- cypherpunks-legacy@lists.ogf.org

(fwd) anonymus@charcoal.com is going away
by tcmay＠netcom.com 20 Aug '93

20 Aug '93

Submitted for your consideration.... Message-ID: <Aug201408031993(a)charcoal.com> Date: 20 Aug 1993 18:08:05 GMT From: Karl_Kleinpaste(a)charcoal.com Organization: Charcoal Communicators, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Newsgroups: alt.privacy.anon-server,alt.personals,alt.sex.movies,alt.sex.fetish.feet,alt.personals.ads,alt.sex.bondage,alt.personals.bondage,soc.bi Followup-To: alt.privacy.anon-server Subject: anonymus(a)charcoal.com is going away Reply-To: anonymus+admin(a)charcoal.com I got off the phone a while ago with someone who is responsible for mail at a large southern university. He called me because he is being pressed for action regarding anonymous mail sent through charcoal.com. It seems that there is a dweeb at this university who is sending anonymous "secret admirer" mail. Two of the five recipients of this sort of mail have raised the issue through university channels as harassment, and at least one of those is in the process of dealing with the police because it correlates uncomfortably closely with harassing phone calls and other incidents going down. This mail admin, having looked through his system's mail logs for sources of the trouble, observed that one individual has repeatedly sent mail to anonymus+clear(a)charcoal.com, and sometime shortly thereafter mail comes back for these recipients, on the same machine. (Yes, really. This person is sending questionable anonymous mail to people on the same system as himself. No joke, though I wish it was. It's a Big Bluish Beastie.) So while I was unwilling to identify the originator of the mail myself, the admin identified him for me by login name, and he was (no surprise) correct. The individual in question is going to get at least a stern talking-to by Those Who Matter. It is hoped that the police can be kept at bay, and that more of that university's channels will not be exercised in this process. This comes on the heels of my having had to chase down incidents in the last week or two... ...someone sending half-Mbyte uuencoded core files via anonymus+clear ...having had to extinguish a couple of individuals due to, e.g., repetitious reposting, and personals posted outside alt.personals* ...another report of anonymous harassment whose details I do not feel I am at liberty to disclose at all. anonymus(a)charcoal.com is going away. My heart is no longer in it, because I am unwilling to ride herd on this ridiculous minority of totally cluefree individuals who seem to believe that they are somehow superior to the rest of the universe and can do things that are clearly against the requirements I stipulate in the info sheet. The potential for repercussions against myself as admin is far too high when I am informed that police are already involved -- I was much too close to such a situation 10 months ago. This server will cease operation on 31 Aug. It is my belief that other anon servers operate in all of the groups currently supported here. Users have 10 days to make other arrangements. More and more, I am convinced that life as a hermit is preferable to life on the network. It is amazing how far one's attitude will fall following one phone call. Please respect Followup-To:. Feel free (feel encouraged) to disseminate this notice wherever appropriate. This note is being posted to alt.privacy.anon-server and those groups which have received 50+ postings in the life of the current news transfer log, less alt.sexual.abuse.recovery (which happens to be far and away in the #1 slot of such a list). --

1 0

Blinded RSA signatures
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 20 Aug '93

20 Aug '93

An excellent description of blinding and digital cash, forwarded from sci.crypt: In article <24924cINNg4c(a)network.ucsd.edu>, loki(a)sdphu3.ucsd.edu (Lance M Cottrell) writes: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Some time ago I read an article in Scientific American about using RSA and smart cards to achieve untraceable and unforgable electronic cash. The system hinged on being able to "blind" a message which would be signed by the bank, and then the blinding would be removed without disturbing the signature. The signed message would then decrypt to the original message, but the signer would not know what she had signed. The article made no mention of how to do this "blinding". This morning I came up with a method which I would like comments upon. First the notation ^ : exponentiation n : the bank's modulus (p*q in usual notation) e : the exponent used to encrypt the message sent to the bank d : the exponent used to decrypt the bank's encryption. t : the text that you want signed. x : some random number with a multiplicative inverse mod n. y : the inverse of x mod n. c : the cipher text corresponding to t a : the blinded plain text b : the encrypted blinded text. Now the procedure. blind the plain text by a = ((x^d) * t) mod n the bank encrypts a by b = (a^e) mod n = ((((x^d)^e)mod n) * ((t^e)mod n)) mod n the blind is removed by multiplying through by y since ((x^d)^e)mod n = (x^(d*e))mod n = x c = y * b = (y * x * ((t^e) mod n))mod n = (t^e) mod n The question is, can one find x and y such that (x*y) mod n = 1, and can the bank recover t when only given a. Also, please tell me if there is some fundamental error in my handeling of math mod n. Many thanks for any comments. If anyone knows the method the original authors used, please post that as well. Fine description of Chaum's blind signature protocol. Your math looks good. It is easy to find y, given x and n, such that (x*y) mod n = 1, (provided gcd(x,n)=1, as it is for most x ). See Knuth Vol II section 4.5.2, or look up the extended Euclid's algorithm in some good algorithms text. The bank can not tell which t was signed via some a, since for any t and a with t in the multiplicative group mod n, there is some x such that a=x^d * t (mod n). Thus (1)the procedure is tractable, (2)blind forgeries are only possible if RSA is weak, and (3)the "blind" is unconditionally secure. Bryan Olson olson(a)umbc.edu

2 1

building a sound sampler for cryptophone application...
by Graham Toal 20 Aug '93

20 Aug '93

My old uncle - a retired electrical engineer - has gone back to night classes to learn electronics. His class has to do little projects that they pick themselves; nothing too advanced yet - his last one was a musical door-chime... Anyway, he was asking me for ideas for projects to build, and believe me I've got dozens :-) The one that I think is of most value to most people, if he designs a simple circuit for it that I can publish, is a cheap sound sampling interface .... which we can happen to steal for our various cryptophone projects... Here's how I see the design: it feeds data into a (probably IBM PC) parallel port (has to be the bidirectional kind, a plain printer port clearly won't work), and *it* supplies the timing, ie the PC reads from the port when the flags say data is ready, and no more data will be presented to that port until n uSecs later - I foresee it supplying data at either 8000 bytes/sec or 4000 bytes/sec if the former is too fast for a PC to handle. Putting the timing in the sampler frees the PC from a horrendous overhead in sampling at accurate times, and would make it trivial to feed the 4000Hz samples into code like 'shorten' which would then be shoved down a v32bis modem quite comfortably. At a cost *much* less than any commercial sampler: this thing is built from: a battery; a box; a DAC; a 7$ microphone; a parallel port driver; a crystal, and a counter. And that's it. Dead cheap and easy to build, I hope. What I'm writing here to ask is where can I get info on what chip to use to feed data into a PC down the bidirectional parallel port, and how do you drive the chip and what are the pinouts etc. I don't expect anyone to mail me detailed schematics or anything like that, just a pointer to where to look for them. (Though if someone *did* have data sheets, I wouldn't say no to a quick fax :-) ) (fwiw, I used to do electronics as a hobby *years* ago - I once built a dual-processor micro with dynamic ram, so don't be shy of mailing me anything grossly technical; I've forgotten most of what I knew in detail, but I remember enough to steer my uncle in the right direction, though I won't be doing the actual circuit design myself) Thanks for your time. I hope this isn't considered too off-topic... (I mean, I *could* have posted an incredibly interesting piece about the Challenger disater instead, eh Eric? ;-)) G PS Pointers to suitable usenet groups equally appreciated...

2 1

Re: cypher breaking and genetic algorithms
by baumbach＠atmel.com 20 Aug '93

20 Aug '93

Scott Collins writes: >[...] > between. Being one bit off in the key should give a totally fruitless > result. GA's don't help much with such ciphers. >[...] What if the GA "knew" the plain-text, the cyphertext, and the encryption algorithm, and was searching for a decryption algorithm without the encryption key? Would that be for fruitful? Peter Baumbach baumbach(a)atmel.com

1 0

No Subject
by remailer＠merde.dis.org 20 Aug '93

20 Aug '93

1 0

Re: Traveller's Checks...
by baumbach＠atmel.com 20 Aug '93

20 Aug '93

Peter Wayner says: > I think that American Express wouldn't be interested in > anonymous cash because the most important "feature" of > a traveller's check is the lack of transferability. Once > they're bought, only one person can spend them. >[...] I think American Express would be interested in collecting a percentage of the cash-flow. The underground economy is pretty big. Wouldn't it be nice to get a percentage of it? Peter Baumbach baumbach(a)atmel.com

2 1

Re: Traveller's Checks...
by jim＠tadpole.com 20 Aug '93

20 Aug '93

> > I think that American Express wouldn't be interested in > anonymous cash because the most important "feature" of > a traveller's check is the lack of transferability. Once > they're bought, only one person can spend them. I doubt that Amex is interested in traveller's checks for this reason. AMEX likes traveller's checks because they make a lot of money on the 'float', the time value of the money you give them before they have to redeem the checks when some bank presents them for payment. A digital bank could make a lot of money on 'float' too. Given that anonymous cash could be much harder to steal than paper checks, AMEX could very well be interested in this 'new' type of monetary instrument. Jim

2 1

Genetic Algorithms and password cracking
by an31122＠anon.penet.fi 20 Aug '93

20 Aug '93

Hi, If my understanding of GAs is correct (not a given), they operate by progressively narrowing the search space until they arrive at the solution. More clearly, each generation uses information gleaned from previous generations to guide the current search. The operation depends on being able to take two sets of input parameters and decide which operates better than the other. I'm not a cryptographer, so I don't know whether there is a way to find out if an answer is "close" to the actual. If not, GAs will probably be of little use. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help(a)anon.penet.fi. Due to the double-blind, any mail replies to this message will be anonymized, and an anonymous id will be allocated automatically. You have been warned. Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin(a)anon.penet.fi.

1 0

T. Wells & Anonymity
by L. Detweiler 20 Aug '93

20 Aug '93

My last response to Mr. Wells was in private and I hoped he would take that course himself in future communication, but as it stands he now has screamed insults at me twice in a row in this forum, and I must address his latest unanswered letter; most of these following points are from my private letter. The fundamental issue at stake is: is Mr. Wells routinely and regularly monitoring the content of the email he forwards via his so-called `anonymous server'? The answer is: definitely. To do so is very ethically borderline, IMHO, no matter who his `family'. This was enough to alarm me seriously to the point of writing a very vehement letter condemning this type of `surveillance'. Yes, he has provided this service for a long time, he is doing so voluntarily, he has a select group of participants with a particular sensitivity and need, `most' of whom are satisfied with it, this I all acknowledge. However, it's evident to me that all users of anonymous services have a set of unconscious expectations, foremost among them that the operator will not routinely be reading their mail. I pointed out to Mr. Wells that breaking the violation of trust in privacy may lead the operator to breach the trust in anonymity. Merely the knowledge of content can lead the operator to serious quandaries that can be wholly avoided in completely adhering to privacy. Furthermore, an operator who does not strive to adhere conscientiously to the set of unconscious user expectations, even if working on a voluntary basis, is actually doing his users a disservice. Mr. Wells' rambling letter, replete with references to his personal philosophy of Objectivism, is a complicated set of rationalizations that amount to `yes, I regularly monitor my server's email traffic, in fact I consider it my duty.' Given his unswerving obstinacy to this practice, I asked that he make this policy clear in his introductory statements to the server, but he has consistently failed to reassure me that he actually has done so, making me wonder to what extent of the readers in the newsgroup and of his server (a substantial overlap according to him) are aware of this very serious matter of `systematic observation'. Are any people using this server as a plain vanilla server, or do they all realize that they are establishing a very strong personal arrangement of trust with this operator, who considers their relationship analogous to the protective Platonic intimacy between a therapist and his patients? Who will personally censor messages he thinks will unduly upset them? Mr. Wells tells us that `this is neither the time nor the place to discuss the wherefors and whys of abuse recovery; you'll just have to take it as a given that the rules used for understanding people in general won't work so well when applied to this newsgroup, or to my anonymous service.' Mr. Wells, I don't claim to be a specialist in the area as you insinuate yourself, but I believe there are fundamental laws of respect and candor that are appropriate -- *necessary* -- for *all* people, and my concern is precisely that you may be not be adhering to it in this case in presenting your policies. Your polarized dance of defensiveness and offensiveness indicates to me clearly a nerve has been struck. Mr. Wells' letter is full of seemingly contradictory statements. He seems to think that `confidentiality' and `privacy' are `two distinct functions', and suggests that in his regular email monitoring he actually achieves a `tighter, higher standard of confidentiality' than Helsingius or Kleinpaste's servers. Also, his attitudes on the limitations of his actual commitments to the people who use his service are extremely disturbing. He says `Their rights do not extend to arbitary protection of their confidentiality or privacy' and the actual protections granted are `mine to choose' and `not implicit in an anonymous server'. I find these comments simultaneously highly revealing and alarming. From my point of view the sheer all-encompassing trust awarded a server operator by users requires every conceivable commitment on the latter's part to *transcend* the common denominator in user expectations of privacy. Mr. Wells says he personally handles `half the traffic' of the sexual abuse recovery newsgroup, and that `most' of its users and his `potentially legitimate' correspondents are satisfied, and that most people who have `expressed dislike for my policies' are coincidentally `outsiders'. His service is `integral to a specific community'. Perhaps so, but how would he react to another server operator specifically serving that group? His statements seem to reflect a perverse pride in his monopoly on the group's anonymity and secret knowledge of its participants. IMHO, this is precisely the kind of extremely compromising position encryption would effortlessly avert. Finally, I'm extremely disappointed in Mr. Wells transparently vitriolic rhetoric to deflect the primary issues of systematic monitoring and truth in advertising to ugly subsidiary sideshows, such as with his expert diagnosis of me as `mentally unbalanced'. This classicly ridiculous ad hominem insult is particularly ironically insensitive coming from someone who professes to tiptoe around areas requiring the utmost delicacy in human interaction in supporting people with mental anguish! Yes, my mind is indeed teetering on the brink of a breakdown -- from Mr. Wells blows, who says of me, `he should consider himself honored that I bothered to tell him where he went wrong.' -- such words bespeak an attitude of shocking, sickening arrogance and intolerance. Caveat emptor! P.S. I will respond no further to Mr. Wells in this forum.

5 4

Parallel DES Decrypt Experiment
by nobody＠shell.portal.com 20 Aug '93

20 Aug '93

> Recent postings have gotten me to thinking: If we wrote a > easily portable UNIX program to decrypt DES in parallel across > our many machines, how fast could we go? > What do y'all think? I say do it as an experiment. That's how I always justified doing crazy stuff as a child. Besides, as a non-programmer, I am exempt from actually doing any work on the project.

1 0