Re: kernel.org status: establishing a PGP web of trust

2011-10-03 Thread Jerome Baum
On 2011-10-02 00:58, Aaron Toponce wrote:
 On 10/01/2011 02:46 PM, Robert J. Hansen wrote:
 That's not a healthy dose of paranoia. A healthy dose of paranoia in
 that case would be washing your hands before you eat, or not eating
 something off the floor. Starving yourself, because you think people are
 tying to poison you is not healthy.

When his wife was hospitalized, Gödel literally starved himself to
death, unwilling to eat anything not prepared by her.
(http://www.webcitation.org/629GhJ129)

What I don't get is, why didn't he just make his own food?

-- 
Q: What is your secret word?
A: That's right.
Q: What's right?
A: Yes.
Q: Sir, you're going to have to tell me your secret word.
A: What?
Q: I said please tell me your secret word.
A: What?
Q: What's your secret word?
A: Yes.
Q: Sorry, yes is not your secret word. You have two more chances.
A: I said what?
Q: Yes.
A: Right, so you admit I said it.
Q: No, you said yes.
A: No, what!
Q: When?
A: When you asked for my secret word!
Q: What?
A: Yes!
Q: I'm sorry, that's incorrect. You have one more chance to say your
secret word.
A: I'd like to speak to your supervisor.
Q: Very well, I'll transfer you. His name is Hu.

(http://boingboing.net/2010/05/03/fun-with-a-banks-sec.html)

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Re: kernel.org status: establishing a PGP web of trust

2011-10-03 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 10/2/2011 10:53 PM, Jerome Baum wrote:
 What I don't get is, why didn't he just make his own food?

He did, until he ran out of food.  Then he was literally too paranoid to
leave the house to buy groceries.

Clinical paranoia is a brutal mental illness.

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Re: kernel.org status: establishing a PGP web of trust

2011-10-01 Thread brian m. carlson
On Sat, Oct 01, 2011 at 07:01:14AM -0600, Aaron Toponce wrote:
 Having a sufficient amount of paranoia, would keep you from using DSA, I
 would think.

I have an RSA key with RSA subkeys, but now that larger DSA keys are
generally available, I'd be okay with revolving DSA signing subkeys.  As
you've pointed out, DSA has the disadvantage that k must always be
different, but it also has advantages, one of them being that p, q, and
g can be shared among a group of people such that p and q can be
*proven* to be prime and generated in a reproducible way.  Another one
is that DSA signatures are smaller: there are two MPIs stored for each
signature, but those MPIs are at most 256 bits long each, while for an
RSA signature that was only 512 bits long, the security would be
woefully inadequate.

Point being, both DSA and RSA have their good and bad points, and if
you're fairly confident that you have a good PRNG, such as /dev/urandom,
then there's not really much concern about k.  After all, you also need
a good PRNG for CFB IVs as well, although the consequences aren't as
disastrous.

-- 
brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US
+1 832 623 2791 | http://www.crustytoothpaste.net/~bmc | My opinion only
OpenPGP: RSA v4 4096b: 88AC E9B2 9196 305B A994 7552 F1BA 225C 0223 B187


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Re: kernel.org status: establishing a PGP web of trust

2011-10-01 Thread Peter Lebbing
On 01/10/11 18:51, brian m. carlson wrote:
 Point being, both DSA and RSA have their good and bad points, and if
 you're fairly confident that you have a good PRNG, such as /dev/urandom,
 then there's not really much concern about k.  After all, you also need
 a good PRNG for CFB IVs as well, although the consequences aren't as
 disastrous.

But you need a good PRNG for generating the session key, which is a lot more
important than the CFB IV.

But when it comes to signing stuff, not encryption, I suppose you can indeed use
RSA without a good PRNG.

The Debian OpenSSL debacle, however, rendered every DSA key *used* on such a
system useless, whereas RSA was only compromised when the key was *generated* on
such a box.

Personally, I see it as an advantage of RSA that using it with a poor PRNG
doesn't disclose your private key, but it wouldn't stop me from using ECDSA when
it is mainstream. Your PRNG simply shouldn't be bad when you do crypto.
Obviously software bugs can always happen, and in the specific Debian OpenSSL
instance it was worse for DSA, but the next big bug might by chance hurt RSA and
leave DSA in the clear.

And we have DSA to thank for the fun of Sony's silly mistake! :)

Peter.

-- 
I use the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) in combination with Enigmail.
You can send me encrypted mail if you want some privacy.
My key is available at http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~lebbing/pubkey.txt

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Re: kernel.org status: establishing a PGP web of trust

2011-10-01 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 10/1/2011 9:01 AM, Aaron Toponce wrote:
 https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Digital_Signature_Algorithm#Sensitivity

This is an argument against having a *bad* DSA implementation, in the
exact same way you shouldn't use a bad RSA implementation, either.  RSA
has just as many warnings -- take a look at how many times PKCS has been
updated to reflect new understandings of RSA's risks.

 Having a sufficient amount of paranoia, would keep you from using DSA, I
 would think.

That's the same level of paranoia that led to Kurt Goedel starving to
death because he was afraid of how everyone around him was trying to
poison him.  I don't think we should recommend that level of paranoia.


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kernel.org status: establishing a PGP web of trust

2011-09-30 Thread Marcio B. Jr.
http://lwn.net/Articles/461236/



Marcio Barbado, Jr.

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Re: kernel.org status: establishing a PGP web of trust

2011-09-30 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 9/30/2011 8:57 PM, Marcio B. Jr. wrote:
 http://lwn.net/Articles/461236/

Before people panic, there are no known weaknesses in DSA.  The SHA-1
hash algorithm has some severe problems, but there's nothing in DSA that
requires the use of SHA-1: you can replace it with any 160-bit hash.

Let's not panic, and let's not migrate away from DSA without good
reason.  :)  Migrate away from SHA-1, sure, but DSA is fine.


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