Curt Smith wrote:
It is strange that crypto was a lot more popular back when cryptography export was heavily controlled. Many people fought for their crypto rights, but cannot be bothered with encrypted e-mail. It is similar to securing the right to vote and then declining to do so.
Acts that are potentially slightly illegal and certainly considered naughty by some carry more appeal to many than acts that are unquestionably as above board as they are boring. Once the export regs changed and more advanced uses of cryptographic applications failed in the market place, crypto lost some of its sex appeal to its initial early-adopter rebel constituency.
Lucky indicates that strong crypto has gone "under the hood" and is now "mainstream" and "ubiquitous".
This is not true. There are countless e-mail and instant messages sent as plaintext across networks, through wireless, and over the Internet.
I believe our viewpoint coincide, rather than conflict. Crypto has gone under the hood, it is used by anybody accessing an https website, which nowadays is just about anybody with a web browser. Crypto is used by many corporate employee's accessing the corporate VPN. It is the rare Internet user, of which there are of course many more than there were Cypherpunks got started, that does not employ strong crypto in some fashion.
Also "under-the-hood" is a risky place for crypto. It may be "patched" or "upgraded" right out of your system. Or perhaps "improved" to 40-bit for optimum performance.
Agreed. Which is why I pointed out that the encryption taking place under-the-hood tends to be a reasonable defense against a passive or less-resourced attacker while being frequently unsuitable against the active, well-resourced attacker. Though I would contend that there are more of the former than there are of the latter, I too continue to utilize, as I pointed out, strong crypto that requires active user interaction permitting the trust decision to occur.
Stand alone cryptography is best. I enjoy sealing my personal letters in an envelope. I am uncomfortable entrusting that process to a third-party, or to the mailman. I am similarly uncomfortable entrusting e-mail encryption to an embedded system and cached authentication systems.
I indeed consider passive encryption methods alone to be typically insufficient for some of my personal security needs and am continuing to utilize encryption that requires me as the user to make that trust decision. But that does not mean that no security benefits are to be had from opportunistic encryption of Internet traffic. Example: the other day I sent an email to a friend that accidentally failed to PGP encrypt. The email did not contain truly critical information, but I certainly would have preferred for neither my friend's nor my ISP to have ready access to the cleartext of that email. Fortunately, we had encrypted SMTP connections end-to-end, thus protecting the contents of the email from the ISP's, albeit perhaps not from the NSA. Lastly, allow me to address the issue raised that many IM protocols in use today do not support crypto at this time. This is true, but I noticed that a good majority of the P2P efforts introduced at CODECON all included support for encryption as part of the protocol. The various developers had read Applied Cryptography, understood a sufficient part of it, and made provisions to design crypto into their protocols from the beginning rather than as an adjunct to be thought about later. While the details of the initial implementations were of varying quality, one project began by using Blowfish in ECB mode until the developer realized that he could see patterns in the ciphertext, but changing a protocol during alpha testing to use a secure mode of a block cipher given that the protocol already contains all the hooks for crypto, may be considerably easier than gluing crypto onto some of the existing IM system Given the rapid changes in the P2P space, just because some IM and P2P systems today fail to offer cryptographic protections should not be taken as an indicator that these protocol's successors will not offer transparent crypto as a default feature. One such project that I have been somewhat following is the Anonymous IRC project. While their design is far from perfect, it is one of many steps into the right direction. http://www.invisiblenet.net/ There are dozens of similar projects underway, all employing crypto, that may one day replace the prevalent IM clients as rapidly as Gnutella and later Kazaa and Morpheus replaced Napster. How does the increased use of strong crypto under-the-hood help Cypherpunks? The answer reminds me of the response another Cypherpunk gave to my posting statistics about the nature of the USENET traffic seen by a major node. I expressed surprise at these rather revealing statistics, musing that there had to be a lesson to be learned from the fact that the bulk of the data is generated in newsgroups that one would not initially consider mainstream. His response was illuminating: "Yes, the lesson is: just look at all that cover traffic". --Lucky