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Secret Swedish GAK and ITAR
by Asgaard 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Gunnar Klein, a Swedish MD, is chairing a EU committee dealing with standardization of security measures in medical information systems. Recently, in a full-page anti-GAK debating article in a national Swedish evening newspaper (Aftonbladet 9/25/96), he chose to reveal some secret information he's gotten hold of: Sweden's representatives in the OECD GAK proceedings have declared that Sweden is willing to sign bilateral or multilateral GAK treaties, if other countries so demand. This declaration, along with the OECD records per se, has been classified. He also discloses that Sweden in late 1994, effectively in total secrecy, issued a completely new law against export of 'stretegic products', principally including all cryptography, without permission from the 'Inspection for Strategic Products'. In theory this law would cover export of a crypto program on a notebook. Gunnar Klein suspects US strong-arming behind all this. Obviously, Denmark has taken a different, anti-GAK, position in the OECD proceedings. Denmark is less susceptible to US blackmail than Sweden - they don't build fighter-planes with lots of US high tech parts inside (like the JAS/Gripen). Asgaard

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RE: DESCrack keyspace partitioning
by geeman＠best.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Another thinking step: most real-world DES keys are derived from hashes. Not (P)RNGs. The distributions are **not** uniform. I am talking about FAMILIES of predictable bit patterns in keys, not any specific pattern. I'm doing the stats. The goal is to search the most likely keys first, and not all keys are created equally. Your reasoning is thin. ---------- From: Mike McNally[SMTP:m5@tivoli.com] Sent: Friday, October 04, 1996 6:10 AM To: geeman(a)best.com Cc: 'cypherpunks(a)toad.com' Subject: Re: DESCrack keyspace partitioning geeman(a)best.com wrote: > > (P)RNG's just aren't that likely to produce a key of 010101010..... > nor 001100110011... etc etc Right. A good CSPRNG is ulikely to produce the pattern 010101010101. It's also unlikely to produce the pattern 0011001100110011. Oh, and it's also unlikely to produce 01100100101001011. In fact, a good 32-bit CSPRNG has only a 1/2^32 chance of producing any particular bit pattern. Of course, another way of saying that is that it's just as likely to get an "obvious" bit pattern as it is to get any other one. You can't just throw away part of the keyspace based on such bogus reasoning. (There may be other reasons to throw away part of the keyspace, of course.) ______c_________________________________________________________________ Mike M Nally * IBM % Tivoli * Austin TX * How quickly we forget that mailto:m5@tivoli.com mailto:m101@io.com * "deer processing" and "data http://www.io.com/~m101/ * processing" are different!

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CNET Digital Dispatch Vol. 2 No. 40
by Alan Olsen 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This was in the latest version of CNET's e-mail list. Anyone want to add a few good sound bytes? > >7. "YOUR TURN": ARE ENCRYPTION LAWS TOO STRICT? > >The White House has finally loosened up the export restrictions on >powerful encryption software: > > http://www.news.com/News/Item/0%2C4%2C4003%2C00.html > >But the software industry and the Web community generally agree >it's too little, too late. How do you feel about the export of >encryption technology? What about the government's continued >insistence that law enforcement be availed of a method to decode >any encrypted message if granted a court order? > >To contribute your opinion, phone CNET at 415/395-7805, enter >extension 5400, and leave a message. We'll listen to the responses >and broadcast some of the best on CNET Radio. > >Each week Digital Dispatch brings you the new "your turn" >question, and each Wednesday you can hear the responses to the >previous week's question on CNET Radio: > > http://www.cnet.com/Content/Radio/ --- 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/ "We had to destroy the Internet in order to save it." - Sen. Exon "Microsoft -- Nothing but NT promises."

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Re: Cybertax
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 10:17:00 -0500 Reply-To: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM> Sender: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM> From: Evelyn Brody <ebrody(a)KENTLAW.EDU> Organization: Chicago-Kent College of Law Subject: Re: Cybertax Comments: To: loukidej(a)tor.gpv.com To: CYBERIA-L(a)LISTSERV.AOL.COM The U.S. Treasury Department and other agencies are quite interested in these issues. In September, at a 2-day conference in Washington, DC, on electronic money and banking, Internal Revenue Commissioner Margaret Richardson described the concerns of tax commissioners world-wide about digital currency. Treasury will be issuing a White Paper in the next month or two that will request comments from the public on a range of tax and policy legal issues relating to electronic commerce. These issues will include, among others, permanent establishment, U.S. trade or business, and compliance and enforcement. See the news story in _Tax Notes_ magazine, Sept. 23, 1996, at 1588, by Ryan Donmoyer, "Tax Principles Must Be Applied to Wired Economy, Richardson Says." (A version of this story is also available electronically in LEXIS, Fedtax Library, TNT file (as a new search).) EB --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "'Bart Bucks' are not legal tender." -- Punishment, 100 times on a chalkboard, for Bart Simpson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/

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KRF_eat
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

A roundup of press reports on GAK: "IBM, other firms, in data encryption alliance" The consortium was initiated by IBM. "Export controls are a fact of life," said Jim Bidzos. "U.S. To Loosen Computer Code Restrictions" "It's wrongheaded, and it's going backward," Peter Harter, at Netscape, said. "U.S. Export of High-Tech Devices Planned" CDT's Danny Weitzner said U.S. companies' and citizens' encrypted communications sent over the Internet could be vulnerable to "improper foreign government access." The administration doesn't want that to happen and is working with major trading partners and other countries to adopt plans that are consistent with the U.S. plan and to expedite electronic key recovery by law enforcement, the CIA's Deutch said. "IT Execs, Lawmakers Reactions Mixed on Encryption Plan" Rick Cardona, a security technology engineer at security software maker TradeWave Corp., said the law doesn't go far enough. "I think this is part of a trend. It's only a matter of time before the government will allow exports of 128-bit key software." "NCR Corp. Joins Alliance To Develop Exportable, Worldwide Strong Encryption " "We also look forward to the rapid movement of the work of the alliance into an established standards- based consortium body." "TradeWave meets new government data encryption requirements" Although other Internet software security companies have announced their intention to support this new key-recovery requirement, no other Internet Web security software company currently offers this service to its customers besides TradeWave. TradeWave's current customers, which include over 350 electric power companies representing over 70% of the electric power industry, are using the TradeVPI software and services which include this key recovery feature. ----- http://jya.com/krfeat.txt (22 kb for 6) ftp://jya.com/pub/incoming/krfeat.txt KRF_eat

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[COMMENT][GAK] "GAK from KRAP"
by Brian D Williams 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

1) Thanks to Phil Zimmerman the world already has "Pretty Good Privacy." 2) Only an idiot, much less one of the 4 Horsemen would get caught using GAK from KRAP. 3) As the FOIA obtained documents from the Clipper I era indicated, the gubmint knows the only way to make this work is to ban other forms of encryption. 4) That and that alone would be "The Shot Heard 'Round the Net." Brian

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Re: (Firewalls) Where is that Snake Oil FAQ again?
by Lou Zirko 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- To: adam(a)homeport.org, cypherpunks(a)toad.com Date: Fri Oct 04 18:15:25 1996 This is the same company that made the claim earlier on this list to "break our code and own the company for $1". It definately generated a lot of comments then, I think about six months ago. They changed their name to IPG midway through the process. This should be in the archives. Sorry about the late response to this but I have been unavailable for the last four days working on a project and am just beginning to catch up on sleep and mail. Lou Zirko Lou Zirko (502)383-2175 Zystems lzirko(a)c2.org "We're all bozos on this bus" - Nick Danger, Third Eye -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: latin1 iQEVAwUBMlWamctPRTNbb5z9AQGoAggAngPrYPYCOp+53BZ3Ns0XJtsI6O/PqUzQ sbxzpROa/blx9O3e1zIxbxPk1+aQcEwUXsnfFbDnciAjouaSnRzIfKG9XJ+cOy5y XRaLzBgZ3lQr3fIp7mHv5n+nsdtrj8mdgmUxYXpO9q+MwTuGL54n12Qw23rJ4KMq TSkBSgJWeqr7Mf1X2bI8ejaIbgImv9dCNFXIF+mUpKea2rarGej7lM1NOFd5FuyT umaFeOcH05pcmC8sYmaabe5i9kmDXztCiGaCD3O101a7JoIh8GOCNjg7blo7q/lZ rw77jyYpsI+3Ra67jWOMRK3p3WeBq9K8XqpP0b0Wo02R5nU1w5UnjQ== =eT3d -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Speaker Position Filled
by se7en 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks for all who responded to my request for a speaker on Computer Security Disaster Prepardness. I have filled the position and have two alternates. se7en ------------------------------------------- I will be speaking in nine different states over the next nineteen days. I will not be reading my email while I am gone......se7en -------------------------------------------

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Re: anagrams
by ! Drive 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I generally use wordsmith(a)wordsmith.org Its preety quick! ---------- : Subject: anagrams : Date: Friday, October 04, 1996 7:42 PM : Fast(est?) anagram generator: : : ftp://suburbia.net/pub/proff/original/gan/an-0.93.tar.gz : (unix source and dos executable) : : : Some Anagrams Found Using an-0.92 : ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ : Free Software Foundation - I'd fan out tons of freeware! : National Security Agency - Lusty yearning at cocaine. : President Dole - Led despite Ron. : Central Intelligence Agency - Langley: Inelegant, eccentric. :

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RE: WINDOWS NT ????
by John Fricker 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Bill Stewart (stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com) said something about Re: WINDOWS NT ???? on or about 10/4/96 7:44 AM >At 07:47 PM 10/3/96 +1030, you wrote: >>hi, >> is Windows NT secured system ? > >Windows 4.x moves the graphics/windowing system into Ring 0, >where the "secure" parts of the kernel are. Bad. >This means graphics bugs can make the kernel insecure or crash. >I don't trust it, especially because Windows 3.1 crashes all the time >for me, and stupid bugs make Windows 3.1 behave badly for me. >So if they put the window system in the kernel, I don't trust it. >End of message Graphics bugs will not crash the system since graphics bugs still run in protected mode. (ie bugs in applications that screw up GDI). Buggy video drivers though can bring the system down. But this does not affect security, only stability. Security in NT can be defeated by any clever, out of work, bored, NT device driver author who brews up a stealth device driver replacement (perhaps a COM port improvement) that could run amok on the file system or basically do anything. Of course, any clever device driver developer is making enough money to not be bored nor even consider writing a backdoor into a driver. Right? --j

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