GoodIdea||BadIdea: Ayers Island Challenge?

[Nathan Fain]

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"This is going to push the envelope on a lot of fronts," said George
Markowsky, president of Ayers Island LLC. "The goal is to detect anyone
coming onto the island at any point, and to follow them if they exhibit
suspicious behavior."
When an envelope is pushed, especially in this case, it does so ALL
fronts.  The scenario is that *Man creates best-of surveillance and
Good-vs-Evil differential/profiling system* with the reaction from this
being *Evil changes to look more like Good*.  Leaders and people alike
often don't see validity in the second.  Now don't get me wrong, I want
the Ayers Island project to happen.  I believe the work put in to this
island and the boundaries it will push have already been pushed and are
essential if not inevitable to happen in a more public manner.  I'm just
trying to find a way to use this to remind people of the forgotten effects.
So, I'm curious if anyone would want to work together in building a
simple online forum for chronicling the eventual subversion of their
profiling system?  The objective would be to track vulnerabilities in
the methods used to determine "suspicious behavior" more so than
technical vulnerabilities (such as, say, the fence system.)  It would
not be directly involved with any activity itself.  Example content
might be a story from someone that found a way to roam with a false ID,
or no ID at all... or footage of reverse surveillance (see:
http://wearcam.org/acm_mm96.htm )
fain://nathan
http://cypherpoet.com
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Iraq developments

[Justin]

Politics in action... acting president of the Iraqi council is
assassinated; coalition finds "small amounts of" sarin released from an
exploding shell in Iraq.

What's next, we steal all their remaining chemical weapons and bring
them and our military home?

-- 
"Not your decision to make."
"Yes.  But it's the right decision, and I made it for my daughter."
 - Bill, Beatrix; Kill Bill Vol. 2

EU seeks quantum cryptography response to Echelon

[R. A. Hettinga]

Network World Fusion


EU seeks quantum cryptography response to Echelon

By Philip Willan
IDG News Service, 05/17/04

The European Union is to invest ¤11 million ($13 million) over the next
four years to develop a secure communication system based on quantum
cryptography, using physical laws governing the universe on the smallest
scale to create and distribute unbreakable encryption keys, project
coordinators said Monday.

 If successful, the project would produce the cryptographer's holy grail --
absolutely unbreakable code -- and thwart the eavesdropping efforts of
espionage systems such as Echelon, which intercepts electronic messages on
behalf of the intelligence services of the U.S., the U.K., Canada, New
Zealand and Australia.

 "The aim is to produce a communication system that cannot be intercepted
by anyone, and that includes Echelon," said Sergio Cova, a professor from
the electronics department of Milan Polytechnic and one of the project's
coordinators. "We are talking about a system that requires significant
technological innovations. We have to prove that it is workable, which is
not the case at the moment." Major improvements in geographic range and
speed of data transmission will be required before the system becomes a
commercial reality, Cova said.

 "The report of the European Parliament on Echelon recommends using quantum
cryptography as a solution to electronic eavesdropping. This is an effort
to cope with Echelon," said Christian Monyk, the director of quantum
technologies at the Austrian company ARC Seibersdorf Research and overall
coordinator of the project. Economic espionage has caused serious harm to
European companies in the past, Monyk said. "With this project we will be
making an essential contribution to the economic independence of Europe."

 Quantum cryptography takes advantage of the physical properties of light
particles, known as photons, to create and transmit binary messages. The
angle of vibration of a photon as it travels through space -- its
polarization -- can be used to represent a zero or a one under a system
first devised by scientists Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard in 1984. It
has the advantage that any attempt to intercept the photons is liable to
interfere with their polarization and can therefore be detected by those
operating the system, the project coordinators said. An intercepted key
would therefore be discarded and a new one created for use in its place.

 The new system, known as SECOQC (Secure Communication based on Quantum
Cryptography), is intended for use by the secure generation and exchange of
encryption keys, rather than for the actual exchange of data, Monyk said.

 "The encrypted data would then be transmitted by normal methods," he said.
Messages encrypted using quantum mechanics can currently be transmitted
over optical fibers for tens of kilometers. The European project intends to
extend that range by combining quantum physics with other technologies,
Monyk said. "The important thing about this project is that it is not based
solely on quantum cryptography but on a combination with all the other
components that are necessary to achieve an economic application," he said.
"We are taking a really broad approach to quantum cryptography, which other
countries haven't done."

 Experts in quantum physics, cryptography, software and network development
from universities, research institutes and private companies in Austria,
Belgium, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany,
Italy, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland will be contributing to the project,
Monyk said.

 In 18 months project participants will assess progress on a number of
alternative solutions and decide which technologies are the most promising
and merit further development, project coordinators said. SECOQC aims to
have a workable technology ready in four years, but will probably require
three to four years of work beyond that before commercial use, Monyk said.

 Cova was more cautious: "This is the equivalent of the first flight of the
Wright brothers, so it is too early to be talking already about supersonic
transatlantic travel."

 The technological challenges facing the project include the creation of
sensors capable of recording the arrival of photons at high speed and
photon generators that produce a single photon at a time, Cova said. "If
two or three photons are released simultaneously they become vulnerable to
interception," he said.

 Monyk believes there will be a global market of several million users once
a workable solution has been developed. A political decision will have to
be taken as to who those users will be in order to prevent terrorists and
criminals from taking advantage of the completely secure communication
network, he said.

 "In my view it should not be limited to senior government officials and
the military, but made available to all users who need really secure
communications," Mon

Vulnerability in the WinZip implimentation of AES?

[Dave Howe]

http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/users/tkohno/papers/WinZip/

 Abstract: WinZip is a popular compression utility for Microsoft Windows
computers, the latest version of which is advertised as having
"easy-to-use AES encryption to protect your sensitive data." We exhibit
several attacks against WinZip's new encryption method, dubbed "AE-2" or
"Advanced Encryption, version two." We then discuss secure alternatives.
Since at a high level the underlying WinZip encryption method appears
secure (the core is exactly Encrypt-then-Authenticate using AES-CTR and
HMAC-SHA1), and since one of our attacks was made possible because of the
way that WinZip Computing, Inc.~decided to fix a different security
problem with its previous encryption method AE-1, our attacks further
underscore the subtlety of designing cryptographically secure software.

Diffie-Hellman question

[Thomas Shaddack]

I have a standard implementation of OpenSSL, with Diffie-Hellman prime in
the SSL certificate. The DH cipher suite is enabled.

Is it safe to keep one prime there forever, or should I rather
periodically regenerate it? Why? If yes, what's some sane period to do so:
day, week, month?

If the adversary has a log of a passively intercepted DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
secured SSL communication, presuming the ephemeral key was correctly
generated and disposed of after the transaction, will the eventual
physical retrieval of the DH prime (and the rest of the certificate) allow
him to decode the captured log?

I am rather inexperienced in this area, don't want to make a mistake, and
generation of 2048-bit primes is CPU-hungry enough to not decide to just
throw it in without a good reason.