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Oh the humanity!! [was: MaidSafe: p2p encrypted anonymous drivesharing homedir network?]
by coderman 10 Mar '14

10 Mar '14

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 3:34 AM, rysiek <rysiek(a)hackerspace.pl> wrote: > ... > TALKS ABOUT DECENTRALISATION > CHOOSES A CENTRALISED SERVICE AS MAIN COMMUNICATION CHANNEL this shit makes me laugh every day of the week. thank you!

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Alleged NSA-GCHQ Attack on Jean-Jacques Quisquater
by John Young 09 Mar '14

09 Mar '14

Any further information on the alleged NSA-GCHQ attack on Jean-Jacques Quisquater than these two reports? http://cryptome.org/2014/02/nsa-gchq-quisquater.pdf Apparently Quisquater would not have known about the attack if not told by an insider. Insider comsec disclosures may be finally getting legs, not yet long, but more than NDA-official secrecy paralysis. Any other cryptographer attacked (as if it would be known)?

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Jean-Jacques Quisquater on Alleged NSA-GCHQ Hack
by John Young 09 Mar '14

09 Mar '14

http://cryptome.org/2014/02/quisquater-comments.htm

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Taint Review Team
by Rich Jones 09 Mar '14

09 Mar '14

Docs via MuckRock show internal DEA training manuals instructing for parallel construction based on classified / illegally obtained information, combined with an internal review board to shield that information from the public courts. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/feb/03/dea-parallel-constructio… "Americans don't like it!" R

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Re: [cryptography] Snowden Drop to Poitras and Greenwald Described
by coderman 09 Mar '14

09 Mar '14

On Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 11:27 PM, ianG <iang(a)iang.org> wrote: > ... So what > British Intelligence did was to switch gears and harass his operations > to make them as difficult as possible. Instead of trying to necessarily > stop the bombs, they pushed gear across that made bomb making risky, and > aggressively clamped down on 'safe' gear where they could. In effect, > making unstable explosives and detonators available, and controlling the > market for the quality stuff. > > So the bomb maker was forced into employing ever more risky techniques ... > > This tactic of harassing the enemy to make mistakes more likely is > rather well known. In war as in business. And it can and is applied to > the media. if you haven't observed this in the information security domain, you're not paying attention, of you're incompetent.

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A Surprisingly Easy Tool for Encrypting Email, Courtesy of an Ex-NSA Employee
by Gutem 09 Mar '14

09 Mar '14

Encrypting for the masses? http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-surprisingly-easy-tool-for-encrypting-em… Att, - Gutem ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Registered Linux User: 562142

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Gox dox'ed
by coderman 09 Mar '14

09 Mar '14

it seems the answer is here: http://blog.magicaltux.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/MtGox2014Leak.zip http://89.248.171.30/MtGox2014Leak.zip https://mega.co.nz/#!0VliDQBA!4Ontdi2MsLD4J5dV1-sr7pAgEYTSMi8rNeEMBikEhAs http://burnbit.com/download/280433/MtGox2014Leak_zip let me know if you're still short a mirror... On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 10:16 PM, Juan Garofalo <juan.g71(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > --On Thursday, February 27, 2014 11:12 PM -0600 Troy Benjegerdes > <hozer(a)hozed.org> wrote: > >> >> I'd argue that centralized systems provide, on averge, a larger anonymity >> set and privacy in the majority of cases than decentralized ones. In >> particular exchanges that everyone believes are 'incompetent' are a >> wonderful place to get a lot of cheap plausible deniability by making >> everyone else that uses it pay for it when the house of cards falls down. > > > In the case of something like mtgox, how did it provide privacy? Or > plausible deniality? Users have to send IDs, bank account details, > everything is logged, etc etc. What am I missing? > > > >> >> >> >> -- >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------- >> --- Troy Benjegerdes 'da hozer' >> hozer(a)hozed.org 7 elements >> earth::water::air::fire::mind::spirit::soul grid.coop >> >> Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, >> nor try buy a hacker who makes money by the megahash >> >> > >

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Inferring the NSA's MO from a short clip of Joel Brenner on BBC
by Jen Savage 09 Mar '14

09 Mar '14

I want to preface this message with a disclaimer: I am in no way defending the actions of the NSA. I am merely attempting analysis of their motivations and their MO. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H33r2weM6Zc Joel Brenner says, "There is in all the intelligence agencies a tension between doing offense better and doing defense better" ...and, "but unless you think 0days are finite" Ok let's talk about this issue for a moment. - In the CTF world, it has been widely accepted that given a red team and a blue team of equal abilities, the red team always wins. - Academics say there is no way to create provably secure software. - Developers have a phrase, "there is no such thing as bug free software." - CISOs are using the term "risk" to describe pen test findings: a recognition that pen tests have become a measure of the risk that someone will find an exploitable flaw. Suppose that the NSA gave up on securing software because they view it as impossible. In fact, we know they view it as impossible because they have called it a Sisyphean Task. If there are diminishing returns from reporting software vulnerabilities to the vendor, then doing so is a losing battle. I hear people say that the NSA undermines the security of software by not releasing the vulnerabilities, but we know that historically companies have been very bad at actually fixing the vulnerabilities they are given. In some cases, a new product is released before a vulnerability is even looked into, thus rendering the effort useless. So, is defense dead? Is that an accepted fact these days? If offense is a type of defense, is the NSA perhaps aiming to use 0day for their offensive capabilities to effect a kind of defense? How would they accomplish this? Have any of you been to the Berlin Unterwelten? It is a tour of revision after revision of nuclear bomb shelters that could never possibly save the population they are tasked with saving. We are living in an age where there is an entire set of strategies that deal with war in a world with weapons so strong that no walls can possibly defend against them. Although the reach of nuclear weapons historically has been further reaching than so-called "cyber" weapons, that is changing. Despite the very many warnings from the infosec industry, that is changing. (Sometimes I think my Home Invasion 2.0 talk fell on deaf ears because smart home appliances are proliferating.) And in the future of smart homes, smart cities, even smart bodies, when everything is internet connected: everyone is vulnerable. Imagine cities that can be invaded without physical armies. If you were the NSA, and you believed these things to be true, what would you be doing? -Jen

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chip vulns [was: Snowden and Compilers]
by coderman 09 Mar '14

09 Mar '14

On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 1:47 PM, Kelly John Rose <iam(a)kjro.se> wrote: > I could see them more easily subverting chip designs themselves then trying > to subvert the entire compiler ecosystem. ^ this. so,... how 'bout that malay crash?

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Get offa my lawn. (was Re: [Cryptography] BitCoin bug reported)
by Robert Hettinga 09 Mar '14

09 Mar '14

On Feb 16, 2014, at 10:40 PM, Lucky Green <shamrock(a)cypherpunks.to> wrote: > I say, let them and all of Bitcoin burn to dust. Dang kids. Get offa my lawn. It’s been interesting, I’ll say that much. I have people on their honeymoon here in .ai asking to see me, buy me and Mrs. RAH $30 hamburgers at Viceroy, etc. Or “prove”, “stylometrically", on various Bitcoin fora, that I'm Satoshi. Heh. I’ll never get tired of braggin’ about *that* one. :-) I expect others here know where the stylistic clues came from, but I think Grigg has the right approach to that question. Leave well enough alone. Being, even now, generally optimistic about the future, if not my own in particular, I can’t help thinking there’s a pony in there somewhere. I *do* find it annoying that the only time people wanna talk to me about this stuff is at the top of a bubble. I expect that it may be a hint from the Almighty I should pay attention to. At the moment, PayPal, which we all looked down the nose at back then, is still, um, printing money, and a cypherpunk gave me some BTC a little while ago, a kind of eating-the-dog food exercise for old time’s sake. Or something. The price has since fallen 40%, but it’s bouncing back, and will probably be fine. “You have to be *this* tall to take this ride”, as another friend said about Bitcoin prices last week. Meanwhile I can’t think of anything I want to spend it on anyway. Even in its current form, Bitcoin makes rather short work of those speed bumps Mr. May used to tell us about, which *may* be the real point to the exercise. Having to file several kinds of forms to get paid for a small consulting job as US citizen outside the US was enough to make me foreswear getting paid for much of anything anymore, anything small at least, and BTC solves several problems there quite handily, push ever came to shove. Besides, my passport is stamped “Employment Prohibited”, which, apparently, I’m evidently honoring even in the breach. So, I think BTC, or something like it, would make a nice numeraire, temporary or otherwise, having gnawed at the edges of *that* problem when most of the Bitcoinners were, as Marc notes, in short-pants. Yes, even in its current volatile state. And contrary to the opinions of people who know better than I do about these things. It wasn't quite what Dr. Fama got the Nobel for, but New Monetary Economics might be as good once as it ever was, and Bitcoin might be the camel’s nose under that particular tent, and given that it is the ultimate fiat currency that’s quite an assertion. As someone whose stated goal, back in the day, was to securitize *everything*, debt, equity, cash, services, title to assets in storage, transit, or just sitting there with a house on it, cats, dogs, mass hysteria -- and all derivatives thereof -- using bearer-transaction financial cryptography protocols on a ubiquitous geodesic public internetwork, Bitcoin *is* a bit, oh, please let me say it, self-referent as a solution. I saw it blow by here on this list, said, “meh”, shortly had the magic smoke go out of most of my internet presence by a power-spike in a hurricane, and never got around to paying attention to either Bitcoin, or the internet, very much at all until various people frog-marched my attention back into focus recently with me muttering variously about being too old for this shit anymore... So, Bitcoin, if it survives, makes a *nice* hack, by solving, what Barnes, and ultimately everyone else, called the “loading problem”. And, so far at least, it solves the “and then you go to jail” part of the book-entry transaction error-handler, something Barnes was also noted for saying. That, too, only if Bitcoin survives. "...any [network] architecture that can survive a nuclear attack can survive withdrawal of government subsidy...” Godwin said on Cyberia, long ago. I’ve jokingly called it his Second Law. I suppose the Strong Form of that hypothesis, speaking of Dr. Fama, is surviving not mere withdrawal of the implicit subsidy of monopolistic contract enforcement, and all transfer-priced assets and “externalities” appertaining thereto, but also active attack from the ostensible contract enforcer itself. I hear of others, well, gnawing around the edges, actually, of securitizing other stuff with variants of the Bitcoin protocol, but, like predicting the end of the world, expanding the blockchain to other assets "has not been found agreeable to experience.” So far as I can see. Meanwhile, Chris Odom, aka, “Fellow Traveller”, aka, “Lovedrop” (yes, *that* “Lovedrop”), is banging away on something called Open Transactions, which inserts an actual transaction protocol, among other much more interesting things, into the works to glue Bitcoin and other stuff onto, for starters, Wagner Blinding, using, for starters, Ben Laurie’s lucre code. I haven’t seen a code-stoke like the one I see Chris with, well, since the old days. Which is nice. Very nice. Big grins all around, down here in the elbow of the Caribbean. Apparently, like me, he noticed that he was delivering instantly-usable product now, and getting paid later, too much later usually. I discovered cypherpunks in late spring of 1994 looking for a solution to something Barnes (again) called the “latency” problem. Chriss bumped into the gold-silver-crypto list, I think, about 10 years later. Mr. Odom has been been kind enough to involve me in testing OT a bit, and, ultimately, I’ve more-or-less bailed on iterative break-it-and-fix-it. Mostly because I don’t have the patience for testing — much less writing — code, if I ever really did. But here’s the rub, I also I have no *idea* what I, personally, would do with Open Transactions these days even if I could get it running in production. I have lots of ideas in *general*, you understand, but they’re mostly of the “let’s you and him fight” variety. Many more people than *I* would have to be involved, they, and I, would risk much more than money, and, ultimately, I’m not sure any of it would work. It’s a drag to think that most of what I’m interested in doing requires the dissolution, or at least dissipation, of The World’s Only Remaining Superpower to happen. As someone who still, barely, calls himself mostly an anarcho-capitalist but still a patriot, that’s about the only thing worse than only being interesting to other people during the top of a bubble. Yup. A Mass of Contradictions, as usual. "Let’s you and him fight" is only two or three steps removed from Mr. Briceno’s original observation, I figure. Hell, even “set here next to the rockin' chair, sonny, and I’ll tell ya a story”, is, ultimately, not much more help than “get off my lawn”, when you get right down to it... Cheers, RAH

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