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PGP Public Key Server Commands HTML Document
by Jon 'Iain' Boone 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Although I can access this document and read its contents, I am unable to select the options for submitting or extracting a key. I am using XMosaic to access it -- is this a problem? Jon Boone | PSC Networking | boone(a)psc.edu | (412) 268-6959 finger boone(a)psc.edu for PGP public key block

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An easy-to-create pay-for-use remailer service
by Sameer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I might set one of these up sometime this fall when I get a better net connection for my computer.. meanwhile, here's the idea: A payforuse anonymous id system. Someone would snail mail to me a money order, an login/aliasname, and a pgp SASE, encrypted with the public key of the remailer of their choice. (And the address of the remailer of course.) I would set up a mail alias which would take incoming mail, and send it off to the anonymous remailer defined by the user, with the SASE block thrown in the beginning of the message, and the To: From:, etc. lines added to the message using the "##" header pasting mechanism. Accounts would be debited according to the amount of traffic going through. Once all credit is used up, it would take another money order with the login/aliasname attached to refill the account with credit. In this way an anonymous persona can have a much more normal-looking email address, and the operator of the remailer is still ignorant of the anon-id<=>real-address mapping, to protect against subpeonas. This is just as weak as the remailer-chain used in the SASE block. The privacy of that will improve as the remailers improve.

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Re: Index for ftp site csn.org:/mpj/
by smb＠research.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I just recently got MacRipem and find it much easier to use th an PGP, and was wondering why I should use PGP over Ripem. The above seems to indicate that Ripem isn't as secure. Why is this? I don't doubt that its much easier to use -- it was written by Ray Lau, who is an excellent Mac/UI programmer. The most reasonable reasons why it might be called "less secure" is that RIPEM does not have a signature web like PGP does. It is possible in PEM to only have one signature on your certificate, which can be your own signature, or that of a CA. Therefore, you either have the status of "I say I am who I say I am", or a "Certification Authority says I am who I say I am". I can't speak for RIPEM, but that's not accurate for PEM. You can have as long a chain of signatures as you want up to the certifying authority. That may not be as general as you'd like, but it's better than just a single authority. A bigger problem is that PEM uses DES rather than IDEA. I just learned of a new attack by Mitsuru Matsui of Mitsubishi that requires 2^43 *known* plaintexts, not chosen ones. The note I received says that it ``breaks the scheme in 50 days on 12 HP9735 workstations''. This was presented last week at the Japanese Conference on Cryptography and Information Security.

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Re: 2-way anonymous via SASE
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jon Boone <boone(a)psc.edu> writes > Isn't it true that no matter how many remailers you use, the full spec > of the return path has to be included? And if the last remailer is > keeping a log of all messages passed, then the reciever/replier need > only interrogate the last remailer to find out the sender's address? No, the last remailer only needs to know how to send mail to the preceeding remailer. Depending on how fancy a remailer system you're using, and whether the recipient or remailer operator can be trusted, there are different amounts of work you need to do to get what you want. If you're creating 1-shot reply tokens, they can be set to send to an address at the n-1th remailer, which anonymizes and adds the address for the n-2th remailer, etc. This gives you reasonable security as long as at least one remailer can be trusted and isn't coercible. Don't know if anybody's implemented remailers supporting this yet; Julf's anon.penet.fi remailer gives a more persistent return address. BTW, an alternative to arranging digipayment to every remailer in the chain, which is complex, slow, and introduces opportunities for leakage, might be to create a "Remailer Postage Cooperative"; postage gets sent to the first remailer only, and the remailers use some sort of settlements process to divide up the payments, the way phone companies or post offices do. Postage might vary by number of hops you're paying for or whatever (e.g. a 3-hop stamp), and settlements might be per-message or might just be apportioned by the difference in amount of traffic flowing in each direction. This works better with a stable system of remailers, but even if the remailers aren't all cooperating, it at least lets you reduce the number of postage-stamp messages to the number of cooperatives your message uses instead of the number of remailers, and reduces setup considerably. > Jon Boone | PSC Networking | boone(a)psc.edu | (412) 268-6959 > finger boone(a)psc.edu for PGP public key block Finger can be faked - including your Key ID or fingerprint in your .signature file lets people be more sure it hasn't. e.g. > finger boone(a)psc.edu for PGP public key block ID #123456 # Bill Stewart AT&T Global Information Systems, aka NCR Corp # 6870 Koll Center Parkway, Pleasanton CA, 94566 Phone 1-510-484-6204 # email bill.stewart(a)pleasantonca.ncr.com billstewart(a)attmail.com # ViaCrypt PGP Key IDs 384/C2AFCD 1024/9D6465

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Re: Index for ftp site csn.org:/mpj/
by Ron Davis 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>ripem/ A subset implementation of the proposed Privacy > Enhanced Mail standard. Not as secure as PGP or > Viacrypt PGP, but it is both free and free of patent > infringements in the USA. > I just recently got MacRipem and find it much easier to use than PGP, and was wondering why I should use PGP over Ripem. The above seems to indicate that Ripem isn't as secure. Why is this? ___________________________________________________________________________ "I want to know God's thoughts...the rest are details." -- Albert Einstein _________________________________________ Ron Davis rondavis(a)datawatch.com Datawatch, Research Triangle Park, NC (919)549-0711

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Re: 2-way anonymous via SASE
by jim＠bilbo.suite.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Jon Boone writes > Isn't it true that no matter how many remailers you use, the full spec > of the return path has to be included? And if the last remailer is > keeping a log of all messages passed, then the reciever/replier need > only interrogate the last remailer to find out the sender's address? At no time do any of the remailers see a "full spec of the return path", especially the last remailer in the chain of remailers used for the reply message. You might view the SASE as a "full spec of the return path", however, only the receiver of the original message sees the full SASE, and the SASE is mostly a bunch of encrypted information nested in layers that only become readable as the SASE gets "unwrapped" in its trip back to the original sender. Each remailer involved in the return trip sees only the layer of the SASE that becomes readable when it decrypts the portion of the SASE it received from the previous hop. By the time reply gets to the last remailer (inner most layer of the SASE), the reply contains no information about any of the outer layers of the SASE. All it contain is: (Bob, D, (stuffN))Rx, (((reply)A)B)C (A, B, and C, indicates keys used to re-encrypt the reply. They are not addresses of previous hops.) If Bob was really unlucky, it is possible he could build an SASE using only remailers that are under the control of Ted. If this happend, then Ted would be able to trace back to Bob. However, "Bob" could be an anonymous Penet-style account and Ted would still not have learned who "Bob" really is. Jim_Miller(a)suite.com

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Linear Cryptanalysis of DES - New Developments by Matsui
by schneier＠chinet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Jan. 27, at the Japanese Conference on Cryptography and Information Security, Mitsuru Matsui of Mitsubish presented a known plaintext attack on the full 16-round DES. It requires 2^43 plaintext-ciphertext pairs, and breaks the scheme in 50 days on 12 HP9735 workstations. I have absolutely no more information at this point. I will post again when I know something else. Bruce

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An interesting tidbit in Information Week Magazine
by Chris Johnson 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hi Everyone... Just noticed a little 6 liner on page 10 of the Jan 10 edition of Information Week Magazine: Quoted from said magazine... The government's information superhighway team is finally coming together. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown last week named the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. Members include Craig Fields, chairman of MCC; Mitch Kapor, chairman of the *Electronic_Frontier_Foundation* and co-creator of Lotus 1-2-3; nathan Myhrvold, senior VP for advanced technology at Microsoft; Bert Roberts, chairman of MCI; and John Sculley, former chairman of Apple. End of Quoted text - Emphasis on EFF MINE! I wasn't around in the beginning of January and didn't notice if you guys had a discussion about this. If so - sorry, otherwise - interesting isn't it? Keep up the great work everyone! Chris -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLU28RdQ8XnNL4/CHAQEUfwQAlptuqMdmQzCb1MofpIEqjaddJEgvnaz2 V6Qm1RQZry+tMgXlbKyABMhut5T2rc6TexQOIG2pywmgH/V9ru2UQLF+mGhqFKR5 bOn6jPfanFSWxBOMU0Hzc0GPU3Gxf69UsOAKSqwdkR+DTjcziAVdnEjt3CFaO0OR DxCCG2TFOAM= =yjp7 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Comments Requested for preso outline
by jdblair＠nextsrv.cas.muohio.EDU 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Fellow c*punks, I plan on creating several informational sessions on net legal issues here at Miami University. Use of E-mail has risen considerably in just the last year. Most users of this e-mail have no idea how the words move from their screen to the screen of the addressee, much less government attempts to regulate cryptography. I want to create an overview of no more than an hour (hopefully shorter) that will cover many of the important issues involved. The meetings will be followed by PGP distribution and key generation on Mac and MS-DOS platforms. The following outline is "version 0.1" of what I would like to explain. Unfortunately, I believe the outline needs to be considerably edited. The main problems are 1) Keeping interest, and 2) Making concepts of cryptography understandable for people who are not mathematicians or programmers. I would appreciate any input, criticisms, suggestions any of you have. Mainly, I'm looking for ideas about the best way to teach a basic, conceptual understanding of public key cryptography and digital signatures. I don't expect every person who shows up to start encrypting their communications. What I aim to do is increase awareness, mainly about the activities of their government, and to distribute PGP. These will be people interested in the future of the net as end users, not as code- writers or hackers. I want to educate them about the policies, being formed now, that will affect the net for decades. - -john. - --------------------------------cut here------------------------------- 1) Basic overview of the net. o There is, currently, no "Internet Inc." o The Internet started as a cold war problem: How do you communicate after a nuclear attack? Electronic Mail: How do the words go from your screen to your friend's screen? o broken up into ASCII packets and sent towards the destination this ASCII could be intercepted and read by numerous people along the way Why should you be worried about your privacy? o low cost of information archiving o low cost of key-word scanners o ease of implementation, at least along backbones (in our area, OARnet) o the backbones are often funded, or operated by government agencies o you use envelopes in reality, why not in Cyberspace? 2) How do you keep communications private?: Overview of encryption o encryption is hiding data in plain site o plaintext -> key -> ciphertext relationship o symmetric ciphers > requires a secure channel for key transmission > limited to governments, corporations > ex: DES, used by banks for wire transactions o public key ciphers > does not require a secure channel for key transmission > relationship of public/private keys > overview of a transmission > conceptual description of Alice and Bob communicating (diagrams) o signing methods > what is a digital signature? > what can they be used for? > verifying the integrity of a message o What makes an algorithm secure? > peer-reviewed, public algorithm > security in vast key-space, not in secret algorithm o Software you can use > PGP > demonstrate key generation, data encoding/decoding > various other schemes, probably Curve Encrypt (IDEA) 3) Legal Issues o government regulation > What is the NSA? > Export Laws > Clipper/Skipjack o What is Clipper? > government designed hardware encryption for voice and data > secret algorithm > government backdoor > created to allow tapping of communications by drug dealers, terrorists, etc. o what does it mean for you? o why won't it work? > smart criminals won't use it > government checks on key use probably inadequate o what can you do? > distribution of letter to the president, congress, representatives > encourage algorithm distribution > EFF info 4) Software distribution, Key generation o Mac and MS-DOS PGP o Curve Encrypt -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3 iQBVAgUBLU2L+hD3efpluabZAQHzEwH8DPrdnDfG2zVXAD/MV+21+m6iinT7DN1+ PshKBLAE/UfZCjlplGgZGaHBY+8O9gQ/XsCUp5HDJRLKSxzVvCGKEg== =53C1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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please unsubscribe
by Mack Knopf 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Unfortunately, I just can't handle all the mail and mailing the automatic server didn't work. So, please unsub! Thanks.

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