Re: Paying for drinks with wave of the hand

[sunder]

R. A. Hettinga wrote:

WorldNetDaily
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE ...
Paying for drinks with wave
 of the hand
Club-goers in Spain get implanted chips for ID, payment purposes
Posted: April 14, 2004
5:00 p.m. Eastern
2004.12.18:
"A new crime is sweeping the nation.  Criminals everywhere are now cloning 
implanted chips of passerby well to do rich.  Some have been caught hiding 
outside the bushes of the rich with a high powered RFID transponder, 
waiting for their victims to drive by.  Congress has been presented with a 
bill outlawing all RFID readers, except by store owners."

2005.03.22:
"In the news today, actress Jennifer Lopez has been found dead in a 
dumpster near a shady street with her hand severed.  Her American Express 
implant chip records show that unscrupulous fiends have ran up several 
million dollars in bar tabs all over downtown Los Angeles, and several 
large money wire transfers to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Iran.  Ms. 
Lopez apparently instructed AMEX to remove all her daily spending limits on 
her credit chip after her chip refused her intended purchases at her local 
Porsche dealer.  A recorded conversation with AMEX customer support reveals 
she believe it cramped her style.

"The FBI is searching for her killers.  Special Agent Tom Jones said that 
no further information will be made available at this time, as that the FBI 
does not wish to comment on an ongoing investigation since it may aid the 
perpetrators, and that citizens should switch to cash immediately.

"Random J. Citizen on the street commented: 'Well, what do you expect? 
Congress Outlawed RFID readers, and now the thugs have resorted to chopping 
off hands.'

"Meanwhile thousands of implanted citizens are suing American Express for 
refusing to allow removal of their credit card chips, some demanding 
billions of dollars for their severed hands."

2006.03.23:
"In an unsurprising move today, CEO Jim Jones of American Express 
Corporation has stepped down after his company recently filed for Chapter 
11 protection after Visa Corporation backed out of purchase negotiations."


-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Software protection scheme may boost new game sales

[Sunder]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, Jerrold Leichter wrote:

> different forms.  It's been broken repeatedly.  The one advantage they have
> this time around is that CD readers - and, even more, DVD readers; there is
> mention of applying the same trick to DVD's - is, compared to the floppy
> readers of yesteryear, sealed boxes.  It's considerably harder to get at the
> raw datastream and play games.  Of course, this cuts both ways - there are
> limits to what the guys writing the protection code can do, too.

>From the POV of a coder for this kind of protection, there's probably some
API you can use to get at the error correction info somewhere -- or you
can use timing info... i.e. ask for a bad sector, and see how long it
takes to return the sector vs one that's supposed to be good...  

You can't stray too far from published API's, since if you do, you'll
potentially break your game when future OS's, patches, service packs,
hotfixes, or devices come out...  I.E. if you don't support anything but
IDE CDROM's, will you fuck users that use SATA, scsi, FireWire, or USB
cdroms? etc...  What happens under Windblows 2005?  Does your business
model say that they can't play on future OS's/hardware?  You won't be in
business very long if you do that.


>From the POV of the cracker, you can write a driver that looks like a
CDROM driver to the OS, and run the game.  It would act as a proxy to the
real CDROM, but also log any unusual activity (errors, odd timing,
etc...)  So then, the cracker can write a second virtual cdrom driver, one
that passes through the usual data off the CDR copy, but for those
"unusual" sectors that it captured earlier, replay the action.

Might even want to do this with two machines so you lessen the chance that
the game will find the original CD and ignore the virtual. :)

Of course the game could somehow figure out if a CD is virtual - by
getting driver information?  But if you're sneaky enough you can make your
virtual CDROM driver look like a second IDE controller, etc.. (see above
about SATA, USB, etc...)


Doing a search on google for "virtual cdrom" I see quite a few such
beasts...  It's possible one of these even has source code, but I don't
much care to bother searching further as I've no interested in this except
from the theoretical. :)

(In terms of things like Linux/*BSD you don't need no stinkin' driver, you
can directly mount an ISO file, but you could very easily write a block
device driver that added the errors/delays or whatever these things depend
on.)


That said, the scheme isn't without merit provided that it tells the luser
that he should purchase a real one maybe after it stops working pop up
an ad and say "Now that you've played your friend's copy, and saw the
demo, you can continue if you buy the full version..."

I seem to remember lots of old Macintosh software doing this.  You were
allowed and even encouraged to copy the floppy it came on and give it to
your friends.  When your friend installed the software, it would ask for
the serial #, (which you weren't supposed to give out.)

At that point, it would go into demo mode and run for a week, or two, and
then refuse to run.  So if your friend wanted the cool program you
recommended, they'd buy their own copy.  I'm not sure how successful that
was, but I'm assuming it did quite well...

The difference between that and this, is that if you put the floppy on
your fridge door with a magnet, you could always get your backup (or ask
your friend for her copy.)  With this, even if you have a legally
purchased copy, one or two scratches and it's literraly "Game Over Man!"  

:)


--Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.\|/
 + v + :   The look on Sadam's face - priceless!   
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sunder.net 

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Software protection scheme may boost new game sales

[Sunder]

Yawn...  This is no different than any of the copy protection schemes
employed in the 1980's on then popular home computers such as the
commodore 64.  

Hindsight is 20/20 and recalls, all of these were broken within weeks if
not months.  "Nibbler" copiers and other programs were quickly built that
allowed the breaking of all of these systems.  All sorts of "error"
sectors, duplicate tracks, half tracks, extra tracks, extra sectors,
non-standard sized sectors, tracks written at different speeds, erroneous
checksums, hidden data, and other sorts of weird bits were employed.  All
were broken.  None survived the ages.

In the end, the companies that employed copy protection only managed to
piss off customers who lost their only copy of the software, and created a
market for the copiers and crackers.  The crackers won, the software
companies lost.  

Few of the companies of that era are still in business today.  CEO's,
Vulture Capitalists, and others who have an interest in such schemes would
do well to invest some time in learning about that time, and the results,
for their investments, and dollars will go the same way... the way of the
brontosaurus, the trilobite, and the dodo.

Let them try, if they wish to burn their money.  As far as I'm concerned,
I'll vote with my wallet as usual and only run open source, free software.  
If the moronic kids at whom these titles are aimed have the $50-$70 per
title to waste on self destructing, flavor of the month games, they are
certainly free to spend that money to their heart's desire.


Not a dime from my wallet will wind up in their pockets - except perhaps
indirectly:  the next time I buy my next burger, "no, I don't want fries
with that, no, I don't want to supersize it," my $5 eventually makes a
small contribution to the salary of the burger flipper, which in turn is
applied to the purchase of said game.  :)



I've not read the said article just yet, but from that direct quote "as
the copy degrades..." I can already see the trouble with this scheme:
their copy protection already fails them.  They allow copies to be made
and rely on the fact that the CDR or whatever media, will eventually
degrade, because their "code looks like scratches..."  Rggghtt.

If you can make one copy, you can make many, and you can certainly store
the ISO in compressed form on a normal CD to make more copies
later.   CDR's are what? $0.20@ these days?

Hell, you can even get one of those virtual CDROM programs to mount the
CD's as if they were CD's, and store the ISO on a hard drive, or DVD-R
instead. Hard drives are already in the 250-500GB range these days.  So
their scheme is already flawed and doomed from the start.

It seems to me that people that engage in treating their customers like
theives to begin with lack a vital ingredient for making money: common
sense.


--Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.\|/
 + v + :   The look on Sadam's face - priceless!   
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sunder.net 

On Sat, 11 Oct 2003, Steve Schear wrote:

> Companies are using a new software protection system, called Fade, to
> protect their intellectual property from software thieves. Fade is being
> introduced by Macrovision, which specializes in digital rights management,
> and the British games developer Codemasters. What the program does is make
> unauthorized copies of games slowly degrade, by exploiting the systems for
> error correction that computers use to cope with CD-ROMs or DVDs that have
> become scratched. Software protected by Fade contains fragments of
> "subversive" code designed to seem like scratches, which are then arranged
> on the disc in a pattern that will be used to prevent copying. Bruce
> Everiss of Codemasters says, "The beauty of this is that the degrading copy
> becomes a sales promotion tool. People go out and buy an original version."
> (New Scientist 10 Oct 2003)
> 
> 

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Johns Hopkins Physics Lab System Detects Digital Video Tampering

[Sunder]

And what stops an attacker from taking that digital video, stripping off
the RSA(?) signatures (I'll assume it's just signed), editing it, creating
another, random, one time private key, "destroying" that private key after
resigning it, and offering it up as unedited?!?!?!?!

They've either obviously not relesed all the details about this method,
since you have no way to validate that the presented public key was
created by their camcorder.  So how would you prove that something came
from a particular camera?  Do you cripple the private key somehow to be
able to identify it?  Do you sign it twice? If you do, then a more
permanent private key lives in the camcorder and can be extracted to also
produce fake keys, etc...

Either that, or this gets a nice wonderful SNAKE OIL INSIDE sticker
slapped on it. :)



Even more obvious: What stops an attacker from taking the camcorder apart,
disconnecting the CCD output, then hooking up an unsigned edited video
signal to it, and recording as a signed video?


IMHO, it has an aroma rich with viperidae lipids.


--Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.\|/
 + v + :   The look on Sadam's face - priceless!   
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sunder.net 

On Mon, 29 Sep 2003, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> Of course, if it's is just signed-frame video, "prior art" doesn't begin to describe 
> this.
> 
> Cheers,
> RAH
> --
> 
> 
> 
> Science Daily
> 
> Source : 
> Johns Hopkins University 
> 
> Date : 
> 2003-09-29 
> 


 
> One key, called a "private" key, is used to generate the signatures and is destroyed 
> when the recording is complete. The second, a "public" key, is used for 
> verification. To provide additional accountability, a second set of keys is 
> generated that identifies the postal inspector who made the recording. This set of 
> keys is embedded in a secure physical token that the inspector inserts into the 
> system to activate the taping session. The token also signs the Digital Video 
> Authenticator's public key, ensuring that the public key released with the video 
> signatures was created by the inspector and can be trusted. 


 

-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: An attack on paypal

[Sunder]

The problem with these stop crackers and hackers by law is that it allows
software developers to get away with leaving huge gaping security holes
unfixed.  Anecodatal evidence: The classic well known Robin Hood and Friar
Tuck "hack".

These days, the bug wouldn't get fixed and the guys reporting it would
wind up in jail because they "convinced" the OS authors to fix the
bug.  IMHO, not the right way to go at all.

from http://ftp.arl.mil/ftp/unix-wizards/V16%23017
scroll down a bit more than half way down the page (also available from 
most other GNU sources)

 Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at
 Motorola discovered a relatively simple way to crack system
 security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system.  Through a simple
 programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick
 the system into running a portion of the program in `master mode'
 (supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply.  The
 program could then poke a large value into its `privilege level'
 byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to bypass
 all levels of security within the file-management system, patch the
 system monitor, and do numerous other interesting things.  In
 short, the barn door was wide open.

 Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an
 official `level 1 SIDR' (a bug report with an intended urgency of
 `needs to be fixed yesterday').  Because the text of each SIDR was
 entered into a database that could be viewed by quite a number of
 people, Motorola followed the approved procedure: they simply
 reported the problem as `Security SIDR', and attached all of the
 necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc.

 The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't
 realize the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the necessary
 operating-system-staff resources to develop and distribute an
 official patch.

 Months passed.  The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox
 field-support rep, to no avail.  Finally they decided to take
 direct action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily
 the system could be cracked and just how thoroughly the security
 safeguards could be subverted.

 They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a
 thoroughly devilish set of patches.  These patches were then
 incorporated into a pair of programs called `Robin Hood' and `Friar
 Tuck'.  Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as `ghost
 jobs' (daemons, in UNIX terminology); they would use the existing
 loophole to subvert system security, install the necessary patches,
 and then keep an eye on one another's statuses in order to keep the
 system operator (in effect, the superuser) from aborting them.

 One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software
 development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of
 unusual phenomena.  These included the following:

* Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the
  middle of a job.
* Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they
  would attempt to walk across the floor (see {walking drives}).
* The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of
  itself and punch a {lace card}.  These would usually jam in
  the punch.
* The console would print snide and insulting messages from
  Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa.
* The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be
  instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A
  (unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card was
  placed into stacker B).  One of the patches installed by the
  ghosts added some code to the card-reader driver... after
  reading a card, it would flip over to the opposite stacker.
  As a result, card decks would divide themselves in half when
  they were read, leaving the operator to recollate them
  manually.

 Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers.
 They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and X'ed them... and were
 once again surprised.  When Robin Hood was X'ed, the following
 sequence of events took place:

  !X id1

  id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack!  Pray save me!
  id1: Off (aborted)

  id2: Fear not, friend Robin!  I shall rout the Sheriff
   of Nottingham's men!

  id1: Thank you, my good fellow!

 Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been
 killed, and would start a new copy of the recently slain program
 within a few milliseconds.  The only way to kill both ghosts was to
 kill them simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately crash
 the system.

 Finally, the system programmers

Re: An attack on paypal

[Sunder]

The worst trouble I've had with https is that you have no way to use host
header names to differentiate between sites that require different SSL
certificates.

i.e. www.foo.com www.bar.com www.baz.com can't all live on the same IP and
have individual ssl certs for https. :(  This is because the cert is
exchanged before the http 1.1 layer can say "I want www.bar.com" 

So you need to waste IP's for this.  Since the browser standards are
already in place, it's unlikely to be to find a workaround.  i.e. be able
to switch to a different virtual host after you've established the ssl
session.  :(

Personally I find thawte certs to be much cheaper than verisign and they
work just as well.

In any case, anyone is free to do the same thing AlterNIC did - become
your own free CA.  You'll just have to convince everyone else to add your
CA's cert into their browser.  You might be able to get the Mozilla guys
to do this, good luck with the beast of Redmond though.

Either way, having a pop-up isn't that big deal so long as you're sure of
the site you're connecting to.

In either case, we wouldn't need to worry about paying Verisign or anyone
else if we had properly secured DNS.  Then you could trust those pop-up
self-signed SSL cert warnings.


--Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.\|/
 + v + :   The look on Sadam's face - priceless!   
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sunder.net 

On Tue, 10 Jun 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

> The most expensive and inconvenient part of https, getting
> certificates from verisign, is fairly useless.
> 
> The useful part of https is that it has stopped password
> sniffing from networks, but the PKI part, where the server, but
> not the client, is supposedly authenticated, does not do much
> good. 



-
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: An attack on paypal --> secure UI for browsers

[Sunder]

Yes, >NOW< if you can load yourself into kernel space, you can do anything
and everything - Thou Art God to quote Heinlein.  This is true of every
OS.  Except if you add that nice little TCPA bugger which can verify the
kernel image you're running is the right and approved one. Q.E.D.

Look at the XBox hacks for ideas as to why it's not a trival issue, but
even so, one James Bond like buffer overflow in something everyone will
have marked as trusted (say IE 8.0, or a specially crafted Word 2005
macro), and the 3v1l h4x0r party is back on and you iz ownz0red once more.

It's not enough to fear Microsoft, you must learn to love it.  Give us 2
minutes of hate for Linux now brother!


--Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.\|/
 + v + :   The look on Sadam's face - priceless!   
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sunder.net 

On Tue, 10 Jun 2003, Rich Salz wrote:

> But if the system is rooted, then the attacker merely has to find the
> "today's secret word" entry in the registry and do the same thing.
> Unless Windows is planning on getting real kernel-level kinds of protection.
> 
> > It was none other than Microsoft's NGSCB, nee Palladium.  See
> > http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-1000584.html?tag=fd_top:
> 
> See previous sentence. :)