Cryptography-Digest Digest #711, Volume #13 Sun, 18 Feb 01 17:13:00 EST
Contents:
Re: Metallurgy and Cryptography (Steve Portly)
Re: My encryption system..... ("Doom the Mostly Harmless")
Re: National Security Nightmare? (Mok-Kong Shen)
Re: Super strong crypto (Hard)
Re: Super strong crypto (David Wagner)
Re: ideas of D.Chaum about digital cash and whether tax offices are (Frog2)
Re: Super strong crypto (Mok-Kong Shen)
Re: The Kingdom of God (William Hugh Murray)
Re: Super strong crypto ("Douglas A. Gwyn")
Re: The Kingdom of God (William Hugh Murray)
Re: Super strong crypto ("Douglas A. Gwyn")
Re: The Kingdom of God (John M Price PhD)
Re: The Kingdom of God ("Douglas A. Gwyn")
Re: The Kingdom of God (William Hugh Murray)
Re: The Kingdom of God (William Hugh Murray)
Re: The Kingdom of God ("Trevor L. Jackson, III")
Re: CipherText patent still pending (Benjamin Goldberg)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Steve Portly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Metallurgy and Cryptography
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 14:33:43 -0500
Tad Johnson wrote:
> Hello All ---
>
> I just realized something:
>
> Don COPPERsmith...
> Bob SILVERman...
> Benjamin GOLDberg...
>
> What the heck is going on here?
Gee those are old resister banding codes from the 60's
Maybe we made a wrong turn and ended up in the Museum?
I wish they would make those signs easier to read.
------------------------------
From: "Doom the Mostly Harmless" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: My encryption system.....
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 19:36:31 GMT
<snip>
> Time to set an appointment with a psychiatrist...
>
> Take it easy, you will be in good company.
>
> BNK
</snip>
Hey! Some of us who /do/ see shrinks might not want to be associated with
this "gentleman."
--
To air is human....
--Doom.
------------------------------
From: Mok-Kong Shen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: National Security Nightmare?
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 20:49:15 +0100
"Douglas A. Gwyn" wrote:
>
> Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
> > As to technological knowledgeable peoples, are you sure
> > that you have every and absolute good grounds to blame
> > those that deviate from an ethical line in countries
> > where teaching staffs in universities could barely
> > support a moderate sized family with their salaries?
>
> I don't know where you're getting your ideas, but I
> certainly never said nor implied that. My opinion is
> that the War on Drugs is worse than hopeless because
> the real problem is the demand for the product, not
> the production of the drugs.
You said, if I interpreted your words correctly, that
ethics and education solve the problems or at least help
in very essential ways and that tracking of nodes of the
criminals on the internet could be done as effectively as
done in war on drugs (in tracking the drug traffic). My
opinions were that ethics apparently wouldn't work in face
of hunger or the like (extreme low income etc.) and that
war on drugs hasn't provided a good record to show the
efficacy of tracking techniques, for it in fact fails, as
you also agreed.
> > ... All this serves to support my prediction
> > that the surveillance apparatus of communications would
> > have their efficacy reduced to almost negligibility in
> > the (hypothetical but possible) case where all common
> > people make use of encryption, thus creating a situation
> > of an order of magnitude more difficult to deal with
> > than what alreay is today.
>
> No, as I said that is not where the real problem lies.
There we disagree. My point is that the capacity (resources)
by far wouldn't suffice in that (hypothetical) situation,
which is implicitly contained in what NSA's director said
in my interpretation.
M. K. Shen
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Hard)
Subject: Re: Super strong crypto
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 19:47:59 GMT
On Sun, 18 Feb 2001 01:23:11 -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (wtshaw) wrote:
>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Steve Portly
><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> The implementations that pop into mind would be temptingly easy to modify
>> into much stronger configurations. Unless there is some new breakthrough
>> that will balance the equation, I don't see an organization like NIST
>> approving such a cipher scheme?
>
>Do you always do what you are told?
I know, I know... it was directed to Steve but IMHO:
If he actually does viable work in the crypto world which equates to
making a living while providing prudent reality-based security for
clients than, with respect to NIST, he probably should.
But if he wants to *not* work in crypto, and just spew tripped-out,
space cadet, legend-in-his-own-mind, bordering-on-group-troll jism on
the wall to see what will stick, then probably he shouldn't.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (David Wagner)
Subject: Re: Super strong crypto
Date: 18 Feb 2001 20:13:18 GMT
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (David Wagner)
Douglas A. Gwyn wrote:
>This thread was apparently about provably strong encryption,
>which forces an information-theoretic approach. If the new
>key is transmitted (encrypted under the old one) before there
>has been enough ciphertext to enable an attack with success
>rate above some specified threshold, it might seem that one
>could keep the channel secure forever.
Ahh, but the proposal doesn't work. The proposed scheme is provably
*insecure*, in the information-theoretic threat model (where the adversary
has unbounded computational power). In particular, anyone who correctly
guesses the value for the first key used will be able to verify the guess,
simply by decrypting the whole stream.
So this construction does not bring us any closer to provable security.
If it has any benefits, they seem to be heuristic in nature, and not
provable.
This brings me back to my original point, which still has me confused:
What is the advantage of the construction? What's the purpose for
introducing it?
------------------------------
From: Frog2 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 18 Feb 2001 20:14:58 -0000
Subject: Re: ideas of D.Chaum about digital cash and whether tax offices are
Crossposted-To: talk.politics.crypto,alt.cypherpunks
.
| And there is traffic loss, remailers are only 95% accurate of course.
| This can be countered by sending the same blackmail multiple times, but
| maybe in the future such messages can be traced (I hope not). Come to
| think of it, I think black-mailers (like angry ex-wifes) will probably
| want to be known. It won't help the black-mailed person much if he tells
| on her.
Yep, if they want to be know, they need no remailer services.
How about old fashioned paper mail in this case?
| cypherpunk activist again without second thoughts. Now if only the
| newspapers would publish my letters :-) They really do suck. Sometimes I
| think they colaborate with the music industry and other evil empires ;-)
How about posting me a sample of our letters? If it's good we might publish
it (or an abstract) in a local, tiny newspaper ...
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
From: Mok-Kong Shen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Super strong crypto
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 21:57:02 +0100
David Wagner wrote:
>
> Douglas A. Gwyn wrote:
> >This thread was apparently about provably strong encryption,
> >which forces an information-theoretic approach. If the new
> >key is transmitted (encrypted under the old one) before there
> >has been enough ciphertext to enable an attack with success
> >rate above some specified threshold, it might seem that one
> >could keep the channel secure forever.
>
> Ahh, but the proposal doesn't work. The proposed scheme is provably
> *insecure*, in the information-theoretic threat model (where the adversary
> has unbounded computational power). In particular, anyone who correctly
> guesses the value for the first key used will be able to verify the guess,
> simply by decrypting the whole stream.
>
> So this construction does not bring us any closer to provable security.
> If it has any benefits, they seem to be heuristic in nature, and not
> provable.
>
> This brings me back to my original point, which still has me confused:
> What is the advantage of the construction? What's the purpose for
> introducing it?
I guess that the purpose is to defeat those attacks that
are based on the availability of some (fairly large)
amounts of materials encrypted with the same key.
M. K. Shen
------------------------------
From: William Hugh Murray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Crossposted-To: alt.security,comp.security,alt.2600
Subject: Re: The Kingdom of God
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 21:30:15 GMT
"Markku J. Saarelainen" wrote:
>
> 1. When he was on earth, Jesus taught his followers to pray for God's
> Kingdom. A kingdom is a government that is headed by a king. God's
> Kingdom is a special government. It is set up in heaven and will rule
> over this earth. It will sanctify, or make holy, God's name. It will
> cause God's will to be done on earth as it is done in heaven.—Matthew
> 6:9, 10.
>
> http://www.watchtower.org/library/rq/index.htm
>
> Sent via Deja.com
> http://www.deja.com/
Yes. And your security point is what? In any case, by definition,
God's will is done.
------------------------------
From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Super strong crypto
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 21:33:04 GMT
David Wagner wrote:
> Ahh, but the proposal doesn't work. The proposed scheme is provably
> *insecure*, in the information-theoretic threat model (where the
> adversary has unbounded computational power).
That is obvious, but you're talking about a theory in its
unrealizable realm, not about real-world systems. The
real-world criterion is that only a "negligible" fraction
of the total traffic is expected to be recovered by the
attack using as many resources as one can realistically
afford. You might think of it as an "information cost".
If the initial putative key recovery lies far beyond the
threshold, then the ability to further verify it by
testing against subsequent key spans doesn't help the
attacker, in the real world. You might as well say that
a singly-keyed channel allows testing of an initial
guess by continuing to decrypt and checking against
known source characteristics; it's true, but not usually
accepted as an argument against the system.
My idea of "provably strong" allows for meeting a
security threshold criterion, since for any practical
system there always is such a threshold.
Now, my example was just a straw-man proposal, and perhaps
one could demonstrate that *any* such embedded-key
approach would be substantially weaker *in practice* than
just using a single key beyond its natural lifetime, but
I don't see how that could be demonstrated. If in fact
the overall scheme is at worst only slightly weaker,
which seems plausible from the information-statistics
point of view (more entropy is introduced with each new
key), so long as each key is long enough to prevent
enumeration of an appreciable fraction of the key space
(a standard assumption) and the basic encryption
algorithm has no fundamental weakness.
------------------------------
From: William Hugh Murray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Crossposted-To: alt.security,comp.security,alt.2600
Subject: Re: The Kingdom of God
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 21:30:55 GMT
"Douglas A. Gwyn" wrote:
>
> Tom St Denis wrote:
> > "drumstik" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > Smile! There is no god.
> > And if there was would it matter anyways?
>
> Yeah, he sure wouldn't waste His time in this thread.
SHE would not waste her time in this thread.
------------------------------
From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Super strong crypto
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 21:38:45 GMT
Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
> I guess that the purpose is to defeat those attacks that
> are based on the availability of some (fairly large)
> amounts of materials encrypted with the same key.
Yes, it's an attempt to address the problem (certainly
in theory, and often in practice) of using a few initial
bits of entropy as the sole protection for many megabytes
of data (whose source characteristics are known). The
conventional public "solution" to this is either block
chaining, which adds no entropy, or periodically
negotiating another key, which is awkward or infeasible
in many environments. I would like a solution along the
lines of my straw-man proposal, if it can be shown to be
sufficiently secure.
------------------------------
From: John M Price PhD <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: The Kingdom of God
Crossposted-To: alt.security,comp.security,alt.2600
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 18 Feb 2001 13:44:43 -0800
In alt.2600 article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> William Hugh Murray
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
: "Douglas A. Gwyn" wrote:
:>
:> Tom St Denis wrote:
:> > "drumstik" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
:> > > Smile! There is no god.
:> > And if there was would it matter anyways?
:>
:> Yeah, he sure wouldn't waste His time in this thread.
: SHE would not waste her time in this thread.
IT would not waste its time in this thread. (Unless you have definitive
proof of genitalia type.)
--
John M. Price, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Life: Chemistry, but with feeling! | PGP Key on request or FTP!
Email responses to my Usenet articles will be posted at my discretion.
Comoderator: sci.psychology.psychotherapy.moderated Atheist# 683
The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and
religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging
from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its
yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the
world put together.
-- Sir Peter Medawar
------------------------------
From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: alt.security,comp.security,alt.2600
Subject: Re: The Kingdom of God
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 21:42:16 GMT
William Hugh Murray wrote:
> SHE would not waste her time in this thread.
No, "she" implies definite knowledge of feminity,
while "he" is neutral. I know that the leftists
have corrupted our educational sytem to the extent
that "political correctness" is being taught with
its bogus notions about the English language as
well as other things, but instead of giving in to
such philosophical terrorism it should be resisted.
------------------------------
From: William Hugh Murray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Crossposted-To: alt.security,comp.security,alt.2600
Subject: Re: The Kingdom of God
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 21:37:16 GMT
We write as though the spammer, Markku J. Saarelainen
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, was ever going to come back to one of these
lists to see what he stirred up.
PennGwyn wrote:
>
> In article <963tf7$aip$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] says...
> >
> >1. When he was on earth, Jesus taught his followers to pray for God's
> >Kingdom.
>
> I am unaware of reliable evidence that Jesus was ever on earth, or had
> followers, or what he taught them. I am reluctant to assume that you were
> present.
>
> >A kingdom is a government that is headed by a king.
>
> I think it would be more accurate to say that a kingdom is a region whose
> Head of State is a king OR QUEEN. Recall that in New Testament times, the
> "kingdoms" of the Middle East were provinces of the Roman Empire.
> A MONARCHY is a government that is headed by a king or queen. A KINGDOM is
> not.
>
> >God's Kingdom is a special government. It is set up in heaven and will rule
> >over this earth.
>
> This is unprecedented. Monarchies rule over kingdoms; empires encompass
> multiple regions which may or may not, individually, be kingdoms.
>
> According to your opening sentence, Jesus' follwers were not taught to pray
> for God's monarchy or empire, only for his kingdom -- which, as far as I can
> see, can only mean Heaven itself.
>
> >It will sanctify, or make holy, God's name.
>
> So God's name is not ALREADY holy? I'm sure you'll find plenty who have
> trouble with THAT blasphemy.
>
> >It will cause God's will to be done on earth as it is done in heaven.
>
> Kingdoms don't "cause" events, either.
>
> >http://www.watchtower.org/library/rq/index.htm
>
> And the relevance to "sci.crypt,alt.security,comp.security,alt.2600" is what,
> exactly?
>
> --
> -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
> Version: 3.12
> GIT/O d+(-) s:+ a? C++(+++) U@ P@ L+ !E W@ N++ o+ K+ w+++<$ !O M+ !V PS++ PE
> Y+ PGP@ t@ 5+ X- R++< tv+ b++ DI++ D G+ e++ h---(-) r? y+++(+*)
> ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
------------------------------
From: William Hugh Murray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Crossposted-To: alt.security,comp.security,alt.2600
Subject: Re: The Kingdom of God
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 21:38:21 GMT
JCA wrote:
>
> Why not a quote from the Old Norse mythology? I mean, it's
> far more fun, and just as irrelevant to the issues that concern
> these newsgroups.
For fun, I recommend the old testament or the Kama Sutra.
>
> "Markku J. Saarelainen" wrote:
>
> > 1. When he was on earth, Jesus taught his followers to pray for God's
> > Kingdom. A kingdom is a government that is headed by a king. God's
> > Kingdom is a special government. It is set up in heaven and will rule
> > over this earth. It will sanctify, or make holy, God's name. It will
> > cause God's will to be done on earth as it is done in heaven.-Matthew
> > 6:9, 10.
> >
> > http://www.watchtower.org/library/rq/index.htm
> >
> > Sent via Deja.com
> > http://www.deja.com/
------------------------------
From: "Trevor L. Jackson, III" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: don't
Crossposted-To: alt.security,comp.security,alt.2600
Subject: Re: The Kingdom of God
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 22:05:22 GMT
William Hugh Murray wrote:
> "Markku J. Saarelainen" wrote:
> >
> > 1. When he was on earth, Jesus taught his followers to pray for God's
> > Kingdom. A kingdom is a government that is headed by a king. God's
> > Kingdom is a special government. It is set up in heaven and will rule
> > over this earth. It will sanctify, or make holy, God's name. It will
> > cause God's will to be done on earth as it is done in heaven.—Matthew
> > 6:9, 10.
> >
> > http://www.watchtower.org/library/rq/index.htm
> >
> > Sent via Deja.com
> > http://www.deja.com/
>
> Yes. And your security point is what? In any case, by definition,
> God's will is done.
This thesis (sorry) implies that resistance to god's will is futile, and
reduces most theological texts (Book of Mormon, Koran, Bible, etc.) into
attitude adjustments. Whither free will?
The presumed congruence between divine and human wills makes the precedence
ambiguous. Just who is the willer and who is the willee, god or the human?
------------------------------
From: Benjamin Goldberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: CipherText patent still pending
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 21:53:21 GMT
Douglas A. Gwyn wrote:
>
> Benjamin Goldberg wrote:
> > Please tell me how you intended the sentence "Consider that so far
> > as we know, P = NP but we haven't found any proof of it yet," to be
> > parsed.
>
> As an English sentence, but *in context*, which you have dropped.
>
> The original concern, which one often hears expressed, was that
> modern cryptology is fundamentally dependent on P!=NP. My point
> was that so far as we know it could be that P=NP, but then how
> would that be exploited to break modern cryptosystems? I.e. the
> truth or falsity of P?=NP is irrelevant to cryptosystem security.
Any cipher which runs in polynomial time can be converted to a 3SAT
problem, where the number of terms is
O( (keysize + blocksize) * knownplaintexts ).
If that 3SAT problem can be solved in polynomial time, then the key can
be recovered in polynomial time with a few blocks of known plaintext.
> From your opposition, I gather that you believe that you know
> that P!=NP. How do you know that? The world is waiting..
I don't believe that I know P!=NP or P=NP.
> If you *don't* know that, then so far as you know P could = NP.
Yes, it could be. I was merely objecting to your [sarcastic?] statement
that the scientific community "knows" that it is one or the other.
--
A solution in hand is worth two in the book.
------------------------------
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