Re: Why is cryptoanarchy irreversible?

Peter Hendrickson writes:

At 3:30 AM 11/9/1996, Adam Back wrote:

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Peter Hendrickson writes:

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Where will you keep your secret key? Remember, when they go through your house they bring 20 young graduates from MIT who are just dying to show how clever they are and save the world at the same time.

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Keep your secret key in your head.

I think this is hard to do in practice. I have tried.

You could probably keep a hashing function around plausibly, then you could do as usual and remember the passphrase and use the hash function to construct the actual key.

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Your plausible deniability has to get quite low before it will stand up as "proof" in court.

My idea is that the lack of noise is used as evidence to get a search warrant. The search warrant is used to get the evidence to put you away forever.

Your plausible deniability has to drop below 100%, your data has deviate from "indistinguishable from normal data distributions" to get yourself investigated in the first place. If your stego techniques are any good, the feds will never get beyond that point. They will then be left with the option of doing random `spot-checks'. Having been on the cypherpunks list probably would increase your chances of having your system checked.

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Your real challenge is keeping your stego programs safe. Boot strapping a stegoed encrypted file system while leaving no stego code lying around isn't that easy.

Excellent point, especially since you don't have an encrypted virtual disk. Can anybody resolve this?

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rc4 in C:

#define S,t=s[i],s[i]=s[j],s[j]=t /* rc4 key

(Under 3.3) I would have a hard time memorizing these programs. This pretty much guarantees that the number of cryptoanarchists will be small.

That program is optimised for size rather than ease of memorizing. RC4 is an elegantly simple algorithm, and I sumbit that you could remember it. Barring that you could just leave around a few cypherpunks archives, or sci.crypt archives or whatever, and cut and paste it form one of my posts :-) Because RC4 is a stream cipher, you shouldn't reuse the key. However you shouldn't need to for this application. You just use it to boot- strap the real code. You'd need to put in the appropriate stego decoder (say getting the bytes from the LSbit of an audio file. Linux loop back devices already provide the stego capability directly. But then linux loop back devices provide IDEA encryption. (I'm talking about Ian Goldbergs patch to the loopback filesystem, which may not have been folded back in yet). Also you may be able to get somewhere with algorithms which are plausible to have coded on your system anway. Say, RC4 makes a good PRNG, so what's wrong with having it in a standard library. That makes coding RC4 really simple. Just reseed the PRNG with your key, and XOR it's output with the encrypted file. Also I did hear tell that Bruce Schneier was working on a crypto algorithm which was designed to work with playing cards, for a book which Neal Stephenson is writing. Presumably painful to use, but maybe good plausible deniability, all that you need is a pack of cards.

(I am deeply envious of your legal right to post this code, however. Now, why was it that we broke away from the Mother Country?)

I would like to see a longer exposition of your approach. Given a hostile environment, how would I operate a small anonymous perl coding service using your techniques?

Once you've bootstrapped to your cryptoanarchists toolkit, you can have anything you want, even a virtual TCP/IP layer, a hidden level of TCP/IP in stego data. TCP/IP itself is a likely candidate for a stego carrier. Non-predictable sequence nos are required to stop things like the spoofing attack, and so are perfectly plausible. The real pain at the moment is that bandwidth is so darned low. You're talking 28.8k for most users, and I'd quite merrily pay $2000 a year for a fractional T1 for personal use, but prices over here are too high yet. Once we get to everyone having enough bandwidth, lots of people with permanent connections, lots of people using video conference software, audio, downloading feature length films, etc. there's no stopping crypto anarchy. The LSbits in that lot would make a fairly responsive subliminal channel by todays standards.

Don't forget to tell me how I get paid and when I get to spend my "ill-gotten" gains and how nobody will notice that I am doing it.

You get paid in ecash, paid on the BlackNet bank. You take a holiday to a tax-haven and get paid off by a getting "lucky" at a BlackNet affiliated casino. The casino takes a their "currency exchange fee", and you get US$. Translations into paper currencies, I'll admit are the weak link if you need paper currencies. However there are two ways to get anonymous electronic cash, either you start with anonymous electronic cash, or you add the anonymity afterwards via `privacy brokers', once there are a few dozen systems, and trillions flowing around using these systems, it's going to be hard to keep track of it all. Adam -- print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0