Re: Practical Advice for those using AES256 cipher?

2009-08-19 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Kevin Hilton wrote: Although I usually get a wide range of responses, is there any practical advice an end-user should take away from the recent AES256 attacks as described here? To repeat my usual advice: Unless you know what you're doing and why, stick with the defaults. The AES256

Re: rotating encryption sub keys

2009-08-27 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 08/27/2009 06:03 PM, Joseph Oreste Bruni wrote: Would it be considered a best practice to rotate encryption subkeys on an annual basis, or would that be considered overkill for most uses? There almost certainly exist people for whom this is a good idea. That said, I've never met 'em. It

Re: rotating encryption sub keys

2009-08-28 Thread Robert J. Hansen
ved...@hush.com wrote: to decrypt any old messages is easy, although somewhat tedious ;-) before you destroy your encryption/decryption key, decrypt all the messages/files encrypted to that key, using the option of --show-session-key then copy the session key as a 'comment' into the

Re: 1.4.10rc1 vs. OS X 10.6

2009-09-02 Thread Robert J. Hansen
I tried compiling 1.4.10rc1 on Mac OS X 10.6 without success. I can recreate this bug on 1.4.9 and 1.4.10rc1 on a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard. I can also confirm that John's fix of passing --disable-asm to the configure script works. Can we get an #ifdef for Darwin to replace the ASM

Re: 1.4.7 packages for OS X

2009-09-02 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Charly Avital wrote: Thank you Robert. I did builds for only a very brief period of time: once he got 1.4.7 packages built, I stopped. He does a great job with MacGPG, and I've got no desire to duplicate work that's already being done well. Thanks, Benjamin, for all your work. The Mac users

Re: Encrypting and signing in the same run

2009-09-03 Thread Robert J. Hansen
However, it doesn't seem to meet their requirements. Here's the reply of our partner : The file is first encrypted and then signed. Not encrypted and signed in the same run. It's possible that your partner has phrased things poorly. It may be your partner meant to say, We want the file to

Re: RSA only enable to sign

2009-09-08 Thread Robert J. Hansen
There are some Spanish-speakers on this list who might be able to give you a Spanish answer. If you don't mind an English answer, I'll try to answer it. Can you help me with the next: why I have RSA only to sign¿? You need to add an RSA encryption subkey. Go ahead and create a sign-only RSA

Re: RSA only enable to sign

2009-09-08 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Iván Cervantes wrote: Changing a little my question, why I have only three options in my gpg installation¿? A GnuPG key isn't just one piece of data. It's a whole lot of pieces of data. All GnuPG keys -- what we should really call certificates -- have a signing key. That's the most basic,

Re: howto secure older keys after the recent attacks

2009-09-09 Thread Robert J. Hansen
So waht I'd like to see is some step by step howto on securing older keys (written by some expert probably ;-) ). Add these lines to your gpg.conf file: personal-digest-preferences SHA256 SHA224 SHA384 SHA512 RIPEMD160 personal-cipher-preferences AES128 3DES ... This will tell GnuPG that

Re: howto secure older keys after the recent attacks

2009-09-10 Thread Robert J. Hansen
- When creating a new key,.. it uses the entropy, right? So is there some way to improve this entropy? Perhaps not using Linux but instead OpenBSD which might have a better PRNG (don't know if this is actually the case ;) ) or use a specific Linux kernel version where a newer and better PRNG

Re: howto secure older keys after the recent attacks

2009-09-10 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On Thu, 2009-09-10 at 14:02 +0200, Philippe Cerfon wrote: Uhm,.. what a pity. What would happen if SHA1 gets fully broken? Would we have to create a new OpenPGP and new keys? Probably. However, if SHA-1 gets totally broken we'll have a lot bigger things to worry about than OpenPGP. Well,

Re: howto secure older keys after the recent attacks

2009-09-10 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On Thu, 2009-09-10 at 16:51 +0200, Philippe Cerfon wrote: Ah,.. right... it was the other way round it didn't work (GPL2 to BSD ;) ) Copyright protects the way an idea is expressed, not the idea itself. If Linux had a better entropy collector than OpenBSD, the OpenBSD folks would study the Linux

Re: howto secure older keys after the recent attacks

2009-09-10 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote: On 09/10/2009 10:54 AM, Robert J. Hansen wrote: On Thu, 2009-09-10 at 14:02 +0200, Philippe Cerfon wrote: I thought the key ID is only used for humans to short check the keys,.. but not in the system itself?! Nope, it's pretty pervasive in the system. Unless i

Re: howto secure older keys after the recent attacks

2009-09-10 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Philippe Cerfon wrote: What specifically do you mean? Crypto-stuff in banking etc.? Specifically? I don't have the time to list everywhere that will break. SHA-1 is used in a ton of places, and often not places you'd immediately expect. For instance, computer fuel injection timings are

Re: howto secure older keys after the recent attacks

2009-09-10 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Philippe Cerfon wrote: But now that you say it. Would it be better to not just check other keys via their fingerprint, but to really copy them (e.g. per USB-stick) from their owners and sign only such direct copies? No. Sharing media is a great way to spread malware. Don't do that to your

Re: howto secure older keys after the recent attacks

2009-09-12 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Faramir wrote: I remember an example from one of the Bruce Schneier book, where 2 people (Alice and Bob, of course) wanted to get a random bit. They thought about each one flipping a coin, and then mixing the results. [puts on his voting security hat] This is part of some voting protocols.

Re: howto secure older keys after the recent attacks

2009-09-12 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Faramir wrote: I remember an example from one of the Bruce Schneier book, where 2 people (Alice and Bob, of course) wanted to get a random bit. They thought about each one flipping a coin, and then mixing the results. [puts on his voting security hat] This is part of some voting protocols.

Re: IDEA patent vs the recent USPTO memorandum

2009-09-16 Thread Robert J. Hansen
M.B.Jr. wrote: I've recently had access to this document, written by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) which basically tries to ban software patents. The memorandum in question is eight pages, twenty slides and two flowcharts. As a ballpark estimate that would mean it

Re: IDEA patent vs the recent USPTO memorandum

2009-09-16 Thread Robert J. Hansen
David Shaw wrote: Whether this means IDEA is okay or not patent-wise, I have a slightly different take on this: who cares about IDEA at this point? IDEA was good back in the 90s and PGP 2.x. It's 2009 now, and we have better ciphers than IDEA, a massive installed software base that doesn't

Re: IDEA patent vs the recent USPTO memorandum

2009-09-16 Thread Robert J. Hansen
David Shaw wrote: If the some people still want this, I haven't seen it in a good long while. Possibly they gave up asking. Gave up the asking, more likely. I still get one or two emails a year inquiring about if/when GnuPG will support this. (No, I don't know why they email me, and I wish

Re: IDEA patent vs the recent USPTO memorandum

2009-09-17 Thread Robert J. Hansen
ved...@hush.com wrote: if only there were a gnupg mini-version with a shorter source-code, (or at least one that's readable by someone looking at it from scratch, not just reading the updates and patches as they go along) then i'd gladly switch This is doable. I did this in '99 for GnuPG

Re: which version is install

2009-09-18 Thread Robert J. Hansen
FOAD FOAD wrote: I want to know which version of gpg is install on my openbsd, could you tell me how to do ? gpg --version ___ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users

Re: IDEA patent vs the recent USPTO memorandum

2009-09-21 Thread Robert J. Hansen
M.B.Jr. wrote: All in all, it looks like IDEA, even if totally freed, is sentenced to gradual abandonment. Is this perception of mine correct? It is more accurate to say it has already been abandoned. Very few people today use IDEA as a symmetric cipher for OpenPGP messages.

Re: email hashes in PGP keys as protection against spam

2009-10-05 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Hauke Laging wrote: Maybe. But I would not call it science that you imply that harvesting from key servers will result in about the same amount of spam as pure address guessing by the spammers would. Estimating how many email addresses are released to spammers via the keyservers is a black

Re: Key types

2009-10-11 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Jim Dever wrote: Are there any caveats I should be aware of if I generate an RSA signing key with an Elgamal encryption subkey? No. ___ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users

Re: A Couple of Questions...

2009-10-25 Thread Robert J. Hansen
sari Al-alem wrote: 1- does GPG have to be installed on all users who will recieve my mail? No: only those users who want to be able to verify your signatures, or who want you to be able to send them encrypted email. 2- does it have to be installed on the mail server? No.

Re: FSFE Fellower Card + LUKS on Startup

2009-11-04 Thread Robert J. Hansen
gerry_lowry (alliston ontario canada (705) 250-0112) wrote: David . you are sending this over and over and over . I have this message 21 times. What's going on? Please stop. One copy is enough ... if someone has time to answer your question, they will. It is likely not his

Re: gpg rejects SHA224 with DSA-2048

2009-11-07 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Kevin Kammer wrote: If I attempt to create a data signature using a 2048-bit DSA signing key, and the SHA224 hash algorithm, GnuPG complains as follows: ~ $ gpg -u A39CE7E5 --digest-algo H11 -b test.txt Your key is not on the keyserver network, so that will impair our ability to help you out

Re: gpg rejects SHA224 with DSA-2048

2009-11-08 Thread Robert J. Hansen
David Shaw wrote: However, if you managed to generate a 2048-bit key with a 224-bit q (as earlier versions of GPG did), all versions of GPG would (correctly) allow the use of SHA-224 with this key. When did this changeover take place, and is there any way to get the old behavior back?

Re: gpg rejects SHA224 with DSA-2048

2009-11-08 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Kevin Kammer wrote: Unless there is some inescapable constraint on the size of one's signature, I am hard pressed to think of a reason for using SHA224 when SHA256 is available. Conformance with corporate IT policies. Many corporate IT policies are drafted by people who don't really

Re: Error importing public key

2009-11-11 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Viet H. Phan wrote: Might there be any bugs in GnuPG 2.0.12? As the key was generated by GnuPG 2.0.12, but then couldn't be imported to GnuPG 2.0.12 ... There certainly are bugs in GnuPG. If there weren't, they wouldn't need to release a 2.0.13 or beyond. It seems unlikely that your problem

Re: Key practice

2009-11-14 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Also -- Keep in mind that I am not criticizing that weblog entry. I am only saying, don't believe the hype. Much of what it says is accurate: it is a good idea to migrate towards better digest algorithms. Just don't believe anyone who tells you that DSA-1024 is insecure: it isn't. That said,

Re: Multiple Identities

2009-11-16 Thread Robert J. Hansen
T. Howell-Cintron wrote: I'm in a position now where I'm using multiple e-mail addresses, for different purposes, but want to share the same key for the sake of simplicity in my applications (Enigmail for example). I know it's possible to use one key for multiple e-mail addresses/identities

Re: avoid gnupg questions

2009-11-16 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Михаил Голубцов (maill.ru) wrote: Could you help me, please? I wonder if you show me a way how to solve this problem. This problem will go away if you sign the recipient's public key. Alternatively, you can add trust-model always to your gpg.conf file. The former is generally preferred, but

Re: Is it possible to decide what is a gpg file?

2009-11-17 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Melikamp The Medley wrote: I mean, is there a reliable way to tell that something is _not_ an encrypted file? If you mean, a reliable way to tell that something is not an OpenPGP-encrypted file, then yes: check the OpenPGP header at the beginning of the message. If you mean, a reliable way to

Re: Problem with the agent, gpg2

2009-11-17 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Mario Castelán Castro wrote: I need GNU PG 2 because i want to get out of the 1024 bits limit and SHA forced for DSA, i want my next key (2010-2012) to be more secure and accept some SHA2. GnuPG 1.4.7 or later (? on the precise version #) supports longer DSAs and better hash algorithms. You

Re: Is it possible to decide what is a gpg file?

2009-11-17 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Melikamp T. Medley wrote: OK so I looked it up and I think what I want is called deniable encryption. What you've described here isn't deniable encryption, not as I know it to be. This shouldn't be too surprising, given there are tons of things I don't know about. :) (3) Can add salt (like

Re: Problem with the agent, gpg2

2009-11-17 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Mario Castelán Castro wrote: Thanks by the --enable-dsa2 tip. Someone can tellme wath line should i put on my gpg.cong?. enable-dsa2 BTW I also want to remove sha1 from my key preferences. Can't be done. The OpenPGP standard requires that it be present. Even if you explicitly remove it,

Re: digital signature primary key and encryption subkey

2009-11-18 Thread Robert J. Hansen
John W. Moore III wrote: Yes, there are! They are the Questions that _were_never_ asked! Japanese: 聞くのは一時の恥、聞かぬのは一生の恥 English: If you ask, you'll feel stupid for a minute. If you don't, you'll be stupid forever. (The translation is pretty far from literal.)

Re: Is it possible to decide what is a gpg file?

2009-11-19 Thread Robert J. Hansen
ved...@hush.com wrote: Unlike cryptography, where the standard is that the encryption is secure, even when the algorithm is known and well studied, no such progress has been achieved (afaik) in steganography. Pierre Moulin's got a whole sheaf of really good steganography papers, and yet most

Re: Backup of private key

2009-11-25 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Brian O'Kennedy wrote: This is a complete n00b question, but I still need to get an opinion on this. We were all new once. :) Welcome to the list! All of these make sense to me, but aren't compatible with my ability to lose physical things. So, what would the risks be of me using

Re: Backup of private key

2009-11-25 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Brian O'Kennedy wrote: So this implies that I could safely upload my ascii-armored private key to an email server without fear (assuming of course that my passphrase is secure and large). Correct. You just have to make *absolutely certain* your passphrase is unguessable. If someone is able

Re: Backup of private key

2009-11-27 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Matt wrote: If I had a sufficiently good passphrase, would Google returning my secret key as the first hit result for every search for a day still be secure? Secure is not a very good word to use. It means so many different things to so many different people. Secure really means in

Re: GnuPG private key resilience against off-line brute-force attacks (was: Re: Backup of private key)

2009-11-28 Thread Robert J. Hansen
David Shaw wrote: Difficult question to answer, since everyone is going to wave around their opinion. :) There are some empirical facts which may be useful, though -- like observing the RC5-64 project was able to break a 64-bit key via a massive distributed project that took 18 months of

Re: Secret Key Needed and Location on Mac Leopard

2009-12-10 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 12/8/09 7:03 PM, emma wrote: Looking through the forums I think this means I need to copy over my secret key, but I can't seem to find where this is located on a mac, nor how to search for it. It will be in a folder called .gnupg. By default, this folder will not appear in Finder. Once

Re: The number of lines of a key opened in a text-editor

2009-12-15 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 12/15/2009 06:05 PM, Robert J. Hansen wrote: 2048 bits, only 512 bytes. 256 bytes. Sorry. [goes off to drink coffee directly from the pot: clearly, caffeine is needed] ___ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org

'Tis the Season.

2009-12-22 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Regardless of your personal beliefs or lack thereof, I think we can broadly agree that this is a good time of the year to reflect on the year, what's happened in it, what good fortune we've had and our hopes for the future. As with many previous years, I feel that it's been our good fortune to

Re: Encrypting with an message expiration date

2010-01-03 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Morten Gulbrandsen wrote: Allen Schultz wrote: Is there a way to force an expiration date when encrypting a message for additional security. [...] sure http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/ There are, as near as I can tell, only three options: either (a) you trust the sender's clock, (b)

Re: Web of Trust itself is the problem

2010-01-07 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 1/7/10 12:08 PM, Mario Castelán Castro wrote: very few really care about their privacity. The fact that free credit reporting services are making a ton of money, as are services like LifeLock and whatnot, plus the huge media impact of identity theft, etc., all points to people knowing their

Re: Web of Trust itself is the problem

2010-01-10 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 01/10/2010 10:57 PM, Faramir wrote: * How hashes are misused and shouldn't be used Ehh... I've never thought about it. How they should not be used? I've seen computerized votes authenticated by MD5 hash... sent over email... in the same message as the official vote record. As in, the

Re: distributing ones public key (email)

2010-01-19 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 1/19/10 11:46 PM, Matthew Krotzer wrote: What is the best way to let people know you use gpg in an email signature? Some email clients (Thunderbird+Enigmail, for instance) let you put a kind of note to other users hidden in the email headers. These things, called kludges, are one of the

Re: Incomplete mailing list archives?

2010-01-23 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 01/23/2010 03:57 PM, Ingo Klöcker wrote: Yes, there is. The (obvious) explanation is: You didn't post anything to this list before March 5, 2006. ;-) This seems ... strange. It does not jibe with my memory at all, not one bit. Then again, it wouldn't be impossible for my memory to be in

Re: Revocation certificates

2010-01-28 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 01/28/2010 10:44 PM, Richard Geddes wrote: Generating a revocation certificate as soon as you generate your key pair is a wise thing to do, in case you lose control of your passphrase ... I did that. Good! :) My question is, if I edit my key pair... let's say I add a new uid to my key

Re: How to sign an email in PHP?

2010-02-24 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 2/24/10 11:18 AM, Jerry wrote: Outlook Express is depreciated. Outlook Express is deprecated, and many people here throw deprecations against it -- but Outlook Express is still one of the most common MUAs in existence, and for that reason alone the PGP/MIME interoperability problem should be

Re: key question

2010-02-25 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 2/25/10 9:24 AM, MFPA wrote: Some people hate the idea and get *very* upset if their key does end up on the servers. What you're advocating here is DRM on the honor system. Don't copy the key, don't distribute the key, don't upload the key, don't do anything with the key, without the

Re: key question

2010-02-25 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 2/25/10 8:29 PM, Yawar Amin wrote: I interpret that word, public, differently. To me just because a key _can_ be made public doesn't mean it automatically _should_. What in life is automatic, besides death and taxes? We are not talking about automatic here. We are talking instead about

Re: key question

2010-02-26 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 2/26/10 9:49 AM, MFPA wrote: I thought signing somebody's key was just stating to the world that you believe the claimed identity of the person who controls that key at the time you are signing it - not an indication that you are in any way associated. I'm scratching my head here trying to

Re: key question

2010-02-26 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 2/26/10 10:53 AM, MFPA wrote: There are privacy issues, especially if user-ids on the key contain email addresses. This isn't persuasive. It's been hammered out tons of times, and no one has ever presented a strong argument for keeping email addresses secret. Usually the same arguments

Re: key question

2010-02-26 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 2/26/10 12:38 PM, MFPA wrote: I am *not* advocating the implementation of any form of Digital Restrictions Malware (DRM). You can say you're not advocating DRM -- but if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, flies like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck. Digital: yes, the

Re: key question

2010-02-26 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 2/26/10 3:14 PM, MFPA wrote: But if it bears only a slight resemblance to a duck, it is probably *not* a duck. You are asserting that (a) the person who created the public key owns the information, (b) the person owns the information has the right to control how it is disseminated, and (c)

Re: key question

2010-02-26 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 2/26/10 11:55 PM, MFPA wrote: Maybe not but there is a perceived need, as evidenced by services like spamgourmet and all the disposable email address outfits There is a perceived need for $150 bowls of soup, as evidenced by dozens of high-priced gourmet restaurants in major cities. The

Re: key question

2010-02-27 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 2/27/10 9:58 AM, David Shaw wrote: Do you really mean to suggest that a US authority getting email headers - even without a warrant - is easier than typing a name into a search box on a keyserver? No. You're right, that's clearly easier. However, that only tells you whether someone has

Re: key question

2010-02-27 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On Feb 27, 2010, at 2:21 PM, MFPA wrote: I have always been taught to challenge the status quo. Because that's the way we do it is *never* a good reason to continue doing something in a particular way. The status quo has something going for it: it works. 95% of all new ideas are awful and

Re: key question

2010-02-27 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On Feb 27, 2010, at 3:02 PM, David Shaw wrote: Much as the email headers do in your example. If the mail is not encrypted, the headers just show that it might be. In practice, headers won't show much as the majority of modern mail programs have the capability for encryption of one sort

Re: Re[2]: key question

2010-02-27 Thread Robert J. Hansen
And whist you have stated that you check first, you have advocated that it's OK not to. Somebody following your advice could land this hypothetical Cuban in a whole lot of trouble. The hypothetical Cuban had a lot bigger problems the instant he shared his public key with people he shouldn't

Re: Re[2]: key question

2010-02-27 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On Feb 27, 2010, at 4:10 PM, Robert J. Hansen wrote: Keep it on the list, please, and not in private mail. Oh, ack. I completely misread the To- line, and didn't see the cc: to gnupg-users. My error, and my apologies to MFPA. :) ___ Gnupg-users

Re: Re[2]: key question

2010-02-27 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Kind of let's agree to disagree? More like, since you are reacting emotionally and refuse to even entertain the possibility of being persuaded, there is no point in continuing this conversation. I wish you a pleasant day. ___ Gnupg-users mailing

Re: key question

2010-02-28 Thread Robert J. Hansen
The perfect is the enemy of the good. It's a pretty common engineering maxim. It's not a statement about morality -- or, at least, it wasn't my intent for it to be taken as such. For an excellent engineering example of the difference between perfect and good, compare Project Xanadu to the

Re: key question

2010-02-28 Thread Robert J. Hansen
You can certainly tell a lot about someone by the signatures on their key. Either directly from the signature or because those signatures point to other keys that have their own signatures, etc. With your permission, may I see what I can find from the signatures on your key D6B98E10? Go

Re: key question

2010-02-28 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Understood, and I agree it makes no such statement. However, it does make a reasonably good statement that you were physically located near that person at a certain point in time, roughly what that time was, and roughly where (geographically) it happened. This is assuming the signature is

David's findings

2010-02-28 Thread Robert J. Hansen
religious upbringing * My religious affiliation * That I use GnuPG rather than PGP [1] * That I'm a fan of Bungie Software's Halo games ... This may sound impressive, but most of it could have been more easily developed via Google. Googling for Robert J. Hansen (with quotes) gives you my homepage

Re: David's findings

2010-03-01 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Both the religion (not sure why this was counted as two 'misses') You phrased it in your email to me as two sentences, and I was cutting back and forth between reading your email and composing the email to the list. Bullet point: raised Methodist, no, Episcopal, cut over to the compose

Re: Migrating from PGP to GPG question

2010-03-02 Thread Robert J. Hansen
What are the ramifications of just saying yes to the prompt - update preferences? How potentially serious is the algorithm mismatch? I'd like to better understand exactly what is happening. Ever since the very early days, PGP has supported a cryptographic algorithm called IDEA. Back in

Re: How to give the keyword from command line. David Shaw

2010-03-02 Thread Robert J. Hansen
My problem (which relates to this) I have an ODB (OpenOffice.Org) database file which I would like encrypted. The process would be to get the pass-phrase from the user, decrypt the file, run soffice -base, and then re-encrypt the results with the same password. This sounds like a use case

Re: key question

2010-03-03 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 3/3/2010 1:25 PM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote: There are issues of tradecraft, then. Using OpenPGP as a tool for committing crimes is kind of stupid. Can we not go down this line of argument, please? I agree that OpenPGP implementations can be useful tools for the advancement of human

Re: key question

2010-03-03 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 3/3/2010 1:44 PM, MFPA wrote: I feel there is a strong assumption among OpenPGP users that our community is, *ahem*, open. Is it not also a reasonable assumption, that those who use and promote privacy-enhancing software will value and respect privacy? It is not reasonable that their

Re: Continued PKA problems on Windows

2010-03-03 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Sean: get a real operating system as GNU/Linux Telling someone to change their entire operating system just to resolve a bit of undesired behavior seems pretty extreme. Linux, FreeBSD, etc., all have plenty to recommend themselves without us needing to characterize Windows, Solaris, etc., as

Re: manipulating the set of keys that can decrypt a file/message

2010-03-05 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 3/5/10 9:51 AM, Nicolas Boullis wrote: I will now have a look at how things are organised in GnuPG code. Would you suggest that I look at the GnuPG 1 or GnuPG 2 code? If memory serves, the codebases are identical with respect to this. Shouldn't matter which one you use. And if I succeed to

Memory forensics

2010-03-05 Thread Robert J. Hansen
http://jessekornblum.livejournal.com/259124.html For quite some time we've known that hibernation files present risks for information security. However, there are always those who say until I see an actual demonstration, I won't believe it. The upshot: we now have an actual demonstration. The

Re: Memory forensics

2010-03-05 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 3/5/10 5:04 PM, Grant Olson wrote: That article was a little vague. And I don't know much about memory forensics in practice. Do you know that it actually was a hibernation file and not swap space? Note Jesse's phrasing: volatile memory forensics. Swap space is nonvolatile storage.

Re: Memory forensics

2010-03-05 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Thanks a million for all this. The company Volatile Systems was really messing with my google-fu. Err -- why? Volatile Systems is behind the Volatility framework, which is probably the best FOSS tool going right now for Windows memory analysis. (Admittedly, it only works on Windows XP...

Re: Implications Of The Recent RSA Vulnerability

2010-03-11 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Alrighty. But doesn't this compromise the layer of security offered by the passphrase? What's the point having a passphrase at all, if it's so easy to compromise a private key? You might as well ask, what's the point of OpenPGP at all, if it's so easy to Van Eyck your monitor? Or, if it's so

Re: Off-The-Record Email

2010-03-11 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Is there a way to be able to have off-the-record email conversations with GPG technology? It would definitely be a terrific thing. Not really. OTR uses DHKEA for symmetric key negotiation. This is an interactive protocol: you send some information, the other person sends some information

Re: Using the OTR plugin with Pidgin for verifying GPG public key fingerprints

2010-03-12 Thread Robert J. Hansen
I don't think OTR technology can claim to solve the gun-to-the-head scenario. Although it claims to give users the benefit of perfect-forward-secrecy and repudiation, I think such things matter little in a court of law. People get convicted either wrongly or rightly, based on spoofed emails

Re: Using the OTR plugin with Pidgin for verifying GPG public key fingerprints

2010-03-12 Thread Robert J. Hansen
you live. If you belong to a minority people susceptible to persecution by a state agency, then yea sure there are many records of wrongful detention and arbitrary human rights abuses based on false pretenses. Sure. But the problem here isn't spoofed emails. The problem here is living in an

Re: Using the OTR plugin with Pidgin for verifying GPG public key fingerprints

2010-03-12 Thread Robert J. Hansen
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that because regular people don't understand what spoofing actually is, that by itself is a security hole. Semantics. A security hole is a way by which the security policy may be violated. Most people don't bother to think about policy in the first

Re: Using the OTR plugin with Pidgin for verifying GPG public key fingerprints

2010-03-12 Thread Robert J. Hansen
You have an existing credential - a passport. You then use that credential to verify another - a PGP key. The passport isn't used to verify the OpenPGP key. The passport is used to verify *identity*. The key fingerprint is used to verify the OpenPGP key. A signature is a statement of I

Re: updprefs command and changing key

2010-03-12 Thread Robert J. Hansen
Just a question, and I don't have any intention about doing it, but, is there a way to disable the usage of 3DES in GnuPG, when encrypting? Kind of, but it's not recommended. --cipher-algo AES will do it, but please don't. This kind of brute force approach is almost always the wrong thing

Re: updprefs command and changing key

2010-03-12 Thread Robert J. Hansen
There is no way other than that. 3DES is a required part of OpenPGP, so if you remove it, you're not going to play well with the other programs out there. --cipher-algo [something other than 3DES] won't do it? Faramir was asking only about disabling it when encrypting: I was under the

Re: Using the OTR plugin with Pidgin for verifying GPG public key fingerprints

2010-03-12 Thread Robert J. Hansen
I'm a little confused as to how does that make it any different from using the Pidgin OTR method. It's a question of degree, not kind. I simply open up an OTR session, ask my friend a question the answer to which is secret (only known to him) How do you know the secret is known only to

Re: Using the OTR plugin with Pidgin for verifying GPG public key fingerprints

2010-03-13 Thread Robert J. Hansen
The reason I think that it's still difficult is because even immigration officials get duped all the time. Cites, please. Show me studies showing how often immigration officials get duped, and how often they correctly flag false passports. When verifying an identity document, the null

Re: Using the OTR plugin with Pidgin for verifying GPG public key fingerprints

2010-03-13 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On Mar 13, 2010, at 7:08 AM, erythrocyte wrote: However, the combined probability that at least one of the encounters would result in accepting a fake ID would be 1/4 + 1/4 + 1/4 + 1/4 = 1 . 99.6%; a little different. The binomial theorem gives us the correct numbers. 0 failures: 31.6% 1

Re: Using the OTR plugin with Pidgin for verifying GPG public key fingerprints

2010-03-13 Thread Robert J. Hansen
But all that aside, I'm pretty sure news reports, etc. of human traffickers, smugglers, spies, etc. all confirm the fact that national IDs such as passports can be forged and do in fact slip by immigration authorities pretty commonly. Only because the news doesn't report on people who get

Re: Using the OTR plugin with Pidgin for verifying GPG public key fingerprints

2010-03-13 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 3/13/10 8:06 PM, erythrocyte wrote: Umm.. if I understand the nature of the probability tests or calculations just mentioned above You don't. If person A and person B disagree on whether something is fake, the operating assumption is that it's fake. The burden is on the person claiming

Re: Using the OTR plugin with Pidgin for verifying GPG public key fingerprints

2010-03-13 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 3/14/10 1:52 AM, erythrocyte wrote: From my understanding, the probabilities calculated give you random error. That is given a population of 4 people, there is a 68.4% chance that there would =1 failures purely by random effects regardless of what actions they may or may not take to

Science News on statistics

2010-03-17 Thread Robert J. Hansen
A while ago we had a discussion here about the use of statistics --- particularly, Type II error rates. It turns out that /Science News/ has a pretty good article on statistics and its limitations http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/57091/title/Odds_Are,_Its_Wrong. It's accessible to the

Re: Secure unattended decryption

2010-03-19 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 3/19/2010 4:26 PM, egg...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, well, changing the AES key on a database (Which may be several hundred gigabytes) is time consuming. Only if you design your database poorly. This is a solved problem in both database design and filesystem design. smime.p7s Description:

Re: Secure unattended decryption

2010-03-19 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 3/19/2010 5:36 PM, FederalHill wrote: Are there refernces where such procedures are detailed that I might look at? http://scholar.google.com Check for encrypted database rekeying. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature ___

Re: AUTO: Richard Hamilton is out of the office (returning 03/22/2010)

2010-03-19 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 3/19/2010 7:39 PM, Jerry wrote: It must be that time of year again; birds sing, flowers bloom and broken 'vacation' message auto responders flourish. In any case, I am calling the number he published. Maybe they can fix the 'vacation message' apparatus. More often than not, these sorts of

Re: AUTO: Richard Hamilton is out of the office (returning 03/22/2010)

2010-03-20 Thread Robert J. Hansen
On 3/20/2010 7:17 AM, Brad Rogers wrote: It'd serve him right. Unless his employer pays him to read the list. There are a fair number of jobs that would. Let's not make presumptions, and let's let the list moderators handle this. smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature

  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   >