June 2021 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Twitter Jack Dorsey Censored Users at the Request of the State
by grarpamp 08 Jul '21

08 Jul '21

https://u8z8g8c2.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/11889-Supplemental… UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS CASE No. 1:20-CV-11889-MLW Twitter Censored Users at the Request of the State "Twitter Trusted Partnership Program and the Twitter Partner Support Portal (PSP). In 2017, Cohen and others began formulating and designing the framework for silently violating the free speech rights of US persons by first characterizing speakers as "Influence Operators" (IOs) thereby fabricating a sinister connotation where none exists, as the ideological framework to justify canceling speakers who exercise their right to express their opinion." Elections Influence Operations Playbook for State and Local Officials The National Association of State Election Directors, and the Secretary of State of Massachusetts, are being sued for partnering with Twitter to censor critics of the state. State election officials developed a system to assess the “threat level” of speech critical of them, or any comments that expressed skepticism of election security. Then they struck a deal in which Twitter agreed to delete Tweets, and ban users, at the request of government officials. The court documents make clear that Twitter attempted to insulate the state actors from the censorship, instead operating under the guise that Twitter’s internal moderators had found the content violated its terms. It’s one thing for a private company to trample free speech. But when the government does it, that clearly violates the constitution.

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[wrong] [draft] [spam] The goal of using cryptography at all.
by Karl 08 Jul '21

08 Jul '21

Since this list is so weird, people talking strange (including me), no signatures, etc etc, it would be good to get better communications going. There are many better communication systems. To know your messages are meant for you by the person who claims to have sent them, it's really good to be able to keep a private key that is actually private. This is hard for me to do. What device I'm on switches. Right now my device is an android phone that runs very very slowly and often misbehaves. A private key kept on this phone, which sometimes does things on its own while I am looking at it, and sometimes may wait a few minutes to respond to touching a button, would make security more complex. I would barely have confidence that the private key was private, because I don't know how to make the phone behave reliably.

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Private free-space communication.
by jim bell 08 Jul '21

08 Jul '21

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-quantum-cascade-lasers-private-free-space.html Jim Bell's comment: I remember a device called a "gunnplexer" in the late 1970s.http://www.microwave-museum.org/exhibits/mwm0022.htm It allowed two-way communication over the Gunn-oscillator frequency, usually 10.25 GHz.------------------- I have long thought that designers of WiFi routers should have incorporated an ability to communicate between nearby units. The vast majority of WiFi routers are within hearing distance of other routers.

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Public crypto audit report: lurch/OMEMO
by ROOT＠HardenedVault 07 Jul '21

07 Jul '21

Dear Cypherpunks, We're glad to kill off some 0days for open source crypto implementations. Here's public crypto audit report: lurch/OMEMO https://hardenedvault.net/files/lurch-audit.pdf Cheers, regards R@HardenedVault

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Ross Ulbricht got 2xLife+40 for a Harmless Website
by grarpamp 07 Jul '21

07 Jul '21

While other people get less than 25y for Murder, Rape, etc, and nothing for War, Torture, Infinite Detention, Global Organized Theft, etc. Any questions? #FreeRoss #RIPJohnHurley #McAfeeDidntKillHimself BTW: People actually could buy, did buy, still can buy, and indeed should consider buying... a cannon. Or at least 3D-Print one :)

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Gizmodo: Texas Power Companies Are Remotely Raising Temperatures on Residents' Smart Thermostats
by jim bell 07 Jul '21

07 Jul '21

Gizmodo: Texas Power Companies Are Remotely Raising Temperatures on Residents' Smart Thermostats. https://gizmodo.com/texas-power-companies-are-remotely-raising-temperatures…

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oramfs - ORAM filesystem written in Rust
by coderman 07 Jul '21

07 Jul '21

https://github.com/kudelskisecurity/oramfs oramfs - ORAM filesystem written in Rust [Rust 1.49+](https://blog.rust-lang.org/2020/12/31/Rust-1.49.0.html) [crates.io](https://crates.io/crates/oramfs) [License: GPL v3](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0) Oramfs provides a fully encrypted and optionally authenticated Oblivious RAM filesystem. Not only does it preserve data confidentiality, but it also prevents remote attackers from observing data access patterns. oramfs features: - ORAM - encrypt files and hide read/write access patterns from remote storage. Enhanced privacy! - Resizable ORAM - extend your ORAM when more space is required! - Cloud storage agnostic - synchronize your files to any remote server that can be mounted as a local directory - Filesystem agnostic - ext4 is used by default. Manual mode lets you use the filesystem you like. - Supports multiple encryption ciphers - ChaCha8, AES-CTR, AES-GCM - Supports multiple ORAM schemes - [Path ORAM](https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/280.pdf), etc. - Written in Rust - Avoids memory safety issues, great performance [DISCLAIMER] oramfs is a prototype and may not be ready for production. It may erase some of your data. Make sure to backup important data before using this software. Why use oramfs? On an encrypted filesystem, an ORAM prevents an attacker from knowing whether read or write operations are performed and which parts of the filesystem are accessed. This enhanced privacy comes with a loss of performance. To setup the ORAM, two inputs are required. A public directory and a private directory. The public directory can be seen as the server and the private directory as the client. The public directory can be any local directory, including remote data mounted as a local directory. Hence, hiding access patterns to a remote SSH directory or to a remote cloud storage is possible. Indeed, these remote storages simply need to be mounted as a local directory first, and then, that directory can be used as the public directory for oramfs . For example, [Rclone](https://github.com/rclone/rclone) supports mounting a variety of cloud storage providers as local directories. The private directory is the one that should be used to access files stored in the ORAM. Any operation performed on the private directory has an impact on the public directory. And if that public directory is a mounted remote storage, then it is safely and transparently synchronized to the remote server whenever an operation is performed on the private directory. Requirements - Rust - FUSE (libfuse-dev package on Debian-based systems, fuse package on Arch) Getting started Install Rust using [rustup](https://rustup.rs/) if it is not installed yet. In /etc/fuse.conf, make sure to enable the user_allow_other option. If not already installed, install the libfuse-dev (Debian-based systems) package using your package manager. For other systems, the package may be named differently. Then, build oramfs using cargo: cargo build --release To get maximum performance and take advantage of native CPU instructions (AES-NI), build in release mode and target the native CPU: RUSTFLAGS="-Ctarget-cpu=native" cargo build --release The oramfs binary will be created in the target/release directory. For convenience, add it to your PATH. Note that installing the binary can also be performed with cargo install --path .. It will be installed in ~/.cargo/bin by default. export PATH=$PATH:target/release Then, create or mount a public directory to be protected by the ORAM, and a private directory: mkdir public mkdir private Finally, run the executable and create an ORAM configuration called myoram: oramfs add myoram public/ private/ Follow the interactive instructions and complete the ORAM setup. Once the ORAM configuration is setup, the details are saved to ~/.config/oramfs/oramfs.yml. Now the ORAM can be mounted and unmounted at any time using this configuration. oramfs mount myoram To unmount the ORAM: oramfs umount myoram To enlarge the ORAM, make sure it is unmounted first, then double its size: oramfs enlarge myoram Then it can be mounted as usual and its size will be larger than before. How does it work? Instead of implementing a full filesystem, oramfs only provides a mounted file. Therefore, the user is expected to create a filesystem on top of that file using a loop device, the filesystem of their choice and finally mounting that filesystem. Note that such operations usually require root privileges and therefore oramfs requires those privileges for mounting. Sudo is called to achieve this, and therefore, oramfs can simply be run as a regular user. It will prompt for your password when sudo is called for mount-related operations. oramfs takes a public directory as input and exposes a single private file, which is a proxy for read and write operations so that they are privacy-preserving thanks to an ORAM scheme. The mounted private file can be used to setup a loop device using losetup. Then, any filesystem, such as ext4 can be created on top of that loop device. oramfs automates this process, but also lets users do it manually if they want to. +---------------------------------------------------+ | | | ext4 filesystem | <---+ or any other FS or your choice | | +---------------------------------------------------+ | | | Loop device (/dev/loop0) | <---+ created with losetup | | +---------------------------------------------------+ | | | ORAMFS (FUSE) | <---+ Input : *public* local directory | | Output : *private* single file, +-------------------+-----------------+-------------+ for use with loop device | | | | | Local directory | Cloud storage | SSHFS | <---+ Input directory can be anything | | | | that appears as a local directory, +-------------------+-----------------+-------------+ including mounted remote directories. Examples: SSH, FTP, anything supported by rclone or similar tools, any mounted FUSE filesystem, etc. Before using ORAMFS: $ tree . ├── private <---+ empty directory └── public <---+ this is the directory that the attacker can see ("public" directory) When ORAMFS is in use, every operation done in the "private" directory - or directly on the "oram" private file in the mountpoint directory - appears ORAMified in the "public" directory. In the standard use case, the user does not directly modify the "oram" private file, but instead uses a higher level abstraction (the filesystem in the "private" directory). The user typically mounts their public cloud storage to the "public" directory before running ORAMFS, so that the public files are transparently synchronized to the cloud in a privacy-preserving way. When ORAMFS is in use: $ tree . ├── private │ └── lost+found │ └── very_private_document.txt └── public └── node_0.oram └── node_1.oram └── node_2.oram └── ... $ tree /tmp/oramfs_myoram/ /tmp/oramfs_myoram/ └── oram Example with remote storage In this example, we go through the setup of an ORAM that transparently synchronizes data to a remote FTP server. Of course, one could use any other remote storage (SSH server, Google Drive, etc.). Anything that can be mounted as a local directory. We assume that an rclone remote has already been configured for an FTP server you have access to, using rclone config. The rclone config file should have an entry for that remote, similar to: [myftp] type = ftp host = 1.2.3.4 user = myusername pass = mypassword Let's mount the remote FTP server directory as local directory. We will use this directory as public directory of our ORAM: rclone mount --daemon --allow-other --dir-cache-time 1s --poll-interval 1s --vfs-cache-mode writes --vfs-write-back 200ms myftp:somedirectory/ public Create an ORAM called myoram: $ oramfs add myoram public/ private/ Please enter desired ORAM total size in bytes, or press enter to use default [default: 16000000 (16 MB)]: Adjusting ORAM size to closest valid value: 16711680 bytes Please enter path to client data directory to use, or press enter to use default [default: /home/foobar/.config/oramfs/myoram]: Please enter path to mointpoint directory to use, or press enter to use default [default: /tmp/oramfs_myoram]: Successfully added ORAM myoram. Mount the ORAM, write a file to it: $ oramfs mount myoram $ echo hello world > private/somefile When finished, unmount it: $ oramfs unmount myoram That's it! Files written/read to/from the private directory are encrypted and access patterns are hidden to the FTP server. For more details, make sure to read the Privacy section below. Configuration The main configuration file is located at ~/.config/oramfs/oramfs.yml. Existing ORAM profiles can be modified by simply editing that file. For example, the ORAM scheme could be changed from pathoram to fakeoram. For a description of all the options, see oramfs add --help. Note that changing these options probably require re-initializing the ORAM, and therefore, it's not possible to change those options without losing the data in an existing ORAM. Advanced Usage Show help with cargo run -- -h Foreground mode By default, oramfs runs in the background. Use --foreground to avoid that. Note that when oramfs runs in the foreground, it implies that manual mode is used. oramfs mount myoram --foreground Manual mode For maximum control, manual mode can be used (--manual). Mount ORAMFS using Path ORAM (with explicit parameters). The mounted ORAMFS appears as a file under the specified mountpoint directory. By default, it is in /tmp/oramfs_{ORAM_NAME}/oram. mkdir private mkdir public oramfs add myoram public/ private/ oramfs mount myoram --manual Since manual mode does not automatically mount a file system for you, you must do it yourself. To do so, create an ext4 filesystem on top of the ORAM. Note that mount automatically creates a loop device for us: mkfs.ext4 /tmp/oramfs_myoram/oram mount -o sync /tmp/oramfs_myoram/oram private/ echo "hello oram" > private/hello.txt Using another filesystem than ext4 oramfs supports any filesystem. To use something different from the default ext4, do the following. During initialization, pass the --manual flag, then manually create the filesystem of your choice on the oram file in the mountpoint directory. Here is an example with ext3: oramfs add myoram public/ private/ oramfs mount myoram --manual mkfs.ext3 /tmp/oramfs_myoram/oram oramfs umount myoram oramfs mount myoram When enlarging an ORAM using a different filesystem, pass the --manual flag. Then, manually resize and unmount the oram file: oramfs umount myoram oramfs enlarge myoram --manual resize2fs -f /tmp/oramfs_myoram/oram # or equivalent for your filesystem oramfs umount myoram oramfs mount myoram Mounting multiple ORAMs at the same time When mounting multiple ORAMs at the same time, make sure that the ORAMs use different, public directories, private directories, mountpoints and client data directories. ORAM initialization Important: the first time that an ORAM is mounted, the --init option is passed automatically. --init is a destructive operation and it will permanently destroy any data in an existing ORAM. In practice, there should be little need to manually pass --init. oramfs looks at the init property in the global oramfs config file to determine whether the ORAM was already initialized. Using other ORAM schemes than Path ORAM This prototype currently only implements [Path ORAM](https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/280.pdf), but it is built so that more schemes can be added in the future. To prove this, there is a second scheme named fakeoram built-in, but it should not be used in production because it is not a true ORAM. FakeORAM is a "Hello World" example ORAM scheme that could be useful for developers who want to add new ORAM schemes to oramfs. To use another scheme, such as fakeoram, update the configuration file and change the algorithm entry to fakeoram. Then simply mount and initialize the oram. Privacy The public directory can be safely mirrored to the cloud, without the cloud provider knowing which file is being accessed and whether read or write operations were performed. One scenario would be to mount a remote Google Drive directory as the public directory, and use that public directory as the public directory for the ORAMFS. Performance When native CPU instructions can be used, AES may be faster than ChaCha8. Changing the cipher can be achieved by passing the --cipher aes-ctr or --cipher aes-gcm flag on adding an ORAM, for example. One can also directly edit the configuration file and reinitialize the ORAM with the updated cipher. Note that this will destroy any data in the ORAM, so proceed with caution when initializing an ORAM. To achieve the best performance, make sure to build or run using cargo's --release flag and to pass the RUSTFLAGS="-Ctarget-cpu=native" environment variable. Benchmarks oramfs was compared to [UtahFS](https://github.com/cloudflare/utahfs). Oramfs was used with default values (AES-GCM, 16MB oram size). UtahFS was used with a local disk and the oram option was set to true. Note that performance is highly sensitive to the choice of n, z and b parameters in oramfs. In this benchmark, the defaults were used for 10MB. Then the ORAM was enlarged (n was doubled) for 25 MB. Read performance File size oramfs UtahFS Speedup 10 MB 1 sec 9 sec 9x 25 MB 3 sec 26.5 sec 8.8x Write performance File size oramfs UtahFS Speedup 10 MB 15 sec 30 sec 2x 25 MB 50 sec 95 sec 1.9x Usage on SSD or flash storage For each read or write operation, the ORAM scheme actually performs multiple operations under the scenes. Even for read operations, underlying write operations are performed. This can significantly reduce the lifespan of SSDs. Limitations and future work Note that oramfs is still a prototype and has the following known limitations. Memory zeroization Memory is currently not zeroized on exit/crash. An attacker may be able to extract private keys or passphrases from non-zeroized memory. Read caching If reads are cached, then the ORAM won't perform any work on cached reads. This is a privacy issue because it would mean that if all reads are cached, then we can be sure that any modification to the public directory must be a write operation. To avoid read caching, on Linux, always clear the kernel cache before reading a file from the ORAM: # sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches Testing Run tests with cargo test --release Contributing Feel free to open an issue or pull request. Code should be formatted with rustfmt. To automatically format the whole project: cargo fmt No warnings should appear when running cargo build and cargo clippy. Additionally, all tests should pass (See Testing section).

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Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment - Stundin
by jim bell 06 Jul '21

06 Jul '21

https://stundin.is/grein/13627/ "Department of Justice case against Julian Assange has admitted to fabricating key accusations in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. The witness, who has a documented history with sociopathy and has received several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and wide-ranging financial fraud, made the admission in a newly published interview in Stundin where he also confessed to having continued his crime spree whilst working with the Department of Justice and FBI and receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution." "The man in question, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, was recruited by US authorities to build a case against Assange after misleading them to believe he was previously a close associate of his. In fact he had volunteered on a limited basis to raise money for Wikileaks in 2010 but was found to have used that opportunity to embezzle more than $50,000 from the organization. Julian Assange was visiting Thordarson’s home country of Iceland around this time due to his work with Icelandic media and members of parliament in preparing the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a press freedom project that produced a parliamentary resolution supporting whistleblowers and investigative journalism." (End of quote)

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WIRED: How Underground Fiber Optics Spy on Humans Moving Above
by jim bell 04 Jul '21

04 Jul '21

WIRED: How Underground Fiber Optics Spy on Humans Moving Above. https://www.wired.com/story/how-underground-fiber-optics-spy-on-humans-movi…

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My blog post on FOIAs, executive function, Alan Turing, avoiding propaganda
by Douglas Lucas 04 Jul '21

04 Jul '21

Hi cypherpunks email list, Y'all might value my new blog post (I've been blogging weekly this year). It uses as its point of departure how I've been catching up on my nagging pile of unattended FOIAs this past week — especially streamlining my processes for keeping track of them with spreadsheets — to discuss the psychology concept of executive function, applying Alan Turing's invention of software programming to mental health recovery and avoiding spy agency propaganda. The post ends with news blasts for Nigeria, Camp Rhonda in Dallas, and Rohingya bodybuilder Noor Kabir. I'm curious what y'all think, though I imagine sending this email will return a bunch of kooky responses from eccentric cypherpunks, which at least will provide me smiles. That's kind of the point of me posting this here... Anyway, this latest entry to my blog is at: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/06/13/foias-executive-function/ And for those who retweet stuff: https://twitter.com/DouglasLucas/status/1404371710447476738 Happy not dying yet, Doug

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