- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Re: Encryption and Backups
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 08:33 PM 2/4/96 -0800, John Pettitt wrote: > >On Sun, 4 Feb 1996, Alan Olsen wrote: > >> Something that I have not seen addressed is the need for strong encryption >> in backup software. >CP Backup (part of PC Tools for Central Point aka Symantec) has DES. As to >how good the implementation is: I have no idea. I have a copy, but I have not yet verified the key sizes. It is on my list of projects. (My current project is for determining if an app is accessing your PGP files under Win95. I may be stuck for a bit though... Looks like I might need the DDK to compile it.) Alan Olsen -- alano(a)teleport.com -- Contract Web Design & Instruction `finger -l alano(a)teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ Is the operating system half NT or half full?

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Re: Automatic E-Mail
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[This isn't quite on topic, though you could stretch it to deal with remailers. Can the winsock remailer do this?] At 10:50 PM 9/18/95 GMT, Rick.Sciorra(a)hudson.lm.com wrote: >Does anyone know of an E-Mail package that will automatically connect >to the Internet and retreive mail at specific intervals? Sigh. Folks have gotten too used to PC-market email systems, which are generally braindamaged by having been around operating systems where you can't just run a listner program that waits for somebody to call you when they want to send you mail, which of course fits in very well with letting ISPs avoid having to make outgoing phone calls instead of just receiving, plus the market reluctance of many of them to forward mail for you to competing mail services and the client/server-orientation that makes peer-to-peer services harder to implement. Unix systems did this job just fine on PDP11/70s, which could support a dozen or two users on a machine with about the horsepower of a PC/AT. And Henry Spencer could do that on a /44 :-) Just about anything that does UUCP can be set to do that, if you've got an ISP who doesn't charge you lots extra for using UUCP. Most high-end terminal emulation packages have scripting languages that let you call up and do stuff, which you should be able to call from timer programs; you can probably even find a free Kermit version that will do it. I use Eudora Light with Trumpet to call Netcom's newbie-friendly Netcruiser service; when I hit the menu item for send or retrieve mail, it pops through all the layers and dials, and hangs up when it's done. If Commercial Eudora can't already do that automagically, it should - ask Qualcomm to add it to the next version... Alternatively, Winsock programming isn't really all that hard, and POP3 is a pretty simple protocol, so you could roll your own. #--- # 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: MIME attachments and ranting.
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>> >Attachment Converted: D:\DOWNLOAD\MIME\RePGPfor.8 >> I, for one, don't need Mystery MIME Attachments cluttering up my drive. If >> it's worth saying, then *say* it. >I really don't know why any mailers call a monopart MIME message an >"attachment". Mail readers come in three basic flavors of unMIMEificationness: 1) Ignorance+bliss - the mailer doesn't know or care about MIME headers, and you can ignore them when you read them, and may be able to configure the reader not to bother you with most of them (e.g. BSD Mail.) 3) Intelligence - the mailer does something genuinely useful to help you read the attachment, like letting you pop up some appropriate reading tool. 2) Naive friendliness - the Sirius Cybernetics approach. "Your mail file has been tastefully shredded into little pieces and sprinkled around your disk drive. Thank you for making a humble mail system so _very_ happy." Free Eudora versions offer you several choices of tastefulness and shredditude, partly intended to provide artistic functionality and partly to encourage you to buy the commercial version which gives you a more flexible user interface for extensions like MIME. So buy it, or cope with it, or tell Eudora to use your RAMdisk for its attachments where they'll soon go away and not bother you. There's also another approach, typified by a vendor whose name will be omitted but they'd know who they were if they had a <perjorative deleted> clue.... 0) Downright hostile - Not only does it _pretend_ to be Intelligent, while only really doing the right thing with its own proprietary data formats*, though generally doing something reasonable with uuencoded documents with names that it understands, but it chokes and dies on messages that have even moderately large amounts of simple, basic, non-attachmentized _text_, and if you _do_ try to package text up to send to some poor sucker who's stuck with one of these <perjorative deleted> systems, it hands it to a brain-damaged user-friendly mouse-editor that _also_ chokes on more than 64KB of text.... [* where "the right thing" allows it to mindlessly run arbitrary code handed to it as macros in the proprietary data formats that the company encourages its users to use instead of real text....] #--- # 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: NYT on Netscape Crack
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> The New York Times, September 19, 1995, pp. A1, D21. > ...... > "The good news and the bad news of the Internet is that > when you put something up there, many more people can test > it," said Mike Homer, the vice president of marketing at > Netscape. "You also give yourself the opportunity of having > people point things out which you can fix quickly." That's a good, and realistic, attitude. > Netscape officials said today that they would strengthen > the system, by making it significantly harder to determine > the random number at the heart of their coding system. They > said they would no longer disclose what data would be used > to generate the random numbers. I do hope this is just John Markoff's simplification of what Netscape's folks said and not an endorsement of security-by-obscurity. I realize that some data does need to be kept around on disk or in the program, since obtaining a lot of random bits at the beginning of every transaction either requires annoying user interactions or takes too long to get decent quality, and certainly this data ought to be kept private by the algorithms involved. One concern I've had about the popular "crunch some bits repeatedly through MD5" approach to random number generation is that knowing one sample from the stream (e.g. by doing a transaction with the victim) gives you the rest of the stream. There's a way to improve that. let X(0) be some number you keep around from a previous session, modified by whatever hardware randomness is available, and seeded by user input the first time. let X(i) = MD5(X(i-1)) let Y(i) = hash(X(i)), where hash is something like MD5(key,X(i)) use Y(i) as the output random number. This eliminates the ability to determine X(i) or Y(i+1) as a function of Y(i), since the search space of X(i) is presumably too large to reverse (unlike the number of bits you can cheaply get in one session). Keeping some of the bits of Y(i) around to use in addition to the other key for the hash, or to key the MD5(X(i-1)) with, may be useful as well. #--- # 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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NYT: WWW Usage Monitoring for Marketing
by futplex＠pseudonym.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

New York Times, National Edition, 95/10/03: A positive sign in the marketing/privacy war on the net: In his regular Advertising column, Stuart Elliott discusses the presentation of a report on the problem of "assuring accurate and comprehensive measurement of consumer exposure to advertisements that appear in interactive media like World Wide Web sites and on-line services." The report was issued by "Casie", the Coalition for Advertising Supported Information and Entertainment, a creation of two main advertising trade groups: the American Assn. of Advertising Agencies, and the Assn. of Nat'l. Advertisers. Elliott's article identifies three main issues covered in the report. One of these is privacy: "Every effort should be made to maintain consumers' privacy," the report urges, adding that identities of computer users "must not be revealed by audience measurement providers." -Futplex <futplex(a)pseudonym.com> If you haven't seen the film "Twelve Angry Men", it's about time you did.

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Re: taxonomies of 'real money' and e-cash
by P.J. Ponder 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On the 18th, Tim May wrote: > > I wasn't saying they are all on the same footing, or are all separate and > compartmentalizable things. Clearly some of them are just slightly > different "flavors" of other things. I listed a bunch of them not as a > taxonomy or ontology, but as an illustration that there are many kinds of > financial dealings, many kinds of roles played. > > That the real world has so many flavors of financial things could of course > be due to inertia and ignorance, partly. But there are also different > functionalities, and costs. Fitting the different needs, the different > roles of the players. I won't go on and on, as my last post on this I think > hit the main points, but consider how many flavors we have just of > "checks": the "ordinary" checks we write, counter checks, dual-endorser > checks, traveller's checks, and so on. (If you are arguing that only > "digital cash" is a real issue, and all other constructs are "small matters > of programming," then we disagree profoundly.) My mistake then. You obviously have in mind some things much more subtle and more logically removed from money, or currency, or even liquidity than what I thought you were referring to. I'm going back to reading the list in the mornings. --PJ . . . . > --Tim May > > ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- > Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, > tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero > Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, > Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. > "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway." >

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Re: NYT on Netscape Crack
by aba＠dcs.exeter.ac.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Eric Young <eay(a)au.oz.mincom> writes: > I will defend Netscapes code on the point about the RNG even though > I have not seen any. I assume the Netscape code is quite large and > each release would have to pass various fuctionality tests. How can > you test that the RND seeding is wrong? You have to actually look > at the code, the number coming out are still random. As of last > week I was told by Mike_Spreitzer.PARC(a)xerox.com that the random > number generator seed routine in my DES library was only copying in > 4 bytes of passed data instead of 8. Given des_cblock data;, it was > > memcpy(init,data,sizeof(data)); > > it should have been > > memcpy(init,data,sizeof(des_cblock)); > > Rather hard to notice unless you know that des_cblock is passed as a > pointer and even this can be compiler dependent. Sure that's hard to notice, but what you describe was an accident, ie the code wasn't working as you thought it was. The netscape one by the sound of it, and the earlier posts of the reverse-engineered ran no code, was working to spec, it was just a dumb spec. I felt sorry for netscape when they got chosen as the example of an ITAR crippled app to break, the breakers intention obviously being to tar ITAR, but some of the bad publicity rubbing off on netscape, who were obviously fully aware of the weakness of 40 bit keys. This one tho' sounds very much like due to sloppy design which is inexcusable, especially given that they are going around selling the 128 bit RC4 browser to people who may have been relying on it, at it's word, and presume the rest of the cryptographic system was up to suitable standard to match 128 bit keys. aka what's the point having 128 bit keys if you use a 32 bit, or 40 bit or 48 bit seed, which can be further narrowed with non-root access to the machine, and even with external info leaked by the machine. > The moral of the story I suppose is to be > paranoid about checking routines relating to RNG. Well that is a valid, and very good moral, but the netscape story is a different story I think, as they knew what their code was doing, and somehow didn't think it was a problem, or didn't even pause to consider the ran no generation security. Reckon any bad publicity they get out of this one is entirely their own fault. The moral in netscapes story is that closed systems are bad news. These things ideally need open review. And of course designing things with the expectation that they are secure with the *given* that the full algorithm is known. Real shame because the rest of the software is very innovative compared to other browsers, and apparently good quality. Also may be a set back for net commerce, which is bad news. Adam -- Munitions-T home page: http://www.obscura.com/~shirt/ #!/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL $m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa 2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length($n)&~1)/2)

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Article requests
by Tim Philp 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I have received many requests for the articles that I wrote on Cryptography so I will post them to the list with the subject "ARTICLES" Regards, Tim Philp =================================== For PGP Public Key, Send E-mail to: pgp-public-keys(a)swissnet.ai.mit.edu In Subject line type: GET PHILP ===================================

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MD4 collision
by norm＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Hans Dobbertin in Germany has found two messages to which MD4 assigns the same hash.

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ARTICLES
by Tim Philp 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Copyright (C) 1995 Tim Philp Brantford, Ontario Canada Article appeared in The Expositor, Brantford, Ont., Canada June 10th, 1995 - COMPUTER CRYPTOGRAPHY - - PROTECTING YOUR PRIVACY - by Tim Philp Last week I discussed ways that the computer has made our lives less private. Today we take up that thread and talk about the stuff of spy novels.Cryptography, in the context that we are discussing it, is a means of preventing unauthorized people from reading our files or correspondence. Cryptography is not new. It has been used throughout history and has played its part in shaping events. Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded because the cipher that she used to arrange a rebellion against Elizabeth I was decoded by the government. Julius Caesar used a primitive cipher, now known as a Caesar Cipher, to disguise his messages to Rome during his military campaigns. Every letter in his messages was replaced by the letter three letters farther in the alphabet. Thus A would become D, B would become E, until you reached the end of the alphabet. You would then wrap around to make X equal to A, Y equal to B and Z equal to C. In this way the word CAESAR would become FDHVDU. Simple substitution ciphers like this one are easily broken and today are used in puzzle books to provide a few moments diversion to puzzle fanciers. The role of computers in cryptography goes back to the early days of computers. One of the first computers was used to help decode enemy messages in England during the second world war. The 'boffins of Bletchley' were the true progenitors of the computer, not IBM. Cryptography has progressed far beyond the simple Caesar Cipher. Indeed, today's methods of encoding messages have progressed to the point where the ciphers are unbreakable within any reasonable amount of effort. It does no good to break a cipher if it takes 1500 years of computer time to do it! Of interest to computer users is the development of a type of cryptography called Public Key Cryptography. With this method you have two keys, a public key and a private key. Simply speaking, a key is a very long number that is used by your program to encode and decode messages. Each person that you want to communicate with has a public key that is published and is known by everyone. To send a message to your friend you would use his public key to encode the message. Your friend receives the message and uses his private key to decode the message. The beauty of this technique, is an eavesdropper can intercept the encoded message and the public key of the recipient, but he cannot use this information to decode the message without the secret key of the recipient. In older systems you had to transmit the secret key to the recipient. The secret key could be intercepted and used to decode the messages. Public key systems require that only the public key be transmitted to the recipient. The message cannot be decoded using only the public key and the message. The availability to the general public of secure, military grade cryptographic methods has generated considerable controversy. The US government has placed this software under export control and has suggested the use of their own system called Clipper. Clipper has a 'backdoor' that will allow the government to decode secret messages. They claim that they need this power to combat drugs and crime. Civil libertarians claim that the government has no business intercepting private communications. Cryptography can be used to protect E-Mail messages and computer files. The software to do this is freely available on the Internet (search for PGP). The US government, it seems, is locking the barn door after the horses have escaped. This file may not be reproduced by any means without the permission of the author -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAwUBMHM8unseeMISF+fVAQFesQP/YxFgW3BAjnvDCMU4SfksgpKLEGMDMv9M YQpn/0BqUZSUnO3yye1bIN5KsDofePaCd6PcE6RcnvZJTBVu9PiZvxiBkr/a76wf 5Ft+F4p2tH0gxPunXZyjDqEnfHDcXY+X0FM7JgmeMyjDxzbq6GIqEX7gLoPAszwp Ayu4jIl2smg= =76yF -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- =================================== For PGP Public Key, Send E-mail to: pgp-public-keys(a)swissnet.ai.mit.edu In Subject line type: GET PHILP ===================================

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