December 2013 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Re: infra-org (urls)
by John Young 07 Dec '13

07 Dec '13

Contact mics for acquiring vibration and resonance emanations are among the still classified TEMPEST offensive and defensive activities, along with other multi-sensory and -physical acquisition and transmission technologies. The celebrated EM components of TEMPEST are commonly used as subterfuges, ruses and ploys to divert attention from the non-EM -- which an almost limitless number of animals and other creatures use for SIGINT and COMINT, and a few like Brian, unfettered by industry conceits, use for full-spectrum HUMINT. TSCM pros have made much of the EM threat and little of the other, or pretend to do so. The US Embassy Moscow cavity resonance bug, and a few others, are highlighted for the same diversion from the slew of others inadvertently ignored. Thanks again to Brian for broadening the discussion from narrow focus on crypto prowess and simple-minded EM and TSCM, a narrowness which might be considered a long running ploy not so different from the Snowden gush generating reams of Chicken Little narrative beloved by the comsec industry guided by its nose toward cash and ignoring its tell-taling stench.

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Re: [Full-disclosure] Secure whistleblowing feedback / reporting systems in the content of compartmented information, endpoint security [was: [NSA bitching] [formerly Re: PRISM][]]
by coderman 06 Dec '13

06 Dec '13

On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 4:40 AM, <dan(a)geer.org> wrote: >... > http://geer.tinho.net/geer.uncc.9x13.txt an interesting discussion :) "This is perhaps our last fundamental tradeoff before the Singularity occurs: Do we, as a society, want the comfort and convenience of increasingly technologic, invisible digital integration enough to pay for those benefits with the liberties that must be given up to be protected from the downsides of that integration?" -- dan i would argue that there is an alternative in design and architecture, mainly those which decentralize and protect end-to-end. however, there is a cost attached to these efforts as well, which so far most opt-out of paying... best regards,

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audiovisual (urls)
by brian carroll 05 Dec '13

05 Dec '13

MIT's Peter Shor explains why he devised an algorithm for a quantum computer that could unravel our online data encryption http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029445.100-my-quantum-algorithm-won… // not worth saying this may be relevant to landspeeder development... 'Electromagnon' effect couples electricity and magnetism in materials http://phys.org/news/2013-11-electromagnon-effect-couples-electricity-magne… "It has been well known for a long time that electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin. Waves in free space, such as visible light or mobile phone radiation, always consist of both an electric and a magnetic component. When it comes to material properties, however, electricity and magnetism have been viewed as separate topics." To Settle Infinity Dispute, a New Law of Logic // not _really https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20131126-to-settle-infinity-questio… note: enormous problems with this. mathematics as if short-fiction. what if concept/cosmology is being influenced by language framework (q: is truth bounded or infinite). hierarchical nesting core of set theory, numberline in this context, why assumed 1d/2d versus N-dimensional. issues of bounded infinity everywhere (particle ladder, consciousness), perhaps zero is issue (empty set?) -- metaphysics seem completely off, being and nothingess as set relations not grounded in reality it seems. (note: why three zeroes allowed to diagram infinity as a first question, what if number line is hiearchical, zero different dimension than 1...N) Your Next Phone Will Be The Ultimate Surveillance Machine // via digg http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/your-next-phone-will-be-the-ultimate-… The internet mystery that has the world baffled // via digg http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10468112/The-int… // consider consolidating many credit cards into one card with bluetooth, // how if that signal is hacked, access to eight cards combined the bounty... Soon, You Might Pay for Everything With a Coin // via digg http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/ideas/2013/11/soon-you-might-pay-for-everyt… [correlation between money and desire. what happens when truth is separated from exchange, kept outside or removed from it. what is the guarantee: in <blank> we trust?] Watch The Idea, the First Animated Film to Deal with Big, Philosophical Ideas (1932) http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/the-idea-1932.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MplLxhyzWSg Australia's Using Pop Radio to Track Space Junk http://gizmodo.com/australias-using-pop-radio-to-track-space-junk-1474126810 [quote] 4 Great Tech Ideas That Flopped // via digg http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=pogue-4-great-tech-ideas-t… "The plug-and-play gadget: A spinoff of the PalmPilot called The Handspring Visor held much of the same attraction as the PhoneBloks. It was a handheld organizer with a big cartridge slot on the back. Into it you could snap a range of accessories: more storage, a GPS receiver, a camera, a cellular transmitter, a remote control, a Bluetooth module, an MP3 module or a voice recorder. The Visors were on the market for about four years (1999 to 2003) and have fans to this day. But clearly, the concept of interchangeable gadget parts alone isn’t enough to start a revolution." (note: the above article mentions something repeatedly endlessly about PDA development, that it no longer exists, especially in the context of the Handspring which preceded and was probably a trial for the modularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch (a PDA or networked digital assistant). the Handspring was certainly limited unlike the Apple ecosystem approach which could expand exponentially and had wide software integration, and thus the concept lives on in another product line and its development yet is consistently not attributed this way.) in-article url: Why Snap-Together Cell Phones Will Never Work http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-snap-together-cell-pho… rel. [video] PhoneBLocks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDAw7vW7H0c tuning of active exhaust systems (kaaaars) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/car-tips/chamber-music-of-a-diff… [video] Siberian Ice Drummers http://www.snowaddiction.org/2013/11/the-coolest-music-in-the-world-listen-… Hüsker Dü - Hare Krsna http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3iXCEhHdUM Hüsker Dü - Eight Miles High http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBKyBlJ_JN8 Hüsker Dü - New Day Rising http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND3haD-c0lw --- ring as platform --- emfs-cellphone/linear hall-effect sensor, gyro-mapping bt as datalogger pole-mounted sensor+computer spatio-temp (freq) excavation/stratigraphy 2 axis or 3 axis, nfc/bt, archeo-GRID SENSOR RINGS - ZigBee comms/authentication - potential follow on box/device, monitor signal spacetime within map framework TSCM monitoring of area (radiation, signals, frequencies, etc) integrated in visual real-time data model LED carpet turns the floor into a screen (with video) http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029455.300-led-carpet-turns-the-flo… (note: consider possibility of tempoary maze or labyrinth, especially crypto or security applications, otherwise invisible) [image] ex. electromagnetic aesthetics as context http://lostvhs.com/2013/11/17/point-blank/ How Braille Was Invented http://gizmodo.com/how-braille-was-invented-1471756840 (invention, innovation, resistance, tragedy, victory) Dead Kennedys - California Über Alles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW8UlY8eXCk Kitsch Palace : Das Model https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J031_IrO24M This New Polymer Regenerates Large Parts of Itself, Like Lizards Do http://gizmodo.com/this-new-polymer-regenerates-large-parts-of-itself-lik-1… Researchers discover roots of superfluorescent bursts from quantum wells http://phys.org/news/2013-11-roots-superfluorescent-quantum-wells.html [quote] ...mysteries remained, especially in results obtained at low or zero magnetic fields. Kono said the team didn't understand at the time why the wavelength of the burst changed over its 100-picosecond span. Now they do. //... Kono said superfluorescence is a well-known many-body, or cooperative, phenomenon in atomic physics. Many-body theory gives physicists a way to understand how large numbers of interacting particles like molecules, atoms and electrons behave collectively. Superfluorescence is one example of how atoms under tight controls collaborate when triggered by an external source of energy. //... "The quantum well, as before, consisted of stacked blocks of an indium gallium arsenide compound separated by barriers of gallium arsenide. "It's a unique, solid-state environment where many-body effects completely dominate the dynamics of the system," Kono said. "When a strong magnetic field is applied, electrons and holes are fully quantized – that is, constrained in their range of motion—just like electrons in atoms," he said. "So the essential physics in the presence of a high magnetic field is quite similar to that in atomic gases. But as we decrease and eventually eliminate the magnetic field, we're entering a regime atomic physics cannot access, where continua of electronic states, or bands, exist." [unquote] {educational fair-use of copyright, 2013} ∎ ♕ ♞

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NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide
by coderman 05 Dec '13

05 Dec '13

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphon… """ NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show By Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, Wednesday, December 4, 12:18 PM The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable. The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractorEdward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool. (Video: How the NSA uses cellphone tracking to find and ‘develop’ targets) The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result. One senior collection manager, speaking on condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data is often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year. In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programsthat have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among individuals using them. (Graphic: How the NSA is tracking people right now) U.S. officials said the programs that collect and analyze location data are lawful and intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets. Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said “there is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States.” The NSA has no reason to suspect that the movements of the overwhelming majority of cellphone users would be relevant to national security. Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools — known collectively as CO-TRAVELER — allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect. Still, location data, especially when aggregated over time, is widely regarded among privacy advocates as uniquely sensitive. Sophisticated mathematical techniques enable NSA analysts to map cellphone owners’ relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths. Cellphones broadcast their locations even when they are not being used to place a call or send a text. (Video: Reporter Ashkan Soltani explains NSA collection of cellphone data) CO-TRAVELER and related tools require the methodical collection and storage of location data on what amounts to a planetary scale. The government is tracking people from afar into confidential business meetings or personal visits to medical facilities, hotel rooms, private homes and other traditionally protected spaces. “One of the key components of location data, and why it’s so sensitive, is that the laws of physics don’t let you keep it private,” said Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. People who value their privacy can encrypt their e-mails and disguise their online identities, but “the only way to hide your location is to disconnect from our modern communication system and live in a cave.” The NSA cannot know in advance which tiny fraction of 1 percent of the records it may need, so it collects and keeps as many as it can — 27 terabytes, by one account, or more than double the text content of the Library of Congress’s print collection. The location programs have brought in such volumes of information, according to a May 2012 internal NSA briefing, that they are “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” data. In the ensuing year and a half, the NSA has been transitioning to a processing system that provided it with greater capacity. The possibility that the intelligence community has been collecting location data, particularly of Americans, has long concerned privacy advocates and some lawmakers. Three Democratic senators — Ron Wyden (Ore.), Mark Udall (Colo.) and Barbara Mikulski (Md.) — have introduced an amendment to the 2014 defense spending bill that would require U.S. intelligence agencies to say whether they have ever collected or made plans to collect location data for “a large number of United States persons with no known connection to suspicious activity.” NSA Director Keith Alexander disclosed in Senate testimony in October that the NSA had run a pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to collect “samples” of U.S. cellphone location data. The data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes, and the project was discontinued because it had no “operational value,” he said. Alexander allowed that a broader collection of such data “may be something that is a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now.” The number of Americans whose locations are tracked as part of the NSA’s collection of data overseas is impossible to determine from the Snowden documents alone, and senior intelligence officials declined to offer an estimate. “It’s awkward for us to try to provide any specific numbers,” one intelligence official said in a telephone interview. An NSA spokeswoman who took part in the call cut in to say the agency has no way to calculate such a figure. An intelligence lawyer, speaking with his agency’s permission, said location data are obtained by methods “tuned to be looking outside the United States,” a formulation he repeated three times. When U.S. cellphone data are collected, he said, the data are not covered by the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures. According to top-secret briefing slides, the NSA pulls in location data around the world from 10 major “sigads,” or signals intelligence activity designators. A sigad known as STORMBREW, for example, relies on two unnamed corporate partners described only as ARTIFICE and WOLFPOINT. According to an NSA site inventory, the companies administer the NSA’s “physical systems,” or interception equipment, and “NSA asks nicely for tasking/updates.” STORMBREW collects data from 27 telephone links known as OPC/DPC pairs, which refer to originating and destination points and which typically transfer traffic from one provider’s internal network to another’s. That data include cell tower identifiers, which can be used to locate a phone’s location. The agency’s access to carriers’ networks appears to be vast. “Many shared databases, such as those used for roaming, are available in their complete form to any carrier who requires access to any part of it,” said Matt Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. “This ‘flat’ trust model means that a surprisingly large number of entities have access to data about customers that they never actually do business with, and an intelligence agency — hostile or friendly — can get ‘one stop shopping’ to an expansive range of subscriber data just by compromising a few carriers.” Some documents in the Snowden archive suggest that acquisition of U.S. location data is routine enough to be cited as an example in training materials. In an October 2012 white paper on analytic techniques, for example, the NSA’s counterterrorism analysis unit cites two U.S.-based carriers to illustrate the challenge of correlating the travels of phone users on different mobile networks. Asked about that, a U.S. intelligence official said the example was poorly chosen and did not represent the program’s foreign focus. The NSA’s capabilities to track location are staggering, based on the Snowden documents, and indicate that the agency is able to render most efforts at communications security effectively futile. Like encryption and anonymity tools online, which are used by dissidents, journalists and terrorists alike, security-minded behavior — using disposable cellphones and switching them on only long enough to make brief calls — marks a user for special scrutiny. CO-TRAVELER takes note, for example, when a new telephone connects to a cell tower soon after another nearby device is used for the last time. Side-by-side security efforts — when nearby devices power off and on together over time — “assist in determining whether co-travelers are associated … through behaviorally relevant relationships,” according to the 24-page white paper, which was developed by the NSA in partnership with the National Geospatial Agency, the Australian Signals Directorate and private contractors. A central feature of each of these tools is that they do not rely on knowing a particular target in advance, or even suspecting one. They operate on the full universe of data in the NSA’s FASCIA repository, which stores trillions of metadata records, of which a large but unknown fraction include locations. The most basic analytic tools map the date, time, and location of cellphones to look for patterns or significant moments of overlap. Other tools compute speed and trajectory for large numbers of mobile devices, overlaying the electronic data on transportation maps to compute the likely travel time and determine which devices might have intersected. To solve the problem of undetectable surveillance against CIA officers stationed overseas, one contractor designed an analytic model that would carefully record the case officer’s path and look for other mobile devices in steady proximity. “Results have not been validated by operational analysts,” the report said. Julie Tate contributed to this report. Soltani is an independent security researcher and consultant. """

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Snowden Civil War
by John Young 05 Dec '13

05 Dec '13

Snowden Civil War: http://cryptome.org/2013/12/snowden-civil-war.htm

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Fwd: [cryptography] A new approach to steganography
by coderman 03 Dec '13

03 Dec '13

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Bram Cohen <bram(a)bittorrent.com> Date: Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 11:27 AM Subject: [cryptography] A new approach to steganography I came up with a new approach to steganography. There's an implementation and writeup of it here - https://github.com/bramcohen/DissidentX

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Willis Ware Dies
by John Young 03 Dec '13

03 Dec '13

Willis Ware dies, early computer engineer: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/technology/willis-ware-who-helped-build-b… Seminal computer security paper 1979: http://cryptome.org/sccs.htm

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trends in cybersecurity
by dan＠geer.org 03 Dec '13

03 Dec '13

Given last month as keynote to the National Reconnaissance Office's planning conference. Trends in Cyber Security http://geer.tinho.net/geer.nro.6xi13.txt Respectfully, --dan

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ntru-crypto - Open Source NTRU Public Key Cryptography Algorithm and Reference Code
by coderman 03 Dec '13

03 Dec '13

https://github.com/NTRUOpenSourceProject/ntru-crypto """ Security Innovation, Inc., the owner of the NTRU public key cryptography system, made the intellectual property and a sample implementation available under the Gnu Public License (GPL) in 2013 with the goal of enabling more widespread adoption of this superior cryptographic technology. The system is also available for commercial use under the terms of the Security Innovation Commercial License. NTRU represents a significant improvement in the Public Key cryptography world—it’s faster, stronger and smaller than virtually any other system in use and it’s quantum computer resistant, making it the best choice for current projects with lifetimes that extend into the post quantum computer age.... NTRU is a lattice-based public key cryptosystem from Security Innovation and the leading alternative to RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) due to its higher performance and resistance to attacks from quantum computers. NTRU was developed in 1996 as a visionary solution to cyber security challenges for the twenty-first century. NTRU is based on a mathematical problem called the “Approximate close lattice vector problem” and comprises three algorithms: NTRUEncrypt, NTRUSign, and PASSSign. It has been reviewed and published in scholarly journals and presented at Crypto, Eurocrypt, and RSA, and has been adopted in IEEE and X9 standards Because it is based on different math from RSA and ECC, the NTRU algorithm has different cryptographic properties. At comparable cryptographic strength, NTRU performs costly private key operations much faster than RSA or ECC. In addition, NTRU's comparative performance increases with the level of security required. As key sizes increase by a factor of n, RSA's operations/second decrease by about n3 whereas NTRU's decrease at n2. """

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Re: bitcoin as a global medium of exchange (was Re: Interesting take on Sanjuro's Assassination Market)
by Bill Stewart 03 Dec '13

03 Dec '13

At 05:43 PM 11/25/2013, David Vorick wrote: >Bitcoin has a lot of problems. >Andy, the problem isn't the denomination, the problem is that >Satioshi has 5% of all the currency, and the Winklevoss twins have >another 0.5%. If bitcoin becomes worth 100 trillion dollars, they've >got a solid 500 billion for being nobody and doing nothing. That's a >problem to me. Satoshi gave us the technology and got people to start using it. If he gets fabulously wealthy by owning 5% of it, I'm not jealous (well, ok, a bit jealous, but I'm not going to contend that he shouldn't have it just because of jealously.) The Winklevossen are just speculators; I don't particularly like using a currency whose value is mostly from speculation, but experimentation is a critical part of rolling out something like a new type of currency, so whatever. At least they pumped some cash into the system early on. And that guy in Norway who was an early experimenter, then kind of forgot about his bitcoins until he suddenly noticed they were worth $800K? Cool, good for him! It wouldn't be surprising if the first people to do GPU-based mining also got a large pile of bitcoins compared to the CPU-based miners. >I'm working on one right now. It's not built but the idea is to use >proof-of-contribution instead of proof-of-work, where contribution >is disk storage contributed to a distributed network. I think "proof of useful contribution" is a much better thing than "proof of wasted electricity"; good luck getting it off the ground. I'd recommend reading all of Zooko's Tahoe-LAFS work for getting some ideas about privacy and reliability issues, both of which are harder than they look. The other catch is that storage costs do keep decreasing, and storage in a cloud is always a lot slower than local storage, so you'll have to think hard about business models. One of the cool things Bitcoin did was created a way to have the proof-of-work turn into currency without needing a banker in the middle; that means that users and miners don't have to worry (much) about the creator absconding with the value or being shut down, and there's built-in protection against hyperinflation, unlike some of the dotcom silly currencies like Beenz and Flooz that appeared and vanished along with the dogfood-on-line dotcoms. It's been interesting to watch Bitcoin's value surviving after the loss of the Silk Road site (which got around the "Nothing To Buy With It" hurdle that helped kill the original Chaumian Digicash.)

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