December 2013 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Re: [Cryptography] Bruce Schneier has gotten seriously spooked
by Eugen Leitl 07 Sep '16

07 Sep '16

----- Forwarded message from Brian Gladman <brg(a)gladman.plus.com> ----- Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 09:33:28 +0100 From: Brian Gladman <brg(a)gladman.plus.com> To: Cryptography Mailing List <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com> Subject: Re: [Cryptography] Bruce Schneier has gotten seriously spooked User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130801 Thunderbird/17.0.8 On 07/09/2013 01:48, Chris Palmer wrote: >> Q: "Could the NSA be intercepting downloads of open-source encryption software and silently replacing these with their own versions?" > > Why would they perform the attack only for encryption software? They > could compromise people's laptops by spiking any popular app. Because NSA and GCHQ are much more interested in attacking communictions in transit rather than attacking endpoints. Endpoint attacks cost more to undertake, only give access to a limited amount of data and involve much greater risks that their attack will either be discovered or their means of attack will leave evidence of what they have done and how they have done it. The internal bueaucratic costs of gaining approval for (adverarial) endpoint attacks also makes it a more costly process than the use of network based interception. There is significant use of open source encryption software in end to end encryption solutions, in file archivers, in wifi and network routers, and in protecing the communications used to manage and control such components when at remote locations. The open source software is provided in source code form and is compiled from source in a huge number of applications and this means that the ability to covertly substitute broken source code could provide access to a huge amount of traffic without the risks involved in endpoint attacks. I stress that I am NOT suggesting that this has happened (or is happening), simply that it has attractions from an NSA/GCHQ viewpoint. Fortunately, I think it is a difficult attack to mount covertly (that is, without the acqiecience of the author(s) of the software in question). On the more general debate here, in my view, 'security for the masses' through the deployment of encryption is a 'pipe dream' that isn't going to happen. Functionality (and the complexity that comes with it) is the enemy of security and it is very clear that the public places a much higher value on functionality than it does on security (or privacy). Every time a new device comes onto the market, it starts with limited functionality and some hope of decent security but rapidly evolves to be a high functionality product in which the prospect of decent security declines rapidly to zero. Raspberry Pis look interesting _now_ but I would be willing to bet that they won't buck the trend of increasing funtionality and declining security simply because this is what the majority in even this limited user community will want. To buck this trend we need an effort like the Raspberry Pi effort but one driven by our community with a strong commitment to simplicty and deliberately limited functionality in both hardware and software. Brian Gladman _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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Re: [liberationtech] Interesting things in keyservers
by Eugen Leitl 17 Aug '16

17 Aug '16

----- Forwarded message from micah <micah(a)riseup.net> ----- Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 10:05:42 -0400 From: micah <micah(a)riseup.net> To: Micah Lee <micahflee(a)riseup.net>, 'liberationtech' <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Interesting things in keyservers User-Agent: Notmuch/0.15.2 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/24.3.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Reply-To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> Hi Micah! Micah Lee <micahflee(a)riseup.net> writes: > I'm working on a talk for OHM2013 about PGP. Can anyone send me examples > of interesting keys in key servers that you know of? Since you are preparing a talk about the subject, I'm going to be pedantic and correct your usage of "PGP", because it is important to get your terminology straight when giving a talk. I presume you aren't giving a talk about the commercial software, but instead you are actually giving a talk about OpenPGP which is the standard specified by RFC4880 that different programs like GnuPG, Seahorse, MacGPG, and PGP etc. all implement. If that is true, then you should refer to it as OpenPGP, and not PGP. I dont know what your talk will consist of, besides the funny enigmail XSS and goatse.cx stuff (thanks for that! always good to have some goatse early in the morning), but I would like to point out a few things that might be useful to mention. One is a wiki page that I created with some people: https://we.riseup.net/riseuplabs+paow/openpgp-best-practices - it contains some useful hints about using OpenPGP, maintaining a good key and some general good practices that people often dont know about (such as the importance of keeping your keys updated to get critical revocation and expiration extension certifications!) One thing mentioned on that page that I wanted to highlight, because you used pgp.mit.edu links in your original email, is that the keyserver pgp.mit.edu is not a good one to use/promote. Everyone uses it as their 'goto' keyserver, but it is a really bad idea! As a keyserver, it has been broken for years. For a long time it was just dropping revocations, subkey updates and expirations on the floor. That is *really* bad. Eventually, they upgraded their keyserver software, but it is *still* running an older version of SKS, a version that fails to handle 16-digit subkeyid lookups (among other failings). So, please don't rely on pgp.mit.edu for your security, and please don't include them in your slides! If you are looking for one to use, I highly recommend using the SKS pool address (hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net or http://hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net/ - or if you want a more close geographical pool, have a look at http://sks-keyservers.net/overview-of-pools.php) Finally, there seems to be some amazing misconceptions about keyservers, keys and the web of trust. In particular this http://cryptome.org/2013/07/mining-pgp-keyservers.htm circulated recently and it pained me to see because it suggested various wreckless conclusions that were dangerously off the mark[0] (and used pgp.mit.edu, hah). While it is true that we've jokingly called the OpenPGP web of trust "the original social network" because of the exposed social relational graphing that can be done by querying keyservers, and it is for this reason that many activists I know do not want to have signatures uploaded to keyservers (and instead use the bulky local-only signature work-around)... ... but for some reason people seem to think that if it is on a keyserver, is true, or it means something that it doesn't. People don't realize critical things, such as the fact that I can create a key with the UID Nadim Kobeissi and upload it to the keyservers[1]. That doesn't mean that is the real Nadim's key (this is what exchanging key fingerprints and doing certifications is for, so you can know, with a certain degree of certainty, that this person is the person who controls that secret key material). Or people think that because I signed your key and that signature is on the keyserver that indicates: I trust you; we met in person at that date; we know each other; we are involved in a criminal conspiracy with each other; or many other wrong assumptions about what that certification means. I can sign Edward Snowden's key and send that to the keyservers[1]. Hell, I can sign Snowden's key with my fake Nadim Kobeissi key[1] and then send it to the keyservers. Does that mean that Nadim and Snowden have met in person?! No, it does not at all. Anyways, I can keep going... but I dont know what the focus of your OHM talk is about, so going on like this isn't particularly useful to you and your talk... however, I'd be happy to provide more feedback about your talk if you would like![2] After all, we Micahs need to stick together, micah 0. "the cryptome article just sounds like impenetrable bullshit from someone with no interest in actually understandning what's happening" - I'm not saying who said this... 1. no, I didn't do that, nor did I upload the edward snowden or bradly manning keys. -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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HavenCo - Rebirth?
by grarpamp 07 Apr '15

07 Apr '15

Highly doubt Ryan, Avi or any cpunks are involved, or that much of anything will actually be in SeaLand. Seems like a news driven oppurtunistic biz to cover tower operation and maintenance costs. Anyone have any facts? Such as who's behind it and why? http://www.sealandgov.org/sealand-news-1/HavenCo http://www.havenco.com/

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Stealthy Dopant-Level Hardware Trojans
by Eugen Leitl 23 Jun '14

23 Jun '14

http://people.umass.edu/gbecker/BeckerChes13.pdf Stealthy Dopant-Level Hardware Trojans ? Georg T. Becker1 , Francesco Regazzoni2 , Christof Paar1,3 , and Wayne P. Burleson1 1University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA 2TU Delft, The Netherlands and ALaRI - University of Lugano, Switzerland 3Horst ortz Institut for IT-Security, Ruhr-Universiat Bochum, Germany Abstract. In recent years, hardware Trojans have drawn the attention of governments and industry as well as the scientific community. One of the main concerns is that integrated circuits, e.g., for military or critical infrastructure applications, could be maliciously manipulated during the manufacturing process, which often takes place abroad. However, since there have been no reported hardware Trojans in practice yet, little is known about how such a Trojan would look like, and how dicult it would be in practice to implement one. In this paper we propose an extremely stealthy approach for implementing hardware Trojans below the gate level, and we evaluate their impact on the security of the target device. Instead of adding additional circuitry to the target design, we insert our hardware Trojans by changing the dopant polarity of existing transistors. Since the modified circuit appears legitimate on all wiring layers (including all metal and polysilicon), our family of Trojans is resistant to most detection techniques, including fine-grain optical inspection and checking against "golden chips". We demonstrate the ectiveness of our approach by inserting Trojans into two designs | a digital post-processing derived from Intel's cryptographically secure RNG design used in the Ivy Bridge processors and a side-channel resistant SBox implementation and by exploring their detectability and their ects on security. Keywords: Hardware Trojans, malicious hardware, layout modifications, Trojan side-channel

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The next gen P2P secure email solution
by grarpamp 02 Jun '14

02 Jun '14

This thread pertains specifically to the use of P2P/DHT models to replace traditional email as we know it today. There was a former similarly named thread on this that diverged... from the concept and challenge of P2P/DHT handling the transport and lookups... back to more traditional models. This thread does not care about those antique models, please do not take it there. In short, we're attempting to examine and develop some form of new transport that looks somewhat like a mix between secure anonymous networks, string@pubkey node addressing, massive decentralized dht-like scaling and finally a user facing daemon that moves messages into and out of local spools for use by normal user/system tools. Pasting in a very rough and unflowing thread summary to date for interested people to pick up and discuss, draft, etc. ===== grarpamp... > [pgp/smime email encryption, etc] > What is the gap we have to close to turn this on by default? How many times has this been rehashed the last six months? You can't fix email as we know it today using todays bolt-ons, protocols and corporate stakeholders/services trying to profit from it. The only way to have any real global seamless success is to go ground up with a completely new model. IMO, that will be some form of p2p message system where every address is a crypto key, masked for grandma by her contact list, decrypted out your p2p daemon and piped into your local mail processing (MUA/filter/lists) and filesystem (encryption). At least that way your local mail tools will still work (no one will give those up anyway). The problem is the antique centralized backend, it needs bypassed. You've got neat stuff like Tor, bittorrent, bitcoin, etc already... so boost email into the 2020's the same way. Then let the old world email services try to keep up, and slowly die like everything else. ===== grarpamp... On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 1:01 AM, ianG <iang(a)iang.org> wrote: > On 23/11/13 15:30 PM, Ralf Senderek wrote: >> On Sat, 23 Nov 2013, David Mercer wrote: >> >>> But of course you're right about actual current usage, encrypted email >>> is an >>> epic fail on that measure regardless of format/protocol. >> >> Yes, but it's about time we do something about that. Do we *exactly know >> why* it is such a failure? > > It's an interesting question, and one worth studying for pedagogical > motives. From my experiences from both sides, it is clear that both sides > failed. But for different reasons. > Hence, I've concluded that email is unsecurable. Obviously. It will never be able to escape the non-body header content and third party routing, storage and analysis with any form of patching over today's mail. And it's completely ridiculous that people continue to invest [aka: waste] effort in 'securing' it. The best you'll ever get clients down to is exposing a single 'To:' header within an antique transport model that forces you to authenticate to it in order to despam, bill, censor and control you. That system is cooked, done and properly fucked. Abandon it. What the world needs now is a real peer to peer messaging system that scales. Take Tor for a partial example... so long as all the sender/recipient nodes [onions] are up, any message you send will get through, encrypted, in real time. If a recipient is not up, you queue it locally till they are... no third party ever needed, and you get lossless delivery and confirmation for free. Unmemorable node address?, quit crying and make use of your local address book. Doesn't have plugins for current clients?, so what, write some and use it if you're dumb enough to mix the old and new mail. The only real problem that still needs solved is scalability... what p2p node lookup systems are out there that will handle a messaging world's population worth of nodes [billions] and their keys and tertiary data? If you can do that, you should be able to get some anon transport over the p2p for free. Anyway, p2p messaging and anonymous transports have all been dreamed up by others before. But now is the time to actually abandon traditional email and just do it. If you build it, they will come. ===== fabio... I'm strongly against most the ideas to abbandon current email systems, because the results will be to create wallet garden. We need something interoperable with existing systems or the system will just be used by a bunch of paranoid people or fostered by the marketing of few cryptography company acquiring customers, not user. ===== grarpamp... It would be interoperable with current end user interfaces/tools, but not directly with you(a)some.dotcom. As with everything else, today's seeds grow into tomorrows garden, sometimes you just have to thorougly plow under last year's chaff first, that's by design. ===== viktor... E-mail is basically business correspondence. - E-mail is stored. - E-mail is sent to many people outside your personal social network. - Business recipients of email are often subject to corporate and/or regulatory policy constraints that are in conflict with end-to-end encryption. The above list of features can be greatly expanded, and the consequences elaborated, but I doubt may on this list truly need to be re-educated about email. So I will confidently predict that end-to-end secure email will remain a niche service used by a tiny minority. ... Even businesses that one might expect to implement at least encryption to the "gateway", are in many cases choosing to out-source their gateway to 3rd-party providers (anti-spam and anti-virus offerings only work with un-encrypted email, and in many cases the provider also operates the entire mail store). .... [and others also said: tls, dane, skype, smime, ca's, smtp, etc] ===== Jerry... Medical, Financial ===== grarpamp... Nothing here changes, only the backend transport between nodes. Once your node decrypts the message to your local system pipes, you can do all this and more with it. Including running a 'business' node and doing whatever you want with the plaintext after your node daemon passes it to you. This is not about those ancient protocols. It's also about 'messaging' not strictly 'email'... those lines are already well blurred, no need to distinguish between them anymore. A 'light' messaging client could simply ignore the non transport email headers, or use your standard msg@nodekey address. Please do not continue to talk about antique tradional centralized systems in this thread, except of course to bash and route around them. The speed of a real P2P/DHT replacement at scale is a research challenge. ===== coderman... this would make an interesting bet! i too believe this to be impossible given the constraints. ===== grarpamp... I'm not so sure about this, look at all the global resources being poured into traditional email, and attempts to 'fix' it. Now redirect fractional 1% of those resources and put them into a P2P replacement. That's ftw. ===== natanael... Say hello to Bote mail on I2P. I2P provides encrypted anonymizing networking, Bote mail provides DHT based serverless encrypted mailing with public crypto keys as addresses (ECDSA or NTRU). http://i2p2.de and i2pbote.i2p (if you don't have I2P installed, add .us to visit it via an inproxy). There is also I2P Messenger that is encrypted P2P IM within I2P also using public keys as addresses. ===== cane... You may have a look of "I2P Bote" it is severless, encrypted mail system, address is the public key, P2P based... nice tool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P#E-mail ===== grarpamp... > You may have a look of "I2P Bote" it is severless, encrypted mail > system, address is the public key, P2P based... nice tool. As in another post of mine, I'll be looking at that again. My first take was that it stores the messages in the DHT, which didn't seem scalable or reliable at all. I may be wrong as I read more later. > Afterwards you can add the "I2P Bote plugin", the serverless mail > system. SMTP- and POP3 support was on the ToDo list some times ago, I I think that's working now. And is the general idea, create a strong overlay network with a frontend MUA's can speak to. As an aside: If you can make that overlay net present an IPv6 tunnel interface on the local host, that lets you use any IPv6 enabled app over it. I'm doubting the world needs a dozen application specific overlay networks. More like just a few classes of network. - message based store and forward - low latency IPv6 transport - data storage and retrieval ===== natanael... Bote mail doesn't have to be used for it's anonymous properties, for me that is just a bonus. For many people it is more than enough to be able to know that it is impossible for anybody else than the intended recipient to read the message thanks to public key addressing. Guaranteed end-to-end security if you can verify the address. I don't think anything that doesn't fundamentally rely on public key addressing is the (long term) future. There will inevitably issues otherwise, including more issues of the type we have with CA:s today. For those who want to make it more user friendly, nothing stops you from adding a transparent "address translation layer" where servers are involved. When you want to send a message to a person with a human readable address at a server, then the server could then reply with the public key based address to the mail client, and the user would have the option to see what that address is. It could even be logged by the client, with TOFU/POP style trust system that reduces the amount of trust you have to place in the server. No need to trust anybody with plaintext. ===== grarpamp... I suggest such interfacing with the current legacy system will only prolong it's long past due extinction. Build a better system and let them come to you, not the other way around. And bolting in exits will only make it harder to do correctly and optimally what you need to do as a P2P system. Please, just forget about interfacing with the legacy transport system. If you really need that you can run your own p2p daemon node that acts as your automated gateway between the two. This is mostly about design of the p2p side, not that. ===== james... It is my understanding of the proposed replacement for email. Magic email addresses that in fact correspond to an identifier of a public key, for example the hash of a rule that identifies the public key, and which result in your message not in fact being passed along by email protocols. ===== grarpamp... If you're not going to send directly to the very long account@nodepubkey, then yes, you'll need to create another layer on top to hold your h(key). However, the key must still be obtainable behind that since that is what the messages will ultimately be encrypted and routed to. It's not much of a stretch beyond that to ensure userland mail tools can handle say 8k long addresses. I'm not against such a [vanity/shorthash] layer. ===== natanael... Bote mail and I2P messenger are two pieces of serverless software that ALREADY is public key addressed within I2P. Have you tried them? You need to add the public keys of the recipients to be able to send a message to start with, although the DHT based search system Seedless allow you to publish Bote mail addresses to the network. (IMAP support for Bote mail is planned but not yet implemented, right now it has a local web interface.) Maybe Namecoin could work together with them to enable you to register your key addresses to your nickname in a secure manner, but then you still have to have a globally unique nickname and tell people the exact spelling. ===== > ralf... > If you are so sure, can you tell us how the next generation secure email > solution will solve the "trust problem", please. grarpamp... Though unclear, that sounds like the old trust of a CA/PKI system problem. > How does the p2p daemon > find the correct crypto key, so that every user can rely on its invisible > performance? In general I suggest that people wish to use messaging with each other once they already know them (or have some other trusted web to them). As in, Hey John, nice to meet ya today, what's your key (address), I'll message you later. Or Hey Jane, what's John's address. Same for employers, businesses, etc. Such peer groups bootstrap and grow very fast. Thus the perceived need for a cold lookup of Ralf, isn't much of a real one. Once you know the address (node crypto key), you put it 'To: <key>', mua hands to spool, p2p daemon reads spool, looks up key in DHT and sends msg off across the transport to the far key (node) when it is reachable. Hopefully the transport looks like I2P/Tor in being a secure random hop layer. In fact, those could probably be used today, they have the keys as nodes and user facing ports for inbound/outbound daemons. They just need scaling work to n-billion nodes (users, aka: the hard part). People are already plugging postfix, bittorrent, etc into these networks. Tor is not currently addressible at the user level by the full key, it 'shortens' the key into a 16char onion address. As you may be hinting at... yes, that is bad... collisions, and needing secondary lookup layers into the full key. Tor may be moving to full key addressibility soon, see tor-dev for that. I2P (and Phantom, and probably GnuNet) are addressible with full keys. So you can send to 'account@key' with them if you want, and keep the John/Jane/Ralf human style lookups in your MUA addressbook (once you know them) without needing a secondary lookup layer into the full key. No, I am not sure. But when looking at some of the p2p transport layers that have come along so far, it seems like a fairly strong possibility for a new backend transport model while retaining user level mail tools... mutt, maildrop, mailman, Thunderbird, etc. Most of what you'd need there is support for very long addresses and split horizon handoff to local daemon/spool based on recognizing what the destination net is... .onion, .i2p, etc. I'd like to read what Pond and I2P-Bote are doing with some parts of this as well. I don't believe you need a trusted CA/PKI service to successfully bootstrap users and their addresses/keys into a new global messaging system. If I want to know what some unknown like Bruce's key is, I'll look it up on his website, social net, list posts, etc. If that's what you mean. ===== bill... I feel like I walking in halfway into a conversation, I'm guessing this started on the cryptography list that I'm not on. Your DHT comment caught my attention though. What in particular about DHTs don't seem scalable or reliable? Seems like DHTs are regularly in the 5-10M range and I don't see any reason that DHTs couldn't be 10 times that. Any reasonable churn rate and reliability could be handled with replication. The bit-torrent DHT for instance claims that 45% of users that bootstrap from a central node are reachable 15 minutes later. So typical setups involve 8 nodes per bin, and 20 bins. So every 15 minutes you ping 160 hosts, only reach 45%, and do some work to repopulate the missing slots. Given the simplicity of the bit-torrent DHT I think there's plenty of room for improvement. Larger routing tables are obvious (at the cost of more network bandwidth to track peers). The most promising idea for DHT improvements I've seen is to divide peers into 3 latency groups. High, medium, and low. Much like L1 cache, L2 cache, and main memory. That way common queries are very fast, yet all queries still to find keys globally. ===== grarpamp... Bittorrent is already in the 100m node range. That's not enough. This needs to replace every possible messaging user on the planet over the duration of their actiive lifetime. That's at least a couple billion nodes. Don't forget, you can always use disk to cache things. ===== > james... > Need a system for handing one's keys around that protects end users from > the horrifying sight of actual keys or actual strong hashes of keys. john... But at the same time the system has to not say, "I can't deliver your message to that person because an invisible gnotzaframmit that I won't describe to you seems to be unavailable to me in the flabogrommit." grarpamp... Address books as usual. Name layer if need be. We are humans, we learn new lexicons, we write manuals, that part is nothing to be afraid of. Being afraid only holds you back. ===== > grarpamp... > I don't believe you need a trusted CA/PKI service to successfully > bootstrap users and their addresses/keys into a new global messaging > system. If I want to know what some unknown like Bruce's key is, I'll > look it up on his website, social net, list posts, etc. If that's what you > mean. > guido... > You can use an untrusted CA to bootstrap. I show how it can be done at: > > http://eccentric-authentication.org/Brucon-Eccentric.pdf ralf... This is an interesting idea, because it provides certificates on demand for ordinary users, if they decide to sign up to a certain site. The certs are then being used for other purposes, so the site does act as a bootstap for using crypto. The one thing that this proposal relies on is the availability of a common piece of software (user agent) that stores the private key for the user. It's this part of the picture where things get tricky. grarpamp... There can be no non-distributed/redundant elements in this p2p system, aka: no 'sites', certainly none with a realworld IP on them, and none where very high percentages of them vanishing will disrupt the system for others. This must replace email, therefore system disruption is intolerable. =====

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QUANTUMINSERT "wide stack" covert network communication
by coderman 13 Mar '14

13 Mar '14

in the discussion regarding well positioned injection points on the backbone (QUANTUMINSERT) i have not yet seen discussion of using these well positioned injection points for covert network connections. consider that you are eavesdropping on return path for a given un-used, high address space of a third party (a lot of that 15.0.0.0/8 is idle :) consider that you can inject arbitrary packets into the egress for same net block (even if upstream, still sufficient to match route). you can now establish a covert TCP connection appearing to come from the high space of 15.0.0.0/8, of which HP only sees the returning (encrypted) martians. (and this assumes they're even watching!) this "wide stack" approach provides cover via multitudes of idle address spaces of third parties, while the actual communicators are hidden. anxiously awaiting the details on how this is used... *sacrifices chickens to the "Snowden Release Gatekeepers" (TM)*

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Replacing corporate search engines with anonymous/decentralized search
by Jesse R. Taylor 18 Jan '14

18 Jan '14

Recently there has been a lot of focus on the importance of developing more secure alternatives to email, instant messaging, browsing, etc. ... but I've seen very little focus on the need for development of alternatives to corporate search engines. Corporate/state control of the Internet involves a three pronged strategy of: mass surveillance, censorship/criminalization of undesirable ideas, and traffic shaping (i.e. directing people away of things you don't want them to see, and towards things you do). Corporate search engines are implicated in all three of these, i.e. they: 1) Monitor what we are searching for 2) Censor websites by removing them from search engine indexes 3) Shape traffic via non-transparent algorithms that can sort search results in a way that grants prominence to certain types of sites (corporate media, etc.), in order to suit the interests of multinational corporations and governments. ... so obviously, developing alternatives to corporate search is every bit as crucial for protecting privacy and free speech as encrypting our emails/chats, and anonymizing our browsing ... But I've seen very little information about practical/simple options that are available for anonymous and decentralized Internet search software. I've only been able to find a few examples like YaCy, but they all seem overly complex and unusable by the vast majority of users. What are the major barriers to creating simple tools (e.g. a plugin for Firefox) that would enable users to perform anonymous, p2p web search (even if it's much slower than centralized search) and break away from using corporate search? Which current efforts to create decentralized search seem most promising to you from a privacy/security standpoint? -- Jesse Taylor

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Jacob Appelbaum in Germany
by Jim Bell 10 Jan '14

10 Jan '14

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/NSA-Surveillance/2013/12/30/id/544431 Privacy Advocate Exposes High-Tech NSA Spy Gadgets Monday, 30 Dec 2013 03:43 PM Share: * A well-known privacy advocate has given the public an unusually explicit peek into the intelligence world's tool box, pulling back the curtain on the National Security Agency's arsenal of high-tech spy gear. Independent journalist and security expert Jacob Appelbaum on Monday told a hacker conference in Germany that the NSA could turn iPhones into eavesdropping tools and use radar wave devices to harvest electronic information from computer even if they weren't online. Appelbaum told hundreds of computer experts gathered at Hamburg's Chaos Communications Conference that his revelations about the NSA's capabilities "are even worse than your worst nightmares." "What I am going to show you today is wrist-slittingly depressing," he said. Even though in the past six months there have been an unprecedented level of public scrutiny of the NSA and its methods, Appelbaum's claims — supported by what appeared to be internal NSA slideshows — still caused a stir. One of the slides described how the NSA can plant malicious software onto Apple Inc.'s iPhone, giving American intelligence agents the ability to turn the popular smartphone into a pocket-sized spy. Another slide showcased a futuristic-sounding device described as a "portable continuous wave generator," a remote controlled device which — when paired with tiny electronic implants — can bounce invisible waves of energy off keyboards and monitors to see what is being typed even if the target device isn't connected to the Internet. A third slide showcased a piece of equipment called NIGHTSTAND, which can tamper with wireless Internet connections from up to 8 miles away. An NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said that she wasn't aware of Appelbaum's presentation, but that in general should would not comment on "alleged foreign intelligence activities." "As we've said before: NSA's focus is on targeting the communications of valid foreign intelligence targets — not on collecting and exploiting a class of communications or services that would sweep up communications that are not of bona fide foreign intelligence interest to the U.S. government." The documents included in Appelbaum's presentation were first published by German magazine Der Spiegel Sunday and Monday. Appelbaum and Der Spiegel have both played an important role in the disclosures of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, but neither has clarified whether the most recent set of slides came from Snowden.

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Re: [cryptography] To Protect and Infect Slides
by Jacob Appelbaum 08 Jan '14

08 Jan '14

Kevin W. Wall: > On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 3:10 PM, John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> wrote: > >> 30c3 slides from Jacob Appelbaum: >> >> http://cryptome.org/2013/12/appelbaum-30c3.pdf (3.8MB) >> > > And you can find his actual prez here: > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA> > > Worth the hour, although I'm sure your blood > pressure will go up a few points. > I'm also happy to answer questions in discussion form about the content of the talk and so on. I believe we've now released quite a lot of useful information that is deeply in the public interest. All the best, Jacob

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Omidyar influence in new Greenwald venture [was: SRF: cryptic]
by coderman 07 Jan '14

07 Jan '14

On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 6:11 PM, coderman <coderman(a)gmail.com> wrote: > ... this should be tempered with appropriate caution: > "Six Degrees of Omidyar" > http://tomslee.net/2013/09/six-degrees-of-omidyar.html > who will surely show up in any Open Data effort making progress... also involved in: """ Glenn Greenwald, who has published many of the most important scoops from the Edward Snowden leaks, is leaving The Guardian and setting up a new media venture with long-time journalist Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill from The Nation. The venture is being funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who has suggested that he's prepared to invest more than $250 million in the new venture. """

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