Re: having source code for your CPU chip -- NOT

1999-09-24 Thread Greg Rose
At 09:02 23/09/1999 -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote: By example, I could verify the machine code for IDEA, but not PGP and certainly not your favorite version of UNIX. Actually, while there are bugs and security holes, it's pretty certain that V6 Unix didn't have any crypto trapdoors ... and

Re: snake-oil voting?

1999-09-24 Thread John R Levine
Did any of you see this http://www.votehere.net/content/Products.asp#InternetVotingSystems that proposes to authenticate the voter by asking for his/her/its SSN#? It looked like the idea for this part was to prevent double voting, plus make sure that only authorized people could vote.

Re: having source code for your CPU chip -- NOT

1999-09-24 Thread Ray Hirschfeld
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 18:38:57 -0400 (EDT) From: Eli Brandt [EMAIL PROTECTED] Arnold Reinhold wrote: Perry, if you really believe that the question of whether a given lump of object code contains a Thompson Trap is formally undecidable I'd be interested in seeing a proof. Otherwise

Re: snake-oil voting?

1999-09-24 Thread Ed Gerck
Anonymous wrote: Ed Gerck wrote: Did any of you see this http://www.votehere.net/content/Products.asp#InternetVotingSystems that proposes to authenticate the voter by asking for his/her/its SSN#? It looked like the idea for this part was to prevent double voting, plus make sure that

Re: having source code for your CPU chip -- NOT

1999-09-24 Thread Arnold Reinhold
At 6:38 PM -0400 9/23/99, Eli Brandt wrote: Arnold Reinhold wrote: Perry, if you really believe that the question of whether a given lump of object code contains a Thompson Trap is formally undecidable I'd be interested in seeing a proof. Otherwise Herr Goedel has nothing to do with this.

Re: having source code for your CPU chip -- NOT

1999-09-24 Thread Matt Crawford
Perry, if you really believe that the question of whether a given lump of object code contains a Thompson Trap is formally undecidable I'd be interested in seeing a proof. That sure smells undecidable to me. Any non-trivial predicate P on Turing machines (non-trivial meaning that

Re: having source code for your CPU chip -- NOT

1999-09-24 Thread Bill Sommerfeld
There are no Turing machines. Real computers are finite, and real source codes are finite. I'm sure that if you set a limit on the length of the source code which is recognized by the supposed trap, a sufficiently large FSM can decide in a finite time whether there's a trap. mere

Re: having source code for your CPU chip -- NOT

1999-09-24 Thread Eli Brandt
Ray Hirschfeld wrote: That sure smells undecidable to me. Any non-trivial predicate P on Turing machines (non-trivial meaning that both P and not-P are non-empty) is undecidable by Rice's Theorem. There are technical issues in encoding onto the tape all possible interactions with the

Re: having source code for your CPU chip -- NOT

1999-09-24 Thread Eli Brandt
Arnold Reinhold wrote: Arnold Reinhold wrote: Perry, if you really believe that the question of whether a given lump of object code contains a Thompson Trap is formally undecidable [...] I am not asking about the class of all Turing machines, just one particular lump of object code OC

Re: having source code for your CPU chip -- NOT

1999-09-24 Thread David Honig
At 06:38 PM 9/23/99 -0400, Eli Brandt wrote: Arnold Reinhold wrote: Perry, if you really believe that the question of whether a given lump of object code contains a Thompson Trap is formally undecidable I'd be interested in seeing a proof. Otherwise Herr Goedel has nothing to do with this.

Re: snake-oil voting?

1999-09-24 Thread Anonymous
John R. Levine writes, quoting others: Did any of you see this http://www.votehere.net/content/Products.asp#InternetVotingSystems that proposes to authenticate the voter by asking for his/her/its SSN#? It looked like the idea for this part was to prevent double voting, plus make

Re: snake-oil voting? voter authentication

1999-09-24 Thread David Honig
At 11:18 PM 9/23/99 -0700, Ed Gerck wrote: that proposes to authenticate the voter by asking for his/her/its SSN#? It looked like the idea for this part was to prevent double voting, plus make sure that only authorized people could vote. It The disconnect here is that it does not make

Re: having source code for your CPU chip -- NOT

1999-09-24 Thread Eugene Leitl
For the truly paranoid: it is perfectly possible to boostrap a working Forth environment *by hand*, whether by hand assembly and flashing the resulting image, or by porting eForth (or any Forths written in C) to an embedded target. You simply can't fit any Trojan in there: a minimal Forth OS

Re: snake-oil voting?

1999-09-24 Thread John R Levine
It seems clear that the system is primarily oriented towards preventing fraud by election officials and those involved in setting up the electronic voting. Historically, this is the greater danger in election fraud. Stuffing the ballot box is much easier if you are the one in charge of

The well-travelled packet

1999-09-24 Thread Russell Nelson
Forwarded with permission (the permission being the short quote below, the message being the long one). I don't have a copy of the traceroute, but it definitely showed packets going from Washington DC to NYC through Paris. Dick St.Peters writes: Well, the questions were really intended to be