- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

NSA UTAH data center Power Consumption FOIA
by Moritz 09 Oct '13

09 Oct '13

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/nsas-utah-data-cen… "This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act. I hereby request the following records: A copy of any letters, emails, or other communications sent or received by the NSA to any representatives of Utah government agencies or policy makers regarding utility rates and taxes in connection with the NSA's Utah Data Center and/or Utah HB325." "As stated in our previous letter dated 14 June 2013, and based on the information you provided in your letter, you are considered an "all other" requester. You must pay for search time in excess of 2 hours and duplication in excess of 100 pages. We have expended your two free hours of search and some responsive records were located within that timeframe. A detailed review to determine the releasability of this information is required. We estimate that the costs involved to further search for material responsive to your request will be approximately $264.00. "

1 0

[RISKS] Risks Digest 27.51
by RISKS List Owner 08 Oct '13

08 Oct '13

RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Tuesday 8 October 2013 Volume 27 : Issue 51 ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann, moderator, chmn ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy ***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. ***** This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/27.51.html> The current issue can be found at <http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt> Contents: Cyber Schools Fleece Taxpayers for Phantom Students and Failing Grades (Mary Bottari) Our Founding Fathers wisely recognized the risks in voting (Paul Robinson) "Beyond the bottom line: The true cost of patent trolls" (Serdar Yegulalp via Gene Wirchenko) Risks of politics (Chris Adams) Lowering Your Standards: DRM and the Future of the W3C (Danny O'Brien via Dewayne Hendricks) Why you can't stop checking your phone (Monty Solomon) Silk Road's founder arrested (PGN) Technologists' Comment to the NSA Review Group (Joseph Lorenzo Hall) Re: Cost and Responsibility for Snowden's Breaches (Robert R. Fenichel) Bruce Schneier: NSA attacks Internet (via Steven J. Greenwald) Mugged by a Mug Shot Online (David Segal via Matthew Kruk) Adobe Announces Security Breach (David Kocieniewski via Matthew Kruk) Notarizations Go Digital in North Carolina (Gabe Goldberg) Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2013 14:02:08 PDT From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann(a)csl.sri.com> Subject: Cyber Schools Fleece Taxpayers for Phantom Students and Failing Grades (Mary Bottari) Mary Bottari, PRWatch: In recent years, there has been an explosion of full-time `virtual' charter schools paid for by the taxpayer. K12 Inc. and ALEC have pushed a national agenda to replace brick-and-mortar classrooms and hands-on teaching with computers and "distance learning." http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/10/12257/junk-bonds-junk-schools-fleece-ta… ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 11:57:41 -0700 (PDT) From: Paul Robinson <paul(a)paul-robinson.us> Subject: Our Founding Fathers wisely recognized the risks in voting Every two years I become a county employee, for two days. I work at the polling place as an election judge on the Primary election and the General election. I'm one of those petty bureaucrats that make you stand in line for hours and prevent you from voting. All kidding aside, I'm proud of the fact that at our little polling place, even under heavy loads of people showing up, 95% of the time, people are inside, already having been checked in and are simply waiting to use one of the voting machines. So, anyway, I point out to the other election judges the true reasons why the United States usually holds elections on "The First Tuesday after the First Monday" in the month of the election. Consider that when our forefathers set up this country, they didn't let every one who was over 21 and had a pulse (or even if they don't if you live in Chicago), you had to be a wealthy landholder, which almost always meant you were a rich, white male. Well, that usually meant you had a household to run and if the election fell on the first of the month, you might not have time to saddle your horse or hitch up your horse and buggy and ride for hours all the way to the polls, it was a long trek, and you had bills to pay and accounts to settle. So they wanted the election not to be on the 1st of the month. Now, they also didn't want the election falling on Monday. After a weekend of binge drinking - especially on Sunday, where, if you weren't binge drinking you might have to stay awake on Sunday when you're in church where the preacher would be giving his dull, boring sermon, and if you stayed awake long enough you might realize how really dull and boring he was and pull out your ball and powder pistol and plug him just for the fun of it or to get some excitement in your life - you'd be so hung over Monday morning that you wouldn't be able to see straight, let alone be able to vote. So, that's why elections are held on Tuesday so that hopefully you'd be sober and not suffering too much from a hangover. Those founding fathers were no dummies. Speaking of plugging people, that's also the reason Wyoming was the first state to give women the right to vote. A couple thousand years ago, the way you moved from Slave or peon to Citizen in Imperial Rome was you raised enough money to afford a sword and shield; you could now show anyone who dared to try to enslave you, a blade. Well, out west, women had to go armed. On the East Coast, this was rare; out west, there were lots of threats from rattlesnakes, both the ones with a tail and the ones on two legs; the best protection against sexual assault was a Colt .45, where it was said, "All men were created equal, but Samuel Colt allowed them to stay that way." and women going armed also made them equal to any man. So, a woman spent several hours to get to the polling place where she walks up to someone like me, rests her hands on her pistols, and declares that she wants to vote. That registrar is not going to tell some woman who's packing heat that she came out there for nothing, he's liable to soon become a permanent resident of Boot Hill. So, women having arms gave them the power to vote, which is usually where people got the power to vote, because they had the power to use violence if they were denied it. Paul Robinson <paul(a)paul-robinson.us> - http://paul-robinson.us ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2013 12:54:50 -0700 From: Gene Wirchenko <genew(a)telus.net> Subject: "Beyond the bottom line: The true cost of patent trolls" (Serdar Yegulalp) Serdar Yegulalp | InfoWorld, 4 Oct 2013 Beyond the bottom line: The true cost of patent trolls The costs of patent trolling often aren't directly visible, but the benefits of fighting back are coming to light http://www.infoworld.com/t/intellectual-property/beyond-the-bottom-line-the… ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 19:43:42 -0400 From: Chris Adams <chris(a)improbable.org> Subject: Risks of politics I noticed a fair amount of discussion today from people dealing with key resources disappearing from government servers: * XML parsers choking on documents which use a DTD maintained by a government organization: https://plus.google.com/u/0/106980687849423472398/posts/b1ubKCPJmy7 (A recurring RISK of an XML implementation anti-pattern: see the 2008 W3C post about the DoS effect of owning popular XML standards: http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dtd_traffic/) * Dan Chudnov and Becky Yoose created mirrors of key Library of Congress datasets: https://twitter.com/dchud/status/385061127010668544 https://twitter.com/yo_bj/status/385070010965585921 * Ed Summers, a coworker at LC, posted about Linked Open Data disappearing and various challenges in distributed replication: http://inkdroid.org/journal/2013/09/30/preserving-linked-data/ * Code for America mirrored various census.gov datasets: http://forever.codeforamerica.org/Census-API/shutdown-2013.html * The Sunlight Foundation had a good general post talking about how they are impacted by canonical sources disappearing: http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/09/30/what-happens-to-gov-in-a-shut… The meta- risk here is assuming that any single point can be too big to fail. Government agencies commonly put considerable resources into making sure that a disaster won't take them offline but it's impossible to deal with a political crisis which prevents you from incurring any new expense whatsoever. That's where the more interesting questions for designing resilient systems come up because questions like replication and trust really need to be considered first-class requirements. Using a protocol like BitTorrent could solve many of the challenges for widely replicating large datasets but it would still require some sort of attestation protocol to decide what copies are trustworthy. One more technical aspect is also the benefit to reusing standard Web technologies where possible: much of the data which currently down can be recovered from the Internet Archive if it's easily accessible to crawlers. An unlinked API or anything with access control will fail much harder. ------------------------------ Date: Oct 3, 2013 3:42 PM From: "Dewayne Hendricks" <dewayne(a)warpspeed.com> Subject: Lowering Your Standards: DRM and the Future of the W3C (Danny O'Brien) Danny O'Brien, EFF, 2 Oct 2013 (via Dave Farber) <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/lowering-your-standards> On Monday, the W3C announced that its Director, Tim Berners-Lee, had determined that the "playback of protected content" was in scope for the W3C HTML Working Group's new charter, overriding EFF's formal objection against its inclusion. This means the controversial Encrypted Media Extension (EME) proposal will continue to be part of that group's work product, and may be included in the W3C's HTML5.1 standard. If EME goes through to become part of a W3C recommendation, you can expect to hear DRM vendors, DRM-locked content providers like Netflix, and browser makers like Microsoft, Opera, and Google stating that they can now offer W3C standards compliant "content protection" for Web video. We're deeply disappointed. We've argued before as to why EME and other protected media proposals are different from other standards . By approving this idea, the W3C has ceded control of the "user agent" (the term for a Web browser in W3C parlance) to a third-party, the content distributor. That breaks a -- perhaps until now unspoken -- assurance about who has the final say in your Web experience, and indeed who has ultimate control over your computing device. EFF believes that's a dangerous step for an organization that is seen by many as the guardian of the open Web to take. We have rehashed this argument many times before, in person with Tim Berners-Lee, with staff members and, along with hundreds of others, in online interactions with the W3C's other participants. But there's another argument that we've made more privately. It's an argument that is less about the damage that sanctioning restricted media does to users, and more about the damage it will do to the W3C. At the W3C's advisory council meeting in Tokyo, EFF spoke to many technologists working on Web standards. It's clear to us that the engineering consensus at the consortium is the same as within the Web community, which is the same almost anywhere else: that DRM is a pain to design, does little to prevent piracy, and is by its nature user-unfriendly. Nonetheless, many technologists have resigned themselves to believing that until the dominant rights holders in Hollywood finally give up on it (as the much of the software and music industry already has), we're stuck with implementing it. The EME, they said, was a reasonable compromise between what these contracts demand, and the reality of the Web. A Web where movies are fenced away in EME's DRM-ridden binary blobs is, the W3C's pragmatists say, no worse than the current environment where Silverlight and Flash serve the purpose of preventing unauthorized behavior. We pointed out that EME would by no means be the last "protected content" proposal to be put forward for the W3C's consideration. EME is exclusively concerned with video content, because EME's primary advocate, Netflix, is still required to wrap some of its film and TV offerings in DRM as part of its legacy contracts with Hollywood. But there are plenty of other rightsholders beyond Hollywood who would like to impose controls on how their content is consumed. Just five years ago, font companies tried to demand DRM-like standards for embedded Web fonts. These Web typography wars fizzled out without the adoption of these restrictions, but now that such technical restrictions are clearly "in scope," why wouldn't typographers come back with an argument for new limits on what browsers can do? Indeed, within a few weeks of EME hitting the headlines, a community group within W3C formed around the idea of locking away Web code, so that Web applications could only be executed but not examined online. Static image creators such as photographers are eager for the W3C to help lock down embedded images. Shortly after our Tokyo discussions, another group proposed their new W3C use-case: "protecting" content that had been saved locally from a Web page from being accessed without further restrictions. Meanwhile, publishers have advocated that HTML textual content should have DRM features for many years. In our conversations with the W3C, we argued that the W3C needed to develop a clearly defined line against the wave of DRM systems it will now be encouraged to adopt. ... Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/> ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 10:38:14 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty(a)roscom.com> Subject: Why you can't stop checking your phone To fight texting and driving means confronting a bigger problem, say experts: our technology is reprogramming us. Leon Neyfakh, *The Boston Globe*, 6 Oct 2013 DRIVE FOR LONG ENOUGH in America, and you're bound to see someone texting behind the wheel. Maybe it'll be the guy ahead of you, his head bobbing up and down as he tries to balance his attention between his screen and his windshield. Or maybe it'll be the woman weaving into your lane, thumbing at her phone while she holds it above the dashboard. Maybe it'll be you. A recent study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute showed that drivers who are texting are twice as likely to crash, or almost crash, as those who are focused on the road. It's a disturbingly common habit: According to a survey analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one-third of American adults had e-mailed or texted on their phones while driving at least once during the previous month. And while most get away with it unscathed, many do not. The National Safety Council estimates that 213,000 car crashes in the United States in 2011 involved drivers who were texting, up from 160,000 the year before. ... http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/10/06/why-you-can-stop-checking-your-… ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2013 13:57:03 PDT From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann(a)csl.sri.com> Subject: Silk Road's founder arrested Ross William Ulbricht (a.k.a. Dread Pirate Roberts, a name well known from The Princess Bride) arrested in San Francisco, charged with conspiracy to distribute narcotics, computer hacking, money laundering, after at least two years of running an online black market for drugs. Silk Road is a service hidden by Tor's anonymization and operated as an "eBay for illegal goods and services." CNN reports that he had successfully been using Tor, but that his apprehension resulted after he posted his Gmail address online! [In the movie, Dread Pirate Roberts was not a unique identity, with multiple people taking on that alias. It is of course conceivable that there might be other DPRs lurking. PGN] Tim Hume, CNN, 5 Oct 2013 http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/04/world/americas/silk-road-ross-ulbricht/index.… Thomas Claburn, Information Week, 2 Oct 2013 http://www.informationweek.com/security/vulnerabilities/silk-road-founder-a… Brian Krebs on Security http://www.krebsonsecurity.com [no longer the first item. PGN] ------------------------------ Date: Saturday, October 5, 2013 From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall Subject: Technologists' Comment to the NSA Review Group EFF and CDT submitted a public comment to the NSA Review Group on behalf of 47 leading technologists (including yourself, of course!). It emphasizes the need for technical input into oversight processes, that the NSA is making everyone unsafe by planting backdoors and subverting encryption, and, finally, that U.S. commitments to privacy and civil liberties require honoring the human rights of non-U.S. people online. CDT blog post: https://www.cdt.org/tech-comment-nsa-review EFF blog post: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/47-prominent-technologists-nsa-review… PDF of comment: https://www.cdt.org/files/pdfs/nsa-review-panel-tech-comment.pdf CDT and EFF coordinated this effort on behalf of the following 47 technologists: Ben Adida Ross Anderson, University of Cambridge Dan Auerbach, Electronic Frontier Foundation Brian Behlendorf, Board Member at EFF, Mozilla, and Benetech Steven M. Bellovin, Columbia University Matt Blaze, University of Pennsylvania Scott Bradner, Harvard University Eric Burger, Georgetown University L. Jean Camp, Indiana University Stephen Checkoway, Johns Hopkins University Nicolas Christin, Carnegie Mellon University Alissa Cooper, Center for Democracy & Technology Lorrie Faith Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University Nick Doty, University of California, Berkeley/World Wide Web Consortium Jeremy Epstein, SRI International David Evans, University of Virginia David Farber, Carnegie Mellon University/University of Pennsylvania Stephen Farrell, Trinity College Dublin Joan Feigenbaum, Yale University Edward W. Felten, Princeton University Bryan Ford, Yale University Daniel Kahn Gillmor Matthew D. Green, Johns Hopkins University J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Center for Democracy & Technology James Hendler, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Nadia Heninger, University of Pennsylvania David Jefferson, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Micah Lee, Electronic Frontier Foundation Morgan Marquis-Boire, Citizen Lab, University of Toronto Siobhan MacDermott, AVG Technologies Jonathan Mayer, Stanford University Sascha Meinrath, Open Technology Institute, New America Foundation Peter G. Neumann, SRI International M. Chris Riley, Mozilla Phillip Rogaway, University of California, Davis Runa A. Sandvik, Independent Researcher Jeffrey I. Schiller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Bruce Schneier, BT Seth Schoen, Electronic Frontier Foundation Micah Sherr, Georgetown University Christopher Soghoian, American Civil Liberties Union Ashkan Soltani, Independent Researcher Brad Templeton, Electronic Frontier Foundation/Singularity University Dan S. Wallach, Rice University Nicholas Weaver, International Computer Science Institute Philip Zimmermann, Silent Circle LLC https://josephhall.org/ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 15:14:53 -0700 From: "Robert R. Fenichel" <bob(a)fenichel.net> Subject: Re: Cost and Responsibility for Snowden's Breaches (RISKS 27.50) Jonathan S. Shapiro's statement that The only questions were *who* would leak it and *how soon*. It happened to be Snowden, but if not for Snowden it would have been somebody else. is optimistic. Snowden was the first one to reveal some of NSA's activities to responsible journalists, but there's no reason to believe that there were not earlier leakers of the NSA-induced vulnerabilities, leaking to less savory recipients than the NYT and the Guardian. Robert R. Fenichel, M.D. http://www.fenichel.net ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 08:47:03 -0400 (GMT-04:00) From: "Steven J. Greenwald" <sjg6(a)gate.net> Subject: Bruce Schneier: NSA attacks Internet (*The Guardian*) Bruce Schneier, theguardian.com, 4 October 2013 Why the NSA's attacks on the Internet must be made public By reporting on the agency's actions, the vulnerabilities in our computer systems can be fixed. It's the only way to force change. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/04/nsa-attacks-internet-b… Today, the Guardian is reporting on how the NSA targets Tor users, along with details of how it uses centrally placed servers on the Internet to attack individual computers. This builds on a Brazilian news story from last week that, in part, shows that the NSA is impersonating Google servers to users; a German story on how the NSA is hacking into smartphones; and a Guardian story from two weeks ago on how the NSA is deliberately weakening common security algorithms, protocols, and products. The common thread among these stories is that the NSA is subverting the Internet and turning it into a massive surveillance tool. The NSA's actions are making us all less safe, because its eavesdropping mission is degrading its ability to protect the US. Among IT security professionals, it has been long understood that the public disclosure of vulnerabilities is the only consistent way to improve security. That's why researchers publish information about vulnerabilities in computer software and operating systems, cryptographic algorithms, and consumer products like implantable medical devices, cars, and CCTV cameras. It wasn't always like this. In the early years of computing, it was common for security researchers to quietly alert the product vendors about vulnerabilities, so they could fix them without the "bad guys" learning about them. The problem was that the vendors wouldn't bother fixing them, or took years before getting around to it. Without public pressure, there was no rush. This all changed when researchers started publishing. Now vendors are under intense public pressure to patch vulnerabilities as quickly as possible. The majority of security improvements in the hardware and software we all use today is a result of this process. This is why Microsoft's Patch Tuesday process fixes so many vulnerabilities every month. This is why Apple's iPhone is designed so securely. This is why so many products push out security updates so often. And this is why mass-market cryptography has continually improved. Without public disclosure, you'd be much less secure against cybercriminals, hacktivists, and state-sponsored cyberattackers. The NSA's actions turn that process on its head, which is why the security community is so incensed. The NSA not only develops and purchases vulnerabilities, but deliberately creates them through secret vendor agreements. These actions go against everything we know about improving security on the Internet. It's folly to believe that any NSA hacking technique will remain secret for very long. Yes, the NSA has a bigger research effort than any other institution, but there's a lot of research being done -- by other governments in secret, and in academic and hacker communities in the open. These same attacks are being used by other governments. And technology is fundamentally democratizing: today's NSA secret techniques are tomorrow's PhD theses and the following day's cybercrime attack tools. It's equal folly to believe that the NSA's secretly installed backdoors will remain secret. Given how inept the NSA was at protecting its own secrets, it's extremely unlikely that Edward Snowden was the first sysadmin contractor to walk out the door with a boatload of them. And the previous leakers could have easily been working for a foreign government. But it wouldn't take a rogue NSA employee; researchers or hackers could discover any of these backdoors on their own. This isn't hypothetical. We already know of government-mandated backdoors being used by criminals in Greece, Italy, and elsewhere. We know China is actively engaging in cyber-espionage worldwide. A recent Economist article called it "akin to a government secretly commanding lockmakers to make their products easier to pick -- and to do so amid an epidemic of burglary." The NSA has two conflicting missions. Its eavesdropping mission has been getting all the headlines, but it also has a mission to protect US military and critical infrastructure communications from foreign attack. Historically, these two missions have not come into conflict. During the cold war, for example, we would defend our systems and attack Soviet systems. But with the rise of mass-market computing and the Internet, the two missions have become interwoven. It becomes increasingly difficult to attack their systems and defend our systems, because everything is using the same systems: Microsoft Windows, Cisco routers, HTML, TCP/IP, iPhones, Intel chips, and so on. Finding a vulnerability -- or creating one -- and keeping it secret to attack the bad guys necessarily leaves the good guys more vulnerable. Far better would be for the NSA to take those vulnerabilities back to the vendors to patch. Yes, it would make it harder to eavesdrop on the bad guys, but it would make everyone on the Internet safer. If we believe in protecting our critical infrastructure from foreign attack, if we believe in protecting Internet users from repressive regimes worldwide, and if we believe in defending businesses and ourselves from cybercrime, then doing otherwise is lunacy. It is important that we make the NSA's actions public in sufficient detail for the vulnerabilities to be fixed. It's the only way to force change and improve security. Bruce Schneier writes about security, technology, and people. His latest book is Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive. He is a member of the EFF's board of directors. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2013 02:13:54 -0600 From: "Matthew Kruk" <mkrukg(a)gmail.com> Subject: Mugged by a Mug Shot Online (David Segal) David Segal, *The New York Times*, 5 Oct 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/business/mugged-by-a-mug-shot-online.html… [This is a relatively long but remarkably well researched article on how mug shots persist even if the would-be culprit is exonerated, how a blackmail-like industry has developed to supposedly remove mug shots, how some real perps are able to get their mug shots removed, and much more. It is mandatory reading for RISKS readers. PGN] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2013 02:00:15 -0600 From: "Matthew Kruk" <mkrukg(a)gmail.com> Subject: Adobe Announces Security Breach (David Kocieniewski) David Kocieniewski, *The New York Times*, 3 Oct 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/technology/adobe-announces-security-breac… Hackers infiltrated the computer system of the software company Adobe, gaining access to credit card information and other personal data from 2.9 million of its customers, the company acknowledged on Thursday. The security breach, which Adobe called a part of a "sophisticated attack," also allowed hackers to obtain encrypted passwords and other personal information from customers. Hackers also illegally took copies of the source code of some of the company's widely used products, which are run on personal computers and businesses servers around the world. There was no indication that the attackers obtained unencrypted credit card numbers, Adobe said in a statement. As a precaution, however, the company said it had notified customers and credit card companies about the breach and reset customer passwords to prevent further unauthorized access. "Cyberattacks are one of the unfortunate realities of doing business today," Adobe's chief security officer, Brad Arkin, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. "Given the profile and widespread use of many of our products, Adobe has attracted increasing attention from cyberattackers." The breach at Adobe is one of a recent spate of hacking episodes at prominent organizations. Already this year, hackers have infiltrated database aggregators like Lexis-Nexis and Dun & Bradstreet and the security firm Kroll Associates, as well as the National White Collar Crime Center, which helps businesses protect their computer systems. Concerns about the security of data at Adobe were first raised last week, when a technology researcher and an independent journalist investigating the hacking episodes discovered copies of Adobe source code on a server that was believed to have been used in the previous attacks. Brian Krebs, the journalist, informed Adobe about his findings, and on Thursday publicly reported the hacking on his site, krebsonsecurity.com. One of the products that had its source code stolen is ColdFusion, which, according to Adobe, is used by the United States Senate, 75 of the Fortune 100 companies and more than 10,000 other companies worldwide. Adobe security officials said they were not aware of any specific risks to customers. But because the source code contains the DNA of the software program, computer experts said it could allow hackers to find and exploit any other potential weaknesses in its security. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 17:41:09 -0400 From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe(a)gabegold.com> Subject: Notarizations Go Digital in North Carolina North Carolina standardized a new process that allows for notarization to be completed electronically. Some state officials are calling the program the first and most robust move to e-notarizations on a statewide level. Notarizations are traditionally completed manually with paper documents and require an authorized "notary public" to approve, sign and seal official documents -- often for legal purposes. Laws require that when documents are notarized, both the notary public and the parties involved with the documents are physically present for the notarization. Although notarizations can now be completed electronically in North Carolina, often with the help of laptops or other mobile devices, the state still requires that both the notary and involved parties be physically present when the e-notarization transaction is completed. The move to digital notarizations was spearheaded by the Secretary of State's office and its current Secretary Elaine Marshall to enhance the signature value on official documents while still upholding statewide standards. http://www.govtech.com/computing/Notarizations-Go-Digital-in-North-Carolina… Aside from the usual "What could go wrong?" query, it's not really clear what's happening, since notary and involved parties must still be physically present. So only the documents can be electronic? Not a word about how they're presented, authenticated, protected, disabled from changes... ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2012 20:20:16 -0900 From: RISKS-request(a)csl.sri.com Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks) The ACM RISKS Forum is a MODERATED digest. Its Usenet manifestation is comp.risks, the feed for which is donated by panix.com as of June 2011. => SUBSCRIPTIONS: PLEASE read RISKS as a newsgroup (comp.risks or equivalent) if possible and convenient for you. The mailman Web interface can be used directly to subscribe and unsubscribe: http://lists.csl.sri.com/mailman/listinfo/risks Alternatively, to subscribe or unsubscribe via e-mail to mailman your FROM: address, send a message to risks-request(a)csl.sri.com containing only the one-word text subscribe or unsubscribe. You may also specify a different receiving address: subscribe address= ... . You may short-circuit that process by sending directly to either risks-subscribe(a)csl.sri.com or risks-unsubscribe(a)csl.sri.com depending on which action is to be taken. Subscription and unsubscription requests require that you reply to a confirmation message sent to the subscribing mail address. Instructions are included in the confirmation message. Each issue of RISKS that you receive contains information on how to post, unsubscribe, etc. => The complete INFO file (submissions, default disclaimers, archive sites, copyright policy, etc.) is online. <http://www.CSL.sri.com/risksinfo.html> *** Contributors are assumed to have read the full info file for guidelines. => .UK users may contact <Lindsay.Marshall(a)newcastle.ac.uk>. => SPAM challenge-responses will not be honored. Instead, use an alternative address from which you NEVER send mail! => SUBMISSIONS: to risks(a)CSL.sri.com with meaningful SUBJECT: line. *** NOTE: Including the string "notsp" at the beginning or end of the subject *** line will be very helpful in separating real contributions from spam. *** This attention-string may change, so watch this space now and then. => ARCHIVES: ftp://ftp.sri.com/risks for current volume or ftp://ftp.sri.com/VL/risks for previous VoLume http://www.risks.org takes you to Lindsay Marshall's searchable archive at newcastle: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/VL.IS.html gets you VoLume, ISsue. Lindsay has also added to the Newcastle catless site a palmtop version of the most recent RISKS issue and a WAP version that works for many but not all telephones: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/w/r <http://the.wiretapped.net/security/info/textfiles/risks-digest/> . ==> PGN's comprehensive historical Illustrative Risks summary of one liners: <http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.html> for browsing, <http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.pdf> or .ps for printing is no longer maintained up-to-date except for recent election problems. *** NOTE: If a cited URL fails, we do not try to update them. Try browsing on the keywords in the subject line or cited article leads. ==> Special Offer to Join ACM for readers of the ACM RISKS Forum: <http://www.acm.org/joinacm1> ------------------------------ End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 27.51 ************************

1 0

Feds Arrest Alleged Top Silk Road Drug Seller
by Eugen Leitl 08 Oct '13

08 Oct '13

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/10/feds-arrest-alleged-top-silk-road-drug-… Feds Arrest Alleged Top Silk Road Drug Seller Federal authorities last week arrested a Washington state man accused of being one of the most active and sought-after drug dealers on the online black market known as the “Silk Road.” Meanwhile, new details about the recent coordinated takedown of the Silk Road became public, as other former buyers and sellers on the fraud bazaar pondered who might be next and whether competing online drug markets will move in to fill the void. NOD's feedback from Silk Road buyers, according to the government. A complaint unsealed Oct. 2 by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle alleges that Steven Lloyd Sadler, 40, of Bellevue, Wash., used the nickname “NOD” on the Silk Road, and was among the “top one percent of sellers” on the Silk Road, selling high-quality cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine in small, individual-use amounts to hundreds of buyers around the world. Investigators with the FBI and U.S. Post Office inspectors say they tracked dozens of packages containing drugs allegedly shipped by Sadler and a woman who was living with him at the time of his arrest. Authorities tied Sadler to the Silk Road after intercepting a package of cocaine and heroin destined for an Alaskan resident. That resident agreed to cooperate with authorities in the hopes of reducing his own sentence, and said he’d purchased the drugs from NOD via the Silk Road. Agents in Seattle sought and were granted permission to place GPS tracking devices on Sadler’s car and that of his roommate, Jenna White, also charged in this case. Investigators allege that the tracking showed the two traveled to at least 38 post offices in the Seattle area during the surveillance period. Interestingly, the investigators used the feedback on NOD’s Silk Road seller profile to get a sense of the volume of drugs he sold. Much like eBay sellers, merchants on the Silk Road are evaluated by previous buyers, who are encouraged to leave feedback about the quality of the seller’s goods and services. According to the government, NOD had 1,400 reviews for individual sales/purchases of small amounts of drugs, including: 2,269.5 grams of cocaine, 593 grams of heroin and 105 grams of meth. The complaint notes that these amounts don’t count sales going back more than five months prior to the investigation, when NOD first created his Silk Road vendor account. Cryptome has published a copy of the complaint (PDF) against Sadler. A copy of Sadler’s case docket is here. NOD’s reputation on the Silk Road also was discussed for several months on this Reddit thread. Many readers of last week’s story on the Silk Road takedown have been asking what is known about the locations of the Silk Road servers that were copied by the FBI. It’s still unclear how agents gained access to those servers, but a civil forfeiture complaint released by the Justice Department shows that they were aware of five, geographically dispersed servers that were supporting the Silk Road, either by directly hosting the site and/or hosting the Bitcoin wallets that the Silk Road maintains for buyers and sellers. Two of those servers were located in Iceland, one in Latvia, another in Switzerland, and apparently one in the United States. See the map above. As if the subset of Bitcoin users who frequented the Silk Road already didn’t have enough to worry about, there are indications that the individual(s) responsible for creating a competing Tor-based drug market — SheepMarketplace — may have made some missteps that could make it easier for authorities to discover the true location of that fraud bazaar as well. Check out this Reddit thread for more on that. Also, there are some indications that a Silk Road 2.0 is in the works, at least according to DailyGadgetry.com. If that doesn’t work out, perhaps would-be future Dread Pirate Robertses will turn to Bitwasp, a budding Github project which aims to provide open source code for setting up standalone markets using Bitcoin. “I think what you’re going to see is that a lot of me-too communities spring up and get squished pretty quickly,” said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and at University of California San Diego. “Part of the reason why the Silk Road was so useful was that it was so popular, and a half dozen smaller markets could be far less efficient than these larger markets. But personally, I’m betting we’ll soon see a fair number of them.” Finally, it seems a large number of Bitcoin users have been spending tiny fractions of their coinage to send messages to the FBI’s Bitcoin address on Blockchain. Some of the love letters to the FBI are amusing, such as, “All your Bitcoins are belong to us,” while others sound a defiant tone, including this one: ”One star is born as another fades away. Which one will come next? is my favorite riddle.” Said a girl puffing rings in a dot, dot, dash haze. “No worry, No hurry. They can’t stop the signal.” Update, Oct. 8, 2013: The BBC is reporting that four men have been arrested in the U.K. for alleged drug offenses on the Silk Road, and that more arrests are expected in the coming weeks. The BBC quotes the U.K. National Crime Agency as saying such sites would are a “key priority.”

3 2

Re: [tor-talk] Silk Road taken down by FBI
by Eugen Leitl 08 Oct '13

08 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from mirimir <mirimir(a)riseup.net> ----- Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 20:58:57 +0000 From: mirimir <mirimir(a)riseup.net> To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Silk Road taken down by FBI Message-ID: <524DDA91.30008(a)riseup.net> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.0 Reply-To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org On 10/03/2013 05:49 PM, Ahmed Hassan wrote: > One question is still remain unanswered. How did they locate > Silkroad server before locating him? > > They had full image of the server before his arrest. >From <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24371894> we know: > According to the court complaint document, it was the discovery of > the rossulbricht(a)gmail.com email address that gave investigators a > major boost in their search. > > Through records "obtained from Google", details of IP addresses - and > therefore locations - used to log into Mr Ulbricht's account focused > the search on San Francisco, specifically an internet cafe on Laguna > Street. > > Furthermore, detailed analysis of Silk Road's source code highlighted > a function that restricted who was able to log in to control the > site, locking it down to just one IP address. > > As would be expected, Dread Pirate Roberts was using a VPN - virtual > private network - to generate a "false" IP address, designed to cover > his tracks. > > However, the provider of the VPN was subpoenaed by the FBI. > > While efforts had been made by DPR to delete data, the VPN server's > records showed a user logged in from an internet cafe just 500 yards > from an address on Hickory Street, known to be the home of a close > friend of Mr Ulbricht's, and a location that had also been used to > log in to the Gmail account. > > At this point in the investigation, these clues, investigators > concluded, were enough to suggest that Mr Ulbricht and DPR - if not > the same person - were at the very least in the same location at the > same time. So they did have the server before they knew who he was. We also knew that he was sold out by his VPN provider. Hopefully, the identity of that VPN provider will come out soon. Given what I see in the complaints, I suspect that he was sold out by one of his administrators, perhaps the one (with a huge drug debt) that he tried to have killed. This is rather like Snowden, isn't it? More fundamentally, a business built around selling drugs by mail to customers' actual physical addresses was doomed. Anonymity in the physical world is much^N harder than on the Internet. > On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 1:26 PM, shadowOps07 <shadow.unit.x(a)gmail.com> > wrote: > >> No, it was a rookie fuck-up that enabled old-fashioned detective >> work. if it wasn't a fookie fuck-up, then none of this would have >> happened. >> >> >> On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 11:15 AM, Gordon Morehouse >> <gordon(a)morehouse.me >>> wrote: >> > Jonathan D. Proulx: >>>>> 2) Traditional police work still works - this should be good >>>>> news to the law and order folks that traditional methods >>>>> still work and no extensive digital survailance state is >>>>> needed. >>>>> >>>>> Note I'm only anecdotally familiar with Silk Road so no >>>>> personal opinion on wether he should be praised or flogged, I >>>>> do think in a "dear legislator please don't ban privacy" >>>>> kindof way point 2 is important. > > A trillion times, this. > > I knew Silk Road would very likely get busted by good old fashioned > police work. It was too big to not leave trails that smart, > patient, Bill-of-Rights-respecting (though that remains to be seen) > cops can pick up. > > Best, -Gordon M. > >>> -- 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 >>> >> -- 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 >> -- 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

5 7

Re: [zs-p2p] how to use Tor securely (Re: Silk Road founder arrested ...)
by Eugen Leitl 08 Oct '13

08 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from Tony Arcieri <bascule(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2013 14:52:33 -0700 From: Tony Arcieri <bascule(a)gmail.com> To: zs-p2p(a)zerostate.is Cc: info(a)postbiota.org Subject: Re: [zs-p2p] how to use Tor securely (Re: Silk Road founder arrested ...) Message-ID: <CAHOTMVJRS8CqVgBTU=gk+16_BdxFxkMTOfzXmVjvJ7D+=KtyvA(a)mail.gmail.com> Reply-To: zs-p2p(a)zerostate.is On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 2:35 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen(a)leitl.org> wrote: > I think that it is inevitable that in the future "decentralized web apps" > will be written in > either Javascript + LAFS, or else Javascript + some-other-decentralized- > storage-system. The Cryptosphere is a heavily Tahoe-LAFS inspired decentralized storage system which is specifically focusing on decentralized HTML+JS apps, FYI: http://cryptosphere.org/ -- Tony Arcieri _______________________________________________ zs-p2p mailing list zs-p2p(a)zerostate.is https://lists.zerostate.is/mailman/listinfo/zs-p2p ----- 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

1 0

[tor-talk] What the NSA cares about getting and defenses
by Eugen Leitl 08 Oct '13

08 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from Watson Ladd <watsonbladd(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 19:13:26 -0700 From: Watson Ladd <watsonbladd(a)gmail.com> To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org Subject: [tor-talk] What the NSA cares about getting and defenses Message-ID: <CACsn0cn1mGUWf7WYyNHn1Mnw8sWWqm3r+xX9wMhnd+iPmyA4_g(a)mail.gmail.com> Reply-To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org Prompted by the Ars Technica reporting on QUANTUM, I took a look at the slide and read the text, as well as compared to the MULLINIZE document describing NAT breaking. My conclusion is that the NSA obtains significant amounts of information from user activity in between closing browsers, and that current Tor Browser Bundle remains vulnerable to this attack. QUANTUM appears to rely on inserting fake references to third party assets and manipulating cookies in the requests made by the browser in response. I propose that we block third party cookies unless over HTTPS to mitigate this problem, and try to encourage users to use more frequent new identities. MULLINIZE achieves the reliable tracking of individual users behind a NAT through similar tricks. It is clear that the NSA views this information as valuable, even without real-world addresses to tie to it. Linkability across pages is difficult: breaking sessions is a major cost of the obvious no cookies approach to preventing this sort of attack. Sincerely, Watson -- 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

1 0

[tor-talk] Convergence and Exit Nodes
by Eugen Leitl 08 Oct '13

08 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from Sean Alexandre <sean(a)alexan.org> ----- Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 21:21:49 -0400 From: Sean Alexandre <sean(a)alexan.org> To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org Subject: [tor-talk] Convergence and Exit Nodes Message-ID: <20131008012149.GA17533@tuzo> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Reply-To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org In light of FoxAcid and the NSA hijacking traffic coming out of exit nodes [1], I'm wondering about the possibilities for building counter measures into exit nodes. To start it might be something as simple as bundling some type alternate CA system such Convergence into exit nodes [2]. Have exit nodes compare what they're seeing, and raise a flag if they see anything suspicious. Over time this could be built out into a fuller set of tools: honey pot HTTP requests to get more info on odd certs and DNS responses, etc. Run responses through automated Tor Browser Bundles on VMs that do system monitoring to watch for exploits, etc, etc. It seems this is an area with a lot of potential for increasing the safety of Tor users. The main goal would be to more quickly expose 0days being used to compromise users, and get them fixed. Also, to flag suspicious IP addresses. Thoughts? [1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-nsa-users-online-a… [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_%28SSL%29 -- 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

1 0

Bruce Schneier on the good, old air gap
by Eugen Leitl 07 Oct '13

07 Oct '13

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/10/149481/ Want to Evade NSA Spying? Don’t Connect to the Internet BY BRUCE SCHNEIER 10.07.13 6:30 AM Photo: Ariel Zambelich / WIRED; Illustration: Ross Patton / WIRED Since I started working with Snowden’s documents, I have been using a number of tools to try to stay secure from the NSA. The advice I shared included using Tor, preferring certain cryptography over others, and using public-domain encryption wherever possible. I also recommended using an air gap, which physically isolates a computer or local network of computers from the internet. (The name comes from the literal gap of air between the computer and the internet; the word predates wireless networks.) But this is more complicated than it sounds, and requires explanation. Since we know that computers connected to the internet are vulnerable to outside hacking, an air gap should protect against those attacks. There are a lot of systems that use — or should use — air gaps: classified military networks, nuclear power plant controls, medical equipment, avionics, and so on. Osama Bin Laden used one. I hope human rights organizations in repressive countries are doing the same. Air gaps might be conceptually simple, but they’re hard to maintain in practice. The truth is that nobody wants a computer that never receives files from the internet and never sends files out into the internet. What they want is a computer that’s not directly connected to the internet, albeit with some secure way of moving files on and off. But every time a file moves back or forth, there’s the potential for attack. And air gaps have been breached. Stuxnet was a U.S. and Israeli military-grade piece of malware that attacked the Natanz nuclear plant in Iran. It successfully jumped the air gap and penetrated the Natanz network. Another piece of malware named agent.btz, probably Chinese in origin, successfully jumped the air gap protecting U.S. military networks. These attacks work by exploiting security vulnerabilities in the removable media used to transfer files on and off the air gapped computers. Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author. His latest book is Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust Society Needs to Survive. Since working with Snowden’s NSA files, I have tried to maintain a single air-gapped computer. It turned out to be harder than I expected, and I have ten rules for anyone trying to do the same: 1. When you set up your computer, connect it to the internet as little as possible. It’s impossible to completely avoid connecting the computer to the internet, but try to configure it all at once and as anonymously as possible. I purchased my computer off-the-shelf in a big box store, then went to a friend’s network and downloaded everything I needed in a single session. (The ultra-paranoid way to do this is to buy two identical computers, configure one using the above method, upload the results to a cloud-based anti-virus checker, and transfer the results of that to the air gap machine using a one-way process.) 2. Install the minimum software set you need to do your job, and disable all operating system services that you won’t need. The less software you install, the less an attacker has available to exploit. I downloaded and installed OpenOffice, a PDF reader, a text editor, TrueCrypt, and BleachBit. That’s all. (No, I don’t have any inside knowledge about TrueCrypt, and there’s a lot about it that makes me suspicious. But for Windows full-disk encryption it’s that, Microsoft’s BitLocker, or Symantec’s PGPDisk — and I am more worried about large U.S. corporations being pressured by the NSA than I am about TrueCrypt.) 3. Once you have your computer configured, never directly connect it to the internet again. Consider physically disabling the wireless capability, so it doesn’t get turned on by accident. 4. If you need to install new software, download it anonymously from a random network, put it on some removable media, and then manually transfer it to the air gapped computer. This is by no means perfect, but it’s an attempt to make it harder for the attacker to target your computer. 5. Turn off all auto-run features. This should be standard practice for all the computers you own, but it’s especially important for an air-gapped computer. Agent.btz used autorun to infect U.S. military computers. 6. Minimize the amount of executable code you move onto the air-gapped computer. Text files are best. Microsoft Office files and PDFs are more dangerous, since they might have embedded macros. Turn off all macro capabilities you can on the air-gapped computer. Don’t worry too much about patching your system; in general, the risk of the executable code is worse than the risk of not having your patches up to date. You’re not on the internet, after all. 7. Only use trusted media to move files on and off air-gapped computers. A USB stick you purchase from a store is safer than one given to you by someone you don’t know — or one you find in a parking lot. 8. For file transfer, a writable optical disk (CD or DVD) is safer than a USB stick. Malware can silently write data to a USB stick, but it can’t spin the CD-R up to 1000 rpm without your noticing. This means that the malware can only write to the disk when you write to the disk. You can also verify how much data has been written to the CD by physically checking the back of it. If you’ve only written one file, but it looks like three-quarters of the CD was burned, you have a problem. Note: the first company to market a USB stick with a light that indicates a write operation — not read or write; I’ve got one of those — wins a prize. 9. When moving files on and off your air-gapped computer, use the absolute smallest storage device you can. And fill up the entire device with random files. If an air-gapped computer is compromised, the malware is going to try to sneak data off it using that media. While malware can easily hide stolen files from you, it can’t break the laws of physics. So if you use a tiny transfer device, it can only steal a very small amount of data at a time. If you use a large device, it can take that much more. Business-card-sized mini-CDs can have capacity as low as 30 MB. I still see 1-GB USB sticks for sale. 10. Consider encrypting everything you move on and off the air-gapped computer. Sometimes you’ll be moving public files and it won’t matter, but sometimes you won’t be, and it will. And if you’re using optical media, those disks will be impossible to erase. Strong encryption solves these problems. And don’t forget to encrypt the computer as well; whole-disk encryption is the best. One thing I didn’t do, although it’s worth considering, is use a stateless operating system like Tails. You can configure Tails with a persistent volume to save your data, but no operating system changes are ever saved. Booting Tails from a read-only DVD — you can keep your data on an encrypted USB stick — is even more secure. Of course, this is not foolproof, but it greatly reduces the potential avenues for attack. Yes, all this is advice for the paranoid. And it’s probably impossible to enforce for any network more complicated than a single computer with a single user. But if you’re thinking about setting up an air-gapped computer, you already believe that some very powerful attackers are after you personally. If you’re going to use an air gap, use it properly. Of course you can take things further. I have met people who have physically removed the camera, microphone, and wireless capability altogether. But that’s too much paranoia for me right now.

3 3

[zfs] [Review] 4185 New hash algorithm support
by Eugen Leitl 07 Oct '13

07 Oct '13

----- Forwarded message from Zooko Wilcox-OHearn <zooko(a)leastauthority.com> ----- Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 21:17:14 +0000 From: Zooko Wilcox-OHearn <zooko(a)leastauthority.com> To: zfs(a)lists.illumos.org Subject: [zfs] [Review] 4185 New hash algorithm support Message-ID: <CAM_a8JxVeY4LNhmmXFzAFWOfgN0Z0KxLkENTCVrhq_moG481Cg(a)mail.gmail.com> Reply-To: zfs(a)lists.illumos.org Hi folks: I just joined this list because I saw this thread. I'm one of the architects of a distributed storage system named Tahoe-LAFS (https://Tahoe-LAFS.org) It has quite a few things in common with ZFS, architecturally, but it is also very different from ZFS, because it's not so much a real *filesystem* as it is like a BitTorrent that has an upload button as well as a download button. But it is like ZFS inasmuch as they both involve a heck of a lot of hashing for error-detection. I'm also an author of a secure hash function which has been designed for this kind of usage and which you should consider as an alternative to SHA-256, Edon-R, or Skein for use in ZFS. It is named BLAKE2. Here are the slides I presented about BLAKE2 at a recent academic crypto conference: ¹. ¹ https://blake2.net/acns/slides.html The slides mention ZFS. ZFS is mentioned on a slide with a list of tools that use secure hash functions for data-intensive purposes. Out of the list there, Tahoe-LAFS and ZFS are the only ones that use a hash function which is actually secure — SHA-256. The others all use hash functions that are known to be more or less unsafe — MD5 and SHA-1. So, before I go on with my pitch for why you should consider BLAKE2, first please clarify for me whether ZFS really needs a collision-resistant hash function, or whether it needs only a MAC. I had thought until now that ZFS doesn't need a collision-resistant hash unless dedup is turned on, and that if dedup is turned on it needs a collision-resistant hash. But this thread seems to indicate that even when dedup is turned on, it might be possible to use a MAC, by having a pool-wide secret to use for the MAC key… If I understand correctly (which I probably don't), that would make it impossible for anyone who doesn't know the secret to cause collisions during dedup, but still possible for someone who knows the secret (presumably root on that system, or someone who stole the secret) to generate blocks that would collide during dedup. If you used a collision-resistant hash for that purpose, then nobody would be able to cause collisions. If you need a MAC, I suggest Poly1305-AES. It is very efficient, has a nice proof that it is as secure as AES is, and it is part of a new proposed cipher suite for TLS ². ² http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-agl-tls-chacha20poly1305-01 If you need a collision-resistant hash function, I suggest BLAKE2. It is more efficient than SHA-256, Skein, or Keccak (see ³), and it has a better reputation among cryptographers than Edon-R has. In fact, BLAKE2's parent, BLAKE, was rated by NIST as being even more well-studied than Keccak was — see my slides, linked above, for quotes from NIST's final report on the SHA-3 contest. ³ http://bench.cr.yp.to/results-hash.html#amd64-hydra8 I get the impression that BLAKE2 has gotten a certain "mind-share" among cryptographers, because after this article ⁴ from the Center for Democracy and Technology came out, questioning NIST's plans to modify SHA-3 to improve its performance, there has been a heated discussion on the SHA-3 mailing list, and several of the cryptographers in that discussion (including the inventors of Keccak) have mentioned BLAKE2 as an example of a high-performance hash function. There has been one academic research paper analyzing BLAKE2 so far: ⁵ (in addition to a ton of them analyzing its predecessor, BLAKE, during the SHA-3 contest). ⁴ https://www.cdt.org/blogs/joseph-lorenzo-hall/2409-nist-sha-3 ⁵ http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/467 In addition to being high-performance in normal single-stream mode, BLAKE2 comes with parallelized modes, so that you can use 4 or 8 CPU cores to compute a hash up to 4- or 8- times as fast. You can get the academic papers, source code (both simple reference implementations and optimized implementations in various languages), test vectors, and so on: https://blake2.net Regards, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn Founder, CEO, and Customer Support Rep https://LeastAuthority.com Freedom matters. ------------------------------------------- illumos-zfs Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182191/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182191/22842876-6fe17e6f Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=22842876&id_secret=22842876-a25d3… Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- 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

1 0

Re: [Cryptography] Universal security measures for crypto primitives
by grarpamp 07 Oct '13

07 Oct '13

On Oct 7, 2013, at 1:43 AM, Peter Gutmann <pgut001(a)cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote: > Given the recent debate about security levels for different key sizes, the > following paper by Lenstra, Kleinjung, and Thome may be of interest: > > "Universal security from bits and mips to pools, lakes and beyond" > http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/635.pdf On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 10:46 AM, Jerry Leichter <leichter(a)lrw.com> wrote: > Then: "...fundamental limits will let you make about 3*10^94 ~ 2^315 [bit] flips > and store about 2^315 bits Then perhaps by the time that engine gets near 256 bits done crunching you, any given secret holder will be either dead, too old / pardonable, or society will have moved on, thereby placing the secret into one of historical value only. It would probably also cost about 2^315 bits to build and operate. Not many 100yr secrets out there besides grand conspiracies and whodunit's, and those don't really need crypto. Might as well bump everything to 512 just to be safe from physics ;)

1 0