- cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

Re: [tor-talk] Content and popularity analysis of Tor hidden services
by Eugen Leitl 05 Sep '13

05 Sep '13

----- Forwarded message from Asa Rossoff <asa(a)lovetour.info> ----- Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 04:36:14 -0700 From: Asa Rossoff <asa(a)lovetour.info> To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Content and popularity analysis of Tor hidden services X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 12.0 Reply-To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org >From Lunar: > Eugen Leitl: >> http://cryptome.org/2013/09/tor-analysis-hidden-services.pdf >> >> Content and popularity analysis of Tor hidden services > > Watch out for dead horses [1] and see the previous discussion [2]. > > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flogging_a_dead_horse > [2] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-May/004909.html Whether or not all issues were discussed in detail or the same detail in the prior thread as well as in the paper, I don't know, but the paper has relevance beyond Tor network flaws: - It exposes an estimate on how manny hidden services existed at the time of the study - It gives a breakdown of what services/some of the services those hidden services offered. - It categories HTTP(S) services by content type, which is interesting. - It describes what resources they required to perform the attack, which sound relatively modest. - It highlights the botnet and botnet command and control activity on Tor. - It describes server configuration issues that allowed easily correlating the shared hosting of many services - It describes server configuration issues that allowed easily deanonymizing the true IP Address of some hidden services. The last two points are importasnt reminders of some of the pitfalls in attempting anonymization, and might be good to be documented in the wiki (if they're not) for setting up hidden services. The prior points are of social and historic value. The present situation with massively escalating numbers of Tor users/"users" highlights the threat that botnets might pose to the Tor network's ability to function. A botnet worm of course could also be used to create a largescale anonymity attack requiring many nodes. Today's RC just announced does some traffic prioritization which should be a bandaid for the current problem, but doesn't really address similar issues in the longterm. I don't know what solutions to propose, as obviously the fundamental rule is that this is an anonymous system, and we probably want to respect net neutrality to the point practical, but more thought/research/development may have to be done to guard against botnets threatening the functionality of the Tor network or botnets' potential to attack the network's anonymity features. Asa -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsusbscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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US stops jailed activist Barrett Brown from discussing leaks prosecution
by Eugen Leitl 05 Sep '13

05 Sep '13

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/04/barrett-brown-gag-order-us-gov… US stops jailed activist Barrett Brown from discussing leaks prosecution Federal court order prohibits Brown from talking to the media in what critics say is latest in crackdown on investigative journalism Ed Pilkington in New York theguardian.com, Wednesday 4 September 2013 22.50 BST Barrett Brown, Anonymous spokesman Brown's lawyer says the gagging order is a breach of Brown's first amendment rights. Photograph: Nikki Loehr A federal court in Dallas, Texas has imposed a gag order on the jailed activist-journalist Barrett Brown and his legal team that prevents them from talking to the media about his prosecution in which he faces up to 100 years in prison for alleged offences relating to his work exposing online surveillance. The court order, imposed by the district court for the northern district of Texas at the request of the US government, prohibits the defendant and his defence team, as well as prosecutors, from making "any statement to members of any television, radio, newspaper, magazine, internet (including, but not limited to, bloggers), or other media organization about this case, other than matters of public interest." It goes on to warn Brown and his lawyers that "no person covered by this order shall circumvent its effect by actions that indirectly, but deliberately, bring about a violation of this order". According to Dell Cameron of Vice magazine, who attended the hearing, the government argued that the gag order was needed in order to protect Brown from prejudicing his right to a fair trial by making comments to reporters. But media observers seen the hearing in the opposite light: as the latest in a succession of prosecutorial moves under the Obama administration to crack-down on investigative journalism, official leaking, hacking and online activism. Brown's lead defence attorney, Ahmed Ghappour, has countered in court filings, the most recent of which was lodged with the court Wednesday, that the government's request for a gag order is unfounded as it is based on false accusations and misrepresentations. The lawyer says the gagging order is a breach of Brown's first amendment rights as an author who continues to write from his prison cell on issues unconnected to his own case for the Guardian and other media outlets. In his memo to the court for today's hearing, Ghappour writes that Brown's July article for the Guardian "contains no statements whatsoever about this trial, the charges underlying the indictment, the alleged acts underlying the three indictments against Mr Brown, or even facts arguably related to this prosecution." The gag order does give Brown some room to carry on his journalistic work from prison. It says that he will be allowed to continue publishing articles on topics "not related to the counts on which he stands indicted". Following the imposition of the order, Ghappour told the Guardian: "The defense's overriding concern is that Mr Brown continue to be able to exercise his first amendment right as a journalist. The order preserves that ability." The lawyer adds that since the current defence team took over in May, Brown has made only three statements to the media, two of which where articles that did not concern his trial while the third ran no risk of tainting the jury pool. "Defendant believes that a gag order is unwarranted because there is no substantial, or even reasonable, likelihood of prejudice to a fair trial based on statements made by defendant or his counsel since May 1, 2013." Brown, 32, was arrested in Dallas on 12 September last year and has been in prison ever since, charged with 17 counts that include threatening a federal agent, concealing evidence and disseminating stolen information. He faces a possible maximum sentence of 100 years in custody. Before his arrest, Brown became known as a specialist writer on the US government's use of private military contractors and cybersecurity firms to conduct online snooping on the public. He was regularly quoted by the media as an expert on Anonymous, the loose affiliation of hackers that caused headaches for the US government and several corporate giants, and was frequently referred to as the group's spokesperson, though he says the connection was overblown. In 2011, through the research site he set up called Project PM, he investigated thousands of emails that had been hacked by Anonymous from the computer system of a private security firm, HB Gary Federal. His work helped to reveal that the firm had proposed a dark arts effort to besmirch the reputations of WikiLeaks supporters and prominent liberal journalists and activists including the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald. In 2012, Brown similarly pored over millions of emails hacked by Anonymous from the private intelligence company Stratfor. It was during his work on the Stratfor hack that Brown committed his most serious offence, according to US prosecutors – he posted a link in a chat room that connected users to Stratfor documents that had been released online. The released documents included a list of email addresses and credit card numbers belonging to Stratfor subscribers. For posting that link, Brown is accused of disseminating stolen information – a charge with media commentators have warned criminalises the very act of linking. As Geoffrey King, Internet Advocacy Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, has put it, the Barrett Brown case "could criminalize the routine journalistic practice of linking to documents publicly available on the internet, which would seem to be protected by the first amendment to the US constitution under current doctrine". In its motion to the Dallas district court, US prosecutors accuse Brown and his associates of having "solicited the services of the media or media-types to discuss his case" and of continuing to "manipulate the public through press and social media comments". It further accuses Ghappour of "co-ordinating" and "approving" the use of the media, and alleges that between them they have spread "gross fabrications and substantially false recitations of facts and law which may harm both the government and the defence during jury selection". But Ghappour in his legal response has pointed out that several of the specific accusations raised by the government are inaccurate. Prosecutors refer to an article in the Guardian by Greenwald published on 21 March 2013 based partly on an interview between the journalist and Brown, yet as Ghappour points out that piece was posted on the Guardian website before the accused's current legal team had been appointed. Under his legal advice, Ghappour writes, Brown has maintained "radio silence" over his case and has given no further interviews, thus negating the government's case for a gagging order.

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Re: [liberationtech] NSA Laughs at PCs, Prefers Hacking Routers and Switches
by Eugen Leitl 05 Sep '13

05 Sep '13

----- Forwarded message from liberationtech(a)lewman.us ----- Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 22:27:46 -0400 From: liberationtech(a)lewman.us To: liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu Subject: Re: [liberationtech] NSA Laughs at PCs, Prefers Hacking Routers and Switches Organization: The Tor Project, Inc. X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.9.2 (GTK+ 2.24.20; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Reply-To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> On Wed, 4 Sep 2013 20:33:09 -0400 Robert Guerra <rguerra(a)privaterra.org> wrote: > > Curious on people's comments on types of routers, firewalls and > other appliances that might be affected as well as mitigation > strategies. Would installing a pfsense and/or other open source > firewall be helpful in anyway at a home net location? When I read this article, I read core routers and switches at ISPs, like Cisco, Juniper, F5, etc. I don't read this as linksys, dlink, netgear, etc. I'm sure NSA could crack into anything consumer level with ease, it's likely any 4-bit criminal could do it too. However, it makes more sense for NSA to watch the core connectivity points on the Internet, rather than watching individuals, solely from an economic effort versus benefit point of view. When I ran global networks, one can record everything and sort out the individual streams later to find employees doing various layers of fraud or not. There was no point in watching the end points because it was too resource intensive. I'm sure the NSA has analyzed this and come to the same conclusion. There's no point in going after tens of millions of endpoints, when you can own them all with a handful of switches. A counterpoint is that most core Internet routers and switches are running at capacity and any monitoring affects quality of service and gets customers complaining. -- Andrew http://tpo.is/contact pgp 0x6B4D6475 -- Liberationtech is a public list whose archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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Content and popularity analysis of Tor hidden services
by Eugen Leitl 05 Sep '13

05 Sep '13

http://cryptome.org/2013/09/tor-analysis-hidden-services.pdf Content and popularity analysis of Tor hidden services July 29, 2013 Alex Biryukov University of Luxembourg alex.biryukov(a)uni.lu Ivan Pustogarov University of Luxembourg ivan.pustogarov(a)uni.lu Ralf-Philipp Weinmann University of Luxembourg ralf-philipp.weinmann(a)uni.lu ABSTRACT Tor hidden services allow running Internet services while protecting the location of the servers. Their main purpose is to enable freedom of speech even in situations in which powerful adversaries try to suppress it. However, providing location privacy and client anonymity also makes Tor hidden services an attractive platform for every kind of imaginable shady service. The ease with which Tor hidden services can be set up has spurred a huge growth of anonymously provided Internet services of both types. In this paper we analyse the landscape of Tor hidden services. We have studied Tor hidden services after collecting 39824 hidden service descriptors on 4th of Feb 2013 by exploiting protocol and implementation aws in Tor: we scanned them for open ports; in the case of HTTP services, we analysed and classified their content. We also estimated the popularity of hidden services by looking at the request rate for hidden service descriptors by clients. We found that while the content of Tor hidden services is rather varied, the most popular hidden services are related to botnets. Keywords Tor, hidden services, port scanning, classification

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Media Gag of Barrett Brown Case
by John Young 05 Sep '13

05 Sep '13

Filed this morning for the hearing: Media should cover the USG Exhibits to gag media coverage of Barrett Brown: <http://t.co/klI5BvhH2i>http://cryptome.org/2013/09/brown-091.pdf The USG argument to gag media coverage: <http://t.co/klI5BvhH2i>http://cryptome.org/2013/09/brown-092.pdf Defense opposition to the gag order: <http://t.co/klI5BvhH2i>http://cryptome.org/2013/09/brown-090.pdf

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[RISKS] Risks Digest 27.46
by RISKS List Owner 04 Sep '13

04 Sep '13

RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Wednesday 4 September 2013 Volume 27 : Issue 46 ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann, moderator, chmn ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy ***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. ***** This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/27.46.html> The current issue can be found at <http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt> Contents: Our Newfound Fear of Risk (Bruce Schneier) 'Walkie-Talkie' skyscraper melts Jaguar car parts (Martyn Thomas) How the "Internet of Things" May Change the World (Matthew Kruk) "Video: PostgreSQL succeeds where MySQL fails" (Pete Babb via Gene Wirchenko) "Developers hack Dropbox and show how to access user data" (Lucas Mearian via Gene Wirchenko) No password is safe from new breed of cracking software (Salon.com via David Farber) Windows 8 Picture Passwords Easily Cracked (ACM TechNews) Password must be 10 characters and begin and end with a number (jidanni) Test 'reveals Facebook, Twitter and Google snoop on e-mails' (Martin Delgado via Henry Baker) "IBM starts restricting hardware patches to paying customers" (Joab Jackson via Gene Wirchenko) The Ghost Messages of Yahoo's Recycled IDs (Lauren Weinstein) "Report: NSA pays millions for US telecom access" (Joab Jackson via Gene Wirchenko) Re: HuffPo Edward Snowden Impersonated NSA Officials (Dimitri Maziuk, Paul Schreiber) Re: In ACLU lawsuit, scientist demolishes NSA's `It's just metadata' (Amos Shapir) Re: Sensitive data left on hard drives (David Alexander) Re: Text a driver in New Jersey, and you could see your day in court (B.J. Herbison, Larry Sheldon, Paul Robinson) Re: DC, Maryland: Speed Camera Firms Move To Hide Evidence (Paul Robinson) Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 12:37:09 -0500 From: Bruce Schneier <schneier(a)schneier.com> Subject: Our Newfound Fear of Risk Bruce Schneier, Our Newfound Fear of Risk http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/our_newfound_fe.html We're afraid of risk. It's a normal part of life, but we're increasingly unwilling to accept it at any level. So we turn to technology to protect us. The problem is that technological security measures aren't free. They cost money, of course, but they cost other things as well. They often don't provide the security they advertise, and -- paradoxically -- they often increase risk somewhere else. This problem is particularly stark when the risk involves another person: crime, terrorism, and so on. While technology has made us much safer against natural risks like accidents and disease, it works less well against man-made risks. Three examples: * We have allowed the police to turn themselves into a paramilitary organization. They deploy SWAT teams multiple times a day, almost always in nondangerous situations. They tase people at minimal provocation, often when it's not warranted. Unprovoked shootings are on the rise. One result of these measures is that honest mistakes -- a wrong address on a warrant, a misunderstanding -- result in the terrorizing of innocent people, and more death in what were once nonviolent confrontations with police. * We accept zero-tolerance policies in schools. This results in ridiculous situations, where young children are suspended for pointing gun-shaped fingers at other students or drawing pictures of guns with crayons, and high-school students are disciplined for giving each other over-the-counter pain relievers. The cost of these policies is enormous, both in dollars to implement and its long-lasting effects on students. * We have spent over one trillion dollars and thousands of lives fighting terrorism in the past decade -- including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- money that could have been better used in all sorts of ways. We now know that the NSA has turned into a massive domestic surveillance organization, and that its data is also used by other government organizations, which then lie about it. Our foreign policy has changed for the worse: we spy on everyone, we trample human rights abroad, our drones kill indiscriminately, and our diplomatic outposts have either closed down or become fortresses. In the months after 9/11, so many people chose to drive instead of fly that the resulting deaths dwarfed the deaths from the terrorist attack itself, because cars are much more dangerous than airplanes. There are lots more examples, but the general point is that we tend to fixate on a particular risk and then do everything we can to mitigate it, including giving up our freedoms and liberties. There's a subtle psychological explanation. Risk tolerance is both cultural and dependent on the environment around us. As we have advanced technologically as a society, we have reduced many of the risks that have been with us for millennia. Fatal childhood diseases are things of the past, many adult diseases are curable, accidents are rarer and more survivable, buildings collapse less often, death by violence has declined considerably, and so on. All over the world -- among the wealthier of us who live in peaceful Western countries -- our lives have become safer. Our notions of risk are not absolute; they're based more on how far they are from whatever we think of as "normal." So as our perception of what is normal gets safer, the remaining risks stand out more. When your population is dying of the plague, protecting yourself from the occasional thief or murderer is a luxury. When everyone is healthy, it becomes a necessity. Some of this fear results from imperfect risk perception. We're bad at accurately assessing risk; we tend to exaggerate spectacular, strange, and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar, and common ones. This leads us to believe that violence against police, school shootings, and terrorist attacks are more common and more deadly than they actually are -- and that the costs, dangers, and risks of a militarized police, a school system without flexibility, and a surveillance state without privacy are less than they really are. Some of this fear stems from the fact that we put people in charge of just one aspect of the risk equation. No one wants to be the senior officer who didn't approve the SWAT team for the one subpoena delivery that resulted in an officer being shot. No one wants to be the school principal who didn't discipline -- no matter how benign the infraction -- the one student who became a shooter. No one wants to be the president who rolled back counterterrorism measures, just in time to have a plot succeed. Those in charge will be naturally risk averse, since they personally shoulder so much of the burden. We also expect that science and technology should be able to mitigate these risks, as they mitigate so many others. There's a fundamental problem at the intersection of these security measures with science and technology; it has to do with the types of risk they're arrayed against. Most of the risks we face in life are against nature: disease, accident, weather, random chance. As our science has improved -- medicine is the big one, but other sciences as well -- we become better at mitigating and recovering from those sorts of risks. Security measures combat a very different sort of risk: a risk stemming from another person. People are intelligent, and they can adapt to new security measures in ways nature cannot. An earthquake isn't able to figure out how to topple structures constructed under some new and safer building code, and an automobile won't invent a new form of accident that undermines medical advances that have made existing accidents more survivable. But a terrorist will change his tactics and targets in response to new security measures. An otherwise innocent person will change his behavior in response to a police force that compels compliance at the threat of a Taser. We will all change, living in a surveillance state. When you implement measures to mitigate the effects of the random risks of the world, you're safer as a result. When you implement measures to reduce the risks from your fellow human beings, the human beings adapt and you get less risk reduction than you'd expect -- and you also get more side effects, because we all adapt. We need to relearn how to recognize the trade-offs that come from risk management, especially risk from our fellow human beings. We need to relearn how to accept risk, and even embrace it, as essential to human progress and our free society. The more we expect technology to protect us from people in the same way it protects us from nature, the more we will sacrifice the very values of our society in futile attempts to achieve this security. This essay previously appeared on Forbes.com. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 19:29:55 +0100 From: Martyn Thomas <martyn(a)thomas-associates.co.uk> Subject: 'Walkie-Talkie' skyscraper melts Jaguar car parts A risk overlooked in the CAD program? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-23930675 [This is strange. A London skyscraper under construction is apparently being blamed for intensifying the sun's rays and reflecting light on a nearby automobile in which various parts melted. Martyn suggests that the possibility of such an occurrence might have been ignored by the architectural CAD program used to design and spec the building. Waggin' the tale of the Jaguar? PGN] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 23:50:25 -0600 From: "Matthew Kruk" <mkrukg(a)gmail.com> Subject: How the "Internet of Things" May Change the World http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/130830-internet-of-things-t… ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 10:30:48 -0700 From: Gene Wirchenko <genew(a)telus.net> Subject: "Video: PostgreSQL succeeds where MySQL fails" (Pete Babb) Pete Babb, InfoWorld, 03 Sep 2013 Head-to-head comparison shows MySQL failing to report major data errors, which would lead to big headaches for developers http://www.infoworld.com/t/sql/video-postgresql-succeeds-where-mysql-fails-… selected text: In the above video, Conery sets up a basic MySQL query, including a directive that nulls should not be allowed. He then intentionally tries to add data with nulls, hoping that MySQL will catch the error. It doesn't. Conery notes, "MySQL decided, 'You tried to insert null, but what you really meant was zero.' ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 13:35:17 -0700 From: Gene Wirchenko <genew(a)telus.net> Subject: "Developers hack Dropbox and show how to access user data" (Lucas Mearian) Lucas Mearian, Computerworld, 28 Aug 2013 The cloud storage provider's two-factor authentication was bypassed to gain access to user data http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/developers-hack-dropbox-and-show-how-ac… ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 15:40:16 -0400 From: David Farber <dave(a)farber.net> Subject: No password is safe from new breed of cracking software - Salon.com http://www.salon.com/2013/09/02/no_password_is_safe_from_new_breed_of_crack… No password is safe from new breed of cracking software. Chances are you need to change your password. No matter how long it is. [This article originally appeared on The Daily Dot.] Over the weekend, the free password cracking and recovery tool oclHashcat-plus released a new version, 0.15, that can handle passwords up to 55 characters. It works by guessing a lot of common letter combinations. A lot. Really really fast. Other long-string password-crackers exist, such as Hashcat and oclHashcat-lite, though they take a great deal more time to cycle through. This improvement runs at 8 million guesses per second while also allowing users to cut down the number of guesses required by shaping their attacks based on the password-construction protocol followed by a company or group. A combination of increasing awareness of official scrutiny, such as the NSA leaks, growing instances of hacking of all kinds and leaked password lists, has inspired users to radically lengthen their passwords and use passphrases instead. As Dan Goodin noted in Ars Technica, ``Crackers have responded by expanding the dictionaries they maintain to include phrases and word combinations found in the Bible, common literature, and in online discussions.'' One security researcher cracked the passphrase Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn1 -- a phrase from an H.P. Lovecraft horror story. It was less impossible than it was super easy, crackable in minutes, because it was in an easily available hacker word list. The release notes state that the ability to target increased character counts was their most requested change in a development process which took the team six months, who modified 618,473 lines of source code, more than half the code in the product. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 11:59:27 -0400 From: ACM TechNews <technews(a)HQ.ACM.ORG> Subject: Windows 8 Picture Passwords Easily Cracked [From ACM TechNews; 4 Sep 2013] Read the TechNews Online at: http://technews.acm.org [Source: *InformationWeek*, 30 Aug 2013, Thomas Claburn] Microsoft Windows 8's picture gesture authentication (PGA) system is not difficult to crack, according to security researchers from Arizona State and Delaware State universities. The researchers say their experimental model and attack framework enabled it to crack 48 percent of passwords for previously unseen pictures in one dataset and 24 percent in another, in a paper presented at the recent Usenix Conference in August. The researchers also believe their results could be improved with a larger training set and stronger picture-categorization and computer-vision techniques. Windows 8 offers gesture-based passwords and traditional text-based passwords. Setting up a gesture-based password involves choosing a photo from the Picture Library folder and drawing three points on the image to be stored as grid coordinates. However, users tend to pick common points of interest, such as eyes, faces, or discrete objects, and the passwords derived from this constrained set have much less variability than randomly generated passwords. The researchers suggest Microsoft could implement a picture-password-strength meter, and integrate its PGA attack framework to inform users of the potential number of guesses it would take to access the system. http://www.informationweek.com/security/vulnerabilities/windows-8-picture-p… ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 01 Sep 2013 11:41:21 +0800 From: jidanni(a)jidanni.org Subject: Password must be 10 characters and begin and end with a number Signing up at http://www.ellisisland.org/ Password __________ (Must be 10 characters and begin and end with a number) Gee, doesn't pinning it down so firmly merely help the crackers? PCRE /^\d.{8}\d$/ [Yes. Old topic in RISKS, still lives. PGN.] ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 01 Sep 2013 13:41:33 -0700 From: Henry Baker <hbaker1(a)pipeline.com> Subject: Test 'reveals Facebook, Twitter and Google snoop on e-mails' (Martin Delgado) Sunday, Sep 01 2013 9PM 87°F 12AM 84°F 5-Day Forecast Test 'reveals Facebook, Twitter and Google snoop on e-mails': Study of net giants spurs new privacy concerns * Study set out to test confidentiality of 50 of the biggest Internet companies * Researchers sent unique web address in private messages through firms * They found six of the companies opened the link from the message Martin Delgado, *Daily Mail*, 31 Aug 2013 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2407949/Test-reveals-Facebook-Twitt… Facebook, Twitter and Google have been caught snooping on messages sent across their networks, new research claims, prompting campaigners to express concerns over privacy. The findings emerged from an experiment conducted following revelations by US security contractor Edward Snowden about government snooping on Internet accounts. Cyber-security company High-Tech Bridge set out to test the confidentiality of 50 of the biggest Internet companies by using their systems to send a unique web address in private messages. Experts at its Geneva HQ then waited to see which companies clicked on the website. During the ten-day operation, six of the 50 companies tested were found to have opened the link. Among the six were Facebook, Twitter, Google and discussion forum Formspring. High-Tech Bridge chief executive Ilia Kolochenko said: ``We found they were clicking on links that should be known only to the sender and recipient. If the links are being opened, we cannot be sure that the contents of messages are not also being read. All the social network sites would like to know as much as possible about our hobbies and shopping habits because the information has a commercial value. ``The fact that only a few companies were trapped does not mean others are not monitoring their customers. They may simply be using different techniques which are more difficult to detect.'' Earlier this year scientists in Germany claimed another big computer company, Microsoft, was spying on customers using its Skype instant messaging service. Facebook declined to comment on the latest research but said it had complex automated systems in place to combat phishing (Internet identity fraud) and reduce malicious material. Twitter also declined to comment directly but said it used robotic systems to bar spam messages from customer accounts. A source at Google said: ``There is nothing new here. It simply isn't an issue.'' An independent expert explained: ``In principle these companies should not be opening the links, but in practice they are giving a service to customers. The protection provided outweighs any potential commercial gain.'' But campaigners called for stricter safeguards. Nick Pickles, director of pressure group Big Brother Watch, said: ``This is yet another reminder that profit comes before privacy every day for some businesses. Companies such as Google and Facebook rely on capturing as much data as possible to enhance their advertising targeting. They intrude on our privacy to build an ever more detailed picture of our lives.'' ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 14:16:40 -0700 From: Gene Wirchenko <genew(a)telus.net> Subject: "IBM starts restricting hardware patches to paying customers" (Joab Jackson) Joab Jackson, InfoWorld, 28 Aug 2013 Following an Oracle practice, IBM starts to restrict hardware patches to holders of maintenance contracts http://www.infoworld.com/d/computer-hardware/ibm-starts-restricting-hardwar… ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2013 19:40:04 -0700 From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren(a)vortex.com> Subject: The Ghost Messages of Yahoo's Recycled IDs Eva Chan knows the value of a good username. She's had @EC on Twitter "longer than Twitter has had vowels." So when Yahoo started offering recycled user IDs, she put a few names on her wishlist. A little later, Yahoo gave her one of those names. Then she started getting e-mails about a stranger's cancer. http://j.mp/176KZQf (Medium via NNSquad) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 10:33:34 -0700 From: Gene Wirchenko <genew(a)telus.net> Subject: "Report: NSA pays millions for US telecom access" (Joab Jackson) Joab Jackson, InfoWorld, 30 Aug 2013 The Washington Post reports the NSA paid telecom companies $278 million this fiscal year to intercept phone calls, e-mail, and instant messages http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/report-nsa-pays-millions-us-telecom-acc… ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 15:26:59 -0500 From: Dimitri Maziuk <dmaziuk(a)bmrb.wisc.edu> Subject: Re: HuffPo Edward Snowden Impersonated NSA Officials (RISKS-27.45) > 'Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was, an anonymous > former intelligence official told NBC, `'This is why you don't hire > brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant > people get you in trouble.'' As a Unix systems administrator, I have access to files owned by, or can assume the identity of, any user of this system. Including my superiors -- there's nothing brilliant about that, it's how Unix works. (I haven't done Windows since last century, so I'm not sure what security knobs are available in the recent versions. I expect the above is also true of MS Windows -- and OSX of course has a Unix inside.) So, - is it that NSA is using its own highly secure OS where the administrator's access is limited, and Snowden brilliantly hacked through its security layers? And if so, I'm curious: how do the subcontractors' computers interoperate with it, what kind of security clearance do you need to see the API, what does EULA look like, and so on. - or is is that NSA and its subcontractors are using COTS OS and have zero to no understanding of the levels of security and access actually afforded by the system? Or if they do understand, how do they subcontract sysadminning to someone without the highest NSAnet security clearance? Dimitri Maziuk, Programmer/sysadmin, BioMagResBank, UW-Madison http://www.bmrb.wisc.edu ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 20:57:02 -0400 From: Paul Schreiber <paulschreiber(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: HuffPo Edward Snowden Impersonated NSA Officials (Kramer, R-27 45) > 'Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was, ... To me, this sounds like a nontechnical user trying to explain how sudo su [1] works. `Impersonating' is too attention-grabbing. [1] Or its GUI equivalent for their Intranet (View page as ...) ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 18:32:20 +0300 From: Amos Shapir <amos083(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: In ACLU lawsuit, scientist demolishes NSA's `It's just metadata' (RISKS-27.44) If current laws and technology were in effect 40 years ago, Nixon wouldn't need clumsy "plumbers" -- the NSA could have bugged the Watergate offices legally (collecting only "metadata" of course), Deep Throat would be sent to jail, and the Washington Post would be prohibited from reporting anything about the whole affair! ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 07:34:53 +0100 (BST) From: David Alexander <davidalexander440(a)btinternet.com> Subject: Re: Sensitive data left on hard drives The only news aspect of this article is that people are still doing it. Andy Jones and Andrew Blyth at the University of Glamorgan were doing surveys like this and publishing the results at least 10 years ago, with the same findings. I watched the movie "Grosse Point Blank" again recently and was amused to see Joan Cusack 'destroying' a PC by hitting the casing with a club hammer. The really funny thing is that some people actually think it works -- <irony>I presume the blows must knock the data bits off of the surface of the hard drive </irony> ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 01 Sep 2013 19:08:32 -0400 From: "B.J. Herbison" <bj(a)herbison.com> Subject: Re: Text a driver in New Jersey, and you could see your day in court > Even the theoretical concept of holding the person at the other end of an > electronic communication (hell, even another person just talking in the same > vehicle) responsible for a driver's stupidity is beyond ludicrous. I disagree. If a passenger intentionally distracts a driver and a crash occurs the passenger has liability for the crash. Moving the distractor outside of the vehicle electronically shouldn't reduce the liability. The key though is "knows that the recipient is driving and texting". That is often unknowable and usually hard to prove. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 16:45:36 -0500 From: Larry Sheldon <lfsheldon(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: Text a driver in New Jersey, and you could see your day in court (RISKS-27.45) There is no word in my vocabulary for how wrong this. One of my typical uses of electronic messaging is and has long been sending messages to people I know will be, at the time, asleep, eating a meal, in a meeting, or in some other way indisposed to real-time conversation. Under this insanity, the only safe thing for me is to never ever originate a message that might conceivably be delivered to a mobile device. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 18:44:13 -0700 (PDT) From: Paul Robinson <paul(a)paul-robinson.us> Subject: Re: Text a driver in New Jersey, and you could see your day in court (RISKS-27.45) ... holding responsible for a driver's stupidity is beyond ludicrous. And unconstitutional. This violates a number of United States Supreme Court -- and other courts -- decisions on a court's jurisdiction to hale a distant defendant into court to defend a lawsuit. Desktop Techs., Inc. v. Colorworks Reprod. & Design, 1999 U.S. Dist. Lexis 1034 (1999) is pretty much on point. A Canadian company merely running a website was not subject to jurisdiction in Pennsylvania. A mere usenet posting is of less quality for holding jurisdiction than a website. Griffis v. Luban, 646 N.W.2d 527 (2002 Minn.) found that a Usenet posting does not cause the poster to be subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign state. A text message doesn't even rise to the level of a Usenet posting, let alone a website, and therefore there should be no grounds to hold a person sending texts or e-mails, absent some criminal behavior such as threats or stalking or other First Amendment unprotected activity, liable for the transmission or give the courts standing to bring the sender in as the party to a case. There must be at least minimum contact with a state for the courts there to have jurisdiction. Hanson v. Denckla, 357 U.S. 235, 78 S. Ct. 1228, 2 L. Ed. 2d 1283 (1958); Helicopteros Nacionales de Colombia, S.A. v. Hall, 466 U.S. 408, 104 S.Ct. 1868, 80 L.Ed.2d 404 (1984); International Shoe Co. v. Washington, 326 U.S. 310, 66 S. Ct. 154, 90 L. Ed. 95 (1945); Shaffer v. Heitner, 433 U.S. 186, 97 S. Ct. 2569, 53 L. Ed. 2d 683 (1977); World-Wide Volkswagen Corp. v. Woodson, 444 U.S. 286, 100 S. Ct. 559, 62 L. Ed. 2d 490 (1980). Paul Robinson <paul(a)paul-robinson.us> http://paul-robinson.us (My blog) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 16:42:04 -0700 (PDT) From: Paul Robinson <paul(a)paul-robinson.us> Subject: Re: DC, Maryland: Speed Camera Firms Move To Hide Evidence (Burstein, RISKS-27.41) It doesn't say if it was a British patent, which would mean it was unpatented in the United States and no royalties would be due, or if it was (or was also) patented in the U.S., in which case the patent, under the rules then, expired 17 years after issuance, and that's only if the intervening maintenance fees on the patent were also paid, which are due at 3, 7 and 11 years after issuance for all patents issued after December 12, 1980 or the patent automatically and irrevocably expires 6 months after the maintenance fee is not paid; paying it late will not reinstate the patent. So the patent would have expired at best, about 13 years ago. Now the rules are even stricter on expirations, you could tie a patent up in holds by constantly refiling with amendments (some inventors did that to try to capture current practices which were done in a way that unknowingly would infringe upon an applied for patent if the patent's original filing were revised to cover new practices the inventor discovered after filing the application), now, to stop that "practice" (pun unintentional; the filing of patents is called a "practice") U.S. patents expire 17 years after issuance, 20 years after the first filing, or six months after non-payment of maintenance fees, whichever comes first. Paul Robinson <paul(a)paul-robinson.us> http://paul-robinson.us (My blog) ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2012 20:20:16 -0900 From: RISKS-request(a)csl.sri.com Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks) The ACM RISKS Forum is a MODERATED digest. Its Usenet manifestation is comp.risks, the feed for which is donated by panix.com as of June 2011. => SUBSCRIPTIONS: PLEASE read RISKS as a newsgroup (comp.risks or equivalent) if possible and convenient for you. The mailman Web interface can be used directly to subscribe and unsubscribe: http://lists.csl.sri.com/mailman/listinfo/risks Alternatively, to subscribe or unsubscribe via e-mail to mailman your FROM: address, send a message to risks-request(a)csl.sri.com containing only the one-word text subscribe or unsubscribe. You may also specify a different receiving address: subscribe address= ... . You may short-circuit that process by sending directly to either risks-subscribe(a)csl.sri.com or risks-unsubscribe(a)csl.sri.com depending on which action is to be taken. Subscription and unsubscription requests require that you reply to a confirmation message sent to the subscribing mail address. Instructions are included in the confirmation message. 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Lindsay has also added to the Newcastle catless site a palmtop version of the most recent RISKS issue and a WAP version that works for many but not all telephones: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/w/r <http://the.wiretapped.net/security/info/textfiles/risks-digest/> . ==> PGN's comprehensive historical Illustrative Risks summary of one liners: <http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.html> for browsing, <http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.pdf> or .ps for printing is no longer maintained up-to-date except for recent election problems. *** NOTE: If a cited URL fails, we do not try to update them. Try browsing on the keywords in the subject line or cited article leads. ==> Special Offer to Join ACM for readers of the ACM RISKS Forum: <http://www.acm.org/joinacm1> ------------------------------ End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 27.46 ************************

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Re: Gag Ordered in Barrett Brown Case
by John Young 04 Sep '13

04 Sep '13

For the order use: http://cryptome.org/2013/09/brown-093.pdf The t.co is not by us.

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NSA Laughs at PCs, Prefers Hacking Routers and Switches
by Eugen Leitl 04 Sep '13

04 Sep '13

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/nsa-router-hacking/ NSA Laughs at PCs, Prefers Hacking Routers and Switches BY KIM ZETTER09.04.136:30 AM Photo: Santiago Cabezas/Flickr The NSA runs a massive, full-time hacking operation targeting foreign systems, the latest leaks from Edward Snowden show. But unlike conventional cybercriminals, the agency is less interested in hacking PCs and Macs. Instead, America’s spooks have their eyes on the internet routers and switches that form the basic infrastructure of the net, and are largely overlooked as security vulnerabilities. Under a $652-million program codenamed “Genie,” U.S. intel agencies have hacked into foreign computers and networks to monitor communications crossing them and to establish control over them, according to a secret black budget document leaked to the Washington Post. U.S. intelligence agencies conducted 231 offensive cyber operations in 2011 to penetrate the computer networks of targets abroad. This included not only installing covert “implants” in foreign desktop computers but also on routers and firewalls — tens of thousands of machines every year in all. According to the Post, the government planned to expand the program to cover millions of additional foreign machines in the future and preferred hacking routers to individual PCs because it gave agencies access to data from entire networks of computers instead of just individual machines. Most of the hacks targeted the systems and communications of top adversaries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea and included activities around nuclear proliferation. The NSA’s focus on routers highlights an often-overlooked attack vector with huge advantages for the intruder, says Marc Maiffret, chief technology officer at security firm Beyond Trust. Hacking routers is an ideal way for an intelligence or military agency to maintain a persistent hold on network traffic because the systems aren’t updated with new software very often or patched in the way that Windows and Linux systems are. “No one updates their routers,” he says. “If you think people are bad about patching Windows and Linux (which they are) then they are … horrible about updating their networking gear because it is too critical, and usually they don’t have redundancy to be able to do it properly.” He also notes that routers don’t have security software that can help detect a breach. “The challenge [with desktop systems] is that while antivirus don’t work well on your desktop, they at least do something [to detect attacks],” he says. “But you don’t even have an integrity check for the most part on routers and other such devices like IP cameras.” Hijacking routers and switches could allow the NSA to do more than just eavesdrop on all the communications crossing that equipment. It would also let them bring down networks or prevent certain communication, such as military orders, from getting through, though the Post story doesn’t report any such activities. With control of routers, the NSA could re-route traffic to a different location, or intelligence agencies could alter it for disinformation campaigns, such as planting information that would have a detrimental political effect or altering orders to re-route troops or supplies in a military operation. According to the budget document, the CIA’s Tailored Access Programs and NSA’s software engineers possess “templates” for breaking into common brands and models of routers, switches and firewalls. The article doesn’t say it, but this would likely involve pre-written scripts or backdoor tools and root kits for attacking known but unpatched vulnerabilities in these systems, as well as for attacking zero-day vulnerabilities that are yet unknown to the vendor and customers. “[Router software is] just an operating system and can be hacked just as Windows or Linux would be hacked,” Maiffret says. “They’ve tried to harden them a little bit more [than these other systems], but for folks at a place like the NSA or any other major government intelligence agency, it’s pretty standard fare of having a ready-to-go backdoor for your [off-the-shelf] Cisco or Juniper models.” Not all of the activity mentioned in the budget document involved remote hacking. In some cases, according to the document, the operations involved clandestine activity by the CIA or military intelligence units to “physically place hardware implants or software modifications” to aid the spying. “Much more often, an implant is coded entirely in software by an NSA group called Tailored Access Operations (TAO),” the Post writes in its story about the document. “As its name suggests, TAO builds attack tools that are custom-fitted to their targets.” A handful of security researchers have uncovered vulnerabilities in routers in recent years that could be used to do the kind of hacking described in the budget document. In 2005, security researcher Mike Lynn found a serious vulnerability in Cisco IOS, the operating system running on millions of Cisco routers around the world. Lynn discovered the vulnerability after his employer, Internet Security Systems, asked him to reverse-engineer the Cisco operating system to see if he could find security problems with it. Cisco makes the majority of the routers that operate the backbone of the internet as well as many company networks and critical infrastructure systems. The Cisco IOS is as ubiquitous in the backbone as the Windows operating system is on desktops. The vulnerability Lynn found, in a new version of the operation system that Cisco planned to release at the time, would have allowed someone to create a router worm that would shut down every Cisco router through which it passed, bringing down a nation’s critical infrastructure. It also would have allowed an attacker to gain complete control of the router to sniff all traffic passing through a network in order to read, record or alter it, or simply prevent traffic from reaching its recipient. Once Lynn found the vulnerability, it took him six months to develop a working exploit to attack it. Lynn had planned to discuss the vulnerability at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, until Cisco intervened and forced him to pull the talk under threat of a lawsuit. But if Lynn knew about the vulnerability, there were likely others who did as well — including intelligence agencies and criminal hackers. Source code for Cisco’s IOS has been stolen at least twice, either by entities who were interested in studying the software to gain a competitive advantage or to uncover vulnerabilities that would allow someone to hack or control them. Other researchers have uncovered different vulnerabilities in other Cisco routers that are commonly used in small businesses and home offices. Every year at computer security conferences — including the Black Hat conference where NSA Director Keith Alexander presented a keynote this year — U.S. intelligence agencies and contractors from around the world attend to discover information about new vulnerabilities that might be exploited and to hire talented researchers and hackers capable of finding more vulnerabilities in systems. In 2008, a researcher at Core Security Technologies developed a root kit for the Cisco IOS that was designed to give an attacker a persistent foothold on a Cisco router while remaining undetected. According to the Post story, the NSA designs most of the offensive tools it uses in its Genie operation, but it spent $25.1 million in one year for “additional covert purchases of software vulnerabilities” from private malware vendors who operate on the grey market — closed markets that peddle vulnerabilities and exploits to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as opposed to the black market that sells them to cyber criminals. The price of vulnerabilities and exploits varies, depending on a number of factors. Vulnerabilities and exploits can sell for anywhere from $50,000 to more than a million, depending on the exclusivity of the purchase — some vulnerabilities are sold to multiple parties with the understanding that others are using it as well — and their ubiquity. A vulnerability that exists in multiple versions of an operating system is more valuable than a vulnerability that exists in just one version. A class of vulnerability that crosses multiple browser brands is also more valuable than a single vulnerability that just affects the Safari browser or Chrome. The Stuxnet cyber weapon that was reportedly created by the U.S. and Israel to sabotage centrifuges used in Iran’s uranium enrichment program, used five zero-day exploits to spread itself among systems in Iran, including a rare exploit that attacked the .LNK function in multiple versions of the Windows operating system in order to spread the worm silently via infected USB sticks. Ubiquitous router vulnerabilities are difficult to find since there are so many different configurations for routers, and an attack that works against one router configuration might not work for another. But a vulnerability that affects the core operating system is much more valuable since it is less likely to be dependent on the configuration. Maiffret says there hasn’t been a lot of public research on router vulnerabilities, but whenever someone has taken a look at them, they have found security holes in them. “They’re always successful in finding something,” he says. Once a vulnerability becomes known to the software maker and is patched, it loses a lot of its value. But because many users and administrators do not patch their systems, some vulnerabilities can be used effectively for years, even after a patch is available. The Conficker worm, for example, continued to infect millions of computers long after Microsoft released a patch that should have stopped the worm from spreading. Routers in particular often remain unpatched because system administrators don’t think they will be targeted and because administrators are concerned about network outages that could occur while the patch is applied or if the patch is faulty. Kim Zetter is a senior reporter at Wired covering cybercrime, privacy, security and civil liberties. Read more by Kim Zetter Follow @KimZetter and @ThreatLevel on Twitter.

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Re: [tor-talk] Exit node stats collection?
by Eugen Leitl 04 Sep '13

04 Sep '13

----- Forwarded message from The Doctor <drwho(a)virtadpt.net> ----- Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 13:14:35 -0400 From: The Doctor <drwho(a)virtadpt.net> To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Exit node stats collection? Organization: Virtual Adept Networks, Unlimited User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130514 Thunderbird/17.0.6 Reply-To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 09/03/2013 06:06 PM, mirimir wrote: > How would one identify new, and suddenly very popular, hidden > services? I do not know if this link has been posted yet, but this jumped out at me this morning - it's a technique for correlating publically known Tor nodes against hidden services: http://cybermashup.com/2013/09/04/dont-run-a-tor-router-and-a-hidden-servic… Thoughts from the community? - -- The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS] Developer, Project Byzantium: http://project-byzantium.org/ PGP: 0x807B17C1 / 7960 1CDC 85C9 0B63 8D9F DD89 3BD8 FF2B 807B 17C1 WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/ "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.20 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlInansACgkQO9j/K4B7F8HwgwCfc1irnBwHpVmfV2Ge4ank1xLH KbIAoIgMqFH2t2NytXCQnJShwWyDct14 =jMxZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsusbscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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Re: [Cryptography] Popular curves (was: NSA and cryptanalysis)
by Eugen Leitl 04 Sep '13

04 Sep '13

----- Forwarded message from Jose Luis Gomez Pardo <gomez.pardo(a)usc.es> ----- Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 18:35:52 +0200 From: Jose Luis Gomez Pardo <gomez.pardo(a)usc.es> To: ianG <iang(a)iang.org> Cc: Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam(a)gmail.com>, cryptography(a)metzdowd.com Subject: Re: [Cryptography] Popular curves (was: NSA and cryptanalysis) X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 7.1.0.9 At 08:20 04/09/2013, ianG wrote: > On 3/09/13 18:13 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > .... >> Do we have an ECC curve that is (1) secure and (2) has a written >> description prior to 1 Sept 1993? > > > (Not answering your direct question.) Personally, I was happy to > plan on using DJB's Curve25519. He's done the research and says it > is good. Comments? > > iang Curve25519 was designed for elliptic Diffie-Hellman taking care of both security and efficiency aspects and seems very strong in both of them. Some comments on its usage for other purposes can be found in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2515948/use-of-curve25519 This curve was originally written for x86 32-bit platforms and a 64-bit implementation can be found in the following links: https://code.google.com/p/curve25519-donna/ https://github.com/agl/curve25519-donna In addition to this curve and to the NIST curves, another source for elliptic curves that can be (according to the developers) freely used is: http://certivox.org/display/EXT/CertiVox+Standard+Curves where cuves over 384 and 512-bit prime fields can be found which are likely secure. Of course, in all these cases you have to trust the curve developers somewhat although you can also check these curves for possible vulnerabilities. Alternatively, one can build one's own curve and for this one needs to have access to an implementation of the SEA point counting algorithm. A little while ago I was writing a cryptography book that uses Maple to implement both cryptographic schemes and cryptanalytic algorithms and, for a while, I contemplated the idea of programming SEA in Maple. However, I soon discarded it because there are already some freely available excelent implementations in compiled languages and my Maple implementation would necessarily be much slower. Thus, for some computations in the examples in my book I ended using MIRACL, a C/C++ library with excellent support for ECC which was recently adquired by CertiVox and can be found in the following links: http://www.certivox.com/miracl/ https://github.com/CertiVox/MIRACL Using the SEA algorithm one can readily find elliptic curves of prime order (or with a very small cofactor) which, additionally, can be tested to ensure that they satisfy some important conditions such as not having small embedding degree (to prevent the MOV reduction attack) or not having trace one (anomalous curves) which makes them also vulnerable. Of course, if the curves are (pseudo)randomly generated, it is very unlikely that they suffer from these vulnerabilities. Methods for verifiably random generation of such curves can be found in: http://www.secg.org/download/aid-780/sec1-v2.pdf and some recommended elliptic curves generated using these methods (including curves over 384-bit and 521-bit prime fields) are available from: http://www.secg.org/download/aid-784/sec2-v2.pdf Of course, I don't know whether these curves are completely free from IP concerns but, according to the sources where these curves are published, this seems to be the case (I am far from expert in the IP subject but, as a mathematician, the idea of someone "owning" an elliptic curve in some sense, seems to me very strange). Jose Luis. _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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