HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: segr@nessie.mcc.ac.uk (Simon Read)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt,alt.security,comp.security.misc,local.crypto
Subject: Re: ATM fraud
Date: 14 Sep 92 08:54:41 GMT
Organization: UMIST

Surely those of us that know about the banks electronic security measures (and
often shocking lack of them) have known that this could happen at any time. There
must be hundreds of variations on this scam!

Unfortunately the banks are not interested in security. I was involved at one
time in a project with the UK banks to provide point-of-sale use of swipe cards
(the project/company etc will remain nameless). The project provided a high
degree of security (physical and electronic) to prevent fraud on the part of the
retailer and the customer (and to some extent the bank!). The banks were simply
not interested in bearing the cost of the fraud protection, they wanted to pass it
on to someone. The project collapsed!

A similar system with much poorer security exists called SWITCH. Despite having a
card to access this system (it's just my bank card), I will not use it! Typing my
PIN in at a terminal in a supermarket knowing that it is not properly secure, even
with  the added security of those bits of paper banks love, is not something I am
willing to do.

The only security a bank customer has is the security of his PIN. The banks do
say "TREAT THIS CARD LIKE CASH" (from an ATM here); they don't provide advice on
keeping your PIN safe though. The naivete of Joe Public is immense, as is
illustrated by password/PIN frauds; but the banks and others must have some duty
of care surely? Why don't they provide more advice on when to use your PIN and
when not to? How to prevent the guy behind you in the ATM queue from seeing your
PIN?


Simon Read
----------
Simon.Read@umist.ac.uk

Disclaimer: The above expresses my *personal* opinion. Not necessarily those of 
            any organisation I currently work for or have worked for in the past.
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
From: hal@gateway.mitre.org (Hal Feinstein)
Subject: does anyone really use encrypted e-mail??
Organization: Mitre Corporation, McLean, VA
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 11:28:03 GMT

 Sometime in the early hours of last night I had this  horrible thought. Does
anyone really use these encrypted e-mail products that we've been 
developing besides us?  I mean, we as interested information security
people sometimes use it (why I don't know except perhaps as an experiment)
but how many commercial outfits are using it I wonder?  These are the
people who supposedly needed it and yet my experience as a security 
analyst (based on what I see in the field) tell me that only a few more
advanced type are going to go throught the trouble of setting it all up for 
commercial use. Now, maybe, in a brighter world when business is conducted 
through the paperless office, when we are all online and have pre-stored 
certificates in some X.500 directory, we then might see some usage. 
But until that happy hour, I'd not be overly surprised to find the number 
of organizations using encrypted e-mail to be small indeed. 


BTW -- Can someone post the algorithm or some write-up on the IDEA algorithm
that PGP 2.0 is using. I know its patented (another drag on commercial usage)
but can't it be posted? 
-
From: howard@titan.hal.com (Howard Gayle)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Allusion to sci.crypt
Date: 6 Sep 92 17:44:13 GMT
Reply-To: howard@hal.com (Howard Gayle)
Organization: HaL Computer Systems, Inc., Campbell, California
NNTP-Posting-Host: titan.hal.com

The article "Pseudorandom Bit Generators in Stream-Cipher
Cryptography" by Zeng et al., Computer, Feb. 1991, says:
   "[T]he only practical way to certify a generator for use in
   communication protection is to subject it to merciless
   mocking attacks." (p. 16)
Surely this is an allusion to sci.crypt.  :-)
--
Howard Gayle
HAL Computer Systems, Inc.
1315 Dell Avenue
Campbell, California 95008
USA
howard@hal.com
Phone: +1 408 379 7000 extension 1080
FAX  : +1 408 379 5022
From: ken@sugra.uucp (Kenneth Ng)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Re: "Sneakers" -- action/adventure movie about Cryptography
Date: 13 Sep 92 16:00:57 GMT
Organization: Private Computer, Totowa NJ

In article <1992Sep10.034159.1617@qiclab.scn.rain.com:, leonard@qiclab.scn.rain.com (Leonard Erickson) writes:
: karn@qualcom.qualcomm.com (Phil Karn) writes:
: >It sounds like that scene was written by the same guy who did the
: >climax of "War Games". Remember how the computer (Joshua?) cracked the
: >missile launch code ONE CHARACTER AT A TIME?
: most cheap "number wheel" bike locks *do* work that way. Put tension
: on the lock, then spin the cylinders. One will bind as it hits the 
: correct number. Then you spin the remaining ones. One of *them* will
: bind. Etc. It takes about a minute to open. :-)
: I know of no *decent* lock that behaves this way. But there are a lot
: of junk locks out there!

Most decent locks are resistent to the tension method of breaking the lock
numbers.  But the ironic thing is that the cheaper locks are *HARDER* to
break in some ways.  This is because the tolerances are so lousy that it
is hard to get a good feel of which element is next.  But then, I'm talking
about pin or wafer locks.

Now, how does one put tension on an electronic lock? :-)

-- 
Kenneth Ng
Please reply to ken@eies2.njit.edu for now.
Apple and AT&T lawsuits: Just say NO!
From: bontchev@fbihh.informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Vesselin Bontchev)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Problems compiling PGP 2.0
Date: 9 Sep 92 17:29:10 GMT
Reply-To: bontchev@fbihh.informatik.uni-hamburg.de
Organization: Virus Test Center, University of Hamburg

Hello, everybody!

I downloaded unix_pgp20.tar.Z from ghost.dsi.unimi.it and tried to
compile it on our Ultrix 4.2 system. The docs say that Ultrix is
supported, but I keep getting compile errors... I haven't played with
the configuration options in the makefile yet. Has anybody succeeded
to compile it on such system? Is there a support person/group for this
program? Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Vesselin
-- 
Vesselin Vladimirov Bontchev          Virus Test Center, University of Hamburg
Tel.:+49-40-54715-224, Fax: +49-40-54715-226      Fachbereich Informatik - AGN
** PGP public key available on demand. **    Vogt-Koelln-Strasse 30, rm. 107 C
e-mail: bontchev@fbihh.informatik.uni-hamburg.de    D-2000 Hamburg 54, Germany
From: WHMurray@DOCKMASTER.NCSC.MIL
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Trusted Path
Date: 8 Sep 92 21:45:00 GMT
Organization: Yale CS Mail/News Gateway


Sorry Paul, trusted path as in the orange book relies upon a trusted
terminal.  It does not protect against the kind of attack descirbed.
Defense against that attack requires rue peer-to-peer authentication
that is independent of the terminal and resistant to playbacks.

Regards, Bill
____________________________________________________________________
William Hugh Murray                     203-966-4769
Information System Security             203-326-1833 (CELLULAR)
Consultant to Deloitte & Touche         ARPA: WHMurray@DOCKMASTER
                                        MCI-Mail: 315-8580
                                        TELEX: 6503158580
                                        FAX: 203-966-8612
                                        Compu-Serve: 75126,1722
49 Locust Avenue, Suite 104             PRODIGY: DXBM57A
New Canaan, Connecticut 06840
From: grady@btr.BTR.COM (Grady Ward  grady@btr.com)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Re: Secure password generation
Date: 12 Sep 92 14:53:22 GMT
Organization: BTR Public Access UNIX, MtnView CA. Contact: Customer Service cs@BTR.COM

For pronounceable passwords,                                                    
you might consider using a combination
of the MD5 (message digest) algorithm
coupled to one or more of my Moby Lexical
databases:
 
The Pronunciator database will give
you a comprehensive set of individual,
double, and longer phonemes tuples that
are, by definition, pronounceable (using
IPA and 150,000 real words and phrases
in English and adopted into English.)

The Part-of-Speech database would even
permit you to construct grammatically
correct "sentences" for passphrase
generation; the Moby Words database has 560,000
entries in English; good enough for a subsequent
comprehensive scan for stereotyped passwords
or phrases.

The MD5 Algorithm would then collapse the
password or phrase into a well-distributed
bit space that a salt cold be coalesced into
or a  key extracted from.

Although not an endorsement,
Eugene Spafford is in fact using Moby Words
in a similar Internet project;  the NSA
is a licensee of the Part-of-Speech database.

These databases are available world-wide,
with special consideration for educational
and research organizations.

For more information on these data sets, please
e-mail a postal address to:  grady@btr.com
phone (408) 373-1491, or write:

Illumind
571 Belden St.
Monterey, CA  93940  USA
         

-- 
Grady Ward  grady@btr.com  Moby Lexicons
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
From: karn@qualcom.qualcomm.com (Phil Karn)
Subject: Re: "Sneakers" -- action/adventure movie about Cryptography
Reply-To: karn@chicago.qualcomm.com
Organization: Qualcomm, Inc
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 20:58:42 GMT

In article <6395@vtserf.cc.vt.edu>, ranck@vtserf.cc.vt.edu (Wm. L. Ranck) writes:
|>    I saw a preview of "Sneakers" when I was at the movies about a week ago.
|> In a couple of scenes they showed groups of letters on a screen rapidly
|> changing (sort of like a slot machine) and resolving into words.  Now this
|> bothered me.  The space characters were already in place!  In other words
|> it was obvious from the cyphertext what the length of each word was.
|> Pretty poor encryption scheme that.

It sounds like that scene was written by the same guy who did the
climax of "War Games". Remember how the computer (Joshua?) cracked the
missile launch code ONE CHARACTER AT A TIME?

I wish I could find a bank with a vault whose combination lock worked
that way.

Phil
Newsgroups: sci.crypt,alt.security
From: res@colnet.cmhnet.org (Rob Stampfli)
Subject: pgp2.0 signature security problem
Organization: Little to None
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1992 17:43:58 GMT

I recently had a chance to play around with pgp2.0 on a sVr2 Unix machine.
There appears to be a big security problem with the signature mechanism:
If you "sign" a file, and then add additional information to the end of
the signed file, pgp includes this additional information as part of what
it says you signed.  For instance:

echo 1 2 3 4 5 | pgp -fs >xyzzy.pgp
echo 6 7 8 9 10 >>xyzzy.pgp
pgp xyzzy.pgp

pgp now tells me I have signed the phrase:

	1 2 3 4 5
	6 7 8 9 10

when I have in fact only signed the first line.
-- 
Rob Stampfli  rob@colnet.cmhnet.org      The neat thing about standards:
614-864-9377  HAM RADIO: kd8wk@n8jyv.oh  There are so many to choose from.
Newsgroups: sci.crypt,alt.security
From: karn@servo.qualcomm.com (Phil Karn)
Subject: Re: Are DES restriction even logically sound?
Organization: Qualcomm, Inc
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 05:19:16 GMT

In article <1992Sep6.071901.21881@uwm.edu> jgd@csd4.csd.uwm.edu writes:
>   The description of DES is public knowledge.  Do what you want with it.
>
>   However, software _implementations_ of DES have been deemed "munitions",
>   and are thus restricted by the US Gummint ("We're your friends! Trust
>   us!").

Obviously only Americans are capable of taking an algorithm
description and turning it into working code. The next thing you know,
the US government will be revoking the passports of anyone suspected
of being able to program...

Phil
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
From: karger@osf.org (Paul A. Karger)
Subject: Re: ATM fraud
Organization: Open Software Foundation
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 16:05:38 GMT

In article <12833@grayt>, grayt@Software.Mitel.COM (Tom Gray) writes:

|> 
|> Perhaps a comment from a layman will be thought appropriate.
|> ATM fraud is an economic enterprise. That is the crook is going 
|> to have to make money on the deal. Complicated schemes to gather
|> thousands of PIN's to rob thousands of accounts are all very well.
|> However if the outcome of this is too deposit thousands of individual
|> sums into the account of Joe Bloggs (computer thief and chef international),
|> the long arm of the law will not be far behind him on the electronic road.
|> The cops say to break up an elaborate criminal conspiracy, one should
|> follow the money. Here the crook is not only leaving a paper path, he
|> is providing a road map.
|> 
|> IMHO anyway
|> 

Quite true - I know of only two cases where the crook actually went to the
trouble of building a phony ATM machine - one in New York City and
one in Italy.   

I've seen other cases where the crooks took a much simpler
approach to robbing the ATM - namely they planted dynamite and tried to
blow the machine up!!  There was a case in my old home town, and the crooks
failed, because they didn't use enough dynamite - the armor plating on the
machine survived the blast.

This is the traditional problem.  The defender must find and close all
holes into the system.  The attacker need only find one hole and exploit
it.  (Or in the case above, create the hole with dynamite!)
From: garfield@utopia.hacktic.nl (garfield)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: brazeries
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 92 02:55:49 GMT
Organization: UTOPIA

Hi there..
 
Could anyone give me some info on the safety I get using
the brazeries cypher (40 disks with each 256 positions
rotating at a variable speed and direction)

Thnx..
  Garfield@maas-neotek.hacktic.nl


 ---
garfield@utopia.hacktic.nl (garfield)
From: marc@tanda.isis.org (Marc Thibault)
Reply-To: marc@tanda.isis.org
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Re: PGP *2.0* available
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 92 10:53:34 
Distribution: na
Organization: Thibault & Friends

In article <1992Sep12.032506.5521@colnet.cmhnet.org> 
(Rob Stampfli) writes: 
    ...
> It would be nice if the current folk would issue their own signature.

    It's hard to believe they don't read this group - how about it
    guys? Just a short message with your public keys for comparison.

> 
> Another reason may be that they are using MD5 in 2.0.  Does anyone know
> if pgp2.0 is compatible with pgp1.0?

    It isn't, but they have put in the hooks to assure upward
    compatibility in future versions.

MOREOVER:

    To get the value of this, it seems to me that we all should take
    the earliest opportunity to begin broadcasting public keys and
    maybe convincing some ftp archives to start collecting them. I'm a
    newbie on Usenet so I have no idea how best to do this.

    Re spoofing: If I'm worried that someone's got a wedge in my mail,
    I could send messages to a number of people who have published
    their keys. The message would be encrypted with their public key
    and contain copies of my public key inside and out. The message
    would include instructions like "Please reply with a single word
    'tomato' if both are the same and 'asparagus' if they are not,"
    using a different pair of words for each message.

    Whoever is spoofing would have no way of knowing what to do,
    unless they were also spoofing everybody else. The best they could
    do is stop the replies entirely, which would tell me what I needed
    to know. At this point I would send my public key under cover to a
    bunch of people with a request to broadcast it, along with a
    disclaimer on the spoofer's key.


    -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: 2.0

mQBNAiqxYTkAAAECALfeHYp0yC80s1ScFvJSpj5eSCAO+hihtneFrrn+vuEcSavh
AAUwpIUGyV2N8n+lFTPnnLc42Ms+c8PJUPYKVI8ABRG0I01hcmMgVGhpYmF1bHQg
PG1hcmNAdGFuZGEuaXNpcy5vcmc+
=HLnv
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

---

 Marc Thibault        |                              |  Any Warming,
 marc@tanda.isis.org  |  Oxford Mills, Ontario       |  Global or otherwise,
 CIS:71441,2226       |     Canada                   |   appreciated.

Newsgroups: sci.crypt
From: Marc.Ringuette@daisy.learning.cs.cmu.edu
Subject: Probabilistic encryption
Organization: The Ohio State University Department of Computer and Information Science
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 05:27:00 GMT

A teaser to get your attention:  

    For the purpose of privacy, this scheme of Blum and Goldwasser's
    is the best that academia has to offer thus far.
		- Giles Brassard, "Modern Cryptography: A Tutorial"
		  (Springer-Verlag, 1988)

The scheme is a version of a technique called "probabilistic encryption" 
and looks like a very interesting variation on the public-key theme.
I'll define it briefly here.


--- Blum and Goldwasser's probabilistic encryption ---

Let p and q be two randomly chosen distinct large primes congruent to 3
modulo 4.  Their product n=pq is a Blum integer.  p and q are the
private key and n is the public key.  Fact:  each quadratic residue
(perfect square) modulo a Blum integer has exactly four square roots,
one of which is itself a quadratic residue, and which is called the
principal square root.  

Assumptions:  
  - Square root modulo a Blum integer is trap-door one-way.
  - Repeated squaring of a random seed x_0 modulo a Blum integer,
    extracting the low-order bit at each iteration, yields a
    cryptographically strong pseudo-random bit stream.
Both of these assumptions have been proved correct assuming that 
factoring is hard.

Method for enciphering a message:
  Let m be some t-bit message.  Let x_0 be some random quadratic residue
modulo n.  Repeatedly square x_0, t times, yielding the sequence x_0 ... x_t.
Let b_i be the low-order bit of x_i, and let B be the t-bit sequence
b_0 ...  b_t-1.  The encipherment of m is the pair of integers <x_t, m xor B>.

Method for deciphering a message:
  Compute the sequence x_0 ... x_t-1 from x_t by repeatly extracting the
principal square root of each x_i+1 to yield x_i.  Extract the low-order 
bits b_0 ... b_t-1 and exclusive-or them with the ciphertext c to give
the message m.

Speedups:
  The low-order log(log(n)) bits of each x_i can be used without
compromising the pseudo-random number stream.  x_0 can be computed
from x_t using some number theory and a couple of modular exponentiations;
once x_0 is known, decryption is as fast as encryption.

----

To quote Brassard again:

   Not only is this scheme faster than RSA, but the difficulty of 
   breaking it is proved equivalent to that of factoring and it leaks
   no partial information on the cleartext if factoring is hard.

Some drawbacks:  the ciphertext is expanded by log(n) bits, so there's
a small space cost.  The speed on long messages is one modular squaring
per log(log(n)) bits, which is still too slow to be practical for
encrypting very long messages.  There is no digital signature capability.

Still, the practicality of the algorithm and the excellent cryptographic
guarantees makes it a very attractive method.  Does anyone know if it's
gotten much attention?


[ Marc Ringuette | Cranberry Melon University, Cucumber Science Department  ]
[ mnr@cs.cmu.edu | 412-268-3728 |      ".surivorter erutangis a ma I"       ]
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
From: xnybpf01@serss0 (Brian P Feeny)
Subject: Re: Unix compatible crypt utility needed
Organization: Florida International University, Miami
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 16:06:17 GMT
Keywords: encryption

In article <phil.714897700@adam.adelaide.edu.au> phil@adam.adelaide.edu.au (Phil Kernick) writes:
>exukev@exu.ericsson.se (Kevin Autrey) writes:
>
>>I've got some files I've encrypted on a Unix workstation that I want
>>to decrypt on my Amiga.  They were encrypted using "crypt" on the Sun
>>(which, I believe, uses the DES encryption scheme).  Does any Amiga
>>utility decrypt data encrypted with Unix's "crypt"?
>
>I think that you may not quite understand how crypt works.
>
>If they have been encrypted by DES then this is a one way algorithm, and
>hence you can't get the text back.
>
>All you could do is encrypt another section of text and compare the crypted
>version.
>
>
>
>Regs,
>Phil.
>
>(Followups directed to sci.crypt)
>
>-- 
>   _-_|\    Phil Kernick                E-Mail: phil@adam.adelaide.edu.au
>  /     \   Departmental Engineer       Phone:  +61 8 228 5914
>  \_.-*_/   Dept. of Psychology         Fax:    +61 8 224 0464
>       v    University of Adelaide      Mail:   GPO Box 498 Adelaide SA 5001


	Yes, crypt is "bidirectional" and DES can be called a one way routine
so to speak.  But you can "decrypt" (if I may use that term :) ) the DES
alogorithm on an Amiga.  If anyone would like the program to do it, email me.

					Brian
-- 
Brian Feeny - Systems Programmer - UNIX System Security Specialist
   __
__///          Internet: signal@phantom.com       "Grep me no patterns and
\XX/ AMIGA!              xnybpf01@serss0.fiu.edu   I'll tell you no lines"
Xref: sparky sci.crypt:3169 alt.security:4321 comp.security.misc:1212
From: jim@cs.strath.ac.uk (Jim Reid)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt,alt.security,comp.security.misc
Subject: Re: ATM fraud
Date: 9 Sep 92 11:57:00 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept., Strathclyde Univ., Glasgow, Scotland.
In-reply-to: rja14@cl.cam.ac.uk's message of 8 Sep 92 11:50:50 GMT

In article <1992Sep8.115050.8694@cl.cam.ac.uk> rja14@cl.cam.ac.uk (Ross Anderson) writes:

   A new type of ATM fraud has just arrived in London.

   An auction was advertised at which video cassette recorders and other
   consumer electronic goods were for sale at very low prices. A lot of
   people turned up and were asked to provide identification at the door -
   this is normal enough at auctions in Britain - and the preferred means
   of identification was a bank or credit card (you had to swipe it in a 
   reader and enter your PIN at a nearby keypad).

A much simpler (and successful) fraud is to steal someone's wallet or
purse. This usually yields the victim's phone number as well as ATM
cards. The fraudster then calls the victim claiming to be a police
officer or bank security official and asks for the PIN number for
"verification" or "for their report".

   What's the point of designing wonderful cryptographic systems when the
   customer corporations think they know it all and build implementations 
   that are trivial to break even without cryptanalysis?

Indeed. The UK banks do tell customers to keep PIN numbers secret, but
they don't properly explain why this is necessary. Even so, it is
disgraceful that their systems fail to take account of the possibility
that the key becomes compromised. This is not an unreasonable
assumption given human nature - witness the scams above or the stories
about people who write down their PINs.

		Jim
Xref: sparky sci.crypt:3140 alt.security:4287
Newsgroups: sci.crypt,alt.security
Subject: Re: Are DES restriction even logically sound?
From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (PeterClaus          Gutmann        )
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 07:04:37 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept. University of Auckland

In <Bu5597.3x4@sneaky.lonestar.org> gordon@sneaky.lonestar.org (Gordon Burditt) writes:

>It is my understanding that a description of DES in text form is not
>restricted, as long as it is not a software implementation of DES.  Byte 
>Magazine already published one quite a few years back.  (I forget whether 
>there was a full software implementation included or not.  There probably 
>was, in something like 6800 assembly language.)

There was 6502 assembly language included.  Interestingly enough, no library
in New Zealand (as far as I could find out) has a copy of the two issues it
was published in, although issues on either side of the two were available
freely...... I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions :-)

Newsgroups: sci.crypt,alt.security
From: markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark)
Subject: Are DES restriction even logically sound?
Organization: Computing Services Division, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Date: Sat, 5 Sep 1992 16:46:46 GMT

   Supposing I have a complete description of DES in text form, and I split it
into 8 parts, with file N containing every 8th character modulo N.

   If 100 people each decide to post one of these files (they make a random
choice without knowing about the other 99 people even being there), and posts
it to a place that can be publically accessed outside the US, then have any
restrictions on DES been violated?  If so, who violated them?  How?
Newsgroups: sci.crypt,alt.security