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re: Love and Math...KEA/Firefly is mod. DH-ElGamal i think...
by Joseph Tag 26 Oct '13

26 Oct '13

In reviewing old issues of ACM-SIGSAC, ACM-SIGCOMM, and ACM-SIGACT (more likely ACM-SIGCOMM ) I have seen discussion of encryption protocols for networks; especially in reference to Motorola's Network Encryption System "mail-guard / router" and also reference to key-exhange for that and the then currrent STU-III . Best wishes to all . On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 12:00 PM, <cypherpunks-request(a)cpunks.org> wrote: > Send cypherpunks mailing list submissions to > cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://cpunks.org/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > cypherpunks-request(a)cpunks.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > cypherpunks-owner(a)cpunks.org > > > 1. Re: [ExI] chilling effects (James A. Donald) > 2. Love and Math Reviewed by NY Times (John Young) > 3. Re: [ExI] chilling effects (Kelly John Rose) > 4. NSA, Love and Math 2 (John Young) > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 4 > Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 11:01:41 -0400 > From: John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> > To: cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org, cryptome(a)freelists.org > Subject: NSA, Love and Math 2 > Message-ID: <E1Va5M1-0008Gn-DZ(a)elasmtp-spurfowl.atl.sa.earthlink.net> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed > > Brian Carroll has been exploring these possibilities since 1999: > > http://cryptome.org/jya/arch-elec.htm > > > http://org.noemalab.eu/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/pdf/b_carroll_seeing_c… > > > > > ------------------------------ > > Subject: Digest Footer > > _______________________________________________ > cypherpunks mailing list > cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org > https://cpunks.org/mailman/listinfo/cypherpunks > > > ------------------------------ > > End of cypherpunks Digest, Vol 4, Issue 94 > ****************************************** >

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Re: Undernet IPv6 Interop [was: Enigmabox/cjdns]
by grarpamp 26 Oct '13

26 Oct '13

Forwarded with permission. ---------- On 10/24/2013 02:35 PM, grarpamp wrote: > On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen(a)leitl.org> wrote: >> ----- Forwarded message from Caleb James DeLisle <cjd(a)hyperboria.ca> ----- > >> I'm not really worried about what the IETF has to say > > Nor am I really, even to the point of stealing an unused external > IPv6/3 since it is unlikely all of them will ever be allocated. My > thoughts are more about what I outlined in the last two paragraphs... > that things like the userbase draw of existing applications, inclusive > multihosting and participation in more than one net easily at the > same time (whether general purpose IP transport, or specfic like > file storage [1])... can and do matter. The simplest way I've seen > yet that covers those areas is an internal IPv6 layer presented on > the host's tunnel interfaces. So what are some means we can make > to fit a world's population worth of users, out of much larger > crypto keyspaces, into about 115 bits? > > [1] Imagine a link in a web page, file://<IPv6>/<internal_file_key>, > where <IPv6> is just a point-to-point tunnel bound to a particular > filestore like GNUnet, ed2k, tahoe, etc. > >> at some point I'll probably add an option to use IPv4 for cjdns too. >> Applications won't even have to support IPv6 to support cjdns. > > Keeping in mind that people need to be clear when/what they are referring to: > - external addressing, used by the host/net on the public internet (IPv6, IPv4) > - internal addressing, the user facing overlay addresses (IPv6, onion, i2p, etc) > - maplayer addressing, map between crypto widths to narrower internal addressing > > Why would anyone want to use IPv4 internally? It's only 32 bits, > easy to generate/spoof a crypto based address collision. And only > a handful of its tiny /8's (ie: 10/8, 16M users/nodes) could be > used on a host's tunnel interface that would not conflict with > external addressing. Further, every OS, and most applications users > want to use, are already IPv6 enabled, such that using them with > internal IPv6 addressing via the host's tunnel interface to that > is not a problem. > >> When you do a DNS lookup for a site it will allocate an address >> for that machine out of whatever block you choose. > > Please rephrase. > What allocation method, from what address space (v6, v4), and for > residence on the external or internal network? Via what interface? > DNS lookup to external or internal DNS server? And for an internal > or external site? IPv4 in cjdns is actually really easy, you just need a mapping table inside of the node. Say you put in your configuration that 11.0.0.0/8 is for mapping. Cjdns will assign 11.0.0.1/8 to your TUN device then whenever you do a DNS lookup, it grabs the next number in the sequence and maps that to the key which is returned by the lookup. It could also map addresses to incoming connections from previously unseen keys allowing you to be a server too. It just breaks p2p stuff which shares IP addresses. This same idea could be used to map any number of different networks into a common IPv6 (or IPv4) address space. > I do see FC00::/8 addresses returned from queries to external > nameservers. Leaking that activity externally can be unwise, so if > a DNS for internal addresses is needed it should be run internally. It's on the todo list. Not because we're trying to keep secrets or prevent web crawlers from firing syn packets off into ISP null routes but because the public domain system is expensive and an SPOF. > >> As far as address generation speed, the address is a double-sha-512 >> of your public key so it's extremely fast. > > Ok, so a few seconds to generate 8 matching bits (into FC00::/8)? On small hardware yes, on my laptop it feels instantanious. > >> Anything less than 128 >> bits (you're forced to collide the last 8 bits) would be dangerous. >> I'm sure we could have decided to limit valid keys to a fixed 16 >> bits or maybe even 24 but 48 bits would be quite unreasonable to >> expect of small devices. > > I think this is in reply to one of the possible means to fit within > a compatible IPv6 bit width. I think Eugens' forwarding style may > have lost me some context there :) Not sure where to place this or > how to read it. > > We're used to disliking anything less than 128 bits for symmetric > (streams, message encryption, etc). But for network ID's there's > probably a reasonable case to be made for using somewhat less than > that... you should use TLS, message encryption, fingerprints and > other means over any network anyways, just in case something breaks. The IPv6 address is effectively the key fingerprint because x509 is a mistake the world should never make again and colliding an IPv6 gives you spoofing ability as well as MiTM. > > For reference, the five nets I referred to are: > cjdns, i2p (garlicat), tor (onioncat), anonet, phantom > Maybe there's a GNUnet interface in the works but I've not seen it > yet. I'm going to sound like an asshole here, probably because I am.. but every one of those systems with the exception of cjdns is heavily geared toward anonymity, privacy, freedom and individualism. Cjdns is designed to facilitate community and I've found the most divisive, manipulative and egomaniacal people ever to grace the Hyperboria community subscribed to just those values. At this point when I hear TOR user, I think "oh shit another one" so while it's not really my right to intentionally break valid use cases, I'm not feeling like putting a lot of effort into making interop work. Thanks, Caleb BTW: it looks like the IPv4 mapping idea I proposed might come sooner than I thought because Apple seems to have broken IPv6 support in Mavericks update. ----------

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Re: <nettime> John Naughton: Edward Snowden: public indifference is the real
by august 26 Oct '13

26 Oct '13

> Original to: > http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/public-indifference-nsa-snowde… > > > John Naughton > The Observer, Sunday 20 October 2013 > > Edward Snowden: public indifference is the real enemy in the NSA affair > > Most people don't seem to worry that government agencies are collecting > their personal data. Is it ignorance or apathy? ... Interesting article. Thanks for posting. Is there a real reason to be more worried that the government agencies are collecting personal data when equally or more powerful institutions such as Google, Apple, and Facebook (who are lacking almost completely in any publicly democratic structure or input) are the main arbiters of this kind of actuarial surveillance? Not really, I think. Is there a real technical reason to have the kind of private centralized electronic communication spaces on the WWW that have been carved out of the decentralized and public internet by 'industry'. No, not really, I think. But, do we see the 'professional peers' or academics (who previously built the internet up and until the web) stepping up? Not really. What's more is, the people who really need to keep their data or conversations a secret from the US government - I don't know say Angela Merkel, drug dealers, paedophiles, journalists, activists, etc - should learn to use the existing tools to do so. The smart ones do already. But, do we see normal users turning to the existing alternative communication spaces and tools (that are often less-convenient or require more of users)? No, not really. Even so, I don't think it is really important that individuals are targeted or perhaps even marketed. That would be a policy issue. The collection of the data _by private parties_ is itself is the danger - turning data into private property into information into power. I really see a long road ahead. Unless users decide, as some have suggested, that they can cope ( they don't care, or decide that knowing what's going on is good enough to set them free?), the only way forward that I see is to build a public infrastructure (like public schools, public highways, public parks etc). That is, if I am not mistaken, the exact challenge that the internet engineering task force met when they circumvented the closed gardens of the old telcos. The current challenge, however, is first cultural, economic and political, then technical. Unless we can set aside some institutional support to build public electronic infrastructures that cater to users without the data surveillance and without major pressure from industry (again, like the internet), then we won't even get a chance to meet the technical challenge. Under current cultural momentum, this is unlikely to happen at the government or the University level (like it did with the Internet). Nor is it likely in the so-called free-market. This is not to say that the technical challenge is not great. It is. The WWW, where the vast majority of online communication happens and where these centralized vortexes have been established, is _worlds_ more complex than the internet that provides its transport. I'm not talking about the protocols and standards - which now that 2 of the 3 major browser vendors are free software - is mostly irrelevant. I'm talking about the entire space of the WWW: the software, data stores, API's, etc. Getting user data out of these private centralized networks is not just an engineering problem. -august. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)kein.org

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Re: [Cryptography] programable computers inside our computers
by =JeffH 25 Oct '13

25 Oct '13

Quoting Viktor Dukhovni (2013-10-22 06:50:38) > I am much more concerned about the proliferation of miniature programmable > computers inside our computers (CPUs and programmable firmware in disk > controllers, battery controllers, BMC controllers, with opaque binary firmware > update blobs, and complex supply chains) that about secp256r1 vs secp521r1. > > We thought embedded devices were for physical infrastructure > engineers to worry about, but now they are proliferating inside > our general purpose computers. The next Stuxnet will run on one > of the invisible computers inside your computer. E.g.: Dragos Ruiu: More on my ongoing chase of #badBIOS malware. https://plus.google.com/103470457057356043365/posts/9fyh5R9v2Ga #badBIOS on G+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/%23badBIOS #BADBIOS (AND LOTSA PARANOIA, PLUS FIREWORKS) http://kabelmast.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/badbios-and-lotsa-paranoia-plus-f… Persistent BIOS malware with hypervisor and SDR found http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=354463 --- end _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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Gentlemen do not read each other's mail...
by Jim Bell 25 Oct '13

25 Oct '13

Germany Summons U.S. Ambassador Over Merkel Phone Tapping Claim ________________________________ Top News: German authorities summoned the U.S. ambassador Thursday to demand a full explanation for claims that the United States had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone, an allegation that has sparked deep outrage in Germany and revived uncomfortable memories of the extensive intelligence apparatus of East Germany. On Wednesday, Merkel called President Obama to air out her concerns about the allegations and received a promise that the United States is not monitoring her calls and will not do so in the future. That assurance, however, did not adress whether the United States had in fact monitored Merkel's calls in the past. Merkel's spokesman said the chancellor "views such practices... as completely unacceptable." "Among close friends and partners, as the Federal Republic of Germany and the US have been for decades, there should be no such monitoring of the communications of a head of government," Steffen Seibert, the spokesman, said in a statement. According to White House spokesman Jay Carney, the United States "is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor." Wednesday's phone call was the second time in 48 hours that the president found himself on the phone with a European leader furious with America's intelligence agencies. Earlier in the week, Obama found himself on the phone with French President Francois Hollande after allegations surfaced that the National Security Agency had collected French phone calls on a massive scale. http://us-mg6.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch?.rand=d9jl53r3e8hhl#

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Re: True necessity of Records? [was: CryptoSeal]
by Ulex Europae 25 Oct '13

25 Oct '13

At 01:53 PM 10/24/2013, coderman wrote: >On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 10:21 PM, grarpamp <grarpamp(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > ... > > There's no reason to hold CDR's more than the last fully paid billing > > cycle, and, yes, further limited by the type of calling plan you have. ... >this had the convenient effect of masking the origin of a caller >through our network. Which makes it no different from how telephone networks worked for decades, in the pre-Caller ID dayze. > needless to say, we were strongly encouraged to >keep all CDR records for years, precisely because some many months >later a request would come in asking for the calling party information >associated with one of these outbound legs. Time was, users were encouraged to contact the phone company immediately after receiving prank, etc., calls. There is still no legitimate reason to retain that data more than 90 days, if that long. Make it available to the individual users and it is their responsibility to keep it, if they want it. Feds stymied by that? It's because the victim on behalf of whom they want to prosecute didn't keep records. Oops.

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<nettime> John Naughton: Edward Snowden: public indifference is the real
by Patrice Riemens 25 Oct '13

25 Oct '13

Original to: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/public-indifference-nsa-snowde… John Naughton The Observer, Sunday 20 October 2013 Edward Snowden: public indifference is the real enemy in the NSA affair Most people don't seem to worry that government agencies are collecting their personal data. Is it ignorance or apathy? One of the most disturbing aspects of the public response to Edward Snowden's revelations about the scale of governmental surveillance is how little public disquiet there appears to be about it. A recent YouGov poll, for example, asked respondents whether the British security services have too many or too few powers to carry out surveillance on ordinary people. Forty-two per cent said that they thought the balance was "about right" and a further 22% thought that the security services did not have enough powers. In another question, respondents were asked whether they thought Snowden's revelations were a good or a bad thing; 43% thought they were bad and only 35% thought they were good. Writing in these pages a few weeks ago, Henry Porter expressed his own frustration at this public complacency. "Today, apparently," he wrote, "we are at ease with a system of near total intrusion that would have horrified every adult Briton 25 years ago. Back then, western spies acknowledged the importance of freedom by honouring the survivors of those networks; now, they spy on their own people. We have changed, that is obvious, and, to be honest, I wonder whether I, and others who care about privacy and freedom, have been left behind by societies that accept surveillance as a part of the sophisticated world we live in." I share Henry's bafflement. At one point I thought that the level of public complacency about the revelations was a reflection simply of ignorance. After all, most people who use the internet and mobile phones have no idea about how any of this stuff works and so may be naive about the implications of state agencies being able to scoop up everybody's email metadata, call logs, click streams, friendship networks and so on. But what is, in a way, more alarming is how relaxed many of my professional peers seem to be about it. Many of them are people who do understand how the stuff works. To them, Snowden's revelations probably just confirm what they had kind of suspected all along. And yet the discovery that in less than three decades our societies have achieved Orwellian levels of surveillance provokes, at most, a wry smile or a resigned shrug. And it is this level of passive acceptance that I find really scary. What's even more alarming is that the one group of professionals who really ought to be alert to the danger are journalists. After all, these are the people who define news as "something that someone powerful does not want published", who pride themselves on "holding government to account" or sometimes, when they've had a few drinks, on "speaking truth to power". And yet, in their reactions to the rolling scoops published by the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, many of them seem to have succumbed either to a weird kind of spiteful envy, or to a desire to act as the unpaid stenographers to the security services and their political masters. We've seen this before, of course, notably in the visceral hatred directed towards WikiLeaks by the mainstream media in both this country and the US. As I read the vitriol being heaped on Julian Assange, I wondered how the press would have reacted if Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning had handed his CD downloads to the editor of the Des Moines Register who had then published them. Would that editor have been lauded as a champion of freedom, or vilified as a traitor warranting summary assassination? Last week in the US, we saw a welcome sign that some people in journalism have woken up to the existential threat posed by the NSA to their profession and, by implication, to political freedom. A group of scholars, journalists and researchers from Columbia Journalism School and the MIT Centre for Civic Media submitted a thoughtful paper on "the effects of mass surveillance on the practice of journalism" to the Review Group on Intelligence and Communication Technologies convened by President Obama. It's a longish (15-page) submission that is worth reading in full. It argues that what the NSA is doing is "incompatible with the existing law and policy protecting the confidentiality of journalist-source communications", that this is not merely an incompatibility in spirit, "but a series of specific and serious discrepancies between the activities of the intelligence community and existing law, policy, and practice in the rest of the government" and most importantly that the climate of secrecy around mass surveillance is actively harmful to journalism, because "sources cannot know when they might be monitored, or how intercepted information might be used against them". In which case, what happens to the freedom that the NSA is supposedly defending? # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)kein.org

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[cryptome] snaps
by taxakis 25 Oct '13

25 Oct '13

A (relatively easy to understand) primer on elliptic curve cryptography Nick Sullivan http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/a-relatively-easy-to-understand-prim er-on-elliptic-curve-cryptography/ How I compiled TrueCrypt 7.1a for Win32 and matched the official binaries https://madiba.encs.concordia.ca/~x_decarn/truecrypt-binaries-analysis/ Hackers compromise official PHP website, infect visitors with malware (updated) http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/hackers-compromise-official-php-webs ite-infect-visitors-with-malware/ Coffee time: Former NSA chief learns the other side of eavesdropping thanks to a Twitter user / Brian Fung http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/former-nsa-chief-learns-the-ot her-side-of-eavesdropping-thanks-to-a-twitter-user/2013/10/24/0c3aa440-3d03- 11e3-b7ba-503fb5822c3e_story.html For your lunch break perhaps: Agency Initiative Will Focus on Advancing Deep Brain Stimulation http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/science/pentagon-agency-to-spend-70-millio n-on-brain-research.html?_r=0

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True necessity of Records? [was: CryptoSeal]
by grarpamp 25 Oct '13

25 Oct '13

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 10:49 PM, Jim Bell <jamesdbell8(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > My (Bell's) comments follow: > A phone company which announces that it WILL NOT record phone metadata Would get my business. Of course many such policies are full of holes and drift anyway. > Why not x-out the last 3-4-7 digits... There's no reason to hold CDR's more than the last fully paid billing cycle, and, yes, further limited by the type of calling plan you have. And if you believe ''exigency' is some last remaining reason to hold them, try calling in a gunfight to 911 and see how long it takes for them to come scrape up your already dead bits. Same for 'threats', unless you're prepared to hire people to keep watch. No more than a week would be necessary, 30 days if you're slow to make the call. > and that phone > company was beholden to the government rather than any individual customer, > now phone companies have a legitimate motivation to compete on the issue of > metadata privacy. Of course instead of fighting back and just dropping their records which they could do tomorrow (to the extent there is no affirmative law that requires keeping), all we see are these big co's 'begging' the gov if they can publish subpoena statistics. Bunch of sheep and fishy practices. Also try to match up recent whitepapers listing retention/LEA periods of major telecoms with the decade or more worth of CDR's these co's/gov seem to have. Someone's lying, or has been feeding to the secret bigdata pools all along, or both. What's the big payoff for keeping (against the cost of keeping)? Favorable regulations? Some order of magnitude more business or debugging insight beyond rollover to aggregating in RRDB? And Instead of what negatives for not keeping in absence of such laws? Any independent audits yet of some of these VPN's, services, etc that say they don't keep records that indeed do confirm no records practice as of the audit? [Substitute herein any type of record about you as appropriate.]

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ACLU amicus brief in the Lavabit appeal
by d.nix 25 Oct '13

25 Oct '13

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