November 2014 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Fwd: [Cryptography] Why mobile and consumer ISPs shouldn't censor encryption or the net
by grarpamp 19 Nov '14

19 Nov '14

Thanks John, forwarding... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John Gilmore <gnu(a)toad.com> Date: Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 8:31 PM Subject: [Cryptography] Why mobile and consumer ISPs shouldn't censor encryption or the net To: Tom Ritter <tom(a)ritter.vg> Cc: John Levine <johnl(a)iecc.com>, cryptography <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com>, jays(a)panix.com > ...this was port 25 on Cricket > Wireless, a prepaid mobile subsidiary of AT&T, i.e., a consumer > network without static IP addresses or mail servers. > > http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/condemnation-mounts-against-isp-… > > Blocking port 25 on consumer networks to prevent outgoing spam, with > real mail submitted on port 587 with authentication, has been an ISP > best practice for over a decade. I want to explore two of the assumptions in the above, that seem to be decisive for some people in the debate: "mobile" and "consumer". The theory seems to be that in a "mobile" Internet provider (that is, one run by a cellphone company), more censorship is justifiable. And that in a "consumer" Internet provider, like one that sells residential DSL or cable service, more censorship is justifiable. In this theory, an uncensored Internet should only be available to end user nodes that are servers and backbone ISPs, because they can be trusted to handle it, and they have the bandwidth to deal with the traffic. Let's talk about "consumer" first. The Internet is a peer-to-peer network. That has always been its strength, and one of the big things that distinguished it from the "master/slave" networks that preceded it like IBM's RJE, SNA, public networks like Telenet and Tymnet, and early computer communication services like MCI Mail, CompuServe and The Source. The Internet started with every peer able to talk to every other peer, with no nodes relegated to mere "clients" or "consumers". TCP is designed to make a working connection even if both nodes simultaneously and spontaneously reach out to each other, as opposed to having a "server" side lying in wait and a "client" side initiating connections. New applications and protocols such as multicast, instant messaging, VoIP, video conferencing, distributed source code control systems like git, Mobile IP, BitTorrent, Kademlia, federated social networking, and many others, including the Web which was invented dozens of years after the Internet, depend on this peer-to-peer behavior. When address exhaustion and NAT threatened peer-to-peer since the 1990s, the network evolved to continue offering peer-to-peer support, including IPv6 as the big fix, plus UPNP, NAT Traversal, dynamic DNS, supernodes, and other NAT circumvention technologies. In a peer-to-peer network it doesn't work to designate some portions of the network as "consumers" or "clients" who don't get full access, and other portions of the network as "providers" or "servers" who do get full access. Servers can be placed anywhere in the network, and frequently are placed on "consumer" networks. For example, in the homes of engineers or entrepreneurs, in consumer Network Attached Storage boxes, in ethernet video cameras, and even in flying $500 quadcopters. Consumers (e.g. people) should have all the same rights on the network as providers (e.g. websites). Consumer devices (e.g. tablets) should have all the same rights on the network as provider devices (e.g. data center servers). A device's location on the network is not and should not be relevant. Many of the most transformative innovations have come from individual consumers like Bram Cohen or Linus Torvalds who created new protocols that run at the edge of the network (BitTorrent and git). Now let's talk about "mobile". The theory is that mobile networks somehow should get more authority to censor or block traffic, because they have less total bandwidth available, or because their endnodes are "only" cellphones, or for reasons like those. Those arguments are largely specious, too. First, cellphones have evolved into full blown pocket computers, and there are more of them in the world than there are desktop computers. If the broad social move from desktops to pocket computers means that their billions of users get fewer rights and capabilities than they had in the previous generation, there's something rotten at the heart of that theory. EFF was founded more than 20 years ago to counter exactly this kind of creeping removal of well accepted civil rights via technological change. Cellphone users should have all the same rights against censorship and rights to encrypt their transmissions, as desktop computer users and as server operators. Software that runs as a mobile "app" should have the same rights on the network as software that runs as a Linux desktop "package". And by the time when our cellphones shrink to run in our wristwatch, our eyeglasses, or in our bloodstreams, our always-on network should not deprive us of rights that we had back in the day when we had to unpack our computer from a bulky suitcase. Second, it is easy for "mobile" networks to provide connectivity to full blown desktop computers or servers. USB mobile dongles are readily available and cheap. Mobile-based WiFi hotspots are readily available and cheap. The endnodes that connect to such hotspots, or use those dongles, should get no worse censorship and encryption policies than when they connect to a hardwired WiFi hotspot or to an Ethernet cable. Third, telephone companies are now actively claiming that they cannot affordably provide wired communications services, so they are asking regulators to be able to withdraw wired services and offering ONLY "mobile" networks to their customers in entire regions. This got the most press coverage after East Coast floods destroyed wired infrastructure, but it is a covert nationwide strategy and every day a telco petitions a government somewhere to eliminate the telco's core requirement to provide wired service to every customer who wants it. So not only do "mobile" users in those regions become second-class customers, but EVERY user in those regions becomes a second class customer. If every user gets a more-censored Internet in this transition, we're back to the dystopia of technological evolution and telco manipulation destroying the valuable and important civil rights that we all once had. Fourth, let's examine the "low bandwidth" theory. In many places on the earth, 3G and 4G and 5G mobile bandwidth exceeds the readily available bandwidth from wired Internet providers. DSL lines only reach tens of thousands of feet from a central office, relegating rural home users to dialup modems or satellite or other wireless feeds. Yet mobile cellular networks in rural areas often cover large geographical areas that hold few subscribers. This means that each subscriber gets a correspondingly large share of the total available bandwidth of the cell site, often making mobile cellular the highest available end user bandwith network. Fifth, even where wired networks offer higher bandwidth than mobile, the absolute bandwidth offered on mobile networks today vastly exceeds the bandwidth that was available just a short time ago. The original ARPAnet's backbones were 56 kilobit/sec leased lines, as were the original high speed ISDN Internet connections offered in the 1990s. When the NSFnet took over from the ARPAnet, it ran on big 1500 kilobit (1.5 Megabit, T1) backbones. Almost every server in the mid-1990s had no better connection to the Internet. The NSFnet was later upgraded to a T3 (45 megabits) backbone, roughly the downstream speed of today's consumer cable modem -- but that was enough for the entire North American continent. Most initial Internet users were on 14.4 kilobit dialup modems, eventually rising to 56 kilobit dialup. When the telco monopolies were forced to allow entrepreneurs to change the signalling on the last-mile wire to your telco central office, ADSL lines that ran a whole megabit or more (in one direction) became cheaply available to consumers and ordinary businesses. So getting back to the "mobile" theory, if your server is perfectly happy on a 1.5 megabit connection, why should you should get your access censored, your encryption blocked, and your application choices limited, depending whether your connection is a T1 line or a "mobile" dongle? Sixth, after natural or man-made disasters, wired connectivity is often destroyed, flakey or unavailable. Mobile networks are much quicker to repair after a flood, war, or earthquake, and may not go down at all. For the resilience of our infrastructure, which includes Internet services and not just backbone connectivity, end users should be able to switch both their "clients" and their "servers" onto whatever networks are functioning, at any time. A company that runs its own mail server should not have mail delivery fail, or refuse encryption, because it was wise enough to provision itself with backup connectivity via a mobile network. If after a tornado you put your web server on port 80 on a mobile network while running the server on battery backup, the cellphone company should not censor it. In disasters the network has to be flexible, not rigid and coercive. All these theories about why it's OK to censor Internet access, block certain services based on the whim of the ISP, and prevent end users from encrypting their traffic, come at their root from the monopoly nature of the underlying access media. In the heyday of the Internet, before these monopolies learned how to manipulate the regulators to prevent it, the monopolies were prohibited by law from telling you what phone numbers you could call, what ISP you could dial into, what protocols you could run over that modem, or who in the rest of the world you could communicate with. The telco couldn't stop you from calling the Internet -- much as they dearly would have loved to -- because they were a common carrier. And if your ISP developed crazy ideas about censorship, you could just dial into another ISP who had policies that suited you -- or start your own ISP and attract customers who like having full rights and freedoms. I did exactly that in the 1990s, when the available ISPs told me that I as a "consumer" couldn't split down and share my net connection with anybody else. The heart of today's "network neutrality" issue is that by falsely conflating the underlying broadband access media with "the Internet", and then deciding to leave both free of regulation, the regulators have abandoned that prohibition on discrimination. The FCC now allows the regulated monopolists to decide who you can talk to and what you can say to them. The fix is not to regulate the Internet. The fix is to regulate the underlying broadband access media -- the phone wiring, cable wiring, fibers to your house or neighborhood, and wireless infrastructure -- while preventing the infrastructure companies from forcing you to choose a particular "Internet" provider over that access medium. Thus over your cable modem you could buy Internet access from any of a dozen providers; over your cellular phone you could buy Internet access from the same dozen. The signals would be carried over a different medium, but neither the cable company nor the cellphone company could dictate which ISP you must use or on what terms you must access the Internet. We see this problem again and again in different corners of different issues, including this "anti-spammers versus consumer privacy" issue, but it's really the same issue. The access providers don't want to be common carriers who are obliged to carry all traffic for everyone -- because there's more money in getting a government granted monopoly and then being able to selectively sell access to that region, piecemeal, to the highest bidders. Like Comcast deciding that it won't take Netflix's traffic unless Netflix pays extra. Like T-Mobile deciding that you can't access http://mpp.org from your phone (try it) because it publishes about the politics of drugs, and "drugs are bad". And like spam-weary ISPs deciding that you can't encrypt your email transmissions because it would make their particular choice of ineffective antispam measures even more ineffective. John Gilmore _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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Re: [Cryptography] FW: IAB Statement on Internet Confidentiality
by grarpamp 19 Nov '14

19 Nov '14

>>> IAB Statement on Internet Confidentiality >>> Encryption should be authenticated where possible, but even protocols >>> providing confidentiality without authentication are useful in the >>> face of pervasive surveillance as described in RFC 7258. >>> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7258 >> Alex: >> On a more serious note, the IAB statement below opens up a whole >> can of worms. You can't [...] >> [... cants, buts, excuses, grandmas, future protocols and policy, >> stake making and preserving, wimps, legal, etc... on and on... >> ad nauseum] > Ian / Jay: > Wot? I encrypt all the time without dealing with legal issues. > ... > No more free lunches, no more rolling over and playing doggy. > ... > No, we need not negotiate with ourselves before building and deploying stuff. > https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ Indeed. Many seem to be missing the hidden extension / meaning of whitewashed quasi-political statements like those of the IAB that are now coming from various entities, and it's a point that needs made directly, at least regarding one aspect of things... It's not anymore about 'should encrypt by default'... continuing to give yourselves the lazy fallback excuse of oppurtunistic crypto and waiting for someone else to do it. It's not anymore about asking your masters for permission to do what is not regulated today, or giving them seats and chance to muddle / dictate your protocols before they're developed / deployed. It's about 'must encrypt' and turning plaintext completely off NOW! It's about telling all the lazy oppurtunistic fiber tapping passive surveillors, (who are today breaking fundamental inalienable human rights not just regulations, and without asking first)... to FUCK OFF! This is not a time to play nice and compromise... it's war, one which they started against you. So deploy your crypto now, far and wide, and faster than the enemy can respond. Mass internet entrenchment has a winning history against subsequent fiat. We won the first crypto war, now it's time to win the second one. Flip the crypto switch, from off to on. Don't ask, don't tell, just do it. Mail providers and web services... turn plaintext off! Banks, schools, utilities, blogs, socialnets, OS distributions, user applications... the public facing, used by the public, whole lot of you... everyone, everywhere... just turn plaintext off! All plaintext transports over the internet... OFF! Even decentralized P2P applications such as chat / filesharing apps that wish no model using CA certs, can still enforce crypto by skipping cert checking under self-signed certs or using [EC]DHE style crypto session negotiation. There's no lack of capability or support among all these internet facing services and apps used by the general public anymore. Every OS / library can deal with TLS 1.0+ or key negotiation for that. And you don't need some grand crypto scheme that you all love to pontificate in endless circles about right now either. Just turn the damn plaintext OFF and tell everyone to go read the FAQ and update their end if they can't connect. Then worry about your pie in the sky later. It doesn't have to be perfect, all you need to do is shift the game from taking cheap passive global wire surveillance up the ass, to requiring more expensive targeted active attacks. Simply turning off the plaintext does that, it's a huge win! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#Applications_and_ado… And while you're at it, set up a nonprofit CA foundation to issue free certs and get it added to the Mozilla and MS cert stores specifically for the purpose of accomplishing 'plaintext off'. CA's are useless profiteers who couldn't authenticate their own ass as customers anyways, and cert stores are uselessly bloated with both them and enemy entities... so just give the damn certs away to anyone who can publish a proof of ownership flag / TLS cert on the forward reference to their own services... simply to quiet self-signed warnings. Nice to see something like this just dropped as I write: https://letsencrypt.org/ Pick July 4 2015 as the day to disable plaintext, since by then everything worth anything will support TLS 1.2 / good negotiation parameters, and it's a fitting meme. And if you don't like that flag, hoist another one... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Talk_Like_a_Pirate_Day Now quit reading, making excuses and waiting... the enemy will just stomp all over your flag. Go get started on your code, updates and crypto configs... you've got a flag day to make.

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Re: [Cryptography] FW: IAB Statement on Internet Confidentiality
by grarpamp 19 Nov '14

19 Nov '14

On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 2:21 PM, Tom Mitchell <mitch(a)niftyegg.com> wrote: >> On a more serious note, the IAB statement below opens up a whole can of >> worms. >> >> 1. The vast bulk of the Internet protocols now and in the future already >> exist. How are we going to retrofit them or somehow deal with them? New >> secure protocols will be a tiny percentage of the installed base of insecure >> protocols. > > If the goal is too large nothing will happen. > > Pick one service (like mail) and design a protocol that > can be used between hosts. > > <simple-mind> > Mail is a good example because it is store and forward. > At a big service like Yahoo or Google there are many sites > and internal store and forward links could use the new protocol. > > At first key management might keep the new connections inside > a service. Later a pair like Yahoo and Google could exchange > keys then others. > ... Blah blah blah same old tired centralized intermediary smtp email services, lack of privacy/anonymity, and application of control/censorship. If the goal is not dreamily large enough and totally revolutionary, nothing will happen but regurgitated refits instead of replacements. Try setting the goal of P2P messaging over an encrypted anonymous P2P overlay network instead. Do you believe pigs can fly? I do. > All that is needed is a specific service and specific firewall rules that > current Cisco > and the like hardware can enforce and audit. More central censorship and control. Where's my DNA based onramp access and Clipper card again... must have left it in the tax machine.

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Doing HTTPS everywhere in the .gov space
by Eric Mill 19 Nov '14

19 Nov '14

Hey, I wrote a piece today for my organization, 18F, about our HTTPS-everywhere policy for the .gov websites we build inside the US government: https://18f.gsa.gov/2014/11/13/why-we-use-https-in-every-gov-website-we-mak… I wanted to give this list some extra context, since I understand the US government is a big, complicated, freighted topic. Below is my *personal* attempt to describe my workplace and is not anything close to an official description or the voice of the government. 18F[1] is a team of ~70 people working as full time employees inside the US federal government. (The name comes from the street intersection -- 18th St & F St -- that its HQ is at in DC.) 18F as a unit was created around a year ago to be a competent, top class in-house technology team for the US federal government. A driving idea here is that the government shouldn't need to outsource its *entire* technical brain to contractors, and that government services can be simple and even beautiful. If you've noticed what's happened over the last few years in the UK at https://www.gov.uk by the Government Digital Service[2], 18F takes a lot of inspiration from them. 18F is housed inside the General Services Administration, an independent federal agency[3] that does as many different things as its name implies, from running all the buildings to housing the nation's data catalog at Data.gov. It's an "independent" federal agency in that it's not subject to the same level of direct executive and White House control that cabinet agencies are. It's the same kind of "independent" that lets the FCC potentially disagree with the President on net neutrality, for example. The team has people all over the country (it has a big SF office, for example), many of which have either never been in government before, or who came in after doing the Presidential Innovation Fellows[4] program. I joined 18F after working for 5 years on open data apps, infrastructure, and policy at the Sunlight Foundation[5], a non-profit in DC that pushes for open government. I had also done a fair amount of work around privacy, HTTPS, and ongoing judicial activity around surveillance. I get to continue doing all of that work in my personal capacity. I say this just to try to communicate that the 18F team has some very sincere people trying to make the US government work better for people all over the world, and to do right by technology in the process. We have substantial support and autonomy to make that happen. When it comes to HTTPS, the .gov surface area is absolutely enormous, and moving it helps move the whole Internet forward. Bringing the government in line with the rest of the web/security community (and being loud about it) is one of my big priorities at 18F, and so I wanted to share this here with you all. -- Eric [1] https://18f.gsa.gov/ [2] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_United_States_gov… [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Innovation_Fellows [5] https://sunlightfoundation.com/ -- konklone.com | @konklone <https://twitter.com/konklone>

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Re: WhisperSystems + WhatsApp
by Subrosa.io 19 Nov '14

19 Nov '14

4. How is the key stored on the user's device? Is it backed up by Android's Sync to Google's servers, or backed up by iCloud to Apple's servers? 5. Even if there is no backdoor right now, an automatic update can easily sneak in a "key escrow". WhatsApp's "end to end encryption" is voodoo. You cannot expect security from closed source code, certainly not automatically updating closed source code. ---- On Wed, 19 Nov 2014 09:46:50 +0100 wrote ---- >Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 09:46:50 +0100 >From: Marco Pozzato <mpodroid(a)gmail.com> >To: Eric Mill <eric(a)konklone.com> >Cc: cypherpunks <cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org> >Subject: Re: WhisperSystems + WhatsApp >Message-ID: > <CAHzaDb=TdsPZDXdOOF1+D_gBu=JxtArJ5+SE+tghMAK-+6k4mQ(a)mail.gmail.com> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > >WhisperSystems designed good protocols, but I am afraid that Moxie was too >anxious to release this info and hit ENTER key too early :-) > >I am quite skeptical about the actual value from the security point of this >press release. > >WhisperSystems reports about end-to-end encryption, that means, I encrypt >my message with an encryption key that only you or both of us know. > > 1. How can we negotiate that key? Users are not involved, but everything > happens automatically, under the hood, between two whatsapp clients. How? > they negotiate the encryption keys through whatsapp servers: is it my own > key or the NSA one? are they leaking the key to Facebook? > 2. We do need to authenticate the identity, eg: via QR code, > fingerprint, spell it loudly on the phone, etc.., which reduces usability, > especially for mass market. > 3. Last but not least: even if we authenticated identities and keys, how > can we be sure that whatsapp client is really using the authenticated keys > and not the NSA keys, maybe only on a white list of suspected mobile phone > numbers? above all, they provide a proprietary and closed source app > >The security model is faulted, at the root level: > > - If I subscribe to a security service - such as messaging -, the > service provider is untrusted by default. I need total transparency -> > every single components in the architecture should be auditable and open > source > - If mobile app is closed source, I can trust only the infrastructure > that should be under my full control, to be sure that no information leak > outside infrastructure is ever possible. > > >My 2 cents > >Marco

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Whatsapp open source
by Marco Pozzato 19 Nov '14

19 Nov '14

I just double checked: - twitter: moxie wrote "it's the same code" - github: GPL3 license That means that Whatsapp is going to open source their app: this is awesome! Marco

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"... these modern weapons technologies, uncontrollably disseminated, could have more than academic effect"
by coderman 17 Nov '14

17 Nov '14

https://medium.com/stanford-select/keeping-secrets-84a7697bf89f "Keeping Secrets" Four decades ago, university researchers figured out the key to computer privacy, sparking a battle with the National Security Agency that continues today. BY HENRY CORRIGAN-GIBBS WHAT IF your research could help solve a looming national problem, but government officials thought publishing it would be tantamount to treason? A Stanford professor and his graduate students found themselves in that situation 37 years ago, when their visionary work on computer privacy issues ran afoul of the National Security Agency. At the time, knowledge of how to encrypt and decrypt information was the domain of government; the NSA feared that making the secrets of cryptography public would severely hamper intelligence operations. But as the researchers saw it, society’s growing dependence on computers meant that the private sector would also need effective measures to safeguard information. Both sides’ concerns proved prescient; their conflict foreshadowed what would become a universal tug-of-war between privacy-conscious technologists and security-conscious government officials. A Controversial Symposium The International Symposium on Information Theory is not known for its racy content or politically charged presentations, but the session at Cornell University on October 10, 1977, was a special case. In addition to talks with titles like “Distribution-Free Inequalities for the Deleted and Holdout Error Estimates,” the conference featured the work of a group from Stanford that had drawn the ire of the National Security Agency and the attention of the national press. The researchers in question were Martin Hellman, then an associate professor of electrical engineering, and his students Steve Pohlig, MS ’75, PhD ’78, and Ralph Merkle, PhD ’79. A year earlier, Hellman had published “New Directions in Cryptography” with his student Whitfield Diffie, Gr. ’78. The paper introduced the principles that now form the basis for all modern cryptography, and its publication rightfully caused a stir among electrical engineers and computer scientists. As Hellman recalled in a 2004 oral history, the nonmilitary community’s reaction to the paper was “ecstatic.” In contrast, the “NSA was apoplectic.” The fact that Hellman and his students were challenging the U.S. government’s longstanding domestic monopoly on cryptography deeply annoyed many in the intelligence community. The NSA acknowledged that Diffie and Hellman had come up with their ideas without access to classified materials. Even so, in the words of an internal NSA history declassified in 2009 and now held in the Stanford Archives, “NSA regarded the [Diffie-Hellman] technique as classified. Now it was out in the open.” The tension between Hellman and the NSA only worsened in the months leading up to the 1977 symposium. In July, someone named J. A. Meyer sent a shrill letter to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which had published Hellman’s papers and was holding the conference. It began: I have noticed in the past months that various IEEE Groups have been publishing and exporting technical articles on encryption and cryptology — a technical field which is covered by Federal Regulations, viz: ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations, 22 CFR 121–128). Meyer’s letter asserted that the IEEE and the authors of the relevant papers might be subject to prosecution under federal laws prohibiting arms trafficking, communication of atomic secrets and disclosure of classified information. Without naming Hellman or his co-authors, Meyer specified the issues of IEEE’s Transactions on Information Theory journal and Computer magazine in which Hellman’s articles appeared. Meyer concluded ominously that “these modern weapons technologies, uncontrollably disseminated, could have more than academic effect.” Meyer’s letter alarmed many in the academic community and drew coverage by Science and the New York Times for two main reasons. First, the letter suggested that merely publishing a scientific paper on cryptography would be the legal equivalent of exporting nuclear weapons to a foreign country. If Meyer’s interpretation of the law was correct, it seemed to place severe restrictions on researchers’ freedom to publish. Second, Deborah Shapley and Gina Kolata of Science magazine discovered that Meyer was an NSA employee. As soon as Hellman received a copy of the letter, he recognized that continuing to publish might put him and his students in legal jeopardy, so he sought advice from Stanford University counsel John Schwartz. In his memo to Schwartz, Hellman made a lucid case for the value of public-domain cryptography research. Astutely, Hellman first acknowledged that the U.S. government’s tight control over cryptographic techniques proved enormously useful in World War II: Allied forces used confidential cryptographic discoveries to improve their own encryption systems while denying those same cryptographic benefits to Axis powers. Even so, Hellman argued that circumstances had changed. [T]here is a commercial need today that did not exist in the 1940’s. The growing use of automated information processing equipment poses a real economic and privacy threat. Although it is a remote possibility, the danger of initially inadvertent police state type surveillance through computerization must be considered. From that point of view, inadequate commercial cryptography (which our publications are trying to avoid) poses an internal national security threat. In the memo, Hellman described how his earlier attempts to prevent “stepping on [the] toes” of the NSA failed when the agency’s staffers would not even disclose which areas of cryptography research Hellman should avoid. Responding to Hellman a few days later, Schwartz opined that publishing cryptography research would not in itself violate federal law. His findings had a strong legal basis: Two regulations governed classified information in the United States at the time — an executive order and the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 — and neither seemed to prevent the publication of unclassified research on cryptography. SHARING THE STEALTH: Merkle, Hellman and Diffie ended government’s monopoly on cryptography. (Photo by Chuck Painter/Stanford News Service) There was only one other likely legal tool that the federal government could use to prevent the Stanford group from disseminating their work: the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, which regulated the export of military equipment. Under a generous interpretation of the law, giving a public presentation on cryptographic algorithms could constitute “export” of arms. It was not clear, however, that a prosecution under this act would stand up to a legal challenge on First Amendment grounds. Evaluating these laws together, Schwartz concluded that Hellman and his students could legally continue to publish. At the same time, Schwartz noted wryly, “at least one contrary view [of the law] exists” — that of Joseph A. Meyer. Hellman later recalled Schwartz’s less-than-comforting informal advice: “If you are prosecuted, Stanford will defend you. But if you’re found guilty, we can’t pay your fine and we can’t go to jail for you.” The Cornell symposium was to begin three days after Schwartz offered his legal opinion; Hellman, Merkle and Pohlig had to quickly decide whether to proceed with their presentations in spite of the threat of prosecution, fines and jail time. Graduate students typically present their own research at academic conferences, but according to Hellman, Schwartz recommended against it in this case. Since the students were not employees of Stanford, it might be more difficult for the university to justify paying their legal bills. Schwartz also reasoned that dealing with a lengthy court case would be harder for a young PhD student than for a tenured faculty member. Hellman left the decision up to the students. According to Hellman, Merkle and Pohlig at first said, “We need to give the papers, the hell with this.” After speaking with their families, though, the students agreed to let Hellman present on their behalf. In the end, the symposium took place without incident. Merkle and Pohlig stood on stage while Hellman gave the presentation. The fact that the conference went ahead as planned, Science observed, “left little doubt that the work [in cryptography] has been widely circulated.” That a group of nongovernmental researchers could publicly discuss cutting-edge cryptographic algorithms signaled the end of the U.S. government’s domestic control of information on cryptography. The View from Fort Meade Vice Adm. Bobby Ray Inman took over as director of the NSA in the summer of 1977. Inman was an experienced naval intelligence officer with allies in both political parties. If his qualifications for the job were good, his timing was not. He had barely warmed his desk chair when he was thrust into the center of what he recently described as “a huge media uproar” over the J. A. Meyer letter — written the very first day of Inman’s tenure. Although Inman was concerned about the impact that publication of these new cryptographic techniques would have on the NSA’s foreign eavesdropping capabilities, he was also puzzled. As he explained, the primary consumers of cryptographic equipment in the 1970s were governments. Apart from that, “the only other people early on . . . who were buying encryption to use were the drug dealers.” Since the NSA already had “incredibly able people working on building the systems to be used by the U.S. government” and the NSA had no interest in protecting the communications of drug dealers, Inman wanted to find out why these young researchers were so focused on cryptography. In the tradition of intelligence professionals, Inman set out to gather some information for himself. He went to California to meet with faculty members and industry leaders at Berkeley, Stanford and elsewhere. Inman quickly discovered that the researchers at Stanford were designing cryptographic systems to solve an emerging problem that was not yet on the NSA’s radar: securing the growing number of commercial computer systems, which were subject to attack or compromise. The researchers’ position, Inman said, was that “there’s a whole new world emerging out there where there’s going to need to be cryptography, and it’s not going to be provided by the government.” Martin Hellman recently recounted their conversation in similar terms: “I was working on cryptography from an unclassified point of view because I could see — even in the mid-’70s — the growing marriage of computers and communication and the need therefore for unclassified knowledge of cryptography.” Inman realized that the California academics saw strong public cryptographic systems as a crucial piece of a functioning technological environment. Still, Inman was not excited about the prospect of high-grade encryption systems being available for purchase, especially abroad. “We were worried that foreign countries would pick up and use cryptography that would make it exceedingly hard to decrypt and read their traffic.” The level of public excitement surrounding the recent cryptography work made growth in the field of unclassified cryptography almost inevitable. In August 1977, Scientific American had published a description of the new RSA cryptosystem devised by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman of MIT. According to Steven Levy’s 2001 book Crypto, the researchers offered a copy of a technical report describing the scheme to anyone who would send a self-addressed stamped envelope to MIT. The authors received 7,000 requests. To reckon with the growing threat of unclassified cryptography, Inman convened an internal NSA panel for advice. As recounted in the declassified NSA history, the panel gave Inman three stark choices for how to control the publication of cryptography research: (a) Do nothing (b) Seek new legislation to impose additional government controls (c) Try non-legislative means such as voluntary commercial and academic compliance. The panel concluded that the damage was already so serious that something needed to be done. NSA documents and Hellman’s recollection both suggest that Inman first tried to get a law drafted to restrict cryptographic research, along the lines of the Atomic Energy Act. For political reasons, the NSA history says, Inman’s proposed bill was “dead on arrival.” “Congress [wanted to] unshackle U.S. commerce from any sort of Pentagon-imposed restriction on trade,” the history ruefully recounts, and the Carter administration “wanted to loosen Pentagon control of anything, especially anything that might affect individual rights and academic freedom.” Even if Inman could get a bill through Congress, Hellman said, the First Amendment would make it difficult to prevent researchers from speaking publicly about their work. If they didn’t publish their papers, “they’ll give 100 talks before they submit it for publication.” As a sort of last-ditch effort at compromise, Inman organized a voluntary system of prepublication review for cryptography research papers. A number of other scientific journals have attempted a similar system in recent years. “That’s really the best anyone has been able to come up with,” said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, an expert on government secrecy. The review process was used for a decade, but Inman recalled that it eventually “fell apart” because of “the explosion of . . . uses” for cryptography. As the world underwent a digital revolution, there was an accompanying “revolution in cryptography,” just as Diffie and Hellman had predicted in 1976. Aftermath It is tempting to view the outcome of the conflict between the Stanford researchers and the NSA as an unequivocal victory for freedom of speech and the beginning of the democratization of the tools of cryptography. There is a grain of truth in this characterization, but it misses the larger effect the run-in had on the academic cryptography community and on the NSA. Hellman and other academic researchers realized they could win the debate, as long as it took place in public. Newspapers and scientific journals found it much easier to sympathize with a group of quirky and passionate academics than with a shadowy and stern-faced intelligence agency. The issue of First Amendment rights, Hellman recalled in 2004, also gave the press and the researchers a common cause. “With the freedom of publication issue, the press was all on our side. There were editorials in the New York Times and a number of other publications. Science, I remember, had covered our work and was very helpful.” >From the other side, NSA officials realized they would have a difficult time getting public support to suppress publication of what they considered dangerous research results. They turned instead to two aspects of nongovernmental cryptography over which they had near-total control: research funding and national standards. As of 2012, the federal government provided 60 percent of U.S. academic research and development funding. By choosing which projects to fund, grant-giving government agencies influence what research takes place. Even before the 1977 Symposium on Information Theory, the NSA reviewed National Science Foundation grant applications that might be relevant to signals intelligence or communications security. The purported reason for these reviews was for the NSA to advise the NSF on the proposals’ “technical merits,” but the agency appeared to use this process to exercise control over nongovernmental cryptography research. For instance, the NSA reviewed and approved an NSF grant application from Ron Rivest. Later, Rivest used the funds to develop the enormously influential RSA cryptosystem, which secures most encrypted Internet traffic today. An internal NSA history suggests that the agency would have tried to derail Rivest’s grant application if the reviewers had understood what Rivest would do with the money. The NSA missed this opportunity, the history complains, because the wording of Rivest’s proposal “was so general that the Agency did not spot the threat” posed by the project. In 1979, Leonard Adleman (another member of the RSA triumvirate) applied to the NSF for funding and had his application forwarded to the NSA. According to Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau’s 2007 book, Privacy on the Line, the NSA offered to fund the research in lieu of the NSF. Fearing that his work would end up classified, Adleman protested and eventually received an NSF grant. Even though the NSF appears to have maintained some level of independence from NSA influence, the agency likely has had greater control over other federal funding sources. In particular, the Department of Defense funds research through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office and other offices. After the run-in with the academic community in the late 1970s, the NSA history asserts that Vice Adm. Inman “secure[d] a commitment” that the Office of Naval Research would coordinate its grants with the NSA. Since funding agencies often need not explain why they have rejected a particular grant proposal, it is hard to judge the NSA’s effect on the grant-making process. The agency has a second tactic to prevent the spread of cryptographic techniques: keeping high-grade cryptography out of the national standards. To make it easier for different commercial computer systems to interoperate, the National Bureau of Standards (now called NIST) coordinates a semipublic process to design standard cryptographic algorithms. Vendors are hesitant to implement algorithms that are not in the NIST standards: Non-standard algorithms are harder to deploy in practice and are less likely to see adoption in the open marketplace. The first controversy over the NSA’s hand in these standards erupted in the 1970s when it persuaded the bureau to weaken the Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm, an NBS-designed cryptosystem widely used by banks, privacy-sensitive businesses and the public. Hellman and his then-student Diffie mounted a vigorous — and ultimately unsuccessful — public relations campaign to try to improve the strength of the DES algorithm. At the time, NSA leadership emphatically denied that it had influenced the DES design. In a public speech in 1979 aimed to quell some of the controversy, Inman asserted: “NSA has been accused of intervening in the development of the DES and of tampering with the standard so as to weaken it cryptographically. This allegation is totally false.” Recently declassified documents reveal that Inman’s statements were misleading, if not incorrect. The NSA tried to convince IBM (which had originally designed the DES algorithm) to reduce the DES key size from 64 to 48 bits. Reducing the key size would decrease the cost of certain attacks against the cryptosystem. The NSA and IBM eventually compromised, the history says, on using a weakened 56-bit key. Today, Inman acknowledges that the NSA was trying to strike a balance be-tween protecting domestic commercial communication and safeguarding its own ability to eavesdrop on foreign governments: “[T]he issue was to try to find a level of cryptography that ensured the privacy of individuals and companies against competitors. Against anyone other than a country with a dedicated effort and capability to break the codes.” The NSA’s influence over the standards process has been particularly effective at mitigating what it perceived as the risks of nongovernmental cryptography. By keeping certain cryptosystems out of the NBS/NIST standards, the NSA facilitated its mission of eavesdropping on communications traffic. Reflections on Secrecy There are a few salient questions to consider when looking back at these first conflicts between the intelligence community and academic researchers in cryptography. A starting point for this analysis, said Aftergood, is to consider “whether in retrospect, [the government’s] worst fears were realized.” According to Inman, the uptake of the research community’s cryptographic ideas came at a much slower pace than he had expected. As a result, less foreign traffic ended up being encrypted than the agency had projected, and the consequences for national security were not as dramatic as he had feared. Essentially, Inman recalled, “there was no demand” for encryption systems outside of governments, even though many high-grade systems eventually became available. “You had a supply but no demand for it.” Even those people who try to use high-grade cryptographic tools, Hellman said, often make mistakes that render their traffic easy for an intelligence agency to decrypt: “People still make a lot of mistakes: use wrong, bad keys, or whatever else.” A second question is whether Hellman was right to worry that a lack of strong cryptography could become an “economic and privacy threat” in a computerized economy. In an unexpected turn, today Inman is as worried about protecting nongovernmental computer systems as Hellman was in the 1970s. When asked if he would make the same decisions about nongovernmental cryptography now as he did then, Inman replied, “Rather than being careful to make sure they were[n’t] going to damage [our collection capabilities] . . . I would have been interested in how quickly they were going to be able to make [cryptosystems] available in a form that would protect proprietary information as well as government information.” The theft of portions of the designs for the F-35 jet, Inman said, demonstrates that weak nongovernmental encryption and computer security practices can grievously harm national security. Even though history has vindicated Martin Hellman, he adamantly refuses to gloat over the accuracy of his predictions and the far-reaching impact of his technical work. On the contrary, Hellman is still deeply troubled by the way he engaged in the debate with the NSA over the publication of his papers and the DES encryption standard. Rather than trying to understand both sides of the issue and make the “right” decision, Hellman said that in the heat of the controversy, he listened to his ego instead. “The thought just popped into my head: Forget about what’s right. Go with this, you’ve got a tiger by the tail. You’ll never have more of an impact on society.” Aftergood said that this sort of ego-driven reasoning is a hallmark of debates over secrecy in research: “If you’re a researcher and you’ve achieved some kind of breakthrough, you’re going to want to let people know. So you’re not a neutral, impartial, disinterested party. You’re an interested party.” It was not until Hellman watched Day After Trinity, a documentary about the development of the atomic bomb, that he realized how dangerous his decision-making process had been. The moment in the film that troubled him most, he recalled, was when the Manhattan Project scientists tried to explain why they continued to work on the bomb after Hitler had been defeated and the threat of a German atom bomb had disappeared. The scientists “had figured out what they wanted to do and had then come up with a rationalization for doing it, rather than figuring out the right thing to do and doing it whether or not it was what they wanted to do. . . . I vowed I would never do that again,” Hellman said. “Thinking it through even now, I still would have done most of what I did. But it could have been something as bad as inventing nuclear weapons, and so I vowed I would never do that again.” Making good decisions in these situations, Aftergood said, requires a large dose of “internal restraint” and a certain “degree of trust” between researchers and government officials, “which is often lacking in practice.” Although Hellman and Inman forged an unlikely friendship in the wake of the conflict in the late 1970s, trust between the academic cryptography community and the NSA is at its nadir. Inman said of the new NSA director, “He has a huge challenge on his plate. How does he . . . can he, in fact, reestablish a sense of trust?” Diffie and Hellman’s now-legendary key-exchange algorithm has an elegant one-line representation. Debates over academic freedom and government secrecy do not lend themselves to such a concise formulation. “It’s not a neat, simple calculation,” Aftergood said. “There are competing interests on all sides, and somehow one just has to muddle through.” HENRY CORRIGAN-GIBBS is a second-year PhD student in computer science.

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G20: Bank deposits not money but paper investments, BTC, Cyprus
by grarpamp 17 Nov '14

17 Nov '14

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2mk0bp/bank_deposits_will_soon_no_…

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Fwd: [Dailydave] More info on SSLMAGEDON
by coderman 17 Nov '14

17 Nov '14

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dave Aitel <dave(a)immunityinc.com> Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 10:59:50 -0500 Subject: [Dailydave] More info on SSLMAGEDON Our friends at BeyondTrust have a page on the bug now: http://blog.beyondtrust.com/triggering-ms14-066 One thing I think people are missing is that this bug works by default on Windows 7 and above. You can force a client cert down Window's throat, which triggers the vulnerability regardless of configuration settings. Of course, what you do next, is the fun part. Immunity's researchers are investigating many techniques, one of which is to attack the crypto variables directly. This may allow a Heartbleed-or-worse style exploitation without code execution at all...

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Lantern: One Device, Free Data From Space Forever
by Eugen Leitl 16 Nov '14

16 Nov '14

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lantern-one-device-free-data-from-space-… Global access to the Internet’s best content on your mobile device. Anonymous. Uncensored. Free. Chicago, Illinois, United States Technology A Library In Every Pocket “The Short Wave Radio for the Digital Age.” -- Fast Company “A Tiny Satellite Dish That Brings Info to the World’s Deadzones.” -- Wired “Outernet aims to provide data to the net unconnected.” -- BBC "Billions of people around the world don't have access to the Internet, so the next big thing is trying to connect the world." -- CNN Lantern is an anonymous portable library that constantly receives free data from space. Like the water we drink or the air we breathe, the information we consume feeds the very essence of what it means to be human. Lantern establishes a new baseline of human knowledge. We are not fixing the world for people, we are giving them the information they need to fix it themselves. Lantern continuously receives radio waves broadcast by Outernet from space. Lantern turns the signal into digital files, like webpages, news articles, ebooks, videos, and music. Lantern can receive and store any type of digital file on its internal drive. To view the content stored in Lantern, turn on the Wi-Fi hotspot and connect to Lantern with any Wi-Fi enabled device. All you need is a browser. Oh, and Outernet is free to use, always. [...]

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