Cryptography-Digest Digest #196, Volume #11 Thu, 24 Feb 00 23:13:01 EST
Contents:
Re: Report Details Vast SPY Network ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: Processor speeds. ("Trevor Jackson, III")
Re: Processor speeds. ("Trevor Jackson, III")
Re: British Plans (with a subject header this time) (Tim Tyler)
D.O.E. SysWorks Updates: (JPeschel)
Re: Implementation of Crypto on DSP (Thierry Moreau)
Re: - US "allows" encryption program online (Isaac)
Re: - US "allows" encryption program online ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: Passwords secure against dictionary attacks? (Tom Holroyd)
Re: Mixmasters encrypt how? (William Rowden)
Re: Processor speeds. ("Clockwork")
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Report Details Vast SPY Network
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 01:02:21 GMT
In article <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Dave
Hazelwood) wrote:
> The plot thickens!
>
> BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - A U.S.-led communications monitoring network
> is intercepting "billions of messages per hour" including telephone
> calls, fax transmissions and private e-mails, according to a European
> Parliament report made public Wednesday.
>
> "We are not talking about a trivial thing here ... we cannot stop
> them, they will continue," said Ducan Campbell, author of
> the special parliament-commissioned report on the Echelon spy-network.
>
> Campbell said that the intelligence network monitors and intercepts
> sensitive European-wide commercial communications. "The level of use
> is getting out of control," he told a packed hearing of the
> Parliament's Committee for Justice and Home Affairs.
>
> He said Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand are also involved
> in Echelon. Other nations including France and Germany also
> participate in a lower level in the spy-network which dates back 50
> years to the beginning of the Cold War.
>
Among the Europeans, the French Government
seems to be the one most upset by this news,
according to other stories on this subject. The
French Government feels left out and wants
greater intelligence capacity like our own.
They are the only major government to have
made public some of their findings on UFOs
(the COMETA report). This report asks for
more intelligence gathering partly because the
French are jealous of the U.S. DOD's knowledge
of UFOs.
> "The capacity of the filtering systems is enormous," Campbell said. He
> added that most international internet communications are being routed
> through the United States and through nine known U.S. National
> Security Agency interception sites.
>
> Intelligence facilities located in the five countries can intercept
> fax, e-mail or telephone communications easily he said.
> Campbell urged the European Union to take action to protect against
> unwanted interception of communications, which he said were violations
> of human rights.
>
> Committee chairman Graham Watson said he wanted to be sure the
> international surveillance system was not abusing its powers.
>
> Campbell said Microsoft, IBM, and a certain "large American microchip
> maker" were providing certain product features which allow the
> interception of information flow.
>
> Campbell said he did not know whether the U.S. corporations were
> benefitting from the information gathering but said
> previous commercial espionage resulted in the collapse of several
> European contracts in the airline industry - both military and
> commercial.
>
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 20:39:21 -0500
From: "Trevor Jackson, III" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Processor speeds.
Clockwork wrote:
> "Trevor Jackson, III" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>
> > When a game console can handle both the applications and the tools needed
> to
> > produce them your comparison might make sense. But AFAIK consoles are
> "not as
> > widely supported" as PCs or even mainframes.
>
> I have tons of experience on these machines (PCs, Consoles, and other
> proprietary hardware). I develop games and dabble in crypto. Please look
> at my previous posts for more discussion, but to answer your concerns
> directly:
Good. Then we are both familiar with the requirements of entertaining
simulations.
>
>
> 1. Games involve more complex systems than the most complex crypto systems.
> The applications "can" and "will" be developed for these systems -- with
> ease. (Most systems use standard RTOS and/or WinCE T).
>
> 2. Nintendo, Sony, and Sega not
> supported??????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Is this a claim that these platforms are as well supported for creating general
purpose applications as they are for creating games? There is a distinct
difference between a platform highly optimized for interaction and one highly
optimized for data processing. In the limit of being ATTAP they might be
indistinguishable, but when I looked at consoles in early 98 they appeared to be
specialized architectures.
>
>
> People really need to research this before posting. These systems are
> incredible and can perform amazing feats of number crunching performance (at
> 128 bits). Go pick up a new console system and then ask yourself, "How do
> you simulate a complete 3D environment with lighting, physics, collision
> detection, artificial intelligence, geometry transformations, DolbyT audio,
> and precision input?" You buy a $2000.00(US) PC or you by a $200.00(US)
> console. Case closed.
>
>
> At this time, I can guarantee that a small cluster of consoles could become
> a super computer of exceptional potential -- for less than a fraction of the
> cost and space of any distributed system. Especially if the systems focuses
> on one task instead of creating beautiful 3D graphics.
>
> I predict you can factor numbers in one 128-bit register (US export
> standards), simulate weather systems, simulate a nuclear explosion, and
> render movie sequences from Toy Story T or Jurassic Park T on an shoestring
> budget.
Why would someone wanting to build a special purpose machine for one of the
above purposes buy the whole console? Why wouldn't it make sense to buy CPUs of
equivalent capability and string them together?
If building a supercomputer were so easy wouldn't S. Cray or D. Hillis have
figured out that they didn't need all that expensive specialized hardware?
>
>
> BTW, look around the Internet read what Sony is planning for there next
> system. They ARE going to move the next PlayStationT to a WorkStation -- it
> is just a matter of time.
It's an interesting thesis. It sounds like it might match the historical
pattern in which mainframe companies looked down upon minicomputers as toys,
mini companies looked down upon micros as toys, and now micro & workstation
companies might look down upon consoles as (literally) toys long enough for the
console companies to eat their lunch.
But even if the support is available for general purpose computing, would you
trust a weather report calculated by a supercomputer running any flavor of
windoze? Would you trust your nuclear weapons simulations to a platform
containing the buggiest software ever written?
Now if someone hacked a BSD or Linux kernel together to that PVM/MPI were
supported, that would be very attractive.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 20:41:49 -0500
From: "Trevor Jackson, III" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Processor speeds.
Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
> Trevor Jackson, III wrote:
> >
>
> > I think part of the answer is the phase change that happened more than 25 years
> > ago. I cannot find the attribution, but the thought is that "We do not write
> > software to tell the machine waht to do. We buy hardware to execute the
> > software." The translation is that software compatibility increasingly
> > outweighs raw hardware performance.
> >
> > When a game console can handle both the applications and the tools needed to
> > produce them your comparison might make sense. But AFAIK consoles are "not as
> > widely supported" as PCs or even mainframes.
>
> When the general acceptance (and hence marketing) of systems is
> at issue, you are right. But for specific applications, e.g. the
> implementation of a specific crypto algorithm or its cracking,
> one could even afford a 'hand-made' assembler, if there is
> sufficient cost benefit (i.e. when the hardware is cheap enough
> to justify that effort/cost).
True. It might be interesting to see a comparison between the original DES cracker
and one built out of consoles. Similarly, the SETI analysis software might run well
on that platform.
------------------------------
From: Tim Tyler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: British Plans (with a subject header this time)
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 01:22:48 GMT
Barry Charters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
: Can anybody give me some good links to find out the British
: Governments position on encryption usage e.g. key escrow etc.
You may find Brian Gladman's page at:
http://www.btinternet.com/~brian.gladman/cryptography_policy/
...to be useful.
If it helps, there are reprints of some recent news articles about the
current bill at http://cryptome.org/uk-crypto-go.htm
--
__________
|im |yler The Mandala Centre http://www.mandala.co.uk/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The simplest explanation is that it just doesn't make sense.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (JPeschel)
Subject: D.O.E. SysWorks Updates:
Date: 25 Feb 2000 02:06:01 GMT
I've added Password Master version 1.22 to the
"Key Recovery" page. This is a new version, which
like its precursor, cracks FTP Explorer.
The crypto lessons by LANAKI and those by
Dr. Eli Biham have been moved to the new
"Crypto Lessons" page.
I've moved the cryptanalysis tools to the
"Historical" page, and added Fauzan Mirza's
Vigsolve to it. Vigsolve determines the
Index of Coincidence and finds the key for
Vigenere, Beaufort, and Variant Beaufort
ciphers. I've included a DOS executable.
Joe
__________________________________________
Joe Peschel
D.O.E. SysWorks
http://members.aol.com/jpeschel/index.htm
__________________________________________
------------------------------
From: Thierry Moreau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Implementation of Crypto on DSP
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 21:25:08 -0500
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > >
> > > I am surprised that there is not much benefit in hand optimisation.
> > > ....Are C compilers that good..?
> > >
> >
> > Don't expect too much out of compiler optimization for crypto
> > algorithms.
> >
> > Here is a representative example: for RSA decryption or signature, the
> > optimization strategy starts from (a) the Montgomery multiplication
> > algorithm
> > and (b) the chinese remainder theorem (otherwise, you position your
> > product
> > out of the market performance-wise). The Montgomery algorithm (a)
> > benefits
> > nicely from a 16X16->40 bits MAC (multiply-accumulate) operation found
> > on DSPs, but
> > such a construct is not part of "portable C". For the chinese
> remainder
> > theorem (b),
> > some newer DSPs can do two such MACs (sustained) every instruction
> > cycle, which is
> > great for the chinese remainder theorem implementation. The C
> optimizer
> > *might*
> > not know beforehand of the chinese remainder theorem, so you'll never
> > get the
> > sustained MIPS rate without explicitly coding the chinese remainder
> > theorem for the
> > specific DSP instruction set.
>
> Thats very interesting. Any other special tricks for DH..we use DH
> mainly...and for 3DES/other Block Ciphers?..would be interesting to try
> them out.
> >
> > - Thierry
> >
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.
The Diffie-Hellman algorithm (DH) is similar to RSA as far as
implementation optimizations are concerned, but DH normally
can't benefit from the chinese remiander theorem (unless the
public prime parameter is replaced by a composite number, "composite
DH", but you usually don't have the choice of the
public parameter).
As far as block ciphers are concerned, each one is different,
e.g. 3DES and the five AES contenders all bring diverse
optimization issues.
The performance pattern of block ciphers makes them suitable
for "bulk encryption", unlike DH and RSA. Then, the optimization
issue usually boils down to meeting a minimum speed requirement
within resource constraints (unit cost, development cost, time-
to-market). In high speed networks, nothing short of a dedicated DES
processor can meet the speed requirement (e.g. FPGA
implementation).
In any event, for efficient DES implementation on various
processors, I use a program-generating-program which outputs
source code for a few target languages, and the set of possible
implementation strategy options is quite large. There is also
the "bit slice" implementation of DES which is preferred by
those who attempt exhaustive DES key searches.
In summary: (a) chances are that your speed requirements put
your design above the performance range where software
optimizations may make a difference, and (b) compiler
optimizations are often insufficient for block cipher
implementations at reasonable speed.
- Thierry
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Isaac)
Crossposted-To: alt.sources.crypto,talk.politics.crypto,us.legal
Subject: Re: - US "allows" encryption program online
Date: 25 Feb 2000 03:04:36 GMT
On Fri, 25 Feb 2000 01:03:11 GMT, Charles R. Lyttle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>It looked to me like this is an attempt to avoid going to court and
>setting a precident. I hopes he keeps it in court.
>
That might not be easy. Courts are not going to decide philosophical points
with no fact situations behind them. If Bernstein has permission to do
what he wants, and his current court case is moot, a new case will be
necessary to resolve any unanswered issues.
Isaac
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Crossposted-To: alt.sources.crypto,talk.politics.crypto,us.legal
Subject: Re: - US "allows" encryption program online
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 03:18:23 GMT
know where will this become available?
joeb
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
------------------------------
From: Tom Holroyd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.security.misc,alt.security.pgp
Subject: Re: Passwords secure against dictionary attacks?
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 12:18:11 +0900
On 24 Feb 2000, Jens Haug wrote:
> > After setting your passphrase, check that just typing in the first 8
> > characters doesn't work. If it does, complain to the authorities that
> > they need to upgrade. There's no excuse for limiting users to 8 character
> > passwords.
>
> How do you change the crypt implementation of a Unix system
> running something like NIS+?
One way is to download SRP and install it. It's a drop in replacement for
the standard passwd tools on Unix and includes instructions for NIS.
http://berlin.arcot.com/srp/
It's also safe to use over the net (it comes with versions of telnet,
ftp). The current version (1.5.0) doesn't replace all the libraries,
though, so you may also want to (or at least) install md5crypt, available
all over the place. It simply replaces the crypt() function (which uses
DES) with an MD5 version (that also uses salt).
Also, send mail to your OS vendor asking THEM to do this.
P.S. GNU libc getpass() has a limit of 128 characters (but getpass()
doesn't do any hashing).
Dr. Tom Holroyd
"I am, as I said, inspired by the biological phenomena in which
chemical forces are used in repetitious fashion to produce all
kinds of weird effects (one of which is the author)."
-- Richard Feynman, _There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom_
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (William Rowden)
Crossposted-To: alt.privacy.anon-server
Subject: Re: Mixmasters encrypt how?
Date: 25 Feb 2000 03:47:45 GMT
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Anton Stiglic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> You can start by reading Ian Goldberg et al paper:
> "Privacy-enhancing technologies for the Internet",
> and check out the refs...
> You can get the paper at this URL:
> http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/privacy-compcon97-www/
> privacy-html.html
>
> Anton
>
> William Rowden wrote:
[Essentially, what algorithm do Mixmaster remailers use for message
encryption?]
[Why do Mixmaster public keys look different from PGP's RSA keys?]
I read the article above, and looked up several references, including
these:
http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai/mix-net.txt
http://www.obscura.com/~loki/remailer/remailer-essay.html
Like most articles on the subject, these take for granted the public
key infrastructure and focus on defeating traffic analysis. These
concepts I understood.
The second article mentions that Mixmaster messages are 3DES encrypted
with headers containing the destination address, packet ID, and 3DES
key encrypted by a 1024-bit RSA key. This sheds some light on the
first question.
I have yet to find documentation with enough detail to explain the
Mixmaster key format. Maybe I need to dig through the source.
Inspection suggests that the keys use the radix-64 (6-bit) method of
PGP, since the keys only include '[a-zA-Z0-9/+]'. The second line
('258'--a version number?) is identical between keys, as is the last
170 characters ('A{167}QAB'--for expansion?). The third line begins
with the 3 characters 'AAS' or 'AAT' (17 fixed bits?) If the first
line (32 characters) is a Key ID (it *does* appear with the name and
email address in the lists), the remaining 171 characters (of 379
total), would be 1026 bits (plus one between 'S' and 'T'), enough for
a 1024-bit key.
Does anyone know if my guesses are close?
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Azerty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> A better place to ask this question would be
> alt.privacy.anon-server, and also on the list remailer-operators
> mailing list - if anyone knows they'll know.
I'm cross-posting in hope that you're correct.
--
-William
SPAM filtered; damages claimed for UCE according to RCW19.86
PGP key: http://www.eskimo.com/~rowdenw/pgp/rowdenw.asc until 2000-08-01
Fingerprint: FB4B E2CD 25AF 95E5 ADBB DA28 379D 47DB 599E 0B1A
------------------------------
Reply-To: "Clockwork" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: "Clockwork" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Processor speeds.
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 04:09:03 GMT
"Trevor Jackson, III" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> Is this a claim that these platforms are as well supported for creating
general
> purpose applications as they are for creating games? There is a distinct
> difference between a platform highly optimized for interaction and one
highly
> optimized for data processing. In the limit of being ATTAP they might be
> indistinguishable, but when I looked at consoles in early 98 they appeared
to be
> specialized architectures.
Please read my previous posts in this thread... I am talking about consoles
for this millenium. 1998 is old news -- in computer years :) Consoles blow
PCs away -- in raw performance.
> Why would someone wanting to build a special purpose machine for one of
the
> above purposes buy the whole console? Why wouldn't it make sense to buy
CPUs of
> equivalent capability and string them together?
Please read my previous posts in this thread... Basically, the WHOLE
console is cheaper and outperforms the latest, high-end chips. It comes
with liquid cooling units, power supplies, and more on a compact circuit
board.
Moreover, it is 128-bits! 128-bits!
> If building a supercomputer were so easy wouldn't S. Cray or D. Hillis
have
> figured out that they didn't need all that expensive specialized hardware?
I don't know? That is a good question. You tell me. Maybe it was expensive
back in the old days, but it is pretty cheap to do anything with computers
nowadays. Additionally, If you look for the most readily available,
advanced computing technology -- it is console systems.
Maybe Cray is flipping in his grave?
> But even if the support is available for general purpose computing, would
you
> trust a weather report calculated by a supercomputer running any flavor of
> windoze? Would you trust your nuclear weapons simulations to a platform
> containing the buggiest software ever written?
No and No! New consoles don't do Windows(tm) -- unless YOU really want them
too. I tend not to use an operating system at all when I code for these
machines (if you can believe that).
> Now if someone hacked a BSD or Linux kernel together to that PVM/MPI were
> supported, that would be very attractive.
Let's get to it and change the world!! :)
For more info, check out:
Wired Magazine, November, 1999, pg 273.
Next Generation, March, 2000, cover story
------------------------------
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