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Random Number Generator article
by jim bell 28 May '16

28 May '16

Seems somewhat over-hyped, and not especially new either. Jim Bell http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3607142/Cybersecurity-breakt… "It could mean completely secure encryption of data, be it emails or voting - and even help beat climate change. Researchers have revealed a groundbreaking new technique to create truly random numbers for the first time. The new method creates truly random numbers with less computational effort than other methods, which could facilitate significantly higher levels of security for everything from consumer credit card transactions to military communications. The new method takes two weakly random sequences of numbers, such as air temperatures and stock market prices sampled over time, and turns them into one sequence of truly random numbers. 'This is a problem I've come back to over and over again for more than 20 years,' said David Zuckerman, who led the study.Described by one cryptography expert as a 'masterpiece,' the University of Texas at Austin research could have wide ranging implications. 'I'm thrilled to have solved it.'Computer science professor Zuckerman and graduate student Eshan Chattopadhyay will present research about their method in June at the annual Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), the Association for Computing Machinery's premier theoretical computer science conference. They publicly released a draft paper describing their method for making random numbers in an online forum last year. Oded Goldreich, a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, commented that even if it had only been a moderate improvement over existing methods, it would have justified a 'night-long party. 'When I heard about it, I couldn't sleep,' says Yael Kalai, a senior researcher working in cryptography at Microsoft Research New England who has also worked on randomness extraction. 'I was so excited. I couldn't believe it. I ran to the (online) archive to look at the paper. It's really a masterpiece.' The new method takes two weakly random sequences of numbers and turns them into one sequence of truly random numbers. Weakly random sequences, such as air temperatures and stock market prices sampled over time, harbor predictable patterns. Truly random sequences have nothing predictable about them, like a coin toss. The new method takes two weakly random sequences of numbers and turns them into one sequence of truly random numbers. Previous versions of randomness extractors were less practical because they either required that one of the two source sequences be truly random (which presents a chicken or the egg problem) or that both source sequences be close to truly random. This new method sidesteps both of those restrictions and allows the use of two sequences that are only weakly random. An important application for random numbers is in generating keys for data encryption that are hard for hackers to crack. Data encryption is critical for making secure credit card purchases and bank transactions, keeping personal medical data private and shielding military communications from enemies, among many practical applications. Zuckerman says that although there are already methods for producing high-quality random numbers, they are very computationally demanding. His method produces higher quality randomness with less effort. 'One common way that encryption is misused is by not using high-quality randomness,' says Zuckerman. 'So in that sense, by making it easier to get high-quality randomness, our methods could improve security.' Their paper shows how to generate only one truly random number – akin to one coin toss – but Zuckerman's former student Xin Li has already demonstrated how to expand it to create sequences of many more random numbers. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3607142/Cybersecurity-breakt…

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New digital activism mailing list
by Anthony Papillion 25 May '16

25 May '16

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 A friend and I have set up a discussion mailing list for activists interested in discussing digital freedom, legislation effecting digital rights, government and corporate surveillance, etc. Just thought this group might be interested. If you want to learn more or to subscribe visit https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/digital-rights-activism or send an email to digital-rights-activism-subscribe(a)lists.riseup.net Anthony - -- OpenPGP Key: 4096R/028ADF7453B04B15 Other Key Info: http://www.cajuntechie.org/p/my-pgp-key.html XMPP?Jabber: cypher(a)chat.cpunk.us -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJXRhyrAAoJEAKK33RTsEsVa/IP/2gnBfQo2KR/pFz26gWmXlAw jpzavAix6oyStFqZsw1eT6UA3BO05pnaM/ehvf/VSO4SDUIu4rA9S2twInnTTxYS EzcpBz4Hrec/U+Sci9Gc/pSmFdy7xjqmx5PAQi6UgWN/Cdlx9Wjmnq3KafvEZCG/ gVuLSHyE3GhrhihfcgloaFBU5RfgNY2J35Ze/eCup7ZKVC7cDAbwBvrxJHZHxdFr tkDC/DBjYIpj/xdrnJDT86rS9Z6rGCbgRTtXs/RYO9R+A3npPmJj5Pu9Oz0e8NIg mlQsVr3Up5K8ewoq5dWUAV8ApB0ah6jYZ4UA4lxsj9p9Q8DIl15YYzO9+cycXyY7 RzvFLPM0rlVsTzqJQIKFL86oTV7BJ8RGm2tjGNVipsS8M0GIdoKKVsO7T9JoiAIS pGo1LD3d5cZped8l42omqr9HnCBK6gMBjA8UeUW4AupbjJq5ZdhxnUGN33W8pxzg kLdv/o3JKPzdWRQsFvqNKMkbsPNbyA73wuRBPV1alrgdRNARqbObzC8RroWS7Ebt GK5YPm5GvqJu4Wd9TrnNZCrFDY+43SIDBlef2NUpR4t7jkL/29E+J445zTPiuOuf WaFTXMrin1H8VRCaPoaHdVki8a54DUI5TVT6oasf3TWYUnTACM1as039U+dp1gVs tv0mVBLQt2c8rb7MgMxg =ipq9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Proxy / VPN before Tor in Qubes: Tor bootstrap stops at 80%
by grarpamp 25 May '16

25 May '16

On 5/25/16, katerimmel(a)sigaint.org <katerimmel(a)sigaint.org> wrote: >> Try turning up debugging. > Debugging shows me that results are all OK until Tor socksport reachability > I'm using JonDo ip changer > What do you means about pointing tor at tor? Tor provides a SOCKS5 interface on the front that is presumably written correctly and not third party, to eliminate jondo and at least test tor at/over tor. ./tor --socks5proxy (-->) ./tor --socksport (-->) internet You may also like to please consider supporting this feature... # Provide a socks5 server port for user apps to use https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/ticket/577 ... which would then make this an interesting narrow portal to route specific apps through (and things like p2p where you cannot predict / program the far end host to route to) without gratuitously grabbing the entire 0.0.0.0/0 routing table of the host... ./openvpn --config c.ovpn --verb 4 --socks-proxy 127.0.0.1 9050 --route-noexec --route-up /usr/bin/env --script-security 2 This may also be of related use to some users... # MAPADDRESS for IP ranges (CIDR, etc) https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3982 Gmail breaks thread to add VPN subject, sorry.

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Re: [Cryptography] Hacking spread spectrum clocking of HW ?
by grarpamp 25 May '16

25 May '16

On 5/25/16, dj(a)deadhat.com <dj(a)deadhat.com> wrote: > It depends on the application. > CAZAC codes for stealth canaries anyone? > Cryptographic spreading codes and wide bandwidths are seen in military > *radiations*. *This*, moar liek this. Imagine noise radiator capable of making your spectrum analyzer look like /dev/urandom across the board. There's no center frequency, no clock, no freq hopping, no spreading, no observables, no off the shelf wireless hardware or reference design... it's not based on that. To any viewer, it's just noise. To you and your peers who hold, say, a shared XOR key for data and a seed for DRBG noise, it looks like data... lots of data ;-) With achievable datarate, error correction, and unjammability governed by the range of spectrum you can generate noise over. You could even mimic within existing spectra if need be. The amplifiers and radiators to cover the spectrum are hardware. Everything else is SDR. There is at least one good paper on this, particularly involving GNURadio style SDR as the enabling basis, but I forgot the magic search terms to find it again. While not the one in mind (and not necessarily from the new SDR guerrilla crowd), these are somewhat relavant... Digital Chaotic Communications https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/34849/michaels_alan_j_200… Synchronization in Cognitive Overlay Systems http://lib.tkk.fi/Dipl/2012/urn100685.pdf Covert Ultrawideband Random Noise papers by Jack Chuang and Ram Narayanan... https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/files/final_submissions/3142

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FBI Black Helicopters Spying And Databasing Everything, Including Your Barbecue
by grarpamp 25 May '16

25 May '16

https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/04/07/1120214/spies-in-the-skies-fbi-pla… Each weekday, dozens of U.S. government aircraft take to the skies and slowly circle over American cities. Piloted by agents of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the planes are fitted with high-resolution video cameras, often working with "augmented reality" software that can superimpose onto the video images everything from street and business names to the owners of individual homes. At least a few planes have carried devices that can track the cell phones of people below. Most of the aircraft are small, flying a mile or so above ground, and many use exhaust mufflers to mute their engines -- making them hard to detect by the people they're spying on. [...] The government's aerial surveillance programs deserve scrutiny by the Supreme Court, said Adam Bates, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. "It's very difficult to know, because these are very secretive programs, exactly what information they're collecting and what they're doing with it," Bates told BuzzFeed News.

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Re: [Cryptography] Hacking spread spectrum clocking of HW ?
by grarpamp 25 May '16

25 May '16

On 5/24/16, Henry Baker <hbaker1(a)pipeline.com> wrote: > https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/app-notes/index.mvp/id/1995 > > Q: How hard is it to diddle with the spreading codes on these clocking > sources? I'd like to experiment with some longer codes. See their spec sheet... https://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/DS1086-DS1086Z.pdf I looking for links to different whitepapers... where dither driving the spread is not pretty triangle frequency and amplitude, but is a random shared key. And it's driving an RF tx/rx capable of extremely wide spread range. Other option is to tx/rx faux wideband noise modulo a random spectrum key. Pointers?

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1st OpenPGP conference, September in Germany
by Blibbet 24 May '16

24 May '16

FYI -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: [openpgp] Join us for the first OpenPGP conference Date: Wed, 18 May 2016 16:39:10 +0200 From: Werner Koch <wk(a)gnupg.org> To: openpgp(a)ietf.org Hello! The German Unix User Group (GUUG) is pleased to announce the first public conference on the OpenPGP protocol taking place in Cologne, Germany on September 8+9, 2016. OpenPGP.conf is a conference for users and implementers of the OpenPGP protocol, the popular standard for encrypted email communication and protection of data at rest. That protocol is the foundation of encryption software like PGP, GnuPG, Mailvelope, OpenKeyChain, and others. OpenPGP.conf is a place to meet, discuss, and learn about latest developments of OpenPGP aware applications and what technical measures can be deployed to repel the ever increasing trend to mass surveillance. Topics are: - The OpenPGP protocol and its planned revision - Current status of OpenPGP applications - Interesting use cases - Key discovery and distribution - Ubiquitous end-to-end encryption - Security analysis - User interface studies - Anonymous mail and the spam problem The Call for Presentations is available at: https://gnupg.org/conf/cfp.html More information will be published at the conference site: https://gnupg.org/conf/ Salam-Shalom, Werner -- Die Gedanken sind frei. Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz. /* EFH in Erkrath: https://alt-hochdahl.de/haus */

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Re: [Cryptography] Text of Burr-Feinstein encryption backdoor bill
by grarpamp 24 May '16

24 May '16

On 4/8/16, Henry Baker <hbaker1(a)pipeline.com> wrote: > https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2797124/Burr-Feinstein-Encryptio… > > "Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016" Current version... https://www.burr.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/BAG16460.pdf

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FBI Gripes About Crypto on Facebook/WhatsApp/Everywhere, People Rebuffing and Accepting "Costs"?
by grarpamp 23 May '16

23 May '16

https://it.slashdot.org/story/16/04/06/1929201/top-fbi-attorney-worried-abo… WhatsApp on Tuesday announced that all types of messages on the latest version of its app are now automatically protected by end-to-end encryption, and the FBI's top attorney is worried some of the platform's more than 1 billion global users will take advantage of the move to hide their crime- or terrorism-related communications. FBI General Counsel James Baker said in Washington on Tuesday that the decision by the Facebook-owned messaging platform to encrypt its global offerings "presents us with a significant problem" because criminals and terrorists could "get ideas." "If the public does nothing, encryption like that will continue to roll out," he said. "It has public safety costs. Folks have to understand that, and figure out how they are going to deal with that. Do they want the public to bear those costs? Do they want the victims of terrorism to bear those costs?"Maybe the government shouldn't have imposed so many surveillance programs on its citizens -- and kept quiet about it for years -- that they now feel the need to use sophisticated security technologies.

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Russia's invasion of Ukraine - finally winding up; Australians nutcase MSM consuming lapdogs as usual
by Zenaan Harkness 23 May '16

23 May '16

The long tail of Ukraine's Western-backed disintegration continues: http://theduran.com/poroshenko-finally-admits-ukraines-military-defeat/ "Thousands of Ukrainian Nationalists Rally, Threaten Coup d'Etat": https://www.rt.com/news/343756-ukraine-nationalists-kiev-parliament/ A reminder of what it would really look like if Russia actually invaded Ukraine: http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/russia-makes-sure-war-will-be-hell-it… For those unsure of what our Western democracy putschists have been fueling, another in depth on the Ukarine Maidan: http://theduran.com/little-little-maidan-truth-surfacing-ukraine-masks-revo… http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/finally-masks-revolution-maidan-docum… Now, in the face of 'the end is close': "Documentary Claiming MH17 Shot Down by Ukrainian Jet to Air on BBC" http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/663787/Ukrainian-fighter-jet-shot-Russi… we see Australian nutcases yet to consume anything but the MSM: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-22/mh17-australian-families-of-victims-t… At least NATO exhibits rationality: "NATO Talking to Itself: Announces Meeting With Russia Without Informing Russia" http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/05/20/466550/Russia-NATO-meeting

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