RE: Is PGP broken?

2000-12-04 Thread Ian Brown
> A problem with including a public key with every plaintext message is that > it isn't very discreet - actually looks kind of ugly in some peoples's > email clients. You could use a separate PGP/MIME bodypart... > Come to think of it, there are some tricky issues with regards to crypto > on mai

Yahoo delivers "secure" email

2000-12-02 Thread Ian Brown
Why don't they use SSL between sender and Yahoo?! http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-3901784.html?tag=st.ne.ron.lthd Yahoo delivers encrypted email By Paul Festa Staff Writer, CNET News.com November 28, 2000, 11:30 p.m. PT Yahoo has quietly introduced a way for people to send scrambled messag

Re: Is PGP broken?

2000-12-02 Thread Ian BROWN
Bram Cohen wrote: >What we really need is a system which just stops passive attacks. The best >idea I've come up with so far is for all outgoing messages to have a >public key attached, and if you have the public key of an email address >you're sending to you use it Indeed -- this is one of the c

International Forum on Surveillance by Design

2000-08-30 Thread Ian Brown
EMAIL PROTECTED] Telephone enquiries : 0207 955 6579 Organising Committee: Simon Davies (PI & LSE), Erich Moechel (Quintessenz), Barry Steinhardt (ACLU), Ian Brown (UCL & Hidden Footprints), Stephanie Perrin (ZKS), Gus Hosein (LSE).

Comcast@Home bans VPNs

2000-08-17 Thread Ian Brown
Customers blast Comcast move to foil bandwidth hogs By Corey Grice Staff Writer, CNET News.com August 16, 2000, 12:00 p.m. PT Revisions made to a Comcast Online customer agreement document have irked some high-speed cable-modem customers concerned about a prohibition on the use of secure networ

Re: UK searching traveler's disk drives for pornography (fwd)

2000-07-23 Thread Ian BROWN
>Wasn't there a story very much like this, a year or two ago, that turned >out to be a hoax? Not that I have heard about. Ken Cukier's original story was confirmed by a UK Customs spokesperson: http://www.sightings.com/political/laptops.htm 'A spokesman for Customs and Excise said officials w

Re: FBI involves itself in Verio merger

2000-07-08 Thread Ian BROWN
>IANAL but wouldn't the UK's proposed legislation make software that >won't provide access to all keys implicitly illegal? This has been the subject of great debate in the UK. The RIP Bill says that you can be served with a key demand if you "have or have had" the requested key. Until this week

UK's key-grabbing legislation

2000-06-22 Thread Ian BROWN
Latest is that the UK's horrendous mish-mash of Internet surveillance and decryption/key (actually government-issued) "warrants" legislation is facing extreme opposition in our House of Lords. Unfortunately, the Government seems intent on driving the bill through Parliament (as they have the powe

Multicast of Whit Diffie on non-secret encryption and public-key cryptography

2000-05-13 Thread Ian Brown
Sorry for the short notice, but we're going to multicast on Tuesday a talk Whit Diffie did here last year on the history of PKC. Unfortunately, multicast support is flaky at best on the UK Internet: most universities will have it, but ISPs may not. I'm not sure about the global situation. You ne

Re: GPS integrity

2000-05-08 Thread Ian BROWN
Dorothy Denning wrote an interesting paper on authenticating location using GPS signals... I think it's reachable from her home page as well as the following citation: D. E. Denning and P. F. MacDoran, "Location-Based Authentication: Grounding Cyberspace for Better Security," Computer Fraud an

Re: Napster - the quiet revolution

2000-02-28 Thread Ian BROWN
>It seems however, that Napster suffers from a few design flaws: >centralism (there is a central database, right?) Unfortunately, yes. Each client logs on to a server, hands over a list of the files it currently is sharing, then uses the server for searches. This seems bad even for Napster Inc.

Re: TechWeb 10/2/2000: "E-Spying Bill Called 'Escrow By Intimidation'"

2000-02-14 Thread Ian BROWN
>A question on UK legislative terminology: >Does "published a bill" mean that Parliament approved it? >Or does it just mean that the ministers are proposing this law >that they'd _like_ to get Parliament to pass, but it >hasn't been passed yet? The latter. A Bill becomes an Act once it has been a

Re: Coerced decryption?

2000-02-14 Thread Ian BROWN
>Let's suppose that some stranger send me an unsolicited >document encrypted with a key different from mine: how am I supposed to >decrypt it? And can I really be thrown to jail for that?? Under the previous draft of the UK bill, yes -- see http://www.stand.org.uk/ for an amusing demonstration o

Re: Controlled CPU TEMPEST emanations

1999-08-26 Thread Ian BROWN
>How easy would it be to include some electronics or use >the circuitry in keyboards and have them emit signals? > >How vulnerable are keyboards to emitting tempest emanations? Some analysis, and suggestions on reducing this threat are at http://www.ftp.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/nato-tempes

Re: HushMail: free Web-based email with bulletproof encryption

1999-05-20 Thread Ian BROWN
Perry Metzger wrote: >Some parts of this description make me nervous. Why are PRIVATE keys >being stored on a server, for instance? It's still hard to give applets access to client-side data in a secure and browser-independent way, but obviously this would be a great improvement. >Why use SSL t

Re: US Treasury use of BBN SafeKeyper in Echeck system

1999-03-19 Thread Ian BROWN
Ryan Lackey wrote: >I believe this to be a categorical problem for all systems lacking a >secured/tamper-resistant I/O conduit directly to the user. If you've solved >it, I would be very interested to learn how. cryptographic neural implants ;)

Re: What was the quid pro quo for Wassenaar countries?

1998-12-09 Thread Ian BROWN
Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: >In addition under the single European act the entire country of Europe is >one export zone for crypto control purposes. Unfortunately, not yet. The European Commission has proposed amending the Dual-Use regulations to allow the free circulation of crypto products amo

Re: DCSB: Risk Management is Where the Money Is; Trust in Digital Comm

1998-11-13 Thread Ian Brown
> Uhm, I see. But in that case, what happens if someone gets a (non-escrowed) > DSA cert, and uses it for a secure web server only supporting the > SSL_DHE_DSS_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA ciphersuite (ephemeral Diffie-Hellman > authenticated with DSS)? Strong, MIM-attack-resistant, and required by TLS >

Re: DCSB: Risk Management is Where the Money Is; Trust in Digital Comm

1998-11-13 Thread Ian BROWN
>Alas, the latest proposals by the Department of Trade and Industry in UK are >to extend legal protection only to digital signatures whose keys are >escrowed with OFTEL Much as I dislike the DTI's proposals, it is more complex than that. "Licensed" CAs do not have to escrow signature-only privat