- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Stealth remailers
by Hal 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

One "quick and dirty" way to get the effect of a stealth remailer is to have all messages leave the remailer net via one or more politically strong hosts. For a long time now I have been having my remailer on alumni.caltech.edu, which I judge to be politically weak, forward mail to shell.portal.com, which seems stronger. When people see some anonymous mail they don't like, they look at where it comes from. They seldom think to blame other remailers in the chain (partially because they can't easily find out who they are). It is the final remailer which takes the heat. If that remailer were in a jurisdiction and/or political position that would allow it to withstand the various threats we anticipate, it would provide cover for the other remailers. And by using other remailers in a chain before going through this final remailer, users don't have to trust the final remailer with any significant secrets. Some time back I proposed a variation of this idea: "second tier" remailers, which always forward their outgoing messages through one or more "first tier" remailers, which work like the current ones and take the political heat as a result. Second tier remailers would be very safe to run and it would be rare that a sysop or supervisor would get a complaint about the remailer's activity. Hal

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RC4 article in Saturday (Sept 17) New York Times
by Matt Blaze 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

John Markoff has a piece on the RC4 betrayal in the Business section of the Saturday NY Times (page 37), "A secret computer code is out -- Key to data security appears on internet". Not much that hasn't already been said here or on sci.crypt, but there was an interesting quote from Jim Bidzos that suggested that one of the conditions RSADSI agreed to in order to get approval of 40 bit RC4 for export in shrink-wrap software included keeping the algorithm confidential. Bidzos speculated that the NSA could revoke RC4's export status as a result of the disclosure. Also, the piece reports that "The RC4 formula was first circulated on Tuesday to a specialized computer network mailing list of computer researchers who oppose the Government's stringent controls on data encryption technology. The mailing list, which has thousands of computer users around the world, is known as Cypherpunks, and the mailings usually consist of highly technical discussions of data encryption technology." I guess Markoff gets Eric Blossom's moderated version of the list :-) -matt

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Nice little privacy threat...
by L. Todd Masco 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Just a little tidbit for the privacy-paranoid among us. I live in NYC, while my father, H. L. Masco, MD, lives in Florida. My dad's never lived in NYC, and I've never forwarded mail from his address to mine... in fact, I haven't forwarded anything from his address since before I left Pittsburgh. I just got a mailing from Harry & David that included a pre-printed list of folks from "my" last year's orders so I could repeat order this year. They were my father's orders from last year. Masco isn't that common a surname, so I have to wonder how often this is going to happen to people with more common surnames. -- L. Todd Masco | "A man would simply have to be as mad as a hatter, to try and cactus(a)bb.com | change the world with a plastic platter." - Todd Rundgren

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(re-tx) RE: Transparent Email (WAS disable telnet to port 25)
by p.v.mcmahon.rea0803＠oasis.icl.co.uk 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I sent this yesterday, but it apparently didn't through. -- > > I don't have an answer to your question, but you did bring up something > > I've been meaning to ask about for some time and I never really got > > around to it; Are there any short-term plans to press for an RFC > > utilizing digital signatures? With the exponential increase of mail Existing standards track RFCs support PEM-based security of RFC-822 email (RFC 1421, RFC 1422, RFC 1423, and RFC 1424). Recent work on security of MIME has allowed for an alternative content protection and certification mechanism (i.e. PGP). See Internet Drafts draft-ietf-pem-sigenc-02.txt and draft-ietf-pem-mime-07.txt which respectively define the framework and the PEM-specific parts. > The best answer that I can come up with for this problem is to allow for > several webs of trust to function simultaneously. Perhaps we would have The intent of the MIME extensions is to enable either PGP or PEM to be used, although the standard for the former is I believe still pending. I am not aware of efforts to integrate the two certification mechanisms. > A web could be defined by a single top-level public key and a set of This is the function for the IPRA (as discussed in RFC 1422). > rules. Perhaps a text based program -- a sort of "meta-pgp" -- could > check chains of signatures to validate a key. This is what a PEM-conformant user agent does. > Suppose, for example, that I'm administering a web of trust. I set up > the web so that I can deputize notaries who can in turn sign user keys. The PEM WG used to call these organisational notaries, but they have been dropped from the standards. They are also referred to in related work as Local Registration Agents or Authorities - and are necessary for large organisations' use of certification services. > Lets further assume that all signatures are good for a year. A keyserver > would return a text file containing: (a) the user's key, concated with a > notary's key, concated with a header specifiying the date it was singed > by me. This sounds similar to the certification message in RFC 1424. There isn't a requirement for certificate retrieval as certificates are sent with the message or handled using (as yet unspecified) directory facilities - probably an extended DNS in the Internet environment. - pvm

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Re: The Market for Crypto--A Curmudgeon's View (fwd)
by Jonathon Fletcher 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On Tue, 29 Nov 1994, Sandy Sandfort wrote: [ ... stuff r'moved ... ] > > Personally, I'm against mandatory digitally signatures as a > rerequisite for posting to Cypherpunks. On the other hand, I > like the idea of having the list software automatic verify > digital signatures. This is a valuable service I'm usually too > lazy to perform for myself. > > Here's my suggestion. Eric should unilaterally impose his first > step, i.e., all unsigned messages and messages with spoofed > signatures will henceforth be flagged as such. Let's see what > effect, if any, that has on the way people post their messages. > After the protocol has been in effect for some time, we can > re-open the topic for further discussion. > This is a good idea - certainly a nice way to emphasize (sp) signing posts. Having majordomo verify signatures automatically and add message content if either (as sandy suggests) signature is missing or bad. One question would be whether majordomo should add content upon verification of a signature, or upon failure to verify a signature (missing or bad). Depends on which would have most 'positive' appearance, and (more importantly) would generate least extra volume in the long term. Personally I think that flagging the messages with bad or missing signatures is a better idea - as more people sign articles on the list there will be less flagging volume sent out by md. Nice idea Sandy. ... only snag is that md has to be modified again. Has Eric the time and desire to fit this in. I can't help with the perl - still not grokked it properly. -Jon -- Jonathon Fletcher j.fletcher(a)stirling.ac.uk " .. all opinions expressed or implied are my own and not necessarily those of my employer or any other party ... "

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where to get secure edit a0.3.3 for macintosh
by Thomas J. Bryce 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I've received a number of inquiries about where to obtain secure edit a0.3.3 for the macintosh. Please finger me at tjbryce(a)amherst.edu if you want information on this. Thank you Tom tjb(a)acpub.duke.edu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAwUBLtuTJk8YjrUhOUC5AQEoAAP/W+kl5cOkuohw5QtafawUFA5kKSrhhv/o rE8mzGVsntNJ52NcCS7ImONTKxH+rHmcrbhYi8A0rVAaf0byYDSZ50PHCqoM4WPc ccNQ4zMO75N38uZ8/pLO9w3nYw5Y386737IND8QOjHmLc/jUQlJqdFuGzxtYq2r1 RzQgKu9xjS4= =m0X4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: ideath remailer permanently down / PGP key changes for Greg Broiles
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Doh, the wordwrap on that message was ugly. Sorry. Gotta spend some more time making friends with Private Idaho. Short version: remailer(a)ideath.goldenbear.com is gone forever, sorry. All mail to anything @goldenbear.com is bouncing. Mail for me should be sent to "gbroiles(a)netbox.com", effective immediately. I have distributed a new PGP key to the keyservers and marked my old key obsolete. I will be signing list messages again once I get that wordwrap thing fixed. -- "The anchored mind screwed into me by the psycho- | Greg Broiles lubricious thrust of heaven is the one that thinks | gbroiles(a)netbox.com every temptation, every desire, every inhibition." | -- Antonin Artaud |

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Can We Cut the Crap?
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Really, the S/N ratio is approaching all-time lows, even for the Silly Season of Xmas. A week or so ago there was a massive flame war involving insults and counter-insults--I returned from my Xmas vacation to find the list melting down. Now, a week later, a new flamewar has erupted. There is no point in the back-and-forth of insults, "Dr. Fred is a loon," "Alice is Detweiler," and other such nonsense. If you don't want to read the comments of Fred Cohen, Dimitri Vulis, Alice whatever, Vlad/Lance/Larry/Pablo, then just don't read them! Filter them out, delete them immediately, read them briefly, whatever. At 5:04 PM 12/31/95, deadbeat wrote: >Regarding Fred Cohen, PhD: > [typical personal insults elided] >Let's also consider the granting institution, a second-rank school. Well, not quite. I seem to recall that Cohen's advisor at USC was Len Adleman, known perhaps to some of you as the "A" in RSA and more recently as the guy doing the "DNA computing" work. He was also working on viruses, perhaps in conjunction with Cohen, as of 1987-88, and gave an interesting paper at the 1988 Crypto Conference on "An Abstract Theory of Computer Viruses." Not surprisingly, Cohen's papers were the main citations. I recall Adleman describing in the oral talk just how it is that determining if a given program contains a virus is essentially equivalent to solving the halting problem, i.e., it may be undecidable whether a program has a virus, except presumably in some special cases (e.g., for very small programs). >Cohen's thesis broke new ground, but how many people have read it, or any of >his writings, or know anything about his ideas beyond a single word? How far >did he carry this work? Where are the conference and journal papers? Cohen's >reputation faded into obscurity long ago. Now he is building a new reputation >as a pig-headed loudmouth, threatening his "defamers." Shades of Sternlight. I have plenty to disagree with some of what Fred Cohen says, as I do with many people, but this is just plain ignorant. "How many people have read it, or any of his writings..." is a ridiculous argument, even for an ad hominem. Those who want to read it, can read it. The articles are readily available. I've even seen some of his books on the bookshelves of my local bookstores (haven't read them, though I flipped through "It's Alive!" and didn't see much of interest....but how many of us have written _any_ books?). I'm not convinced there's much more about the _theory_ of viruses to "push forward," for various reasons. The theory was laid out, some Bulgarians and others are busily writing viruses, but there's not likely to be some whole reservoir of new theory to be worked on. (This is true of a lot of fields, where the work done decades ago basically was complete....look at how we all cite Garey and Johnson and how little has changed in the field of NP-completeness.) Blasting Cohen because you don't think he carried his work far enough is clearly blasting wildly. Have you asked whether others on this list have carried the work they did in their early careers far enough? (Did I carry my work in the 1970s on alpha particle effects on chips far enough, or am I just a Cohen-like slacker because I moved on to other things?) Anyway, if you don't like Sternlight, or Cohen, or May, or Detweiler, or Metzger, or Vulis, *filter* them out! So why don't I just do this? Well, I do have a filter file in my Eudora Pro mailer, and I use it. But I still see the crossfire on the list, the pointless flames and personal attacks. This angers and saddens me. Hence this message. While I don't subscribe to the extreme view espoused by some, that the topics of the list should be exclusively crypto, math, programming, and Internet standards, I do think people should try to find some relevance to the larger themes of the list. The recent increase in "one-sentance repartee" is indicative of late-stage list meltdown. (Some of the posts here quote a couple of paragraphs, add one or two lines of insults, then have another screenful of PGP sigs, auto-signing sigs, anonymous IDs, and then a conventional sig. Jeesh!) I'm hoping that this is just a Xmas vacation silly season. --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Restrictions on crypto exports
by Mike Godwin 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Bill Stewart writes: "Mike - you write that an FTP archive is a library open to the public. While it looks like one to me, the important thing is convincing a grand jury or jury that it's true, or heading off a prosecutor who'll try to paint ftp archives as 'subversive hacker BBSs' or nonsense like that." I don't think we disagree here. "Do you know if anyone's doing this in an organized fashion?" No. I'm really just making a prediction of what the likely outcome of such cases will be. --Mike

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Re: a quote
by Peter Wayner 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Nah. When I'm drunk and driving I always use the left side of the road. If I was in Britain, there would be no problem!

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