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Re: [Cryptography] Cryptography is not a science currently
by Ryan Carboni 07 Dec '15

07 Dec '15

> > There is a long history of corruption in the US. And the FBI and NSA were > certainly not immune. The abuse of the FBI to pursue Hoover's racist > political agenda, LOVEINT, etc. People talk badly about Hoover, but never about the CIA? Given the powers of the FBI, Hoover was nothing like L. Ron Hubbard, Nixon, or Beria. The CIA on the other hand.... stole a hard drive. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/23/el-salvador-civil-war-classifi… This year. Hoover's FBI constantly talked about discretion, and people even wrote to Hoover! Some villain he is. He even blackmailed the elites, which is pretty terrible. Strange that a senile war criminal like Ronald Reagan is more admired than J. Edgar Hoover, true American hero. I assume Google now encrypts everything everywhere inside the corporation. > Excellent, except why didn't all the targets in Prism join all at the same time? I guess each corporation's plaintext are just that hard to crack, they had to work a year per company to break their plaintext. Maybe instead of encryption they should change their plaintext encoding? Maybe for additional security everyone should proprietary plaintext? So when the Snowden papers came out 20 years later they suddenly realized > that the technology had moved on and it would be very easy to send much of > Fort Meade dark. Snowden isn't such a big deal. Maybe no one cares about Nicholas Merril and his fight against a national security letter. Maybe no one cares about Mark Klein, or that Congress gave retroactive immunity to telecommunications providers in cooperating with the government. Maybe no one cares that Theo de Raadt lost a DARPA grant for criticizing the Iraq war. Maybe no one cares... Why am I wasting my time? There are thousands of events that transpired before Snowden, and Snowden is a big deal? How is he a big deal? If you didn't know the NSA was spying on everyone before Snowden, you're a moron or a shill. There's no respectful way to get this point across, it's abundantly clear to anyone with half a brain and pays attention to anything that this is all public knowledge. To pretend that there was some big secret before Snowden is ridiculous. The only interesting new bit of knowledge in 2013 was parallel construction. I had no idea that the federal government was */that/* crooked.

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Re: Non-DoD crypto funding? A contradiction in terms?
by Ryan Carboni 06 Dec '15

06 Dec '15

On Sun, Dec 6, 2015 at 8:19 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1(a)pipeline.com> wrote: > http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf > > "From 2000 to 2010, fewer than 15% of the papers at > CRYPTO that acknowledged U.S. extramural funding > acknowledged DoD funding. In 2011, this rose to 25%. > From 2012 to2015, it rose to 65%. Nowadays, many > cryptographers put together a large patchwork of > grants, *the largest of which are usually DoD.*" > > I'm afraid that *funding* is the biggest hurdle > to achieving Rogaway's goals. It's somewhat > easier for Rogaway, as he has tenure, but how > does a young crypto researcher get non-DoD > funding? > > And yet he expressed fear that an errant remark on a phone call would lead to his assassination? I will trust him if he has a suspicious suicide, otherwise the hyperbole is more cause for suspicion.

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Fwd: [Cryptography] Anyone else seen some odd shipping delays?
by grarpamp 06 Dec '15

06 Dec '15

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill(a)hallambaker.com> Date: Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 9:27 PM Subject: [Cryptography] Anyone else seen some odd shipping delays? To: "cryptography(a)metzdowd.com" <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com> Twice in the past week, I have ordered a computer and it has been subject to odd shipping delays and the UPS data makes no sense. I don't think it is seasonal, other stuff arrives fine. Only computers seem to be held up. So anyone have ideas for checking over a QNAP box to see what surprises might have been planted in the firmware? _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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Re: Sheeple
by coderman 06 Dec '15

06 Dec '15

On 12/5/15, Richard Crisp <rdcrisp(a)earthlink.net> wrote: > Isn't that at odds with "hate crime" laws? These are defined by thought > process vs the actual acts. laws are malleable; like putty. soon enough, laws protecting free speech completely eroded. then, victory! ... best regards,

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Russian citizen won a case against surveillance in the European Court of Human Rights
by Anton Nesterov 06 Dec '15

06 Dec '15

tl;dr Roman Zakharov, Russian journalist and activist, tried to sue Russian government since 2003 for intercepting his mobile telephone communications and the Russian laws on surveillance as unconstitutional. He failed and then went to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that Russian laws violate Article 8 of ECHR and forced Russia to pay 40,000 euro of compensation. Here is the text http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-159324 It also has a good review of Russian laws about surveillance. -- https://nesterov.pw GPG key: 0CE8 65F1 9043 2B11 25A5 74A7 1187 6869 67AA 56E4 https://keybase.io/komachi/key.asc

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Named Data Networking
by dan＠geer.org 06 Dec '15

06 Dec '15

Does anyone here have a grounded opinion about NDN (Named Data Networking)? If that's as new to you as to me, I'm reading here: http://named-data.net It seems to have a lot of implications that I'm trying to think through, not the least of which is the idea that the Internet can and must evolve from an end-to-end communication system to being, itself, a content distribution network. The reason for thinking this way is that "YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, etc., account for more than half of the world's internet traffic" and that reality "is inefficient and unsecure because the information-centric overlay is a poor match to the Internet's conversationally-oriented underlay." I am, myself, perpetually sceptical of efforts to start over, or to put policy into the network itself, such as NDN's aim to make every transmitted packet be signed and to make the network stateful including providing in-network memory. As always, "Who is this for?" needs an answer that looks well ahead. --dan

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Sheeple
by dan＠geer.org 06 Dec '15

06 Dec '15

Some would say that to tell the truth you must use fiction... ----------- Episode 18, CBS television show "Person of Interest" FINCH is a physically damaged billionaire programmer who developed machine intelligence for the government REESE is his sidekick muscle. ----------- REESE No photos? FINCH Not everyone in New York has a driver's license, REESE. First three digits of the social suggest that Jordan Hester was born in Georgia. REESE I'm supposed to recognize him by his accent? FINCH Or her. I can't even verify the gender. Hester's living off the grid. No photos online and nothing on the social networking sites. REESE I've never understood why people put all their information on those sites. Used to make our job a lot easier in the C.I.A. (takes another sip from his cup) FINCH Of course, that's why I created them. REESE You're telling me you invented online social networking, FINCH? REESE stands up. FINCH goes to his computer, setting down his doughnut. FINCH The Machine needed more information. People's social graph, their associations. (opens up search on social networking website for "Jordan Hester") The government had been trying to figure it out for years. Turns out most people were happy to volunteer it. The business wound up being quite profitable, too. Unfortunately, Jordan Hester seems to be more cautious than most, but I was able to run a credit check. REESE looks at papers on glass board. FINCH picks up his doughnut again.

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Cryptography is not a science currently
by Ryan Carboni 05 Dec '15

05 Dec '15

Recently The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work was published online by Philip Rogaway. I am going to explain that the disciplinary culture of cryptography is not a scientific discipline. Cryptography itself is a science. Cryptography in many respects is the inverse of forensic science, while forensics follow a protocol, their results are no better than guessing. While cryptography's results are concrete, the culture is a serious failure. Cryptographers are well aware of the moral implications of their work... since Diffie and Hellman condemned DES's short key length ( http://www.toad.com/des-stanford-meeting.html ). If according to Rogaway, "Most academic cryptographers seem to think that our field is a fun, deep, and politically neutral game—a set of puzzles involving communicating parties and notional adversaries", the fault is not with most cryptographers, but with all cryptographers. Paranoid fear surrounded the AES competition, that a cipher might have a backdoor (it turns out backdooring ciphers are more difficult than expected). Yet after the AES report turns out the full of lies ( http://csrc.nist.gov/archive/aes/round2/r2report.pdf ), that additions are more vulnerable to timing attacks then... table lookups, one should do some critical self analysis. That a cryptographer calls for some sort of self-analysis long after the AES competition, the SHA-3 competition, basically after all the currently accepted ciphers have become entrenched is alarming. Each and every cryptographer seems to fail to understand what the US intelligence community actually does. They truly do, they do not seem to understand that for anyone of import, they'd develop biographies on people, if one is important enough, they might create a psychological profile. Maybe this sounds paranoid. But given that the greatest intelligence scandals involve what is believed to be true to be absolutely false and what is believed to be false to be absolutely true, paranoia is to be expected if the state takes an interest in your profession. And all cryptographers know that the state is interested in cryptography. What about the constant struggles of cryptographers getting their papers published in the seventies and eighties? Maybe only Dan Bernstein remembers that he went to court just to publish his own cipher. Naturally for Philip Rogaway, these issues came to a head after the Snowden disclosures (I'm still waiting for the next drip). For anyone to discredit themselves in the first paragraph of a forty-six page PDF is amazing. Potentially if all cryptographers somehow manage to ignore this immense logical failing is an indictment against the entire cryptographic profession. Especially given that it is commonly accepted that mathematics requires logic. Truly Rogaway is the Chomsky of Cryptography. Chomsky will deny the Cambodian holocaust and claim that oppression in the US "isn't that bad". For anyone to run out and say they are taking on the elite without knowing a damn thing about anything, I wish them a lot of luck. I might as well post a modest suggestion: cryptographers should support an FPGA integrated into the CPU or the ability to use integrated graphics for cryptography. This would remove entrenchment of standards, and allow people to pick their own ciphers. It's possible the AES-NI instructions were developed after the NSA panicked at seeing AES usage in TLS drop rapidly after the timing attacks were revealed. The AES-NI instructions are overkill, and seem to take CISC too literally. One only needs, mixcolumn+subbytes, subbyte, reverse+mixcolumn+subbytes, AESIMC and subbytes instructions of 32-bit sizes each (no need for AESENC, AESENCLAST, AESKEYGENASSIST, AESDECLAST, AESDEC, AESIMC), it would save one instruction, and the instruction will use only one operand. The way the AES-NI instructions are designed precludes usage for Rijndael with 256 bit blocks, and it seems odd that the AES-NI instructions only accept data from the XMM registers. Rigidity should be viewed with suspicion. "Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him." -Sun Tzu

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Shadowy Western governments?
by Zenaan Harkness 05 Dec '15

05 Dec '15

See full article and link below. "No longer are their [terrorists] attacks carried out without many, if not a majority, suspecting the governments in the West at least as equally as shadowy terrorist organizations." Perhaps some find it hard to believe? --- OK, these guys appear to be trying to present an Islamic/ Iran position to English readers, yet don't have any links (in this article at least) to primary information or quotes of the alleged email interview. Quite frustrating. My first reaction was dismissive of such poor 'journalistic practice', yet I get a sense of genuine intent to create a better public dialog which overrides my initial reaction. Based on this I briefly searched without success for a "Contact" link, to email them which this viewpoint I have about their article, as I would like to see all sides of public debate lift their respective games. I will forward this privately to the whois (non-cloudflare) email in the hope that this might be useful to someone there... any better suggestions appreciated. Evidently having a "Contact" email/ form is also recommended for a news website. Zenaan http://www.islamicinvitationturkey.com/2015/12/03/leaders-letter-helped-dis… Leader’s letter helped ‘discover shadowy faces of terrorism’: American Analyst IIT Exclusive News, Imam Ali Khamenei, Iran, Leaders of Ummah, Middle East, North America 3 December 2015 10:10 An independent American analyst believes after Leader’s letter, international public awareness would never allow governments to support terrorism without impunity. Anthony Cartalucci wrote to Payman Yazdani of Mehr News International Service in an email interview about the recent and second letter by the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei to youth in Europe and the US, where he said the letter contributed to an environment which would make public alert, who otherwise would only watch passively their fellow governments’ nebulous acts in sponsoring terrorism. Cartalucci also believed that the West had shifted the blame to Islam and Islamic countries, since they saw clearly the backlash of their own act in arming atrocious terrorists in Islamic lands: In his second letter to western youth, Ayatollah Khamenei has talked about the terrorism and its roots. What is the significance of this issue? To solve any problem, one must first understand it fully. The problem of terrorism has long been poorly understood by the majority of the Western public, and even policymakers. Their inability to grasp the true roots of terrorism have allowed it to flourish indefinitely. For most in the West, the reality that special interests in their own governments have created and perpetuated terrorism intentionally as a geopolitical tool is incomprehensible. Unfortunately, it is also the truth and until they grasp that, those behind the terrorism will have a carte blanche to continue using it both at home and abroad, as a proxy force of violence, and as a tool to create fear and coercion. The wars, instability, growing domestic police states, distrust among nations, and even within nations, among citizens, refugee crises, and others all are wrought from the use of terrorism as a geopolitical tool. Thus, it is at work within the heart of some of the most pressing issues of our time. The Leader has emphasized in his message that Islam is the religion of peace; why do some try to introduce Islam as the religion of violence? The majority who claim Islam is a religion of violence are merely repeating witlessly propaganda they themselves heard. The source of this propaganda are the same interests which themselves are driving the violence – particularly the state sponsors of terrorism, the United States, their Persian Gulf allies, NATO, and others. By blaming Islam and appealing to both ignorance and bigotry which are still deeply rooted in Western culture, these very interests feeding the violence can deflect blame onto others – in this case, Muslim nations and peoples. By appealing to ideology, rationality, history, geopolitics, and critical thinking can be side-stepped and emotional responses can easily be elicited. Why would some try to make connections between Islam and terrorism after any terrorist act happening around the world? Again, it is a matter of deflecting responsibility by those who are actually driving terrorism. The recent attacks in Paris were carried out by terrorists the United States and its closest regional allies have been arming, training, funding, and harboring for years now. All of the attackers were well known to Western intelligence agencies. By all indications, this attack should have been easily foiled by Western security agencies, but it was not. Conveniently, it was carried out on the eve of the Vienna talks on Syria, and just as the West’s agenda in Syria began unraveling in the face of a joint Syrian-Russian-Iranian alliance. Some would say this was a little “too convenient.” Blaming the attacks on Islam is the best way to appeal to people’s emotions directly, and hopefully overwhelm their ability to critically think and ask just who really benefited from the conveniently-timed attacks and why, again, Western security agencies knew of the attackers beforehand but made no attempts to stop them from carrying out their horrific acts of violence. What is the importance of this letter at this juncture? The importance of this letter is that it adds to a growing body of evidence and voices around the world speaking up and confronting state sponsors of global terrorism. The constant efforts of those who know the truth to inform those who yet do not, is having a gradual effect on the special interests driving global terrorism. No longer are they able to act with impunity. No longer are their attacks carried out without many, if not a majority, suspecting the governments in the West at least as equally as shadowy terrorist organizations. It is important for this process, this dialogue to continue, to speak to the truth with every opportunity and in every format, so that as people begin to see the truth for themselves, they can also take note of who has been saying it all along. Interview: Payman Yazdani

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Ethics not moral crap but...
by Cari Machet 04 Dec '15

04 Dec '15

"The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work" http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html

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