- cypherpunks-legacy@lists.ogf.org

Re: Alpha Particles and One Time Pads
by marc＠kg6kf.ampr.org 26 Oct '92

26 Oct '92

Tim May sez: Here's a posting I just sent to sci.crypt, dealing with using alpha particle sources as noise sources for generating one-time pads. Tim, Why not use a back-biased germanium diode, or other noisy semiconductor junction? Seriously, the NRC has allowed the smoke detector people to spread those little radioactive chunks of Americium for too long. John Walker of AutoDesk actually built an IBM-PC card that generated random numbers from a radioactive source. All the best, ^M

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Registering Keys...
by Hal 26 Oct '92

26 Oct '92

This proposal to register keys was also mentioned in the July, 1992 Communications of the ACM, in an article by Ron Rivest, one of the creators of the RSA algorithm. He was mostly criticizing the proposed government Digital Signature Standard, stating that he thought that the NSA was purposely trying to get "weak" cryptography installed as the standard. Then he goes on to say, "Are there technical alternatives that would satisfy all parties? Perhaps. It is certainly the case that the formulation of the problem to be solved has never been made explicit for the cryptographic community to work on. I suspect that a solution based on 'escrowed secret keys' might be workable, wherein each user is legally required to depost his or her secret key with a trusted third party, such as the user's bank. Cryptographic hardware and software would only operate with public keys that were certified to having their corres- ponding secret keys appropriately escrowed. A federal agency could then obtain the secret key, or its use, with an appropriate warrant. Once their secret keys were escrowed, multinational corporations could even operate across borders with a high degree of authentication and privacy (except perhaps from court-ordered wiretaps). Cryptographic hardware and software manufactured in the U.S. would not operate abroad without public keys suitably certified as having their secret counterparts escrowed in the U.S. In an extension of this approach, users can escrow their secret keys with several trusted third parties in a 'secret-sharing' manner, so that no single third party can com- promise the user's key. While this approach may have its own difficulties, it does illustrate that weak cryptography is not the only technical approach available. There may be much better techniques for achieving a compromise between a number of conflicting national concerns." At the time that I read this, I thought it was largely a rhetorical device, making the point that if the government wants to infringe on people's privacy, it should come out in the open and do so, rather than skulking about. (Like saying, "if the government _really_ wants to stop sexual immorality it would have to put a TV camera in every bedroom".) And of course (I thought) this kind of proposal would never be taken seriously. I'm shocked that Denning is now advocating it openly. This proposal makes it illegal for people to communicate so secretly that the government can't find out what they are saying. It could apply to postal mail as well as email - it would be illegal to send a message via post which the government couldn't interpret. If this is really the government's purpose, then it should also require that all private conversations be recorded, and the resulting tapes be "escrowed" similarly in case the government needed to find out what was said, for which it would have to get a court order. As Tim suggested, this is probably a "trial balloon" being floated to see what the reaction is. Let's see that it gets shot down. Hal 74076.1041(a)compuserve.com

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Multiple messages + entropy
by Hal 26 Oct '92

26 Oct '92

The Internet PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail) standard uses the concept which Dean Tribble mentioned of multiple encryption (using each recipient's public key) of a single session key which encrypts the message. PGP's data structures do not currently provide for this but could be extended pretty easily to allow it. On the entropy measure - I thought entropy was how many bits of information you get per character. Encrypted binary text would be pretty close to 8 bits per character. The RFC1113 Ascii encoding used by PGP reduces this to 6 bits per character (e.g. a character set with 64 printable characters) neglecting line separators and message beginnings and endings. So there should be a little less than 6 bits per character for encrypted, Ascii-encoded messages. Hal 74076.1041(a)compuserve.com

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Re: Registering Keys with Big Brother
by efrem＠spitha.informix.com 26 Oct '92

26 Oct '92

It seems that registration would defeat the advantage of a public key system, but it would not prevent private encrypted messages from being hidden from casual traffic analysis or even notice by public key wrapping. This would make registration rather useless against a conspiracy and thus hard to justify in the face of commercial and constitutional opposition. --efrem

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Re: Registering Keys with Big Brother
by George A. Gleason 26 Oct '92

26 Oct '92

Tim's summary of Denning raises some interesting points, and no doubt this will end up in the courts in due time. Some angles of attack which might be pursued include 2nd amendment (original grounds: protection against tyrrany) and 1st amendment. Re the latter, a lawyer I spoke with some years ago, proposed the idea that freedom of speech in some cases depends on the ability for the speaker to determine who will and who will not receive what is said. Then of course there is always good oldfashioned civil disobedience. If enough people conscientiously violate the regulation, it will become unenforceable and all the more likely to be overturned. -gg

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BBS E-mail policy
by omega＠spica.bu.edu 26 Oct '92

26 Oct '92

>> One incentive would be for the BBS operators to phase in a policy that they will accept no e-mail which is _not_ encrypted. Comments? << And how does your BBS software tell whether or not you've just sent encrypted mail, plaintext mail or line-noise? (in an encryption/decryption-at-user's-end scenario) -- Omega(a)spica.bu.edu

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Registering Keys with Big Brother
by tcmay＠netcom.com 25 Oct '92

25 Oct '92

Arise, cypherpunks, evil plans are brewing in the bowels of the Beast! I just read a summary of influential crypto guru Dorothy Denning's talk at the recent 15th National Computer Security Conference (held in Baltimore, don't you know, so con-vee-nient to Fort Meade). See the recent RISKS articles in comp.risks (esp. 13.86). Since RISKS is copyrighted, and we wouldn't to do anything to make the lawscums unhappy, I'll summarize: * Denning proposes that anyone using public key encryption over public networks be required to register their private keys with, for example, the Justice Department. * To avoid the risks of someone else getting the key, she suggests the private keys could be encrypted with the _public key_ of Justice, and then held by an independent agency. (Ostensibly, the encryption and registration could be done by the user himself, though some means of verifying compliance would have to be devised.) * To make use of the private key (for example, to read e-mail encrypted with the key), the government would have to get a court order, present it to the independent agency, take the key back to Justice, decrypt it with the private key of Justice, and then proceed with their surveillance and whatnot. This is ostensibly like the procedure for wiretapping. However, it would screw up the use of encryption in many ways. Registering a key would precluded frequent key changes, would probably cost some fee (on the order of $50, like a driver's license, I'd guess), and would of course greatly complicate the use of digital pseudonyms and all the other neat stuff we've talked about (but which caution tells me not to discuss here on an open and unsecured list...you can check my .sig to see where I stand, of course). My hunch is that Denning and the other "quaint" (cf. Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown" for a description of how the crypto bigwigs interact with hackers at CFP and elsewhere) cryptheads have alerted the government to the _real_ threat of cryto tools. Position papers are being released as trial balloons, to prepare the way for a "Crypto Crackdown." I hope I'm wrong. We need more information. Let's talk to someone who went to this conference and get the Proceedings as quickly as possible. Cryptically Yours, --Tim -- .......................................................................... 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 | PGP 2.0 and MailSafe keys by arrangement.

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Removal from list
by nathanf＠cup.portal.com 25 Oct '92

25 Oct '92

Please remove me from the list. My address is nathanf(a)cup.portal.com Thank you.

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re: pgp key distribution
by Tom.Jennings＠f111.n125.z1.FIDONET.ORG 25 Oct '92

25 Oct '92

U> From: pmetzger(a)shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger) U> for the life of me understand why. The only way to know U> for sure that someone's key is theirs is a signature from U> a trusted introducer anyway, so people can just ask each U> other in clear for public keys and it doesn't do a lick of I think it is valuable for a number of reasons, none of which are traditional encryption reasons. One: Mostly, in my world, I don't need SECURITY, I need PRIVACY. A paper envelope sealed with water-soluble glue is just fine. It stops casual snoops, like the lock on your car door does. None of which will stop a determined thief, but like Eric says, it's economics -- this level of security is inexpensive as hell. Two: it gets people introduced to the very basic concept that there *is* privacy (security) available, and possible. In the FidoNet, and the BBS world, this is important. Three: In FidoNet, we've got 16,000 sysops, doubling every 18 months, worldwide. Traditional key systems are not only wildly impractical, they're unnecessary for traditional reasons -- who much security to I need to talk to someone 5,000 miles away I've never met? Four: If I need *real* security, I will (or better!) obtain keys in "traditional", secure ways. I can plug these keys into my casual privacy system, which will hopefully encompass the technological mechanisms of en/decryption, signing, plaintext handling, and all the assorted baggage we'll have to drag around anyways. Five: it will entrench some disasters; bum, or faked keys, humongous duplicates, inexperienced people forgetting their secret pass phrases so they can't even issue key-removal certificates (this has happened already; its a MAJOR pain in the ass), one "person" with a zillion IDs, inconsistent IDing, etc etc etc etc etc. Oh well. In fact, no system gets implemented right. Period. To pretend it will is folly. Because of the nature of the beast (patents, feds looking for backdoors, stupidity, centralist, authoritarian types trying to exert control, etc, I'm pushing, hard and fast, to get systems set up LIKE CRAZY of all sorts, with all of them being completely distributed and decentralized. Sufficiently Paranoid. --- ReadMail * Origin: World Power Systems / FidoNews / San Francisco CA (1:125/111) -- Tom Jennings - via FidoNet node 1:125/555 UUCP: ...!uunet!hoptoad!kumr!fidogate!111!Tom.Jennings INTERNET: Tom.Jennings(a)f111.n125.z1.FIDONET.ORG

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re: Re: pgp key distribution
by Tom.Jennings＠f111.n125.z1.FIDONET.ORG 25 Oct '92

25 Oct '92

U> From: shipley(a)tfs.COM (Peter Shipley) U> I maintain two public rings one is a collection I have U> collected via direct contact (friends mostly) the other is U> jyanowitz's list plus random other rings). I'm surprised by the number of people who, when they receive a key in the mail, certify it themselves. I leave mine also uncertified unless I got it directly. I don't sign nuttin. --- ReadMail * Origin: World Power Systems / FidoNews / San Francisco CA (1:125/111) -- Tom Jennings - via FidoNet node 1:125/555 UUCP: ...!uunet!hoptoad!kumr!fidogate!111!Tom.Jennings INTERNET: Tom.Jennings(a)f111.n125.z1.FIDONET.ORG

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