http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general hourly 1 1901-01-01T00:00+00:00 http://gmane.org/img/gmane-25t.png http://gmane.org http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14655 <pre>Several people have complained to me that they get their email for the list sent from a different address than the one they send from and that their mail has bounced as a result. To take care of this, on your own, just add a second account using the web interface and click the "no mail" option. You will then be able to mail to the list from that address but you won't get mail to it. For those that asked, this isn't a normal Mailman feature -- I hacked it in with a Postfix policy daemon so it happens at the MTA dialog. It is necessary because the list gets hundreds and sometimes thousands of spam attempts a day and I didn't want to deal with the mail queues being clogged with thousands of bounce messages that would never be delivered Perry </pre> Perry E. Metzger 2011-08-11T00:17:06 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14648 <pre>Our (Sandy Clark, Travis Goodspeed, Perry Metzger, Zachary Wasserman, Kevin Xu and me) Usenix Security paper on vulnerabilities in the P25 two-way radio system (used by public safety agencies in the US and elsewhere) is out today. See http://www.crypto.com/papers/p25sec.pdf for the paper (pdf format) and http://www.crypto.com/p25 for a summary of mitigations. -matt _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography&lt; at &gt;metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography </pre> Matt Blaze 2011-08-10T16:06:48 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14646 <pre>Today's XKCD is on password strength. The advice it gives is pretty good in principle... http://xkcd.com/936/ </pre> Perry E. Metzger 2011-08-10T14:12:07 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14643 <pre>http://www.cio.com.au/article/396417/ Quoting. Crypto starts being mentioned in the fourth paragraph: India's communications ministry has been asked by the home ministry to monitor social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook amid fears that the services are being used by terrorists to plan attacks. The request suggests that the Indian government is trying to broaden the scope of its online surveillance for national security. Telecommunications service providers in India provide facilities for lawful interception and monitoring of communications on their network, including communications from social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, in accordance with their license agreements,[...] But there are certain communications which are encrypted, Deora said Friday. The government did not provide details of what encrypted data they would like to have access to. A spokesman for the home ministry said on Monday that additional information can only be provided in Parliament while it is in session. Perry </pre> Perry E. Metzger 2011-08-09T18:20:37 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14642 <pre>The list has been alive again only for a couple of days, but it appears that I need to post this oldie again. ------------ A3: Please. Q3: Should I avoid top posting on this mailing list? A2: Because, by reversing the order of a conversation, it leaves the reader without much context, and makes them read a message in an unnatural order. Q2: Why is top posting irritating? A1: It is the practice of putting your reply to a message before the quoted message, instead of after the (trimmed) message. Q1: What is top posting? Top Posting FAQ: </pre> Perry E. Metzger 2011-08-09T18:06:33 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14641 <pre>Quoting from the New York Times: David Lammy, Britain's intellectual property minister, also called for a suspension of Blackberry's encrypted instant message service. Many rioters, exploiting that service, had been able to organize mobs and outrun the police, who were ill-equipped to monitor it. "It is unfortunate, but for the very short term, London can't have a night like the last," Mr. Lammy said in a Twitter post. Officials at Research in Motion, the corporate parent of Blackberry, declined to comment on whether the service would be suspended. But the company, based in Waterloo, Ontario, issued a statement saying: "We feel for those impacted by recent days' riots in London. We have engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/world/europe/10britain.html </pre> Perry E. Metzger 2011-08-09T17:18:38 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14640 <pre>----- Forwarded message from Jeffrey Walton &lt;noloader&lt; at &gt;gmail.com&gt; ----- From: Jeffrey Walton &lt;noloader&lt; at &gt;gmail.com&gt; Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2011 20:00:56 -0400 To: Randombit List &lt;cryptography&lt; at &gt;randombit.net&gt; Subject: [cryptography] OT: RSA's Pwnie Award Reply-To: noloader&lt; at &gt;gmail.com, Crypto discussion list &lt;cryptography&lt; at &gt;randombit.net&gt; In case anyone is interested, RSA won a Pwnie for lamest vendor response for its RSA SecurID token compromise: http://pwnies.com/winners/ _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography&lt; at &gt;randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- </pre> Eugen Leitl 2011-08-09T11:52:09 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14638 <pre>Two years after Dr. Craig Gentry of IBM published the proof for fully homomorphic encryption, Microsoft has come up with a prototype that utilizes the technique: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38239/page1/ saqib http://redscarfvestpink.appspot.com/ _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography&lt; at &gt;metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography </pre> Ali, Saqib 2011-08-08T19:37:15 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14636 <pre>Please ignore. (For those that don't ignore these thins, hopefully VERPs should now be on. No, you have no reason to know what that means if you're not someone who runs mailing lists.) </pre> Perry E. Metzger 2011-08-08T00:31:21 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14635 <pre>Please ignore, I am testing bounce processing. </pre> Perry E. Metzger 2011-08-08T00:16:12 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14634 <pre>0) Many of you were asking me about the mailing list quite regularly. My apologies to everyone for how long it took me to get enough free time to get things going again. 1) We are now running on Mailman instead of on the long obsolete Majordomo. This gives us both online archives and the ability for other people to take over for me when I'm too busy (see 3 and 4, below). 2) As list was dead for a large fraction of a year, if you don't want to be on it any more, click on the link at the bottom and unsubscribe. 3) I'm expecting my time will continue to be limited, a side effect of being a doctoral student. To make sure the list does not fall silent again, I'll be announcing at least one (and hopefully more) co-moderators shortly, who will take over for me when I'm too busy. 4) We now have archives back to early 2001 online. They may be a bit mangled -- let me know if you catch any problems. Also, if you have archives dating back before that, let me know -- I'd like to slurp them in. 5) For years, I've considered splitting the list into a technical cryptography only list and a list that discusses the wider range of security and security related politics. This would allow people interested only in cryptography qua cryptography to get an even lower noise environment -- let me know if you have an opinion on the topic. Perry </pre> Perry E. Metzger 2011-08-08T00:08:20 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14633 <pre>Assuming this gets out, the list has been successfully resurrected, now using Mailman instead of the long since unsupportable Majordomo. Expect an administrative message later tonight. </pre> Perry E. Metzger 2011-08-07T23:08:53 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14613 <pre>I have a client with the following problem. They would like to encrypt all of their Windows workstation drives, but if they do that, the machines require manual intervention to enter a key on every reboot. Why is this a problem? Because installations and upgrades of many kinds of Windows software require multiple reboots, and they don't want to have to manually intervene on every machine in their buildings in order to push out software and patches. (The general threat model in question is reasonably sane -- they would like drives to be "harmless" when machines are disposed of or if they're stolen by ordinary thieves, but on the network and available for administration the rest of the time.) Does anyone have a reasonable solution for this? </pre> Perry E. Metzger 2010-10-08T20:27:57 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14610 <pre>My question: if someone plants something in your car, isn't it your property afterwards? http://gawker.com/5658671/dont-post-pictures-of-an-fbi-tracking-device-you-find-on-a-car-to-the-internet </pre> Perry E. Metzger 2010-10-08T15:21:16 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14587 <pre>AT&amp;T debuts a new encrypted voice service. Anyone know anything about it? http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20018761-17.html (Hat tip to Jacob Applebaum's twitter feed.) </pre> Perry E. Metzger 2010-10-06T22:19:01 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14582 <pre>a 19-year-old just got a 16-month jail sentence for his refusal to disclose the password that would have allowed investigators to see what was on his hard drive. I suppose that, if the authorities could not read his stuff without the key, it may mean that the software he was using may have had no links weaker than the encryption itself -- and that is extraordinarily unusual - an encouraging sign of progress in the field, if of mixed value in the current case. Really serious data recovery tools can get data that's been erased and overwritten several times (secure deletion being quite unexpectedly difficult), so if it's ever been in your filesystem unencrypted, it's usually available to well-funded investigators without recourse to the key. I find it astonishing that they would actually need his key to get it. Rampant speculation: do you suppose he was using a solid-state drive instead of a magnetic-media hard disk? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-11479831 Bear </pre> Ray Dillinger 2010-10-06T18:57:26 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14580 <pre>Microsoft is sending up a test balloon on a plan to 'quarantine' computers from accessing the Internet unless they produce a 'health certificate' to "ensure that software patches are applied, a firewall is installed and configured correctly, an antivirus program with current signatures is running, and the machine is not currently infected with known malware." Apparently in a nod to the fact that on technical grounds this is effectively impossible, the representative goes on to say "Relevant legal frameworks would also be needed." as though that would make lawbreakers stop spoofing it. Existing malware already spoofs antivirus software to display current patches, in order to prevent itself from being uninstalled. It is hard to count the number of untestable and/or flat out wrong assumptions built into this idea, and harder still to enumerate all the ways it could go wrong. The article is available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11483008 Bear </pre> Ray Dillinger 2010-10-06T18:13:36 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14576 <pre> Not new, but some probably have missed it. http://www.moserware.com/2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html </pre> Eugen Leitl 2010-10-06T13:29:02 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14575 <pre>http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/trunk/docs/backdoors.txt Statement on Backdoors October 5, 2010 The New York Times has recently reported that the current U.S. administration is proposing a bill that would apparently, if passed, require communication systems to facilitate government wiretapping and access to encrypted data: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html (login required; username/password pairs available at http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com). Commentary by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/government-seeks ), Peter Suderman / Reason (http://reason.com/blog/2010/09/27/obama-administration-frustrate ), Julian Sanchez / Cato Institute (http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/designing-an-insecure-internet/ ). The core Tahoe developers promise never to change Tahoe-LAFS to facilitate government access to data stored or transmitted by it. Even if it were desirable to facilitate such access—which it is not—we believe it would not be technically feasible to do so without severely compromising Tahoe-LAFS' security against other attackers. There have been many examples in which backdoors intended for use by government have introduced vulnerabilities exploitable by other parties (a notable example being the Greek cellphone eavesdropping scandal in 2004/5). RFCs 1984 and 2804 elaborate on the security case against such backdoors. Note that since Tahoe-LAFS is open-source software, forks by people other than the current core developers are possible. In that event, we would try to persuade any such forks to adopt a similar policy. The following Tahoe-LAFS developers agree with this statement: David-Sarah Hopwood Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn Brian Warner Kevan Carstensen Frédéric Marti Jack Lloyd François Deppierraz Yu Xue Marc Tooley </pre> Zooko O'Whielacronx 2010-10-06T05:31:29 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14574 <pre>From https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:MD5and1024: December 31, 2010 - CAs should stop issuing intermediate and end-entity certificates from roots with RSA key sizes smaller than 2048 bits [0]. All CAs should stop issuing intermediate and end-entity certificates with RSA key size smaller than 2048 bits under any root. Under no circumstances should any party expect continued support for RSA key size smaller than 2048 bits past December 31, 2013. This date could get moved up substantially if necessary to keep our users safe. We recommend all parties involved in secure transactions on the web move away from 1024-bit moduli as soon as possible. Right, because the problem with commercial PKI is all those attackers who are factoring 1024-bit moduli, and apart from that every other bit of it works perfectly. Peter. [0] This is ambiguously worded, but it's talking about key sizes in EE certs. </pre> Peter Gutmann 2010-10-06T03:52:46 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/14558 <pre>Moderator's note: I hate to ask this yet again, but PLEASE do not top post, and PLEASE trim the message you are replying to. Multiple messages sent to the list recently have had only a couple of lines sitting above a long original message quoted in its entirety. Taking the time to follow reasonable conventions for replying to email means that the people reading your missive will have a much easier and faster time understanding what you're writing. Perry </pre> Perry E. Metzger 2010-10-01T00:50:22 Search the mailing list at Gmane query http://search.gmane.org/?group=$group=gmane.comp.encryption.general