- cypherpunks-legacy@lists.ogf.org

Re: >Clipper trapdoor?
by David Sobel 12 Aug '93

12 Aug '93

RE>>Clipper trapdoor? Marc - You wrote: >As for the example of snooping on Hussein and his officers, you know >exactly how much legal authorization the NSA needs to conduct that >wiretap. Exactly none. Hence, it needs no paperwork to get the key >to Hussein's phone. > >How the escrow agents make the NSA prove that the keyid in question >belongs to Hussen's phone is an exercise left to the legislature :-/ As you (and others) noted in response to my posting, there is either a trapdoor *or* a "national security exception" to the warrant/escrow arrangement. As your comment suggests, NSA has heretofore been able to act unilaterally in exercising its "legal authorization" to intercept communications overseas, but with the Clipper scheme must obtain assistance from a third (and fourth?) party -- the escrow agents. I think the question you raise is a critical one -- under what guidelines will the escrow agents determine the validity of an NSA request for the key without a FISA warrant? - David

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chaos harnessed for encryption
by klaus＠mail.lds.loral.com 12 Aug '93

12 Aug '93

There is an article in some paper magazine (Technology) about some research at MIT for creating a signal-processing designs that use chaos to encrypt information. Voice telephone would be an excellent use of this technology. Anyone have more info on it? -- Christopher Klaus klaus(a)mail.lds.loral.com cklaus(a)hotsun.nersc.gov

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No Subject
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 12 Aug '93

12 Aug '93

At 12:25 PM 8/9/93 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote: >despite the talk of >mandatory "trap doors" in encryption systems, encryption is >fundamentally easy to do and hard to detect. (For those who doubt >this, let me describe a simple system I posted to sci.crypt several >years ago. An ordinary digital audio tape (DAT) carries more than a >gigabyte of data. This means that thhe least significant bit (LSB) of >an audio DAT recordingng carries about 8megabytes of data! So Alice is >stopped by the Data Police. They ask if she's carrying illegal data. >She smiles inocently and say "No. I know you'll search me." They find >her Sony DATman and ask about her collection of tapes and live >recordings. Alice is carrying 80 MB of data---about 3 entire days >worth of Usenet feeds!---on each and every tape. The data are stored >in the LSBs, completely indistinguishable from microphone and >quantization noise...unless you know the key. Similar methods allow >data to be undetectably packed into LSBs of the PICT and GIF pictures >now flooding the Net, into sampled sounds, and even into messages like >this... Alice better not be carrying any software that could retrieve that data. The cynic in me suggests that this scenario is just an excuse for the data police to seize any equipment or data it feels like. Besides, Alice won't be stopped by the data police, Alice will have her door kicked in by the data police and they'll take everything electronic she has, including harmless music and video. And anything electronic they find in her residence, whether it belongs to her or not.

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Real time OCR
by The Phantom 12 Aug '93

12 Aug '93

--------------- cypherpunks-list #4087 (54 lines) --------------- Date: Thu Aug 12 08:40:56 1993 From: wcs(a)anchor.ho.att.com (Bill_Stewart(HOY002)1305) <wcs/daemon> Subject: Re: [uk.transport] Speed Camera with OCR > > The ability to read a car's plate & decypher the number in real time > > without any human intervention must take a bit of work. > There's a lot of automated-highway research going on; most of it has > been oriented towards radio+smartcards, which are easy to make accurate, > and while they're not totally cheap, you can palm off much of the cost > on the car-owner and use cheap equipment in the tollbooth. > Bill Stewart If anyone can dig out the April issue of 'Advanced Imaging' (I seem to have given mine away), there was an article about imaging license plates for use at border crossings. The bugs looked like they were worked out and the system was ready for action. I don't remember where it was going to be put into effect, but.. mt Matt Thomlinson Say no to the Wiretap Chip! University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. Internet: phantom(a)u.washington.edu phone: (206) 548-9804 PGP 2.2 key available via email or finger phantom(a)hardy.u.washington.edu

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WIRED #4
by Sandy 12 Aug '93

12 Aug '93

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SANDY SANDFORT Reply to: ssandfort(a)attmail.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Punksters, Paul Ferguson asks if the new WIRED is out yet. The answer is "yes and no." Complimentary copies were given away at a couple of recent conferences. Also, subscription copies are going out now or in a few days. Newsstand copies should be available in three weeks or so. I would appreciate any Cypherpunk thoughts, opinions, questions or raves on my article, "Intelligent Island?" which appears in this issue. It and William Gibson's "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" are the lead articles in WIRED #4. Hope you like it. S a n d y >>>>>> Please send e-mail to: ssandfort(a)attmail.com <<<<<< ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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CryptoStacker
by Kent Hastings 12 Aug '93

12 Aug '93

CryptoStacker#000# Whatever happened to CryptoStacker(s) research? Please voluntarily comply with my request for a status report, or I'll padlock your business, throw you in jail, arrest all your friends, and firebomb your compound. It is your choice. Kent - <jkhastings(a)aol.com>#000#

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Re: Secure voice software issues
by norm＠netcom.com 12 Aug '93

12 Aug '93

Eric Blossom <eb(a)srlr14.sr.hp.com> says: > I have seen estimates that a straight forward implementation requires > about 13.5 million Mulitply+Accumulates / second. Most of the time is > burned up using a brute force search for the best excitation vector to > use. There is a fixed 512 entry code book, and a dynamic code book > with 256 entries (it may be 128). Each code book entry is an > excitation vector that is 60 samples long. Therefore, to evalute each one, > you have to run a 60 element vector through a 10 pole filter to get > the predicted output, then compute some measure of error. This > requires an additional difference operation that is implemented as > some kind of "perception weighting filter" (I don't remember the > details). I have been reading the PowerPC 601 manual (MPC601, The Macs of early 1994). It is dangerous to believe performance figures. They give you the world in one chapter and then take it back here and there in bits and pieces. Here is what I see however. Simple single precision floating point operations can issue one per cycle. The book mentions several floating point ops that take more than one clock in a pipeline stage. They don't mention floating multiply-add. I think one can issue each clock. I-unit instructions can issue in the same clock as floating point ops. If you do the block trick used to multiply matrices then one load is required per multiply add. All this leads to the optimistic estimate that the 50MHz machine can sustain nearly 50 fmadd's per microsecond on a 50MHz chip. Inner products are much like matrix multiply which is a benchmark where the RS/6000 (The MPC601's father) achieved nearly one fmadd per clock, and that was double precision! 128 excitation vectors each of 60 single precision loats fit in the on chip cache, but it is tight. There may be enough margin here for it to work with no special DSP. I'll be in Yosemite for a few days so I won't be able to respond immediately to comments.

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under pressure from University Computing svcs,
by hfinney＠shell.portal.com 12 Aug '93

12 Aug '93

From: The Phantom <phantom(a)u.washington.edu> > I'm going to have to shut down the phantom remailer. > > Seems someone complained about a remailed message. I got a copy of the > message, and it didn't seem to bad to me, but I've gotta go with what UCS > says. > > As of today, the phantom remailer (phantom@mead) is hereby out of service. > > Matt It's too bad that this remailer is being shut down. I posted a few days ago about this problem, and someone asked if there had been any specific examples of shutdowns. Here is one; I know Matt's is not the first. If it would help, Matt, I could provide you with code to act as a "second- tier" remailer, one which would only forward to one of the other Cypherpunks remailers. No person would receive messages from your remailer, hence there would be no complaints to your administration. Your remailer would just be an extra "entry port" into the Cypherpunks remailer system. I don't know whether the terms of the shutdown of your remailer would allow you to experiment with what is arguably a different piece of code, one which would not lead to complaints. Hal Finney hfinney(a)shell.portal.com

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Re: Chaos harnessed for encryption / Fluctuations and Or
by fnerd＠smds.com 12 Aug '93

12 Aug '93

gtoal(a)gtoal.com sez- > That was smoke and mirrors by people who understand chaos better than > they understand encryption. All it boils down to is a synchronised > pair of (not very good) PRNGs. > ... > Forget it. It's a dead end. What it is is PRNGs that can synchronize without publishing their states. If this could be done with strong PRNGs, you'd have something. -fnerd quote me

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RE:patent on remote cash transactions?
by nobody＠alumni.cco.caltech.edu 12 Aug '93

12 Aug '93

THE MOUSE THAT ROARED. A small company has received a big patent covering financial transactions from home computers. While industry giants have bickered over who's on first in home banking, shopping, entertainment, etc., Online Resources & Communications Corporation of Fairfax, Va., has received what appears to be an enormously broad patent covering financial transactions made from home computers. "The patented payment process potentially applies to a wide range of nonbanking services, from pay-per-view television to stock trading done from home terminals." (New York Times 8/9/93 C2)

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