Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
-Original Message-
From: Major Variola (ret) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Jul 30, 2004 10:25 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
The profitably part is a non-issue when you have black budgets,
ie $400 toilet seats.
This is silly. They have black budgets, but not infinite ones. Given their budget
(whatever it is), they want to buy the most processing bang for their buck. I doubt
they can do that substantially better than anyone else. I'd expect them to be really
clever at finding tricks to optimize keysearch of various kinds, but not to have
better microprocessor technology than the rest of the world.
Bottom line: they're not ahead in tech, but they can make things that
private-co engineeers only dream of. DesCrack is a suitcase, get it?
So, then they can break 3-key 3DES with moderate numbers of texts as soon as they can
build 2^{56} such suitcases, right? And power them, and get rid of their waste
heat
I'll let you speculate on AESCrack :-)
Do the math, and you'll see how implausible 128-bit keysearch is. Maybe there are
better attacks on AES (the algebraic stuff doesn't seem to have gone anywhere, but it
still might), but if keysearch is all we have to worry about, and nontrivial quantum
computers remain impractical to build, then 128-bit keys are as secure as we're ever
likely to need, and 256-bit keys more or less eliminate keysearch of any kind from the
list of things we need ever worry about again.
--John
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
This is what J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] said about Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarde on 24 Jul 2004 at 18:44 On Sat, 24 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: There might be blind cypherpunks, we don't discriminate[1], There Is No We. [1] the original phone phreaks were blind, This is a ridiculous statement, and even worse, leaks information about your nym: [young enough to have not been there]. You are thinking of Joe Whistler Joe Egressia (sp?), and the kid form New York whose names escape me at the moment. These two do not even com close to the original phone phreaks were blind. More like at least two of the original batch of phreaks were blind. Or are you thinking of the Three Blind Phreaks, profiled in Wired magazine earlier this year? http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/phreaks.html --Bob.
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 12:07 AM 7/29/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: On Wed, 28 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Did you know that your teeth enamel contain isotope ratios that encode regions where you might have grown up around age 6? Yes. I am also aware that tooth enamel has the interesting property of trapping a fantastic number of parmaceuticals. No. Your tooth enamel is static after you grow adult teeth. Your bones recycle every 10-20 years. Your hair gives away your indulgences though, which is what you allude to. Of interest to anthropologists, eg the folks who pinned Otzi's birthplace to other than where he was found. Anyone who wants to piss-test me will find his desk fully irrigated next day.
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 12:36 PM 7/29/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: Remember that the spookfabs don't have to contend with *economics and yield*. Damn, this is precisely where I wish Tim May was still around. We are all just echoes of the voices in his head. But I did work for a company that owned fabs. And have kept up with the semiconductor lit. Yield is a big deal ---you either fit it on a square inch of Si or you don't make it (profitably). The profitably part is a non-issue when you have black budgets, ie $400 toilet seats. Bottom line: they're not ahead in tech, but they can make things that private-co engineeers only dream of. DesCrack is a suitcase, get it? I'll let you speculate on AESCrack :-)
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 06:44 PM 7/24/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: On Sat, 24 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: There might be blind cypherpunks, we don't discriminate[1], There Is No We. touche' [1] the original phone phreaks were blind, This is a ridiculous statement, and even worse, leaks information about your nym: [young enough to have not been there]. Yes. Did you know that your teeth enamel contain isotope ratios that encode regions where you might have grown up around age 6? Ask Otzi. You are thinking of Joe Whistler Joe Egressia (sp?), and the kid form New York whose names escape me at the moment. These two do not even com close to the original phone phreaks were blind. More like at least two of the original batch of phreaks were blind. Ok, so this was book reading. Sosume. I once worked for a guy who hired Capt'n Crunch, *briefly*. [This is reference to a digression later in the thread. His dentition was not discussed.] -- WE are all just voices in Tim May's head.
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Wed, 28 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Did you know that your teeth enamel contain isotope ratios that encode regions where you might have grown up around age 6? Yes. I am also aware that tooth enamel has the interesting property of trapping a fantastic number of parmaceuticals. The teeth can be used to lay out a life history of drug [ab]use, from simple tetracycline use as a kid through to the occasional lines as an adult. AFAIK, the tests now available are simply qualitative, and without accurate date-stamping, but I am no expert in this area (so if it's important to you, seek Knowledgeable Assistance (tm)). I once worked for a guy who hired Capt'n Crunch, *briefly*. Yeah. Most people find John a bit difficult to stomach for long. While I won't go into my personal interactions with him here, it is worth noting that I take pains to point out that John is *not* representative of the average phreak when I teach classes touching on that area. Remember: John spent a great deal of time bemoaning the fact that secrets was published, and that it was going to end phreaking, yet *he* was the one who spent all the time talking to the goddamned reporter! John is not, IMNSHO, well pasted together. Besides, he has the most disturbing physical motions I have ever seen in another human being. The way he moves his body tells you there is something wrong - you don't even need to talk to him before the hairs on the back of your neck start screaming for cover :-( [This is reference to a digression later in the thread. His dentition was not discussed.] Thank god... -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one scares you more?
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 03:52 PM 7/27/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: Variola wrote... In the *public* lit. Well, perhaps but perhaps not. Burst-mode signaling, transceivers, and networking technology are a good example. If you see DISA, NSA, and DARPA all working with the acknoledged experts inthe academic field, and if you see them spending $$$ on burst-mode testbeds, then it's clear that there are some issues they haven't solved. You're right on this, I admit. Its clear that things like smart dust and gait recognition and autonomous cruising across the desert are not things the Beast has yet. There just happen to be physical limitations. But I have zero doubt that the NSA can't make a laser that is siginificantly more efficient than what I can buy off the shelf. I'm not one to dispute physics. However most professional skeptics (eg cryptographers) grant the adversary anything from 2 to 10 x the COTS tech. Do you *really* think the NSA's DesCrack was built with old Sun chassis like Gilmore, Kocher, et als??? Remember that the spookfabs don't have to contend with *economics and yield*. They can use *radioisotopes*. Subs can lay independant cable. Not a lot of folks walk along the undersea cables, to say nothing of how bribable telecom folks are. Conservativism sometimes means being liberal in modelling others' capabilities. -- Be Useful -the Baron
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
Remember that the spookfabs don't have to contend with *economics and yield*. Damn, this is precisely where I wish Tim May was still around. Certainly, the Spooks have their own fabs, and I don't think they even hide this fact (I doubt they could, ultimately). And certainly, the Spooks crank out all sort of special ASICs using their own IP as well as some store-bought stuff they drop onto their designs. However, where I have some BIG doubts is whether their fab is X generations ahead of the most advanced commercial fabs. Frankly, I bet they have a pretty good fab that was modified by a commercial vendor to support small production runs. This fab, however, does not utilize cosmic rays for etching or whatever. It's probably 0.13 microns at best (wait...I think Taiwan Semi and a couple of other places are one step ahead of this). This limits what they can do with a chip or chipset, and implies that they won't be orders of magnitude better at opening up LOTS of traffic. (In non-troll mode.) -TD From: Major Variola (ret) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 21:34:59 -0700 At 03:52 PM 7/27/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: Variola wrote... In the *public* lit. Well, perhaps but perhaps not. Burst-mode signaling, transceivers, and networking technology are a good example. If you see DISA, NSA, and DARPA all working with the acknoledged experts inthe academic field, and if you see them spending $$$ on burst-mode testbeds, then it's clear that there are some issues they haven't solved. You're right on this, I admit. Its clear that things like smart dust and gait recognition and autonomous cruising across the desert are not things the Beast has yet. There just happen to be physical limitations. But I have zero doubt that the NSA can't make a laser that is siginificantly more efficient than what I can buy off the shelf. I'm not one to dispute physics. However most professional skeptics (eg cryptographers) grant the adversary anything from 2 to 10 x the COTS tech. Do you *really* think the NSA's DesCrack was built with old Sun chassis like Gilmore, Kocher, et als??? Remember that the spookfabs don't have to contend with *economics and yield*. They can use *radioisotopes*. Subs can lay independant cable. Not a lot of folks walk along the undersea cables, to say nothing of how bribable telecom folks are. Conservativism sometimes means being liberal in modelling others' capabilities. -- Be Useful -the Baron _ Overwhelmed by debt? Find out how to Dig Yourself Out of Debt from MSN Money. http://special.msn.com/money/0407debt.armx
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
Variola wrote... While this cannot be discounted in toto, the tech comes to them from academia (most of the time), so generally, if you are widely read, you'll have a pretty good idea of what's *possible*. You are likely dead-on accurate about the fabs though. In the *public* lit. Well, perhaps but perhaps not. Burst-mode signaling, transceivers, and networking technology are a good example. If you see DISA, NSA, and DARPA all working with the acknoledged experts inthe academic field, and if you see them spending $$$ on burst-mode testbeds, then it's clear that there are some issues they haven't solved. Of course, they may not be the issues WE think they are, but you get some idea. What that also hints at is that they can't actually always backhaul EVERYTHING. Their interest in burst-mode indicates they still view bandwidth as an obstacle (and not dark fiber, but actual lit bandwidth). Of course, their bandwidth problem is probably at orders of magnitude greater than we'd consider a problem, but their continued interest in burst mode probably indicates there are times when they have huge amounts of data that needs to get through i a short amount of time, and they don't want to clog up a channel. Fair 'nuff. You know that 5 year predictions are too conservative, and 20 year predictions too liberal. Ask Orwell. Well, there's the famous Adaptive Optics story centered around bringing Manua Kea online. When the Manua Kea designers were trying to solve some of the big issues ca. 1988, the military (as part of one of their dual-use programs) declassified Laser Guidestar research they had done in 1962! In other cases you can, however, take a reasonably good guess. Remember, during the bubble there was billions poured in by the private sector in making lasers more efficient, smaller, etc...There just happen to be physical limitations. But I have zero doubt that the NSA can't make a laser that is siginificantly more efficient than what I can buy off the shelf. You think subs are just toys? Actually, this is a most interesting point. Those cables are not merely giant rubber hoses running around on the sea floor...the telecom equipment is actually powered via an electrical layer in the cable sheath. And then remember that there are lots of fibers in any one of those cables, and that the signal therein might easily need to be amplified due to splice losses. So that Sub (which I know exists) must really be something to see. Almost makes me want to join the dark side! (Oh yeah, come to think of it I did actually work on an NSA project that examined some undersea optical component failures out of one of their networks. From the components we looked at, I can only guess what their network topology must have been (OC-3 ATM, BTW), but I can only take vague guesses as to what it must do). -TD _ Dont just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 04:44 PM 7/24/2004, J.A. Terranson wrote: [1] the original phone phreaks were blind, This is a ridiculous statement, and even worse, leaks information about your nym: [young enough to have not been there]. You are thinking of Joe Whistler Joe Egressia (sp?), and the kid form New York whose names escape me at the moment. These two do not even com close to the original phone phreaks were blind. More like at least two of the original batch of phreaks were blind. Cap'n Crunch may have bad teeth, but his eyes were fine the last time I saw him.
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
-- On 23 Jul 2004 at 12:40, Thomas Shaddack wrote: Depends on whom. Often the money are the main motivation. Of course, your own country won't pay you as well as the other one, and will try to appeal to your patriotism like a bunch of cheapskates - it's better to be a contractor. The Soviet Union was notorious for absurdly low pay, yet had no difficulty getting lots of servants. It cultivated a sense of identification. The CIA would give you a crate of money, a crate of guns, and some say a crate of cocaine. but the KGB would ask about your dental problems and arrange for a free dental appointment. If you were a key scientist or something, rather than just some regular guy, they would discover your sexual tastes or your tastes in art and send around a girl or boy to suite, or some art that probably could not be obtained by mere money, or perhaps a boy carrying some art. To the best of my knowledge no one EVER got any decent sized cash payment from the Soviet Union for any act of treason, no matter how crucial. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG TKc9QQNccF421kjpfih8YdB96RpYw17p3sjofelQ 4yBG3NNFrBGZu5Zy/GwjHsjbhkfnJhmOU2OYDAyFn
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 01:11:58AM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: Google's Gmail is an interesting case. Unlike Councilman's ISP, who were sneaky greedy wiretapping bums, Google tells you that they'll grep your mail for advertising material, and tells you how much of that they'll leak to the advertisers and makes you some promises not to leak more. The data's just sitting there waiting for a subpoena, and there's not much point in having it all encrypted because the cool features of Gmail aren't much use on cyphertext. FYI here's something I wrote in April... --Declan http://news.com.com/Is+Google+the+future+of+e-mail%3F/2010-1032_3-5187543.html If Google wanted to veer in a more privacy-protective direction, it could look to the intriguing model of Vancouver, Canada-based Hush Communications, which runs the Hushmail Web mail system. Unlike rivals, Hush encrypts mail sent between Hush users. It uses a Java-based technique that allows for only its intended recipient--and not Hush employees--to decrypt a scrambled e-mail message. If a subpoena arrives, or if a security breach ever happens, disclosure would be limited. Hush offers 2-megabyte-limit free accounts and pay accounts, and it said 900,000 accounts have been created since its May 1999 launch. The company also lets users store files in an encrypted volume and this week plans to announce a feature that permits encrypted volumes to be shared among multiple users. Hush's patent No. 6,154,543 covers some aspects of encrypted e-mail. The company said it'd happy to license it to Google. Originally, Hush Chief Technology Officer Brian Smith said, the patent was quite broad, but we have narrowed the patent to apply only to e-mail and messaging systems. The modifications were accepted but don't yet appear on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Web site. True, if the archived e-mail is encrypted, Gmail won't be able to search message bodies very efficiently, but users might be willing to give up that feature and even pay a monthly charge in exchange for additional security. We'll think about it, said Google's Rosing. We don't have any explicit plans right now...If someone really needs to encrypt a lot of e-mail, maybe they should be putting that on their laptop. We're trying to provide a service that offers some utility to our users. If you change the service to take away all the value of the service, you're back where you started. Maybe. But until that happens, would-be users of Gmail or any similar service should recognize that their so-called free e-mail comes at a price.
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Sun, 25 Jul 2004, Declan McCullagh wrote: On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 10:35:19PM -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote: You don't know about tape robots, or offline indexing, eh? FYI from a recent trip to the NSA crypto museum: http://www.mccullagh.org/image/10d-15/storagetek-automated-cartridge-system.html http://www.mccullagh.org/image/10d-15/robot-arm-tape-cartridge.html I think that was circa 1994 (I'd have to look at the high-res image to see the date on the brass plaque to be sure). -Declan I've actually worked with slightly more recent tech from the same company. Note the limited size of the library (300tb), and also note that seek time to any one sector on any one tape is *incredibly* long. This is strictly a near-line bulk solution - useless for anything but permanent archives with an occasional pull. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one scares you more?
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Thu, 22 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Undersea taps are hard. No matter how you figure it. You think subs are just toys? Yes. Big ass toys for a bunch of boyz without brainz :-) And remember, Ivy Bells technology won't work here. That aside, I'm not arguing that it is un-doable, I am arguing that it is so difficult that it must be reserved for only those special cases where the risk/cost/benefits can all be balanced out (and where there is some backhaul available). Attempting to do this on a universal scale, just won't, well, *scale*. Not yet. I am looking eagerly towards entangled photons though, just to be sure we never reach the point of scalability ;-) The actual intel/counterintel guys make shit for money. What I meant was, Ames and that FBI dude Hansen (sp?), at least the KGB got Ames' wife as part of the package, whereas the FBI CI dude let his wife off as part of the deal he cut. Nice xian that he was, he was into strippers. Aren't we *all* into strippers? -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one scares you more?
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 09:47 PM 7/23/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: What I meant was, Ames and that FBI dude Hansen (sp?), at least the KGB got Ames' wife as part of the package, whereas the FBI CI dude let his wife off as part of the deal he cut. Nice xian that he was, he was into strippers. Aren't we *all* into strippers? There might be blind cypherpunks, we don't discriminate[1], and most provincial (in both senses) laws prohibit touch. Probably beer and sweat overwhelms any smells that the blind might dig. Ever see scent of a woman that Al Pacino (IIRC) movie? [1] the original phone phreaks were blind, looking (unintended pun) to converse for free, having lots of time, and being precise listeners of DTMF frequencies. Back when the protocols were unprotected... much like the 'net today :-)
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Sat, 24 Jul 2004, Riad S. Wahby wrote: for free. You just have to start pulse dialing with the hook before the autodialer kicks in; The easier way is to wait for the retard to answer, then curse at them. They'll hang up, and in ~60 seconds you'll be back to a dial tone, and the dialer will be none the wiser. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one scares you more?
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Sat, 24 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: There might be blind cypherpunks, we don't discriminate[1], There Is No We. [1] the original phone phreaks were blind, This is a ridiculous statement, and even worse, leaks information about your nym: [young enough to have not been there]. You are thinking of Joe Whistler Joe Egressia (sp?), and the kid form New York whose names escape me at the moment. These two do not even com close to the original phone phreaks were blind. More like at least two of the original batch of phreaks were blind. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one scares you more?
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
Major Variola (ret) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Back when the protocols were unprotected... much like the 'net today :-) Hell, as recently as three years ago the pay phones in Boston could still be red boxed. It may actually still be possible---I haven't tried in a while. Haven't done it here in Austin, either. I discovered (probably not the first time it's been discovered, but new to me anyway) a while ago that the autodial phones in ATMs that connect you to the bank's Retard Line could be fooled into making phone calls for free. You just have to start pulse dialing with the hook before the autodialer kicks in; if you do it right the dial tone goes away fast enough that the autodialer never activates. I never tried simply using my own tone dialer, but it's likely that would also work unless they're smart enough to mute the mic. -- Riad S. Wahby [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 10:27 AM 7/22/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: Gilmore et al used a bunch of old Sun Chassis for his Kocher's DEScracker. You think this is somehow more than 100 watts, in a diplo suitcase, nowadays? My point was, Gilmore et al were way behind what's capable. Proof of concept needn't be compact. A suitcase can handle his DesCrack, with all due respect, nowadays. OK, so you're saying that this suitcase takes in say 10 OC-192s, demuxes all of them down to the DS1 level (we're at 50,000 DS1s), demaps and unpacks the ATM cells, and then reassembles all of the packets therein? Questions: Just for yucks, look up the specs on an Intel IXA processor. 1) How does this majic box store all that data? No store, just bridge. 2) I've been in dozens of COs myself, and have worked extensively with people who have spent (collectively speaking) centuries in them. They never saw such a magic box a you describe, and indeed would certainly know about someone trying to install one. Or perhaps the NSA has developed a cloaking device making the box invisible? Do you think they so naif they'd expose themselves to a poster who dares post *here* ? 2) What silicon does t use? Are you saying that the government can do a LOT better than 0.13 microns these days? I'm saying that tech xfer on metal coated diamond is not just for fun. And years behind reality, for those with $400 toilet seat budgets. 3) If the majic box doesn't store the data, how does it get it back to HQ? Telepathy? One more time: dark fiber and compact drivers. Or even your more subtle unused-bandwith usage, back atcha. As for trolling, well when I do it I do it with friggin' style m'friend. True 'nuff. I mean no harm, only to provoke some to think, is all. Clearly you are the uber-Sonet-troll. :-)
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 12:39 AM 7/22/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: I'm following the Principle of not underestimating the adversary, Don't go overboard: remember that there is a difference between underestimating your adversary and unrealistically *over*estimating your adversary. Good point. Channelling Hettinga, crypto is economics. I (and I suspect you) live in the high tech world, Um, yes :-) while a large part of academia tends to believe that the USG is around ten years *behind* them (oh, to have such an ego!). In my personal experience, they tend to have roughly a five year lead on what my world considers bleeding edge. That said, I'm willing to cut them a few more years of slack when doing the necessary threat assessment, but I just do not believe they are 20, or even 10 years ahead. And that is not an idle belief, it's a considered, long formed opinion, based on an awful lot of input data. Fair 'nuff. You know that 5 year predictions are too conservative, and 20 year predictions too liberal. Ask Orwell. My point is only that they will be killed should they leak their actual capabilities. Perhaps that grants the Maryland trogdyltes too much, but again, conservatism rules in this game. Conservatism in the real world, unreasonable paranoia in the academic world (a necessary thing in that context). My academic experience had nothing to do with networking. I'm just a manic mechanic, okay? They also get radioisotope power supplies, etc. This is actually a *very* good point. It would also address the off-shore splice vs power issue nicely. But we are still constrained by backhaul. Ergo my dark fiber remark, even if naif. Yes, VA and DC have gluts of glass. In fact, that is one of the most concentrated glut areas. And most worth observing... While this cannot be discounted in toto, the tech comes to them from academia (most of the time), so generally, if you are widely read, you'll have a pretty good idea of what's *possible*. You are likely dead-on accurate about the fabs though. In the *public* lit. Albeit, Nortel (even if Canadian, eh?) Yup. The Irony Meter is hanging out at the right of the scale again :-) Bent so many needles, I don't even know my real name... Undersea taps are hard. No matter how you figure it. You think subs are just toys? The actual intel/counterintel guys make shit for money. What I meant was, Ames and that FBI dude Hansen (sp?), at least the KGB got Ames' wife as part of the package, whereas the FBI CI dude let his wife off as part of the deal he cut. Nice xian that he was, he was into strippers. All under $2e6, all capable of reading their own records. Go figure, eh? See you in Athens, or before :-)
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Thu, 22 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: My point is only that they will be killed should they leak their actual capabilities. Well... I am reading a book about intelligence now. Specifically, Ernst Volkman: Spies - the secret agents who changed the course of history. Amusing book; describes many ways of intelligence fieldwork, most of them pretty lowtech. Eg, using business representatives as business/technology spies (as eg. a skilled steelworker can assess the capacity and capability and current processing of a factory quite at a glance, and he's often let in during contract negotiations), using pretty women to lure officers into honeytraps... or, recruiting young pretty men to seduce the not exactly pretty old maids who so often work as secretaries in important places. You don't need a *LOT* of money to pull smaller-scale tricks of this kind. Also, using amateurs, private enterpreneurs in the arts of burglaries, safecracking and other relevant areas, instead of governmental employees, poses a counterintelligence advantage that these recruits are unknown to the adversary (and to most of your side too, so there's less chance somebody will be caught or changes sides and squeaks on them). There are many ways to get access to even pretty sensitive info. Patience and persistence and plethora of approaches are important here. Undersea taps are hard. No matter how you figure it. You think subs are just toys? Hard doesn't imply impossible. It however hints on the likely success rate. The actual intel/counterintel guys make shit for money. Depends on whom. Often the money are the main motivation. Of course, your own country won't pay you as well as the other one, and will try to appeal to your patriotism like a bunch of cheapskates - it's better to be a contractor. What I meant was, Ames and that FBI dude Hansen (sp?), at least the KGB got Ames' wife as part of the package, whereas the FBI CI dude let his wife off as part of the deal he cut. Nice xian that he was, he was into strippers. All under $2e6, all capable of reading their own records. Go figure, eh? And many of them disclosed their colleagues when politely asked. But a big truth remains here - SIGINT and COMINT aren't everything, often a drop of HUMINT is the missing secret sauce. Q: What's the difference between a secret service director and a gardener? A: None. Both have their turf full of moles.
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: I'm following the Principle of not underestimating the adversary, Don't go overboard: remember that there is a difference between underestimating your adversary and unrealistically *over*estimating your adversary. who does plenty of RD, just look at their tech-transfer program, multiply by a few decades in capacity.. I (and I suspect you) live in the high tech world, so we have a pretty good grasp of the current state of the art. As a rule, Joe Sixpack thinks that the g'mint is a couple of trillion years ahead of Moore's Law (Shure they can break all that there commie crypto ssl hidden horsesheet!), while a large part of academia tends to believe that the USG is around ten years *behind* them (oh, to have such an ego!). In my personal experience, they tend to have roughly a five year lead on what my world considers bleeding edge. That said, I'm willing to cut them a few more years of slack when doing the necessary threat assessment, but I just do not believe they are 20, or even 10 years ahead. And that is not an idle belief, it's a considered, long formed opinion, based on an awful lot of input data. Perhaps that grants the Maryland trogdyltes too much, but again, conservatism rules in this game. Conservatism in the real world, unreasonable paranoia in the academic world (a necessary thing in that context). These are the right move. But in real-world assessment, if you use the academic paranoia model, you will never be able to engineer an appropriate solution (i.e., one that successfully balances current and expected lifetime threats, along with project expense and elegance of implementation. I truly think we are all addressing the very same thing - we are just approaching it from slightly different perspectives. I see these as real engineering problems, while you are looking at them as pure academic excersizes. We will obviously be reaching different endpoints this way, since we are assuming a different input set :-) Remember, Nortel is cost-bound. TLAs are not. Ahhh, but they are! That's why they went to COTS in the first place (they were forced). The scale of that cost binding may be difficult to ascertain since their outer cost limit is just astronomical (unless you are Shrub, who thinks he can just print more money when he runs out), but it does exist. They also get radioisotope power supplies, etc. This is actually a *very* good point. It would also address the off-shore splice vs power issue nicely. But we are still constrained by backhaul. In answer to the earlier question of how much dark fiber is there: roughly 12% of the fiber now in the ground is lit. Yes, there is a shitload of capacity sitting unused. Unfortunately, the people who buried all that glass were all competing in pretty much the same basic areas, so what we ended up with was orders of magnitude too much capacity around several large hub cities, while there is a critical shortage in other places. Yes, VA and DC have gluts of glass. In fact, that is one of the most concentrated glut areas. And unpublished tech made in unknown fabs. While this cannot be discounted in toto, the tech comes to them from academia (most of the time), so generally, if you are widely read, you'll have a pretty good idea of what's *possible*. You are likely dead-on accurate about the fabs though. Albeit, Nortel (even if Canadian, eh?) Yup. The Irony Meter is hanging out at the right of the scale again :-) etc are 0wn3d by the USG, so taps through COTS are not so hard, Undersea taps are hard. No matter how you figure it. Pressurized cables with PSI monitors and microsecond resolution monitoring is not something you can break into and splice without a great deal of care. For the record, yes, I believe it can be, and is being done. I would be surprised if it was on a large scale though - even with nukular poweer. and my dark fiber only means the physical capacity is there. Or not, depending on geographic location. And of course people are cheaper than tech. Always. And *this* is the lesson most often forgotten. Hell, the counter-intel folks seem to be real bargains, whether FBI or CIA. Man, you would not believe what these guys are [not] paid! A senior guy may naver break 100K in his lifetime (unless s/he (a) has a terminal degree, (b) swallows, and (c) decides to work a desk as an ASAC or somesuch. The actual intel/counterintel guys make shit for money. But if you prefer to believe they play on the same field as us, go ahead, I'll still read your posts, and appreciate the questioning. Thanks, I think :-) MV -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 10:09 AM 7/21/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: Variola wrote... Dark fiber. Dark Fiber ain't a talisman you merely wave at data to get it to magically move to where you want it to.You've got to LIGHT that fiber, and to light that fiber you need LOTS and LOTS of power-hungry, space-occupying equipment. In other words, you'd need to duplicate a significant fraction of the current public transport network. With all due respect, you think Ft. Meade uses the same COTS crap as you are forced to deal with? Bwah hah hah. Gilmore et al used a bunch of old Sun Chassis for his Kocher's DEScracker. You think this is somehow more than 100 watts, in a diplo suitcase, nowadays? Just curious as to the depth of navite in the field
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 11:28 AM 7/21/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: As for the cable landings, likewise I've never heard anyone mention that they saw any government equipment at the landings, so I suspect it's relatively minimal. I'm sorry but I have to puke at your cluelessness. Do you actually think the folks in the Know would let *your kind* know of their taps? Frankly, you trolls are too easy; but you're probably not, which is even more painful. Take it as a compliment, if there really is a TD.
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 10:12 PM 7/21/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: With all due respect, you think Ft. Meade uses the same COTS crap as you are forced to deal with? Bwah hah hah. Sorry Major, I'm gonna have to call you on that one. Yes, they are lighting that fiber on COTS. Likely on Nortel gear, which I can tell you from personal experience requires an incredible amount of power, cooling, and rackspace. Just curious as to the depth of navite in the field As we are curious of yours. Fair 'nuff. I'm following the Principle of not underestimating the adversary, who does plenty of RD, just look at their tech-transfer program, multiply by a few decades in capacity.. Perhaps that grants the Maryland trogdyltes too much, but again, conservatism rules in this game. Remember, Nortel is cost-bound. TLAs are not. They also get radioisotope power supplies, etc. And unpublished tech made in unknown fabs. Albeit, Nortel (even if Canadian, eh?) etc are 0wn3d by the USG, so taps through COTS are not so hard, and my dark fiber only means the physical capacity is there. And of course people are cheaper than tech. Hell, the counter-intel folks seem to be real bargains, whether FBI or CIA. But if you prefer to believe they play on the same field as us, go ahead, I'll still read your posts, and appreciate the questioning. MV
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: At 10:09 AM 7/21/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: Variola wrote... Dark fiber. Dark Fiber ain't a talisman you merely wave at data to get it to magically move to where you want it to.You've got to LIGHT that fiber, and to light that fiber you need LOTS and LOTS of power-hungry, space-occupying equipment. In other words, you'd need to duplicate a significant fraction of the current public transport network. With all due respect, you think Ft. Meade uses the same COTS crap as you are forced to deal with? Bwah hah hah. Sorry Major, I'm gonna have to call you on that one. Yes, they are lighting that fiber on COTS. Likely on Nortel gear, which I can tell you from personal experience requires an incredible amount of power, cooling, and rackspace. Gilmore et al used a bunch of old Sun Chassis for his Kocher's DEScracker. You think this is somehow more than 100 watts, in a diplo suitcase, nowadays? Totally different animal. We are talking about lighting single mode fiber and doing so for long distances: likely to standard 60-per-hop rule. You can't send light out that kind of distances without BIG power inputs: lasers are not very efficient. Just curious as to the depth of navite in the field As we are curious of yours. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one scares you more?
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
Variola: You say a lotta good shit here, but you're really out of your area in this case. You seem to miss the basic points, and then fill in your blindspot with pure theoretical conjecture. Let me point out some of the lil' flaws in your thinking With all due respect, you think Ft. Meade uses the same COTS crap as you are forced to deal with? Bwah hah hah. For some things, sure. Actually I know from first hand experience. (I've actually been in an NSA, DISA, and a few other experimental network nodes.) Lots of the equipment I saw was from the big vendors, most notably Lucent and Nortel. Somewhere deeper than I had access to, however, they almost certainly use special silicon. Gilmore et al used a bunch of old Sun Chassis for his Kocher's DEScracker. You think this is somehow more than 100 watts, in a diplo suitcase, nowadays? OK, so you're saying that this suitcase takes in say 10 OC-192s, demuxes all of them down to the DS1 level (we're at 50,000 DS1s), demaps and unpacks the ATM cells, and then reassembles all of the packets therein? Questions: 1) How does this majic box store all that data? 2) I've been in dozens of COs myself, and have worked extensively with people who have spent (collectively speaking) centuries in them. They never saw such a magic box a you describe, and indeed would certainly know about someone trying to install one. Or perhaps the NSA has developed a cloaking device making the box invisible? 2) What silicon does it use? Are you saying that the government can do a LOT better than 0.13 microns these days? Somehow I doubt it. Look at the off-the-shelf SONET chip architectures. Sure, there's lots of stuff onboard that you wouldn't need for what you're talking about, but getting rid of that stuff would still put the most advanced chip lightyears behyind what you're talking about. 3) If the majic box doesn't store the data, how does it get it back to HQ? Telepathy? Or, does it use a bank of lasers that somehow are several orders of magnitude more efficient that off-the-shelf lasers? (And let us remember that there's a fundamental constraint with bulk optics..an optical multiplexer or ciculator can't be an order of magnitude smaller than the wavelength it will support.) JA's comments about fiber exhaust are dead-on, and were not known to most of the Telecom Bubble participants. (Indicates the dude knows what he's talking about with respect to telecom.) But dark fibers aren't a real concern. It would be easy to develop a DWDM system that operated over the L or M bands, under the C-band wavelengths used by a carrier. So the problem isn't the fiber, it's lighting it. As for my comments about cable landings, I explicity stated that the splices back to VA were seen and known. And yes, I was in a position to know. (There's not a lot you can hide in a CO...it's not like they staff them with NSA agents or something.) As for trolling, well when I do it I do it with friggin' style m'friend. But sometimes, the truth is so mundane it looks fairly boring. Sorry to dissappoint you. I'm going to have to confiscate your copy of Deepness in the Sky... -TD _ MSN Toolbar provides one-click access to Hotmail from any Web page FREE download! http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200413ave/direct/01/
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 10:20:36AM -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: Yes, but I think it's fairly clear that if one needs to dissasemble the OC-Ns in the field, you simply need too much gear. It's going to be far It's clearly not viable to process much underwater. How much machine room square meters do you need at those cable landings, though? http://cryptome.quintessenz.at/mirror/cable-eyeball.htm easier to grab whole swathes of it and ship it back to Montana or wherever for it to be sifted through later. There is no later, there's only elsewhere. Traffic filtering is an embarrassingly parallel problem. It's the data mining that needs to integrate and correlate. Here is your centralized bottleneck. How many .gov in http://top500.org/list/2004/06/ ? Data mining is different from Linpack. What they probably do, however, is grab specific DS1s/3s locall and switch those via CALEA back to optical access points, where all of this stuff is pulled together into OC-192s or (very soon) OC-768s. As Variola suggests, once you get it back then you can plow through it at your leisure. Got a disident you want to shut down? Surely he's said SOMETHING over the last 2 years that you could incriminate him onfind it, dammit! -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgpTm29tosZBD.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
Eugen Leitl wrote... It's clearly not viable to process much underwater. How much machine room square meters do you need at those cable landings, though? Not that much, if all you need to do is send a spliced copy over to your own undersea Optical Fiber Amplification node or undersea DWDM OADM. As for the cable landings, likewise I've never heard anyone mention that they saw any government equipment at the landings, so I suspect it's relatively minimal. A the least, it's a splice over to the FDF (THAT they've seen). At the most, they have a card in the carrier's transport gear where they've dropped-and-continued some of the traffic. I guess the question arises as to whether the FBI, for instance, shares it's network with the NSA. -TD _ Dont just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Tyler Durden wrote: I guess the question arises as to whether the FBI, for instance, shares it's network with the NSA. You've got it backwards. -TD -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one scares you more?
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 01:07 PM 7/18/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: Let me fill in what he left out. Yes, the industry is moving towards MPLS over POS. That's not where it is now though. At least not for most interfaces. Right now the industry is chock full of lagacy gear, mostly old fashioned ATM. You think you can just casually reassemble this crap in transit? Let's see it! Gimme an intel IXA network processor and no problem. ATM is fixed size data, not as tricky as IP decoding. Predicatable bandwidth. Stream all into megadisks, analyze later. You need to tap the MPLS label assignment service (or watch all the egress ports and correlate to endpoints) too to know which ATM chunks went where. Besides that old fashioned transport diversity, we have the original problem: even if you could do it (maybe in three to five years), what are you going to do with the data you've snarfed? Backhaul it? Shove it into TB cassettes? Better keep a guy on staff to change the tray!! You don't know about tape robots, or offline indexing, eh?
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 07:56:05AM -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: None of which qualify here - remember, the discussion was based upon a quiet implementation. A VPN link from a *nivore box streaming filtered info is pretty quiet. There are plenty of dedicated network processors for packet filtering purposes: http://leitl.org/ct/2004.1/01/160/art.htm As suggested, tapping oversea fibres in shallow waters is probably the Way To Do It. No way to store the entire traffic, and expect to still be able to mine it. What is interesting is how they do VoIP voice recognition, if at all. Too mancy simultaneous channels to screen them all, or are they? -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgpig1tQupMm0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
As suggested, tapping oversea fibres in shallow waters is probably the Way To Do It. Apparently NSA has it's own splicing sub for this purpose. As for US fibers, I've spoken to folks who have actually seen the splice in cable landings that went over to W. VA or wherever. -TD _ Dont just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
Gimme an intel IXA network processor and no problem. ATM is fixed size data, not as tricky as IP decoding. Predicatable bandwidth. Stream all into megadisks, analyze later. I'm gonna have to challenge this bit here, Variola. Let's back up. You've got an OC-48 or OC-192 fiber and you want to grab ALL of the data in this fiber. Now I'll grant that in real life there's going to be a lot telephony circuit in there, but let's take a worst-case and assume you need ALL the data. What's in this OC-192? Right now it definitely ain't 10Gb/s of packets. It's going to have LOTS of DS1s, DS3s and, if you're lucky, and STS-3c or two. So you'll need to first of all demux ALL of the tributaries. Next, you've got to un-map any ATM in each of the DS1s, etc, and then pull out the IP data from the ATM cells, remembering to reassemble fragmented packets (and there will be plenty with ATM). And remember, you may have to do this for 5000 simultaneous DS1s. Oh, and let's not forget pointer adjustments. You can't just blindly grab stuff...remember that all those tribs come from different STRATUM 1/3 clocks, so they'll be moving at different speeds and as a result have periodic slips w.r.t the STS-192 container. And that's just one fiber. How will you actually get all of this traffic back to HQ? Remember, it keeps coming and won't stop. No, I think I'm becomming convinced that they can't yet get ALL of it. But they DO probably grab complete wavelengths and backhual them, storing them for later study. (They must do some grooming too. For instance, they probably CALEA everything into and out of Brooklyn, and then that will get switched over to the Beltway where it will be packed into a GIG-BE OC-768 back to storage and processing.) -TD From: Major Variola (ret) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 22:35:19 -0700 At 01:07 PM 7/18/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: Let me fill in what he left out. Yes, the industry is moving towards MPLS over POS. That's not where it is now though. At least not for most interfaces. Right now the industry is chock full of lagacy gear, mostly old fashioned ATM. You think you can just casually reassemble this crap in transit? Let's see it! Gimme an intel IXA network processor and no problem. ATM is fixed size data, not as tricky as IP decoding. Predicatable bandwidth. Stream all into megadisks, analyze later. You need to tap the MPLS label assignment service (or watch all the egress ports and correlate to endpoints) too to know which ATM chunks went where. Besides that old fashioned transport diversity, we have the original problem: even if you could do it (maybe in three to five years), what are you going to do with the data you've snarfed? Backhaul it? Shove it into TB cassettes? Better keep a guy on staff to change the tray!! You don't know about tape robots, or offline indexing, eh? _ Dont just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, Eugen Leitl wrote: For those of you who have worked at major ISPs, can the fact that traffic is routed through a few customer boxes be hidden from employees? Speaking as someone who qualifies: no. However, the fact that you even asked the question begs another question, namely, what do you consider major? Savvis was, in my opinion, at the very lower end of major, operating in ~140 countries, although most of that was vpn and multicast. Lets guess that internet was considerably less, say ~15-20 countries directly. In short, the trouble with trying to stuff all this through a choke point (or even 10 choke points) is it's going to be either seen directly as a router hop (if at layer3), or seen indirectly at layer two. And the kind of detailed troubleshooting that goes on in the first through third level support groups just wouldn't be able to miss this - sooner or later someone whold see something, and then the whole place would know. Now, *mirroring* to a couple of choke points, sure, but then you ave transit and other associated costs (you gotta haul the data to all of the collectors). Just not feasible to do it quietly. Note, I said quietly. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one scares you more?
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 02:06:40PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: On the other hand, 100,000 employees times two disk drives per desktop and a few departmental servers can get you that much capacity. I understand there is this thing called a black budget. The production rate limit of plain text is human fingers. If you want to keep it all online, your burn rate is a kilobuck/day for hardware. Filtering traffic to extract relevant parts is going to cost a bit more, especially if you're using centralized taps and not server clouds in the periphery. For those of you who have worked at major ISPs, can the fact that traffic is routed through a few customer boxes be hidden from employees? -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgp8RNv4H8YKL.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, Eugen Leitl wrote: I was thinking about a box at each incoming/outgoing point with a NIC in passive mode. A NIC? You gotta realize that we're talking about mesh circuits here: OC3-OC48 trunks, OC192 backbones... This is no small job. A mom/pop or midsized regional maybe you could do this - you know, the guy with a half a dozen DS3s. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one scares you more?
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 06:13:49AM -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: A NIC? You gotta realize that we're talking about mesh circuits here: OC3-OC48 trunks, OC192 backbones... This is no small job. A mom/pop or At times of 10 GBit Ethernet, OC192 data rate doesn't seem all that intimidating. A standard 1U Dell should have enough crunch to just filter out the plain text packets of a 1 GBps Ethernet line. midsized regional maybe you could do this - you know, the guy with a half a dozen DS3s. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgphUuwrbnENi.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 07:50:16AM -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: I have seen a passive tap on a gig line used for IDS, true, but that's pretty close to the state of the art right now. There's an issue with There are dedicated network processors, though, and one can outsorce the filter bottlenecks into an FPGA board. This is still reasonably small and cheap. getting the interfaces for the 1U Dell, and then you have the secondary issues of just how much encapsulated crap do you need to strip off, and how fast. Remeber, you only get 1 shot, and you *can't* ask for more time - if your buffer runneth over, you be screwed. It's not as easy as it feels. I think it would be far easier if WAN protocols were plain GBit Ethernet. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgpLxqSDx89Aj.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, Eugen Leitl wrote: On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 06:13:49AM -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: A NIC? You gotta realize that we're talking about mesh circuits here: OC3-OC48 trunks, OC192 backbones... This is no small job. A mom/pop or At times of 10 GBit Ethernet, OC192 data rate doesn't seem all that intimidating. A standard 1U Dell should have enough crunch to just filter out the plain text packets of a 1 GBps Ethernet line. I have seen a passive tap on a gig line used for IDS, true, but that's pretty close to the state of the art right now. There's an issue with getting the interfaces for the 1U Dell, and then you have the secondary issues of just how much encapsulated crap do you need to strip off, and how fast. Remeber, you only get 1 shot, and you *can't* ask for more time - if your buffer runneth over, you be screwed. It's not as easy as it feels. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one scares you more?
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 05:55:02AM -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: Now, *mirroring* to a couple of choke points, sure, but then you ave transit and other associated costs (you gotta haul the data to all of the collectors). I was thinking about a box at each incoming/outgoing point with a NIC in passive mode. Filtered traffic is a tiny fraction of total, and should be easy to send to a central location (I presume because it's feasible to process and store world's entire relevant text traffic in a pretty small central facility, no one is going to bother with true distributed processing; though filtering at the periphery already qualifies as such). Otoh, presence of a number of such boxes is goign to need a gag order, and a really major ISP. Small shops are too informal to be able to hide something like that. Just not feasible to do it quietly. Note, I said quietly. Hardware required for tapping major arteries is going to need modified high-end routers (filtering of cloned traffic), no? I don't see how this is going to be a limit on organization of the size of NSA consorts. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgpGH8RQ41qnT.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At times of 10 GBit Ethernet, OC192 data rate doesn't seem all that intimidating. Well, as it turns out the 10GbE standard has a few flavors, and one of them uses a 'lite' version of OC-192 framing. So for all intents and purposes, consider them the same data rate. -TD From: Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 14:46:10 +0200 On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 06:13:49AM -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: A NIC? You gotta realize that we're talking about mesh circuits here: OC3-OC48 trunks, OC192 backbones... This is no small job. A mom/pop or At times of 10 GBit Ethernet, OC192 data rate doesn't seem all that intimidating. A standard 1U Dell should have enough crunch to just filter out the plain text packets of a 1 GBps Ethernet line. midsized regional maybe you could do this - you know, the guy with a half a dozen DS3s. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net attach3 _ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, Tyler Durden wrote: I think it would be far easier if WAN protocols were plain GBit Ethernet. WAN won't be 1GbE, but it will probably be 10GbE with SONET framing, or else OC-192c POS (ie, PPP-encapsulated HDLC-framed MPLS). In either case, I suspect it will be far cheaper in the long run to monitor a big fat pipe than to try to break out a zillion lil' tiny DS1s. -TD OK, so Tyler [apparently] works in the business :-) Let me fill in what he left out. Yes, the industry is moving towards MPLS over POS. That's not where it is now though. At least not for most interfaces. Right now the industry is chock full of lagacy gear, mostly old fashioned ATM. You think you can just casually reassemble this crap in transit? Let's see it! Besides that old fashioned transport diversity, we have the original problem: even if you could do it (maybe in three to five years), what are you going to do with the data you've snarfed? Backhaul it? Shove it into TB cassettes? Better keep a guy on staff to change the tray!! None of the many obstacles curretly in the way will allow this to be done on the QT. Semi-openly would be another story, as would the scenario of a smaller, say regional, ISP. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one scares you more?
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
I think it would be far easier if WAN protocols were plain GBit Ethernet. WAN won't be 1GbE, but it will probably be 10GbE with SONET framing, or else OC-192c POS (ie, PPP-encapsulated HDLC-framed MPLS). In either case, I suspect it will be far cheaper in the long run to monitor a big fat pipe than to try to break out a zillion lil' tiny DS1s. -TD From: Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 15:34:18 +0200 On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 07:50:16AM -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: I have seen a passive tap on a gig line used for IDS, true, but that's pretty close to the state of the art right now. There's an issue with There are dedicated network processors, though, and one can outsorce the filter bottlenecks into an FPGA board. This is still reasonably small and cheap. getting the interfaces for the 1U Dell, and then you have the secondary issues of just how much encapsulated crap do you need to strip off, and how fast. Remeber, you only get 1 shot, and you *can't* ask for more time - if your buffer runneth over, you be screwed. It's not as easy as it feels. I think it would be far easier if WAN protocols were plain GBit Ethernet. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net attach3 _ Discover the best of the best at MSN Luxury Living. http://lexus.msn.com/
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
JA, ya' gotta good point here. Or at least, this sheds a lot of doubt on things. But then again, the purpose of GIG-BE may be precisely to move an optical copy (use a $100 splitter) back to processing centers where the traffic is stored. In this case, they won't even be trying to break it down to circuits prior to storage...they may instead dump the raw OC-Ns directly onto some kind of fast storage medium and then sift through it later. The idea of duplicating all optical traffic seems a little farfetched, though, but I bet everything from the cable landings may soon get swallowed whole, if it isn't already. I'm still thinking they must do some kind of grooming prior to mass backhauls of traffic. There are just too many fibers and too many transmission systems out there for them to duplicate all of it. Perhaps at the routers they sniff, and then CALEA whatever circuit that conversation came out of. -TD From: J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Tyler Durden [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 13:07:10 -0500 (CDT) On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, Tyler Durden wrote: I think it would be far easier if WAN protocols were plain GBit Ethernet. WAN won't be 1GbE, but it will probably be 10GbE with SONET framing, or else OC-192c POS (ie, PPP-encapsulated HDLC-framed MPLS). In either case, I suspect it will be far cheaper in the long run to monitor a big fat pipe than to try to break out a zillion lil' tiny DS1s. -TD OK, so Tyler [apparently] works in the business :-) Let me fill in what he left out. Yes, the industry is moving towards MPLS over POS. That's not where it is now though. At least not for most interfaces. Right now the industry is chock full of lagacy gear, mostly old fashioned ATM. You think you can just casually reassemble this crap in transit? Let's see it! Besides that old fashioned transport diversity, we have the original problem: even if you could do it (maybe in three to five years), what are you going to do with the data you've snarfed? Backhaul it? Shove it into TB cassettes? Better keep a guy on staff to change the tray!! None of the many obstacles curretly in the way will allow this to be done on the QT. Semi-openly would be another story, as would the scenario of a smaller, say regional, ISP. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one scares you more? _ Discover the best of the best at MSN Luxury Living. http://lexus.msn.com/
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, Tyler Durden wrote: JA, ya' gotta good point here. Or at least, this sheds a lot of doubt on things. But then again, the purpose of GIG-BE may be precisely to move an optical copy (use a $100 splitter) back to processing centers where the traffic is stored. In this case, they won't even be trying to break it down to circuits prior to storage...they may instead dump the raw OC-Ns directly onto some kind of fast storage medium and then sift through it later. The idea of duplicating all optical traffic seems a little farfetched, though, but I bet everything from the cable landings may soon get swallowed whole, if it isn't already. Note that this is totally not the scenario we had under discussion (i.e., the intercepts being done at the ISP level). If you were to ask me if Mr. Fed. was currently capable of (a) intercepting offshore, say 3-4mi off the formal landings, (b) splice into transatlantic fibers and send the copy down their own fibers, all of it underwater, well, that would be a different discussion entirely. One we seriously discussed just after a pair of buildings became a pair of dust factories. I *firmly* believe this is possible, if not probable, at least on a large scale (although probably not on a complete scale). When the towers came down and the feds were asking everyone to volunteer to host carnivores, we all thought they gave up *way* too easily when turned away (at least the were turned away where I worked - my understanding is that this was not universal). Subsequently, we discussed, mostly as an academic excersize, whether we believed this was possible - and the consensus was a resounding yes. To listen offshore, just prior to making land, is *doable*. Completely. Now, three years and hundreds of hours of federal agencies interaction later, I'd be surprised if this wasn't at least part of the problem that NSA has with data saturation: Are we deaf, or is the volume too loud? Yes. -TD -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF ...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them. Osama Bin Laden - - - There aught to be limits to freedom!George Bush - - - Which one scares you more?
zks source (Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies)
You could try sending an email to Austin Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] to see if he could organize releasing source for remaining freedom related source that they are not currently using. Adam On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 02:34:04PM -0700, Steve Schear wrote: I wonder if the mail 2.0 code could be publicly released so it could be used with the forthcoming i2p IP overlay http://www.i2p.net/ ? steve At 01:09 PM 7/7/2004, Adam Back wrote: Then we implemented a replacement version 2 mail system that I designed. The design is much simpler. With freedom anonymous networking you had anyway a anonymous interactive TCP feature. So we just ran a standard pop box for your nym. Mail would be delivered to it directly (no reply block) for internet senders. Freedom senders would send via anonymous IP again to get sender anonymity. Used qmail as the mail system. Unfortunately they closed down the freedom network pretty soon after psuedonymous mail 2.0 [3] was implemented.
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
I can't imagine any intelligence professional wasting her time reading the crap at times coming over this list. As of mid 2000 most of traffic is recorded. By this time 'most' is very close to 'all'. But if you e-mail someone with account on the same local ISP, using dial-in at the recipient is also using dial-in, and ISP didn't farm-out dial-in access, then your message may not be backed up forever.
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 01:09 PM 7/7/2004, Adam Back wrote: Then we implemented a replacement version 2 mail system that I designed. The design is much simpler. With freedom anonymous networking you had anyway a anonymous interactive TCP feature. So we just ran a standard pop box for your nym. Mail would be delivered to it directly (no reply block) for internet senders. Freedom senders would send via anonymous IP again to get sender anonymity. Used qmail as the mail system. Unfortunately they closed down the freedom network pretty soon after psuedonymous mail 2.0 [3] was implemented. I wonder if the mail 2.0 code could be publicly released so it could be used with the forthcoming i2p IP overlay http://www.i2p.net/ ? steve
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
Thomas Shaddack writes: Reading some news about the email wiretapping by ISPs, and getting an idea. There are various email forwarding services, which are nothing more than a SMTP server with pairs of [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Right, mostly for use as disposable email addresses. I've used spamgourmet to good effect, myself. Messages in storage have much lower judicial protection than messages in transit. (This does not have much technical merit, in the current atmosphere of damn the laws - there are terrorists around the corner, but can be seen as a nice little potential benefit.) One thing I haven't understood in all the commentary is whether law enforcment still needs a warrant to access emails stored in this way. Apparently the ISP can read them without any notice or liability, but what about the police? Also, what if you run your own mail spool, so the email is never stored at the ISP, it just passes through the routers controlled by the ISP (just like it passed through a dozen other routers on the internet). Does this give the ISP (and all the other router owners) the right to read your email? I don't think so, it seems like that would definitely cross over the line from mail in storage to mail in transit. There can be an easy enhancement for such forwarder service; GnuPG proxy. Every email that arrives to the forwarder address, before it is forwarded to the real recipient, is piped through a GnuPG script; the recipient has then to upload his public key during the registration of the target address, otherwise the function is the same. That's a great idea. You'd want to be sure and encrypt the whole message including headers, and make the whole thing an encrypted attachment. Has the added side benefits of compressing the email, and you could even have the server do some spam filtering. For added benefit, the forwarder should support SMTP/TLS (STARTTLS) extension, so the connections from security-minded owners of their own mailservers would be protected. STARTTLS support at the proxy should pretty much go without saying these days, so you might as well do it, but if you're already PGP encrypting then it's not adding that much security. Well, maybe it does, but you're talking about a different threat. For the problem that ISPs can read your email in storage, STARTLS doesn't help much because it will only protect the email until it gets to your local ISP, who will store your email for you and can read it then (which is where the PGP comes in). Where STARTTLS would help is with power users who run their own mail servers. But those people don't suffer from the problem we are talking about here, legal access to the email by the ISP (I think, see above). Nevertheless a mail-receiving proxy that uses STARTTLS connections to power users would be kind of cool because it would keep anyone local from knowing anything about the incoming mail. Hopefully, STARTTLS will eventually become so widespread that this functionality will be redundant, but we are not there yet. The recipient himself then can either run his own mailserver and download mails through fetchmail, or receive mails using SMTP/ETRN (both methods allow automated decryption of such wrapped mail during its receiving), or use a POP/IMAP decryption proxy, or have a plugin in mail client. (I know, auto-decryption is dangerous, but we now talk about the system for one's grandma, transparent to use.) Absolutely, look at the threat model. You're not worried about someone breaking into your computer, you're worried about your ISP legally reading your email. To address this threat, auto-decryption is a perfect solution. Recently there was a proposal for a nym receiving service, http://www.freehaven.net/doc/pynchon-gate/, by Bran Cohen and Len Sassaman. They have a complicated protocol for downloading email anonymously. To hide the complexity, they propose to set up a POP compatible mail server agent on the user's computer running as a daemon process (Windows service). He would configure his mailer to connect to localhost:4949 or whatever, just like any other POP server. The service would periodically go out and poll for email using the fancy protocol, but then it would make it available to the local mail agent in perfectly vanilla form. The point is that this architecture hides the complexity and makes it transparent for end users to use arbitrarily complex crypto for mail receiving. Something similar would be perfect for your idea. The only vulnerable parts of the mail route then will be the sender's computer, the pathway between the sender and the forwarder server (if SMTP/TLS is not used correctly or at all), the forwarder server (if compromised), and the recipient's computer. The way between the forwarder and the recipient's ISP, including the recipient's mailbox, is secured. What do you think about this scheme? I think it's a great idea. Of course as you say
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 11:36:11PM -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote: At 06:58 AM 7/7/04 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: I can't imagine any intelligence professional wasting her time reading the crap at times coming over this list. Frankly sir, that's because you have no idea of their budget, or their fascistic urges.Its not paranoia to think you're tapped, its rationality. Of course we're tapped, despite funky headers like Received: from positron.jfet.org (positron.jfet.org [66.136.223.122]) (using TLSv1 with cipher EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA (168/168 bits)) (Client CN positron.mit.edu, Issuer positron.mit.edu (not verified)) by leitl.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BDD9D3A8326 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Wed, 7 Jul 2004 08:39:41 +0200 (CEST) Received: from positron.jfet.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by positron.jfet.org (8.12.11/8.12.11/Debian-3) with ESMTP id i676giK6021720 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NOT) for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Wed, 7 Jul 2004 01:42:44 -0500 just don't fool yourself about all your fans at Mt. Spook central ejecting coffee through their nose at our jokes and witticisms. Databases, despite much improved, don't have a good sense of humor. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgpBX7H8lAFAM.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 02:47 PM 7/6/04 -0700, Hal Finney wrote: Messages in storage have much lower judicial protection than messages in transit. (This does not have much technical merit, in the current atmosphere of damn the laws - there are terrorists around the corner, but can be seen as a nice little potential benefit.) Ie zero. One thing I haven't understood in all the commentary is whether law enforcment still needs a warrant to access emails stored in this way. Apparently the ISP can read them without any notice or liability, but what about the police? You are state meat, whether 5150'd or not. Also, what if you run your own mail spool, so the email is never stored at the ISP, it just passes through the routers controlled by the ISP (just like it passed through a dozen other routers on the internet). Does this give the ISP (and all the other router owners) the right to read your email? I don't think so, it seems like that would definitely cross over the line from mail in storage to mail in transit. If you think the cable landings in Va/Md are coincidental, you are smoking something I've run out of. Its all recorded. I'm sure the archiving and database groups in Ft. Meade will get a chuckle out of your the right to idioms.
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
If you think the cable landings in Va/Md are coincidental, you are smoking something I've run out of. Its all recorded. I'm sure the archiving and database groups in Ft. Meade will get a chuckle out of your the right to idioms. Well, I don't actually believe it's all recorded. As I've attempted to explain previously, they almost certainly have risk models in place. When several variables twinkle enough (eg, origination area, IP address, presence of crypto...) some rule fires and then diverts a copy into the WASP'S Nest. There's probably some kind of key word search that either diverts the copy into storage or into the short list for an analyst to peek it. -TD From: Major Variola (ret) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2004 21:40:29 -0700 At 02:47 PM 7/6/04 -0700, Hal Finney wrote: Messages in storage have much lower judicial protection than messages in transit. (This does not have much technical merit, in the current atmosphere of damn the laws - there are terrorists around the corner, but can be seen as a nice little potential benefit.) Ie zero. One thing I haven't understood in all the commentary is whether law enforcment still needs a warrant to access emails stored in this way. Apparently the ISP can read them without any notice or liability, but what about the police? You are state meat, whether 5150'd or not. Also, what if you run your own mail spool, so the email is never stored at the ISP, it just passes through the routers controlled by the ISP (just like it passed through a dozen other routers on the internet). Does this give the ISP (and all the other router owners) the right to read your email? I don't think so, it seems like that would definitely cross over the line from mail in storage to mail in transit. If you think the cable landings in Va/Md are coincidental, you are smoking something I've run out of. Its all recorded. I'm sure the archiving and database groups in Ft. Meade will get a chuckle out of your the right to idioms. _ MSN 9 Dial-up Internet Access helps fight spam and pop-ups now 2 months FREE! http://join.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200361ave/direct/01/
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 02:47 PM 7/6/2004, Hal Finney wrote: Thomas Shaddack writes: There are various email forwarding services, which are nothing more than a SMTP server with pairs of [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Right, mostly for use as disposable email addresses. I've used spamgourmet to good effect, myself. They're also marketed as permanent addresses you can keep when you change ISPs, for example pobox.com was one of the first ones. Unfortunately, as far as I know, none of the forwarders let you forward mail from [EMAIL PROTECTED] to [EMAIL PROTECTED], which means that they don't support tag-based spam protection. When I want disposable addresses, I either use free providers, or I use tagged addresses at free / cheap providers like fastmail.fm. One thing I haven't understood in all the commentary is whether law enforcment still needs a warrant to access emails stored in this way. Apparently the ISP can read them without any notice or liability, but what about the police? Councilman currently only affects the First Circuit (the Northeast), and it was only the three-judge-panel version of the Appeals Court, so he could appeal it to the full court before going to the Supremes. My reading of the opinions is that the two majority judges totally failed to grasp the technology, while the dissenting judge got it, so even if the opinion stands, it's very narrow in scope - but it's a strong reminder that the current laws don't protect stored email very well, and that if judges aren't technical enough to understand it when it's laid out in front of their faces, they're certainly not going to be sufficiently uncooperative when police try to get warrants or subpoenas (or at least it probably won't be hard for police to find a cooperative judge.) Also, in the Steve Jackson Games case, the courts and Feds got away with declaring that the ECPA didn't apply to mail that had arrived in mailboxes, only to mail that was in transit. It's not clear that ISPs in general can read mail without any notice or liability - just that the obvious readings of the law that Councilman sued them under don't currently work in the 1st Circuit. He might have tried various business-related torts successfully, but the wiretapping laws looked like a slam-dunk. But that doesn't usually work against police, just businesses. Police reading mail like this really is a different case - they either need some kind of court papers to hand the ISP (though these days the Patriot Act seems to be used to justify almost anything and place a gag order on the activity, and a subpoena is easier to get than a warrant), or they need some bogus justification that the ISP has to obey administrative requests that aren't court-issued, or they need to wiretap the bits legally. Also, what if you run your own mail spool, so the email is never stored at the ISP, it just passes through the routers controlled by the ISP (just like it passed through a dozen other routers on the internet). Does this give the ISP (and all the other router owners) the right to read your email? I don't think so, it seems like that would definitely cross over the line from mail in storage to mail in transit. One scary thing about Councilman was that it happened in a case where the government was vaguely neutral and responsible for protecting the citizen's privacy - when the prosecutors are _trying_ to get outrageously twisted anti-privacy rulings they're more likely to win. In particular, does a message count as in transit if you're only hauling IP packets around with parts of the message rather than the whole message, or does each part count as in storage when it's gotten to a router that has to queue it before forwarding it on to the next hop? Or if the whole message is queued in your ISP's sendmail queue because you've got an MX there? What about _outgoing_ mail queued at your ISP, who's being a good anti-spammer and forcing you to use their mail transfer agent instead of sending directly to the destination? There can be an easy enhancement for such forwarder service; GnuPG proxy. There are several different threat models to think about - - Greedy ISP reading your mail for their own purposes - ISP responding to court-ordered wiretapping - ISP collaborating enthusiastically with police - Police wiretapping without court orders - All of the above, but for stored mailboxes, not in-transit - All of the above, but for traffic analysis / headers, not content Mail-handling services don't prevent any of the in-transit threats, but they can eliminate most of the threats to stored mailboxes, and they do let you move your vulnerability to a different jurisdiction, which can potentially reduce the likelihood that they'll wiretap you there. For instance, if you're using your local cable modem company for mailbox services, and you annoy your local police, they may try to tap you, but police in Anguilla will probably only try to tap you if you've gotten the US Feds or MI5/MI6 annoyed. Police in Sealand
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 06:58 AM 7/7/04 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: I can't imagine any intelligence professional wasting her time reading the crap at times coming over this list. Frankly sir, that's because you have no idea of their budget, or their fascistic urges.Its not paranoia to think you're tapped, its rationality. --- Stop shedding our blood to save your own and the solution to this simple but complex equation is in your hands. You know matters will escalate the more you delay and then do not blame us but blame yourselves. Rational people do not risk their security, money and sons to appease the White House liar.
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 09:40:29PM -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote: smoking something I've run out of. Its all recorded. I'm sure the archiving and database groups in Ft. Meade will get a chuckle out of your the right to idioms. All this stuff goes into some database slot. It will only get reviewed by a human analyst if the ranking function trips over threshold (or reviewed forensically after the fact). I can't imagine any intelligence professional wasting her time reading the crap at times coming over this list. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgpsbjR4gltul.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
Absolutely, look at the threat model. You're not worried about someone breaking into your computer, you're worried about your ISP legally reading your email. Guaranteed, and encryption is bait. Use stego. That's very true, however there can be operators you trust more than your ISP, eg. a group of friends running such forwarder offshore. Until they're busted and open up... As Zappa sang, the hot iron sausage... and the sinister midget...
Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
Reading some news about the email wiretapping by ISPs, and getting an idea. There are various email forwarding services, which are nothing more than a SMTP server with pairs of [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Messages in storage have much lower judicial protection than messages in transit. (This does not have much technical merit, in the current atmosphere of damn the laws - there are terrorists around the corner, but can be seen as a nice little potential benefit.) There can be an easy enhancement for such forwarder service; GnuPG proxy. Every email that arrives to the forwarder address, before it is forwarded to the real recipient, is piped through a GnuPG script; the recipient has then to upload his public key during the registration of the target address, otherwise the function is the same. For added benefit, the forwarder should support SMTP/TLS (STARTTLS) extension, so the connections from security-minded owners of their own mailservers would be protected. The recipient himself then can either run his own mailserver and download mails through fetchmail, or receive mails using SMTP/ETRN (both methods allow automated decryption of such wrapped mail during its receiving), or use a POP/IMAP decryption proxy, or have a plugin in mail client. (I know, auto-decryption is dangerous, but we now talk about the system for one's grandma, transparent to use.) The only vulnerable parts of the mail route then will be the sender's computer, the pathway between the sender and the forwarder server (if SMTP/TLS is not used correctly or at all), the forwarder server (if compromised), and the recipient's computer. The way between the forwarder and the recipient's ISP, including the recipient's mailbox, is secured. What do you think about this scheme?
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, Hal Finney wrote: There are various email forwarding services, which are nothing more than a SMTP server with pairs of [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Right, mostly for use as disposable email addresses. I've used spamgourmet to good effect, myself. I wrote the patch for qmail's fastforward for similar purposes. Everything in the name that is beyond the specified wildcard is ignored when resolving the mail alias (but stays there for procmail processing). As added benefit, the addresses that receive spam can be used for teaching bogofilter. Messages in storage have much lower judicial protection than messages in transit. (This does not have much technical merit, in the current atmosphere of damn the laws - there are terrorists around the corner, but can be seen as a nice little potential benefit.) One thing I haven't understood in all the commentary is whether law enforcment still needs a warrant to access emails stored in this way. Apparently the ISP can read them without any notice or liability, but what about the police? Let's expect them so as well. The ISP can hand them over to the police anyway, like a nosy neighbour fink finding your grass stash. Also, what if you run your own mail spool, so the email is never stored at the ISP, it just passes through the routers controlled by the ISP (just like it passed through a dozen other routers on the internet). Does this give the ISP (and all the other router owners) the right to read your email? I don't think so, it seems like that would definitely cross over the line from mail in storage to mail in transit. If it passes through their SMTP servers, I am not sure. If it goes only through their routers, I'd think it's definitely in transit. There can be an easy enhancement for such forwarder service; GnuPG proxy. Every email that arrives to the forwarder address, before it is forwarded to the real recipient, is piped through a GnuPG script; the recipient has then to upload his public key during the registration of the target address, otherwise the function is the same. That's a great idea. You'd want to be sure and encrypt the whole message including headers, and make the whole thing an encrypted attachment. Has the added side benefits of compressing the email, and you could even have the server do some spam filtering. The original idea I based it on was encrypting everything including the headers on the sender, then decrypting it on the receiver relay, and adding the data about the decryption of the message into the headers in some unspoofable way (eg. if the headers were there already when the message arrived to the decrypting script, prepend X- to them - not really bulletproof but rather decent). For added benefit, the forwarder should support SMTP/TLS (STARTTLS) extension, so the connections from security-minded owners of their own mailservers would be protected. STARTTLS support at the proxy should pretty much go without saying these days, so you might as well do it, but if you're already PGP encrypting then it's not adding that much security. Well, maybe it does, but you're talking about a different threat. It hides the fact encrypted comm is in use. Which may be handy on its own. For the problem that ISPs can read your email in storage, STARTLS doesn't help much because it will only protect the email until it gets to your local ISP, who will store your email for you and can read it then (which is where the PGP comes in). That's true. But it protects the data in transit nearly for free. Where STARTTLS would help is with power users who run their own mail servers. But those people don't suffer from the problem we are talking about here, legal access to the email by the ISP (I think, see above). Nevertheless a mail-receiving proxy that uses STARTTLS connections to power users would be kind of cool because it would keep anyone local from knowing anything about the incoming mail. Hopefully, STARTTLS will eventually become so widespread that this functionality will be redundant, but we are not there yet. STARTTLS is by far not widespread. Few people use it, including the knowledgeable ones. :((( (I know, auto-decryption is dangerous, but we now talk about the system for one's grandma, transparent to use.) Absolutely, look at the threat model. You're not worried about someone breaking into your computer, you're worried about your ISP legally reading your email. To address this threat, auto-decryption is a perfect solution. It's always better to select overly restrictive threat model and then loose it when necessary, than the other way. An omission then results in more work instead of a security hole. He would configure his mailer to connect to localhost:4949 or whatever, just like any other POP server. With a local SMTP server, you can run such service as a daemon (or from cron) with function
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 10:28:01AM -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: Well, I don't actually believe it's all recorded. As I've attempted to explain previously, they almost certainly have risk models in place. When several variables twinkle enough (eg, origination area, IP address, presence of crypto...) some rule fires and then diverts a copy into the WASP'S Nest. There's probably some kind of key word search that either diverts the copy into storage or into the short list for an analyst to peek it. How much plain text can ~10^9 online monkeys daily enter into their keyboard? A ~10^3 average ballpark gives you a TByte/day (minus the redundancy), which is currently a 1U worth of SATA RAID/day, or 3 years worth of world's entire traffic in a 10^3 node cluster, which is on the low side these days. Hard drive storage density goes up exponentially, and probably faster than people can go online (the old world has saturated) -- it isn't a problem, given that population increase doesn't occur at these growth rates. You don't have to delete anything, ever. Given what Google manages with some 10^4..10^5 nodes, this problem set looks puny in comparison. Keeping the data on a cluster gives you the local crunch to do some very nontrivial data mining, especially if you narrow the scope down sufficiently to be able to lock the data in memory and crunch it there. Fax OCR/telex is just as easy, speech recognition doable, given the budget. We don't know whether they are actually doing it (I *think* these people are too conservative to be doing clusters right now, so they're probably doing storage hierarchies with tape libraries -- but then they as well could be MIB types years ahead of the mainstream), the point it is that they could, given the documented amount of hired talent and official budget. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgpge4v738Vwi.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
At 07:28 AM 7/7/2004, Tyler Durden wrote: If you think the cable landings in Va/Md are coincidental, you are smoking something I've run out of. Its all recorded. I'm sure the archiving and database groups in Ft. Meade will get a chuckle out of your the right to idioms. Well, I don't actually believe it's all recorded. As I've attempted to explain previously, they almost certainly have risk models in place. When several variables twinkle enough (eg, origination area, IP address, presence of crypto...) some rule fires and then diverts a copy into the WASP'S Nest. There's probably some kind of key word search that either diverts the copy into storage or into the short list for an analyst to peek it. Perhaps, but at a Bay Area meeting a few years back held to discuss NSA/SIGINT, I think it was held on the Stanford campus, a developer disclosed that an American contractor manufacturer had won a contract to install 250,000 high-capacity disk drives at one of these agenicies. stveve
Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies
This is somewhat related to what ZKS did in their version 1 [1,2] mail system. They made a transparent local pop proxy (transparent in that it happened at firewall level, did not have to change your mail client config). In this case they would talk to your real pop server, decrypt the parts (they were reply-block like onions), remove duplicates (as with mixmaster etc you can send duplicates via separate remailers to improve reliability). So the transparent proxy would leave alone your normal mail that you received in the pop box and remove duplicates only from the reply-block delivered pseudonymous mail. Actually they implemented the reply-block from scratch, it always seemed to me it would have been less development work to use mixmaster (it was implemented before I started). The ZKS reply block did not even use chunking (ala mixmaster) so traffic analysis would have been trivial as the message size would show through. At least that's what I recall, no chunking. However I am finding the security issues paper [1] says otherwise. The 1.0 architecture document [2] is ambiguous, there is no mention of chunking. (I've sent mail to one of the original developers to check I have it right). It was also unreliable because it did not use SMTP, it used its own transport AMTP and its own retry-semantics on nodes called MAIPs. (Mail AIPs, an AIP is an Anonymous Internet Proxy). Then we implemented a replacement version 2 mail system that I designed. The design is much simpler. With freedom anonymous networking you had anyway a anonymous interactive TCP feature. So we just ran a standard pop box for your nym. Mail would be delivered to it directly (no reply block) for internet senders. Freedom senders would send via anonymous IP again to get sender anonymity. Used qmail as the mail system. Unfortunately they closed down the freedom network pretty soon after psuedonymous mail 2.0 [3] was implemented. There is an interesting trade-off here. The interactive communications are perhaps more vulnerable to real-time powerful adversary traffic analysis than mixmaster style mixed chunked delivery. However they are less vunerable to subpoena because they are forward-secret on a relativey short time-frame. (1/2 hr if I recall; however more recent designs such as chainsaw internal prototype, and cebolla [4] by ex-ZKSer Zach Brown change keys down to second level by using a mix of backward-security based on symmetric key hashing (and deleting previous key) and forward security using DH.) It would be nice to get both types of anonymity, but I suspect for most typical users the discovery / subpeona route is the major danger, and if that is thwarted it is unlikely that their activities would warrant the effort of real time analysis. Well we have carnivore now, so they could potentially do real-time traffic analysis more routinely if they were to distribute enough collaborating analysis carnivore plugins. Adam [1] http://www.homeport.org/~adam/zeroknowledgewhitepapers/security-issues.pdf [2] http://www.homeport.org/~adam/zeroknowledgewhitepapers/arch-notech.pdf [3] http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/pubs/freedom2-mail.pdf [4] http://www.cypherspace.org/cebolla/ On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 02:47:43PM -0700, Hal Finney wrote: Recently there was a proposal for a nym receiving service, http://www.freehaven.net/doc/pynchon-gate/, by Bran Cohen and Len Sassaman. They have a complicated protocol for downloading email anonymously. To hide the complexity, they propose to set up a POP compatible mail server agent on the user's computer running as a daemon process (Windows service). He would configure his mailer to connect to localhost:4949 or whatever, just like any other POP server. The service would periodically go out and poll for email using the fancy protocol, but then it would make it available to the local mail agent in perfectly vanilla form. The point is that this architecture hides the complexity and makes it transparent for end users to use arbitrarily complex crypto for mail receiving. Something similar would be perfect for your idea.
