Provider without revealing system passwords and other secrets to possible eavesdroppers. "In addition to providing secure login connections, F-Secure SSH Server secures all remote systems administration tasks by providing secure tools to replace the existing rsh, rlogin, rcp, rdist and telnet protocols," says Mr. Olli Voima, Product Development Manager of F-Secure SSH. "As a new feature, the secure file transfer application offers an easy-to-use graphical interface for the safe transfer of files." F-Secure SSH Tunnel&Terminal and F-Secure SSH Server support the forwarding of TCP/IP services like pop, smtp (used by e-mail software), http (used by Web browsers), etc., or almost any other TCP/IP-based service. The local proxy server in F-Secure SSH Tunnel&Terminal listens for a socket on the desired port and forwards the request and data over the secure channel. It then instructs the F-Secure SSH Server to make the connection to the specified service on the remote machine. Automatic forwarding of the X11 Windowing System secures graphical applications. F-Secure SSH products are based on the SSH protocol, an application level security mechanism used in conjunction with Internet protocols. "The SSH protocol is the most widely audited and standardized security protocol in the world," says Mr. Voima. "Its strong end-user authentication and encryption leave no room for security compromises. As a European company, Data Fellows is not restricted by the US export regulations, and has thus been able to make strong encryption available worldwide. F-Secure SSH host authentication is based on 1024-bit RSA keys, and the secure connections use 128-bit session keys." In addition to being strongly secured, the F-Secure SSH products are easy to use. The single sign-on technology makes the handling of multiple terminal sessions simple. Says Mr. Voima: "Easy-to-use and strongly secured, F-Secure SSH is a truly unique security solution for remote systems administration." About Data Fellows: Data Fellows is one of the worlds leading developers of data security products with offices in San Jose, California and Espoo, Finland. Its groundbreaking F-Secure product family is a unique combination of globally available, strong encryption and revolutionary anti-virus software. The integrated F-Secure product range provides a complete security solution for enterprises, and includes file encryption and IPSec communication encryption products, VPN gateways, SSH based secure remote management software, and a full range of anti-virus products to workstations, servers and gateways. Data Fellows is also the developer of the award winning F-PROT Professional anti-virus, now part of the dual scanning engine concept of F-Secure Anti-Virus. Data Fellows is privately owned. Since it was founded in 1988, its annual net growth of net sales has been over 80%. Data Fellows offers a worldwide network of technical support, training and distribution in over 70 countries. Data Fellows belongs to an elite group of companies that have a triple-A rating from Dun&Bradstreet. For further information, please contact: Mr. Olli Voima, Product Development Manager Tel. +358 9 859 900, Fax. +358 9 8599 0599 E-Mail: Olli.Voima(a)DataFellows.com or visit out website at http:// www.DataFellows.com ALSO, VISIT OUT BOOTH AT CEBITŽ98 (HALL 3, STAND B46) €€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€ Mia.Westerholm(a)DataFellows.com http://www.DataFellows.com Data Fellows Ltd. PL 24 FIN-02231 ESPOO, FINLAND Tel. +358 9 859 900 Fax. +358 9 8599 0599

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(fwd) Christopher Ruddy on Colby 5/7/96 (fwd)
by anonymous-remailer＠shell.portal.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Theories on cause of Colby death abound By Christopher Ruddy FOR THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW WASHINGTON - The body of "the Old Gray Man of the CIA," William Colby, has been found in waters near his weekend home, but theories about his demise continue to thrive. Colby, who served as CIA director under Presidents Nixon and Ford, disappeared April 28. Maryland authorities found his body Monday morning after it washed ashore. This followed an intensive search of the Wimcoico River near Colby's home in Rock Point, Md. Local police believe his body was lost in the cloudy waters of the Wicomico while canoeing, a favorite pastime of Colby's. At 76, Colby was physically fit and, after surviving parachute drops behind Nazi lines in War World II and stints in Vietnam, he was a cautious, careful and cunning man who lived up to his James Bond super-spy credentials. Last week, The New York Post's irreverent Page Six raised concerns about Colby's disappearance and apparent death with an article headlined "Conspiracy Crowd Snatches Colby." "The theory among conspiracy-minded, cloak-and-dagger buffs is that Colby was assassinated so he wouldn't spill any more agency secrets," the gossip page began. Agency insiders reportedly resented Colby for talking to Congress about the "family jewels" - supposed illegal operations the agency conducted in the decades before Watergate. As a result, Colby lost the support of agency insiders and the Ford administration. President Ford fired Colby on Halloween 1975. Some theorists point to the similar circumstances surrounding the 1978 death of CIA deputy director John A. Paisley. Paisley's sailboat was found adrift in the Chesapeake Bay just 15 miles from Colby's home. His body was discovered days later. He died of an apparent gunshot behind his ear. His body had been weighted with diving belts. Since no blood was found on the boat, authorities theorized Paisley first jumped into the water and then fired the shot into his head. However, murder was never ruled out in the case. While some refuse to believe 20-year-old grudges could have led to Colby's demise, others, including Fred Davis, the Maryland county sheriff in charge of the probe, still find the death suspicious and haven't ruled out foul play Already, the death has been the buzz of talk radio and the Internet. Pittsburgh's Jim Quinn on WRRK-FM joked that Colby's body will rise to the top as soon as "someone cuts the concrete slabs tied to his feet." New York shock-jock Don Imus, whose recent roast of the Clintons caused a stir, started off one of his morning programs wondering what the "Whitewater" connection was with Colby's death - a reference, no doubt, to the high number of deaths likened to a web of Arkansas scandal. Even though Imus didn't realize it, Colby did have a Whitewater connection. For the past two years, he has been a contributing editor with a monthly financial newsletter, Strategic Investment. Co-edited by James Dale Davidson and former Times of London editor Lord William Rees Mogg, Strategic is read by more than 100,000 subscribers worldwide and has been closely monitoring the Whitewater scandal. Davidson has written in the newsletter that Vincent Foster, former White House deputy counsel, was murdered and that significant evidence links the Clintons to drug trafficking, murder and organized crime in their home state of Arkansas. Foster was found shot to death more than two years ago in Fort Marcy Park near Washington, D.C. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that it was glad to see James Davidson "pushing the envelope" on the Whitewater scandal. Colby began taking a more active role in the newsletter in February, writing a weekly column on geo-political matters and their effects on investments in Strategic Weekly Briefings - a facsimile newsletter tailored for high-income investors. Colby traveled with Davidson several times to Asia, leading groups of investors. In his columns, Colby never touched upon the Clintons or the Whitewater affair. His name and former association with the CIA was no doubt a real credibility boost for the newsletter and was touted throughout the newsletter and its promotional brochures (which often detailed the newsletter's reporting of the darker side of Whitewater). "I find the death suspicious for a lot of reasons," Davidson told the Tribune-Review. He does not link his Whitewater coverage to the death, but points to problems associated with Colby's disappearance. "It's not clear how his life jacket and paddle, which he always took canoeing with him, disappeared,''he said. Davidson also is disturbed by an early Associated Press report quoting Mrs. Colby as having spoken with her husband on the day of the death. The AP reported that Colby said he was not feeling well, but planned to go canoeing anyway. In a statement this week, Mrs. Colby, who was in Texas when she spoke to her husband for the last time, said he was feeling fine, and never mentioned any plans to go canoeing. Davidson described Colby as a "charming and fit" man who had great stamina traveling. "He was a New Deal Democrat like many who started in the OSS (the forerunner to the CIA)," Davidson remarked. According to Davidson, one of his staff members contacted local police who said they were perplexed as to where the AP got the original report on Colby's conversation with his wife. Some old Cold Warriors recollect Colby's longstanding feud with James Jesus Angleton, the longtime head of the CIA's counterintelligence division. Angleton believed the CIA had been infiltrated by KGB moles; Colby believed Angleton had become symptomatic of Cold War paranoia and forced his ouster in 1974. After his dismissal, a bitter Angleton told associates he believed that Colby had been recruited by the KGB and was a long-term asset of the Soviets. Angelton's supporters noted Colby's association with far left committees - including ones supported by the Institute for Policy Studies - after Colby departed from the CIA. Colby also called for near unilateral disarmament - an immediate 50 percent reduction in the American defense budget during the height of East-West tensions. One friend of Colby's scoffed at such notions and suggested that his espousal of unorthodox views were not based on a longtime hidden ideology, but may be explained by his desire to live down an undesirable reputation he acquired in Vietnam for heading up the controversial Operation Phoenix, a program to eradicate peasant support of the Viet Cong, for which Colby had been branded by war protesters as a war criminal.

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Re: Spaces in passwords
by Steve Gibbons 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

# > I have a hard enough time getting lusers to choose non-dictionary # > passwords that they can *remember* - one technique is to teach sub-100 # > i.q. types to use two words, seperated by a #,@, etc., with a number # > tossed in: kill#pig1et, which isn't a dictionary word, but has a chance of # > being remembered without writing it on a sticky note and pasting it to # > the @#%&ing monitor. # It's hard. I'd really rather have longer pass{words,phrases} so that there's # the potential for lots of entropy without requiring line-noise for passwords. One of the ideas that I've been kicking around in the back of my head for a while for stronger, easier to uses user authentication goes something like this: 1) User enters a pass-phrase. 2) System "tokenizes" the pass-phrase. The tokenization would probably include a normalization step: condensing white-space and punctuation, standardizing the casing of words, perhaps even going so far as converting 3133+ speak to something readable. Once normalized, the pass-phrase would be parsed, and tokenized. It would be useful to have a large system-wide dictionary, sorted by how common a given word or group of words is normally used in the most commonly used languages that the system's users speak/write. Any word or group of words found in the dictionary would be converted to a number, representing its position in the dictionary, and the significant bits of that number are concatenated to a running bit string. Words and tokens not found in the dictionary would pass through some other algorithm that I haven't thought too much about, yet. 3A) System examines the tokenized pass-phrase against another (probably _very_ large) dictionary of common phrases for acceptability. (maybe just comparing the hashes of the phrases [smaller dictionary]) System also examines the "length" of the tokenized pass-phrase for acceptability (for pass-phrase changes.) 3B) System hashes the tokenized pass-phrase, and compares it against the previously stored hash (for authentication.) [ Standard crypt(3) stuff ] Ignoring the fact that strong one-time-passwords are orders of magnitude better, what would something like this buy you? 0) "Good" pass-phases should be more difficult to brute-force or inteligently attack than simple (8 or 16 byte) passwords. [ rm /usr/local/bin/crack ] 1) Pass-phrases are generally easier to remember than system-generated passwords. [ no more post-its pasted to screens or hidden under keyboards with passwords written on them. ] 2) Pass-phrases can be a pain to type in correctly, the normalization step should help in this regard. [ happier users ] 3) Enforcement of selecting good pass-phrases is difficult. This scheme addresses _some_ of the issues involved. [ The next generation of 'crack' won't have a foothold - happier security officers. ] This message has been sponsored by off-the-cuff, back-of-the-brain, and poorly-thought-out; comments and suggestions/improvements are welcomed. -- Steve(a)AZTech.Net

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no help for the clueless
by Dave Del Torto 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Sameer, I submit that the "info" command should be implemented with a little ReadMe for clueless "subscrivers"... this is part of the idea, right? dave ................................. cut here ................................. >Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 04:38:16 -0700 (PDT) >To: ddt(a)lsd.com >From: Majordomo(a)c2.org >Subject: Majordomo results: info clueless > >-- > >>>>> info clueless >#### No info available for clueless. >>>>> >>>>>

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