At 12:24 PM 1/21/98 -0500, John Young wrote:
Not much from the West Coast since the C2-CP meet on Saturday. Were they all busted, or fragged, or has the underground mole hole at last been taken?
What, C2 shanghai-ed them all, with irrefusable bucks galore to securely distribute porn, NDA$ accomplishing what TLAs couldn't.
Well, we got there and there was a note on the door saying we had to "sign in credibly" and not freak the guards, so some people signed in credibly and some signed incredibly. Sameer did take down the Police Line Do Not Cross tape and let us get at the sodas; perhaps that bribed some people :-) We had a reasonably good crowd, and a bunch of out-of-towners got to talk about what they were doing and work in progress. Peter Trei did a nice rehash of his talk on the state of key cracking, somewhat more technical than the layperson version he'd done at the RSA show. It keeps getting easier; 40 bits is laughable, 56 is work, but very crackable, even for RC5, and 64 bits will take years at the current rate - he and some others would rather see the next big distributed cracks going for RSA 512-bit keys. Hardware has been advancing a good bit as well as distributed efforts. The social dynamics of distributed cracking are much different than expected - the feeling of community that teams have appears to be more of a motivator than the prize for most people, so coordinated efforts have been the big contributors. The talk on export control was put off until another meeting, though Greg Broiles gave a nice short summary of what's going on. He'd appreciate input on other people's experience getting products through the export bureaucrats. Hugh talked about the state of FreeS/WAN Linux IPSEC, and also about Secure DNS, which he and John Gilmore recently went through the paperwork of exporting, crypto source and all. Lucky Green talked about the Smartcard activities - he and his unindicted co-conspirators discovered that they're the only group making public smartcard support tools that aren't controlled by a smartcard vendor. Check them out on cypherpunks.to. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639