-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I noticed Sameer's release had some nice shots at ITAR. Heh. When aiming for outsiders, it might be productive to explain what cpunks do in a I'm- ok-you're-ok sorta way. For example, "the cryptographic research group 'cypherpunks'..." ObHackNetscape: I was thinking last night about the process of verifying that someone had swept the keyspace that they claimed to have swept. (Umm, well, so much for Mozilla, but ya know, next time...) and I wanted to run this idea past Those Who Know[tm]: When doling out a segment of 16M keys, attach results of two randomly chosen garbage decryptions. The bruter has to report back which two keys they are. The overhead would add up, but I don't think it would be significant. Or if a stronger method is needed, provide the MD5 hash of the garbage decryptions. Maybe with a discriminator or something, so you only MD5 a few thousand. Anyway, the idea is that if you have to prove that you swept a big enough chunk to find the two keys, you've proven that you've swept a great portion of the keyspace. Of course, this does nothing to prevent _withholding_ a result. But it does prove that most of the keyspace has been swept; and most likely the search continued even after the two keys are found. This would make it much more possible to give consolation prizes without worrying about false NAKs of big segments. If anyone is still interested in that idea. ObFactoring: Picked up the Quadratic Sieve factoring program from Mathworks. Haven't had a chance to compile it yet, but Bob Silverman told me in email he was willing to make it available to a group such as [The Cryptographic Research Foundation] Cyperpunks. ObHamilton '95: Pulled up my tomorrow's stock pages. Netscape takes a big hit, but not big enough for a foolish thing like that. I hope none of my banks go around setting their safe combinations to 1234 or anything... ;| Don -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQB1AwUBMF4xO8La+QKZS485AQFQtQL/f9bmpnGT/3FfB2rqnFmMltJEkgY8/Oym Vtkzm6xrlApY7b9b2UhVvPXurHU8DBAZeqj5Yu7VvLsQ+w3YelGEAYfzdhECk2t/ 5NRYi0RkgFkIs+XCuDGVkoSXExT++KsZ =V54e -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- <don@cs.byu.edu> fRee cRyPTo! jOin the hUnt or BE tHe PrEY PGP key - http://bert.cs.byu.edu/~don or PubKey servers (0x994b8f39) June 7&14, 1995: 1st amendment repealed. Death threats ALWAYS pgp signed * This user insured by the Smith, Wesson, & Zimmermann insurance company *