October 2013 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Re: [Cryptography] programable computers inside our computers
by John Gilmore 23 Oct '13

23 Oct '13

> >> We thought embedded devices were for physical infrastructure > >> engineers to worry about, but now they are proliferating inside > >> our general purpose computers. The next Stuxnet will run on one > >> of the invisible computers inside your computer. It is probably ALREADY running there. With regard to the invisible single-chip computer that sits on every server's motherboard (thanks, you idiots at Intel), I can't say it any better than Dan Farmer: IPMI: Express Train to Hell, v2.0 dan farmer/zen(a)trouble.org http://fish2.com/ipmi/itrain-gz.pdf John _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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Re: [zfs] [Review] 4185 New hash algorithm support
by Zooko Wilcox-OHearn 22 Oct '13

22 Oct '13

On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 6:05 AM, Schlacta, Christ <aarcane(a)aarcane.org> wrote: > > If any weakened algorithm is to be implemented, how can we know how weak is too weak, and how strong is sufficient? Each professional Cryptographer has given different opinions and all those at our immediate disposal have now been biased. A good way to do that is use an algorithm that has attracted interest from a large number of independent cryptographers. If many cryptographers have invested extensive effort trying to find weaknesses in a algorithm, and haven't reported any, then we can feel more confident that it is less likely to harbor undiscovered weaknesses. Among the algorithms we've been talking about in this thread, SHA-256, HMAC-MD5, Skein, Keccak, and BLAKE are all in this category of being well-studied. Cryptographers publish it if they find a weakness in a reduced-round variant of an important algorithm. You can see a summary of the best results against weakened variants of BLAKE in ¹ (Table 1). ¹ http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/467 The rows labeled "perm." and "cf." are attacks on just one component of the hash, not the whole algorithm. The "# Rounds" column shows how many rounds of a reduced-round variant would be vulnerable to that attack. Don't forget to look at the "Complexity" column, too! That shows (roughly) how many calculations would be necessary to implement the attack. Yes, almost all of them are computations that are completely impossible for anyone to actually execute in the forseeable future. But still, they are the best attack that anyone has (publicly) come up with against those weakened variants of BLAKE so they serve as a heuristic indicator of how strong it is. Among the well-studied algorithms listed above, BLAKE is one of the best-studied. It was one of the five finalists in the SHA-3 contest, and in the final report of the contest ², NIST wrote “The cryptanalysis performed on BLAKE […] appears to have a great deal of depth”. Here is a list of research reports that analyzed BLAKE: ³. ² http://dx.doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.7896 ³ https://131002.net/blake/#cr Now, BLAKE2 is not necessarily as secure as BLAKE. We could have accidentally introduced weaknesses into BLAKE2 when making tweaks to optimize it. The paper ¹ looked for such weaknesses and reported that they found nothing to make them distrust BLAKE2. We use a stream cipher named ChaCha ⁴,⁵ as the core of BLAKE and BLAKE2, and nobody has found any weakness in ChaCha. Again, that doesn't mean we didn't manage to screw it up somehow, but I think it helps! If anyone found a weakness in ChaCha, it would *probably* also show them a weakness in BLAKE2, and vice versa. ⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaCha_%28cipher%29#ChaCha_variant ⁵ https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-agl-tls-chacha20poly1305-02 In sum, there has been a lot of independent analysis of BLAKE2, BLAKE, and ChaCha, and I hope there will be more in the future. If you use a reduced-round version of BLAKE2, you can look at these results to see whether anyone has published an attack that would break that reduced-round version. Of course, more rounds is safer against future breakthroughs. It was in that context that I recommended that ZFS use the most rounds of BLAKE2 that it can while still being faster than Edon-R. ☺ That will probably be around 5 rounds. Regards, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn Founder, CEO, and Customer Support Rep https://LeastAuthority.com Freedom matters. ------------------------------------------- illumos-zfs Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182191/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182191/22842876-6fe17e6f Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=22842876&id_secret=22842876-a25d3… Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com

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TBB and tor-relays as a bitcoin wallets
by Trigger Happy 22 Oct '13

22 Oct '13

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 Hi all, Just an idea. In theory : is it possible to implement bitcoin wallet into tor-relay and TBB 1) ? TBB users could tip tor-relays (f.e. 1 satoshi for guard and middle relay, 3 satoshi for exit-node per circuit). Running tor-relays could be profitable or at least cheaper. 1).I think Cody Wilson is working on a bitcoin wallet in a browser. - -- Trigger Happy jabber: triggerhappy(a)jabber.ccc.de torchat: xruq34bnhbqlkjtn -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJSZo5zAAoJEEtm9wC9fGLFvF0P/3HYQSCcZea4iFeTygEkk1Fi s4Us35LVEMHeUx4fODEEXa4PlHMpHtitpBTa6yHRf+XsQLsvca4Xxvo5n1HMq09N FMK9JFFrItCdQO/T/lYNu9Tj3qLU34gpMlzsiN7u3fE8oALAyvHzyAmX0uaJM4Hk p5UsCU9REs5QBIjd8ZLqVodBPj5JHxRnyfxRhcHLZPb5WrrAluIwSOWeQW7GxhpL 3Hed2lZbcdaGyYGqTTBT6/C2KsMsvG097xTZXJKl+x7yL3521ceE9FW1zL7oTE3L i5PJpopbxjhqA3xH68RrSdw7L0Bbp79p3lRUzi4EC1DamHHhFal/tuRfJldhj3m1 4330nXP5pthqufJBql/lklkd7yG0exijq72I2nb9sb/SQLJG7LvF1ga0TKgoMAXC pKRy5NoMW6+UAHtSlFBmeOMKlxsFEbVRAGRhCBlQrbWOIuK+47VfGm7cDaQMID3T AAusJA5z6h+aZlncwyWiJohk753mnrON6lPBD0y9luHFusZ4eUL2Zzy+cqL27xBp mULJR9ABGKW4vndKBBLoH9/wDQmEm1ejL1+74BYRDZrO9mgBADjD50yc4RZ/sK6s JsX/KB/WOLSmYXdk28eS2k+YK+8ke8Y6kuZSAWqEuePqcHiM2+wyHLEhyE8Y7Shv 0JX2WiE0goClZOQfNRH7 =y5Ga -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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[Cryptography] Mail Lists In the Post-Snowden Era
by Jerry Leichter 22 Oct '13

22 Oct '13

Perry re-started this mailing list in response to the Snowden revelations about the NSA's attacks on Internet cryptography. He raised the questions of whether we could make a Prism-proof Internet. That's a big problem, and we've been debating small pieces of it ever since. I'd like to suggest a smaller problem, just as a kind of rallying point. This list has certainly attracted NSA interest. Whether by subject, by keyword matching, or because so many of the participants here are clearly "adversaries" of those in the NSA responsible for gaining access to all that crunchy good stuff out there, there's no way anyone here could avoid scrutiny. So ... imagine we don't like that. How could this list be constituted in a "secure" way? The quotes are on "secure" because even the definition of the word isn't clear. Realistically, there's no way to avoid an NSA "plant" joining an open group, so perhaps there's little point in encrypting the messages. Anonymous/pseudonymous posting? Signed messages? (A few members post them; hardly any of us do.) Does that just make messages even more traceable/linkable? We think we know what it means to have secure 1-1 email. Adding a couple of additional participants seems as if it leaves the nature of the problem unchanged, but in fact you very quickly get into trust issues: In a 1-1 conversation, I can decide whether to trust my correspondent. In any multi-party conversation, it's likely that at least one of the participants doesn't know *all* the others, so must make an indirect trust decision: I trust him because the others here seem to trust him. For a mailing list, this problem explodes - while in addition there are all kinds of issue with how exactly to set up key exchanges. A moderated group like this could be looked at as a star configuration: In a way, each participant really only communicates with the moderator. But that seems to miss the point - despite the moderation, this group *feels* like a free-flowing conversation among a group of people. So what would a reasonable security model for the Cryptography list look like? Is it inherently just an open discussion? Or could we come up with something else? If we can do more, what kind of software would be needed to make it as free-flowing and easy to participate in and manage as the current list? -- Jerry _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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[liberationtech] Google Unveils Tools to Access Web From Repressive Countries | TIME.com
by Yosem Companys 22 Oct '13

22 Oct '13

http://business.time.com/2013/10/21/google-digital-rebels/ Google Ideas, the New York City-based “think/do tank” run by the Internet search giant, is launching several new technologies designed to highlight hacker attacks around the world and help people in repressive regimes access the Internet. The new products, which are being announced Monday at the Google Ideas Summit in New York City, represent the most substantial offerings delivered by the three-year-old Google policy unit and could be a major boon to activists and reformers in the world’s most closed and repressive societies. “There are billions of people around the world living in environments that severely restrict their free expression,” Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas, told TIME in an interview on Sunday. “We want to empower them to have access to the same Internet that the rest of us experience. We talk about how we have a responsibility to our users. That also includes people in Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Syria, where the challenges are so serious.” Cohen, a 31-year-old geopolitical expert, earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford and Oxford and later worked as a U.S. State Department advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton before being asked by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt to launch Google Ideas in 2010. Cohen, who co-authored The New Digital Age with Schmidt in April, said that he was attracted to Google by the “activist spirit” of many of the company’s employees. “This is a company of activists and white-hat hackers,” Cohen says. “When you work at Google and tell these engineers that their skill-set is relevant to somebody in Iran who doesn’t have access to information in their country or the rest of the world, it really inspires them to want to do something about it. There is a genuine altruism that exists at this company, and that’s why I’m here and not anywhere else.” The most ambitious product launch is uProxy, a new Web browser extension that uses peer-to-peer technology to let people around the world provide each other with a trusted Internet connection. This product is designed to protect the Internet connection of users in, say, Iran, from state surveillance or filtering. Google Ideas is providing funding and technical assistance for uProxy, which was developed by researchers at the University of Washington and Brave New Software. “If you look at existing proxy tools today, as soon as they’re effective for dissidents, the government finds out about them and either blocks them or infiltrates them,” says Cohen. “Every dissident we know in every repressive society has friends outside the country whom they know and trust. What if those trusted friends could unblock the access in those repressive societies by sharing their own access? That was the problem we tried to solve.” UProxy allows users in the U.S. to give their trusted friends in Iran—people they might already be emailing or chatting with—access to the open U.S. Internet. “The user in Iran can get unfiltered access to the Internet that’s completely uncensored and will look just like it does in the U.S.,” says Cohen. “It’s completely encrypted and there’s no way for the government to detect what’s happening because it just looks like voice traffic or chat traffic. We wanted to build a proxy service that builds on top of trusted relationships that already exist.” Google Ideas is also launching Project Shield, which is an initiative designed to help human rights activists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), election monitoring groups, and news organizations better protect their websites from “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks. Several high-profile news organizations, including The New York Times, have recently been targeted by hackers who used DDoS attacks to temporarily shut down websites. ”Google is very good at protecting itself from DDoS attacks,” says Cohen. “But NGOs, independent media outlets, human rights organizations, and election-monitoring organizations don’t have the capacity to protect themselves in the way that we do.” “We believe in human rights, we believe in free expression, we believe in election-monitoring, and we believe in independent media.” Cohen says the goal is to leverage Google’s technology to aid these efforts. Project Shield is currently under development—consistent with Google’s “launch and iterate” product philosophy—and the company is inviting web-masters working in these areas to apply to join its next round of “trusted” testers. For now, the product is free, Cohen says. The third Google Ideas product launch is the Digital Attack Map, which is a live data visualization, built in conjunction with network security firm Arbor Networks, that displays DDoS attacks worldwide in real-time. This online tool shows real-time anonymous traffic data related to DDoS attacks, and also lets users explore historical trends and see related news reports, via Google News, of website outages as they are happening. “What we’ve done for the first time is take all of the DDoS attacks worldwide and show what the state of DDoS activity looks like in real-time, much like you’d check the weather,” says Cohen. “If you think about all of the organizations around the world that use a website as their modern-day office—NGOs, businesses, governments—it’s not OK to have this many digital office raids shutting them down.” Cohen says DDoS attacks are the online equivalent of masked gunmen storming a newsroom and taking a station off the air by force. (MORE: The Internet Doesn’t Hurt People — People Do: ‘The New Digital Age’) Google Ideas is introducing the new products during a conference in New York City called “Conflict in a Connected World,” which the tech giant is sponsoring in conjunction with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Gen Next Foundation. Computer security experts, entrepreneurs, dissidents and journalists from around the world have gathered in lower Manhattan to discuss how technology can be both a liberating force—and a tool for state repression. Given Google’s size and influence in the tech world, it’s only natural that some observers might take a cynical view of the company’s Internet freedom efforts. After all, Google is neither a non-profit group (although it has a philanthropic arm called Google.org) nor a charitable organization. Google is a capitalist juggernaut with a $337 billion market capitalization, $56.5 billion in cash, and a stock price that now exceeds $1000 per share. Put simply, as more people around the world use the Internet, Google is poised to benefit financially. Last quarter, Google said that revenue from outside the U.S. totaled $7.67 billion, representing 56% of the company’s total business, a figure that will only grow as more people around the world get online. In the interview with TIME, Cohen addressed such doubts. “If you think about some of the environments we’re talking about, like North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Sudan, all of these countries have sanctions on them,” says Cohen. “So there’s no business interest in these countries. The interest we have is in giving users in every environment the same level of security and unfiltered access that you or I have here in the United States. We care about free expression, and this is an example of us putting our product where our mouth is.” Read more: http://business.time.com/2013/10/21/google-digital-rebels/#ixzz2iNWOHfnF -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu.

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Re: CryptoSeal shutters, ala: LavaBit
by Bill Stewart 22 Oct '13

22 Oct '13

>>> Third-party outside the US Why should a customer buy from you instead of directly from the non-US party? If you can find a way to only have service compromised if you're BOTH compromised, that might let you add some value, but otherwise you're just a consultant. >enforce forward secrecy, allow no non-forward secret suites. this is critical. Absolutely. >problem solved.. > ...they will however treat this as contempt of court - the escalation >would be infinitely interesting! If your certificate is for signatures only (e.g. on DH keyparts), not for encryption, you've got a much stronger case to make in court. And it's much tougher for them to argue "contempt" if you do have to cave and give them your signature key but then generate a new one and start using it, as long as you don't destroy the old one (which would potentially be destroying evidence.) The question is whether they can force you to retain the DH keyparts.

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Enigmabox releases source
by Eugen Leitl 22 Oct '13

22 Oct '13

Just got word, Enigmabox has published source and put up first documentation on http://wiki.enigmabox.net/ Roll your own Enigmabox: http://wiki.enigmabox.net/build-your-own Not too sure how to get a Debian 7 with minimum pain, pfSense offers dd'able images. Voyage Linux or Debian for Alix?

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Re: [liberationtech] Google Unveils Tools to Access Web From Repressive Countries | TIME.com
by Juan Garofalo 22 Oct '13

22 Oct '13

--On Monday, October 21, 2013 10:25 AM -0700 Yosem Companys <companys(a)stanford.edu> wrote: > http://business.time.com/2013/10/21/google-digital-rebels/ > > Google Ideas, the New York City-based "think/do tank" run by the > Internet search giant, is launching several new technologies designed > to highlight hacker attacks around the world and help people in > repressive regimes access the Internet. Don't these fucking google idiots realize that they are their own parody? Or are they laughing at how stupid the 'western' and 'democratic' public is? [rest of corporative crap deleted]

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list of end-to-end secure protocols, decentralized and end-to-end secure protocols [was: CryptoSeal shutters, ala: LavaBit]
by coderman 22 Oct '13

22 Oct '13

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 9:08 PM, Kelly John Rose <iam(a)kjro.se> wrote: > ... > The only solution is to not have the private key itself available to you interestingly enough, it seems there is so very little analyzing this space. typical search for elligator, today, "Cited by 1" ... WTF? they will point out it's rude to bitch without a patch,... touché someone has to pay this decentralizing cost, and so far the consumer has refused. a "fun problem" to solve; good luck!

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Cheney afraid of terrist h4x0rs
by Eugen Leitl 22 Oct '13

22 Oct '13

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/cheney-had-heart-device-part… Cheney had heart device partially disabled to prevent a terrorist from sending a fatal shock Olivia Harris, Pool, File/Associated Press - In an interview with CBS’ ”60 Minutes,” former Vice President Dick Cheney says he once feared that terrorists could use the electrical device that had been implanted near his heart to kill him and had his doctor disable its wireless function. By Associated Press, Saturday, October 19, 1:34 AM WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he once feared that terrorists could use the electrical device that had been implanted near his heart to kill him and had his doctor disable its wireless function. Cheney has a history of heart trouble, suffering the first of five heart attacks at age 37. He underwent a heart transplant last year at age 71. In an interview with CBS’ ”60 Minutes,” Cheney says doctors replaced an implanted defibrillator near his heart in 2007. The device can detect irregular heartbeats and control them with electrical jolts. Cheney says that he and his doctor, cardiologist Jonathan Reiner, turned off the device’s wireless function in case a terrorist tried to send his heart a fatal shock. Years later, Cheney watched an episode of the Showtime series “Homeland” in which such a scenario was part of the plot. “I found it credible,” Cheney tells “60 Minutes” in a segment to be aired Sunday. “I know from the experience we had, and the necessity for adjusting my own device, that it was an accurate portrayal of what was possible.” Cheney and Reiner are promoting a book they co-authored, “Heart: An American Medical Odyssey.” In the “60 Minutes” interview, Reiner says he worried that Cheney couldn’t stand the pressure that came on Sept. 11, 2001, the day terrorists attacked the U.S. Medical tests seen that morning showed Cheney had elevated levels of potassium in his blood, a condition called hyperkalemia, which could lead to abnormal heart rhythms and cardiac arrest. Reiner says he watched news coverage of the day’s events on television and thought, “Oh, great, the vice president is going to die tonight from hyperkalemia.”

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