Cryptography-Digest Digest #673, Volume #12 Wed, 13 Sep 00 20:13:01 EDT
Contents:
Ideas on elliptic curves ("Ålisabeth Konstantinou")
Re: Ideas on elliptic curves ("Mikal 606")
Re: Ideas on elliptic curves (Bill Unruh)
Re: (Jury Selection) Re: Carnivore article in October CACM _Inside_Risks (Robert H.
Risch)
Re: Intel's 1.13 MHZ chip (Jerry Coffin)
Re: Intel's 1.13 MHZ chip (Jerry Coffin)
Re: Bytes, octets, chars, and characters (Jerry Coffin)
[SF Bay Area] RSA Patent Expiration Composite Party - Sept. 21 (Ian Goldberg)
Re: question on the bible code ("Douglas A. Gwyn")
Re: question on the bible code ("Douglas A. Gwyn")
Re: Crypto Related Pangrams ("Douglas A. Gwyn")
Re: Bytes, octets, chars, and characters (Michael Rubenstein)
Re: Crypto Related Pangrams ("Clifton T. Sharp Jr.")
Re: Bytes, octets, chars, and characters (mike burrell)
Re: Crypto Related Pangrams (Jim Reeds)
Re: Bytes, octets, chars, and characters ("Douglas A. Gwyn")
Re: Ideas on elliptic curves (Bob Silverman)
Re: For the Gurus (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jacques_Th=E9riault?=)
Hash algorithms
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Ålisabeth Konstantinou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Ideas on elliptic curves
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 23:38:22 +0300
Hi,
I'm beggining my master thesis on elliptic curves
and I search for a more specific topic on that (example DSA, discrete log
etc).
Does anyone have any good ideas for something interesting
(some recent developments) in this field in order to elaborate?
Thanks
Betty
------------------------------
From: "Mikal 606" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Ideas on elliptic curves
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 16:44:19 -0700
"Ålisabeth Konstantinou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in
message news:8poo90$lh3$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> Hi,
>
> I'm beggining my master thesis on elliptic curves
> and I search for a more specific topic on that (example DSA, discrete log
> etc).
> Does anyone have any good ideas for something interesting
> (some recent developments) in this field in order to elaborate?
>
> Thanks
>
> Betty
>
>
http://www.maths.nott.ac.uk/postgraduate/projects.html
http://www.amphilsoc.org/library/guides/ahqp/bios.htm
http://theory.ipm.ac.ir/preprints/list/hep-th/9801
http://www.ioppublishing.com/PEL/article/jb30018l4/full/
http://theory.ipm.ac.ir/preprints/list/q-alg/9711
Enjoy!
_L_
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bill Unruh)
Subject: Re: Ideas on elliptic curves
Date: 13 Sep 2000 20:55:50 GMT
In <8poo90$lh3$[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>I'm beggining my master thesis on elliptic curves
>and I search for a more specific topic on that (example DSA, discrete log
>etc).
>Does anyone have any good ideas for something interesting
>(some recent developments) in this field in order to elaborate?
The hardest thing in research is to come up with questions to ask.
Answering them is often the easier. I would advise you to read widely
and ecclectically in the topic. Think of questions as you go along. If
you don't understand something, try to figure it out on your own first
for a little while, then try to look it up. Why do you find elliptic
curves interesting? Use that to guide you.
------------------------------
From: Robert H. Risch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.security.misc,alt.security,talk.politics.crypto,us.legal
Subject: Re: (Jury Selection) Re: Carnivore article in October CACM _Inside_Risks
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 21:06:01 GMT
On 13 Sep 2000 15:05:28 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Yiorgos
Adamopoulos) wrote:
>Here the President of the Judges is the God inside the court. So if he
>wishes (and some times they do) they let the witness testify in their
>own words: ``Tell us what you know about the case'' and such stuff.
>And because he is God(tm) noone can object :-) Sometimes the witnesses
>ask to establish their yes or no with arguments direct to the judge :-)
>
>This is allowed because there are questions where although the lawyer
>requires a simple yes / no answer this is not enough.
>
>-Y
In the few courts in the US where jurors are allowed to ask questions,
the juror must send the question in writing to the judge and then the
lawyers can object to the question so it may not even get asked. Do
the jurors just raise their hand and ask in Greece?
RHR
------------------------------
From: Jerry Coffin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Intel's 1.13 MHZ chip
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 15:16:44 -0600
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
says...
[ ... ]
> Perhaps not with exactly the speed of the last ones, but
> there have been quite a number of Crays all over the globe,
> not all being used for civil purposes. That seems to be
> quite certain.
Oh, there's no question about that -- the comment to which I was
replying was something to the effect that although 1 GHz (or
thereabouts) was relatively recent for Intel (and AMD, though that
wasn't mentioned) that the military had undoubtedly had it for a
decade or more. There's no question that the NSA, et al, have had
Crays for a long time, but then again other than the clock speed
there's not a lot really new or different about the 1.13 GHz PIII
either. It's obviously faster than a 650 MHz PIII, but that's about
it. The differences between other Crays of the time (E.g. a C90) and
the Cray IV were really considerably larger.
--
Later,
Jerry.
The Universe is a figment of its own imagination.
------------------------------
From: Jerry Coffin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Intel's 1.13 MHZ chip
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 15:16:52 -0600
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] says...
[ ... ]
> If the government did not express interest once Cray had machines
> ready to ship, one is tempted to speculate that the NSA, at least,
> might have had machines of similar speed from internal production: it
> is difficult to believe that their appetite for processing power was
> anything other than insatiable at that time as at any other.
I seriously doubt it. Instead I suspect rather the opposite.
Two factors contributed to this. First of all, this was happening
shortly after the USSR collapsed, and second, anything with
"nuclear" in the name was becoming such a political hot-potato that
quite a few projects related to peaceful uses for nuclear devices had
to be cancelled.
The first resulted in drastically reduced military budgets for a
while, and the second removed some of the projects that had the
largest demands for simulations that used huge chunks of computer
time. Between lack of funding and reduced demand for computation, I
strongly suspect that quite the opposite of the equivalent having
been built internally, that instead there was considerable relief to
have a reasonable excuse for cancelling orders since the machines
were no longer wanted and couldn't be afforded without major cuts
elsewhere anyway.
--
Later,
Jerry.
The Universe is a figment of its own imagination.
------------------------------
From: Jerry Coffin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Bytes, octets, chars, and characters
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 15:16:53 -0600
In article <FQLv5.6152$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] says...
[ ... ]
> > Yes and no -- it's not required to be, but it's relatively
> > straightforward to use it as an fpos_t that (as an extension) allows
> > arithmetic on file positions.
>
> this still has nothing to do with long long. if i'm an implementor of a
> system with 32-bit longs and 64-bit fpos_t's, i could do:
> typedef __WackyOS_64bit_uint fpos_t;
> just as easily as i could do:
> typedef unsigned long long fpos_t;
> i.e. a rose by any other name.... ;)
Oh, is that so? An fpos_t is required to be an object type, which
(at least as I read things) means it has to be one of the other types
specified in the language, or a struct or array of the same -- e.g.
it could be a struct containing 2 longs, or it could be a long that
happened to be 64 bits wide, but contrary to the statement above,
apparently could NOT have been some type totally unknown to the rest
of the language in general.
--
Later,
Jerry.
The Universe is a figment of its own imagination.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Ian Goldberg)
Subject: [SF Bay Area] RSA Patent Expiration Composite Party - Sept. 21
Date: 13 Sep 2000 21:49:30 GMT
As most of you know, the RSA patent expires next week (that they issued
a press release waiving some rights early notwithstanding). We've been
waiting a *long* time for this, and now we're throwing a long-anticipated
party to celebrate!
This is a benefit for the CryptoRights Foundation, which, among other
things, promotes the use of cryptography by Human Rights workers in
"less-friendly" countries in order to protect both the workers and the
people they're trying to interview and help. [If you've never heard a talk
by one of these people who goes to train said human rights workers in the
use of crypto and steganography, you should get someone to tell you about
it; it's not otherwise obvious how related the fields are, and it's
extremely enlightening.]
There will be no charge at the door, but t-shirts and stuff will be
available to buy. You need to reserve (free) tickets in advance, though,
which can be had by emailing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
Below is the full announcement. Corporate stuff starts at 8, music starts
at 10. Let people know about this, and I hope to see you there!
- Ian
A copy of this note will be at:
http://www.cryptorights.org/benefit
http://www.shmoo.com/rsa
Celebrate with us as we celebrate the end of an era
The Big RSA Patent Expiration Composite Party
A fundraiser for the Cryptorights Foundation
(http://www.cryptorights.org/)
September 21, 2000
8PM-2AM
produced by
Cryptorights Foundation
BPM Consulting International
with special thanks to our Gold Sponsor
Certicom
also sponsored by
VA Linux
Electronic Frontier Foundation
PAIP International
The Shmoo Group
The Secret Order of Former Primes
The Great American Music Hall
859 O'Farrell St. (between Polk & Larkin)
21+
http://www.musichallsf.com/info/directions/
By invitation only. In order to receive your invitation, send an
email with the # of people who plan to attend to
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Entrance is free, but the
Cryptorights Foundation will be accepting donations at the door.
The first few hours will feature short speeches and presentations
from luminaries in the fields of cryptography and human rights. We
will present awards to various individuals for technical and activist
contributions.
The tail end of the presentations will feature a "Wheel of Fortune"
with by your friendly hosts, John Gilmore and Cindy Cohn from the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. Solve the puzzle (donation
suggested) or buy one vowel and benefit human rights!
Finally, at 10:00PM, the beats will drop and your evening will end
with the slamming techno sounds of the San Francisco underground!
Featuring
Sameer (FnF, Cloudfactory, Urban Wasteland, Mad Hatter, trustcrew)
Sameer has been active in the San Francisco underground throwing
parties since 1993. In 1999 with some of the crew he met through
Friends & Family he started throwing the legendary Urban Wasteland
parties in urban renegade locations in and around the East Bay. He
also picked up his first slab of wax in early 1999 and has been
playing sick pounding techno at parties around the world since then.
He is also involved in producing a weekly club in Oakland called the
Mad Hatter. Sameer is also known as the founder of C2Net, the company
that pioneered the international development of strong cryptography to
avoid United States export restrictions.
DJ Tektrix (Sister, Tetractys, Influence Recordings)
Cary, a/k/a DJ Tektrix, moved to San Francisco in 1997. Since then
Tektrix has played alongside DJs such as Forest Green, Twerk, Terrac,
Plateshifter, Mike Sims, Darin Marshall, Sean Murray, J-Bird, Tom L-G,
2x4 with DJ Zeel, Sifu, HoneyB, and Ethan. In 1999 she threw a party
called Circle that took place at the Mother's Cookies Warehouse,
conducted weekly live internet and pirate radio broadcasts on Vulcan
Free Radio, and this year became a resident at Tetractys and Sister.
She has played at parties such as Static, Circle, Overworld, and
Topica.
Forest Green (Cloudfactory, Sister, XLR8R, technologix, FnF)
Forest Green has been throwing down beats with the sickness for
several years. She has traveled both across the nation and into Canada
to bring the sick Techno sound to those in need. you might also know
her as one of the starring DJs from the hit underground movie Groove!
------------------------------
From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: question on the bible code
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 18:04:29 -0400
TaoenChristo wrote:
> The Bible Code ... contains ALL events present and past and even
> those that COULD happen. The Bible contains all of the wisdom of
> all time, and that simply is impossible in a simple 66 book
> collection.
It's also impossible with a system like the "Bible Code".
But it's pointless arguing with someone who takes as fact
that "the Bible contains all of the wisdom of all time".
------------------------------
From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: question on the bible code
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 18:06:36 -0400
TaoenChristo wrote:
> Why would God put a code in the bible ...?
The obvious response is staring you in the face,
but your faith blinds you to it.
------------------------------
From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Crypto Related Pangrams
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 18:14:22 -0400
Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
> What is a 'pangram'? Is it generated automatically through
> randomly choosing a grammatical structure and randomly
> filling the proper kind of words at the nodes of the tree?
No, "pangram" comes from "pan" and "gram" and means a piece
of writing that contains every letter of the alphabet. The
classic examples were given earlier in the thread, including
"the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", which has
often been used to verify that all the alphabetic keys of a
typewriter are functioning. The ultimate challenge would be
to construct a pangram where each letter of the alphabet is
used exactly once, but so far as I know nobody has done that
for the English language using only words in common usage.
So a fair challenge is to create a pangram that is as short
as possible while conveying an intelligible meaning, using
words known to a normally educated person.
------------------------------
From: Michael Rubenstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Bytes, octets, chars, and characters
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 18:38:29 -0400
On Wed, 13 Sep 2000 15:16:53 -0600, Jerry Coffin
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>In article <FQLv5.6152$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] says...
>
>[ ... ]
>
>> > Yes and no -- it's not required to be, but it's relatively
>> > straightforward to use it as an fpos_t that (as an extension) allows
>> > arithmetic on file positions.
>>
>> this still has nothing to do with long long. if i'm an implementor of a
>> system with 32-bit longs and 64-bit fpos_t's, i could do:
>> typedef __WackyOS_64bit_uint fpos_t;
>> just as easily as i could do:
>> typedef unsigned long long fpos_t;
>> i.e. a rose by any other name.... ;)
>
>Oh, is that so? An fpos_t is required to be an object type, which
>(at least as I read things) means it has to be one of the other types
>specified in the language, or a struct or array of the same -- e.g.
>it could be a struct containing 2 longs, or it could be a long that
>happened to be 64 bits wide, but contrary to the statement above,
>apparently could NOT have been some type totally unknown to the rest
>of the language in general.
How could a strictly conforming program determine that fpos_t is
not such a type?
------------------------------
From: "Clifton T. Sharp Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Crypto Related Pangrams
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 18:01:20 -0500
Doug Kuhlman wrote:
> wtshaw wrote:
> > 42) *Vexed xenophobes fear crypto's jazzy, quaint, works.
>
> Loved these! Unfortunately, this one isn't a pangram, as it doesn't
> contain the letter "l".
This, of course, makes it the Christmas pangram.
--
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Cliff Sharp | Hate spam? Take the Boulder Pledge! |
| WA9PDM | http://www.zdnet.com/yil/content/mag/9612/ebert9612.html |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
------------------------------
From: mike burrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Bytes, octets, chars, and characters
Crossposted-To: comp.lang.c
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 23:02:42 GMT
In comp.lang.c Jerry Coffin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In article <FQLv5.6152$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] says...
>> this still has nothing to do with long long. if i'm an implementor of a
>> system with 32-bit longs and 64-bit fpos_t's, i could do:
>> typedef __WackyOS_64bit_uint fpos_t;
>> just as easily as i could do:
>> typedef unsigned long long fpos_t;
>> i.e. a rose by any other name.... ;)
> Oh, is that so? An fpos_t is required to be an object type, which
> (at least as I read things) means it has to be one of the other types
> specified in the language, or a struct or array of the same -- e.g.
> it could be a struct containing 2 longs, or it could be a long that
> happened to be 64 bits wide, but contrary to the statement above,
> apparently could NOT have been some type totally unknown to the rest
> of the language in general.
no that's rubbish:
[#1] object
region of data storage in the execution environment, the
contents of which can represent values
as long as it can represent a value, it's an object.
--
/"\ m i k e b u r r e l l
\ / ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN [EMAIL PROTECTED]
X AGAINST HTML MAIL,
/ \ AND NEWS TOO, dammit finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for GPG key
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jim Reeds)
Subject: Re: Crypto Related Pangrams
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 23:08:52 GMT
For me, the best crypto related pangram is in Latin, &
so uses all 23 of the letters of the Latin alphabet:
"Gaza frequens Libycos duxit Karthago triumphos". This
was used as an example plaintext by Johannes Trithemius
in his _Steganographia_ of 1499/1500. The corresponding
cryptogram was not solved until 1676, 1996, and 1998
(by 3 people working independently), so T's idea of hiding
messages steganographically wasn't so shabby.
"Gaza frequens...", like other pangrams, was a common writing
exercise in the middle ages. See: Berhard Bischoff,
``Elementarunterricht und Probationes Pennae in der ersten
Haelfte des Mittelalters,'' appearing in his "Mittelalterliche
Studien: Ausgewaehlte Aufsaetze zur Schriftkunde und
Literaturgeschichte" (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1966),
1:74-87.
--
Jim Reeds, AT&T Labs - Research
Shannon Laboratory, Room C229, Building 103
180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971, USA
[EMAIL PROTECTED], phone: +1 973 360 8414, fax: +1 973 360 8178
------------------------------
From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Bytes, octets, chars, and characters
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 19:23:19 -0400
Michael Rubenstein wrote:
> How could a strictly conforming program determine that fpos_t is
> not such a type?
You guys are asking the wrong question. Even *using* fpos_t
could render a program not strictly conforming, if fpos_t
could be some implementation invention. A proper requirement
for fpos_t would be that it be an integer type (within the
meaning of the standard). For C99 that includes optional
implementation-defined extended integer types, but C99 also
provides new standard tools to help deal with those, e.g.
intmax_t. The only really new thing that standardizing
long long does is that it guarantees that there *will* be,
in any conforming implementation, *some* integer type with
width of at least 64, and if that is what you want there is
a standard name for it. The previous standard lacked such a
guarantee.
------------------------------
From: Bob Silverman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Ideas on elliptic curves
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 23:21:47 GMT
In article <8poo90$lh3$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Ålisabeth Konstantinou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm beggining my master thesis on elliptic curves
> and I search for a more specific topic on that (example DSA, discrete
log
> etc).
> Does anyone have any good ideas for something interesting
> (some recent developments) in this field in order to elaborate?
Try looking at curves over medium fields, i.e. GF(p^q) where p
is moderately large and q is near log p. This differs from current
practice of using GF(2^n) for large n or GF(p^1) where p is very
large
--
Bob Silverman
"You can lead a horse's ass to knowledge, but you can't make him think"
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
------------------------------
Subject: Re: For the Gurus
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jacques_Th=E9riault?=)
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 23:43:05 GMT
root@localhost <spamthis> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If I wanted to design a simple manual system that I felt was very
> difficult to crack, what historical system would you recommend I start
> with and why?
You can take a look at http://www.nightbird.n3.net/Mcter.html for an
algorithm that is usable manually.
This is not the final version, I'm working now on version 4.0 which is
more secure than this one.
I will post it on this news group shortly since I have not finished
writing the description to update my web page.
Jacques Thériault
http://www.nightbird.n3.net
------------------------------
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Hash algorithms
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 00:00:00 GMT
Greetings,
I have a project that requires me to look into 5 hash algorithms, I have
been attempting to figure out what exactly is a hash algorithm. I know that
MD2-5 are one-way hash algorithms, but what would the definition be of a
hash algorithm so I can identify the other 4 that I require?
Thanks in advance,
Ray
------------------------------
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