Re: Verisign CRL single point of failure

[t . c . jones]

Verisign incorrectly built the new certificate causing every SSL access on IE 5.x to 
request a 
new CRL (700k) on every single SSL access.  This has been fixed, a new udated cert is 
available and the CRL storm is abating.  See the versign site for more details on what 
they did to 
fix the problem, but nothing of course on what they did wrong.

Note that two separte certs expired at the same time so there were two competing DOS 
attacks 
simultaneously.
hth  ..tom
> Can someone explain to me why the expiring of a certificate causes new 
> massive CRL queries?
>   /r$
> 
> -- 
> Rich Salz, Chief Security Architect
> DataPower Technology   http://www.datapower.com
> XS40 XML Security Gateway   http://www.datapower.com/products/xs40.html
> XML Security Overview  http://www.datapower.com/xmldev/xmlsecurity.html
> 
> -
> The Cryptography Mailing List
> Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Did American slaves use steganography?

[bmanning]

> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/02/0205_040205_slavequilts.html
> 
> CCH

IRA award, Reading Rainbow Book : Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt
by D.Hopkinson 

Childrens Book of the Month Selection. Published 1993

--bill

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

(federal) PKI spending hits $1b

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

(federal) PKI spending hits $1b
http://www.washingtontechnology.com/news/1_1/daily_news/22526-1.html
GAO Faults 'inconsistent' online security programs ($1b on PKIs)
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17301563
--
Anne & Lynn Wheelerhttp://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm
 

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

[Publicity-list]: DIMACS Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Security

[Linda Casals]

*
 
DIMACS Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Security 
  
 June 15 - 17 , 2004
 DIMACS Center, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

Organizers: 
  Bill Arbaugh, University of Maryland, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
 
Presented under the auspices of the Special Focus on Communication
Security and Information Privacy.



The rapid growth of both voice and data wireless communications has
resulted in several serious security problems in both the voice and 
data spaces. Unfortunately, many of the early security mistakes made 
with wireless voice communications were repeated with data
communications, i.e. the use of flawed authentication and
confidentiality algorithms. For example, the standards committee for 
802.11 left many of the difficult security issues such as key
management and a robust authentication mechanism as open problems. 
This has led many organizations to use either a permanent fixed
cryptographic variable or no encryption with their wireless networks. 
Since wireless networks provide an adversary a network access point
that is beyond the physical security controls of the organization, 
security can be a problem. Similarly, attacks against WEP, the
link-layer security protocol for 802.11 networks can exploit design 
failures to successfully attack such networks. This workshop will 
focus on addressing the many outstanding issues that remain in
wireless cellular and WLAN networking such as (but not limited to):
Management and monitoring; ad-hoc trust establishment; secure roaming
between overlay networks; availability and denial of service
mitigation; and network and link layer security protocols. We will 
seek to extend work on ad hoc networking from a non-adversarial
setting, assuming a trusted environment, to a more realistic setting
in which an adversary may attempt to disrupt communication. We will
investigate a variety of approaches to securing ad hoc networks, in 
particular ways to take advantage of their inherent redundancy 
(multiple routes between nodes), replication, and new cryptographic 
schemes such as threshold cryptography.

**
Participation:

Interested participants may contact the organizer.

**
Registration Fees:

(Pre-registration deadline: June 8, 2004)

Regular Rate 
Preregister before deadline $120/day 
After preregistration deadline  $140/day

Reduced Rate*
Preregister before deadline $60/day
After preregistration deadline $70/day

Postdocs 
Preregister before deadline $10/day 
After preregistration deadline $15/day

DIMACS Postdocs $0 

Non-Local Graduate & Undergraduate students 
Preregister before deadline $5/day 
After preregistration deadline $10/day

Local Graduate & Undergraduate students $0
(Rutgers & Princeton) 

DIMACS partner institution employees** $0 

DIMACS long-term visitors*** $0 

Registration fee to be collected on site, cash, check, VISA/Mastercard
accepted.

Our funding agencies require that we charge a registration fee during
the course of the workshop. Registration fees include participation in
the workshop, all workshop materials, breakfast, lunch, breaks and any
scheduled social events (if applicable).

* College/University faculty and employees of nonprofit and government
organizations will automatically receive the reduced rate. Other
participants may apply for a reduction of fees. They should email
their request for the reduced fee to the Workshop Coordinator at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Include your name, the Institution you
work for, your job title and a brief explanation of your
situation. All requests for reduced rates must be received before the
pre-registration deadline. You will promptly be notified as to the
decision about it.

** Fees for employees of DIMACS partner institutions are
waived. DIMACS partner institutions are: Rutgers University, Princeton
University, AT&T Labs - Research, Bell Labs, NEC Laboratories America
and Telcordia Technologies. Fees for employees of DIMACS affiliate
members Avaya Labs, IBM Research and Microsoft Research are also
waived.

***DIMACS long-term visitors who are in residence at DIMACS for two or
more weeks inclusive of dates of workshop.

*
Information on participation, registration, accomodations, and travel 
can be found at:

http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/MobileWireless/

   **PLEASE BE SURE TO PRE-REGISTER EARLY**



-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Crypto Law Survey updated - version 22.0

[R. A. Hettinga]

--- begin forwarded text


Approved-By:  Bert-Jaap Koops <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:06:08 +0100
Reply-To: Bert-Jaap Koops <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sender: Mailinglist about existing and proposed laws and regulations on
cryptography <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: Bert-Jaap Koops <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Crypto Law Survey updated - version 22.0
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

I have updated my Crypto Law Survey to version 22.0.
http://rechten.uvt.nl/koops/cryptolaw/


NEWS
My thesis is now on-line full-text in pdf. The Crypto Controversy gives
an overview of the crypto problems for law-enforcement and their
"solutions":
http://law.uvt.nl/koops/thesis/thesis.htm


EUROPE
* Belgium (current state of Program Act)
* Israel (new license stats)
* Italy (radio-amateur law)
* Lithuania (export and import controls, no domestic law)
* Netherlands (no TTP law)
* Spain (new Telecommunications Act)
* Switzerland (radio-traffic law)

AMERICAS
* Brazil (working on policy)
* United States (Patriot II; Bernstein case ends (for now))

ASIA
* China (wireless crypto; clarification letter only pre-2000)

Any additions you may provide are greatly welcomed.

Bert-Jaap Koops
Tilburg University
14 January 2004

--
You may forward this message in its entirety.
--

To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send a message to
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with in the body of the message "UNSUBSCRIBE
CRYPTOLAW-L".

To subscribe to this mailing list, send a message to
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with in the body of the message "SUBSCRIBE
CRYPTOLAW-L".

--- end forwarded text


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Verisign CRL single point of failure

[Rich Salz]

>   I'm not sure what the "no longer
>   dynamically changing" means, I assume they've made it even worse by giving
>   it a much larger expiry period, so your online check gives you the status
>   from last year instead of last week.

It means that they learned the lesson when the erroneously issued
two MSFT certificates:
In the future, VRSN patches will be issued as MSFT
software updates.

--
Rich Salz  Chief Security Architect
DataPower Technology   http://www.datapower.com
XS40 XML Security Gateway  http://www.datapower.com/products/xs40.html
XML Security Overview  http://www.datapower.com/xmldev/xmlsecurity.html

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Verisign CRL single point of failure

[Peter Gutmann]

Rich Salz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

>Can someone explain to me why the expiring of a certificate causes new
>massive CRL queries?

Here's the reply straight from Verisign:

-- Snip --

We wanted to pass on a notification that we have determined what we feel is
the root cause of the CRL outage issue. It appears that at midnight GMT (4pm
PST) on January 7, 2004, VeriSign experienced a sudden and dramatic increase
in the number of requests by Windows-based clients to download a certificate
revocation list (CRL). The CRL is a file which confirms the validity status of
a set of certificates, and is used by applications and users to determine
whether a particular certificate has been revoked between the time it was
issued and the time it will expire. The CRL in question was for a code-signing
application.

VeriSign normally serves up several million CRLs per hour. These CRLs
typically have one- to two-week validity periods, and client applications
using CRLs will check for an update as the CRL expires. The Code Signing CRL
was supplied to a large number of Windows clients. When that CRL expired,
those clients simultaneously requested a particularly large CRL file,
resulting in an eight-fold increase in traffic at the site crl.verisign.com,
where VeriSign hosts all our CRLs. As a result, As a result, Windows-based
browsers requesting status of certain server certificates have experienced
intermittent delays.

VeriSign has increased its capacity to handle these requests by 10 fold in the
past 8 hours. As the particular code-signing CRL file is no longer a
dynamically changing, there will be no need for clients, once they have
downloaded this file, to request a new version of this particular CRL. While
this does not represent a security risk, it may have represented a performance
degradation for some users. VeriSign regrets the inconvenience caused to
customers, and has implemented procedures both internally, and with our
partners, to ensure that this problem does not reoccur. Please note that this
problem is in no way related to the Intermediate CA expiration issue discussed
on our site at <
http://www.verisign.com/support/vendors/exp-gsid-ssl.html?sl=070807>. Although
the expiration dates are the same, it is strictly a coincidence in timing.

-- Snip --

ObComment again: Ahh, the wonders of doing an online CRL fetch that feeds you
  information that's two weeks out of date.  I'm not sure what the "no longer
  dynamically changing" means, I assume they've made it even worse by giving
  it a much larger expiry period, so your online check gives you the status
  from last year instead of last week.

Peter.


-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: fun with CRLs!

[Peter Gutmann]

>/. is reporting this, anyone know the real story?

The CryptoAPI list has been lit up end to end with mail about this.  The
summary from one poster (Tim Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) is:

  IE5.x's digital signature expired yesterday. Every computer that uses
  WinVerifyTrust now has to have the "verify publisher certificate" dealy
  unchecked or the WinVerifyTrust call takes upwards of 5 minutes to complete.

The fix, as for the "We're from Microsoft, give us a certificate" fiasco of
two years ago, is an OS update from Microsoft to replace the certs.  Further
patches will be in Win2K SP5 and WinXP SP2.

ObSnideComment: It's a good thing 99.99% of PKI use is just window dressing,
  imagine if people were basing things like electronic funds transfers on
  technology as brittle as this: "Please wait 5 minutes for the server to time
  out so your funds can become available".

Peter.

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

A possible explanation for the world's most enigmatic book

[R. A. Hettinga]

The Economist
The Voynich manuscript

Another twist in the tale

Jan 8th 2004
>From The Economist print edition


A possible explanation for the world's most enigmatic book

Worth 600 ducats of anybody's money!

THE Voynich manuscript, once owned by Emperor Rudolph II in 16th-century
Bohemia, is filled with drawings of fantastic plants, zodiacal symbols and
naked ladies. Far more intriguing than its illustrations, however, is the
accompanying text: 234 pages of beautifully formed, yet completely
unintelligible script.

Modern scholars have pored over the book since 1912, when Wilfrid Voynich,
an American antiquarian, bought the manuscript and started circulating
copies in the hope of having it translated. Some 90 years later, the book
still defies deciphering. It now resides at Yale University.

The manuscript is written in "Voynichese", which consists of strange
characters, some of which look like normal Latin letters and Roman
numerals. Some analysts have suggested that Voynichese is a modified form
of Chinese. Others think it may be Ukrainian with the vowels taken out. But
Voynichese words do not resemble those of any known language. Nor is the
text a simple transliteration into fanciful symbols: the internal structure
of Voynichese words, and how they fit together in sentences, is unlike
patterns seen in other languages.

Another possibility is that the text is written in code. But the best
efforts of cryptographers over the past 30 years have failed to crack it.
This resilience is unusual, given that other ciphers from the period have
yielded their secrets.

On the other hand, the text could just be gibberish and the book-which may
have been passed off to Emperor Rudolph as the work of Roger Bacon, a
13th-century natural philosopher, in exchange for the princely sum of 600
gold ducats-a grand hoax. But Gabriel Landini, a Voynichese enthusiast at
the University of Birmingham, in England, argues against this theory. Given
the complex structure of Voynichese words, writing hundreds of pages of
internally consistent gibberish would be a tough task for a fraudster to
pull off.

But perhaps not an impossible one. Gordon Rugg, a computer scientist at
Keele University, in England, thinks he may be one step closer to an
explanation of how the text might have been created. In a paper published
in the January issue of Cryptologia, he uses low-tech 16th-century methods,
rather than 20th-century computing, to generate text resembling that in the
book.

If the Voynich manuscript is a fraud, then one plausible suspect is Edward
Kelley, an Elizabethan con-artist. So Dr Rugg borrowed one of Kelley's
techniques. He used a grid of 40 rows and 39 columns to create a table
which he filled in with Voynichese syllables. He then placed a grille-a
piece of cardboard with three squares cut out in a diagonal pattern-on top
of the table, and started forming words by reading off the syllables as he
moved the grille across columns and down rows. The result was words with
the same internal patterns as Voynichese. Dr Rugg and his team are now
writing software to create dozens of tables and grilles in an attempt to
reproduce other linguistic patterns in the manuscript. If their findings
hold up, it would mean that the regularity of Voynichese is no longer an
argument against the manuscript being an elaborate hoax.

Of course, this does not prove that the manuscript is nonsense-an
impossible thing to demonstrate, in any case, since failure to find meaning
in the text does not make it meaningless, but simply beyond current methods
of decoding. Indeed, Dr Landini believes that the Voynich manuscript might
yet yield to massive computing power. If it does, most people expect to
find a work of modest historical interest, rather than the secret of life.
As with most puzzles, the thrill of solution lies in the process, rather
than the product.


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Verisign CRL single point of failure

[Rich Salz]

dave kleiman wrote:
Because the client has a Certificate Revocation Checking function turned on
in a particular app (i.e. IE or NAV).
I don't think you understood my question.  Why is crl.verisign.com 
getting overloaded *now.*  What does the expiration of one of their CA 
certificates have to do with it?  Once you see that a cert has expired, 
there's no need whatsoever to go look at the CRL.  The point of a CRL is 
to revoke certificates prior to their expiration.
	/r$

--
Rich Salz, Chief Security Architect
DataPower Technology   http://www.datapower.com
XS40 XML Security Gateway   http://www.datapower.com/products/xs40.html
XML Security Overview  http://www.datapower.com/xmldev/xmlsecurity.html
-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

RE: Verisign CRL single point of failure

[dave kleiman]

>>I don't think you understood my question.  Why is crl.verisign.com 
>>getting overloaded *now.*  What does the expiration of one of their CA 
>>certificates have to do with it?  Once you see that a cert has expired, 
>>there's no need whatsoever to go look at the CRL.  The point of a CRL is 
>>to revoke certificates prior to their expiration.

You are correct I did miss your point in haste. 
I cannot answer that, but I can tell you that disabling the function or
uninstalling NAV that has CRL function, fixes the problem immediately.
And if you watch your firewall as the clients open a file that requests a
virus scan they all try to hit crl.verisign.com. This has been happening
since the 7th when that cert expired.
DK


-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Israeli coders, Arab testers

[Don Davis]

from "the volokh conspiracy" weblog, a law professors' blog:

- don


Eugene Volokh, 3/25/2004 04:02:38 PM 

Israeli coders, Arab testers: A reader writes, apropos
checking sensitive source code for sabotage:  I spoke to
[someone] from the NSA, about this subject a couple of
years back. As you probably know, although the NSA has
teams of cryptographers at its disposal, a large amount
of the successful interception it carries out is simply
due to exploiting software faults in communications soft-
ware. Consequently, in their other role, as advisor to
the DoD about communications security issues, they focus
on software assurance to an extent that often takes new-
comers by surprise.

The NSA used to have a requirement that only American
citizens should be allowed to work on sensitive source
code, because they considered there to be too great a
risk of backdoors being placed in the code by foreign
nationals . . . . More recently, because of the number
of H1(B)s and green cards in the computer industry, it's
been impractical for the NSA to insist on that. Instead,
what they've encouraged -- and this is the interesting
and quite clever part -- is that programmers and testers
should be of different nationalities. If you have Israeli
coders, get Arabic testers. If you have British coders,
get French testers. And so on.

A cute solution to the problem. But I don't know if it
ever worked. I suspect the NSA still insists, though,
that source code for sensitive systems be written by
American companies on American soil, even if it isn't
written by American fingers.Of course, even if the NSA's
program worked for the NSA, it would be pretty expensive
to adopt for the important source code and off-the-shelf
object code used by lots of other organizations -- many
of which are private companies -- that manage critical
American infrastructure. Nor am I sure that it would work
that well even if it were adopted. Still, it struck me as
interesting enough to be worth mentioning.

http://volokh.com/2004_03_21_volokh_archive.html#108025935883663167






-

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

[Publicity-list] DIMACS Workshop on Security Analysis of Protocols

[Linda Casals]

*
  
 DIMACS Workshop on Security Analysis of Protocols
  
 June 7 - 9, 2004
 DIMACS Center, CoRE Building, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

Organizers: 

  John Mitchell, Stanford, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
  Ran Canetti, IBM Watson, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
   
Presented under the auspices of the Special Focus on Communication
Security and Information Privacy.

 

The analysis of cryptographic protocols is a fundamental and
challenging area of network security research. Traditionally, there
have been two main approaches, the logic approach aimed at developing
(automated) tools for the formal veri.cation of protocols and the
complexity theory approach that characterizes protocol security as a
set of computational tasks and proves protocol security via reduction
to the strength of the underlying cryptographic functions. Although
these two lines of work share a common goal, there has been little
commonality between them.

The goal of this workshop is to generally promote work on security
analysis of protocols and foster cooperative research combining the
logical and complexity-based approaches. The workshop will include
tutorials on the basics of each approach and will allow
representatives from both communities to talk about their current
work.

TOPICS

* - Analysis methods involving computational complexity
* - Game-theoretic approaches
* - Methods based on logic and symbolic computation
* - Probabilistic methods
* - Model checking and symbolic search
* - Formal proof systems
* - Decision procedures and lower bounds
* - Anything else that sounds like a great idea 

**
Participation:

The workshop will be open for the public. If you'd like to give a
presentation please send a title and abstract to the organizers as
soon as possible. Also, we intend this to be a participatory and
interactive meeting so we hope you will be able to contribute to the
meeting even without giving an announced talk.

**
Registration Fees:

(Pre-registration deadline: May 28, 2004)

Please see website for information on registration.

*
Information on participation, registration, accomodations, and travel 
can be found at:

http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Protocols/

   **PLEASE BE SURE TO PRE-REGISTER EARLY**



-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

[Publicity-list]: DIMACS Workshop on Usable Privacy and Security Software

[Linda Casals]

*
 
DIMACS Workshop on Usable Privacy and Security Software
  
 July 7 - 8, 2004
 DIMACS Center, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

Organizers: 

  Lorrie Cranor, Chair, Carnegie Mellon University, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  Mark Ackerman, University of Michigan, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
  Fabian Monrose, Johns Hopkins University, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
  Andrew Patrick, NRC Canada, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  Norman Sadeh, Carnegie Mellon University, [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Presented under the auspices of the Special Focus on Communication
Security and Information Privacy.



This workshop and working group is intended to bring together security
and privacy experts with human-computer interaction experts to discuss
approaches to developing more usable privacy and security
software. The workshop sessions on July 7 and July 8 will include
invited talks and discussion. July 9 will feature a "working group" of
invited participants who will spend the day identifying important
problems, discussing some of the research issues raised during the
workshop in more depth, and brainstorming about approaches to future
research, collaboration, and more user-centered design of security and
privacy software.

**

Participation:

 Participation in the workshop is open to anyone who registers (no
 submission necessary). Participation in the working group on July 9 is
 limited because of the emphasis on achieving a high degree of
 interactivity and discussion. Workshop participants who are interested
 in participating in the working group session should send a 1-page
 abstract or position paper describing their work relevant to this
 workshop to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Abstracts and position papers should be
 submitted in plain text, HTML, or PDF formats only. All submissions
 must be received by April 2, 2004 and authors will be notified by
 April 19, 2004 as to whether they have been accepted to participate in
 the working group. In addition, the authors of some submissions will
 be invited to present 10-minute short talks about their
 work. Submissions may describe ongoing or planned work related to the
 development of usable interfaces for security or privacy software, or
 they may discuss important research problems or propose a research
 agenda in this area. Submissions are especially encouraged that
 identify security and privacy areas in need of examination by HCI
 researchers, as well as areas where HCI researchers would like
 assistance from security and privacy researchers.

**
Registration Fees:

(Pre-registration deadline: June 30, 2004)

Please see website for registration fees and details.

*
Information on participation, registration, accomodations, and travel 
can be found at:

http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Tools/

   **PLEASE BE SURE TO PRE-REGISTER EARLY**



-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Ancient clay stamp seals and sealings of Sri Lanka

[R. A. Hettinga]

Sunday,  8 February 2004
 

Online edition of Sunday Observer - Business

Ancient clay stamp seals and sealings of  Sri Lanka

by Rajah M. Wickremesinghe
The world's oldest clay stamp seal had been unearthed in 1990 in the
ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur. This city was situated in Southern Iraq
along the river Euphrates, below present day Baghdad. The seal is
attributed to a king of the 1st dynasty of Babylon circa 2550 BC.

 Sarah Kielt has in her work expressed the opinion that the various  types
of seals discovered by archaeologists can be dated from as far back  as
6000 BC particularly in the ancient civilisations of the Near East.  Roger
J. Mathews identifies such seals as stamp, cylinder, and tablet, the  last
named bearing a seal impression on both sides.

 A stamp seal could even have been attached to a ring and has only one
impression impression as opposed to a cylinder seal which had multiple
imprints on it. The latter were utilized by rolling them on to wet clay.
Cylinder seals have an aperture running through the centre in its entire
length, facilitating being rolled. They could also be worn round the
owners neck to make it secure. It is accepted by archaeologists that
cylinder seals had been invented in Southern Mesopotamia around 3500 BC.

 Seals provide important evidence similarly to coins, for the
re-construction of ancient socio-economic history of a region. Many active
trading and administrative centres of ancient civilisations have yielded
seals and sealings of clay in very large numbers. This has enabled the
uncovering of their hidden secrets.

 Seals had initially been used for accounting and later as Temple  records,
for administration purposes and lastly as trading receipts. In  the Near
East it is observed that the advent of coins was centuries after  the use
of seals.

 However, in Sri Lanka we note that in Ruhuna a unique lead coinage
inscribed in Brahmi appears simultaneously with seals and clay sealings.

A sealing is the impression of a seal pressed on wet clay, its usage
similar to that in modern times, when sealing wax is placed over a knot,
in the instance string is used to secure a parcel or package. In ancient
times a lump of clay was pressed over the knot of string or strapping
securing packages or bundles and then marked with the senders seal which
was his stamp of ownership. Sealings were also used when the mouth of jars
or containers were covered with woven material and secured with a string.
In Mesopotamia they were in addition used to securing containers, jars,
baskets, sacks, leather bags and also door ways and lids of boxes.

 The clay sealing 32x30 mm (fig. 1) bearing the legend 'Maharaja Gamini
Tissaha Devanampiya' in Nagari Script meaning 'of the great king Gamini
Tissa the beloved of the Gods' was found by a villager cultivating his
land in Akurugoda in Tissamaharama in 1989. In 'Ruhuna an ancient
civilisation revisited' co-authored by O. Bopearachchi and the writer it
is attributed to king Saddhatissa 77 - 59 BC.

 This at present is the oldest attested clay sealing found in the  island.
At the centre of the seal is a railed swastika with the above  noted legend
distributed on the three sides excluding the base.

 Two other sealings also of the same provenance are illustrated (Figs.  II
and III). One depicts the foreparts of two lions each facing opposite
directions with outstretched fore legs and the other a lion and elephant
similarly joined. Both sealings have distinct legends in Brahmi.

 The three sealings described above are not trade sealings. They have no
impressions of string at the back and could be identified as having been
used only for an administrative purpose. This places these three sealings
apart from all other sealings described.

 Clay trade sealings

Fig. IV depicts a sealing with evidence of a securing device (appearing  to
be a strap and not string at the back) and bears a large railed  swastika
68x58 mm. with an indistinct Brahmi legend on the outer edge.  This
presently is the largest trade sealing found in the Island.

Fig. V is of a unique clay sealing yet unpublished, found in Niyadella  in
Ruhuna in 1996 where figures similar to those found on Roman coins of  the
early Christian era, are clearly visible in the three separate stamps  on
the sealing. On the reverse instead of a string it depicts the design  of a
woven reed mat on which the seal has been placed. Another clay  sealing
depicting the head of a Roman soldier similar to those on 3rd  century
brass Roman coins had been found in Tissamaharama in 1989.

 Over 30 stamp sealings recording trade had been found in Akurugoda,
depicting male and female figures, lions, elephants, bulls and humped
bulls both standing and seated, wild boar, fishes, and one in which one
animal appears to be attacking another astride its back. Illustrated are
clay trade sealings with clear evidence of string used for securing - 'A'
an elephant (the re

Did American slaves use steganography?

[Chuck Hardin]

"Two historians say African American slaves may have used a quilt code
 to navigate the Underground Railroad. Quilts with patterns named
 'wagon wheel,' 'tumbling blocks,' and 'bear's paw' appear to have
 contained secret messages that helped direct slaves to freedom, the
 pair claim."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/02/0205_040205_slavequilts.html

CCH

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

[IP] China Mandates Closed Security Standard

[Gregory Hicks]

Of interest to security folks...  From Dave Farber's IP list..

- Begin Forwarded Message -

Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2004 18:33:18 -0500
From: Dave Farber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

China Mandates Closed Security Standard

The Wi-Fi Alliance and IEEE were apparently taken by surprise when the
Chinese government's regulatory arm announced that only devices that
included WAPI (Wired Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure) would
be legal to sell in China after Dec. 1, 2003.

That was the first most companies and individuals had heard of WAPI,
which is a home-grown replacement for the broken WEP (Wired Equivalent
Privacy) standard that in the rest of the world is being replaced by
WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) and IEEE 802.11i (due to be finished in
2004).

The Chinese apparently didn't want to wait for WPA or 802.11i, and have
mandated WAPI on new equipment. Existing gear doesn't have to be
trashed, and companies with contracts to deliver equipment that
extended past Dec. 1 were allowed to continue to deliver it.

Only a handful of Chinese companies are licensed to include WAPI in
their equipment, which may force non-Chinese vendors to partner to
continue to sell into a growing market.

What's worse, WAPI is confidential. It hasn't been openly discussed or
tested, and given the nature of China's monitoring of other forms of
communication, it's likely that the standard includes a method for
interception of ostensibly encrypted traffic.

-
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

- End Forwarded Message -


---
Gregory Hicks| Principal Systems Engineer
Cadence Design Systems   | Direct:   408.576.3609
555 River Oaks Pkwy M/S 6B1  | Fax:  408.894.3400
San Jose, CA 95134   | Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"The trouble with doing anything right the first time is that nobody
appreciates how difficult it was."

When a team of dedicated individuals makes a commitment to act as
one...  the sky's the limit.

Just because "We've always done it that way" is not necessarily a good
reason to continue to do so...  Grace Hopper, Rear Admiral, United
States Navy

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

NIST e-authentication spec out for comment

[R. A. Hettinga]

NIST e-authentication spec out for comment
01/30/04
By William Jackson,
GCN Staff
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is seeking public
comments on its draft recommendations for electronic authentication.
NIST Special Publication 800-63 follows up guidelines from the Office of
Management and Budget defining four levels of authentication assurance for
federal IT systems.
The levels indicate increasingly serious risks of authentication errors or
misuse of electronic credentials. Making an online reservation for a
national park campsite, for example, carries less risk than online filing
of financial information.
The guidelines present technical requirements for identity proofing,
tokens, remote authentication and assertion mechanisms at each level of
assurance.
Level 1 requires no identity proofing and allows a wide range of
authentication technologies and tokens, including a simple personal ID
number. There is no requirement for Federal Information Processing
Standard-approved cryptography.

Level 2 requires some identity proofing and at least a password as a token.
FIPS-approved cryptography is required to thwart eavesdropping or hacker
attacks.

Level 3 requires a high level of identity proofing and FIPS-approved
cryptography to protect the authentication token as well prevent
eavesdropping or attacks. Tokens can be either software or hardware.

Level 4 provides the highest practical remote network authentication
assurance. It is similar to Level 3 but requires hardware tokens with
cryptographic modules validated at FIPS 140-2 Level 2 or higher. "By
requiring a physical token, which cannot readily be copied and must be
unlocked with a password or biometric, this level ensures good, two-factor
remote authentication," NIST said.

NIST will accept comments on the proposed recommendations until March 15 at
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



© 1996-2004 Post-Newsweek Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

DIMACS Workshop on Electronic Voting -- Theory and Practice

[Linda Casals]

*
 
DIMACS Workshop on Electronic Voting -- Theory and Practice
  
   May 26 - 27, 2004 
   DIMACS Center, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

Organizers: 
   
   Markus Jakobsson, RSA Laboratories, [EMAIL PROTECTED]  
   Ari Juels, RSA Laboratories, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
   
Presented under the auspices of the Special Focus on Communication
Security and Information Privacy and the Special Focus on Computation 
and the Socio-Economic Sciences..



To many technologists, electronic voting represents a seemingly simple
exercise in system design. In reality, the many requirements it
imposes with regard to correctness, anonymity, and availability pose
an unusually thorny collection of problems, and the security risks
associated with electronic voting, especially remotely over the
Internet, are numerous and complex, posing major technological
challenges for computer scientists. (For a few examples, see
references below.) The problems range from the threat of
denial-of-service-attacks to the need for careful selection of
techniques to enforce private and correct tallying of ballots. Other
possible requirements for electronic voting schemes are resistance to
vote buying, defenses against malfunctioning software, viruses, and
related problems, audit ability, and the development of user-friendly
and universally accessible interfaces.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together and foster an interplay
of ideas among researchers and practitioners in different areas of
relevance to voting. For example, the workshop will investigate
prevention of penetration attacks that involve the use of a delivery
mechanism to transport a malicious payload to the target host. This
could be in the form of a ``Trojan horse'' or remote control
program. It will also investigate vulnerabilities of the communication
path between the voting client (the devices where a voter votes) and
the server (where votes are tallied). Especially in the case of remote
voting, the path must be ``trusted'' and a challenge is to maintain an
authenticated communications linkage. Although not specifically a
security issue, reliability issues are closely related and will also
be considered. The workshop will consider issues dealing with random
hardware and software failures (as opposed to deliberate, intelligent
attack). A key difference between voting and electronic commerce is
that in the former, one wants to irreversibly sever the link between
the ballot and the voter. The workshop will discuss audit trails as a
way of ensuring this. The workshop will also investigate methods for
minimizing coercion and fraud, e.g., schemes to allow a voter to vote
more than once and only having the last vote count.

This workshop is part of the Special Focus on Communication Security
and Information Privacy and will be coordinated with the Special Focus
on Computation and the Socio-Economic Sciences.

This workshop follows a successful first WOTE event, organized by
David Chaum and Ron Rivest in 2001 at Marconi Conference Center in
Tomales Bay, California (http://www.vote.caltech.edu/wote01/). Since
that time, a flurry of voting bills has been enacted at the federal
and state levels, including most notably the Help America Vote Act
(HAVA). Standards development has represented another avenue of reform
(e.g., the IEEE Voting Equipment Standards Project 1583), while a
grassroots movement (http://www.verifiedvoting.org) has arisen to
promote the importance of audit trails as enhancements to
trustworthiness.

**
Participation:

Interested participants may contact the organizers.

**
Registration Fees:

(Pre-registration deadline: May 20, 2004)

Regular Rate 
Preregister before deadline $120/day 
After preregistration deadline  $140/day

Reduced Rate*
Preregister before deadline $60/day
After preregistration deadline $70/day

Postdocs 
Preregister before deadline $10/day 
After preregistration deadline $15/day

DIMACS Postdocs $0 

Non-Local Graduate & Undergraduate students 
Preregister before deadline $5/day 
After preregistration deadline $10/day

Local Graduate & Undergraduate students $0
(Rutgers & Princeton) 

DIMACS partner institution employees** $0 

DIMACS long-term visitors*** $0 

Registration fee to be collected on site, cash, check, VISA/Mastercard
accepted.

Our funding agencies require that we charge a registration fee during
the course of the workshop. Registration fees include participation in
the workshop, all workshop materials, breakfast, lunch, breaks and any
scheduled social events (if applicable).

* College/University faculty and employees of nonprofit and government
organizations will automatically receive the reduced rate. Other
participants may apply for a reduction of fees. They should email
their request for the red

[CSL Colloq] The Architecture of Colossus, the first PC * 4:15PM, Wed February 04, 2003 in Gates B03 (fwd)

[Sean McGrath]

[Note: Webcasts available live and from archives]

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:23:31 -0800
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [CSL Colloq] The Architecture of Colossus, the first PC * 4:15PM,
 Wed February 04, 2003 in Gates B03


  COMPUTER SYSTEMS LABORATORY COLLOQUIUM
   4:15PM, Wednesday, February 04, 2003
   NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03
   http://ee380.stanford.edu[1]

Topic:The Architecture of Colossus, the first PC

Speaker:  Benjamin Wells
  University of San Francisco

About the talk:

Colossus, the first electronic digital computer, was built by
Tommy Flowers at the General Post Office Research Station in
Dollis Hill, London. It was installed during December 1943 at
Bletchley Park, the famous WWII British code-cracking enclave.
Its purpose was to assist with the decryption of wireless traffic
among German high-level commands encrypted using the Lorenz
teletype cipher machine. Called Colossus because of its size, it
could be run by a single operator --and often was. At least in
that sense, it was also the world's first personal computer.

Bletchley had already developed a highly successful automated
attack on the Enigma cipher system under the guidance and genius
of Alan Turing. Built without direct input from Turing, Colossus
was designed to support the cracking of the highest volume of
German strategic code transmissions. These intelligence-rich
messages were thousands of characters long, overshadowing the
hand-encoded tactical traffic using Enigma. Because Colossus was
kept secret until 1973, and full details of its use and
construction were not released until 2000, it did not play a
direct role in the evolution of digital computers. Of course,
many who worked on it were involved with later computers.

With the release of previously classified documents, interest in
Colossus has grown over the last three years. This accessible,
multimedia talk will compare the architectural features of
Colossus with those of modern PCs. Although it is tempting to
assert that the former was a stored-program general purpose
machine, as some have done in print, that analysis is less than
promising. What is amazing is that Colossus introduced buffered
I/O, branch decisions, biquinary representation, and bit masking,
and anticipated some deeper modern features: parallelism, dual
rail, hardware interrupt, shift register, asynchronous dataflow,
and plug-ins. Moreover, recent results (AMS Abstracts 04T-68-2)
show that a universal Turing machine could have been implemented
on a cluster of the ten Colossi, proving the power of Colossus.

About the speaker:

Benjamin Wells teaches both mathematics and computer science
courses at the University of San Francisco, including freshman
seminars that combine science and art. He holds degrees from MIT
and UC Berkeley and has studied in four countries. The last
student of noted logician Alfred Tarski, Wells works on the
boundary of logic, algebra, and computing; he also contributes to
computer graphics and visual communication. He won a John
Templeton Foundation science and religion course prize in 1998
and held the USF Davies Professorship in 1989. He enjoys
mysticism, cooking, computer-supported art, hiking, languages,
dancing, tales, and family.

Contact information:

Benjamin Wells
Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science
University of San Francisco
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Embedded Links:
[ 1 ]http://ee380.stanford.edu
[ 2 ]mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

DIMACS Workshop on Security Analysis of Protocols

[Linda Casals]

*
 
DIMACS Workshop on Security Analysis of Protocols
  
 June 7 - 9, 2004
 DIMACS Center, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

Organizers: 
   
 John Mitchell, Stanford, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
 Ran Canetti, IBM Watson, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
 
Presented under the auspices of the Special Focus on Communication
Security and Information Privacy.



The analysis of cryptographic protocols is a fundamental and
challenging area of network security research. Traditionally, there
have been two main approaches, the logic approach aimed at developing
(automated) tools for the formal veri.cation of protocols and the
complexity theory approach that characterizes protocol security as a
set of computational tasks and proves protocol security via reduction
to the strength of the underlying cryptographic functions. Although
these two lines of work share a common goal, there has been little
commonality between them.

The goal of this workshop is to generally promote work on security
analysis of protocols and foster cooperative research combining the
logical and complexity-based approaches. The workshop will include
tutorials on the basics of each approach and will allow
representatives from both communities to talk about their current
work.

TOPICS

* - Analysis methods involving computational complexity
* - Game-theoretic approaches
* - Methods based on logic and symbolic computation
* - Probabilistic methods
* - Model checking and symbolic search
* - Formal proof systems
* - Decision procedures and lower bounds
* - Anything else that sounds like a great idea 

**
Participation:

Interested participants may contact the organizers.

**
Registration Fees:

(Pre-registration deadline: May 28, 2004)

Regular Rate 
Preregister before deadline $120/day 
After preregistration deadline  $140/day

Reduced Rate*
Preregister before deadline $60/day
After preregistration deadline $70/day

Postdocs 
Preregister before deadline $10/day 
After preregistration deadline $15/day

DIMACS Postdocs $0 

Non-Local Graduate & Undergraduate students 
Preregister before deadline $5/day 
After preregistration deadline $10/day

Local Graduate & Undergraduate students $0
(Rutgers & Princeton) 

DIMACS partner institution employees** $0 

DIMACS long-term visitors*** $0 

Registration fee to be collected on site, cash, check, VISA/Mastercard
accepted.

Our funding agencies require that we charge a registration fee during
the course of the workshop. Registration fees include participation in
the workshop, all workshop materials, breakfast, lunch, breaks and any
scheduled social events (if applicable).

* College/University faculty and employees of nonprofit and government
organizations will automatically receive the reduced rate. Other
participants may apply for a reduction of fees. They should email
their request for the reduced fee to the Workshop Coordinator at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Include your name, the Institution you
work for, your job title and a brief explanation of your
situation. All requests for reduced rates must be received before the
pre-registration deadline. You will promptly be notified as to the
decision about it.

** Fees for employees of DIMACS partner institutions are
waived. DIMACS partner institutions are: Rutgers University, Princeton
University, AT&T Labs - Research, Bell Labs, NEC Laboratories America
and Telcordia Technologies. Fees for employees of DIMACS affiliate
members Avaya Labs, IBM Research and Microsoft Research are also
waived.

***DIMACS long-term visitors who are in residence at DIMACS for two or
more weeks inclusive of dates of workshop.

*
Information on participation, registration, accomodations, and travel 
can be found at:

http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Protocols/

   **PLEASE BE SURE TO PRE-REGISTER EARLY**



-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Canon's Image Data Verification Kit DVK-E2 ?

[Hadmut Danisch]

Hi,

Canon provides a so called Data Verification Kit
which allegedly allows to detect whether a digital 
image has been tampered with since it has been taken
with a digital camera.

I found the announcement at
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0401/04012903canondvke2.asp 

They say:

  How it works

  The kit consists of a dedicated SM (secure mobile) card
  reader/writer and verification software. When the appropriate
  function (Personal Function 31) on the EOS-1D Mark II or EOS-1Ds is
  activated, a code based on the image contents is generated and
  appended to the image. When the image is viewed, the data
  verification software determines the code for the image and compares
  it with the attached code. If the image contents have been
  manipulated in any way, the codes will not match and the image
  cannot be verified as the original. 

So some kind of hash code or digital signature is generated. 

Does anybody know details about this? I never heard that there
are digital mass market cameras which could generate digital
signatures.  But if the signature is generated inside the SM card
only, why should the PC where the image was modified be unable to
write the modified image the same way as a digital camera writes
an unmodified one? (And, btw., how do they detect that the
picture was taken at a real scene and is not a repro of a
modified and printed picture?)

I guess the secure mobile card generates some signature and they
presume that the attacker would not have access to the memory card. 
This would start to protect the image not from the moment it 
had been taken, but from the moment when it was copied from the 
card to other media. And it would require to trust the
photographer.

Is there a technical description of those secure mobile cards 
available? I didn't find any details, just marketing blabla.


regards
Hadmut

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Diffie Optimistic About Secure Computing Future

[R. A. Hettinga]

Diffie Optimistic About Secure Computing Future

By Paul Kapustka, NetworkingPipeline, InternetWeek
Jan 27, 2004 (1:00 AM)
URL: http://www.internetweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17501559

Even as the MyDoom worm continued its spread around the Internet, noted
cryptographer Whitfield Diffie was waxing optimistic about the future of
secure computing, saying that technological advancements and better
networking infrastructures would solve many security problems in the near
future.

Diffie, whose biography describes him as the discoverer of the concept of
public key cryptography, used his keynote speech at the Comnet trade show
here Tuesday to outline several advancements in computing that he said
would make the future more secure in the near future, a list that included
cheaper and better hardware, and software and hardware verification
techniques that would allow for greater trust between connected systems.

"I'm optimistic that we are going to solve a lot of the secure computing
problems in the next few years," said Diffie, who is chief security officer
at Sun Microsystems.

Widely available cryptography products, combined with cheaper, faster
computing hardware will greatly reduce security problems, Diffie said.
"Users will have more powerful tools to work with," he added.

Software and hardware verification methods, Diffie said, will also mature
rapidly, allowing users to perform the networking equivalent of credit
checks on the systems and software they interconnect with.

Viruses like the MyDoom program, he said, take advantage of the "lazy
programming" methods of the past, where programs are written to perform
many functions, instead of discrete tasks.

"One of the problems with [Microsoft] Outlook is that it makes more tasks
possible than it should," Diffie said. Administrators and developers, he
said, could reduce such risks by determining the scope of tasks that are
necessary, and tailoring programs or networks to limit the ability of
hackers to perform destructive tasks.
-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

FYI: 3 qubits encrypted

[Michael_Heyman]

Apparently, it is as hard (or harder) to produce random qubits as random
bits. There are some sentences in this article that don't make sense so
I am guessing the author doesn't really understand the subject.

From:



  ...random operators would be useful for quantum 
  communications tasks like encryption, said Emerson. 
  "The idea is to randomize a specific configuration of 
  qubits containing the message, and then transmit this 
  randomized state," he said...The researchers tested the 
  method on a three-qubit prototype liquid nuclear 
  magnetic resonance (NMR) quantum computer. 

-Michael Heyman

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

PGP Corporation Releases PGP Universal 1.1 with Expanded Capabilities for Enterprise Secure Messaging

[R. A. Hettinga]

 All Headlines

 


 
January 26, 2004 08:30 AM US Eastern Timezone
PGP Corporation Releases PGP Universal 1.1 with Expanded Capabilities for
Enterprise Secure Messaging

 PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 26, 2004--

 
PGP Corporation's Product Enhancements Add Capability for Microsoft
Exchange Server Users, Incorporate S/MIME and X.509 Messaging Standards,
LDAP Directories, and Mac OS X Support
 



PGP Corporation, the global leader in digital information security, today
announced a new version of its PGP(R) Universal product.

This new product extends the world's first enterprise security architecture
to a broader user base and allows improved interfacing with existing email
security infrastructures. PGP Universal Server shifts the burden of
securing email messages and attachments from the desktop to the network in
a way that is automatic and entirely transparent to users. The product line
is actively being used by large enterprises worldwide. PGP Universal Server
is an award-winning solution, having received the VARBusiness Technology
Innovation Editor's Choice Award, and was recently featured in Information
Security magazine.

"The PGP Universal product line focuses on the three A's," said Phillip
Dunkelberger, President and CEO of PGP Corporation. "First, we automate
processes (encryption, digital signatures, key management) to make email
security simple and easy; second, we aggregate tasks and functions (desktop
and network email security, PKI infrastructure) under a single architecture
to make systems management more effective; and third, we accelerate an
enterprise's ability to quickly and inexpensively deploy secure messaging
to all critical employees and external partners."

The Product

PGP Universal Server 1.1 includes significant feature enhancements to the
product line, first introduced in September 2003, simplified installation
for IT administrators and a new pricing structure. Key functional
enhancements in PGP Universal 1.1 include:

S/MIME and X.509 support -- PGP Universal Server 1.1 now supports S/MIME
messages and X.509 certificates in addition to OpenPGP keys and messages.
This capability allows PGP Universal to interoperate with PKI deployments,
easily adding email security to existing PKI investments.

Microsoft Exchange MAPI support -- PGP Universal Satellite now supports
Microsoft Outlook users who use MAPI to connect to Microsoft Exchange
Server, providing both gateway and end-to-end email security.

PGP Universal Satellite Mac OS X -- PGP Universal Satellite now supports
Mac OS X as well as Windows clients.

LDAP Directory Synchronization -- PGP Universal Server 1.1 now
automatically synchronizes with popular directory servers, including Active
Directory and Exchange Groups, allowing customers to apply security policy
only to LDAP defined users.

PGP Universal Web Messenger Inbox -- PGP Universal Web Messenger now
displays a full webmail-style secure Inbox for messages received by
external users.

PGP Universal Web Messenger attachments and HTML -- PGP Universal Web
Messenger now supports sending and receiving of attachments as well as
display of HTML content, including inline images.

PGP Universal Web Messenger Internationalization -- PGP Universal Web
Messenger is now automatically internationalized for users in French,
German, Japanese and Spanish.

PGP Universal Web Messenger load balancing -- PGP Universal Web Messenger
now load balances services between clustered PGP Universal Servers
designated as PGP Universal Web Messenger servers.

Architecture Goals

Added Mr. Dunkelberger: "Our technology vision begins with secure email,
then expands to include all enterprise digital information. In the future,
we will extend PGP Universal technology to also secure instant messaging,
mobile devices, stored local and network data, CRM and ERP records, and all
other digital information that can be proxied at the transport level. PGP
Universal Server is the foundation on which we will build this future."

PGP Universal Server 1.1 further addresses the myriad needs and goals of a
wide range of users within the enterprise:

For Executive and Business Management: User transparency; automatic central
security policy; two-way policy enforcement; digital signatures; immediate,
incremental, and scalable deployment; and low cost of ownership.

For Network, Email, and IT Management: Implementation; interoperability and
standards compatibility; certificate and message format compatibility;
self-managing security architecture; incremental deployment.

For Information Security Management: Central, two-way security policy
management; network-based policy enforcement; self-managing security
architecture; single solution; keyless recipient management; certificate-
and message format-agnostic; additional decryption keys (ADKs); and trusted
technology foundation.

PGP Universal 

Re: [Fwd: Re: Non-repudiation (was RE: The PAIN mnemonic)]

[Nicholas Bohm]

At 11:42 07/01/2004 -0800, Ed Gerck wrote:
Jerrold Leichter wrote:
> Now that we've trashed non-repudiation ...
Huh? Processes that can be conclusive are useful and do exist, I read
here,
in the legal domain. It may not be so clear how such processes can exist
in
the technical domain and that's why I'm posting ;-)
> just how is it different from authentication?
Using an information theory model, it's clear that authentication needs
one
channel of information (e.g., the CA's public key, the password list) in
addition
to the signal (e.g., a signed message, a username/password entry).
Authentication
rests on the information channel being trusted (i.e., independently
verifiable). In
this model, non-repudiation is different because it needs at least one
additional
out-of-band signal (where authenticated absence of the signal is also
effective).
BTW, that's why digital signatures per se are repudiable -- there's no
second,
out-of-band signal.
An additional technical difference is that authentication promotes
"strength of
evidence" while non-repudiation promotes "lack of repudiation
of evidence".
The latter is intuitively recognized to be stronger because  a
single, effective
denial of an act can rebuke any number of strong affirmations.
This also means, intuitively,  that another difference exists.
Non-repudiation
should be harder to accomplish than authentication (you want more, you
need
to pay more). However, to the  extent that the process *can be*
conclusive,
non-repudiation may be worth it. Imagine the added costs, time and
hassle
(going back to a real-world comparison) if your bank would have to call
you
to confirm payment for every check you sign? This would be the case
if
paying a check could not be cast as a conclusive process for the bank
(i.e.,
without the possibility of an irrebuttable presumption of
payability).
In the UK, but not in other countries, there is a statutory rule which
prevents a bank from debiting a customer's account with a forged cheque
(if you will forgive the British spelling), with only very limited
exceptions.  If the customer repudiates a signature, it is for the
bank to prove the genuineness of the signature, or suffer the
loss.
My bank has once or twice telephoned to check the genuineness of an
unusual transaction, though this over a period of many years.
This is not to disagree with your comments, but to observe that existing
paper systems can work satisfactorily without non-repudiation
rules.  There are obvious advantages to some parties in such systems
if it adopts a non-repudiation rule, probably matched with corresponding
disadvantages for others.  The change from paper to electronic
systems of course also alters the balance of risks and the approach of
banks to non-repudiation rules.
I and colleagues have written about this at:
http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/00-3/bohm.html
Regards
Nicholas Bohm
Salkyns, Great Canfield,
Takeley, Bishop’s Stortford CM22 6SX, UK
Phone   01279
871272(+44 1279 871272)
Fax 020 7788
2198   (+44 20 7788 2198) - please note new
fax number
Mobile  07715 419728 (+44 7715 419728)
PGP RSA 1024 bit public key ID: 0x08340015.  Fingerprint:
9E 15 FB 2A 54 96 24 37  98 A2 E0 D1 34 13 48 07
PGP DSS/DH 1024/3072 public key ID: 0x899DD7FF.  Fingerprint:
5248 1320 B42E 84FC 1E8B  A9E6 0912 AE66 899D D7FF 

ADMIN: the list...

[Perry E. Metzger]

No, I'm not dead, I've just been extremely delinquent in moderating
the list.

I should be sending out the queued messages that are still relevant
over the next few days, and then we'll be back to normal.

Perry

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]