- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

A5
by klockstone＠cix.compulink.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

The A5 code in the back of Schneier's 'Applied Cryptography' seems to have some errors in it - has anybody else had a serious play with it? Keith.

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Re: PGP, Inc.--What were they thinking?
by spencer_ante＠webmagazine.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Declan, perhaps the Big Brother vs. The Boss debate has been talked about for years in the crypto community but, as far as I can tell, it hasn't crossed over into the mainstream mediasphere. And that's partly due to the rhetoric of cyberlibertarians, who have consistently pointed their finger (justifiably most of the time) at the evil government, at the expense of seriously analyzing surveillance in the private sector. For example, how many people know what their company's security policy is? Do they read your email? How often and with what cause? I think any type of surveillance system is cause for concern--whether it originates from the government or IBM. Lastly, I think you overestimate the amount of wiggle room folks have in the labor market, which is never perfect. What happens when most of the Fortune 500 starts eavesdropping on company email? (Incidentally, I think that most working people--unlike the digerati--are not in a position to launch their own company.) It reminds me of the drug testing issue. Sure, it sucks and may even be unconstitutional, but that hasn't stopped a lot of companies from doing it. -Spencer (posting this from my the computer in my corporate cubicle) At 15:08 -0700 10/22/97, spencer_ante(a)webmagazine.com wrote: >But with this new product, I agree that they run the risk of alienating >their core user group of cypherpunks and hackers. Encryption is a very >complicated topic that doesn't lend itself well to sloganeering and >histrionics. And one major thing that needs to be pointed out: PGP's key >recovery system is *voluntary and private*--not mandatory and gov. >controlled, which is what the Feds and Louis Freeh have been pushing for. >One potential positive side effect of PGP 5.5 is that it could realign the >crypto debate and force people to consider this question: Whose back door >should netizens be more worried about: Big Brother or The Boss? Spencer, the folks on the cypherpunks list know better than perhaps anyone else that encryption is a complicated topic. I know it's tempting to search for New Things to Say about the crypto debate. I try it myself sometimes. But the question you posed about "whose backdoor should netizens be more worried about" has been debated for years and is hardly new. The short answer to it is: when Big Brother is my Boss, I have remedies. I can leave the company or pressure it to change policies. I can file a union grievance. If all else fails, I can leave the company and start my own. This is not the case when Big Brother is Louis Freeh or Janet Reno. When worldwide GAK is the rule, where else can I go? Also: governments have guns; governments have jails. They have unique coercive powers, which the law and western philosophical traditions recognize -- and try to limit. -Declan (posting this before a soccer game somewhere in virginia)

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A Constitutionalist Recants
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Law & Order has showed me the error of my ways. After watching tonight's show, I realized that those who 'hide behind the Constitution' are all murderers. I was so proud of the judge who made his speech about supporting the concepts behind the constitution, and then was able to see his error in not throwing it out the window because of a single dead person. I cheered when the judge dismissed a juror for quoting the founding fathers. God bless what used to be America! ReformedConstitutionalistMonger "Sure, Dan Quayle was an idiot for getting all worked up over a Murphy Brown episode, but this is different...isn't it?"

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Proof IE4 not an OS, was Re: Bill Gates, the Bully Savior
by James Love 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Nifty comment by Michael McMain on JavaLobbyCafe(a)iceworld.org list: -------------------------- A friend at work made an interesting point about MS's claim that IE4 is simply an OS extension and not an application. All the DA has to do is turn on a Power Mac, start IE4, turn to MS and say "So what other parts of your OS run on the Macintosh exactly?".

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DC cypherpunks party on Sunday, November 2
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A DC cypherpunk working meeting and party is tentatively scheduled for Sunday, November 2. The party is open to all, including non-cypherpunks and even (especially?) NSA spooks. (I somehow got suckered into organizing this portion.) Folks who showed up to my party and the cypherpunk meeting before it last month remember that Marc Rotenberg and his wife at that time volunteered to host the next one. Their home is near the National Cathedral in NW Washington, DC. About a 20 minute walk from the Woodley Park Metro, lots of parking. Special guests likely will include Peter Neumann and Simon Davies. Details forthcoming. -Declan

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Re: Technical Description of PGP 5.5
by William H. Geiger III 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In <3.0.2.32.19971022210316.00727944(a)netcom10.netcom.com>, on 10/22/97 at 09:03 PM, Lucky Green <shamrock(a)netcom.com> said: >At 07:12 AM 10/15/97 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote: >>Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to imply that the CMR fields >>in the key structure are really just a convenience -- if PGP, Inc. >>didn't write an smtp filter that enforced a CMR key, someone else >>(say a firewall vendor) could do so easily, defining whatever >>relationship between keys they wanted. >Anybody with half a brain, a copy of perl, and the PGP 5.0 source from >http://www.pgpi.com/ could write a similar filter in a matter of hours. I made this point at the very begining. Source code is not even needed, all one needs to know is the encryption & signature packet formats to be able to pull the keyID's. >I am going to install PGP's SMTP filter on my box. To make it impossible >to accidentally send unencrypted mail to certain people. :-) I already have this inplace as a Rexx script on my E-Mail client. :)) >>To make that a bit stronger, it seems like *any* model that uses >>persistent encryption keys essentially enables CMR-like functionality >>in a smtp filter -- it could be done using pgp 2.6. My set-up works with 2.6->5.0. It's just not persistent keys but the ability to encrypt to multiple recipiants. Of cource even without these features this functionality can implemented by moveing encryption to the server. Only signing & decryption need to be on the client machines. It may even be more efficent in a corporate enviroment to do so. There are performance questions in a high volumn enviroment but I have developed techniques that greatly enhance the perfomance of PGP when working with large keyrings. I know C2-Net has done work with their Stronghold product for supporting hardware based encryption to improve performance on high volumn servers, it would be intresting to see how well these cards would lend themselves to PGP. >Correct. But this isn't going to stop people from complaining. >PGP 5.5 is considerably better than PGP 5.0. The LDAP support alone is >reason to upgrade. The UI is improved and if you don't want to use >message recovery, just don't turn it on. I will agree that 5.5 is an improvement but to be honest I am not that crazy about it. Not that all of it is PGP's fault alot has to do with the OS it runs on. NT just isn't ready for prime time. I have my own GUI I designed for PGP on the OS/2 platform so I am a little biased in that area. :) - -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html - --------------------------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a Charset: cp850 Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000 iQCVAwUBNE7+aY9Co1n+aLhhAQFhwgP/SdJSeNgbG/SRgR15gwtb22QFOF/VBEL6 K047yXYEwJ/2Vd/zEwJ8AU/6ycVawtGMFpIGyLQHG91ATVear7CSHmsa6KMPH7EC dtK2bbEQlpJsgGbQpXNt6gHOuKYRZIXp65XIlEvu8qW3CJLUGz+RTNnKOAIFkUe2 JWWYRj7N5Wc= =xwCN -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: PGP Employee on MKR
by mark＠unicorn.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[Resent because god-damned Netscape screwed up the line-breaks] A PGP Employee wrote: >> Unfortunately these people just don't get it. Corporations refused >> to buy 5.0 because it did not have any way for the corps to get at >> email encrypted to their employees. There are some very legitimate >> uses of this, such as when an employee dies and someone else has >> to take over for them. No, PGP Inc 'just don't get it'. I'm sure that there are plenty of people out there who disagree with the entire concept of CMR, and I'm not very happy with it myself. But that's not the most important issue here. Since this point just doesn't seem to get through to PGP Inc employees, I'm going to shout. FORCING ENCRYPTION TO MULTIPLE KEYS FOR ONE RECIPIENT IS ONE STEP AWAY FROM GAK. FORCING ENCRYPTION TO MULTIPLE KEYS FOR ONE RECIPIENT IS ONE STEP AWAY FROM GAK! FORCING ENCRYPTION TO MULTIPLE KEYS FOR ONE RECIPIENT IS ONE STEP AWAY FROM GAK!! FORCING ENCRYPTION TO MULTIPLE KEYS FOR ONE RECIPIENT IS ONE STEP AWAY FROM GAK!! !!!*FORCING ENCRYPTION TO MULTIPLE KEYS FOR ONE RECIPIENT IS ONE STEP AWAY FROM GAK*!!! Is that clear enough? Do you understand what I (and, apparently, Adam Back and others) am saying now? The problem is not so much with the fact that you're supporting company needs, but with the way you're doing so. >> They also don't seem to realize that you always have the ability >> to remove the MRK from your list of recipients. Just as government-supported rating schemes are purely voluntary and will be so for, oh, I don't know, a couple of years? Once the infrastructure is there, we need only an executive order to make it mandatory. If this software ships in its current form and becomes the dominant player in the market, in four or five years all keys will be GMR keys with the FBI or NSA as one mandatory recipient. You 'privacy zealots' will have created the government's surveillance infrastructure. I hope you'll feel proud. >> Sometimes I really feel like screaming at these people. _All_ of >> the developers at PGP are personal privacy zealots and no one >> likes the idea of the MRK. Good. Then reimplement it to avoid giving the government a GAK/GMR infrastructure. Yesterday I posted a modified version of PGP's CMR to the cypherpunks list which can't be used for GAK because it only encrypts to one key; Jon Callas just told me I'd 'redesigned PGP 5.5'. Cool. I've redesigned PGP 5.5 so that it can't support GAK; in that case, please implement it, or accept that you're deliberately choosing to support the thugs in governments around the world and have become part of the problem. >> That is why we refuse to make them >> required. Just 'mandatory voluntary' for companies which have your SMTP enforcer enabled. What's the difference? >> Most everyone at PGP has >> internalized personal privacy as a cause (actually most had it >> before they joined PGP). So prove it. Stop working on creating a GMR/GAK infrastructure. The current PGP CMR system has numerous problems which many people have pointed out on the cypherpunks list, and you'd do better to solve those problems rather than see them in a major New York Times article about '101 Ways PGP 5.5 Harms Company Security'. How long will PGP Inc last when it's reputation for providing secure products is in tatters, because it chose to release a product which deliberately reduced company security and opened them to new threats, rather than redesign their CMR to remove these problems? The current CMR implementation is bad for us, bad for PGP Inc's commercial customers, and bad for PGP Inc. Why is this so hard for you to accept? Why ship a bad product when you can fix the problems? Mark

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Re: PGP Employee on MKR
by mark＠unicorn.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A PGP Employee wrote: >> Unfortunately these people just don't get it. Corporations refused >> to buy 5.0 because it did not have any way for the corps to get at >> email encrypted to their employees. There are some very legitimate >> uses of this, such as when an employee dies and someone else has >> to take over for them. No, PGP Inc 'just don't get it'. I'm sure that there are plenty of people out there who disagree with the entire concept of CMR, and I'm not very happy with it myself. But that's not the most important issue here. Since this point just doesn't seem to get through to PGP Inc employees, I'm going to shout. FORCING ENCRYPTION TO MULTIPLE KEYS FOR ONE RECIPIENT IS ONE STEP AWAY FROM GAK. FORCING ENCRYPTION TO MULTIPLE KEYS FOR ONE RECIPIENT IS ONE STEP AWAY FROM GAK! FORCING ENCRYPTION TO MULTIPLE KEYS FOR ONE RECIPIENT IS ONE STEP AWAY FROM GAK!! FORCING ENCRYPTION TO MULTIPLE KEYS FOR ONE RECIPIENT IS ONE STEP AWAY FROM GAK!! !!!*FORCING ENCRYPTION TO MULTIPLE KEYS FOR ONE RECIPIENT IS ONE STEP AWAY FROM GAK*!!! Is that clear enough? Do you understand what I (and, apparently, Adam Back and others) am saying now? The problem is not so much with the fact that you're supporting company needs, but with the way you're doing so. >> They also don't seem to realize that you always have the ability >> to remove the MRK from your list of recipients. Just as government-supported rating schemes are purely voluntary and will be so for, oh, I don't know, a couple of years? Once the infrastructure is there, we need only an executive order to make it mandatory. If this software ships in its current form and becomes the dominant player in the market, in four or five years all keys will be GMR keys with the FBI or NSA as one mandatory recipient. You 'privacy zealots' will have created the government's surveillance infrastructure. I hope you'll feel proud. >> Sometimes I really feel like screaming at these people. _All_ of >> the developers at PGP are personal privacy zealots and no one >> likes the idea of the MRK. Good. Then reimplement it to avoid giving the government a GAK/GMR infrastructure. Yesterday I posted a modified version of PGP's CMR to the cypherpunks list which can't be used for GAK because it only encrypts to one key; Jon Callas just told me I'd 'redesigned PGP 5.5'. Cool. I've redesigned PGP 5.5 so that it can't support GAK; in that case, please implement it, or accept that you're deliberately choosing to support the thugs in governments around the world and have become part of the problem. >> That is why we refuse to make them >> required. Just 'mandatory voluntary' for companies which have your SMTP enforcer enabled. What's the difference? >> Most everyone at PGP has >> internalized personal privacy as a cause (actually most had it >> before they joined PGP). So prove it. Stop working on creating a GMR/GAK infrastructure. The current PGP CMR system has numerous problems which many people have pointed out on the cypherpunks list, and you'd do better to solve those problems rather than see them in a major New York Times article about '101 Ways PGP 5.5 Harms Company Security'. How long will PGP Inc last when it's reputation for providing secure products is in tatters, because it chose to release a product which deliberately reduced company security and opened them to new threats, rather than redesign their CMR to remove these problems? The current CMR implementation is bad for us, bad for PGP Inc's commercial customers, and bad for PGP Inc. Why is this so hard for you to accept? Why ship a bad product when you can fix the problems? Mark

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Fwd: 56-bit RSA/RC5 Cracked
by Jeffrey Gold 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Apologies if this already seen - JG =================================== Date: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 18:26:52 -0400 To: mac crypto list <mac-crypto(a)vmeng.com> From: Vinnie Moscaritolo <vinnie(a)vmeng.com> Subject: RC5 cracked Press Release and Background Sheet FORMAL PRESS RELEASE For Immediate Release Contact: David McNett October 22,1997 205-458-8208 SECURE ENCRYPTION CHALLENGED BY INTERNET-LINKED COMPUTERS CHICAGO, IL (October 22, 1997) In what could be called the largest distributed-computing effort ever, tens of thousands of computers linked across the Internet, under the leadership of distributed.net, decrypted a message encoded with RSA Labs' 56-bit RC5 encryption algorithm. Considered by many experts to be a sufficient level of encryption, this feat has cast grave doubts in the minds of analysts as to the level of encryption required to keep private data secure. "Our effort has shown that it is dangerous to consider any 56-bit key secure", says David McNett, one of the primary coordinators of this distributed supercomputing project. The distributed.net effort to decrypt the encoded message required massive computing power, harnessed by utilizing the idle, or otherwise unused computing power from ordinary office and home computers. Combined, these machines managed to evaluate 47% of the keyspace, or 34 quadrillion keys, before finding the winning key. At the close of the contest there were over 4000 active teams processing over 7 billion keys each second at a combined computing power equivalent to more than 26 thousand high-end personal computers. The work was performed entirely using consumer PCs during off-hours or otherwise idle time. Add them all together, however, and you have the world's largest computer. The winning key was found by Peter Stuer, working for the STARLab Bovine Team coordinated by Jo Hermans and centered in the Computer Science Department (DINF) of the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Belgium. Of the US$10000 prize from RSA Labs, Mr. Stuer will receive US$1000. US$8000 is being donated to Project Gutenberg, a non-profit organization created for the purpose of converting the classics of literature into electronic format for the unlimited public use. The remaining US$1000 is being retained by distributed.net to assist in funding future projects. Distributed.net is the brainchild of Adam L. Beberg. It is the largest non-profit venture focused on developing the full potential of distributed computing. Its purpose is to utilize the Internet, allowing home and office computer users to join forces in tackling great and seemingly insurmountable computational challenges. The net result is computing power sufficient to challenge the dominance of even the most expensive mainframes and research computers. Information about distributed.net is available from the official distributed.net web site at: http://www.distributed.net/ MEDIA CONTACTS: David McNett, Voice: (205) 458-8208, Fax: (205) 458-8206 nugget(a)distributed.net ALTERNATE: Adam L. Beberg, (708) 396-9532, beberg(a)distributed.net ------------------------------------------------------------------ SECURE ENCRYPTION CHALLENGED BY INTERNET-LINKED COMPUTERS Background for release dated October 22, 1997 distributed.net data sheet distributed.net web site: http://www.distributed.net/ Related sites: Project Gutenberg: http://www.promo.net/pg/ RSA Labs: http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/ RSA Secret Key Challenge: http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/97challenge/ Principal organizers: Adam L. Beberg, Software Engineer, Chicago, Illinois Jeff Lawson, Junior Computer Science Major, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California David McNett, Computer Programmer/Network Administrator, Birmingham, Alabama Project statistics: Start of contest: January 28, 1997 Start of distributed.net effort: March 20, 1997 End of contest: October 19, 1997 Size of keyspace: 72,057,594,037,927,936 Number of "blocks":268,435,456 Number of keys in one "block": 268,435,456 Peak keys/day: 600,246,644,113,408 Peak keys/second: 7,200,000,000 (estimated) The unencrypted message: "It's time to move to a longer key length" Computing equivalents: Distributed.net is equivalent in processing power to: 14,685 Intel Pentium Pro 200 processors 13,362 Motorola PowerPC 604e/200 processors 116,326 Intel 486DX2/66 processors 58,163 Intel Pentium 133 processors Perspective: distributed.net could compromise 46-bit RC5 in under one hour. If you printed a single page to represent each key block as it was checked and placed those pages in a stack, it would grow 6.24 inches taller every minute. If keys were drops of water, the flow rate would be 464428 litres per second. If Keys were dollars, we could pay off the U.S. National Debt in 12.44 minutes. If keys were bytes, we could fill 290268 3 1/2" floppy diskettes every minute If keys were drops of water, the flow rate would be 122609 gallons per second. If Key Blocks were hamburgers, we could feed the entire city of Phoenix, AZ lunch each day The computer that found the key: CPU: Intel Pentium Pro 200 RAM: 128 megabytes Operating System: Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0 Owner: Vrije Universiteit, Brussels, Belgium Operator: Peter Stuer More information: http://dinf.vub.ac.be/bovine.html/ MEDIA CONTACTS: David McNett, Voice: (205) 458-8208, Fax: (205) 458-8206 nugget(a)distributed.net ALTERNATE: Adam L. Beberg, (708) 396-9532, beberg(a)distributed.net --Brian Bechtel, blob(a)ricochet.net Vinnie Moscaritolo http://www.vmeng.com/vinnie/ Fingerprint: 3F903472C3AF622D5D918D9BD8B100090B3EF042 "You can get a lot more with a smile and a gun then a smile, alone." - Al Capone -- Robert Guerra - PGP public key available on PGP key servers Email-> mailto:az096@freenet.toronto.on.ca Home Page-> http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3378

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Laws recognizing digital signatures
by Vincent Cate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have talked to people in government and the offshore private sector here and think Anguilla has a very good chance of passing a law making digital signatures legally recognized, at least for corporations. I think we would be the first taxhaven to do so. Currently companies use corporate seals. I mentioned that there were a few other jurisdictions that had passed some laws like this and they would like me to try to pin down which and, if possible, get copies of the laws. I remember some talk about this on cypherpunks, so I am hoping someone here can tell me which places (think there was some state) have such laws, and if possible tell me where I can get a copy. Thanks, -- Vince ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Vincent Cate Offshore Information Services Vince(a)Offshore.com.ai http://www.offshore.com.ai/ Anguilla, BWI http://www.offshore.com.ai/vince ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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