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Firefox will scan your browsing history to suggest advertiser sites
by stef 28 May '15

28 May '15

i hope the torbrowser will have soon patches to disable this disgrace: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/firefox-will-scan-your-browsing-hist… -- otr fp: https://www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/otr.txt

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Re: Apple At-Rest Encryption
by BizDevCon 28 May '15

28 May '15

Polemic question: how do you want to propose default File Vault encryption when I see most people using 0000 as their default iPhone password? Real question: using encryption also forces one to thing about a proper backup strategy. And where will the average user store his FileVault key for each device? I remember one service (not sure which one) which forces you to store and print a backup key. You cannot / could not copy and paste: disabled! (I think it was even some Apple service.) Default File Vault is neat but forget "recovering" stuff when your wife/kid/mom/dog forgets the passcodeâ¦ The recent death of my father also made me think of implementing a "two-level" personal privacy: 1) Things you want others like relatives to have access to in the ultimate scenario of death. 2) Things you want to keep private forever. My dad never thought about such and his social accounts are as much protected as mundane information on insurance information of a shared property. In other words: I have a hard time unbundling everything and I am even thinking of taking a strong magnet and let it do the final task on his iMacâ¦ Long post, short summary: we need to rethink storing personal information before enabling things like File Vault for everyone. â BizDevCon -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Apple At-Rest Encryption Time (GMT): May 28 2015 05:01:13 From: jon(a)callas.org To: anx(a)riseup.net CC: cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org > On May 25, 2015, at 1:11 PM, anx wrote: > > What are some bottlenecks to Apple turning on File Vault by default? I > can only come up with "battery life." You should turn it on. The battery effect on the CPU is negligible; itâs using AES-NI in the processor and thatâs running at less than one clock per byte. But if youâre on a computer that has flash â like any of the Air/Retina machines â the write time and power requirements of NAND flash are much better when you use a whitening function, of which AES makes a great one. But in any event, itâs all going to be not worth worrying about in the costs. You might even benefit. You are also gaining in the security end. We can certainly debate whatever the operational security benefits are from encrypting your disk, but the real benefit comes from when you inevitably decommission that machine and storage. You are vastly, vastly better off with encrypted storage then, and better off for having encrypted it all along. Jon

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Apple At-Rest Encryption
by anx 28 May '15

28 May '15

What are some bottlenecks to Apple turning on File Vault by default? I can only come up with "battery life." --Anx

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Basic income (was) Re: noscript is 10 years!
by Troy Benjegerdes 27 May '15

27 May '15

On Sun, May 17, 2015 at 03:55:23PM -0400, grarpamp wrote: > On Sun, May 17, 2015 at 1:37 PM, John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> wrote: > > NYT today has book review on gradual replacement of humans > > by robots, a beloved investment of those at the top, so John Deere > > Shame no one properly broke the last 3-5 messages off into a > separate thread when it went off noscript. > > What will happen to the 7000000000 unpaid system redundancies? We don't need the money, the money needs us, and I expect something like 6,999,999,900 redundancies will suddenly find themselves with various forms of basic income guarantees once the money finally figures out it's automating itself out of job, and realizes it needs to start giving the HCF (human confinement farms) money or humans are going to stop spending it, and this, my friends, would be the end of money. What's important for this cypherpunk is to figure out how to make sure we have alternatives and free choice to leave the HCFs and choose among many basic income systems, or make the choice to not use money at all. Are blockchains a reasonable thing to build a basic income system on? How do you ensure a blockchain private key is held or controlled by only one person, so that one cannot simply create many anonymous IDs and collect several hundred basic income guarantees? It seems there must be a human factor, and something that looks a lot like a government, but I can't quite wrap my head around how to make sure each of those 7e9 redunancies can only create 7e9 basic income generating accounts, and do a moderately good job of identifying and stopping those that try to collect, via force, coercion, or deceit, more than their share of basic income.

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Astoria - new Tor client designed to be more resistant to timing attacks
by Jesse Taylor 26 May '15

26 May '15

Curious to hear your thoughts on this <http://www.dailydot.com/politics/tor-astoria-timing-attack-client/>: --- /With the threat of powerful intelligence agencies, like the////NSA <http://dailydot.com/tags/nsa>//, looming large, researchers have built a new////Tor <http://dailydot.com/tags/tor>////client called////Astoria <http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.05173.pdf>////designed specifically to make eavesdropping harder for the world's richest, most aggressive, and most capable spies.// //// //Tor, the world’s most popular anonymity network, works like this: A user fires up the client and connects to the network through what's called an entry node. To reach a website anonymously, the user’s Internet traffic is then passed encrypted through a so-called middle relay and then an exit relay (and back again). That user-relay connection is called a circuit. The website on the receiving end doesn’t know who is visiting, only that a faceless Tor user has connected.////An eavesdropper shouldn’t be able to know who the Tor user is either, thanks to the encrypted traffic being routed through 6,000 nodes in the network.////But something called "timing attacks" change the situation. When an adversary takes control of both the entry and exit relays, research shows they can potentially deanonymize Tor users //within minutes <http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03940>//.// ////A full 58 percent of Tor circuits are vulnerable to network-level attackers, such as the NSA or Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), when they access popular websites, according to new////research <http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.05173.pdf>////from American and Israeli academics. Chinese users are the most vulnerable of all to these kinds of attacks, with researchers finding 85.7 percent of all Tor circuits from the country to be vulnerable.// //// //Even though Tor is designed to provide complete anonymity to its users, the NSA’s position means they can potentially see and measure both traffic entering the Tor network and the traffic that comes out. When an intelligence agency can see both,//simple statistics <http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#danezis:pet2004>////help an autonomous system at their control match the data up in a timing attack and discover the identity of the sender.////Anonymity over.////This kind of threat has been known to Tor developers for over a decade. They’ve been trying to make eavesdropping difficult for spy agencies for just as long.// //// //To counter the threat, American-Israeli researchers built Astoria, a new Tor client focused on defeating autonomous systems that can break Tor’s anonymity.////Astoria reduces the number of vulnerable circuits from 58 percent to 5.8 percent, the researchers say. The new solution is the first designed to beat even the most//recently <http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03940>////proposed <http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2673869>////asymmetric correlation attacks on Tor.// //// //Designed to beat such attacks, Astoria differs most significantly from Tor's default client in how it selects the circuits that connect a user to the network and then to the outside Internet. The tool, at its foundation, is an algorithm designed to more accurately predict attacks and then securely select relays that mitigate timing attack opportunities for top-tier adversaries.// //// //Astoria adroitly considers how circuits should, according to the researchers, be made “when there are no safe possibilities,” how to safely balance the growing bandwidth load across the Tor network, and how to keep Tor’s performance “reasonable” and relatively fast even when Astoria is in its most secure configuration.////All this while under the unblinking gaze of the world’s best intel services.////Defeating timing attacks against Tor completely isn’t possible because of how Tor is built, but making the attacks more costly and less likely to succeed is a pastime that Tor developers have dedicated a decade to. Astoria follows in those footsteps.////By choosing relays based on lowering the threat of eavesdropping by autonomous systems and then choosing randomly if no safe passage is possible, Astoria aims to minimize the information gained by an adversary watching an entire circuit.// //// //“In addition to providing high-levels of security against such attacks, Astoria also has performance that is within a reasonable distance from the current Tor client,” the researchers wrote. “Unlike other AS-aware Tor clients, Astoria also considers how circuits should be built in the worst case—i.e., when there are no safe relays that are available. Further, Astoria is a good network citizen and works to ensure that the all circuits created by it are load-balanced across the volunteer driven Tor network.”// //// //In an upgrade aimed at making Tor even more usable for the average person, the newest Tor Browser allows a sliding scale of security that balances speed and usability with strong security preferences.////Similarly, Astoria provides multiple security options. However, it's both most effective and most usable when at its highest security level, the researchers say, so "Astoria is a usable substitute for the vanilla Tor client only in scenarios where security is a high priority."/ --- Source: http://www.dailydot.com/politics/tor-astoria-timing-attack-client/

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TFC 0.5.5 out
by Markus Ottela 26 May '15

26 May '15

TFC 0.5.5 is now out I found another vulnerability in the constant transmission feature; between each long message only one command would be sent at most. This issue has now been fixed. After a request, I added further message authentication for CEV: In addition to GMAC it now does encrypt-then-MAC style authentication using HMAC-SHA2-512 (512-bit key) and SHA3-512 MAC (1144-bit key) before GCM authenticates and decrypts the ciphertext. I upgraded all keys to 512-bit ones so cyclic hashing of keys won't reduce security over long period of time (there is no key negotiation in TFC). I also upgraded hashes from Keccak-256 to Keccak-512 and at the same time the Keccak-CTR key size was upgraded to 512-bits. So 1280-bits of symmetric key security in total. As for key generation, CEV now has constant 2kHz sampling speed (1.5M samples are loaded in total), three vN whitening passes and between each of those, Keccak-512 compression with 2:1 ratio (1024 bits in, 512 out). User can now input different entropy from keyboard for each of the eight 512-bit keys generated. Also fixed lots of bugs and typos, and as usual, updated whitepaper and manual where necessary. UI was tweaked slightly: I added cleaner completion messages and some startup animation for the lulz (disable option available in settings). Full update log: https://github.com/maqp/tfc-cev/blob/master/0.5.5%20update%20log.txt

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Re: Karl Rove's confusion about capacity of NSA's Utah data center.
by Cari Machet 25 May '15

25 May '15

On May 25, 2015 9:38 PM, "Cari Machet" <carimachet(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Oh so sorry jim here: > > http://www.Recode.net/2015/05/24/twitter-suspends-troll-chuck-johnson-are-i… > > Specifically he tweeted: > > 'Go to gotnews.com/donate if you want to give money to taking out @deray.' > > On May 25, 2015 2:34 PM, "John Young" <jya(a)pipeline.com> wrote: >> >> Disks or any electro-mechanical device, may not be the only, or >> principle, means of storage. So capacity may not be the measure >> of capability. >> >> The need for speed of access to and processing of data requires >> the data to be in active memory all the time. Arrayed, large CPU-like >> "chips" or solid state (best is unsolid state) processors make data >> constantly usable, always up to date, no lag time, no wear and tear. >> >> Physical disks use too much energy and require too much architecture >> to rack, interconnect, house, energize, maintain, repair, replace, update. >> And are way too slow and clunky. >> >> However, this doesn't mean Utah Data Center is not useful as a >> Potemkin deception. Or that much of it is Potemkin deception. >> Why else make it so observable during funding, design, construction >> and afterwards a juicy easily photographed, concentrated target of >> sneaky weaponry of hardware, software, sneakerware, hey come >> attack us ware. >> >> Somewhere, in Utah, or the planet, there are data handlers about >> which little is publicly known except as miniaturized examples on >> personal playthings. Meanwhile we are fed out of date fantasies of >> capability based on xxx-bytes of increasingly absurd prefixes which >> are like innumerable angels on pinheads. >> >> One way to spot what's what is to look at the generators of facilities. >> And their fuel tanks. Fully active data require a lot of uninterruptable >> juice. We traced the power lines for UDC and found they lead far >> astray, also Potemkin. Could be the generators and fuel tanks are >> too. >> >> This is not to suggest Snowden pushing crypto and dribbling docs >> are Potemkin. Could be, though, so slow and clunky, so observable, >> and publishable for those willing to suspend disbelief. >> >> >> >> At 12:22 AM 5/25/2015, you wrote: >>> >>> Is Fox News illegal? You'd say it's illegal to deceive people. The sheer quantity of false information on Fox News, and it's popularity, are a serious harm to America. >>> >>> Is it that free markets only perform properly with rational agents? >> >> >>

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Re: Karl Rove's confusion about capacity of NSA's Utah data center.
by John Young 25 May '15

25 May '15

Disks or any electro-mechanical device, may not be the only, or principle, means of storage. So capacity may not be the measure of capability. The need for speed of access to and processing of data requires the data to be in active memory all the time. Arrayed, large CPU-like "chips" or solid state (best is unsolid state) processors make data constantly usable, always up to date, no lag time, no wear and tear. Physical disks use too much energy and require too much architecture to rack, interconnect, house, energize, maintain, repair, replace, update. And are way too slow and clunky. However, this doesn't mean Utah Data Center is not useful as a Potemkin deception. Or that much of it is Potemkin deception. Why else make it so observable during funding, design, construction and afterwards a juicy easily photographed, concentrated target of sneaky weaponry of hardware, software, sneakerware, hey come attack us ware. Somewhere, in Utah, or the planet, there are data handlers about which little is publicly known except as miniaturized examples on personal playthings. Meanwhile we are fed out of date fantasies of capability based on xxx-bytes of increasingly absurd prefixes which are like innumerable angels on pinheads. One way to spot what's what is to look at the generators of facilities. And their fuel tanks. Fully active data require a lot of uninterruptable juice. We traced the power lines for UDC and found they lead far astray, also Potemkin. Could be the generators and fuel tanks are too. This is not to suggest Snowden pushing crypto and dribbling docs are Potemkin. Could be, though, so slow and clunky, so observable, and publishable for those willing to suspend disbelief. At 12:22 AM 5/25/2015, you wrote: >Is Fox News illegal? You'd say it's illegal to deceive people. The >sheer quantity of false information on Fox News, and it's >popularity, are a serious harm to America. > >Is it that free markets only perform properly with rational agents?

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Senate against PATRIOT ACT renewal
by rysiek 23 May '15

23 May '15

Hi, so: http://www.npr.org/2015/05/23/408927009/senate-blocks-patriot-act-extension Mind the spin, though. ;) "The Senate struggled to prevent an interruption in critical government surveillance programs early Saturday, rejecting both a House-passed bill and a short-term extension of the USA Patriot Act. (...) The vote was 57-42, short of the 60-vote threshold to move ahead. That was immediately followed by rejection of a two-month extension to the existing programs. The vote was 45-54, again short of the 60-vote threshold. (...) The Justice Department has said the NSA would begin winding down its collection of domestic calling records this week if the Senate fails to act because the collection takes time to halt." -- Pozdrawiam, Michał "rysiek" Woźniak Zmieniam klucz GPG :: http://rys.io/pl/147 GPG Key Transition :: http://rys.io/en/147

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Dig out your OCR and copier... for PGP part deux
by grarpamp 21 May '15

21 May '15

http://www.itworld.com/article/2925375/security/us-proposes-tighter-export-… The U.S. Commerce Department has proposed tighter export rules for computer security tools, a potentially controversial revision to an international agreement aimed at controlling weapons technology.

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