- cypherpunks-legacy@lists.ogf.org

Re: FLAME: taking action
by pete＠cirrus.com 08 Apr '93

08 Apr '93

>> Not voting in today's society is a cop out. It is most certainly not >> perfect, and the choices suck, but it remains one of the major voices you >> have today in the world. > > Voting arguably endorses the system. If you are vocal about why > you don't endorse the system, your refusal to vote can have a lot > more impact than going to the polls. If you don't vote, your opinion literally doesn't count, and means that you are perfectly happy with the status quo. Not voting guarantees that you will have no voice. Perot's name will be remembered a lot longer than some nuts whining how about the process doesn't work. The best way to protest the current system, is to vote for something else. I'm a Libertarian rather than a Perotian, but I give him a lot of credit for allowing so many people to see beyond the two party system. Vote with your feet, not with your butt. --- Pete Carpenter pete(a)cirrus.com Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills, One man gathers what another man spills. - Robert Hunter

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false analogy
by D Anton Sherwood 08 Apr '93

08 Apr '93

> If you don't like your goverment, vote. If you don't like something that > is published, write something yourself. . . . That should be -- If you don't like your government, start your own. Or better yet --- If you don't like your government, govern yourself. *\\* Anton Ubi scriptum? ;)

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subscribe
by anon0709＠nyx.cs.du.edu 08 Apr '93

08 Apr '93

Please subscribe me to the cypherpunks list. Sean Carton /es

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Musical Cypher CD project
by George A. Gleason 08 Apr '93

08 Apr '93

Excellent news...! Recall Matt's & my postings about putting cyphertext into a CD as part of the artistic presentation....? The idea being to establish it as part of the overall protected artistic speech as it were. Well, I've found a band in the area who have tried doing something VERY similar and currently have a very decent quantity of material READY TO GO. Includes hypercard stacks, quicktime movies, macromind movies, miscellaneous art & screen savers.... a lot of it is footage of the band playing live, with music tracks included (i.e. show videos), some of it is computer graphic art, and so on. The band is called NOW, and they sound like a cross between Rush, Crimson, and Yes; are incredibly talented, write new songs so prolifically (sp?) that they could put out 5-10 more albums with what's already ready... have a couple of albums out on an indie label... and are ready & willing & way interested in doing a project. What they wanted to do was put all the video and other stuff on the first track of a CD so it would be accessible on a CDROM player. They got that far and also some studio sessions with the songs for the album, and then ran into a wall as far as the tech angle on getting the stuff to work right. We have studios available to record the music, the band can go in any time, and they're hip to encrypting their video stuff & having people go hunting for the key (put it in the lyric sheets, have people write for it, etc). I recall someone from Contra Costa offering to fund this; well, we're ready. This will easily sell a few thousand copies which will pay back costs; and given the band's artistic strengths, will probably do better than that. And it will certainly be a first, and a decent stake in the ground for crypto as artistic freedom of expression. Email gg(a)well.sf.ca.us for more info.

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The WELL took off PGP from public downloads
by crunch＠netcom.com 08 Apr '93

08 Apr '93

Just thought I should mention, that "gail" has removed PGP from the WELL's public downloads, and when I asked her why, she didn't comment (yet!). JD

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MATH: Zero Knowledge Proofs
by tcmay＠netcom.com 08 Apr '93

08 Apr '93

[Since this should also be of interest to the Cypherpunks list, which Ray is/was subscribed to, I am posting this essay to that list.] Ray Cromwell writes: > Could someone explain zero knowledge proofs and give me an example. I >have taken number theory and abstract algebra so feel free to use equations. > >(I know that zero knowledge proofs are a way of certifying something without >revealing the information you are certifying, but I want to know how they >work mathematically) Zero knowledge interactive proof systems ("ZKIPS") are sometimes called "minimum disclosure proofs" (with some subtle differences) and are exciting and mysterious (at first) methods that lie at the heart of modern cryptology. Here's a simple explanation. Too bad we don't have a blackboard! ALICE AND BOB (some people call them Peggy the Prover and Vic the Verifier) Alice wishes to prove to Bob that she knows some item of knowledge without actually giving Bob any of that knowledge. Let us first imagine that Alice claims she knows a "Hamiltonian cycle" on a particular graph. (For a given set of nodes and arcs linking some of those nodes, a Hamiltonian cycle is one which passes through each node once and only once. You might want to draw some graphs on a sheet of paper and try to find a Hamiltonian cycle for the graphs, to get a feel for the problem.) The particular graph may be "registered" somewhere with Alice's claim that she--and only she, for reasons I'll discuss at the end--knows a Hamiltonian cycle for the graph. In a sense, this is her "proof of identity." To make this example concrete, Alice is using this piece of knowledge as her *password* to get into some system. She presents a map of 50 cities and some set of highways interconnecting them and says "I am who I say I am if and only if I know a Hamiltonian cycle for this graph." The conventional (non zero knowledge) way to convey this knowledge is for Alice to simply *show* the Hamiltonian cycle to Bob. This is how passwords are currently handled. Bob, and anybody else who is spying on the exchange, then knows the "secret," which isn't a secret anymore. (Anybody who saw the exchange, including Sysadmin Bob, could then impersonate her.) ENTER ZERO KNOWLEDGE Alice, instead of showing Bob the Hamiltonian cycle, takes the cities and covers them with something, say, coins. (On a computer, this is all done in software, using the cryptographic protocol called "bit commitment.") Alice scrambles the position of the cities (covered by coins) so as not to allow positional cues. (Most of the 50 cities should have about the same number, ideally exactly the same number, of links to other cities, to ensure that some cities are not "marked" by having some unique number of links. A detail.) Needless to say, she scrambles the cities out of sight of Bob, so he can't figure out which cities are which. However, once she's done with the scrambling, she displays the cities in such a way that she can't *later change*..i.e., she "commits" to the values, using well-known cryptographic methods for this. (If this sounds mysterious, read up on it. It's how "mental poker" and other crypto protocols are handled.) Bob sees 50 cities with links to other cities, but he doesn't have any way of knowing which of the covered cities are which. Nor, I should add, are the links labelled in any way--it wouldn't do to have some links permanently labelled "Route 66" or "Highway 101"! She says to Bob: "Pick one choice. Either you can see a Hamiltonian cycle for this set of covered cities and links, or you can see the cities uncovered." In other words, "Alice cuts, Bob chooses." Bob tosses a coin or chooses randomly somehow and says: "Show me the cities." Alice uncovers all the cities and Bob examines the graph. He sees that Akron is indeed connected to Boise, to Chicago, to Denver, not to Erie, and so on. In short, he confirms that Alice has shown him the original graph. No substitution of another graph was made. Bob, who is suspicious that this person is really who she claims to be, says to Alice: "Ok, big deal! So you anticipated I was going to ask you to show me the cities. Anybody could have gotten Alice's publicly registered graph and just shown it to me. You had a 50-50 chance of guessing which choice I'd make." Alice smugly says to him: "Fine, let's do it again." She scrambles the cities (which are covered) and displays the graph to Bob...50 covered cities and various links between them. She tells Bob to choose again. This time Bob says: "Show me the Hamiltonian cycle." Without uncovering the cities (which would give the secret away, of course), Alice connects the cities together in a legal Hamiltonian cycle. Bob says, "OK, so this time you figured I was going to ask you the opposite of what I did last time and you just substituted some other graph that you happened to know the Hamiltonian cycle of. I have no guarantee the graphs are really the same." Alice, who knows this is just the beginning, says: "Let's do the next round." ...and so it goes.... After 30 rounds, Alice has either produced a legal Hamiltonian cycle or a graph that is the same as (isomorphic to...same cities linked to same other cities) the registered graph in each and every one of the rounds. There are two possibilities: 1. She's an imposter and has guessed correctly *each time* which choice Bob will make, thus allowing her to substitute either another graph altogether (for when Bob wants to see the Hamiltonian cycle) or just the original graph (for when Bob asks to see the cities uncovered to confirm it's the real graph). Remember, if Alice guesses wrong even once, she's caught red-handed. 2. She really is who she claims to be and she really does know a Hamiltonian cycle of the specified graph. The odds of #1 being true drop rapidly as the number of rounds are increased, and after 30 rounds, are only 1 in 2^30, or 1 in a billion. Bob choose to believe that Alice knows the solution. Alice has conveyed to Bob proof that she is in possession of some knowledge without actually revealing any knowledge at all! The proof is "probabilistic." This is the essence of a zero knowledge proof. There's more to it than just this example, of course, but this is the basic idea. SOME DETAILS 1. Could someone else discover the Hamiltonian cycle of Alice's graph? Exhaustive search is the only way to guarantee a solution will be found--the Hamiltonian cycle problem is a famous "NP-complete" combinatorial problem. This is intractable for reasonable numbers of nodes. 50 nodes is intractable. 2. If finding a Hamiltonian cycle is intractable, how the hell did Alice ever find one? She didn't *have* to find one! She started with 50 cities, quickly connected them so that the path went through each city only once and then wrote this path down as her "secret" solution. Then she went back and added the other randomly chosen interconnects to make the complete graph. For this graph, she obviously knows a Hamiltonian cycle, *by construction*. 3. Can Bob reconstruct what the Hamilonian cycle must be by asking for enough rounds to be done? Not generally. Read the papers for details on this, which gets deeply into under what circumstance partial knowledge of the solution gives away the complete solution. 4. Are there other problems that can be used in this same way? Yes, there are many forms. I find the Hamiltonian cycle explanation quite easy to explain to people. (Though usually I can draw pictures, which helps a lot.) 5. How general is the "zero knowledge interactive proof" approach? Anything provable in formal logic is provable in zero knowledge, saith the mathematicians and crypto gurus. Check out the various "Crypto Conference" Proceedings. Hope this helps. -Tim May -- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: MailSafe and PGP available.

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Thanks for Mac PGP 2.2 Pointers
by Doug.Brightwell＠Corp.Sun.COM 08 Apr '93

08 Apr '93

Thanks to all who responded to my query regarding ftp sites for Mac PGP 2.2. Doug Brightwell

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Re: PGP and problems therewith.
by kieran2101＠aol.com 08 Apr '93

08 Apr '93

> I was under the impression that there was a newsgroup for discussion of how > to use PGP. There is: alt.security.pgp. Of course, like all alt.* groups, its propagation may vary.

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FLAME: Perry M. vs. taking action (was: Re: PHRACK...)
by fen＠genmagic.genmagic.com 07 Apr '93

07 Apr '93

Perry - > > If you don't like your goverment, vote. > > I'm an anarchist. You might as well say to an atheist "if you don't > like Catholicism, start a schism." I, too, aspire towards anarchy, but I don't ignore the tools around me. Not voting in today's society is a cop out. It is most certainly not perfect, and the choices suck, but it remains one of the major voices you have today in the world. Anarchy works best when people are informed. Education is key. Simply bad-mouthing other's works is not giving people a choice to decide which of two views they feel are better. Rather, it just fuels the fires of apathy (that the governemnt have been fanning for so long). Cypherpunks are trying to change the world. Sounds like you're just going to whine about it. Positive action will always be more effective. And better received. Fen PS: I must say that with your lack of content in your posts, if I had a filter on my email, it would filter out yours.

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Re: PHRACK: ...put up or...
by Mr. Noise 07 Apr '93

07 Apr '93

> > >The flaws are big enough to drive a bakery truck through. Its trash. > > > maybe you should do a better writeup and publish it in PHRACK or 2600? > [...] > If you don't like your goverment, vote. If you don't like something that is > published, write something yourself. It's not some type of elite club of > writers, both publications welcome people of all walks to submit. Hear, hear! For cryin' out loud, Fido 'Snooze' accepts *everything* they're sent! ...& if that isn't good enough, start your own: electrons are free! (Well, sort of...)

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