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Twitter details on 2FA
by Kyle Maxwell 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

I kinda dig the level of detail in Twitter's blog post today on their new 2FA system. Not really qualified to analyze said details, but certainly they're not going for the obscurity approach. https://blog.twitter.com/2013/login-verification-on-twitter-for-iphone-and-… -- @kylemaxwell

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Re: [liberationtech] CJDNS hype
by Eugen Leitl 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from Caleb James DeLisle <calebdelisle(a)lavabit.com> ----- Date: Mon, 05 Aug 2013 14:55:22 -0400 From: Caleb James DeLisle <calebdelisle(a)lavabit.com> To: Michael Rogers <michael(a)briarproject.org> Cc: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> Subject: Re: [liberationtech] CJDNS hype User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130623 Thunderbird/17.0.7 Reply-To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello, On 08/05/2013 01:26 PM, Michael Rogers wrote: > Hi Caleb, > > On 03/08/13 01:33, Caleb James DeLisle wrote: >> We could spend a long time discussing locally effective attacks on social networks and not be any closer to agreement. > >> Instead I think it's worth asking who your attacker is... I find that when people don't stop to ask who the attacker is, what he wants and what resources he can apply on the attack, they end up with a default assumption that the attacker is everywhere and has infinite resources..... > >> If you can give me a clear picture of the person who would use this attack, what they want from the attack and what resources they can bring to bear on the problem, I might be able to speak more to the issue. > > Excellent point! The adversary I have in mind looks something like this: > > * Can create adversarial nodes * Can persuade a limited proportion of users to make direct connections to adversarial nodes Infecting existing nodes is cheaper than knocking on doors asking people to connect to your evil nodes because your reputation doesn't suffer when the trick is discovered. > * Can co-ordinate the behaviour of all adversarial nodes * Can create low-latency, high-bandwidth connections between adversarial nodes It doesn't cover whether adversarial nodes are geographically dispersed or not. If they are then the the attack is significantly more expensive. > * Can't monitor or tamper with direct connections between non-adversarial nodes * Can't break standard crypto primitives * Aims to degrade the performance of cjdns for some or all users This is good from a capabilities standpoint but it doesn't cover motive which is hugely important to threat modeling. If someone has significant resources and their motive is "to cause mayhem", securing infrastructure against them is not really possible which is why traditional antiterrorism efforts seem incoherent. Causing localized network disruption is trivial in any ethernet, you simply answer ARP or DHCP packets. This is done by some malware but the motive is to carry out a MiTM attack and trick the victim into installing the malware binary which is disguised as an update. With cjdns you would not have the ability to MiTM so the same style attack would just cause a localized network outage. Another motive for localized DoS is to force users to an unencrypted channel. If every time the police use encrypted radio you jam it, they may be tricked into using unencrypted channels. The main defense against this is not to have an insecure backup. Also note that localized network outages can be caused by wire cutters and/or wifi jammers so a protocol attack may never be the most effective approach. > >>> What heuristics do you have in mind? > > >> Given a set of known evil nodes, find the longest common route prefix(es) which contain all of the evil nodes. The last node along each common prefix is probably an edge. > > How would you find a set of known evil nodes? cat-and-mouse games which is why I don't like this approach. You could send forwarded packets to nodes to whom you know a direct path and then send them a direct packet asking if they got the forwarded packet. You have to try it a few times to be sure the endpoint is not fooling you and there are still more ways to detect and work around it. It's not something I'm interested in ever implementing so it's not really worth further discussion. > >>> People have put years of research effort into designing automatic Sybil defenses. The solutions they've come up with (SybilGuard, SybilLimit, Gatekeeper, SybilInfer) are complex and heavyweight, and they depend on assumptions about the structure of the social network - in other words they're not off-the-shelf solutions that you could just drop into cjdns later if the need arises. > > >> They operate under different constraints. > > Could you elaborate on the differences? The systems I mentioned are designed for use in P2P networks where the edges are based on real-world social relationships and there's no central authority. Isn't that similar to the cjdns setting? I suppose it is because the same information can be derived, albeit with some complexity. In cjdns the path through the social network which is represented by any given node is expressed in the label so you get it for free. > >> Everybody knows paths to those who are the numerically closest to themselves no matter the physical distance. Since addresses are spread randomly throughout the network, it means that anyone given node is directly reachable from a few nodes in each physical locality of the network. > > Let's consider what happens as the network grows. On average, each node is pointed to by t routing table entries, where t is the size of a node's routing table. As the network grows, the t entries pointing to a given node will be spread more thinly across the network, unless we increase t in direct proportion to the number of nodes. Increasing t like that won't scale indefinitely, but for the sake of argument let's assume it will scale well enough for whatever size cjdns grows to. > > So wherever we start from, there's some nearby node that knows a switching path to the destination. However, the length of that switching path will increase (on average) as the network grows. Even if we had a magic oracle that told us the shortest path to any destination, that path would still be longer on average in a large network than a small network. > > Therefore if some proportion of the nodes are adversarial, the probability of hitting an adversarial node on the way from a randomly chosen source to a randomly chosen destination will increase as the network grows. It's all true but it's worth noting that in order to maintain the same proportion of evil nodes in a growing network, the evil net must grow as well which brings us back to motive. If somebody is willing and able to invest a significant amount of money into setting up evil nodes then he must want something. It seems more realistic that the evil nodes would be compromised good nodes, an attack which which scales better. > >>> If the attacker creates a Sybil region of social space that's larger than the non-Sybil region, and you try to ensure that your routing table contains a diverse sampling of the whole social space, then your routing table will tend to contain more Sybils than non-Sybils. > > >> The number of nodes and the way they're organized doesn't help. They're all behind a common label prefix (the path to the sybil edge) and that label prefix would cause them to be seen as a cluster. > > Unfortunately it's not that simple. You're assuming that from the point of view of a given node, all the Sybils are behind a single edge (an attack edge, in SybilGuard terminology). But a given Sybil may be reachable via multiple attack edges. That's why SybilGuard and its descendents are so complex: before sampling the network to look for clusters, they have to ensure that there's only a single way for samples to reach each node. With cjdns there are multiple ways to reach a node but only one best way so that's mostly a solved problem. A non-adversarial way to look at this proposal is it attempts to avoid over-reliance on a single network link. Each edge would just appear as a link with a disproportionate number of nodes relying on it. You should check out the network, I think you'd find some interesting discussions in the dark irc network (irc.hypeirc.net) #hyperboria and #cjdns you might also find some people interested in helping with briar ;) Thanks, Caleb > > Cheers, Michael > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJR//UaAAoJECYAmptlsgnWHtMP/07m2NN2A+vk9isBn9eOzkyN GcjgJFL0VbcRQXU/sSQnzowcfoGT2bDy2IkscrjrIZYULbzJMGTurkfQK8+t/ZDH MVCouz6T/p8XVhPjQ8s/sq/JEIS3roV4sE/Qrt+P7vZp7Dv6vL69gAmf+OSTmgLY K8R1NY9BQD1wv16pwSUfyaccsoftxE3GytKCxMkW4jqa8ENUIDWEJ5qrsbesSTdy Tl0zaypC2Z1teud8G1plxV7sQvTQjjeV7+RXG39icTdkteyZQr8wcqo/69FUI6yb MXc2fBYLjnQjr6yJFSZPvhCnD8AR5TLwZC6Oi2x3TbYsBNXqjGxr73y/gRsX/SEv mHXWCzIa3MIWStVQZTDuM4edLi6ab2ZViMueospfs/sfptMiJkDpPjom8HvHgNZh 9tjScCPZKiOqYU44DYNkCeNKKbuABukkEGh5S0KafSg0YiV4qrogLsfata2+AXjy joa3YydwcCkjZ2wa5A3LIZV8qwLFVdQ9Y+6dIMOe1xqBF7Cd/5KOtFMpglXU0pdF tIFxnILYc3B5w71wADDGnC69+iOde3Wv8NVgqmSplu94nq1UKQO4MzQB2hiiMgE9 XG+xBNpqJH0MpTgoH0zSwcdaw5z2E94MQ+stSDi2Ll19pmoTQHIDKcSdnT6Q/UPP XUOK2ZWn3eP24w9F4Ao9 =Pohw -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Liberationtech list is public and archives are searchable on Google. Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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[guardian-dev] BREACH: SSL is pwnd
by Eugen Leitl 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from Josh Steiner <josh(a)vitriolix.com> ----- Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2013 11:06:10 -0700 From: Josh Steiner <josh(a)vitriolix.com> To: Guardian Dev <guardian-dev(a)lists.mayfirst.org> Subject: [guardian-dev] BREACH: SSL is pwnd in summary, you need to turn off gzip to mitigate this for now: http://breachattack.com/ https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2013/aug/06/breach-and-django/ At last week's Black Hat conference, researchers announced the BREACH attack<http://breachattack.com/>, a new attack on web apps that can recover data even when secured with SSL connections. The BREACH paper<http://breachattack.com/resources/BREACH%20-%20SSL,%20gone%20in%2030%20seco…> (PDF) contains full details (and is a good and fairly easy read). Given what we know so far, we believe that *BREACH may be used to compromise Django's CSRF protection*. Thus, we're issuing this advisory so that our users can defend themselves. BREACH takes advantage of vulnerabilities when serving compressed data over SSL/TLS. Thus, to protect yourself from BREACH, you should disable compression of web responses. Depending on how your application is deployed, this could take a couple forms: 1. Disabling Django's GZip middleware<https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/middleware/#module-django.middlew…> . 2. Disabling GZip compression in your web server's config. For example, if you're using Apache you'd want to disable mod_deflate<http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_deflate.html>; in nginx you'd disable the gzip module<http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpGzipModule> . Additionally, you should make sure you disable TLS compression by adjusting your server's SSL ciphers<http://hynek.me/articles/hardening-your-web-servers-ssl-ciphers/> . We plan to take steps to address BREACH in Django itself, but in the meantime we recommend that all users of Django understand this vulnerability and take action if appropriate. Posted by *Jacob Kaplan-Moss* on August 6, 2013 _______________________________________________ Guardian-dev mailing list Post: Guardian-dev(a)lists.mayfirst.org List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/guardian-dev To Unsubscribe Send email to: Guardian-dev-unsubscribe(a)lists.mayfirst.org Or visit: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/options/guardian-dev/eugen%40leitl.org You are subscribed as: eugen(a)leitl.org ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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[zfs-discuss] Harddisk hacking - gain root in some bisare way
by Eugen Leitl 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

Potentially useful attack vector. ----- Forwarded message from Turbo Fredriksson <turbo(a)bayour.com> ----- Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2013 18:09:00 +0200 From: Turbo Fredriksson <turbo(a)bayour.com> To: zfs-discuss zfs-discuss <zfs-discuss(a)zfsonlinux.org> Subject: [zfs-discuss] Harddisk hacking - gain root in some bisare way X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.1283) Reply-To: zfs-discuss(a)zfsonlinux.org Just came across this, thought I'd share... http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack -- Turbo Fredriksson turbo(a)bayour.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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NSA 2013 Cryptologic History Symposium
by John Young 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_history/news/ind… The theme for the 2013 symposium, to be held on October 17-18 at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory's Kossiakoff Conference Center (just west of Laurel, Maryland) is "Technological Change and Cryptology: Meeting the Historical Challenges." The conference will include sessions on "A Tribute to Alan Turing," a "Roundtable on Cyber History," "Bletchley Park," "COMINT and the Civil War," "The Cryptologic Legacy of the Great War Era," "SIGINT and the Vietnam War Era," and "A Technological Advantage: Historical Perspectives on Cryptologic Research and Development." In all there will be 21 separate sessions and over 70 presentations. Speakers will include scholars such as David Kahn and cryptologic pioneers such as Whitfield Diffie. All symposium sessions are unclassified. A complete agenda and registration information will be available on this site in mid-August. For more information, please contact the Center for Cryptologic History at 301-688-2336 or via email at <mailto:history@nsa.gov>history(a)nsa.gov.

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Secrecy News -- 08/06/13
by Eugen Leitl 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from Steven Aftergood <saftergood(a)fas.org> ----- Date: Tue, 06 Aug 2013 06:48:11 -0700 From: Steven Aftergood <saftergood(a)fas.org> To: eugen(a)leitl.org Subject: Secrecy News -- 08/06/13 Reply-To: saftergood(a)fas.org X-Mailer-LID: 1 X-Mailer-RecptId: 399049 X-Mailer-SID: 1866 X-Mailer-Sent-By: 2 Format Note: If you cannot easily read the text below, or you prefer to receive Secrecy News in another format, please reply to this email to let us know. SECRECY NEWS from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy Volume 2013, Issue No. 72 August 6, 2013 Secrecy News Blog: http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/ ** MILITARY TESTS DATA MINING OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SPECIAL OPS ** U.S. TRADE POLICY, AND MORE FROM CRS MILITARY TESTS DATA MINING OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SPECIAL OPS The U.S. military has been investigating the use of sophisticated data mining tools to probe social media and other open sources in order to support military operations against money laundering, drug trafficking, terrorism and other threats. But the window for doing so may be closing as the social media landscape changes, according to an internal assessment. U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) National Capital Region (NCR) conducted a series of experiments over the past year under the rubric "QUANTUM LEAP" that was intended to test "non-traditional" tools and techniques to advance the SOCOM mission. An after-action report on the first experiment said it "was successful in identifying strategies and techniques for exploiting open sources of information, particularly social media, in support of a counter threat finance mission." Counter threat finance refers to efforts to disrupt an adversary's finances. A copy of the SOCOM NCR report was obtained by Secrecy News. See "Project QUANTUM LEAP: After Action Report," 12 September 2012: http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/quantum.pdf "Major lessons learned were the pronounced utility of social media in exploiting human networks, including networks in which individual members actively seek to limit their exposure to the internet and social media...," the report said. The QUANTUM LEAP project, which did not utilize classified intelligence, relied heavily on participation by private sector firms identified in the report, who demonstrated tools they had developed "to enhance the ability to discover relationships, human networks, and geospatial features" from open source data. A tool called Social Bubble permitted the search of Twitter-related content "to explore human networks associated with the [counter threat finance] scenario and enabled identification of various entities... associated with the moneylaundering network." A tool called Recon was used to reconstruct source documents from a raw data stream. Another tool served to "collect large quantities of data from the 'deep web', or sources which are accessible via the internet but not necessarily indexed or linked via a world wide web page." And another called Semantica "is capable of ingesting structured and semi-structured data and displaying it in a 'triplet' format, e.g. two entities and a relationship, such as [A is owned by B]." "More than 200 additional open-source tools and sources were identified relevant to counter threat finance," the SOCOM report said. The report said that as valuable as the opportunity created by new techniques for data mining of open sources appears to be, it may prove to be transient. "We are currently in a 'window' of opportunity for exploitation of social media sources for application to CTF [counter threat finance] or other SOCOM NCR missions. This window could be as narrow as 18-24 months before the social media phenomenon transforms. This future transformation is unknown and could offer additional opportunities, or existing opportunities could be closed, but the only thing that is certain is that there will continue to be rapid change." There are also unresolved legal issues. "Legal review of the appropriate use and application of social media data is in its infancy. Social media is transforming notions of privacy and distinctions between personally identifiable information (PII) and self-reported public information will have to be established by precedent in case law," the report said. "Almost all information relevant to the QUANTUM LEAP experiment has a locative context [revealing the location of the source]. Location based services (LBS) are becoming integrated into every facet of our lives and are becoming much more accepted. There is a cultural/generational component to acceptance of LBS in social media," the report said. SOCOM Public Affairs did not respond to requests for comment or further information about the project, and the report describing the effort (labeled "draft") has not been formally released. However, the report was kept unclassified, facilitating its dissemination and discussion among the interested public. Meanwhile, the future of SOCOM National Capital Region is itself uncertain, as Congress has thus far declined to authorize or appropriate funds that were requested for it in the coming fiscal year. "The Committee remains unclear about the function, purpose, and costs associated with the operations, infrastructure, and facilities for this entity [SOCOM National Capital Region] both in the interim phase and the final end-state," according to a June 2013 report of the House Appropriations Committee. "Further, the Committee has received conflicting information over the course of the last year as to the purpose of this entity." Project QUANTUM LEAP derives its name and inspiration from an initiative in the late 1990s to incorporate advanced technologies into Naval Special Warfare capabilities. That earlier Project QUANTUM LEAP was described in "Stimulating Innovation in Naval Special Warfare by Utilizing Small Working Groups" by Thomas A. Rainville, Master's Thesis, March 2001. http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/rainville.pdf U.S. TRADE POLICY, AND MORE FROM CRS New and newly updated Congressional Research Service reports that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following. Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) and the Role of Congress in Trade Policy, August 2, 2013: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33743.pdf Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) and Its Role in U.S. Trade Policy, August 5, 2013: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41922.pdf Trade Adjustment Assistance for Firms: Economic, Program, and Policy Issues, August 5, 2013: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS20210.pdf African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA): Background and Reauthorization, August 2, 2013: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R43173.pdf International Crises and Disasters: U.S. Humanitarian Assistance Response Mechanisms, August 1, 2013: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33769.pdf Chemical Facility Security: Issues and Options for the 113th Congress, August 2, 2013: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R42918.pdf Health Care for Veterans: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions, August 1, 2013: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42747.pdf The MF Global Bankruptcy, Missing Customer Funds, and Proposals for Reform, August 1, 2013: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42091.pdf _______________________________________________ Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists. The Secrecy News Blog is at: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/ To SUBSCRIBE to Secrecy News, go to: http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/subscribe/ To UNSUBSCRIBE, go to http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/unsubscribe/ OR email your request to saftergood(a)fas.org Secrecy News is archived at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/index.html Support the FAS Project on Government Secrecy with a donation: https://members.fas.org/donate _______________________ Steven Aftergood Project on Government Secrecy Federation of American Scientists web: www.fas.org/sgp/index.html email: saftergood(a)fas.org voice: (202) 454-4691 twitter: @saftergood ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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[silk] The Ecuadorian Library - Bruce Sterling
by Eugen Leitl 04 Aug '13

04 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from Vinayak Hegde <vinayakh(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2013 22:25:09 +0530 From: Vinayak Hegde <vinayakh(a)gmail.com> To: silklist(a)lists.hserus.net Subject: [silk] The Ecuadorian Library - Bruce Sterling Reply-To: silklist(a)lists.hserus.net Some money quotes from the article "Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock." and "Computers were invented as crypto-ware and spy-ware and control-ware. That’s what Alan Turing was all about. That’s where computing came from, that’s the scene’s original sin, and also its poisoned apple." Article by Bruce Sterling: https://medium.com/geek-empire-1/a1ebd2b4a0e5 ---- The Ecuadorian Library or, The Blast Shack After Three Years Back in distant, halcyon 2010, I was asked to write something about Wikileaks and its Cablegate scandal. So, I wrote a rather melancholy essay about how things seemed to me to be going — dreadfully, painfully, like some leaden and ancient Greek tragedy. In that 2010 essay, I surmised that things were going to get worse before they got any better. Sure enough, things now are lots, lots worse. Much worse than Cablegate ever was. Cablegate merely kicked the kneecap of the archaic and semi-useless US State Department. But Edward Snowden just strolled out of the Moscow airport, with his Wikileaks personal escort, one month after ripping the pants off the National Security Agency. You see, as it happens, a good half of my essay “The Blast Shack” was about the basic problem of the NSA. Here was the takeaway from that essay back in 2010: One minute’s thought would reveal that a vast, opaque electronic spy outfit like the National Security Agency is exceedingly dangerous to democracy. Really, it is. The NSA clearly violates all kinds of elementary principles of constitutional design. The NSA is the very antithesis of transparency, and accountability, and free elections, and free expression, and separation of powers ― in other words, the NSA is a kind of giant, grown-up, anti-Wikileaks. And it always has been. And we’re used to that. We pay no mind. Well, dear readers, nowadays we do pay that some mind. Yes, that was then, while this is now. So, I no longer feel that leaden discontent and those grave misgivings that I felt in 2010. The situation now is frankly exhilarating. It no longer has that look-and-feel of the Edgar Allen Poe House of Usher. This scene is straight outta Nikolai Gogol. This is the kind of comedic situation that Russians find hilarious. I mean, sure it’s plenty bad and all that, PRISM, XKeyScore, show trials, surveillance, threats to what’s left of journalism, sure, I get all that, I’m properly concerned. None of that stops it from being hilarious. Few geopolitical situations can ever give the Russians a full, free, rib-busting belly laugh. This one sure does. If Snowden had gotten things his own way, he’d be writing earnest op-ed editorials in Hong Kong now, in English, while dining on Kung Pao Chicken. It’s some darkly modern act of crooked fate that has directed Edward Snowden to Moscow, arriving there as the NSA’s Solzhenitsyn, the up-tempo, digital version of a conscience-driven dissident defector. But Snowden sure is a dissident defector, and boy is he ever. Americans don’t even know how to think about characters like Snowden — the American Great and the Good are blundering around on the public stage like blacked-out drunks, blithering self-contradictory rubbish. It’s all “gosh he’s such a liar” and “give us back our sinister felon,” all while trying to swat down the jets of South American presidents. These thumb-fingered acts of totalitarian comedy are entirely familiar to anybody who has read Russian literature. The pigs in Orwell’s “Animal Farm” have more suavity than the US government is demonstrating now. Their credibility is below zero. The Russians, by contrast, know all about dissidents like Snowden. The Russians have always had lots of Snowdens, heaps. They know that Snowden is one of these high-minded, conscience-stricken, act-on-principle characters who is a total pain in the ass. Modern Russia is run entirely by spies. It’s class rule by the “siloviki,” it’s Putin’s “managed democracy.” That’s the end game for civil society when elections mean little or nothing, and intelligence services own the media, and also the oil. And that’s groovy, sure, it’s working out for them. When you’re a professional spy hierarch, there are few things more annoying than these conscience-stricken Winston Smith characters, moodily scribbling in their notebooks, all about how there might be hope found in the proles somehow. They’re a drag. See, dissidence is like Andrei Sakharov. Such a useful guy, modest, soft-spoken, brainy, built you a hydrogen bomb. This eerie device straight from hell even works, so it’s all good. Then all of a sudden he’s like: you know what? The noble science of physics shouldn’t harm mankind! What kind of self-indulgent, fatuous gesture is that? Look here, Dr Labcoat: why was the public’s money given to you, if not to “harm mankind”? If physics was harmless, you wouldn’t have a damn salary! That’s what life feels like for the NSA right now. That is the shoe Snowden laced on their foot. If you’re NSA, as so many thousands are, you’ve known from the get-go that the planet’s wires and cables are a weapon of mass surveillance. Because that is their inherent purpose! You can’t get all conflicted, and start whining that Internet users are citizens of some place or other! That is not the point at all! Citizens and rights have nothing to do with elite, covert technologies! The targets of surveillance are oblivious dorks, they’re not even newbies! Even US Senators are decorative objects for the NSA. An American Senator knows as much about PRISM and XKeyScore as a troll-doll on the dashboard knows about internal combustion. So, yes, the wry and mordant humor here has not escaped me. But let’s change perspective a bit. Yes, some time has passed, and the smoke of 2010 has lifted from the scene. The cypherpunk blast shack was blown to smithereens for good and all. It’s now clear that the NSA has created its own dissidents. The closer they get to the actual living fully functional NSA, the bigger, and hairier, and more consequential these dissidents are. First let’s consider Bradley Manning, who is not at all close to the NSA. Bradley was a bored and upset minor military technician who burned a zillion US documents onto a DVD, and labeled that “Lady Gaga.” The authorities finally got around to convicting Bradley this week, of some randomized set of largely irrelevant charges. But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high. At least they didn’t manage to kill him. Bradley’s visibly still on his feet, and was not so maddened by the torment of his solitary confinement that he’s reduced to paste. So he’s going to jail as an anti-war martyr, but time will pass. Someday, some new entity, someone in power who’s not directly embarrassed by Cablegate, can pardon him. Some future Administration can amnesty him, once they get around to admitting that Bradley’s War on Terror is history. The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed. There’s terror all over the sands now, terror from Mali to Xinjiang, and a billion tender-hearted Bradleys couldn’t stop that bleeding, no matter how much they leak. Thanks to the modern miracle of fracking, though, the mayhem in the oil patch means a lot less to K Street. Someday, Bradley Manning will be as forgotten to them as Monica Lewinsky is. Then they’ll yield to the hornet-like, persistent buzz of the leftie peaceniks, and let Bradley go. He’s not dangerous. Bradley Manning will never do anything of similar consequence again. He’s not a power player. He’s a prisoner of conscience. However, unlike poor Monica Lewinsky, Bradley Manning will never lack for passionate adherents who admire him and love him. Before Bradley went into his ugly maelstrom, he didn’t have that. Nowadays, he does. Maybe it’s worth it. Then there’s Julian Assange. Yeah, him, the silver-haired devil, the Mycroft Holmes of the Ecuadorian Embassy. Bradley Manning’s not at all NSA material, he’s just a leaky clerk with a thumb-drive. But Julian’s quite a lot closer to the NSA — because he’s a career cypherpunk. If you’re a typical NSA geek, and you stare in all due horror at Julian, it’s impossible not to recognize him as one of your own breed. He’s got the math fixation, the stilted speech, the thousand-yard-stare, and even the private idiolect that somehow allows NSA guys to make up their own vocabulary whenever addressing Congress (who don’t matter) and haranguing black-hat hacker security conventions (who obviously do). Julian has turned out to be a Tim Leary at the NSA’s psychiatric convention. He’s a lasting embarrassment who also spiked their Kool-Aid. Crushing Julian, cutting his funding, that stuff didn’t help one bit. He’s still got a roof and a keyboard. That’s all he ever seems to need. There’s nothing quite like a besieged embassy from which to mock the empty machinations of the vengeful yet hapless State Department. House arrest has also helped Julian with this obscure struggle he has, not to fling himself headlong onto Swedish feminists. The ruthless confinement has calmed him; it’s helped him to focus. He’s grown and matured through ardent political struggle. Julian Assange is still a cranky extremist with a wacky digital ideology, but he doesn’t have to talk raw craziness any more, because the authorities are busy doing that for him. They can’t begin to discuss PRISM and XKeyScore without admitting that their alleged democratic process is a neon façade from LaLaLand. Instead, they’re forced to wander into a dizzying area of discourse where Julian staked out all the high points ten years ago. More astonishing yet: this guy Assange, and his tiny corps of hacker myrmidons, actually managed to keep Edward Snowden out of US custody. Not only did Assange find an effective bolthole for himself, he also faked one up on the fly for this younger guy. Assange liberated Snowden, who really is NSA, or rather a civilian outsourced contractor for the NSA, like there’s any practical difference. It’s incredible to me that, among the eight zillion civil society groups on the planet that hate and fear spooks and police spies, not one of them could offer Snowden one shred of practical help, except for Wikileaks. This valiant service came from Julian Assange, a dude who can’t even pack his own suitcase without having a fit. I wouldn’t ever have picked Assange as a travel agent, but then just look at the fellow-travellers — the solemn signatories of the recent “International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance.” I’ll toss a few in as an ideological bloc here, just to memorialize their high-minded indignation. SIGNATORIES 7iber (Amman, Jordan), Access (International), Africa Platform for Social Protection – APSP (Africa), AGEIA Densi (Argentina), Agentura.ru (Russia), Aktion Freiheit statt Angst (Germany), All India Peoples Science Network (India), Alternatif Bilişim Derneği (Alternatif Bilişim) – Turkey (Turkey), Alternative Law Forum (India), Article 19 (International), ASL19 (Canada/Iran), Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia – ACIJ (Argentina), Asociación de Internautas Spain (Spain), Asociación Paraguaya De Derecho Informático Y Tecnológico – APADIT (Paraguay), Asociación por los Derechos Civiles – ADC (Argentina), Aspiration (United States), Associação Brasileira de Centros de inclusão Digital – ABCID (Brasil), Associació Pangea Coordinadora Comunicació per a la Cooperació (Spain), Association for Progressive Communications – APC (International), Association for Technology and Internet – APTI (Romania), Association of Community Internet Center – APWKomitel (Indonesia), Australia Privacy Foundation – APF (Australia), Bahrain Center for Human Rights (Bahrain), Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communication – BNNRC (Bangladesh), Big Brother Watch (United Kingdom), Bits of Freedom (Netherlands), Bolo Bhi (Pakistan), Brasilian Institute for Consumer Defense – IDEC, (Brasil), British Columbia Civil Liberties Association – BCCLA (Canada) Bytes for All (Pakistan)… Just look at them all, and that’s just the A’s and B’s… Obviously, a planetary host of actively concerned and politically connected people. Among this buzzing horde of eager online activists from a swarm of nations, what did any of them actually do for Snowden? Nothing. Before Snowden showed up from a red-eye flight from Hawaii, did they have the least idea what was actually going on with the hardware of their beloved Internet? Not a clue. They’ve been living in a pitiful dream world where their imaginary rule of law applies to an electronic frontier — a frontier being, by definition, a place that never had any laws. The civil lib contingent here looks, if anything, even stupider than the US Senate Intelligence Oversight contingent — who have at least been paying lavishly to fund the NSA, and to invent a pet surveillance court for it, with secret laws. That silly Potemkin mechanism — it’s like a cardboard steering wheel in the cockpit of a Predator drone. While Julian Assange, to do him credit, has the street smarts to behave as if he’s in a situation of feral realpolitik. Because he is. And how. However, Assange now knows that. He’s a hardened veteran of it. And he’s gonna stay imperiled for the immediate future, because the upshot of this is pretty easy to see. The inconvenient truth about the NSA is lying there on a table in the Ecuadorian Embassy, as stark as a poisoned crow. But it’ll join our planet’s many other inconvenient truths. Snowden told the truth to the public — but then again, so did Solzhenitsyn, and even Al Gore lets on sometimes. The truth doesn’t do the trick for anybody, the truth is just a complicating factor. The present geopolitical situation is absolutely cluttered with amazing lies that didn’t work out for their owners. The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction never existed. Climate change does exist, and could drown Wall Street any day now. The abject state of global finance is obvious, yet it makes no difference to the ongoing depredations. Drones are stark assassination machines, and they don’t stay classified. Anyone could go on. And, yeah, by the way, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Google et al, they are all the blood brothers of Huawei in China — because they are intelligence assets posing as commercial operations. They are surveillance marketers. They give you free stuff in order to spy on you and pass that info along the value chain. Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock. Even the NSA is humiliated by the billowing clouds of ongoing pretense. Why pick on the NSA, anyway? They’re quiet professionals, well-trained, well-educated, they’re discreet. NSA guys don’t even know what the guy in the next NSA office is doing. So, who made the NSA the scaly Godzilla, besides one loose civilian contractor who ran off to Hong Kong? What about the National Reconnaissance Office? The NRO never gets outed for their gorgon-stare cameras that can pick out the font on any license plate, anywhere from pole to pole. What about all the other national cyberwar players, like the Chinese units, methodically spearphishing every Microsoft vuln on the planet? What about those truly ferocious coders who wrote Stuxnet, burned up Iranian atomic factories with raw malware, and who have never been glimpsed since? They’re a hundred times scarier than the kindly and gentlemanly NSA. But can the NSA speak up for themselves, by leveling with the stakeholders about what really goes on, in the NSA’s actual, lived experience? Nope. Not even. Before Snowden, their mouths were duct-taped; after Snowden, it’ll be duct-tape, plus handcuffs and electronic ankle bracelets. So, the truth is out there, but nobody’s gonna clean up all that falsehood. There is no visible way to make a clean break with the gigantic, ongoing institutional deceits. There’s no mechanism by which any such honesty could be imposed. It’s like reforming polygamy in the Ottoman Empire. Even if the proles rise up in a wave, busily Twittering away, you’re gonna get an Arab Spring, followed by a regretful military coup once people figure out that networks just aren’t governments. Even the electronic civil lib contingent is lying to themselves. They’re sore and indignant now, mostly because they weren’t consulted — but if the NSA released PRISM as a 99-cent Google Android app, they’d be all over it. Because they are electronic first, and civil as a very distant second. They’d be utterly thrilled to have the NSA’s vast technical power at their own command. They’d never piously set that technical capacity aside, just because of some elderly declaration of universal human rights from 1947. If the NSA released their heaps of prying spycode as open-source code, Silicon Valley would be all over that, instantly. They’d put a kid-friendly graphic front-end on it. They’d port it right into the cloud. Computers were invented as crypto-ware and spy-ware and control-ware. That’s what Alan Turing was all about. That’s where computing came from, that’s the scene’s original sin, and also its poisoned apple. There’s not a coherent force on Earth that wants to cork up that bottle. They all just want another slug out of that bottle — and they’d rather like to paste their own personal, prestige label onto the bottle’s glass. You know, like your own attractive face, pasted on the humming planetary big iron of Facebook. Digital, globalized societies — where capital and information moves, and where labor and human flesh doesn’t move — they behave like this. That is what we are witnessing and experiencing. It’s weird because we are weird. We’re half actual and half digital now. We’re like the squirming brood of a tiger mated to a shark. You can tell that Manning, Assange and Snowden are all the same kind of irritant, because, somehow, amazingly, the planet’s response is to physically squish them. They’re all online big-time, and their digital shadow is huge, so the response is just to squeeze their mortal human bodies, literally, legally, extra-legally, by whatever means becomes available. It’s a wrestling match of virtuality and actuality, an irruption of the physical into the digital. It’s all about Bradley shivering naked in his solitary cage, and Julian diligently typing in his book-lined closet at the embassy, and Ed bagging out behind the plastic seating of some airport, in a jetlag fit of black globalization that went on for a solid month. And, those tiny, confined, somehow united spaces are the moral high ground. That’s where it is right now, that’s what it looks like these days. You can see that in the recent epic photo of Richard Stallman — the Saint Francis of Free Software, the kind of raw crank who preaches to birds and wanders the planet shoeless – shoulder-to-shoulder with an unshaven Assange, sporting his manly work shirt. The two of them, jointly holding up a little propaganda pic of Edward Snowden. They have the beatific look of righteousness rewarded. Che Guevara in his starred beret had more self-doubt than these guys. They are thrilled with themselves. People, you couldn’t trust any of these three guys to go down to the corner grocery for a pack of cigarettes. Stallman would bring you tiny peat-pots of baby tobacco plants, then tell you to grow your own. Assange would buy the cigarettes, but smoke them all himself while coding up something unworkable. And Ed would set fire to himself, to prove to an innocent mankind that tobacco is a monstrous and cancerous evil that must be exposed at all costs. And yet the three of them together, they look just amazing. They are fantastic figures, like the promise of otherworldly aid from a superhero comic. They are visibly stronger than they’ve ever been before. They have the initiative in a world afflicted with comprehensive helplessness. And there’s more coming. Lots, lots more. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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[tor-dev] augmenting RSA identities/signatures with ECC and beyond
by Eugen Leitl 04 Aug '13

04 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from Jacob Appelbaum <jacob(a)appelbaum.net> ----- Date: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 01:29:45 +0000 From: Jacob Appelbaum <jacob(a)appelbaum.net> To: tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org Subject: [tor-dev] augmenting RSA identities/signatures with ECC and beyond Reply-To: tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org Hi, Linus and I had an interesting discussion at IETF 87 this past week in Berlin. We're both concerned about long term Directory Authority identity keys as well consensus signing with RSA keys. We've agreed that we're interested in writing a proposal whereby we add additional identity keys for authorities. Thus, we'll have whatever security may be provided by RSA and the security that should be provided by ECC signatures. The work on ntor should directly assist us in having almost all the required crypto we'll need for such augmentation. I tend to think that every directory authority should generate an additional and new long term ECC identity key. This will require that tor-gencert is extended to understand both ECC and RSA. We'll want to add these fingerprints to src/or/config.c for each respective DA. We'll want each directory authority to sign with both RSA and ECC. We'll also want to extend the consensus format to handle publication of such signatures. Older clients should be able to parse the consensus without worry and they will check RSA signatures as always. Newer clients should check both and report a mismatch into the logs at a high level. When combined with ntor, I believe that we will have significantly improved the cryptography in Tor. It would be nice to be able to add other signature schemes - specifically for pq crypto related undertakings. In an ideal world, I'd like to be able to sign the consensus from my directory authority with RSA, ECC and some kind of djb approved, tanja tested post-quantum computer signature construct. What do you think we should consider as we draft this proposal? All the best, Jacob _______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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[tor-dev] Damian's Status Report - July 2013
by Eugen Leitl 04 Aug '13

04 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from Damian Johnson <atagar(a)torproject.org> ----- Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2013 16:16:31 -0700 From: Damian Johnson <atagar(a)torproject.org> To: tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org, tor-reports(a)lists.torproject.org Subject: [tor-dev] Damian's Status Report - July 2013 Reply-To: tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org Hi all. This month was mostly spent on non-tor work including a server migration, bad service outage at work, and a full week of cleaning my apartment. Still, plenty of spiffy news in stem land... ====================================================================== Remote Descriptor Fetching ====================================================================== Major feature for this month was the addition of a module to remotely fetch tor descriptors... https://stem.torproject.org/api/descriptor/remote.html https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-July/005156.html This works much like tor itself does, downloading descriptor content from directory authorities and mirrors. With it we can now easily script against the present state of the tor network without piggybacking on a live tor instance. Curious what you can use it for? See our present monitors for some ideas... https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-July/005209.html https://gitweb.torproject.org/atagar/tor-utils.git/tree This also included a little work with Nick on the spec and tor side... * Dropped the unimplemented microdescriptor query from the spec. (#9271) * Noting the max queryable fingerprints/hashes in spec. (#9282) * We're getting a high failure rate on the downloads we make. A little more investigation is needed on my part to help narrow this down. (#9379) ====================================================================== Other news includes... * Revised the appearance of stem's frontpage. The blue buttons were pretty jarring, so switched to something that matches the rest of the page... http://www.atagar.com/transfer/stem_frontpage/before.png http://www.atagar.com/transfer/stem_frontpage/after.png * Added Slackware to our download page. Many thanks to Markus for adding us to SlackBuilds! http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.0/python/stem/ * Worked with Sreenatha to port Tor Weather to stem. Unfortunately Weather does not presently have an active maintainer so I'm not sure how we will proceed on this front. (#8264) https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-July/005111.html * The Munich dev meeting has attracted quite a few potential volunteers. After discussing prospective projects with seros I tidied up our volunteer page. Changes included... * Added Christian's Globe project https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-commits/2013-August/060124.html * Dropped Thandy https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-commits/2013-July/059830.html * Merged TorStatus into the entry for Atlas https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-commits/2013-July/060003.html * General page corrections https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-commits/2013-August/060125.html * Our automated Jenkins test runs ran into another regression in tor that caused it to segfault. (#9298) * STREAM events mishandled IPv6 addresses. (caught and patched by soult, #9181) * Thread with Pierre about TorPylle which turned into a discussion with Nick regarding future language direction for the tor codebase. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes! https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-July/005161.html * We just finished with midterms for Google Summer of Code. Chang unfortunately did not pass, but the other projects are going well. * Sorted out travel arrangements for the GSoC mentor summit. Nick and I will be going, and Moritz is presently on the waitlist. * Code reviewed ra's rttprober. He provided some great feedback for which I still owe him a reply. https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-July/005183.html Cheers! -Damian _______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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Re: [liberationtech] LeastAuthority.com announces a Spy-Proof Storage Service
by Eugen Leitl 04 Aug '13

04 Aug '13

----- Forwarded message from Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn <zookozot(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2013 00:44:58 -0700 From: Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn <zookozot(a)gmail.com> To: liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu Subject: Re: [liberationtech] LeastAuthority.com announces a Spy-Proof Storage Service Reply-To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> Hello again, people of liberationtech. Nobody replied to my missive. Perhaps it was Too Long; Didn't Read! But I wanted to mention to you that I subsequently talked to some young programmers at DefCon. I told them that my claim is that LeastAuthority.com's S4 is proof against PRISM-style indiscriminate surveillance, but not proof against targeted surveillance. They suggested: why not call it “PRISM-proof” then? Good idea! I might do that. Regards, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn Founder, CEO, and Customer Support Representative https://LeastAuthority.com -- Liberationtech list is public and archives are searchable on Google. Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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