"U.S. May Help Chinese Evade Net Censorship"

[Tim May]

On Thursday, August 30, 2001, at 02:11 PM, Faustine wrote:

> True, of course they do. "Technology is morally neutral," sure, 
> whatever.
> Yay capitalism. I still think handing over your security product beta 
> on a
> silver platter in exchange for a nice fat government contract is a 
> stupid,
> stupid idea.

And since software is infinitely replicable, all the NSA would have to 
do if ZKS refused to sell to them is to get a copy anywhere else: from 
an employee who orders it sent to his home address, from a contractor, 
off the shelf at Fry's or Circuit City (someday, maybe not today), and 
so on.

Much more importantly, modern crypto relies to avoiding "security 
through obscurity." As outlined by Kirchoff in the 19th century, the 
security of a cipher ultimately depends only on the _key_, not the 
algorithm used to process the key. (Phrased in more modern terms, 
figuring out the algorithm is an "easy" problem, presumably solvable in 
polynomial time, while discovering the key is either provably impossible 
(except by guessing) or in the case of RSA is believed to be "hard" (not 
yet proven, and textbooks will tell you all kinds of stuff about what 
"hard" means).

Now Freedom is not a cipher, but a system. And no doubt supplying an 
attacker with the program would help him to design an attack. Supplying 
him with the source code and detailed specs would help him even more.

But, as with Kirchoff's point, the attacker is going to get the design 
eventually. But not the keys.

In any case, NSA probably had it from their buddies in Canada, who 
either got it by arrangement with ZKS or snarfed it in one of several 
ways.

The security of Freedom should not depend on even having access to the 
source code, else ZKS would be lying when they claim that even they 
cannot trace a message back to the sender. (Something which some may 
doubt...)

>
> Either way, the prospects for "dissident-grade untraceability" are 
> fairly
> bleak.


You pontificate as if you know something about our field, when you 
clearly know very little. Get some education if you plan to pontificate 
like this.

A mixnet of the N extant remailers offers pretty damned good 
untraceability. Needs some work on getting remailers more robust, but 
the underlying nested encryption looks to be a formidable challenge for 
Shin Bet to crack.


--Tim May