Re: How to Stop Junk E-Mail: Charge for the Stamp

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 03:29:21PM +, Ian G wrote:
> Peter Gutmann wrote:
> 
> >Barry Shein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >>Eventually email will just collapse (as it's doing) and the RBOCs et al will
> >>inherit it and we'll all be paying 15c per message like their SMS services.
> >
> >And the spammers will be using everyone else's PC's to send out their spam, 
> >so
> >the spam problem will still be as bad as ever but now Joe Sixpack will be
> >paying to send it.
> >
> >Hmmm, and maybe *that* will finally motivate software companies, end users,
> >ISPs, etc etc, to fix up software, systems, and usage habits to prevent this.
> >  
> 
> My view - as controversial as ever - is that the problem
> is unfixable, and mail will eventually fade away.  That
> which will take its place is p2p / IM / chat / SMS based.
> In that world, it is still reasonable to build ones own IM
> system for the needs of ones own community, and not
> to have to worry about standards.  Which means one can
> build in the defences that are needed, when they are
> needed.

Better start on those defenses now then-
there is already significant amounts of IM and SMS spam.

I would be suprised if the people designing IM and SMS systems
have learned much from the failures of SMTP et al.  


Eric

Re: [p2p-hackers] SHA1 broken?

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 07:55:15AM -0500, R.A. Hettinga wrote:
> From: "Serguei Osokine" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: "Peer-to-peer development." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: RE: [p2p-hackers] SHA1 broken?
> Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 00:11:07 -0800
> 
> Okay, so the effective SHA-1 length is 138 bits instead of full
> 160 - so what's the big deal? It is still way more than, say, MD5

In applications where collisions are important, SHA1 is now
effectively 69 bits as opposed to 80.

That's not very much, and odds are there will be an improvement on
this attack in the near future. 

Eric

Re: Dell to Add Security Chip to PCs

[Eric Murray]

On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 11:45:01PM -0600, Shawn K. Quinn wrote:
> Isn't it possible to emulate the TCPA chip in software, using one's own
> RSA key, and thus signing whatever you damn well please with it instead
> of whatever the chip wants to sign? So in reality, as far as remote
> attestation goes, it's only as secure as the software driver used to
> talk to the TCPA chip, right?

The TCPA chip verifies the (signature on the) BIOS and the OS.
So the software driver is the one that's trusted by the TCPA chip.

Plus the private key is kept in the chip, so it can't
be read by your emulator.  If your emulator picks its own key pair
then its attesations will be detected as invalid by a
relying party that's using the real TCPA public keys.


Eric

Using TCPA

[Eric Murray]

On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 11:51:57AM -0500, Trei, Peter wrote:
 
> It could easily be leveraged to make motherboards
> which will only run 'authorized' OSs, and OSs
> which will run only 'authorized' software.

[..]

> If you 'take ownership' as you put it, the internal
> keys and certs change, and all of a sudden you
> might not have a bootable computer anymore.

I have an application for exactly that behaviour.
It's a secure appliance.  Users don't run
code on it.  It needs to be able
to verify that it's running the authorized OS and software
and that new software is authorized.
(it does it already, but a TCPA chip might do it better).

So a question for the TCPA proponents (or opponents):
how would I do that using TCPA?


Eric

Re: An interesting thread...Hacking Bluetooth

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2004 at 09:48:01PM -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
> Oh no, it gets really interesting. He claims to be an ex-German TLA-type 
> (how many Ls do German TLAs normally have?), and had advanced knowledge of 
> 9/11. That's not super-implausible.

[..]

> Me? I suspect he just pulled all this shit from David Emory's shows and then 
> added some nice google tech searches.

[..]

> I was hoping someone knew about this and had already hacked this hoax, 


If he sounds like Dave Emory, then there isn't much debunking that's required.

Food for thought and grounds for further research,

Eric

Re: nyms being attacked by malware

[Eric Murray]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2004 at 10:16:11AM +0100, privacy.at Anonymous Remailer wrote:
> I've noticed a very high increase of incoming virii and malicious code of
> various sorts to one of my nyms. Since the nym is not used anywhere
> publically I really wonder if these are deliberate attacks to try to
> compromise the machines of people using nyms to protect their identity. Is
> this something that's a known strategy somehow? Obviously it could also be
> that the nym was previously used by someone else online and that's partly
> why it would be interesting to hear other's comments on this.

Spammers probe SMTP servers for valid names using dictionary attacks.

It's difficult to set up an SMTP server that will
accept mail for an address and not also give up
the information that the address is valid.

Re: bin Laden gets a Promotion

[Eric Murray]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 02:29:51PM -0400, Tyler Durden wrote:
> GodDAMN George W is a dumb fuck.
> 
> If the guy's IQ had broken the 3-digit barrier he might have figured out 
> that by nearly directly replying to the new bin Laden video he's basically 
> elevating bin Laden to a hostile head-of-state.

Bush needs bin Laden to be as scary as possible.
I'm amused by the timing.  Its almost as if they're both
following Karl Rove's playbook.

Eric

Re: Backdoor found in Diebold Voting Tabulators

[Eric Murray]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 11:30:35AM -0400, Sunder wrote:
> Oops! Is that a cat exiting the bag?
> 
> 
> http://www.blackboxvoting.org/?q=node/view/78


Apparently so.  Going to www.blackboxvoting.org now just gives:

This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.


Interestingly, while the whois info is gone, the DNS records are 
still around:

% dig blackboxvoting.org any

; <<>> DiG 8.3 <<>> blackboxvoting.org any 
;; res options: init recurs defnam dnsrch
;; got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 4
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 3
;; QUERY SECTION:
;;  blackboxvoting.org, type = ANY, class = IN

;; ANSWER SECTION:
blackboxvoting.org. 4H IN A 69.73.175.26
blackboxvoting.org. 4H IN NSns4.nocdirect.com.
blackboxvoting.org. 4H IN NSns2.nocdirect.com.
blackboxvoting.org. 4H IN NSns3.nocdirect.com.
blackboxvoting.org. 4H IN SOA   ns3.nocdirect.com. admin.nocdirect.com. (
2004081101  ; serial
4H  ; refresh
2H  ; retry
5w6d16h ; expiry
1D ); minimum

blackboxvoting.org. 4H IN MX0 blackboxvoting.org.

Olympics snooping

[Eric Murray]

http://sports.yahoo.com/oly/news?slug=ap-securitytech&prov=ap&type=lgns

Unprecedented electronic net over the Olympics

By MIRON VAROUHAKIS, Associated Press Writer

August 9, 2004

ATHENS, Greece (AP) -- If you're going to the Olympics, you'd better be
careful what you say and do in public.

Software will be watching and listening.

Recent leaps in technology have paired highly sophisticated software
with street surveillance cameras to create digital security guards with
intelligence-gathering skills.

`It is a very vast network and it is the first time it is being done
on such a scale at an international level,'' Greek police spokesman
Col. Lefteris Ikonomou told The Associated Press.

The system -- developed by a consortium led by San Diego-based Science
Applications International Corp., or SAIC -- cost about $312 million
and took up a sizable chunk of Athens' record security budget of more
than $1.5 billion.

It gathers images and audio from an electronic web of over 1,000
high-resolution and infrared cameras, 12 patrol boats, 4,000 vehicles,
nine helicopters, a sensor-laden blimp and four mobile command centers.

Spoken words collected by the cameras with speech-recognition software
are transcribed into text that is then searched for patterns along
with other electronic communications entering and leaving the area --
including e-mail and image files.

The system, which includes components already used by U.S. and British
government intelligence agencies, covers all of greater Athens, nine
ports, airports and all other Olympic cities.

Ikonomou said it ``allows the users to manage a critical incident in
the best way possible and in the shortest time possible because they
have all the information in front of them.''

The software used for surveillance camera recordings is designed to spot
and rank possible risks, said Dionysios Dendrinos, general manager of
One Siemens in Greece, one of the companies in the consortium.

``They can distinguish the sound of a flat tire from an explosion or
a gunshot and inform the user at the command center of the incident,''
he said. ``This is also the case with any anomaly in the picture, such
as a traffic jam.''

Technology also allows the users of the system at the main command center
to save and analyze data from the surveillance network and beyond. And
the material from the closed circuit cameras is kept for seven days,
Ikonomou said, so specific incidents can be analyzed in depth.

Much of that analysis is enabled by software from London-based Autonomy
Corp., whose clients include the U.S. National Security Agency, that
parses words and phrases collected by surveillance cameras and in
communications traffic.

In June, the Greek government expanded surveillance powers to screen
mobile and fixed-line telephone calls during the Olympics.

``It listens, reads and watches,'' Dominic Johnson, Autonomy's
chief marketing officer, said of his company's software. Then it
synthesizes. Beyond Greek and English the software understands Arabic,
Farsi and all major European languages, Johnson said.

Other companies in the SAIC consortium include Germany's Siemens AG;
General Dynamics Corp. and Honeywell International Inc. of the United
States; and the Israeli company Elbit Systems. Several Greek companies
also are participating.

According to the contract, the system was to be delivered by May 28,
but due to construction delays at some Olympic venues -- such as the
main Olympic stadium -- it was delivered just weeks before the opening
ceremony.

Nevertheless, Public Order Minister Giorgos Voulgarakis declared last
week that all the security systems were in full deployment and working
smoothly.

There'll be other sniffing going on, of course.

A network of sensors designed to detect chemical agents has also been
deployed near Olympic venues and around the capital, including on the
security blimp.

Advanced technology is also used in the creation of the Olympic
credentials, which use such security features as holograms. All cardholder
information, such as a person's photo and passport number, are printed
on a very thin film designed to make the cards impossible to forge.

The digitally enhanced surveillance net may provide comfort to Olympics
attendees, but not everyone is happy at authorities' computer-aided eyes
and ears.

Several groups have held protests in recent months against what they say
is an invasion of their privacy, and some demonstrators have spray-painted
street cameras, seeking to blind them.

``The Olympic Games are accompanied with extended security measures
that are unprecedented for Greece,'' six human rights groups said in a
protest letter to Greek Parliament in July. ``Although the state's right
to take all necessary measures that it deems necessary is recognized,
there is fear that these measures will have a negative impact on basic
human rights.''

Re: On how the NSA can be generations ahead

[Eric Murray]

On Sun, Aug 01, 2004 at 10:20:38AM -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> 
> > Tyler D asked about how the NSA could be so far ahead.
> > Besides their ability to make 2" sq. chips at 10% yield (not
> > something a commercial entity could get away with)
> 
> What, exactly, would be the point of doing this?

More gates == more processing.

> > they can also *thin and glue* those chips into say stacks
> > of 5 thinned die.
> 
> As easily as you could do this to high efficiency chips.

It's possible, using technologies like flip-chip.  But its not
as good as having everything on one die.  The interconnects
are limited in number and large in size, so they take up a lot of
room.

Stacked die are also more difficult to keep cool.

> > 2" sq = 4 x performance
> 
> How do you figure 4x performance on a 2" chip?  Most of the chip
> performance is tied to the total distance that signals must traverse
> across the chip surface.

4x the gates (roughly) means 4x performance.
Chip performance, especially for highly parellizable things like
key cracking, is determined by the number of gates.


Eric

FIPS chassis/linux security engineer?

[Eric Murray]

Does anyone know of a manufacturer of FIPS 140 certified or
certifiable 1u/2u rack mount chassis?

For a seperate project, does anyone know of a small linux-ready/able
box with ethernet?
Gumstix looks cool but I need hardwire networking.


Last, I'm looking for a Linux expert security engineer in the SF
bay area.  (I'm managing a security group at a startup that has
been shipping products to paying customers for a few years.  No its
not lne.com, this just address I use to post).

This person will need to know linux/unix OS security/hardening _in
depth_ and also have an understanding of crypto APIs (writing them not
using them) plus significant industry experience.  Sorry, no relocation
assistance.


Eric

recent brute-force work factor calculations

[Eric Murray]

Does anyone know of a recent brute-force work
factor calculation for the various common symmetric ciphers?
I.e.   it'll take X 3.2gh Xeons Y years to brute cipher Z.
I know there's a table of these in Schneier and there's the "Seven
Cryptographers" paper but they're both pretty old at this point.

I'm just looking for an approximation.

Thanks.

Eric

Re: Windows source leaked?

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 11:45:34AM -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
(in reply to someone else)
> 
> >Lots has been said about OSS developers not wanting to look at this
> >for fear that they will be "tainted."  While it is true that simply
> >the act of looking at the code is unauthorized and illegal,
> 
> If you didn't steal it, its not your problem if you read it.

I disagree.  I don't have time to look up the cases now
but there have been a number of cases of companies being sued for
(effectively) their programmers having SEEN some other code.
The theory being that they are somehow contaminated with
the valuable ideas embodied within and are helpless to resist
implementing them.  This has resulted in
many companies having "chinese walls" between some programming
groups who are working on a version of a competitors product that
the company has the code for.

This may not be "right", but it was extremely common in the early 90s.
It's very expensive so I would be quite suprised if there was not
strong case law on this.

> I wonder
> >if there is any truth to the claim that a developer who looked at
> >Windows source would endanger future projects (assuming, of course,
> >that simple copying---which is clearly illegal---doesn't happen).
> 
> How would M$ show that you had in fact read the code?

They'd just alledge that you had, and then have "discovery"
all through your files.  Essentially any program could look
like an "infriging work" to some judge somewhere.

If I were a conspiracy theorist I'd say tha MS released the code
themselves just for this reason.

Eric

Re: Windows source leaked?

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 03:25:11PM -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
 
> I wonder if frags of OSS code can be found in proprietary binaries.

Of course.

Here's an example of MS using BSD code:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357
and another:
http://austinlug.org/archives/alg/2002-05/msg00606.html

Re: Howard Dean wants national IDs, internet drivers licenses.

[Eric Murray]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2004 at 10:09:31AM -0500, Trei, Peter wrote:
> 
> I realize that there isn't a major party presidential
> candidate alive who gets approval from most of the people
> on this list, but it's worthwhile to note which ones are
> proposing explicitly poor internet and privacy policy.


Deans campaign licenses Wave technology.  The speech
he gave below was at a Wave-sponsored conference.
Dean's campaign manager is a former Wavoid.

Be scared.  He's either completely clueless, knows but
doesn't care, or owned.

Re: new CDR node?

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 04:27:08AM -0500, An Metet wrote:
> On Monday, 12 Jan 2004 at 15:47, Riad S. Wahby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I'm thinking of setting up a new CDR node much like LNE's.  Current
> > CDR operators, would you email me off-list so we can discuss adding me
> > to the backbone and arrange to transfer user lists so that I can limit
> > posting to subscribers (and of course known anonymous entry points).
> 
> Create your own white list. Include your own subscribers. Inspect rejects
> and add any valid emails' addresses.

That means that more posts from list members languish awaiting forwarding.


Eric

Re: unsub from lne

[Eric Murray]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 07:58:03PM +0100, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
> Another alternative could be a couple lines of PHP or perl, unsubscribing
> via a web form.
> 
> On related note, what's a good node to migrate to?

pro-ns.net is running a CDR similar to lne.

A number of other people have gotten my scripts but
I havent' seen any up and running yet.

> PS: Thanks, Eric. It was a good node.

Thanks.  


Eric

Re: unsub from lne

[Eric Murray]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 11:42:56AM -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote:
>Hmm, maybe Eric needs to undo his spam filter so people can unsub from
> lne.com. I just tried to, but it was rejected as undeliverable "spam". Tried

I'm experimenting with a new sendmail milter.
(the SMTP HELO arg needs to be reasonably valid in order to pass).
I've now set it to not reject mail to majordomo at
lne.com.  The blocklist thing is still
in effect, but if you're bounced by that
you get a URL in the bounce message
that you can use to get it fixed.

Eric

lne.com CDR to close

[Eric Murray]

The lne.com CDR node will stop accepting new
subscriptions on Jan 1 2004, and will stop forwarding
cypherpunks mail on Jan 15.  There are other nodes
currently and hopefully more will announce themselves.

I've learned a lot on the cpunks list over the last
10 years and I'd like to thank some of the people whose
writing I've enjoyed:  Lucky Green, Black Unicorn, 
Declan McCullagh, Tim May, John Gilmore.


Eric

Re: Speaking of Reason

[Eric Murray]

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 03:05:29PM -0800, Tim May wrote:

> Since Eric Murray has expressed distaste with my views

I pretty much agree with your views, minus the racism and misogny.
On days that the brilliant thoughtful Tim posts, I'm in awe.
When Tim the asshole posts, I'm disgusted.  Unfortunately
these days the latter Tim isn't letting the former Tim
near the keyboard very often.   

> Fuck you dead. Fuck all of you Bolshies dead.

Ok, bye!


Eric (just to make it crystal clear, Tim's going in my _personal_ killfile)

Re: cypherpunks discussions

[Eric Murray]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 08:31:07AM -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
 
> The advantage of eg Yahoo groups (and presumably blogs)
> is their moderation; the lack thereof enabled spammers to
> bulldoze the commons of usenet.   Inevitable.  

I've been hearing about blog-spamming lately, and I've
seen spammers attack web boards as well.
Spammers are also using worms to get control of victim's
machines and sending their spam from there.

> >Kids these days don't know how to use shell shortcuts either.
> 
> Not sure what you mean by that.  "Shortcut" is a M$ term
> for lame-ass sym link.

Sorry, I was in a hurry.
History substition is what I meant...  i.e.

% ericm >  mkdir /home/cpun
% ericm > ^pun^punk
% ericm > cd !$
etc.

or any of the hundreds of other history substitution commands.
No one I work with knows any of them; they all either laboriously re-type
or use the command-line editor even when it requires many more keystrokes.
I try to restrain myself from barking out "bang dollar!  bang dollar dammit!"
but sometimes I can't help it.


Eric

Re: cypherpunks discussions

[Eric Murray]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 12:21:21AM -0800, Sarad AV wrote:
> I prefer not getting flamed like every one else and that
> too in quick succesion :-).  so my guess is that as far
> as newbies are concerned all the discussions are taken
> private.

This is why the cpunks list has very little new subscribers...
most newbies who post questions get flamed.  Usually by Tim
who sears them for not having read some post from
1992 or for bringing up a topic that was discussed in 1996.

Perhaps if the archives were complete, well organized and
easy to find it would be appropriate to politely tell newbies to
read the FAQ.  But they're not.   It's also not a complete waste of
time to discuss topics that have been discussed previously...
some new information may come from the discussion.  Someone
who is not interested can just skip those posts.  If the list
is restricted to discusing topics that are only of interest to Tim
(or any long-time member, Tim's not the only one) then
only a few people will even be able to follow the discusssion, let
alone participate.

Tim, before you reply, I suggest that you look back through the
last year or so's worth of your cpunks posts to see how many are
the thoughtful incisive kind vs a barage of insults or complaints
that the poster you are replying to is an idiot.

A related problem is the tendency for a number of posters to turn every
thread into an intellectual dicksizewar.   It's gotten to the point where
I don't post much, and I've been _working_ in security for the 8 years
(and on Usenet, where the dicksizewar was invented, for 15).  I can only
imagine what it's like for new people.  Only the most stubborn
will stay.   The list is selecting for obstinance.

On a related note, I do see the addresses of people who unsubscribe,
and they are often addresses that recently subscribed.  


Other people have made the point that mailing lists are "old tech"
and I agree.   I don't like the new replacements (blogs, web boards)
as much as lists, but perhaps that's because of what I used first.
Kids these days don't know how to use shell shortcuts either.


BTW, there's about 415 list members.  LNE doesn't censor, we do block
networks that we've gotten spam from.  Currently we block about 12,000
spams a week and receive another 1500 or so.  We're still on dial-up
(Verizon rural phone service sucks).  Allowing those 12,000 spams
through to process them would make our 43k line unuseable.
Hence the blocking.  I explained this to John in private email, and also
explained how to get unblocked by following a link in the bounce message.
He's refused to do this, prefering to claim that I'm "censoring" him.
Whatever.  The CIA agent reading over my shoulder says that John's way
too paranoid.

I realize that my spam solution is non-optimal but its
the best I can come up with at the moment.

I'm getting tired of running the list.  As it is now it doesn't provide
much value and I could use my time for something else.  Could someone
please set up another node?  I'll send you all my scripts etc.  But I
won't maintain it on a machine you provide, you'll have to do it.
Maybe some of our list members from the government would like
to step forward with some homeland security $$. :-)


Eric

Re: Lucrative update mail flood

[Eric Murray]

Sorry about the mail storm.  Someone at monash.edu.au has
apparently set up a mail loop that was resubmitting cpunks mails.

Eric

[declan@well.com: [Politech] FBI visits John Young, asks about anti-government activity [fs]]

[Eric Murray]

- Forwarded message from Declan McCullagh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -

Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 17:01:52 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Declan McCullagh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [Politech] FBI visits John Young, asks about anti-government activity [fs]


John Young is a longtime supporter of open government and public access to 
government information. See:
http://www.mccullagh.org/cgi-bin/photosearch.cgi?name=john+young

-Declan

---

http://cryptome.org/fbi-cryptome.htm

4 November 2003

Cryptome received a visit today from FBI Special Agents Todd Renner and 
Christopher Kelly from the FBI Counterterrorism Office in New York, 26 
Federal Plaza, telephone (212) 384-1000. Both agents presented official ID 
and business cards.

SA Renner said that a person had reported Cryptome as a source of 
information that could be used to harm the United States. He said Cryptome 
website had been examined and nothing on the site was illegal but 
information there might be used for harmful purposes. He noted that 
information in the Cryptome CDs might wind up in the wrong hands.

SA Renner said there is no investigation of Cryptome, that the purpose of 
the visit was to ask Cryptome to report to the FBI any information which 
Cryptome "had a gut feeling" could be a threat to the nation.

There was a discussion of the purpose of Cryptome, freedom of information, 
the need for more public information on threats to the nation and what 
citizens can do to protect themselves, the need for more public information 
about how the FBI functions in the field and the intention of visits like 
the one today.

SA Kelly said such visits are increasingly common as the FBI works to 
improve the reporting of information about threats to the US.

Asked what will happen as a result of the visit. SA Renner said he will 
write a report of the visit.

Cryptome said it will publish a report of the visit, including naming the 
agents. Both agents expressed concern about their names being published for 
that might lead to a threat against them and/or their families -- one 
saying that due to copious personal databases any name can be traced.

Cryptome said the reason for publishing names of agents is so that anyone 
can verify that a contact has been made, and that more public information 
is needed on how FBI agents function and who they are.

Cryptome noted that on a previous occasion FBI agents had protested 
publication of their names by Cryptome.

Cryptome did not agree to report anything to the FBI that is not available 
on the website.
___
Politech mailing list
Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)

- End forwarded message -

Re: Palladium/TCPA/NGSCB

[Eric Murray]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 11:59:47AM -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> And virii that infect the immune system can be fun too --imagine a virus
> infecting your antiviral program.  HIV for Windows.


Or a virus that modifes your other programs to make them appear to
be known virii.  You'd have to turn off your AV progams
to keep them from destroying your files (or moving them
around, going crazy with warnings when you start any program, etc)

I'd bet that no AV programs have safeguards against this
sort of false positive attack.

Eric

Re: Verisign's Wildcard A-Records and DNSSEC Plans?

[Eric Murray]

ISC is releasing a new BIND to deal with the Verisign land-grab:

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/6791550.htm

Re: GPG Sig test

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 02:08:00PM -0400, Damian Gerow wrote:
> Configure your demime to *not* strip attachments of
> application/pgp-signature.

If someone knows how, please tell me.

Eric

SSH MITM (was Re: Getting certificates)

[Eric Murray]

On Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 10:48:55PM -0700, James A. Donald wrote:

> 
> On 4 Sep 2003 at 7:56, Eric Murray wrote:
> > ..which means that it [ssh-- ericm] still requires an OOB authentication. 
> > (or blinding typing 'yes' and ignoring the consequences). But
> > that's another subject.
> 
> Not true.   Think about what would happen if you tried a man in
> the middle attack on an SSH server. 


you'd get the victim's session:


http://www.monkey.org/%7Edugsong/dsniff/

Abstract
dsniff is a collection of tools for network auditing and penetration
[..]
sshmitm and webmitm implement active monkey-in-the-middle
attacks against redirected SSH and HTTPS sessions by exploiting weak
bindings in ad-hoc PKI.


also see http://sysadmin.oreilly.com/news/silverman_1200.html for 
discussion.

Re: Random musing about words and spam

[Eric Murray]

On Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 09:02:30PM -0400, Steve Furlong wrote:
> On Tuesday 02 September 2003 19:00, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
> > Spammers recently adopted tactics of using randomly generated words,
> > eg. "wryqf", in both the subject and the body of the message.
> ...
> > Could the pseudowords be easily detected by their characteristics,
> ...
> > Presence of pseudowords then could be added as one of spam
> > characteristics.


Many of them space the code words away from the rest of
the subject text, i.e.

"Subject: what if it were true?   5258pf2"

I think this is to hide the code word since many mail readers
only show 40-60 characters of the Subject.

I've been id'ing spam by looking for excess whitespace
in the Subject line for a couple years (it's one of
about 200 checks my program makes).  I'm sure
other spam-recognition software does this as well.


Eric

Re: Getting certificates.

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 08:27:18AM -0700, James A. Donald wrote:
> --
> SSH server public/private keys are widely deployed.  PKI public 
> keys are not.  Reason is that each SSH server just whips up its 
> own keys without asking anyone's permission, or getting any 
> certificates.

.which means that it still requires an OOB authentication.
(or blinding typing 'yes' and ignoring the consequences).
But that's another subject.


> Now what I want is a certificate that merely asserts that the  
> holder of the certificate can receive email at such and such an 
> address, and that only one such certificate has been issued for 
> that address.  Such a certification system has very low costs  
> for issuer and recipient, and because it is a nym certificate, 
> no loss of privacy.

Verisign had for a number of years an email-only cert.
That is, they verified that the email address had someone
or something that answered email.  I beleive that they
called this a 'Class 1' cert.
 
> The certs that IE and outlook express accept oddly do not seem 
> to have any provision for defining what the certificate  
> certifies.
> 
> This seems a curious and drastic omission from a certificate  
> format.

X.509, PKIX et.al. allow a CA to insert a pointer
to a certificate practice statement, which can define
what the certificate certifies.

> and application of such certificates.  It also, as anyone who  
> tries to get a free certificate from Thawte will discover,  
> makes it difficult, expensive, and inconvenient to get  
> certificates.  

Thwate's making free certs difficult has nothing to do
with the usefulness of certs or X.509 or true names or
whatever, and everything to do with maximizing profit.

Since each cert carries a fixed risk of legal issues
(i.e being sued because they certified X who wasn't X)
Verisign/Thwate want to sell a comparatively few expensive
certs instead of a lot of cheap certs.

Eric

Re: Responding to orders which include a secrecy requirement

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 06:54:03PM -0700, Tim May wrote:
 
> But when Big Brother commands that his Carnivore boxes be added, ISPs 
> are afraid to shoot his agents who trespass.
 
> I think my solution may be best: take a few ISPs who have bent over for 
> Big Brother and kill their owners and staff. A few ISP owners found 
> necklaced and smoking may send a message to others. 

The message it sends is to accept the cops offer of on-site "protection"
when the ISP is faced with allowing the tap or being put in jail.
By upping the stakes you force the business
owner to accept the cops as the lesser of two evils.

The mafia's actions tended to make business owners clamor for
more police and more intrusive police protection.   Not less.

This is a problem that's better solved with crypto.

Eric

spam blacklists and lne CDR

[Eric Murray]

Hi.  The last couple days I've gotten a lot of mail bounces from cpunks
subscribers who are blocking lne.com because it's on the osirusoft spam
"blacklist".  There is no way to get off this list; in fact the site
appears to be down.  Lne.com doesn't send spam; I don't know why we are on
this list.  My guess is that it's becase we're listed on a couple other
"extreme" blacklists that blacklist entire networks that are owned by
ISPs that the list operator does not like.

If you or your ISP uses this blacklist, I have no choice but to drop
you from the lne cdr lest my mailbox drown in reject messages.

I have mixed feelings about blacklists-- I've had to implement one
here so we didn't drown in spam and it seems to work reasonably well.
But lists that 1) don't let you get off and 2) list sites to pressure
them to change ISPs don't get much respect from me, and neither do the
ISPs that blindly use them.

Eric

Re: National Emergency?

[Eric Murray]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 08:17:35AM -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:
>So how much of the Constitution gets shredded by Bush's declaration of a
> "national emergency" right after 9/11, and how long can he maintain that. I
> mean, I realize the the Constitution/bill of rights is pretty much gone anyway,

Hasn't there been a perpetual "National Emergency", signed by
every president since WWII or therebouts?

Is Bush's a double plus National Emergency?


Eric

[cta@hcsin.net: Re: CNN: 'Explores Possibility that Power Outage is Related to Internet Worm']

[Eric Murray]

Food for thought and grounds for further research:


- Forwarded message from "Bernie, CTA" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -

Mailing-List: contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]; run by ezmlm
Precedence: bulk
List-Id: 
List-Post: 
List-Help: 
List-Unsubscribe: 
List-Subscribe: 
Delivered-To: mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Delivered-To: moderator for [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: "Bernie, CTA" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Organization: HCSIN
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 14:09:12 -0400
Subject: Re: CNN: 'Explores Possibility that Power Outage is Related to Internet Worm'
Priority: normal
In-reply-to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Windows (v4.11)

It is ridiculous to accept that a lightning strike could knock 
out the grid, or the transmission system is over stressed. There 
are many redundant fault, limit and Voltage-Surge Protection 
safeguards and related instrumentation and switchgear installed 
at the distribution centers and sub stations along the Power 
Grid that would have tripped to prevent or otherwise divert such 
a major outage. 

I believe that the outage was caused by the MSblaster, or its 
mutation, which was besieged upon the respective vulnerability 
in certain control and monitoring systems (SCADA and otherwise) 
running MS 2000 or XP, located different points along the Grid. 
Some of these systems are accessible via the Internet, while 
others are accessible by POTS dialup, or private Frame relay and 
dedicated connectivity.

Being an old PLC automation and control hack let me say that 
there is a very good plausibility that the recent East Coast 
power outage was due to an attack by an MBlaster variant on the 
SCADA system at the power plant master terminal, or more likely 
at several of the remote terminal units "RTU".  SCADA runs under 
Win2000 / XP and the telemetry to the RTU is accessible via the 
Internet.

>From what I recall SCADA based monitoring and control systems 
were installed at many water / sewer processing, gas and oil 
processing, and hydro-electric plants. 

I also believe that yesterdays flooding of a generator sub-
facility in Philadelphia was also due to an MBlaster variant 
attack on the SCADA or similarly Win 2000 / XP based system.  

To make things worst, the Web Interface is MS ActiveX. Now lets 
see, how can one craft an ActiveX vuln vector into the blaster?

Oh, and for the wardrivers, SCADA can be access via wireless 
connections on the road puts a new perspective on sniffing 
around sewer plants.

It is also reasonable to assume that we could have a similar 
security threat regarding those system (SCADA and otherwise 
based on MS 2000 or XP) involved in the control, data 
acquisition, and maintenance of other critical infrastructure, 
such as inter/intra state GAS Distribution, Nuclear Plant 
Monitoring, Water and Sewer Processing, and city Traffic 
Control. IMO

I think we will see a lot of finger pointing by government 
agencies, Utilities, and politicians for the Grid outage, until 
someone confess to the security dilemma and vulnerabilities in 
the systems which are involved in running this critical 
infrastructure.

Regardless of whether the Grid outage can be attributed to the 
blaster or its variant, this is not entirely a Microsoft 
problem, as it reeks of poor System Security Engineering 
practiced by the Utility Companies, and associated equipment and 
technology suppliers.

Nonetheless, the incident will cause lots of money to be 
earmarked by the US and Canadian Governments, to be spent in an 
attempt to solve the problem, or more specifically calm the 
public. 

This incident should be fully investigated, and regulations 
passed to ensure that the Utility companies and their suppliers 
develop and implement proper safeguards that will help prevent 
or at least significantly mitigate the effects of such a 
catastrophe. 

Conversely, I do not want to see our Government directly 
involved in yet another "business", which has such a controlling 
impact over our individual lives. 

-




On 14 Aug 2003 at 15:18, Geoff Shively wrote:

> Just flipped on CNN, watching the masses snake through the
> streets of Manhattan as correspondents state that this could be
> an affect of the blaster worm.
> 
> Interesting but I don't see how an worm of this magnitude
> (smaller than that of Slammer/Sapphire and others) could
> influence DCS and SCADA systems around the US, particularly just
> in the North East.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Geoff Shively, CHO
> PivX Solutions, LLC
> 
-

Bernie 
Chief Technology Architect
Chief Security Officer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Euclidean Systems, Inc.
***
// "There is no expedient to which a man will not go 
//to avoid the pure labor of honest thinking."   
// Honest thought, the real business capital.
//  

Re: All your base are terrorists

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 06:57:50PM -0600, Roy M.Silvernail wrote:
> On Friday 04 April 2003 03:54 pm, Eric spake:
> > Some kids put up "all your base are belong to us" flyers in
> > Missouri and the police arrested them for being terrorists.
> >
> > http://sturgisjournal.com/display/inn_news/news1.txt
 
> That's an ephemeral URL.  But a quick search of their "archive" produced no 
> hits.  Got a better link?

It's still there for me.

Here's the text for the browsing-impaired:


Signs land seven in court

By CLIFFORD JEFFERY STURGIS JOURNAL

What started as an April Fool's joke involving bad grammar landed seven
people in jail Tuesday.

Sturgis police arrested seven Sturgis men for placing more than 20
threatening letters on various businesses, schools, banks and at the
post office. At least 12 signs were posted Monday morning. Another 20
were put up Tuesday evening, according to Sturgis police.

The letters all read "All your base are belong to us and you have no
chance to survive, make your time."

Information about the letters was forwarded to the FBI and U.S. postal
authorities, said Sturgis police Chief Eugene Alli.

"This is no joking matter," he said. "During a time of war and with
the present concern for homeland security, terrorist acts will not be
tolerated and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

The "All your base are belong to us" are lines said by Cats, a bad guy
in a 1989 Japanese video game. The poor translation to English led to
its use by many involved in the video game culture.

According to the "All your base are belong to us" Web site, a voiceover
of the Zero Wing video game introduction, including the poorly translated
line, was put to music and sung by a Wayne Newton impersonator. Stories
about the phrase have appeared in Time, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times
and Wired. The phrase is printed on T-shirts and bumper stickers.

But police were not in on the joke.

Officer Damon Knapp witnessed three people placing the signs on a downtown
business. By early this morning, police had arrested seven men, charging
them with disorderly conduct.

Robert McNew, 20, Carl McNew, 19, John Wolf, 20, William Caldwell,
17, Dustin Garn, 19, Kirk Vezeau, 20, and Kyle Woodward, 18, were all
released after posting bond.

all your base are a terrorist threat

[Eric Murray]

Some kids put up "all your base are belong to us" flyers in
Missouri and the police arrested them for being terrorists.

http://sturgisjournal.com/display/inn_news/news1.txt

aljazeera.net blocking

[Eric Murray]

Getting a 503 or any HTTP error means that you are getting
through to something that is too busy.
An HTTP error jibes with the usual result of a web site hack
that "takes down" the server.  But it also could be a result of
too many connection attempts.

Not being able to resolve the name indicates something
different than too many users or a web site hack, since the name
information comes from DNS servers which are not on the same network.
Simplifying a lot, the ultimate DNS record comes from the registrar
who places it on the "root servers".

If the root servers no longer have the record, then no one
will be able to resolve the name (modulo local cache timeouts, usually of
a day or so).

ALJAZEERA.NET is registered by networksolutions.com (Verisign), who
also control most of the root servers as well.
Two days ago, ALJAZEERA.NET resolved to an IP address that
had a web server on it.  Yesterday, it couldn't be resolved.
Today it points to 216.34.94.186.

216.34.94.186 appears to belong to a Cable & Wireless IP block.
A traceroute ends at a CW router that is probably somewhere
in America:

 9  p0-0-0-1.rar1.sanjose-ca.us.xo.net (65.106.1.65)  4.936 ms  9.793 ms  4.802 ms
10  p0-0.ir1.paloalto-ca.us.xo.net (65.106.5.194)  5.489 ms  5.389 ms  5.461 ms
11  bpr2-so-6-0-0.paloaltopaix.cw.net (206.24.241.213)  5.398 ms  15.071 ms  5.223 ms
12  agr2-loopback.santaclara.cw.net (208.172.146.102)  5.680 ms  5.569 ms  5.802 ms
13  dcr2-so-7-1-0.santaclara.cw.net (208.172.156.185)  7.210 ms  5.810 ms  7.434 ms
14  acr1-loopback.seattle.cw.net (208.172.82.61)  23.783 ms  26.939 ms  23.587 ms
15  bhr1-pos-0-0.tukwilase2.cw.net (208.172.83.130)  24.920 ms  24.461 ms  24.630 ms
16  csr11-ve240.tukwilase2.cw.net (216.34.64.34)  25.067 ms  24.883 ms  24.769 ms
17  * * *
18  * * *


They could have picked a bad time to move servers and be doing it
incompetently.  Hackers could have spoofed Verisign into changing
their DNS record, and have broken into router control networks
to break their routing.  Or the US government could be ordering
Verisign and CW to make ALJAZEERA.NET unavailable.

Eric

Re: U.S. Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 03:24:01AM -0800, Sarad AV wrote:

> it doesnt matter as long as Al-Jazeera is live and
> kicking and the camera's are rolling.


Yesterday morning I could get to english.aljazeera.net.
As of yesterday afternoon, it has become unavailable.

Supposedly they are "victims of hackers" but yesterday a traceroute
from california stopped somewhere in Sprints' network in the US.

This morning I can't even resolve their name.
None of their listed nameservers will respond.


Eric

faking WMD evidence

[Eric Murray]

Apparently the CIA and MI6 have been faking WMD evidence for quite a while:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1

Re: IDEA

[Eric Murray]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2003 at 09:40:50AM +, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> 
> IDEA is listed on the fourth line, so it seems IDEA was installed with
> OpenSSL, but MixMaster's install may be improperly detecting that IDEA
> is absent.  It's when I run the Mixmaster install that I get the
> error:
> 
>...
>Looking for libz.a...
>Found at /usr/lib/libz.so.
>Found source directory zlib-1.1.4.
>Use the source if the pre-installed library causes compilation problems.
>Use source? [n]
>Looking for libpcre.a...
>Found source directory pcre-2.08.
>Looking for libcrypto.a...
>Found at /usr/local/ssl/lib/libcrypto.a.
>./Install: [: 90701f: integer expression expected

I think that line means that mixmaster's install script isn't
properly identifying the version of Openssl.  If it were
me, I'd fix the Mixmaster install script.


>./Install: tmptst.c: Permission denied
>gcc: tmptst.c: No such file or directory

Yep, the install script needs help.


BTW, if you will be posting Mixmaster messages to the cpunks
list, could you fix it so it uses an informative Subject: line
instead of "Mixmaster Type III Message"?  

Eric

Re: surveillance nation

[Eric Murray]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 01:17:21PM -0500, Sunder wrote:
> Interesting, lne.com flagged this as spam.

We probably rejected the SMTP connection as coming from
a source that's sent us spam in the past.  Read the
bounce message and use the URL to send me the ID code please.

There's no content-based spam filtering on the lne cpunks list.


Eric

Re: Press Coverage, Snarky Media Personalities, and War

[Eric Murray]

On Sat, Mar 01, 2003 at 01:43:58PM -0800, Eric Cordian wrote:
> Tim May wrote:
> 
> > P.S. I plan to make strong efforts to stop my new address from being 
> > harvested by spammers, such as using "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" in 
> > Usenet posts. I hope this works.
> 
> I'm pretty sure, based on my spam volume, that spammers grep Cypherpunks
> for email addresses.

I don't think that spammers bother to subscribe to mailing lists
directly.
I think they use google to search for email addresses
on the web.  Cpunks is web archived.
/[EMAIL PROTECTED](com|net)/ is probably a great way to find
valid addresses.

> So you're probably already hosed.

I probably spend half an hour to an hour a week on
spam blocks of various sorts.  This week I blocked
3800 spams to lne.com, and foiled another thousand
SMTP name searches.  lne.com only has a few users.
That spam count doesn't count the spam that goes to cpunks, most
of which is filtered out before I see it.

It's to the point where I'm considering actively fighting back.

Eric

Re: To Steve Schear, re Rome, Architects, Shuttles, Congress

[Eric Murray]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 11:32:43PM -0500, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
 
> Carburetor?  Didn't that connect to the phonograph through a cat's whisker? 

Carburetor is French for "leave it alone".

While only one of my cars is old enough to have a carb, all but one of
the 10 or so motorcycles in the garage do.  So I work on carbs a lot.
They are a marvel of applied physics and they work pretty well.  And if
you are careful and keep things clean
(carbs hate dirt), they are easy to work on.

> > but except for my first auto mechanics class, I didn't mess with brakes -
> > if I mess up an engine, my car might not go anywhere, but that's
> > usually fail-safe, while making mistakes on brakes is fail-dangerous.
> 
> Bingo.   And hacking on production machines is a no-no.

It was a bit tough for street cars for a while, but these days
there's a lot you can do and be 100% legal.  Many aftermarket
manufacturers get EPA approval for their bits (not difficult to do).
Fuel-injection has made automotive systems both simpler and
more readily modified.  It's a lot easier to plug a laptop in and
diddle the fuel mapping than it is to take the carb(s) off
and change jets.


I prefer motorcycles to cars as they are much easier to work
on and there are fewer regulations and less enforcement, even
in California.  And many of the bikes I have worked on have
been competition bikes, not road bikes.

> Doncha wish there was a traceroute for hoses under the hood? 
> 
> Cars look like the hoses pipes and tubes in _Brazil_ nowadays.

Not nearly as bad as they did in the 80s.  I have an early 80s
Toyota 4x4 farm truck and it's got probably 40-60 different
Little Black Hoses plus assorted Mystery Boxes.  New cars just have an FI
computer and a throttle body and a few wires.

Some vehicles (i.e. Ducati 999 motorcycle) use a digital network
instead of dedicated circuits.  Making it even more amenable to hacking, at
least until the factory figures out DRM...
The future is in a few powerful networked computers per vehicle
instead of many dumb microprocessors on seperate circuits.  This will make
vehicles even more hackable.

The other place that computer tech is changing things for the
home vehicle haxor is in machining.  There are a lot of
cheap CNC setups available now.  Most use PCs.  One of the better
CNC programs runs on Linux and was developed by/for NIST, who
distributes it free.
 
> [1] Air Quality Management District, the pollution police in SoCal at 
> least.  They make 2-cycle engines and useful BBQ lighter fluid illegal here.
> Also won't let you register a car if you've modified the pollution controls
> in any way, since mods are officially bad and you can't register a car
> without a periodic smog check.

You're not supposed to paint your own vehicles in SoCal either, automotive
paint being a VOC.  But a back room or garage can be made into
a dandy hidden paint booth.  All you need is a fan and some plastic
sheeting and duct tape.  The fumes will disperse enough
that the neighbors probably won't notice, and if they do they'll
just think that you're running a meth lab.

Eric

Re: To Steve Shear, re Rome, Architects, Shuttles, Congress

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 08:27:31PM -0500, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> Hackers don't work on their own brakes for a reason: evolution.

I do.  That way I know they were done right.
Specialization is for insects.

Eric

Re: Digital Certificates

[Eric Murray]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 01:22:21PM -0800, Joseph Ashwood wrote:
> I was just wondering if anyone has a digital certificate issuing system I
> could get a few certificates issued from. Trust is not an issue since these
> are development-only certs, and won't be used for anything except testing
> purposes.

Whenever I need some test certs I use openssl to generate them.
(Or an ingrian box, but not many people have one of those.)
There's instructions in the openssl docs.  For test purposes
you don't need openca, its only needed if you want to
issue a lot of certs automagically.

> The development is for an open source PKCS #11 test suite.

Let me know when its done, I could use it.


Eric

Re: The practical reason the U.S. is starting a war

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 09:54:33AM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> I've been watching the Security Council session this morning. Positions 
> are established.


The French diplomat gave a wonderful speech, but its all for show.
The real decisions are made in the back rooms.

[..]

> * The reason is clear: the juggernauts of the military buildup are 
> rolling: 5 carrier battle groups now either in the region or arriving 
> within the next 10 days. More than 100,000 U.S. and British troops 
> massing in Kuwait, Qatar, and other staging areas.
> 
> * The new moon, when moonlight is minimal, is happening around 1 March. 
> This is the standard military time to attack, and fits with the 
> cresting of the military buildup. (Carriers and aircraft and troops 
> should be in place by 25 February, and so the war could start any time 
> after that.)

It's been well known for months in the rest of the world that the war is
scheduled to start on the 27th.  Our media isn't mentioning that, to
heighten the suspense and preserve the various fictions of
working with the UN and having a debate.


> All of these issues point to what a clusterfuck this is turning into, 
> exposing the hypocrisy of the U.S. position that it doesn't start wars 
> (a claim that can never be made again with a straight face if this war 
> starts...though some would say this claim has been bogus for the past 
> 40 years). 

Having its hypocrisy exposed no longer bothers american
adminstrations.  The Big Lie technique works better now than it ever did.

> And exposing the hypocrisy of the notion that Congress 
> debates important issues. And of course the U.N. suffers.
> 
> Not all of these things are bad. Which is why I am hoping for a war. A 
> war that goes badly, a war that results in world opinion turning 
> sharply against the American aggressor state. 

Our government won't care.  They own the world and they know it.
France will block a UN resolution because the USG didn't cut them
in for enough of the oil fields, and the USG will go ahead anyhow.
Any government that opposes too seriously will find itself part
of the axis of evil.

> A war that causes Iran to 
> decide to seize some disputed territory (what we gonna do then, homey?).

Invade and set up a puppet government of course.
 
> A war that returns the United States to blissful isolationism.

Won't happen.  Even if the war costs $200B/year they'll just raise
taxes on the middle class and run up the deficit and Congress will
bleat 'yea' votes when required.

> A war that, Allah willing, causes Washington, D.C. to be be hit with a 
> suitcase nuke, cleansing it of a million criminal politicians and two 
> million inner city welfare mutants. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be 
> wished.
> 

Not.
The rot and corruption runs far too deep in politics for a single hit
on DC to change anything fundamental, and the vicious police state that would
result would be far worse than any of our current nightmares.


Eric

ClearChannel memo "Preparing for war"

[Eric Murray]

Appropriate to the recent media thread, a leaked ClearChannel memo
on some station's war preperations:

http://www.internalmemos.com/memos/memodetails.php?memo_id=1329

They're clearly salivating at the prospect.

Eric

Re: Shuttle Humor, Risk Estimation

[Eric Murray]

On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 05:01:41PM -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote:
 
> The biggest question there is why didn't they inspect it? Seems very
> bizarre, since that's what they did in the past. 

All the KH-71s were busy mapping Iraq's oil fields
and photographing Saddam's nose hairs.

Eric

Re: "Touching shuttle debris may cause bad spirits to invade your body!"

[Eric Murray]

On Sun, Feb 02, 2003 at 10:19:27AM -0800, Tim May wrote:
 
> A real journalist would just roll his eyes and say "Look, folks, NASA 
> wants these pieces to be aid in reconstructing the accident. There are 
> no traces of liquid propellants and deadly chemicals on these pieces. 
> And they certainly didn't stay hot for long. NASA is trying to get us 
> to feed you jive so you'll be properly frightened and won't touch 
> them.?"

No one with the gumption to say the truth is allowed near a mic
at any major media outlet.  Instead they get marginalized as a
"conspiracy theorist" along with the UFO idiots, and the mass media
hire dolts who will read what they're told to read.

I'm not sure which is more irritating-- the obvious way in which
the govermedia manipulate the issue, or their automatic assumption that
americans are too stupid/criminal to turn in all the parts they
find if NASA just said "we need all the parts, please bring 'em in".


Eric

Re: Life Sentence for Medical Marijuana?

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 04:50:00PM -0800, Eric Cordian wrote:
> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,77234,00.html
> 
> The Feebs are crowing over their latest victory, having just obtained a
> conviction against a medical marijuana grower for the city of Oakland.

They went after Ed Rosenthal because he is the author of
a popular book on growing dope.


>"There is no such thing as medical marijuana," said 
> Richard Meyer, a DEA spokesman. "We're Americans 
> first, Californians second."

Interesting how selective the "states rights" crowd in Washington is.

Eric

Re: Cpunks: The Tee-shirt

[Eric Murray]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 04:11:21PM -0500, Trei, Peter wrote:
> I was poking around thinkgeek, and it appears that
> the CDR now has it's own tee-shirt.
> Suitable for old farts and wannabes alike.
> Now available in black!
> 
> Peter Trei
> http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/57ee/

Not "The Fedz declared me an enemy combatant, sent
me to Cuba for torture and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"?


Eric

CDR administrivia

[Eric Murray]

I've just been made aware of a bug in my CDR code
that causes MIME-encoded mail that uses the (rare)
Content-Type: multipart/mixed to get dropped into the bit bucket.

I'll fix it soon, but in the mean time please post in plain ASCII.
You should post in plain ascii anyhow since any MIME gets demimed
(the demime program being the problem in this case) but I know that
some mailers don't make it easy and some people post from environments
where MIME encoding is the norm and forget to switch.

Eric

Re: Is the minder CDR down?

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 09:47:20AM -0500, Trei, Peter wrote:
> I'm subscribed thru minder, and have had no
> cypherpunks mail for nearly 24 hours. I can
> see that there is more recent traffic on the
> web archive.

The last mail I got from them here was yesterday morning.  But their
majordomo did answer a ping this morning, so their server was up and
sending and receiving at least some mail them.


Eric

Re: stego building

[Eric Murray]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2002 at 03:54:13PM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
> That, or it's a dot-com that didn't make it,
> or an office-space construction that someone hoped to sell to a dot-com
> but missed the boom.  There's huge amounts of that in SF.

They wouldn't have security if it was empty, and would
probably have at least one sign if it was occupied.

Also, office space tends to have windows.

Perhaps its a phone company CO or other facility.  I have seen large
windowlwss concrete buildings used by the phone company before.  Or maybe
that's just what "they" want us to think...



Eric

 
> At 05:37 PM 11/24/2002 -0600, Neil Johnson wrote:
> >On Sunday 24 November 2002 04:49 pm, Tarapia Tapioco wrote:
> > > There is a huge concrete building, hardly any windows, occupying the whole
> > > block-width between Market and Mission streets in san francisco, one side
> > > being 11th street. Funny thing is that it has no markings at all. The main
> > > entrance seems to be at 14xx Market, with visible security.
> > >
> > > Any clues appreciated.
> >
> >It's probably just a co-location center for web servers. I vaguely 
> >remember an
> >dot-com boom article about some sort "secure" datacenter for web server
> >bussiness being built in that area.
> >
> >Not quite as secure as the "The Bunker" though.
> >
> >
> >-Neil

Re: Q: opportunistic email encryption

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 09:23:57PM +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> Question: if you control the traffic layer you can easily disrupt
> opportunistic encryption (STARTTLS & Co) by killing public key exchange,
> or even do a MITM.

An attacker can prevent opportunistic STARTTLS by modifying
the STARTTLS tag in SMTP.

> Is there any infrastructure in MTAs for public key caching, and admin
> notification if things look fishy? (Fishy: a host which used to do PKI 
> with you suddenly says it can't, or its key differs from key you cached).

ssh does this.


Eric

Re: Retry: Yet another attempt to defraud egold!

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 10:02:54AM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> On Friday, November 15, 2002, at 08:59  AM, Tim May wrote:
> > I received a similar letter, and also one from PayPal/EBay which was
> > quite similar in language. The full headers of the E-gold letter are
> > included at the end of this message.
> > Here are the headers of the E-gold message I got:
> >
> > From:
> >
> > [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type image/tiff which had a 
> > name of image.tiff]
> >
> >
> 
> The headers got "demimed," at least on the version I got back from 
> lne.com.

"Image.tiff"? Wierd.  Could you send me a copy of the one that got demimed?

 
> So, I hope what follows is plain text only. (My editors say it is.)
> 
>  From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fri Nov 15 08:05:42 2002
> Received: by sphinx (mbox tcmay)
>   (with Cubic Circle's cucipop (v1.31 1998/05/13) Fri Nov 15 08:10:44 
> 2002)
> X-From_: [EMAIL PROTECTED]  Fri Nov 15 07:31:14 2002
> Return-Path: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Received: from psmtp.com (exprod5mx17.postini.com [64.75.1.157])
>   by sphinx.got.net (8.12.2/8.12.2/Debian -5) with SMTP id gAFFVDap010192
>   for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Fri, 15 Nov 2002 07:31:14 -0800
> Received: from source ([24.51.87.108]) by exprod5mx17 ([64.75.1.245]) 
> with SMTP;
>   Fri, 15 Nov 2002 10:31:13 EST

I'm guessing that 24.51.87.108 is the source and the Received
line below is fake.
24.51.87.108 is in a netblock owned by Adelphia.
64.75.1.245 is an MX for got.net.  Its common for spammers
to send their spam through MX hosts to bypass blacklists.

I'd compare this to other "e-gold" mails to be sure but I'd
say just from loking at the headers there's a strong chance its fake.



> Received: from 216.53.150.250 (HELO maple.omnipay.net)
>by smtp.c000.snv.cp.net (209.228.32.87) with SMTP; Fri, 15 
> Nov 2002 15:31:32 +
> Received: by MAPLE with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2655.55)
>id ; Fri, 15 Nov 2002 15:31:32 +
> From: "Service EG" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: "e-gold customer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: [e-gold-service] We have set a value limit on your e-gold 
> account
> X-Priority: 3
> X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
> X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2655.55)
> Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 15:31:32 +
> Message-ID: 
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"


Eric

[perry@piermont.com: The FBI Has Bugged Our Public Libraries]

[Eric Murray]

This will come as no suprise to people on this list.


- Forwarded message from "Perry E. Metzger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -

Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: The FBI Has Bugged Our Public Libraries
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 05 Nov 2002 18:40:31 -0500
User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2
Precedence: bulk


>From Interesting-People


Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2002 17:12:52 -0500
Subject: [IP] The FBI Has Bugged Our Public Libraries
From: Dave Farber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


From: Richard Forno <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: The FBI Has Bugged Our Public Libraries
To: Dave Farber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2002 16:40:41 -0500


The FBI Has Bugged Our Public Libraries
November 3, 2002
http://www.ctnow.com/features/lifestyle/hc-privacy1103.artnov03col.story

Some reports say the FBI is snooping in the libraries. Is that really
happening?

Yes. I have uncovered information that persuades me that the Federal Bureau
of Investigation has bugged the computers at the Hartford Public Library.
And it's probable that other libraries around the state have also been
bugged. It's an effort by the FBI to obtain leads that it believes may lead
them to terrorists.

Many members of the public regularly use computers in libraries to access
the Internet for research purposes or to locate information about particular
interests. It's also not uncommon for students and others to communicate
with friends and relatives through e-mail from there.

The FBI system apparently involves the installation of special software on
the computers that lets the FBI copy a person's use of the Internet and
their e-mail messages. (Don't ask me how I know about this because I can't
reveal how I was able to collect the information.) Members of the public who
use the library have not been informed that the government is watching their
activities. It's not just the computers. Circulation lists that show which
books someone borrowed are also accessible to the government.

What are the Hartford librarians saying?

"I can't disclose that we were presented with anything," said Louise
Blalock, Hartford's head librarian.

I asked Mary W. Billings, the library's technical services manager, if the
FBI had given her a subpoena or a court order for library information. Her
response: "I cannot answer that question."



http://www.ctnow.com/features/lifestyle/hc-privacy1103.artnov03col.story


--





-- 
Perry E. Metzger[EMAIL PROTECTED]


- End forwarded message -

Re: Details on lne.com's blocking of Cypherpunks posts??

[Eric Murray]

On Sun, Oct 27, 2002 at 06:31:40PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> On Sunday, October 27, 2002, at 01:04  PM, Bill Stewart wrote:
> 
> > [Hmm.  lne.com spam-blocked me on the first attempt.
> 
> Can you provide details?
> 
> If lne.com is blocking posts, I will have to find another CP node.


Lne has been blocking mail from spam sites for years.  The original
lne CDR 'charter' posting mentioned that lne blocks spammers.  

But lately the spam has been getting really bad, close to 50% of the
mail we were getting, and then the spammers started doing brute force
name searches as well many thousands per day.  That really
pissed me off.  So I have increased the use of the block list, for
lack of better technology.

The block list isn't intended to keep any mailing list postings out.  The
program that adds to it checks that there isn't a list subscriber at that
site, but it's not perfect.  Especially with list subscribers who have
shadow domains or forwards, which a lot of cpunks list subscribers have.
In Bill's case, a mindspring SMTP server seemed to be a spam haven based
on what we received here, but then Bill's mail got routed through it.

There's a web form that the SMTP error message points you
to in the very rare case that there was legitimate mail rejected (it's
happend all of five times so far), and that form can be used to let me
know that there is a human whose mail is getting blocked so I can fix it.


Eric

Re: The Register - UK firm touts alternative to digital certs (fwd)

[Eric Murray]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 03:37:33PM +0100, David Howe wrote:
> at Monday, October 21, 2002 3:14 PM, Trei, Peter
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> was seen to say:
> > I'd be nervous about a availability with centralized servers,
> > even if they are "triple redundant with two sites". DDOS
> > attacks, infrastructure (backhoe) attacks, etc, could all
> > wreck havoc.
> Indeed so, yes.
> I suspect (if it ever takes off) that they will have to scale their
> server setup in pace with the demand, but to be honest I think 600/sec
> is probably quite a high load for actual payments - we aren't talking
> logins or web queries, but actual real-money-payment requests.

Looking at their web site, they seem pretty generic about
what it's for, but I did not see any mention of using it for payments.
So I assume it's for logins.

They do say that their servers are "benchmarked at 300 transactions/sec".
That's pretty darn slow for single des.  There would have to
be an authenticated and probably encrypted session between the
server accepting the login (or the merchant if it really does payments)
and the back end.  But even using SSL/TLS, which would be more
than is required but an easy component to plug in, they ought
to be able to get at least a true 1000 sessions/sec using one of the
current SSL accelerators out there.

Maybe they have a bunch of slow database lookups?  Perhaps there
is a long RTT for the check against the CIA blacklist?

If it is for logins, how many sites would be willing to let someone
else know when their employees log in?  That could be useful
competitive intelligence.

Eric

Re: Echelon-like...

[Eric Murray]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 02:28:26AM -, anonimo arancio wrote:
[..]

> But I am wondering if Cypherpunks have mentioned the 'obvious'.
> 
> The government knows exactly what it's doing. It wants to discourage the use of 
>encryption by any means necessary, because of sheer numbers.
> Basically, the more messages that are encypted, the more hardware (and therefore 
>$$$) will be needed to decrypt them.
> Therefore, the only way they can stay ahead of the game is to keep the numbers as 
>low as possible, so they can continue to "outspend" the problem.
> This is, from their perspective, a perfectly reasonable approach to decrypting large 
>numbers of messages, a small fraction of which may contain "interesting" information.
> 
> Is the above statement a) wrong, b) obvious c) mentioned previously on the 
>cypherpunks boards, or d)"hey! We never thought of that"


B and C, extensively.

The US Government has pretty much given up on restricting crypto
exports.  There is just enough of a vestigial restriction there to
maintain the illusion that the government has a right to control crypto
exports.  If there was anything more, it would be challenged in court
and most likely get thrown out.  The government backed off on
previous challenges (Bernstein, Zimmerman) to avoid that.

Eric

Re: Trojan-modified Sendmail floating around - 8.12.6 - Since Sept. 28th or earlier.

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Oct 09, 2002 at 11:01:21PM +0100, Ben Laurie wrote:
> Bill Stewart wrote:
> > Somebody backdoored the source code for Sendmail on the official server.
> > So if you recompile from scratch, your sendmail is 0wned.
> > Another reason not to run mail systems as root
> 
> In this case, as I understand it, it bites when you compile. 

Running 'configure' has always made me nervous.
Its a little difficult to read for exploit code.

> So, its 
> another reason not to build them as root.

"But you're _supposed to_ run rpm -b as root!"-- someone
who should know better since I'd just spent an hour
explaining what to look for to see if his install
of sendmail had gotten him 0wned.

Sigh.


Eric

Re: smartcards

[Eric Murray]

Someone who's sending from a mailer that lne.com blocks because
of spam said:

- Forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] -


[...]
> When Chaumian money comes into wide use, I think that for most
> end users we will have to stash all unused tokens inside
> smartcards.  However, because of the critical mass problem,
> initial deployment for small payments cannot rely on such
> means, though initial deployment for large payments could.

Here in Hong Kong, contactless "Octopus" smartcards (based on the Sony
FeliCa device) are well established for paying fares on buses, ferries and
subways, and also for small transactions with vending machines, convenience
stores and supermarkets. The implementation is definitely non-Chaumian (it's
based on symmetric encryption using shared secrets for both mutual
authentication and secure transfer of value) but the cards can be purchased
and reloaded with cash. Alas, the system does not allow uploads of value to
banks or peer-to-peer transfers, as Mondex did. For those who may be
interested, the standard is ISO/IEC 14443:

http://makeashorterlink.com/?O1B042DE1

The card's specs are at:

http://www.sony.net/Products/felica/pdf/833e.pdf

Reader:

http://www.sony.net/Products/felica/pdf/441e.pdf

General info:

http://www.sony.net/Products/felica/index.html

Second source:

http://www.mitsubishi.co.jp/iccard/main/3_smart/smart.html


Enzo

- End forwarded message -

Re: What good are smartcard readers for PCs

[Eric Murray]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 07:12:47PM +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> "James A. Donald" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> >Increasingly however, we see smartcard interfaces sold for PCs. What for, I
> >wonder?


A previous company I worked for made a secure smart-card reader
chip/system that used smart cards to carry a user's private key and
cert.  The initial application was the SET electronic payment protocol.
(all together now: yuck!)  SET didn't take off, and not many of these
were sold.

Amex hyped up their 'blue' card & was giving out free readers for
a while... until they discovered that the drivers were fatally broken
(ha ha, it was done by a competitor of the company above, their
product was shite).  That, plus the fact that Amex couldn't get
more than a few merchants to go along with it, doomed the project.
They stopped giving out free smartcard readers pretty quickly.

The company I work for now uses smart-cards in a K-of-N split key
scheme to authenticate administrators of secure proxy servers.  These are
actually selling to real live customers and work just fine.

Niche markets like these are the only place where smart card use will
be growing in the near term, unless Larry Ellison and Scott "you
have no privacy" McNealy get their fat government contracts for
implementing the single signon surveilance state...

Eric

I see everything twice!

[Eric Murray]

It looks like one of the CDRs, possibly algebra, is
changing the Message-ID on cpunks mail and redistributing
it to the CDRs-- I'm seeing two copies of each message, one
of which has an X-Algebra header in it.

Could the algebra maintainer check this out?

Thanks.

Eric

Re: right MTA for crypto support

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 03:26:47PM +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> Eugen Leitl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

(actually, I wrote:)

> >It's relatively easy to turn on TLS in sendmail.  It's not secure against
> >active attackers that can modify the data in the TCP stream but it's better
> >than nothing.
> 
> Actually it's better than any other mail security out there.  See the slides
> for my talk at Usenix Security 
> (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/usenix02_slides.pdf) for more
> details (the StartTLS stuff is about halfway through).

It depends on how you define "better".


STARTTLS is defeated by Norton AV (silently!) and probably other
programs... if not now, then soon.  Mail is rarely stolen when in transit,
it's much easier to steal it from the destination spool, and STARTTLS does
nothing to protect stored mail.  The authentication option is only used
to authenticate roaming SMTP clients, and probably not often even then
since distributing client certificates is hard and too many IT folks
still think encrypted == secure.

If you define "better" as "more secure", or even "secure against
most classes of attackers", it's not better, it's a waste of CPU time.
But if you define "better" as "secure against passive eavesdroppers"
or as "increases the use of crypto", then it's better.

What's needed is something that IS better for both definitions
and is as easy to set up as STARTTLS... same thing that's been
needed for the last 10 years.


Eric

Re: right MTA for crypto support

[Eric Murray]

On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 11:53:08AM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> I'm getting rather pissed at diverse wiretap legislations making the
> global rounds (lately EU is making noises towards storing a one year deep
> FIFO of all email and browsing traffic for all users), and would like to
> run my own MTA, with MX fallback to ISPs. I would like to have secure
> MUA-MTA (IMAP/SSL POP/SSL and MTA-MTA (if the other end supports it).


lne.com's sendmail now supports START_TLS.  Not that that adds
any security to cpunks list mail of course.  But it does
increase the amount of encrypted traffic.

It's relatively easy to turn on TLS in sendmail.  It's not secure 
against active attackers that can modify the data in the TCP stream
but it's better than nothing.

 
> If anyone knows of patches which automatically query keyservers and
> GPG/PGP encrypt emails to targets (this is not a deep paranoia setup, just
> a cheap measure to increase encrypted mail traffic) that would be nice to
> have, too.

Besides START_TLS which is built in, there is probably an auto-PGP patch
for sendmail.


Eric

Re: Thanks, Lucky, for helping to kill gnutella

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, Aug 09, 2002 at 10:05:15AM -0700, AARG! Anonymous wrote:
 
> > On Gnutella discussion sites, programmers are discussing a number of
> > technical proposals that would make access to the network contingent
> > on good behavior: If you write code that hurts Gnutella, in other
> > words, you don't get to play. One idea would allow only "clients that
> > you can authenticate" to speak on the network, Fisk says. This would
> > include the five-or-so most popular Gnutella applications, including
> > "Limewire, BearShare, Toadnode, Xolox, Gtk-Gnutella, and Gnucleus." If
> > new clients want to join the group, they would need to abide by a certain
> > communication specification.
> 
> They intend to do this using digital signatures, and there is precedent
> for this in past situations where there have been problems:


Depending on the clients to "do the right thing" is fundamentally stupid.


[..]

 
> Be sure and send a note to the Gnutella people reminding them of all
> you're doing for them, okay, Lucky?

This sort of attack doesn't do your position any good.


Eric

Re: Challenge to David Wagner on TCPA

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 11:45:35PM -0700, AARG! Anonymous wrote:
> Peter Trei writes:
> > AARG!, our anonymous Pangloss, is strictly correct - Wagner should have
> > said "could" rather than "would".
> 
> So TCPA and Palladium "could" restrict which software you could run.

TCPA (when it isn't turned off) WILL restrict the software that you
can run.  Software that has an invalid or missing signature won't be
able to access "sensitive data"[1].   Meaning that unapproved software
won't work.  Ok, technically it will run but can't access the data,
but that it a very fine hair to split, and depending on the nature of
the data that it can't access, it may not be able to run in truth.

If TCPA allows all software to run, it defeats its purpose.
Therefore Wagner's statement is logically correct.


Yes, the spec says that it can be turned off.  At that point you
can run anything that doesn't need any of the protected data or
other TCPA services.   But, why would a software vendor that wants
the protection that TCPA provides allow his software to run
without TCPA as well, abandoning those protections?
I doubt many would do so, the majority of TCPA-enabled
software will be TCPA-only.  Perhaps not at first, but eventually
when there are enough TCPA machines out there.  More likely, spiffy
new content and features will be enabled if one has TCPA and is
properly authenticated, disabled otherwise.  But as we have seen
time after time, today's spiffy new content is tomorrows
virtual standard.

This will require the majority of people to run with TCPA turned on
if they want the content.  TCPA doesn't need to be required by law,
the market will require it.  At some point, running without TCPA
will be as difficult as avoiding MS software in an otherwise all-MS
office theoretically possible, but difficult in practice.

"TCPA could be required" by the government or MS or  is, I agree, a red herring.  It is not outside
the realm of possibility, in fact I'd bet that someone at MS has
seriously thought through the implications.  But to my mind
the "requirement by defacto standard" scenerio I outline above
is much more likely, in fact it is certain to happen if TCPA
gets in more than say 50% of computers.

I worked for a short while on a very early version of TCPA with Geoff
Strongin from AMD.  We were both concerned that TCPA not be able to
be used to restrict user's freedom, and at the time I thought that
"you can always turn it off" was good enough.  Now I'm not so sure.
If someday all the stuff that you do with your computer touches data that can
only be operated on by TCPA-enabled software, what are you going to do?

BTW, what's your credentials?  You seem familiar with the TCPA spec, which
is no mean feat considering that it seems to have been written to
make it as difficult to understand as possible (or perhaps someone
hired an out-of-work ISO standards writer).  I think that Peter's
guess is spot on.  Of course having you participate as a nym
is much preferable to not having you participate at all, so don't
feel as though you have to out yourself or stop posting.


[1] TCPAmain_20v1_1a.pdf, section 2.2


Eric

Re: Challenge to David Wagner on TCPA

[Eric Murray]

On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 02:33:43PM -0700, James A. Donald wrote:

> According to Microsoft, the end user can turn the palladium 
> hardware off, and the computer will still boot.  As long as that 
> is true, it is an end user option and no one can object.
> 
> But this is not what the content providers want.  They want that 
> if you disable the Fritz chip, the computer does not boot.  What 
> they want is that it shall be illegal to sell a computer capable 
> of booting if the Fritz chip is disabled.

Nope.  They care that the Fritz chip is enabled whenever
their content is played.  There's no need to make it a legal
requirement if the market makes it a practical requirement.
The Linux folks just won't be able to watch the latest
Maria Lopez or Jennifer Carey DVDs.  But who cares about a few
geeks?  Only weirdos install alternative OSs anyhow, they can be
ignored.  Most of them will probably have second systems
with the Fritz chip enabled anyhow.

Eric

Re: What happened to cypherpunks?

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 04:56:31PM +0100, Ken Brown wrote:
> This is just a test message to see if it gets back to me.
> 
> No traffic on lne or ssz though here for 24 hours.
> Which after a few 100 in previous 2 days seems odd.


Ssz seems to have gotten itself put in most of the open
relay blacklists recently.  Your ISP may be blocking
mail from Ssz to you.  Received cpunks traffic here at lne
has been pretty light over the last four days
or so.  Perhaps everyone is taking a break?


--
Eric (who doesn't use other people's blacklists)

Re: Tunneling through a hostile proxy?

[Eric Murray]

On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 09:42:49AM -0400, Trei, Peter wrote:
 
> If you're interested in tunneling other protocols
> than HTTP, things get more complex. Assuming
> SSL tunneling is allowed you can run other
> protocols through it if you can set up the software
> at each end appropriatly.

So who's written an IP-over-HTTP(S) library?

Reminds me of Ranum's NFS-over-SMTP firewall
bypassing proof of concept.


BTW Roy, first try ssh on a non-standard non-reserved port.

Eric

Re: economics of DRM, was Re: Ross's TCPA paper

[Eric Murray]

On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 07:10:07PM -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 10:59:23AM -0700, Eric Murray wrote:
> > Microsoft does not do things simply because they enjoy being evil.
> > They are not so worried about Linux (with its small share of the market)
> > that they will spend mega-bucks now on a very long term project that might
> > possibly let them keep it off some PCs in the far future.  They _are_
> > concerned with getting paid for the 50% of their software that isn't
> > paid for.  There's a shitload of money there, and if getting at some of
> > it costs a little, well, its still more profit than they would
> > have gotten otherwise.
> 
>Isn't it much simpler for them to just write into their OS the ability to
> snitch on what M$ software was on the users machine everytime they go online? In
> fact, I've been assuming that everything from w98 on did exactly that. And
> wouldn't it be trivial for them to check for cracked serial numbers, or
> duplicate serial numbers? 


I don't think 98 does it, but XP does.
It just raised the bar a bit-- there was a pirate version
of Office XP out before the legal version. 


Eric

economics of DRM, was Re: Ross's TCPA paper

[Eric Murray]

On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 06:34:36PM +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> Eric Murray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >On Fri, Jul 12, 2002 at 07:14:55PM +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> >>From a purely economic perspectice, I can't see how this will fly.  I'll pull a
> >>random figure of $5 out of thin air (well, I saw it mentioned somewhere but
> >>can't remember the source) as the additional manufacturing cost for the TCPA
> >>hardware components.  Motherboard manufacturers go through redesigns in order
> >>to save cents in manufacturing costs, and they're expected to add $5 to their
> >>manufacturing cost just to help Microsoft manage its piracy problem?
> >
> >Motherboard makers don't pay for it.  Microsoft pays for it.
> 
> Hmm, I can just see it now, Windows 2005 ships as three CDs, a 400-page EULA, a
> fine-tip soldering iron, a magnifying glass, an EMBASSY chip, and a copy of
> "SMD Soldering for Dummies".


You're probably joking, but just in case you're not, or there's
somone who doesn't get it, here's how it works:


Wave (or someone like them) makes a deal with the motherboard
makers to install EMBASSY chips.  Wave pays the motherboard makers
to do it, so there is no added cost to them.  Wave then sells the rights
to use the EMBASSY to Microsoft, Sony, et. al.   The arrangement
may involve percentages of the fees that users pay (i.e. Wave
gets 50% of $1 that a user pays for a Sony-owned song, and gives half
of that to the motherboard maker), or it might involve up-front
payments.  It can work either way.

The difficulty is to get enough EMBASSY or whatever chips out there to
make a critical mass that's attractive to use, and to distribute the
cost of the DRM hardware and software over enough DRM customers that
it's profitable for each one.  i.e. MS might not want to underwrite $20
worth of DRM by itself, because it doesn't make enough more through
DRM-enforced licensing to make a profit from it.  But if the $20 for
the DRM is split among 20 companies, each paying $1, they can all make
a profit from using it.  TCPA, by standardizing the DRM, makes it easier
to get a critical mass and easier to round up participants.

I think that it is important to understand the economics behind DRM
because that is ultimately what will determine if and how it is deployed.
Microsoft does not do things simply because they enjoy being evil.
They are not so worried about Linux (with its small share of the market)
that they will spend mega-bucks now on a very long term project that might
possibly let them keep it off some PCs in the far future.  They _are_
concerned with getting paid for the 50% of their software that isn't
paid for.  There's a shitload of money there, and if getting at some of
it costs a little, well, its still more profit than they would
have gotten otherwise.

Of course its even better for them if they can convince users that DRM
is an added security feature, or they can get governments to require it
(i.e. V-chip).  Then the users pay for it.  But I don't see either of
those being very likely.  It's more probable that there needs to be
significant profit in it for a number of players to make it go.


Eric

Re: Ross's TCPA paper

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, Jul 12, 2002 at 07:14:55PM +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> 
> >From a purely economic perspectice, I can't see how this will fly.  I'll pull a
> random figure of $5 out of thin air (well, I saw it mentioned somewhere but
> can't remember the source) as the additional manufacturing cost for the TCPA
> hardware components.  Motherboard manufacturers go through redesigns in order
> to save cents in manufacturing costs, and they're expected to add $5 to their
> manufacturing cost just to help Microsoft manage its piracy problem?

Motherboard makers don't pay for it.  Microsoft pays for it.
Or, Microsoft and Vivendi and Sony and ... all chip in.
Each pays a portion, and reaps the rewards.  Ok, really
Wave or their ilk reaps the rewards as well.

This is what Wave's been trying to sell for years now.
It hasn't flown, yet.  MS, Sony et al. would rather
the chip get paid for by someone else first so
they can use it for free.
But there's a likelyhood that eventually someone will
see where they can make money from it and go with it.
If not with Wave or TCPA, with some other deal.


>Sounds a bit like the SET business model in which the issuing bank got to carry
> all the cost and liability and the aqcuiring bank got all the benfits.

What killed SET wasn't that Visa got greedy and arrogant, although
that certainly didn't help.  They didn't want it to succeed.  It was a
placeholder against Mondex, which looked like it was going ot take off
in the mid 90s..  When Mondex didn't happen, SET got harder and harder
to actually implement (with new fees for participating inthe "standards
body" and new fees for compliance testing, etc. etc)  Visa makes more
money from the current SSL situation because they charge a hefty added
fee for 'card not present' transactions.  SET would have gotten rid of
that, which would have been good if there was a competing payment system
(Mondex), bad if there's a virtual monopoly (what actually happened).

It took me a year or so of going to SET meetings before I figured
out that they really wern't that incompetent at getting a standard
organized, they were fscking it up on purpose.

Eric

Re: TPM cost constraint [was: RE: Revenge of the WAVEoid]

[Eric Murray]

On Sun, Jul 07, 2002 at 07:13:54AM -0700, Optimizzin Al-gorithym wrote:
> At 07:05 PM 7/6/02 -0700, Lucky Green wrote:,>
> Adding the cost of an EMBASSY or SEE environment to the,>purchase of
> every new PC is more than the market for bare-bones or even,>mid-range
> PC's will bear.,>,>--Lucky,>
> 
> Too bad PCMCIA cardreaders aren't widespread, then a bank could give
> away smartcards
> which would be arguably more secure than browserware.

Smartcards are more secure than browsers.  But normal cardreaders
don't keep malware that's on the PC from accssing the card.  It can snoop
on the user's PIN, or in the case of the few cardreaders that keep the PIN
local, wait for the card to be unlocked and then use it for illegitimate
purposes.  The smartcard still depends on the security of the PC.
It's not any more secure than the PC, its just portable.  That hasn't
been enough to make smartcards take off for PC-based applications.

A few companies have made secure smartcard readers that prevent this
type of attack.  One of those was N*able Technologies, which Wave bought
in '99.  The current EMBASSY chip is one that N*Able designed.  I was
Nable's chief architect.  I left after the buyout.  Nable's system was
for secure commerce, not DRM, but as a secure building block it can be
used for lots of things.

I don't know WAVE's pricing for the current EMBASSY chip, but based on
prices for earlier Nable chips, I'd guess that they could sell it for
$5-10 in quantity.  That's still a significant adder to the cost of a
motherboard.   But it isn't insurmountable.   The beneficiary pays for it,
not the end user.  All it takes is one customer who can get enough value
from it to make it worthwhile.  Microsoft is a good example... simply
increasing their license payment rate for Word from 50% of users to 60%
would make them more than enough $$ to cover the cost of an EMBASSY or
similar in most PCs.  The potential anti-competitive side effects then
come for free.

Of course marketing for PCs will attempt to get users to pay more
for the "security enhanced" DRM-equipped PCs.  But the added cost
doesn't need to be paid by the users to make it viable.

Eric

Re: politicians vs. bill of rights (your legislature on drugs)

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, Jun 14, 2002 at 09:22:58AM -0700, Khoder bin Hakkin wrote:
> SACRAMENTO -- Dismayed by new disclosures of the use of steroids in
> Major League Baseball, a state senator wants to force most professional
> sports teams to test athletes for performance enhancing drugs if they
> play
> games in California.

[..]

> 
> 
> If politicians have this little respect for the prohibition on
> unreasonable search, perhaps
> they will have more respect for the noose due traitors...


It's already a reality in some sports and some countries.
In France for instance, police can randomly drug test professional
cyclists at any time.  They can also search them, their
houses and cars at any time and with no warrant.

Italy also has somewhat similar provisions.

Perata is a well-known rights-taker.
He's also a well-known hypocrite, having sponsored gun-grabbing
legislation while using his position to get himself
a concealed weapon permit, something that is nearly always 
denied to ordinary California citizens.

http://www.nrawinningteam.com/calnra/perata/

Eric

Re: What's with all the spam?...

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 10:15:37AM -0700, Tim May wrote:
> 
> I like the LNE node, but a lot of junk still seems to get through. If 
> Eric is only passing through the posts of subscribers, does this mean 
> this person "houshen2 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>" is a list subscriber?

[chinese spam deleted]

No, that was an error on my part, typing over a high
latency connection.

Eric

Re: What's with all the spam?...

[Eric Murray]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 07:58:49AM +0200, Tom wrote:
> 
> speaking of unfiltered - I subscribed to ssz exactly because I don't
> want to have anyone moderating for me. however, the spam volume is
> deafening.

The LNE node isn't moderated.
All posts from list subscribers, to any CDR, plus
any post from a non-subscriber that isn't spam, get sent to
LNE subscribers.

> is there a fee available that is filtered, but only for spam?

LNE qualifies.

Eric

S/MIME and web of trust (was Re: NAI pulls out the DMCA stick)

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, May 24, 2002 at 11:17:08AM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> --
> On 23 May 2002 at 0:24, Lucky Green wrote:
> > Tell me about it. PGP, GPG, and all its variants need to die
> > before S/MIME will be able to break into the Open Source
> > community, thus removing the last, but persistent, block to an
> > instant increase in number of potential users of secure email by
> > several orders of magnitude.
> 
> My impression is that S/MIME sucks big ones, because it commits
> one to a certificate system based on verisign or equivalent.

It uses X.509, which is supposed to be a hierarchical certificate system. 
Verisign is just the dominant X.509 CA.

But as others have pointed out, its possible to become one's own X.509
CA and issue oneself certs.  Netscape and IE browsers will accept certs
from completely made up CAs.  You might have to click on a few "do you
really want to do this" dialog boxes but that's it.  All you need is a
copy of Openssl and directions off a web site..

Additionally, there is nothing that prevents one from issuing certs
that can be used to sign other certs.  Sure, there are key usage bits
etc but its possible to ignore them.  It should be possible to create
a PGP style web of trust using X.509 certs, given an appropriate set of
cert extensions.  If Peter can put a .gif of his cat in an X.509 cert
there's no reason someone couldn't represent a web of trust in it.

Each user would self-sign their cert.  Or self-sign a CA cert and
use that to sign a cert, same thing.  Trust would be indicated
by (signed) cert extensions that indicate "I trust Joe Blow X amount as
a signer of keys".  Each time you added a trust extension you would
generate a new cert using the same key.  Each trust extension would
indicate the entity, their key id (hash of public key), and the degree of
trust.  When you added a trust extension you'd give a copy of the enw
cert to the entity you just added.  They can then append these
certs onto their cert when they authenticate to someone.

When authenticating, you verify the other guys cert, something he signed
with his private key, then all the other people's certs that he sends
in addition to his own, all of which attest to his trustworthiness.
Ideally, you also trust some of the same people, so you now have their
signed "statements" attesting to a degree of trust in the new guy.
[note, there's probably a conceptal flaw in this since  I'm loopy from
allergy drugs today and probably not thinking as clearly as I think I
am, so be polite when you point out my error.  In any case, the point
is that its possible to do a web of trust in x.509, not that I have a
fully formed scheme for implementing it]

Since all this is in X.509, S/MIME MTAs accept it (unless they are
programmed to not accept self-signed CAs, in which case your MTA is a
slave to Verisign et. al).  You'd need an external program to verify the
web of trust, but that's about it.  And to be honest, exactly zero of the
PGP exchanges I have had have actually used the web of trust to really
verify a PGP key.  I've only done it in testing.  In the real world,
I either verify out of band (i.e. over the phone) or don't bother if
the other party is too clueless to understand what I want to do and getting
them to do PGP at all has already exausted my paticnce.


But why bother?

Even if I could do this X.509 web of trust tomorrow, no one besides a
few crypto-geeks would use it.  People just don't give a shit about other
people reading their email.  Most people can't even be bothered to use
a decent password or shred their credit-card statements.  Only criminals
have anything to hide, right?


--
Eric

Re: NAI pulls out the DMCA stick

[Eric Murray]

On Fri, May 24, 2002 at 12:07:48PM -0700, Curt Smith wrote:
> While we are on the subject of issuing your own X.509
> certificates:
> 
> 1.  How do you create a X.509 signing hierarchy?

Do a web search on "openssl certificate authority".

> 2.  Can you add additional algorithms (ie. Twofish)?

Yes, if the libraries you use support them.
Note that twofish, being a symetric algorithm, would
not be used in certificates.  Public key and hashes only.

> 3.  Is a relavent developer reference is available for X.509?


X.509 is an ITU/T standard, which means, among other things, that
they charge money for copies.  You can find copies on the net though.
Being ITU/T also means that the standard is written in a format and
style that is designed to be incomprehensible as possible.  This keeps
the professional meeting-goers who write these things from having to
search for honest work.  The documents get progressively less
understandable over time, so its best to start with the 1988 version.
PKCS#6 explains X.509 as well and is easier to understand.

Peter Gutman's X.509 Style Guide is quite comprehsnsible and
also pretty funny after you have spent time trying to decipher
X.509 or any other X.whatever standard.
Peter also has a neat utility called dumpasn.1 which you will
want if you start diddling X.509 certs.

Openssl is probably the most common library for doing cert
stuff these days.  Unfortunately the docs for Openssl are pretty
much non-existent and the ASN.1 code is particularly difficult
to understand.


Eric

Re: Eyes on the Prize...not the Millicent Ghetto

[Eric Murray]

On Mon, May 13, 2002 at 01:20:35PM -0700, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> > Go after those who already _know_ they need untraceability. Go after 
> > niches where VALUE >> COST. Don't try to argue that the world needs to 
> > replace its multi-billion dollar infrastructure of 
> 
> The question is  - are there enough of these to justify development. Or maybe
> they all already have their private cryptographers.

On-line porn.

Their transaction costs are huge, because many of their customers
realize that the bills are gonna show up on the statement
that their wife reads, so they repudiate.  This pushes up the costs
to the rest of the customers.

An anonymous system would keep the customers from getting
busted by the wife.  If it were also non repudiable then
there would be an added incentive for merchants.

Alowing cheaper minipayments would also be a bonus-- lots of
porn transactions are in the $5-10 range where the cheapest fixed 
costs for a CC transaction is like $1 plus a percentage.

On-line porn people are probably more likely to spend a little time
setting up an account than Sally Sixpack is.

Didn't Tim write something about this within the last year?


The problems of course are 1) hooking it into the existing money system
and 2) keeping from getting busted for "money laundering".

Eric

Re: Australian government proposed 'terror laws'

[Eric Murray]

On Sat, May 11, 2002 at 04:35:29AM +1000, Julian Assange wrote:
> Australia needs your help!
> 
> The Howard government is using the `war on terrorism' as justification
> to introduce so called `Asian Values' (a euphonism used by Mahathir
> to explain his governments removal of rights from the Malaysian
> people) into Australia.

Jesus, what a horrible fuck job.

But we don't need N copies of this mail on the cpunks list. One will do.

I would not be supriseed if the USG has something to do with this, they seem
to use Australia as the repressive legislation beta test site.

Hmm.  First they took all the guns, now a few year later, this.


Eric

Re: all about transferable off-line ecash (Re: Brands off-line tech)

[Eric Murray]

On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 08:37:05AM +0200, Anonymous wrote:
> [Copied to Adam so he doesn't have to wait for some moderator to get
> off his fat ass and approve it.

The LNE CDR isn't moderated in the usual sense. 

However, postings from new users[1] don't go through until I look at them
(since about 99.5% are spam).  I do this as often as possible, but
I do have a life.  So if you (the generic you) feel the urge
to forge a new cute name on every post, be warned that your posts may
take a while to go through.  I suggest forging one cute name and sticking
with it... besides, you will want all of us to have a pseudo to attach
the appropriate reputation capital to.



[1] a 'new' user is the name in the From: line which isn't a subscriber
to a node and which hasn't already posted.


Eric, your "fat ass moderator"

[garww@antisocial.com: cached web pages]

[Eric Murray]

I got this interesting email today.

It's refering to a study I did almost two years ago
which surveyed https (SSL) servers's crypto strength.

For a while I had the list of weak-crypto servers on my site; I took
it down after getting too many complaints, but it was accidentally
left in a copy elsewhere on my site that got indexed.  I've deleted
the list from that copy as well, on the theory that the list is nearly
2 years old and there is a web page for checking a site in real time
that's linked from the paper, and the results from that are up to date.
The date is prominent in the results page, but still I wouldn't want to
unfairly label a site as weak in 2-year-old data if they have updated
their site to use better crypto.



It's interesting that someone sounding like they're from Bear Stearns
would use an external account to make this request rather than doing so
from Bear Stearns directly.

I replied that I'd consider it if I got a request from BearStearns, but
that I might post such a request on my web site to let people know that
BearStearns is trying to suppress legitimate security research.  I also
pointed out that this information isn't secret; anyone can disccover
that they are using a weak key by connecting and clicking on a button
in their browser.

They're using a 512-bit key, so if I had a current list of
weak servers, they would be on it.


Eric



- Forwarded message from garww <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -

X-EM-Version: 5, 0, 0, 4
X-EM-Registration: #01E0520310450300B900
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: My Own Email v4.00
From: "garww" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: cached web pages
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2002 06:52:59 -0600

   We wonder what your motivation would be to post the names of firms in
your detailed survey results page?

Did your lawyer not question this practice?

Please get these removed from the search engines. 

THX
gar
 

 Web Images Groups Directory   
Searched the web for murray www.bearstearns.com.Results 1 - 10 of about
15. Search took 0.22 seconds. 

Mortgage Banker Websites
... Bear Stearns Mortgage Company. http://www.bearstearns.com/. Budget
Mortgage Bankers,
Ltd. ... com. http://www.mortgageexpo.com/. Murray Financial Associates,
Inc. ... 
www.banking.state.ny.us/mortlink.htm - 55k - Cached - Similar pages 

Eric Murray: Papers: SSL Server Survey: Detailed Results
... Eric Murray. ... bcefa.org www.beadbear.com www.beanbagworld.net
www.beaniesforless.com
www.bearstearns.com www.beautyforwomen.co.uk www.beautyhub.com www.bellind
... 
www.securedesignllc.com/papers/ssl_server_stats.html - 58k - Cached -
Similar pages 



_
Free email with personality! Over 200 domains!
http://www.MyOwnEmail.com

- End forwarded message -

Re: 1024-bit RSA keys in danger of compromise

[Eric Murray]

Here's the distribution of RSA key sizes in SSL servers, as
recorded by my SSL server survey in June 2000 and June 2001

RSA Server Key size
   Key bits2000 2001
2048 .2% .2%
1024   70% 80%
>= 1000 2%   .7%
>= 768  2%   1%
>512 -   0%
<= 512  25% 17%



Eric