- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

re: NSA data centre power surges & unknowns...
by Bill Stewart 10 Oct '13

10 Oct '13

Current quantum computers aren't that big, but they're only good for multiplying numbers up to 15 (I've heard rumors of 21!) As with the early Cray supercomputers, where the size of the air conditioners and power systems were much larger than the round wirey bits, a quantum computer is likely to be pretty small but may have some bigger helium coolers on-site. Remember that you're trying to entangle subatomic particles, and maybe have some magnetic detector things that still aren't all that big. If quantum computers became practical, they'd be using them to crack codes, factoring 1024-bit numbers or whatever. What's really big are the NON-quantum computers they'd be using to attack those problems now. The reason they need all that space is almost certainly for conventional data storage and processing. They want to be able to collect and store everybody's phone calls, locations, credit card purchases, and internet traffic, so they're handling multiple petabytes of data a day, finding the interesting bits, correlating the interesting people with other people who might have been in the same place at the same time, saving the parts that might be useful later. Maybe doing some voice recognition on all their phone calls. It takes a lot of basic horsepower and storage, and the correlation takes a lot of memory. I think they've bought themselves a lot of cheap-ass electrical work, done by people who assume that scaling up power requirements for a conventional data center by a factor of 10-100 doesn't change the principles. At 07:11 PM 10/9/2013, brian carroll wrote: >Lodewijk andrÃ© de la porte <<mailto:l@odewijk.nl>l(a)odewijk.nl> wrote: > > > The massive quantum computer has unpredictable power consumption. > >Lee Azzarello ><<mailto:lee@guardianproject.info>lee(a)guardianproject.info> wrote: > > > I guess inventing new math to break crypto has some physics problems. > > >these comments has me contemplating what a >large-scale networked quantum computer >installation would involve.. and to what extent >the image of racks of servers may note correlate >with the computing technology inside the boxes, >or in some percentage of the data centre. > >in other words- how would a quantum installation >differ from the classical computer systems of >the last many decades- would they be of yet >another smaller scale or would an installation >inherently be enormous. what if the data centre >was all quantum computing in terms of the data >throughput - do these numbers correlate or are >different approaches to security calculations required > >is it possible that a 'computer within a >computer' could exist, such that a quantum chip >could be embedded and use a classical electronic >based system, that is, some form of stealth or >hidden computing that occurs in a parallel >hidden framework, including for networking data. >could ethernet or fibre channel be used or would >it need to be different, say tuned resonant >circuits computing in other dimensionality.

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Re: [pfSense] NSA: Is pfSense infiltrated by "big brother" NSA or others?
by Eugen Leitl 10 Oct '13

10 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from Giles Coochey <giles(a)coochey.net> ----- Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 10:39:46 +0100 From: Giles Coochey <giles(a)coochey.net> To: list(a)lists.pfsense.org Subject: Re: [pfSense] NSA: Is pfSense infiltrated by "big brother" NSA or others? Message-ID: <525675E2.4090707(a)coochey.net> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130801 Thunderbird/17.0.8 Reply-To: pfSense support and discussion <list(a)lists.pfsense.org> On 10/10/2013 09:38, Thinker Rix wrote: > On 2013-10-10 01:13, Przemysław Pawełczyk wrote: >> On Thu, 10 Oct 2013 00:05:22 +0300 >> Thinker Rix <thinkerix(a)rocketmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Well, actually I started this thread with a pretty frank, >>> straight-forward and very simple question. >> That's right and they were justified. > > Thank you! > >> BTW, you pushed to the corner the (un)famous American hubris (Obama: US >> is exceptional.), that's the nasty answers from some. > > Yes, I guess I have hit a whole bunch of different nerves with my > question, and I find it to be highly interesting to observe some of > the awkward reactions, socioscientificly and psychologically. > > I have been insulted, I have been bullied, I have been called to > self-censor myself and at the end some users "virtually joined" to > give the illusion of a majority an muzzle me, stating, that my > question has no place at this pfSense mailing list. Really amazing, > partly hilarious reactions, I think. > These reactions say so much about how far the whole surveillance > and mind-suppression has proceeded already and how much it has > influenced the thoughts and behavior of formerly free people by > now. Frightening. > >> Thinker Rix, you are not alone at your unease pressing you to ask >> those questions about pfSense and NSA. > > Thank you for showing your support openly! I too was surprised to see some activity on the pfsense list, after seeing only a few posts per week I checked today to find several dozen messages talking about a topic I have been concerned with myself - as a network security specialist, how much can I trust the firewalls I use, be they embedded devices, software packages, or 'hardware' from manufacturers. There are many on-topic things to discuss here: 1. Which Ciphers & Transforms should we now consider secure (pfsense provides quite a few cipher choices over some other off the shelf hardware. 2. What hardware / software & configuration changes can we consider to improve RNG and ensure that should we increase the bit size of our encryption, reduce lifetimes of our SAs that we can still ensure we have enough entropy in the RNG on a device that is typically starved of traditional entropy sources. This is so much on-topic, I am surprised that there has been a movement to call this thread to stop, granted - it may seem that the conversation may drift into a political one, with regard to privacy law etc... however, that is a valid sub-topic for a discussion list that addresses devices that are designed and implemented to safe-guard privacy. -- Regards, Giles Coochey, CCNP, CCNA, CCNAS NetSecSpec Ltd +44 (0) 8444 780677 +44 (0) 7983 877438 http://www.coochey.net http://www.netsecspec.co.uk giles(a)coochey.net _______________________________________________ List mailing list List(a)lists.pfsense.org http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list ----- 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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snaps
by Eugen Leitl 10 Oct '13

10 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from taxakis <taxakis(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 11:21:52 +0200 From: taxakis <taxakis(a)gmail.com> To: cryptome(a)freelists.org Cc: 'Eugen Leitl' <eugen(a)leitl.org> Subject: snaps Message-ID: <006301cec59a$291b6620$7b523260$@com> X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 12.0 >From Ietf: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-agl-tls-chacha20poly1305-01 (pdf available) >From Tor-talk: "Why the web of trust sucks" by Mike Perry https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2013-September/030235.html Mail cient: http://flowingmail.com/ On encrypted video and the open web by W3C: http://www.w3.org/blog/2013/10/on-encrypted-video-and-the-open-web/ The following is not for the technically challenged. It does not directly deal with crypto, but the new set does include over 100 new instructions. And the latter will undoubtedly contain several 'interesting' vectors. Future instruction set AVX-512: http://agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=288 ----- 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: [tor-talk] Tor Weekly News — October 9th, 2013
by Eugen Leitl 10 Oct '13

10 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from Joe Btfsplk <joebtfsplk(a)gmx.com> ----- Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 18:43:56 -0500 From: Joe Btfsplk <joebtfsplk(a)gmx.com> To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Tor Weekly News — October 9th, 2013 Message-ID: <5255EA3C.8030809(a)gmx.com> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130801 Thunderbird/17.0.8 Reply-To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org On 10/9/2013 5:32 PM, Juan Garofalo wrote: > > > Why hasn't Snowden published all the stuff he got from the NSA > nazis? Why hasn't he uploaded it to wikileaks for instance? Or > torrented it? > > Top 10 Reasons Snowden hasn't published his documents: 10. Wiki what? 9. Unaware of statute of limitations on publishing stolen government documents. 8. Can't find a ghost writer. 7. Been too busy traveling. 6. Worried it might hurt his chances for public office. 5. Waiting for The Presidential Medal of Freedom, for exposing violation of the Constitution. 4. Has grown fond of eating & breathing. 3. Hoping for Ambassadorship of Syria. 2. Holding them as "Get Out of Jail" card. 1. Waiting for ABC to offer movie of the week deal. -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsusbscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- 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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Audit of TrueCrypt
by Eugen Leitl 10 Oct '13

10 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from taxakis <taxakis(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 10:37:08 +0200 From: taxakis <taxakis(a)gmail.com> To: cryptome(a)freelists.org Cc: 'Eugen Leitl' <eugen(a)leitl.org> Subject: Audit of TrueCrypt Message-ID: <000c01cec593$e83d29f0$b8b77dd0$@com> X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 12.0 http://www.fundfill.com/fund/4-spzFJdDQk211KJDAUfcOw==# If sharing this link, please use http://fundfill.com/fund/TrueCryptAudited A working draft of our rules is at http://istruecryptauditedyet.com. Stay tuned, and follow #istruecryptauditedyet on twitter. ----- 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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[liberationtech] FW: [bestbits] Rousseff & Chehade: Brazil will host world event on Internet governance in 2014
by Eugen Leitl 10 Oct '13

10 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from michael gurstein <gurstein(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 15:12:22 -0700 From: michael gurstein <gurstein(a)gmail.com> To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> Subject: [liberationtech] FW: [bestbits] Rousseff & Chehade: Brazil will host world event on Internet governance in 2014 Message-ID: <0f4501cec53c$a90304a0$fb090de0$(a)gmail.com> X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 14.0 Reply-To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> A very very important post-Snowden development. Bravo to Brazil (and Chehade)! M Bestbits.net [mailto:bestbits-request@lists.bestbits.net] On Behalf Of Carlos A. Afonso Sent: Wednesday, October 09, 2013 2:46 PM To: Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus - IGC; NCSG List; BestBits List Subject: [bestbits] Rousseff & Chehade: Brazil will host world event on Internet governance in 2014 [sorry for possible duplicate posts] Dear people Here is the Google Translate English version (I did some editing) of the official report on the meeting between President Rousseff and ICANN's President and CEO Fadi Chehadé, which just happened. The original version in Brazilian Portuguese is at the end. fraternal regards --c.a. http://convergenciadigital.uol.com.br/cgi/cgilua.exe/sys/start.htm?infoid=35 107&sid=4&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter#.UlXEbbOm1q8 Brazil will host world event on Internet governance >From the editor :: Convergência Digital :: 09/10/2013 Brazil will host the meeting in 2014 to discuss the necessary changes to Internet governance. After meeting with the president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann, its acronym in English), Fadi Chehadé, President Dilma Rousseff agreed to meet global leaders from different sectors interested in the topic. According to Chehadé, the world counts on Brazil's leadership on this issue, after President Dilma Rousseff spoke at the opening of the 68th UN General Assembly, held in September in the United States. "The world heard the Brazilian president, who spoke with deep conviction, with great courage, and expressed the frustration that many people around the world feel about the fact that the trust relationship we have with the Internet had been broken,"said, revealing that the speech by Dilma was the motivation of his proposal for their meeting. Chehadé cited allegations of espionage involving the communication of Brazilian authorities and citizens, among them the very president, Petrobras and the Ministry of Mines and Energy. "I came to ask the president to elevate her leadership to a new level, to ensure that we can all get together around a new model of governance in which all are equal," he said. The president of Icann said that future decisions on how leaders can manage the internet should be based on the principles of the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet in Brazil which is going through the National Congress. Fadi Chehadé was yesterday (Oct.7th) with Communications Minister Paulo Bernardo, to ask for help from Brazil to start discussions about changes in the governance of the Internet, and said that the arrangements should begin this year. According to him, the need for a new governing body of the Internet requires the involvement of multiple actors, not just the government. "I understand that the internet has a new feature that requires active participation by governments, their respective agencies within the United Nations, but also in the context of users, civil society, the technicians, who after all make the Internet work," Chehadé defended. For the president of the corporation, academics and industrialists need to participate in the debate, as they reflect on rights and carry out the management of the Internet infrastructure. The president of Icann said telecommunications companies must also attend the conference."They are integral part of the family with which we must work," he said. According to Paulo Bernardo, President Dilma agreed that changes in network governance must occur multilaterally and with the participation of all actors who engage the internet, and said that "we must not allow economic, political and religious interests to interfere in the free circulation of ideas." The minister said that the suggestion of the president is that the event be held in April 2014 in Rio de Janeiro. Source : Agência Brazil -------- original in pt-br ------------- O Brasil vai sediar em 2014 o encontro para discutir as mudanças necessárias para a governança da internet. Após se encontrar com o presidente da Corporação da Internet para Atribuição de Nomes e Números (Icann, na sigla em inglês), Fadi Chehadé, a presidenta Dilma Rousseff concordou em reunir líderes globais de diferentes setores interessados no tema. De acordo com Chehadé, o mundo conta com a liderança brasileira nesta questão, depois que a Presidenta Dilma Rousseff discursou na abertura da 68ª Assembleia Geral da ONU, ocorrida em setembro nos Estados Unidos. O mundo ouviu a Presidenta brasileira, que falou com profunda convicção, com muita coragem, e externou a frustração que muitas pessoas, em todo mundo, sentiam com o fato de que a confiança havia sido quebrada que temos com relação à internet, disse, revelando que o discurso de Dilma foi a motivação da sua proposta para o encontro. Chehadé citou as denúncias de espionagem envolvendo a comunicação de autoridades e cidadãos brasileiros, dentre eles a própria presidenta, a Petrobras e o Ministério de Minas e Energia. Vim solicitar à presidenta que elevasse sua liderança a um novo nível, de modo a assegurar que todos possamos nos reunir em torno de um novo modelo de governança, em que todos sejamos iguais, afirmou. O presidente da Icann disse que as futuras decisões sobre como os líderes poderão gerir a internet devem ter como base os princípios do marco civil brasileiro, que tramita no Congresso Nacional. Fadi Chehadé esteve anteontem (7) com o ministro das Comunicações, Paulo Bernardo, a fim de pedir ajuda do Brasil para iniciar os debates sobre mudanças na governança da internet, e disse que as articulações devem começar este ano. Segundo ele, a necessidade de um novo órgão gestor da internet passa pela participação de múltiplos atores, não só do governo. Entendo que a internet tem um novo recurso, que exige participação ativa por parte dos governos, dos seus respectivos órgãos no âmbito das Nações Unidas, mas também no âmbito dos usuários, da sociedade civil, dos técnicos, que afinal de contas fazem a internet funcionar, defendeu Chehadé. Para o presidente da corporação, os acadêmicos e industriais precisam participar do debate, pois refletem sobre o direito e fazem a gestão da infraestrutura da internet. O presidente da Icann disse que as empresas de telecomunicações devem também participar da conferência. Elas são parte integrante da família com a qual precisamos trabalhar, afirmou. Segundo Paulo Bernardo, a presidenta Dilma concordou que as mudanças na governança da rede devem ocorrer de forma multilateral e com a participação de todos os atores que se envolvem a internet, e disse que não se pode permitir que interesses econômicos, políticos e religiosos interfiram na livre circulação das ideias. O ministro informou que a sugestão da presidenta é que o evento ocorra em abril de 2014 no Rio de Janeiro. fonte: Agência Brasil -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu. ----- 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: NSA data centre power surges & unknowns...
by brian carroll 10 Oct '13

10 Oct '13

Lodewijk andré de la porte <l(a)odewijk.nl> wrote: > The massive quantum computer has unpredictable power consumption. Lee Azzarello <lee(a)guardianproject.info> wrote: > I guess inventing new math to break crypto has some physics problems. these comments has me contemplating what a large-scale networked quantum computer installation would involve.. and to what extent the image of racks of servers may note correlate with the computing technology inside the boxes, or in some percentage of the data centre. in other words- how would a quantum installation differ from the classical computer systems of the last many decades- would they be of yet another smaller scale or would an installation inherently be enormous. what if the data centre was all quantum computing in terms of the data throughput - do these numbers correlate or are different approaches to security calculations required is it possible that a 'computer within a computer' could exist, such that a quantum chip could be embedded and use a classical electronic based system, that is, some form of stealth or hidden computing that occurs in a parallel hidden framework, including for networking data. could ethernet or fibre channel be used or would it need to be different, say tuned resonant circuits computing in other dimensionality. would such an installation be possible and be manageable via secondary, zoned interface, and not noticeable, especially if sealed into processors or chips and thus tamper- and inspection-proof. to what extent may the data centre be a Spruce Goose or Glomar Explorer, providing conventional 'economies-of-scale' development for computing that is beyond this present-day technological situation. the idea that the NSA would field an early quantum computer in such a situation seems unlikely. especially if considering the scale issue whereby early computing starts large and shrinks down, thus ENIAC or other room or warehouse sized earlier computer installations of newly developing technology eventually moving into transistor and integrated circuit (IC) fabrications, personal computing, server boxes instead of tape-storage mainframes, and now cellphones compared to peak computing power thirty or more years earlier. would quantum computers require different storage technology, for instance, or could they rely on today's storage- or would it need to be formatted differently. and given massive parallelism and the nature of supercomputers to be custom programmed and time-shared by various projects, could such a quantum device exist nested in another system yet be linked in parallel to make a massive installation, and then be called upon for particular vexing tasks versus number crunching or data processing that can effectively be managed via existing tech, such as voice recognition or text analysis in particular modeling approaches. i wonder if - and perhaps it is entirely wrong-minded - in some way -- besides the issue of batteries as a limit upon scale and usability of computing resources, that if the electron itself is a false-limit and there could be smaller particle flows harnessed via destabilizing the natural equilibrium and thus the imbalance forces movement of charge at a smaller scale or within a different kind of circuitry that could be nested inside a larger electronic installation. what if a quantum computer would be equivalent to a tiny unmarked IC on a circuitboard and yet would it require access to the same components of existing computer architectures today or could it operate beyond or outside this, say as a connectable linked quantum processor networked into parallelism, for calculations alone. would a quantum computer installation be humongous or could a sufficiently developed (say, over the last 50 years) quantum computer be the size of a PC today yet wield teraflop or beyond capacity. what would be a telltale sign of such computing. could it involve strange or aberrant electronic or electrical interference or events, is it possible that the flow of electrons may interfere with such computation or that such a computer may need to be isolated else it could force strange current backwards, beyond diode barricades even, given weirdness of the physics. would the power draw be the same or more or less. would existing parallel software approaches even be viable within such a context or is it reliant upon assumptions that no longer apply if one or more foundations of existing computer architectures are changed or made unnecessary. is a quantum computer only quantum in some senses, such as processing, and this stops at I/O or other supposed 'motherboard' interactions, or would the entire circuit be changed. could there be hybrids where both co-exist, or like questioned, if one computing system could be embedded within another, via protected boundary? (this is already assumed for tech today, though seemingly in the same realm of technology in the mundane sense, like masquerade processing or other mystery functionality) the assumption i think is most likely if such a scenario existed would be that any such quantum technology would be highly advanced from the rudimentary first stages it exists today in the commercial realm, and would be possible to deploy and crack crypto en masse and that there is not symmetry between AES256 and this giant installation- built just for that- and instead whatever capacity were to exist it would be so far beyond the requirements of existing crypto as to provide decades of headroom for more data crunching atop what exists to be parsed and analyzed, catalogued, and stored in terms of record keeping. that it would involve 'big picture' data modeling of the state itself in its many and various dimensions as they are correlated- or perhaps that is only the domain of the underground data centres, who knows. in other words: can the assumption be made that the image of rows upon rows of computing servers equal 'traditional computing power' or might they function as the signage for conventional technology when stealth computing infrastructure could be within the mystery boxes networked and sparking. is it conventional for such feedback upon large scale installations or could such aberrations or anomalies indicate other possibilities, as commented. is there some truth to the irreverence, in that would anyone in the public know or be able to know, or even in government or private service - unless vetted and kept out of the mainstream, and its venue of conventional technological development. could quantum computing exist over the existing internet and be unrecognized or would it require its own parallel infrastructure. would the equivalent of a non-stealth advanced quantum computer installation be at the same scale or, if unhidden, potentially much smaller, else indicate anything if the existing installation was entirely or a large percentage of quantum computers. what would it mean for crypto, for instance. would emissions or anything else provide indication of quantum versus traditional computing architectures, via escaped signature forms of data structuring tuned into remotely. what would it mean, otherwise. (i put these things here at the bottom to make space for the post, there is no extra line break at the end, so the list footer often crunches the last line of text. even if fixed/added i may include an ASCII character anyway, for issues of symbolism as it relates to code and processing) xp

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Re: [Cryptography] Iran and murder
by Eugen Leitl 09 Oct '13

09 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 08:44:05 -0400 From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam(a)gmail.com> To: Tim Newsham <tim.newsham(a)gmail.com> Cc: John Kelsey <crypto.jmk(a)gmail.com>, "cryptography(a)metzdowd.com" <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com>, "James A. Donald" <jamesd(a)echeque.com> Subject: Re: [Cryptography] Iran and murder Message-ID: <CAMm+LwiYZfYAYU_r97B3WhWjbgSr8=W7-rC5HWHRCY3+p9qRfw(a)mail.gmail.com> On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 12:44 AM, Tim Newsham <tim.newsham(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > We are more vulnerable to widespread acceptance of these bad principles > than > > almost anyone, ultimately, But doing all these things has won larger > budgets > > and temporary successes for specific people and agencies today, whereas > > the costs of all this will land on us all in the future. > > The same could be (and has been) said about offensive cyber warfare. > I said the same thing in the launch issue of cyber-defense. Unfortunately the editor took it into his head to conflate inventing the HTTP referer field etc. with rather more and so I can't point people at the article as they refuse to correct it. I see cyber-sabotage as being similar to use of chemical or biological weapons: It is going to be banned because the military consequences fall far short of being decisive, are unpredictable and the barriers to entry are low. STUXNET has been relaunched with different payloads countless times. So we are throwing stones the other side can throw back with greater force. We have a big problem in crypto because we cannot now be sure that the help received from the US government in the past has been well intentioned or not. And so a great deal of time is being wasted right now (though we will waste orders of magnitude more of their time). At the moment we have a bunch of generals and contractors telling us that we must spend billions on the ability to attack China's power system in case they attack ours. If we accept that project then we can't share technology that might help them defend their power system which cripples our ability to defend our own. So a purely hypothetical attack promoted for the personal enrichment of a few makes us less secure, not safer. And the power systems are open to attack by sufficiently motivated individuals. The sophistication of STUXNET lay in its ability to discriminate the intended target from others. The opponents we face simply don't care about collateral damage. So I am not impressed by people boasting about the ability of some country (not an ally of my country BTW) to perform targeted murder overlooks the fact that they can and likely will retaliate with indiscriminate murder in return. I bet people are less fond of drones when they start to realize other countries have them as well. Lets just stick to defense and make the NATO civilian infrastructure secure against cyber attack regardless of what making that technology public might do for what some people insist we should consider enemies. -- Website: http://hallambaker.com/ _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- 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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Secrecy News -- 10/08/13
by Eugen Leitl 09 Oct '13

09 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from Steven Aftergood <saftergood(a)fas.org> ----- Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 08:59:10 -0700 From: Steven Aftergood <saftergood(a)fas.org> To: eugen(a)leitl.org Subject: Secrecy News -- 10/08/13 Message-ID: <181be29e41961c44cc8cf25aaf148cf5(a)lists.fas.org> Reply-To: saftergood(a)fas.org X-Mailer-LID: 1 X-Mailer-RecptId: 399049 X-Mailer-SID: 1881 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. 87 October 8, 2013 Secrecy News Blog: http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/ ** CIA HALTS PUBLIC ACCESS TO OPEN SOURCE SERVICE CIA HALTS PUBLIC ACCESS TO OPEN SOURCE SERVICE For more than half a century, the public has been able to access a wealth of information collected by U.S. intelligence from unclassified, open sources around the world. At the end of this year, the Central Intelligence Agency will terminate that access. The U.S. intelligence community's Open Source Center (OSC), which is managed by the CIA, will cease to provide its information feed to the publicly accessible World News Connection as of December 31, 2013, according to an announcement from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), which operates the World News Connection (WNC). The WNC "is an online news service, only accessible via the World Wide Web, that offers an extensive array of translated and English-language news and information," an NTIS brochure explains. "Particularly effective in its coverage of local media sources, WNC provides you with the power to identify what really is happening in a specific country or region. Compiled from thousands of non-U.S. media sources, the information in WNC covers significant socioeconomic, political, scientific, technical, and environmental issues and events." "The information is obtained from full text and summaries of newspaper articles, conference proceedings, television and radio broadcasts, periodicals, and non-classified technical reports. New information is entered into WNC every government business day. Generally, new information is available within 48-72 hours from the time of original publication or broadcast." "For over 60 years, analysts from OSC's domestic and overseas bureaus have monitored timely and pertinent open-source materials, including grey literature. Uniquely, WNC allows you to take advantage of the intelligence gathering experience of OSC," the NTIS brochure says. Soon, that will no longer be true. http://www.ntis.gov/products/wnc.aspx The WNC public feed from the Open Source Center is a highly attenuated version of what is available to official government users. Within government, copyright considerations are ignored, but for public distribution they must be respected, and so (with some exceptions) only information products whose creators have signed a royalty agreement with NTIS are publicly released. Even with that significant limitation and the attendant public subscription fees, the NTIS World News Connection has remained a highly prized resource for news reporters, foreign policy analysts, students and interested members of the public. I check it almost every day. Recently, for example, I have been following official statements from Russian officials who allege that the U.S. is covertly developing biological weapons for use against Russia in a military laboratory in the Republic of Georgia. The claim seems bizarre, but may nevertheless be politically significant. Detailed English-language coverage of the matter, or of many other stories of regional interest and importance, is not readily available elsewhere. (Moreso than in the past, however, portions of the material that is publicly accessible through WNC can be obtained elsewhere, through other news services or foreign websites.) The reasons for the decision to terminate the World News Connection are a bit obscure. Producing it is not a drain on U.S. intelligence-- the marginal costs of providing the additional feed to NTIS are close to zero. (The total budget for open source intelligence was about $384 million in FY2012, according to classified budget records obtained by the Washington Post from Edward Snowden.) However, the program is a headache for NTIS to manage, particularly since NTIS officials had to negotiate numerous contracts with media source providers to offer their products to the public. But the large majority of that work has already been accomplished, and now it will be rendered useless. Mary Webster of the Open Source Center had initially proposed to cancel the public information feed as of September 30, according to an NTIS official. Then she was persuaded to grant a six month reprieve. But in the end, a cut-off date of December 31, 2013 was set. If that comes to pass, it will be a blow to researchers and proponents of public intelligence. The Federation of American Scientists had previously argued that the U.S. government should actually expand public access to open source intelligence by publishing all unclassified, uncopyrighted Open Source Center products. ("Open Up Open Source Intelligence," Secrecy News, August 24, 2011.) Instead, even the current range of publications will no longer be systematically released. (Only a small fraction of publicly unreleased OSC records ever seem to leak.) http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2011/08/open_up_osint/ Although the Open Source Center is managed by the Central Intelligence Agency, it is formally a component of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Yet the move the terminate public access to OSC products seemed to catch the ODNI unawares. "Obviously our attention is on a possible lapse in appropriations, but we are looking into this," said an ODNI spokesman on September 30, just before the government shutdown. "The information provided through NTIS makes an irreplaceable contribution to U.S. national security," wrote Prof. Gary G. Sick of Columbia University in an October 1999 letter, in response to a previous proposal to curtail coverage in the World News Connection. The World News Connection "informs us about other countries in ways that otherwise would be nearly impossible," Dr. Sick wrote. "It costs virtually nothing in comparison with almost any other national security system. It is not as sexy as a bomber or a missile, but its contributions to national security can be attested to by generations of policy-makers. I was in the White House during the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis, and my respect for the power of this information was born at that time. I often found it more helpful than the reams of classified material that came across my desk at the NSC." http://www.fas.org/irp/fbis/sicklet.html _______________________________________________ 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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Re: [tor-talk] Tor Weekly News — October 9th, 2013
by Eugen Leitl 09 Oct '13

09 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from Joe Btfsplk <joebtfsplk(a)gmx.com> ----- Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 12:41:04 -0500 From: Joe Btfsplk <joebtfsplk(a)gmx.com> To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Tor Weekly News — October 9th, 2013 Message-ID: <52559530.1060502(a)gmx.com> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130801 Thunderbird/17.0.8 Reply-To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org On 10/9/2013 10:27 AM, Lunar wrote: > ======================================================================== > Tor Weekly News October 9th, 2013 > ======================================================================== > > Welcome to the fifteenth issue of Tor Weekly News, the weekly newsletter > that covers what's happening in the world of Tor — “king of high-secure, > low-latency anonymity” [1]. > > [1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/tor-high-secure-in… > > New tranche of NSA/GCHQ Tor documents released > ---------------------------------------------- > > ... a series of stories were published > in the Guardian and the Washington Post that detailed alleged attempts > by NSA, GCHQ, and their allies to defeat or circumvent the protection > that Tor offers its users. ... > > The documents in question [3] offer,... a summary of > attacks against Tor users and the network as a whole that they have > considered or carried out. > I'm sure Tor developers have considered the real possibility that some or all of what different agencies release, about their capabilities & successes (or lack of) against Tor - or anything else, is misinformation, designed to make the Tor Project AND users more comfortable in continuing to use TBB. Logically, if any agency or adversary divulged they can somewhat successfully track users or "infiltrate the system," then most would stop using it and a valuable method to gather information or catch "criminals" would cease to exist. Good poker players and gov'ts NEVER reveal their hands. I wouldn't take seriously anything that ANY gov't publicly reveals about their technology or intelligence capability (or lack there or). Over a long history, it's been repeatedly shown that advanced gov'ts always know more & have more technology capability, than is revealed. That is, often until decades later, when the real truth comes out. It's no different now. -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsusbscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- 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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