Cryptography-Digest Digest #207, Volume #11 Sun, 27 Feb 00 06:13:02 EST
Contents:
Re: e-payment suggestion (David A Molnar)
NSA SPIES ON THE POPE, MOTHER THERESA AND DIANA! (Dave Hazelwood)
Re: On jamming interception networks (Nemo psj)
Key escrow and echelon (hev)
Re: On jamming interception networks (Steve K)
Re: CRC-16 Reverse Algorithm ? ("Marty")
Snuffle source code? ("helper")
Re: Go after all and any CIA and NSA and FBI officers, controllers, handlers and
their agents and destroy their networks completely ("lezbefranc")
Re: Key escrow and echelon (Dave Hazelwood)
Re: On jamming interception networks ("Douglas A. Gwyn")
Re: Cryonics and cryptanalysis ("Douglas A. Gwyn")
Re: Cryonics and cryptanalysis (Vernon Schryver)
Re: On jamming interception networks (Mok-Kong Shen)
Re: On jamming interception networks (Mok-Kong Shen)
Re: On jamming interception networks (Mok-Kong Shen)
Re: On jamming interception networks (Mok-Kong Shen)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: David A Molnar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: e-payment suggestion
Date: 27 Feb 2000 05:24:08 GMT
Guy Macon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Do you, by any chance, let some poorly paid waitress take
> your card away for a few moments when you are dining out?
One more good reason not to have a credit card in the first place...
-David
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Dave Hazelwood)
Subject: NSA SPIES ON THE POPE, MOTHER THERESA AND DIANA!
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 06:02:24 GMT
SPY agencies in Britain and America eavesdropped on
Diana, Princess of Wales and Mark Thatcher, son of the
former prime minister, as part of a global system of
monitoring communications, according to former intelligence
officials.
Calls by Diana were picked up because of her international
charity work; Thatcher's calls surfaced in the monitoring of
British arms deals with Saudi Arabia.
The officials also revealed that charities such as Amnesty
International, Christian Aid and Greenpeace were secretly
spied on. Overseas targets have even included the Vatican:
messages sent by the Pope and the late Mother Teresa of
Calcutta have been intercepted, read and passed on to
Whitehall intelligence officers, the sources say.
Codenamed Echelon, the monitoring system is part of a
worldwide network of listening stations capable of processing
millions of messages an hour. At least 10 Echelon stations
operate around the world. Canada, Australia and New
Zealand participate, as well as Britain and the United States.
Read it all here:
http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/02/27/stinwenws02035.html?999
All in the name of democracy and human rights? Isn't this what we
fought Communism for 50 years to avoid ?
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Nemo psj)
Subject: Re: On jamming interception networks
Date: 27 Feb 2000 06:06:24 GMT
Not now that you have mentioned that people might want to add random or sudo
random messages at the end of there mail to trick the NSA into decoding them
the NSA wont bother now since its almost a certenty that they read these
messages here.
-Pure
------------------------------
From: hev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: alt.2600
Subject: Key escrow and echelon
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 06:09:31 GMT
Some PKI vendors are big on Key escrow, the storage of encryption keys
in a "secure location." Some of these PKI vendors have intimate
relationships with big Echelon players (Defense Canada, NSA, DoD, M15
etc). I've always wondered if these three letter agencies could get into
the private key repositories. You may think you have a secure connection
with your PKI or VPN, but if someone has access to the private
encryption keys, you are screwed.
Coincidence?
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Steve K)
Subject: Re: On jamming interception networks
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 06:12:19 GMT
On Sun, 27 Feb 2000 13:02:33 +1000, Andy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
>>
>> [.. snipped ..] It was suggested
>> instead that everybody (it suffices, if there would be sufficient
>> number of people who cooperate) appends to his/her mails or posts
>> a few lines of random hex sequences. [.. snipped ..]
>>
>> Thinking that this suggestion is indeed not too bad for practical
>> realization, I am presenting it here for discussions. Perhaps
>> some readers of this thread have cool and much better ideas.
>>
>> M. K. Shen
>> --------------------------
>> http://home.t-online.de/home/mok-kong.shen
>
>Excellent idea. And just to wet their appetite, also
>include a few interesting plain text words as well.
>
>Bomb President Assassination IRA Carlos etc.
>
>Regards
>Andy
Pretty good ideas. IMO "they" probably don't try to decrypt random
text, since that's practically always going to be an exercise in
futility. But they would not be doing their job, if they did not
record the fact that an encrypted message of a given size went from
point A to point B, and if either party is on a watch list, the whole
text would have to be saved, just in case keys become available at a
later date. (BTW, the likely existence of these archives suggests a
reason to change cipher keys periodically, however redundant that may
be from a purely mathematical viewpoint...)
Adding pseudo-encrypted junk might help to defeat filters that are
specifically designed to identify and ignore messages with "ESCHELON
jammer" keywords. I'm sure that the monitoring network uses massively
parallel purpose-built processors to scan messages, that reject texts
with "key words" that are not part of complete sentences with related
context.
The only problem is logistical: Getting people to do it, in
sufficient numbers to make a real difference. Distributing reuseable
blocks of random junk wouldn't help much; they would be too easily
recognised after a few repetitions. IMO, its just as easy, if not
more so, to use real encryption. Besides, that way the participants
get the tools to discuss their political and other personal affairs
with a large measure of security against eavesdropping.
:o)
Steve
---Continuing freedom of speech brought to you by---
http://www.eff.org/ http://www.epic.org/
http://www.cdt.org/
PGP key 0x5D016218
All others have been revoked.
------------------------------
Reply-To: "Marty" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: "Marty" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: CRC-16 Reverse Algorithm ?
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 22:23:34 -0800
David A. Wagner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:89a959$to6$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> In article <#txNt0Ng$GA.262@cpmsnbbsa03>, Marty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Inserted and/or deleted ones at the start of a ones initialized CRC are
> > indeed detected.
>
> Did you mean "not detected"? I thought Doug Stell got it right.
No, I believe Doug's incorrect.
>
> Surely I'm missing something. We know that, when the CRC uses an
> primitive polynomial, the all-ones state 111..1 goes to 11..10
> after clocking it once [*]. In other words, if initialize the CRC
First, CRC's do not ussually use a primitive polynomial. They serve
a somewhat different purpose, error detection rather than max
cyclical length.
Second, when the state of a CRC is all ones it transforms to a non
zero, non all ones state on the next clock. This state is independent (
except for the lsb) of the incomming data bit. The data bit
is not xored in before the decision to toggle the other crc state bits.
> to all-ones and feed in a zero bit, we get the new state 11..10.
> But now we can imagine initializing it to the all-ones state and
> feeding in a one bit; this complements the feedback tap, and so
> where a zero was previously fed in, now a one will be fed in, and
> thus the new state will be 11..11, always.
>
> Consequently, if the CRC is initialized to the all-ones state, we
> can insert as many one bits at the start of the message as we like,
> and it won't affect the final result.
>
Another way to see this is to note that the high speed lookup table
entry for 0xff is not 0xffffff.....00 which would be the case if the state
register remained all ones after recieving a 0xff byte.
> (It may be easier to see this by symmetry: a corresponding property
> holds for the all-zeros state and prepending zero bits; and everything
> is linear, so you can just complement everything in sight and by
> symmetry the property will still hold.)
>
Symmetry is not applicable here. 0's act quite differntly from 1's.
> Where did I go wrong? What am I missing? I'm confused.
>
I hope this explanation makes sense. Try out a CRC-32 which starts
with all ones. You will see it changes state when fed ones.
>
> [*] Proof: Obvious. Treat it as a free-running LFSR. There are only
> two states it can go to, i.e., 11..11 and 11..10. If it goes to
> the former, then we have a cycle of length, so the LFSR isn't
> full-period, and thus the polynomial can't be primitive,
contradiction.
> When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains must be true,
> and so surely 111..1 -> 11..10.
-Marty
------------------------------
From: "helper" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Snuffle source code?
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 23:31:53 -0800
There was an article Thursday
(http://wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,34550,00.html) about Daniel Bernstein
finally being given the go-ahead to post his source code for Snuffle to the
net. Anyone gotten it, yet? If so, where? Thx.
------------------------------
From: "lezbefranc" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To:
alt.politics.org.cia,soc.culture.russian,soc.culture.soviet,soc.culture.europe,soc.culture.nordic,soc.culture.italian,soc.culture.israel,soc.culture.china,alt.security
Subject: Re: Go after all and any CIA and NSA and FBI officers, controllers, handlers
and their agents and destroy their networks completely
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 08:22:54 -0000
is this David shaila?
Markku J. Saarelainen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>
> Go after all and any CIA and NSA and FBI officers, controllers, handlers
and
> their agents and destroy their networks completely.
>
> There are massive human networks operating in all regions of the world and
> in Europe these US Intelligence Community driven establishments are
stealing
> the economic and business information from European businesses to decrease
> the European competitiveness.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Markku
>
> "Markku J. Saarelainen" wrote:
>
> > Basically, I was within the program and system of the US Intelligence
> > Community that was spying on other businesses and individuals. The US
> > National Security Strategy is heavily based on economical performance
> > and objectives and US government steals any information in the
> > categories of special intelligence topics to protect the US National
> > Security Strategy or this is how they call it. Many counter intelligence
> > activities are just offensive intelligence programs geared toward
> > acquiring the information of other businesses, their operations and
> > business intelligence. This is the mindset of the US National Security
> > Council and Advisors and the tope of the CIA/ NSA. FBI is just
> > protecting these programs and actually are violating also all kinds of
> > laws and regulations. So when these politicians are talking about
> > "potential espionage or spying", they are just implementing the US
> > covert action to protect the intelligence system and try to maintain
> > some good relations with some so called "friendly nations". The US
> > Intelligence Community is operating in trade organizations, commercial
> > enterprises, standards bodies and so on (see some examples from my
> > postings where I have been - and especially good luck with your
> > operations here in Coopers, Ramos and Lee - Miami ). In addition, many
> > internet businesses and operators such as few mailing list runners such
> > as ISO 9000 are within their system. I have specific experiences of this
> > that I have posted in 1999 on the USENET (Some of my message such as TL
> > 9000 were not distributed although they were discussing relevant issues
> > and were based on factual statements - basically I had changed the
> > direction of my thinking and my postings were immediately rejected) Many
> > U.S. people operating in international business in the US are under
> > cover and providing the business information from these businesses to
> > the US intelligence services operating within the US and globally too
> > for the U.S. companies. This is their ways of maintaining "economic
> > leadership and competitiveness". If I would be the CEO of any
> > international company, I would initiate the complete polygraph testing
> > of all and any U.S. people working in my company.
> >
> > And then I read these stories that are just describing covert actions to
> > protect the US Intelligence Community.
> >
> > " ....... evel playing field in big international contracts."
> >
> > " European Suspicions
> > European furor centers around a massive eavesdropping
> > and information sharing system run by the United
> > States,
> > Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which is
> > believed to intercept as many as 3 billion phone, fax
> > and
> > e-mail transmissions worldwide every day (see
> > interactive
> > and video, above).
> > "
> >
> > http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/echelon000224.html
>
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Dave Hazelwood)
Crossposted-To: alt.2600
Subject: Re: Key escrow and echelon
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 08:35:39 GMT
No it is not coincidence.
Key escrow is worse than publishing your keys in the
newspaper. Why? Because they want you to THINK you have security
because only then will you divulge information that they desire.
It is the worst form of entrapment you can think of and brought to you
by your very own free and democratic human rights loving
anti-communist government.
I have no doubt they salivate at the chance to eavesdrop on Lady Diana
gleam at the chance to get information they can later use to blackmail
even the Pope and discredit Mother Theresa.
What kind of sickos are these people?
hev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Some PKI vendors are big on Key escrow, the storage of encryption keys
>in a "secure location." Some of these PKI vendors have intimate
>relationships with big Echelon players (Defense Canada, NSA, DoD, M15
>etc). I've always wondered if these three letter agencies could get into
>the private key repositories. You may think you have a secure connection
>with your PKI or VPN, but if someone has access to the private
>encryption keys, you are screwed.
>
>Coincidence?
------------------------------
From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: On jamming interception networks
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 09:18:16 GMT
Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
> In a private communication it was correctly pointed out to me that
> my suggestion [encryption] evidently entails too much work for the
> people to do ...
Not if it is done automatically, as with PGP-enabled mail interfaces.
The main problem is getting interoperable encryption to occur *by
default* (the first time somebody e-mails something, he'd be asked
to set up his personal key). Otherwise it would be much worse than
the guys who send HTML to newsgroups.
> ... It was suggested
> instead that everybody (it suffices, if there would be sufficient
> number of people who cooperate) appends to his/her mails or posts
> a few lines of random hex sequences. Since the agencies could not
> know whether these are innocent 'scarecrows' or are outputs of
> encryption algorithms, they would try to decrypt them.
That has been suggested before (as has "jamming ECHELON" by sending
lots of supposed search keywords like "bomb"). It would be a waste
of effort and bandwidth. I think you guys are working from a badly
flawed model of how interception works.
------------------------------
From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Cryonics and cryptanalysis
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 09:22:09 GMT
Jerry Coffin wrote:
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] says...
> > But can people be described by bits? In the past several years, quite a
> > few authors have pointed out that a sufficiently precise description of
> > a human being -- a description in bits -- provides a "snapshot" of that
> > human being at a specific point in time. Given the "snapshot," we could
> > in principal restore the human being.
I missed the original posting, but the idea is unworkable for
several reasons. For one, we don't know of any way to extract
the internal state information of a person's consciousness
(his memory, personality, etc.). For another, we don't know
of any way to implant it back into a clone. There is a lot
more to a person than just the order of amino acids on his DNA.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Vernon Schryver)
Subject: Re: Cryonics and cryptanalysis
Date: 26 Feb 2000 19:12:37 -0700
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Jerry Coffin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> ...
>One obvious way of doing that would be to invest some money in
>something extremely stable, but encrypt the access to it so the only
>way to get the money is for you to tell them the key. You memorize
>the key and they can get the money by un-freezing you. This leaves
>another problem though: somebody might wake you up even though they
>haven't cured you. They torture/whatever you to get the key, and
>then let you die.
>
>To prevent that, what you probably want as a key is a combination of
>three things: the result of a test showing you're disease-free, a
> ...
That falls apart given the assumptions. With enough knowledge about how
the human body works to revive what Larry Niven named a "corpsicle," you
could surely recover the memories in a frozen head without bothering to
really revive or probably even thaw it. That might destroy the corpsicle,
but so what? Given all of your memories, how do you prevent tricking
those tests? It sounds to me like the software copy protection problem.
Given the full state of a computer, the "debugging" tools implied by having
the full state, and the motivation, you can break absolutely any copy
protection scheme. Encryption, authentication, etc. don't work or are
irrelevant when all of the secrets are known.
See Niven's stories based on the observation that future generations are
unlikely to have much motivation for thawing their predecessors. See also
the stories of many, such as B.Aldiss, F.Pohl, L.Niven, D.Knight, and
I.Asimov, based on obvious implications of being able make and then
instantiate "recordings" of people or even only inanimate objects. Many
of them ignore some of the obvious and worst implications for the sake of
having a story to tell. Note also that the point of "cronyics" is
practical immoratility, and so see the stories of many about the
implications of practical immortality, whether it is so expensive that
only handful can have it, or cheap and easy for everyone. If you think
about them for a little while, the ideas of cryonics and of recording
people are as discouraging as time travel. If and where it become
possible, its nature would immediately make it impractical.
Vernon Schryver [EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
From: Mok-Kong Shen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: On jamming interception networks
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 12:10:04 +0100
Douglas A. Gwyn wrote:
>
> Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
> > In a private communication it was correctly pointed out to me that
> > my suggestion [encryption] evidently entails too much work for the
> > people to do ...
>
> Not if it is done automatically, as with PGP-enabled mail interfaces.
> The main problem is getting interoperable encryption to occur *by
> default* (the first time somebody e-mails something, he'd be asked
> to set up his personal key). Otherwise it would be much worse than
> the guys who send HTML to newsgroups.
I don't yet understand you. One could simply use a PRNG to generate
the needed hexs and append these just as one appends one's signature.
I don't yet see the problems.
>
> > ... It was suggested
> > instead that everybody (it suffices, if there would be sufficient
> > number of people who cooperate) appends to his/her mails or posts
> > a few lines of random hex sequences. Since the agencies could not
> > know whether these are innocent 'scarecrows' or are outputs of
> > encryption algorithms, they would try to decrypt them.
>
> That has been suggested before (as has "jamming ECHELON" by sending
> lots of supposed search keywords like "bomb"). It would be a waste
> of effort and bandwidth. I think you guys are working from a badly
> flawed model of how interception works.
Intentionally putting in keywords like 'bombs' at best leads to
some humans of the agencies to personally look at the messages
and to quickly discard these but the hex strings of 'unknown'
nature would actually cause their resource-consuming analysis
mechinery to 'run'.
M. K. Shen
------------------------------
From: Mok-Kong Shen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: On jamming interception networks
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 12:10:00 +0100
Steve K wrote:
>
> Pretty good ideas. IMO "they" probably don't try to decrypt random
> text, since that's practically always going to be an exercise in
> futility. But they would not be doing their job, if they did not
> record the fact that an encrypted message of a given size went from
> point A to point B, and if either party is on a watch list, the whole
> text would have to be saved, just in case keys become available at a
> later date. (BTW, the likely existence of these archives suggests a
> reason to change cipher keys periodically, however redundant that may
> be from a purely mathematical viewpoint...)
As said also in another response, it's all the much better if they
don't look at the apparently random lines. I am not sure that
traffic analysis is any useful to track really secret messages.
Firstly, the volume is small in the first place and one can arrange
these to be sent by a number of friends, for example. Second,
these could be sent from a neutral place (from internet cafes to,
say, a newsgroup for the intended recipients to read).
> Adding pseudo-encrypted junk might help to defeat filters that are
> specifically designed to identify and ignore messages with "ESCHELON
> jammer" keywords. I'm sure that the monitoring network uses massively
> parallel purpose-built processors to scan messages, that reject texts
> with "key words" that are not part of complete sentences with related
> context.
As said, such rejections would actually help.
> The only problem is logistical: Getting people to do it, in
> sufficient numbers to make a real difference. Distributing reuseable
> blocks of random junk wouldn't help much; they would be too easily
> recognised after a few repetitions. IMO, its just as easy, if not
> more so, to use real encryption. Besides, that way the participants
> get the tools to discuss their political and other personal affairs
> with a large measure of security against eavesdropping.
If the people have and take the trouble to use the encryption tools,
then there is no reason of not doing that. The suggestion takes
care of the rest of the people, who in my opinion constitute
the vast majority. Here a very simple mechanism suffices, e.g. a
simple pseudo-random generator that outputs hexs.
M. K. Shen
------------------------------
From: Mok-Kong Shen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: On jamming interception networks
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 12:09:47 +0100
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> > encryption algorithms, they would try to decrypt them. Since the
> > sequences, however, are in fact random, they can never succeed,
> > no matter how much efforts/resources are spent on them. On the
> > other hand, they can also never be sure that what they have in
> > hand are not secret messages, albeit encrypted with algorithms
> > of very high strength.
>
> I think that the sequences should be randomly taken from dictionaries and
> encrypted with known algorithms. If they were pure random, weakness of
> known encryption algorithms could serve as a means to distinguish between
> random messages and actually encrypted ones.
Theoretically you are right. But practically it is not necessary
in my view. For the good algorithms should produce outputs
barely distinguishable from random strings (they are sometimes
used as pseudo-random generators). On the other hand, each
algorithm would have its specific such weakness and the agencies
don't know which algorithm is actually used (it could well be one
with which they have yet hardly much real exeprience).
M. K. Shen
------------------------------
From: Mok-Kong Shen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: On jamming interception networks
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 12:09:54 +0100
Nemo psj wrote:
>
> Not now that you have mentioned that people might want to add random or sudo
> random messages at the end of there mail to trick the NSA into decoding them
> the NSA wont bother now since its almost a certenty that they read these
> messages here.
If the agencies don't bother to look at these random lines, that's
all the much better. For one has then finally a secure channel to
transmit (as occasionally the need arises) encrypted messages
without fear of any analysis being attempted by them.
M. K. Shen
------------------------------
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