Re: Crypto hardware
At 2:28 PM -0700 on 7/10/01, Kent Crispin wrote: Does this description trigger any recollection? Are there similar devices on the market from other sources? Yup. Talk to NCipher. http://www.ncipher.com -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Crypto hardware
You are describing a Hardware Security Module (HSM) and there are several on the market from various vendors. For further data on our product line please feel free to look at our website. Our nShield product is FIPS 140-1 Level 3 validated: http://www.ncipher.com/products/nshield/index.html HTH, --John John P. Sullivan Senior Consulting Engineer nCipher, Inc. 781-994-4084 (office) [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Kent Crispin Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2001 5:28 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Crypto hardware A couple of years ago at the RSA conference one of the vendors was exhibiting a tamperproof that would keep a secret key and perform encryptions/signatures using the key. Since the key never left the box, in theory security reduced to physical security around the box. The intended use of the box was as a master for a CA. I thought the vendor was GTE, but I didn't find anything definitive on their site. Does this description trigger any recollection? Are there similar devices on the market from other sources? -- Kent Crispin Be good, and you will be [EMAIL PROTECTED] lonesome. -- Mark Twain - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED] - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Crypto hardware
On Tue, Jul 10, 2001 at 02:28:08PM -0700, Kent Crispin wrote: A couple of years ago at the RSA conference one of the vendors was exhibiting a tamperproof that would keep a secret key and perform encryptions/signatures using the key. Since the key never left the box, in theory security reduced to physical security around the box. The intended use of the box was as a master for a CA. I thought the vendor was GTE, but I didn't find anything definitive on their site. Does this description trigger any recollection? Are there similar devices on the market from other sources? Was it the BBN Safekeeper? I haven't seen one, but I have had it described to me as a PC welded into a box, intended for use as a CA. Eric - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Navajo Code Talkers
H. CON. RES. 174 Authorizing the Rotunda of the Capitol to be used on July 26, 2001, for a ceremony to present Congressional Gold Medals to the original 29 Navajo Code Talkers. -- William Allen Simpson Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32 - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Crypto hardware
At 02:28 PM 7/10/01 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote: A couple of years ago at the RSA conference one of the vendors was exhibiting a tamperproof that would keep a secret key and perform encryptions/signatures using the key. Since the key never left the box, in theory security reduced to physical security around the box. The intended use of the box was as a master for a CA. I thought the vendor was GTE, but I didn't find anything definitive on their site. Does this description trigger any recollection? Are there similar devices on the market from other sources? Look up ibutton.com - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FW: Zero-Knowledge proofs for valid decryption !!
The background of my question was an auction application where encrypted bids are published on a bulletin board. All bids are authenticated, i.e. signed by the bidders. Since there is no anonymity, (there are reasons for this), the link between the encrypted bids and the decrypted results, which will be published for verifiability, must be hidden. Note that in electronic voting, which is a similar application to auctions, the homorphism of the encryption scheme may allow an observer to gather the encrypted results, and then only verify the sum of encrypted votes. However, in an auction application, this is not the case. So there is a need for the Auctioneers (they are distributed, for bid-secrecy) to publish a shuffle of the decrypted bids, and then prove correctness of the decryption in zero-knowledge. Although I have read a few papers about mix-nets (in the e-voting context), I had not realized that the mix idea answered my question (although I should have :). Thanx for all folks who answered my question !! - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Crypto hardware
Are you talking about the BBN/GTE SafeKeyPer (I may have mis-spelled that)? I don't know if they are still on the market -- they were priced Really High. -derek Kent Crispin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: A couple of years ago at the RSA conference one of the vendors was exhibiting a tamperproof that would keep a secret key and perform encryptions/signatures using the key. Since the key never left the box, in theory security reduced to physical security around the box. The intended use of the box was as a master for a CA. I thought the vendor was GTE, but I didn't find anything definitive on their site. Does this description trigger any recollection? Are there similar devices on the market from other sources? -- Kent Crispin Be good, and you will be [EMAIL PROTECTED] lonesome. -- Mark Twain - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/PP-ASEL-IA N1NWH [EMAIL PROTECTED]PGP key available - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Crypto hardware
This sounds like the BBN Safekeyper. (BBN was acquired by GTE, but still operates using the BBN name.) A similar device is described at: http://www.bbn.com/infosec/signassure.html - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Crypto hardware
The unit is called the SafeKeyper from BBN. It is based on a unit designed for type-1 cryptography and met the various government standards required. That unit was, I believe, the first cryptographic peripheral device accepted by the government and led to the acceptance of other peripheral cryptographic devices like Fortezza, SmartCards, etc. We in the biz never use the term tamperproof ;-) Besides being impossible, it is often viewed as a challenge. Highly tamper resistant and tamper evident is the claim. For example, we speculate that if you took a SafeKeyper and froze it in liquid nitrogen, then you might be able to disassemble it and neutralize the tamper circuitry. This would allow you to extract the keying material and perhaps re-assemble the unit. We believe that the tampering would be evident due to tamper resistant seals on the opening of the unit although cleverness would probably defeat those too. Of course, if freezing damaged the circuitry then that would be tamper evidence too ... It would be a fun experiment. We can take this offline if you wish. I'm not certain it is of general interest. BTW: you can still buy these and an improved model is in the works. John Lowry - John Lowry Division Engineer BBN/Verizon 617-873-2435 [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Kent Crispin Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2001 5:28 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Crypto hardware A couple of years ago at the RSA conference one of the vendors was exhibiting a tamperproof that would keep a secret key and perform encryptions/signatures using the key. Since the key never left the box, in theory security reduced to physical security around the box. The intended use of the box was as a master for a CA. I thought the vendor was GTE, but I didn't find anything definitive on their site. Does this description trigger any recollection? Are there similar devices on the market from other sources? -- Kent Crispin Be good, and you will be [EMAIL PROTECTED] lonesome. -- Mark Twain - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED] - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
DCSB: David Birch; European Wireless E-Commerce
--- begin forwarded text Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 11:44:45 -0400 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: R. A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: DCSB: David Birch; European Wireless E-Commerce Cc: Dave Birch [EMAIL PROTECTED], Arnold G. Reinhold [EMAIL PROTECTED], Jean Camp [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: R. A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- [The Harvard Club is now business casual. No more jackets and ties, but see below for details. While it lasts, anyway. Since last year's dot-bomb, the suit-ratio in the main dining room has been asymptotically approaching unity. :-). --RAH] The Digital Commerce Society of Boston Presents David G.W. Birch, Director, Consult Hyperion M-Commerce and Wireless E-Commerce: A European Perspective Tuesday, August 7th, 2001 12 - 2 PM The Downtown Harvard Club of Boston One Federal Street, Boston, MA Getting from the general view that m-commerce will be huge to the specifics of which business models will come to dominate the sector is difficult. First, no one knows anything about mobile data and so we have little to go on to make predictions. Second, the speed and unpredictability of technological evolution make it hard to stabilise the platform for services (especially when comparing North American wireless e-commerce with European m-commerce efforts). Third, there are legal, political and social issues yet to be resolved. Yet there have been some successes, and it is worth looking at them to try and understand the dynamics behind them. What are the real lessons to be learned from Japan's iMode? Why is business moving in on the text messaging boom? Is good old e-mail turning out to be the killer app? To what extent does the SIM shape the future? Does the French micropayments launch change anything? Do Australian Coca-Cola machines provide a window on the future or a diversion? Who will benefit most from E911 and the introduction of location-based services (my tip: lawyers). This presentation attempts an overview of these issues, against the backdrop of the 3G transition, and combines it with experience gained advising leaders in the m-commerce field to try and make some sensible predictions about the direction of the m-commerce sector. David G.W. Birch is a Director of Consult Hyperion, one of the UK's leading e-commerce consultancies, which he helped found after several years working as a consultant in Europe, the Far East and North America. Their clients -- ranging from Mastercard and Microsoft to Orange and NTT Data -- are working at the leading edge of commerce on line. A physicist by training, Dave has lectured on the impact of new communications technologies to MBA level. He has been on the editorial board of the Financial Times Virtual Finance Report and Microsoft's Finance on Windows, as well as the editorial advisory board for European Business Review. He chaired the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation's first working group on the Internet and Retail Banking and is the moderator of First Tuesday's Wireless Wednesday resource for mobile entrepreneurs. He has written for publications ranging from The Guardian to the Parliamentary IT Review and is a media commentator on electronic commerce issues. He is the author, with payment systems consultant Mike Hendry, of last year's Informa report Retail Consumer Payments in Europe and North America. This meeting of the Digital Commerce Society of Boston will be held on Tuesday, August 7th, 2001, from 12pm - 2pm at the Downtown Branch of the Harvard Club of Boston, on One Federal Street. The price for lunch is $37.50. This price includes lunch, room rental, A/V hardware if necessary, and the speakers' lunch. The Harvard Club has relaxed its dress code, which is now business casual, meaning no sneakers or jeans. Fair warning: since we purchase these luncheons in advance, we will be unable to refund the price of your meal if the Club finds you in violation of what's left of its dress code. We need to receive a company check, or money order, (or, if we *really* know you, a personal check) payable to The Harvard Club of Boston, by Saturday, August 4th, or you won't be on the list for lunch. Checks payable to anyone else but The Harvard Club of Boston will have to be sent back. Checks should be sent to Robert Hettinga, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02131. Again, they *must* be made payable to The Harvard Club of Boston, in the amount of $37.50. Please include your e-mail address so that we can send you a confirmation If anyone has questions, or has a problem with these arrangements (we've had to work with glacial A/P departments more than once, for instance), please let us know via e-mail, and we'll
pseudonymous decentralized marketplace
I've been attempting to design a decentralized auction/ exchange system that permits pseudonymous participants. By 'decentralized', I mean that NO central server, or subset of individual servers, controls access to any resource the system cannot work without; that there is no single point of failure. A consequence of this is that every ability that exists in any node, must exist in every node. So the whole problem of currency issue gets the slightly weird solution of everybody has to be able to print their own money. The sticking point is that this basically means the system will be without any single universal currency. A lot of E-cash techniques are usable, but what you wind up trading is certificates that represent goods or services offered by individuals in the system -- Alice the Farmer might issue certificates for bushels of wheat, while Bob the Carpenter might issue a bunch of certificates that say collect a thousand of these and I'll redeem them for a new 10x10 meter deck on your house and Carol the moneychanger might promise to redeem hers for one US dollar each, just for the amusement value of redeeming something in a system where hard currencies are the norm with a fiat currency. So these would be effectively a sort of digital merchants scrip, reducing back down to barter. Exchange rates between the currencies issued by different participants would fluctuate according to trust and commodity values, and I'm okay with that. Given the nature of the trust/reputation thing, I'd expect only a very small percentage of the participants to *actually* issue their own currency, as they wouldn't get good acceptance/exchange values until widely known, but everybody would have the ability. The problem I'm running into is that while all kinds of e-cash protocols exist that protect the anonymity of the buyer and a lot protect the anonymity of the seller, there are none that protect the anonymity of the currency issuer, which would be ideal in this circumstance. With the techniques I know of, the issuer can have only Nym protection. The basic problem with anonymizing the issuers (beyond technique alone) would be how the scrip gets redeemed when you don't necessarily know whom the issuer is. Can anybody recommend appropriate reading? Bear - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
