Re: [Cryptography] Thoughts about keys

2013-08-31 Thread James A. Donald
On 2013-09-01 11:16 AM, Jeremy Stanley wrote: At free software conferences, where there is heavy community penetration for OpenPGP already, it is common for many of us to bring business cards (or even just slips of paper) with our name, E-mail address and 160-bit key fingerprint. Useful not onl

Re: [Cryptography] NSA and cryptanalysis

2013-08-31 Thread Jerry Leichter
On Aug 31, 2013, at 2:02 PM, Ray Dillinger wrote: > ... It is both > interesting and peculiar that so little news of quantum computing has been > published since. I don't understand this claim. Shor's work opened up a really hot new area that both CS people and physicists (and others as well) ha

[Cryptography] Backup is completely separate

2013-08-31 Thread Phill
So I was thinking about Jon's claim that keys should be 'disposable'. Not sure if I buy that. But I did decide that key backup is a completely separate problem and demands a separate infrastructure. Let us imagine that I do the key-splitting and share in 5 places thing for my Comcast email. I

Re: [Cryptography] Thoughts about keys

2013-08-31 Thread Jeremy Stanley
On 2013-08-25 16:29:42 -0400 (-0400), Perry E. Metzger wrote: [...] > If I meet someone at a reception at a security conference, they might > scrawl their email address ("al...@example.org") for me on a cocktail > napkin. > > I'd like to be able to then write to them, say to discuss their > exciti

Re: [Cryptography] NSA and cryptanalysis

2013-08-31 Thread James A. Donald
On 2013-09-01 4:02 AM, Ray Dillinger wrote: On 08/30/2013 08:10 PM, Aaron Zauner wrote: I read that WP report too. IMHO this can only be related to RSA (factorization, side-channel attacks). I have been hearing rumors lately that factoring may not in fact be as hard as we have heretofore sup

Re: [Cryptography] Keeping backups (was Re: Separating concerns

2013-08-31 Thread Peter Saint-Andre
On 8/29/13 11:30 AM, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > On Wed, 28 Aug 2013 20:04:34 +0200 Faré wrote: >> One thing that irks me, though, is the problem of the robust, secure >> terminal: if everything is encrypted, how does one survive the >> loss/theft/destruction of a computer or harddrive? > > So, as

Re: [Cryptography] Functional specification for email client?

2013-08-31 Thread John Kelsey
I think it makes sense to separate out the user-level view of what happens (the first five or six points) from how it's implemented (the last few points, and any other implementation discussions). In order for security to be usable, the user needs to know what he is being promised by the securi

Re: [Cryptography] NSA and cryptanalysis

2013-08-31 Thread John Kelsey
If I had to bet, I'd bet on bad rngs as the most likely source of a breakthrough in decrypting lots of encrypted traffic from different sources. --John ___ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo

Re: [Cryptography] NSA and cryptanalysis

2013-08-31 Thread Ray Dillinger
On 08/30/2013 08:10 PM, Aaron Zauner wrote: I read that WP report too. IMHO this can only be related to RSA (factorization, side-channel attacks). I have been hearing rumors lately that factoring may not in fact be as hard as we have heretofore supposed. Algorithmic advances keep eating into

Re: [Cryptography] NSA and cryptanalysis

2013-08-31 Thread ianG
On 31/08/13 06:10 AM, Aaron Zauner wrote: On Aug 30, 2013, at 1:17 PM, Jerry Leichter wrote: So the latest Snowden data contains hints that the NSA (a) spends a great deal of money on cracking encrypted Internet traffic; (b) recently made some kind of a cryptanalytic "breakthrough". What a

Re: [Cryptography] Functional specification for email client?

2013-08-31 Thread ianG
Some comments, only. On 30/08/13 11:11 AM, Ray Dillinger wrote: Okay... User-side spec: 1. An email address is a short string freely chosen by the email user. It is subject to the constraint that it must not match anyone else's email address, but may (and should) be pronounceable