April 2022 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms
by jim bell 21 Apr '22

21 Apr '22

https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/ "Good news for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists: Scraping publicly accessible data is legal, according to a U.S. appeals court ruling. "The landmark ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals is the latest in a long-running legal battle brought by LinkedIn aimed at stopping a rival company from web scraping personal information from users’ public profiles. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court last year but was sent back to the Ninth Circuit for the original appeals court to re-review the case. "In its second ruling on Monday, the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed its original decision and found that scraping data that is publicly accessible on the internet is not a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, which governs what constitutes computer hacking under U.S. law.

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Design brief for a new system of killing
by professor rat 21 Apr '22

21 Apr '22

Reading about the Kalashnikov AK-47 I was struck by its design that deliberately avoid tight machining and complexity where-ever possible. It was also part of a broader German-Russian trend towards smaller, lighter army rifles and ostensibly and technically less powerful ones - the now ubiquitous assault-rifle. Now proven much more powerful in real-world conditions! This gave me an idea for our assassination markets ( Dead Lucky, APster, PAM, etc ) If they could avoid all the usual bells-and-whistles ' shovelware ' - such as anonymity, end-to-end encryption and untraceable e-cash - then they might ' go viral ' more easily. Softly-softly catchee Gatesy - yeah?

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If only MIT taught a course on failed speculative theories
by professor rat 21 Apr '22

21 Apr '22

John Baez says: April 19, 2022 at 10:22 pm It would actually be great if MIT taught a course on failed speculative theories in physics, perhaps using Helge Kragh’s book as a textbook. If students only learn about successful theories they won’t get how hard it is to be right, and how many great physicists had theories that didn’t pan out. https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12775#comments

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JOHN " Cryptome " Young volunteers to become a rat informant at the DoJ
by professor rat 21 Apr '22

21 Apr '22

Oh wait. . . no, sorry . . . that was John's bum-buddy, Alex Jones. I get these Texas cannibals confused - its a common mistake but; my bat.

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Jew-haters are like hemorrhoids,
by professor rat 21 Apr '22

21 Apr '22

“As a Jew who lived successively in several countries before finding refuge in Hollywood,” McBride observes, Wilder “often resembled a cabaret artist darkly amusing his audience by dancing on the edge of an abyss.” https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/billy-wilder-biography/

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Anarchist publishing fair in Lecce on 21st and 22nd May.
by professor rat 21 Apr '22

21 Apr '22

Feel the power - live the dream https://anarchistnews.org/content/iv-edition-“idea-and-action”-anarchist-pu…

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MKULTRA CIA Mind Control KUBARK Govt Torture
by grarpamp 21 Apr '22

21 Apr '22

https://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/13inmate_ProjectMKULTRA.pdf http://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/cia-mkultra-collection/ https://archive.org/details/mkultrafiles https://archive.org/movies/details-db.php?collection=independent_news&colle… http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/index.htm http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/archive/news/dodmans.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_and_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_and_CIA_interrogation_manuals http://www.salon.com/2009/05/18/torture_25/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PSY https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PSIL The psychic driving procedure was a chronological precursor to Cameron's depatterning, the latter involving massive doses of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) combined with similarly large doses of psychedelic drugs (such as LSD). The intent was to break down the subject's personality—theoretically psychic driving could then be used with some efficacy in establishing a new personality.[1] In Cameron's depatterning, the ECT would often continue to be administered despite the manifestation of convulsive fits, which were consensually considered to be contraindications to normal and safe ECT procedure. Such biologically and psychologically devastating procedures, adopted internationally by the psychiatric establishment, were largely abolished by the time the CIA was brought before a Senate Hearing (1977)[2] for its involvement and funding of Cameron's experimental activities—as part of the MKULTRA program.[3] The topic of Cameron's psychic driving is dealt with in some detail in the docudrama entitled The Sleep Room (1998) directed by Anne Wheeler.[4] Dulles ordered Bluebird to be expanded and centralized, and renamed the Project Artichoke. Dulles and Gottlieb both believed there was a way to influence and control the human mind that could lead to global mastery.

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Gmail banned some Russian officer
by zeynepaydogan 20 Apr '22

20 Apr '22

I heard some people have a little bit of a problem with their accounts.Don’t use Gmail.Hey American govlick company Gmail Where were you when America raped all the African and Middle East countries?And it's still going on;The Ukrainian army rapes and kills its own people. But what a world's agenda is Ukraine with the Nazi army!They don't deny that they're publicly Nazis.A lot of civilians were killed, and it's painful for the Ukrainian army to do that.The world applauded a racist army.Hey folks, after years,the Ukrainian army will be remembered just like Hitler .There were very few people who thought Hitler was evil at the time

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[spam][joke] implementing a timing attack
by Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many 20 Apr '22

20 Apr '22

[ridiculous psychological patterns] in order to deanonymise an anonymity network using timing patterns, we will need two things: 1. newly hacked machine learning algorithms 2. use of an effective anonymity network to deanonymise I suppose we should start with #2. 2a. add constant chaff to tor, knowing this was helpful two decades ago and having no idea what is helpful now 2b. register an email address from a clean purposed system, dissociated from our legal identity

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CVE-2022-21449: Psychic Signatures in Java
by coderman 20 Apr '22

20 Apr '22

https://neilmadden.blog/2022/04/19/psychic-signatures-in-java/ CVE-2022-21449: Psychic Signatures in Java The long-running BBC sci-fi show [Doctor Who](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who) has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to get out of trouble by showing an identity card which is actually completely blank. Of course, this being Doctor Who, the card is really made out of a special “[psychic paper](https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Psychic_paper)“, which causes the person looking at it to see whatever the Doctor wants them to see: a security pass, a warrant, or whatever. [Doctor Who holding up a blank ID card with a badly superimposed image of Duke (the Java mascot) holding a glass of wine.](https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Psychic_paper?file=Psychic_paper_DW_S… legit to me. [Hic!](https://images.app.goo.gl/1cgL8VJRpaAGaEnm9)“ It turns out that some recent releases of Java were vulnerable to a similar kind of trick, in the implementation of widely-used [ECDSA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_Algor… signatures. If you are running one of the vulnerable versions then an attacker can easily forge some types of SSL certificates and handshakes (allowing interception and modification of communications), [signed JWTs](https://jwt.io/), [SAML assertions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Assertion_Markup_Languag… or [OIDC id tokens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID#OpenID_Connect_(OIDC)), and even [WebAuthn](https://webauthn.guide/) authentication messages. All using the digital equivalent of a blank piece of paper. It’s hard to overstate the severity of this bug. If you are using ECDSA signatures for any of these security mechanisms, then an attacker can trivially and completely bypass them if your server is running any Java 15, 16, 17, or 18 version before the [April 2022 Critical Patch Update (CPU)](https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpuapr2022.html) For context, almost all WebAuthn/FIDO devices in the real world (including Yubikeys[*](https://neilmadden.blog/2022/04/19/psychic-signatures-in-java/#footnote-1)) use ECDSA signatures and many OIDC providers use ECDSA-signed JWTs. If you have deployed Java 15, Java 16, Java 17, or Java 18 in production then you should stop what you are doing and immediately update to install the fixes in the [April 2022 Critical Patch Update](https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpuapr2022.html). Update: the official announcement from Oracle also lists older versions of Java, including 7, 8 and 11. Although I’m not aware of the bug impacting those older implementations they did fix a similar bug in the (non-EC) DSA implementation at the same time, so it’s possible older versions are also impacted. There are also other security vulnerabilities reported in the same CPU, so (as always) it is worth upgrading even if you are running an older Java version. The [OpenJDK advisory](https://openjdk.java.net/groups/vulnerability/advisories/2022-04-… on the other hand lists only versions 15, 17, and 18 as affected by this specific issue (CVE-2022-21449). Oracle have given this a CVSS score of 7.5, assigning no impact to Confidentiality or Availability. Internally, we at ForgeRock graded this [a perfect 10.0](https://www.first.org/cvss/calculator/3.1#CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:… due to the wide range of impacts on different functionality in an access management context. ForgeRock customers can [read our advisory about this issue](https://backstage.forgerock.com/knowledge/kb/article/a90257583) for further guidance. Background: ECDSA signatures ECDSA stands for the [Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_A…, and it is a widely used standard for signing all kinds of digital documents. Compared to the older RSA standard, elliptic curve keys and signatures tend to be much smaller for equivalent security, resulting in them being widely used in cases where size is at a premium. For example, the WebAuthn standard for two-factor authentication allows device manufacturers to choose from a wide range of signature algorithms, but in practice almost all of the devices manufactured to date support ECDSA signatures only (a notable exception being Windows Hello, which uses RSA signatures; presumably for compatibility with older [TPM](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/what-is-tpm-705f241d-025d-44… hardware). Without getting too much into the technical details, an ECDSA signature consists of two values, called r and s. To [verify an ECDSA signature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_A…, the verifier checks an equation involving r, s, the signer’s public key, and a hash of the message. If the two sides of the equation are equal then the signature is valid, otherwise it is rejected. One side of the equation is r and the other side is multiplied by r and a value derived from s. So it would obviously be a really bad thing if r and s were both 0, because then you’d be checking that 0 = 0 ⨉ [a bunch of stuff], which will be true regardless of the value of [a bunch of stuff]! And that bunch of stuff is the important bits like the message and the public key. This is why the very first check in the ECDSA verification algorithm is to ensure that r and s are both >= 1. Guess which check Java forgot? That’s right. Java’s implementation of ECDSA signature verification didn’t check if r or s were zero, so you could produce a signature value in which they are both 0 ([appropriately encoded](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1)) and Java would accept it as a valid signature for any message and for any public key. The digital equivalent of a blank ID card. Here’s an interactive jshell session showing the vulnerable implementation accepting a completely blank signature as valid for an arbitrary message and public key: | Welcome to JShell -- Version 17.0.1 | For an introduction type: /help intro jshell> import java.security.* jshell> var keys = KeyPairGenerator.getInstance("EC").generateKeyPair() keys ==> java.security.KeyPair@626b2d4a jshell> var blankSignature = new byte[64] blankSignature ==> byte[64] { 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... , 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 } jshell> var sig = Signature.getInstance("SHA256WithECDSAInP1363Format") sig ==> Signature object: SHA256WithECDSAInP1363Format<not initialized> jshell> sig.initVerify(keys.getPublic()) jshell> sig.update("Hello, World".getBytes()) jshell> sig.verify(blankSignature) $8 ==> true // Oops, that shouldn't have verified... Note that the “InP1363Format” qualifier just makes it easier to demonstrate the bug. Signatures in ASN.1 DER format can be exploited in the same way, you just have to do a bit more fiddling with the encoding first, but note that JWTs and other formats do use the raw IEEE P1363 format. A few technical details If you go and look at the fine details of ECDSA on wikipedia, you’ll see that the right hand side of the equation is not multiplied by s but rather by its multiplicative inverse: s-1. If you know a little maths, you may be thinking “won’t calculating this inverse result in a division by zero?” But in elliptic curve cryptography, this inverse is being calculated modulo a large number, n, and for the curves typically used in ECDSA, n is a prime number so we can use the [Little Theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat's_little_theorem) of Fermat (vandalizer of margins) to calculate the modular inverse: xn = x1 = x (mod n) x(n-1) = x0 = 1 (mod n) x(n-2) = x-1 (mod n) This is very efficient, and it’s [exactly what Java does](https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/ec205f68a883cef6b98f26a06baf675f7…. However, it is only valid for when x is not zero, as zero doesn’t have a multiplicative inverse. When x is zero then 0(n-2) = 0: garbage in, garbage out. The fact that arithmetic is carried out modulo n is also why you need to check that r and s are both < n too, because n = 0 (mod n) so setting r or s to n would have the same effect as setting them to 0. Another check that should’ve saved Java is the check described in step 5 of the verification algorithm on Wikipedia: checking that a point calculated from r and s is not the “point at infinity”. If r and s are both zero, then the resulting point will in fact be the point at infinity and so this check will fail. But again, Java failed to perform this check. Why did you just find this now? You may be wondering why this is just coming to light now, when Java has had ECDSA support for a long time. Has it always been vulnerable? No. This is a relatively recent bug introduced by a rewrite of the EC code from native C++ code to Java, [which happened in the Java 15 release](https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8237218). Although I’m sure that this rewrite has benefits in terms of memory safety and maintainability, it appears that experienced cryptographic engineers have not been involved in the implementation. The original C++ implementation[is not vulnerable to these bugs](https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/jdk-15-ga/src/jdk.crypto.ec/share…, but the rewrite was. Neither implementation appears to have very good test coverage, and even the most cursory reading of the ECDSA spec would surely suggest testing that invalid r and s values are rejected. I am not at all confident that other bugs aren’t lurking in this code. What should we do about it? First of all, if you are using Java 15 or later then please go and update to the latest version to get the fix for this issue. In general, cryptographic code is very tricky to implement correctly and public key signature algorithms are some of the trickiest. ECDSA is itself one of the most fragile algorithms, where [even a tiny amount of bias in one random value can allow complete recovery of your private key](https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/615). On the other hand, we now have excellent resources like [Project Wycheproof](https://github.com/google/wycheproof) that provide test cases for known vulnerabilities. After I found this bug I updated a local copy of Wycheproof to run against Java 17 – it found this issue immediately. Hopefully the JDK team will adopt the Wycheproof test suite themselves to avoid any similar bugs slipping through the net in future. If you are designing a protocol or application that you think needs to use digital signatures, consider if you really do – would a simpler mechanism work instead? Simple MAC algorithms like [HMAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAC) are incredibly hard to mess up compared to signature schemes. If you really need a signature then consider using a modern algorithm like [EdDSA](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8032.html) that avoids some of the pitfalls of ECDSA. Timeline 11 Nov 2021 – Issue found and disclosed to OpenJDK vulnerability report email address. 11 Nov 2021 – Determined [JDK change](https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=JDK-8237218) that introduced the bug in Java 15. 12 Nov 2021 – Initial acknowledgement from Oracle. 18 Nov 2021 – Oracle confirms the bug and indicates it will be patched in a future Critical Patch Update (CPU). It is assigned tracking ID S1559193. 18 Nov 2021 – ForgeRock [issues a security advisory](https://backstage.forgerock.com/knowledge/kb/article/a90257583) informing our customers not to deploy affected versions of Java into production. 14 Jan 2022 – Ask Oracle for status update. Told that the fix is targeting the April 2022 CPU, scheduled for 19th April. 25 Mar 2022 – Confirm again with Oracle that the fix will be in April CPU. Inform them that ForgeRock will proceed to full disclosure if the bug is not fixed by then. 19 Apr 2022 – Fix released by Oracle in April CPU. 19 Apr 2022 – Article published. * Yubico is one of the few WebAuthn manufacturers that support the more secure [EdDSA](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8032.html) standard in addition to ECDSA. EdDSA signatures are less prone to the type of bug described here.

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