waashk/20ng huggingface dataset:
If it's forbidden to inform someone of a police wiretap on their phone, then is it legal to work privtely as a "sweeper," and report to the person you work for whether you found a bug?
Misinterpretation, though it should be a crime in itself, is what United States lawyers use to make their bread and butter.    In Manchester, CT a few years ago, a small company wanted to run a game system galled "LaserGames," similar in many aspects to Photon (tm). Three lawyers and about a hundred citizens found an ancient law in Manchester's books which clearly from context was designed to prohibit travelling carnivals by enumerating the features of a carnival which they felt at the time made the prohibition obvious. Among these things was "shooting galleries," which is what the lawyers for the opposition to LaserGames wanted to harp upon. The judge took the two words from this law, completely out of context, and ruled that LaserGames could not operate in Manchester.    Keep in mind that most travelling carnivals use projectile weapons in their shooting galleries, and not light beams. Clearly from context, LaserGames got shafted, but if the two words are applied, their denial of operating permission was justified.    If I had the text of the law I'd post it, but I'm afraid I don't remember it all well enough to even try. That little bit with the two words stuck well, though.
If "I forgot" doesn't have as much credibility as you'd like, consider this alternative.  Somewhere on the hard disk, duplicated a few times, keep a 128-bit random number.  When the 128-bit digest of your passphrase is computed, it is XORred with the random number before being used as the key for your hard disk.  Writing random junk over the random numbers makes the hard disk unreadable by anyone.
I envision incorporation of new standart into various communication systems, thus making it prevalent on the market &  therefore cheap. The way to do that may be detaching crypto chip from  communication equipment. It seems logical to provide Clipper chip  to the end-user not as a part of phone, fax, modem & like but in the form of smart-card compatible with various telecomm. products. Banks  will encourage extensive use of new cards to make transactions by phone. Natural step will be to cross-reference this card to the person in the  government databases - or else this new version of "wiretap proposal"  make no sence at all; one wish to eavesdrop (spell.) on the particular  person, not on the particular modem or phone.   As a side note, I disagree with one poster, who said he won't care about ability of the government to eavesdrop, since they can do that now  anyway. Clipper will take away electronic survelliance from citizens,  making it monopoly of the government. May be, we can find examples when interceptions made by (unauthorised) people uncovered crimes of  state officials ?   --  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------       For PGP2.1 public key finger mkagalen@lynx.dac.northeastern.edu
In article <artmel.735538777@well.sf.ca.us>,    artmel@well.sf.ca.us (Arthur Melnick) writes: > >     In order to get export approval for SECOM/NEA, it was >necessary to go through NSA and to reveal to them the details of >the program and algorithm.  This was done only AFTER we had a >finished product to submit.      . . . . .  >     With the encryption algorithm approved for export, we set  Please don't be insulted, but based on this I would say that your encryption algorithm is very likely not worth the paper it's printed on.  If the NSA gave export approval, that means they felt confident that they could crack it -- that's their JOB, mandated by LAW, and I'm sure they believe in what they do.  If they gave export approval to an encryption algorithm which they weren't confident of being able to crack, they would be derelict in their sworn duty to monitor foreign communications for US national security related material.  Just because many (most?) of us think that the government and the spooks are pugnacious slimeballs is no reason to lose sight of the fact that they do their jobs to the best of their ability, and further that said ability is rather high.  I hope that one day we can make them all obsolete....... but until then, we have to cope with their existence. Export approvals are one thing they do that we can learn a lot from, for example.
I was wanting to ask the same question Dan Bernstein asked--how does the Clipper chip exchange keys?  If the public key is only 80 or 160 bits long, does anyone know of any public-key schemes that are secure with that key size?  (Diffie-Hellman or maybe El Gamal, with p set to a constant value?)    Presumably, the real scheme is something like:      1.  Exchange/verify public keys.    2.  Send encrypted (randomly-generated) session key.    3.  Encrypt / Decrypt voice trafic with some sort of fast stream cipher.      Can anyone elaborate on this, or show me what I'm missing here?
I'd *desparately* prefer it if we didn't rehash the same arguments that went on ad infinitum last time.  That's especially true for sci.crypt.  For that matter, I've created alt.privacy.clipper, since the traffic is appearing in *many* different groups right now.  I'm going to focus here on some technical aspects of the plan, hence my followup to sci.crypt.  Frankly, if you're not an absolutist, your feelings may turn on some of these issues.  For example -- with an 80-bit key, simply splitting it into two 40-bit pieces is much less acceptable than other schemes, because it means that if just one repository is, shall we say, overly pliable, a would-be eavesdropper would need to recover just 40 more bits of key.  I need not point out in this newsgroup that that's pretty easy to do by exhaustive search. A slightly more complex scheme -- XOR-ing the key with a random number, and then with its complement -- would produce two 80-bit subkeys, neither of which is useful alone.  That variant is much more resistant to attack.  Clearly, one can get even more sophisticated, to protect the subkeys even more.  Other thoughts...  Some people have noted the size and complexity of the databases necessary.  But the id strings the phones emit could be their back door key, double-encrypted with the escrow repositories' public keys.  For that matter, they could do that only with session keys, and have no back door at all.  In that case, the FBI would have to bring every intercept to the repositories to be decrypted.  This would answer many of the objections along the lines of ``how do you make sure they stop''.  We can even combine that with a variant of the digital telephony back door -- have the switch do the tap, but with a digitally-signed record of the time, phone number, etc, of the call.  That provides proof to the escrow agents that the tap was done in compliance with the terms of the warrant.  I can suggest other variations, too.  Suppose each Clipper chip had 100 public key pairs.  Each would be used ~10 times, after which you'd need more keying material.  (Not a bad idea in any event.)  This could be used to enforce time limits, or rather, usage limits, on each warrant; the keys the repository agents would deliver wouldn't last for very long.  I suspect that the cryptographic algorithm itself is secure.  Apart from the obvious -- why push a weak algorithm when you've already got the back door? -- I think that the government is still genuinely concerned about foreign espionage, especially aimed at commercial targets.  This scheme lets the spooks have their cake and eat it, too.  (I've heard rumors, over the years, that some factions within NSA were unhappy with DES because it was too good.  Not that they couldn't crack it, but it was much too expensive to do so as easily as they'd want.)  They're keeping the details secret so that others don't build their own implementations without the back door.
In article <1993Apr20.150531.2059@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>, jebright@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (James R Ebright) writes: > Now why is that?  I doubt there is a trapdoor in Skipjack.  (But we will > never know).  And I doubt the NSA would promote a mass market chip they > couldn't compromise.  Ergo, NSA is now capable of compromising (probably > with brute force keysearch) engines of the complexity of Skipjack.  Look > at the specs.  Why, I bet they have thousands of little chips chugging > away in their crypto busters... Maybe even tens of thousands.  Complexity? > Not much more than a 3090.  How many such machines will fit into Fort Meade?  > I think PGP2.3 should have 256 bit IDEA keys...  Thousands?  Tens of thousands?  Do some arithmetic, please...  Skipjack has 2^80 possible keys.  Let's assume a brute-force engine like that hypothesized for DES:  1 microsecond per trial, 1 million chips.  That's 10^12 trials per second, or about 38,000 years for 2^80 trials.  Well, maybe they can get chips running at one trial per nanosecond, and build a machine with 10 million chips.  Sure -- only 3.8 years for each solution.  IDEA uses 128-bit keys.  Shall I bother doing the calculations for you? Hint:  multiply 3.8 years by 2^(128-80).  And you can't do IDEA at that speed; key setup takes much too long.  I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case for Skipjack, too, though there's no way of knowing just yet.  DES used only xor because that's what was feasible with mid-70's technology.  Modern chips can do a lot more.
In article <strnlghtC5wCMo.Fx5@netcom.com> strnlght@netcom.com (David Sternlight) writes:     >At the company I worked for previously, I received a file that was    >des encryped and the person that had sent it, went on vaction.    >Rather than wait two weeks I set up a straight frontal attack with    >one key at a time.  It only took two(2) days to crack the file.    >No, I don't have any faith in DES.         Taking this at face value (though it seems quite dissonant with    much else that has been published here about brute force DES    cracking, unless Russell was lucky with respect to the key), I'd be    very interested in whether the program Russell used is available?  key search is very practical in many real situations since people use such stupid keys on the average.  password crackers know this well.     Depending on his answer, this could be an appalling development    calling into question both DES and RSA/DES.  not really.  in fact, public key based communication systems very often pick keys automatically which are much better than passwords or pass phrases.     If any bright programmer with a little idle machine time can crack    a single DES message in a couple of days (assuming no tricks that    are message-specific),
Is it realistic for the government to try to keep the details of the encrytion algorithm secret if it intends to use evidence from wiretaps in court?  Won't defense attorneys attempt to obtain the details of the method if the prosecution attempts to present evidence from wiretaps in court?  Is it certain that such attempts will fail?                           James B. Shearer
In article <1993Apr17.032022.14021@clarinet.com> (sci.crypt,alt.security,comp.org.eff.talk,comp.security.misc,comp.org.acm,comp.org.ieee), brad@clarinet.com (Brad Templeton) writes: > Let's assume, for the moment, that the system really is secure unless > you get both halves of the encryption key from the two independent > escrow houses.  Let's say you even trust the escrow houses -- one is > the ACLU and the other is the EFF.  (And I'm not entirely joking about > those two names)  The problem with "Let's assume" reasoning is that, taken to the extreme (and you're close), you arrive at "Let's assume this is perfectly OK."  The assumptions you make are big ones. If the system is really secure, then why does the government have to keep the algorithm secret?  There are plenty of encryption algorithms that don't depend upon nondisclosure to be secure, so why in the world use one that does?  There are reasons, of course, but I certainly can't think of any honest ones.  Next, you assume we can "trust" the escrow houses. But the last time I checked, EVERY SINGLE BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT has experienced unauthorized disclosure, corruption, and even fabrication, of supposedly secure data. The govt is saying "Yeah, but NOW we're serious, so you can trust us."  Bullcrypt.   And finally, although you didn't state it explicitly, you implicitly assume that the warrant mechanism in this country is safe and reasonable. The case in Ventura County of a man shot and killed by officers serving a deliberately fraudulant warrant tells me that the govt has a long ways to go on this score.  Remember that all this is to catch the drug dealers, right?  As others have pointed out, the current proposal will, if deployed, render truly secure encryption much more expensive and inconvenient than Uncle Sam's brand. Who will be able to afford, and be sufficiently motivated, to purchase this expensive, inconvenient higher protection?  Somebody with lots of extra cash...  The following is more true than ever:    "When [strong] encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have [strong] encryption."
In article <2079@rwing.UUCP> pat@rwing.UUCP (Pat Myrto) writes: >For example, a conversation between a suspect and a lawyer will no longer >be private from Big Brother eavesdropping.  Now, almost 100 years later, we have the right words for the problem here.  Phone calls are "virtual visits".  Those experienced in virtual reality would know from that title that phone calls need to have all the properties of a walk in the park with your friend -- security from casual overhearing and easy verification to see if anyone is listening secretively.  As designed, they fail at that.  ..trouble is, telephones were invented a long time ago and people didn't realize the danger or the concept of virtual reality back then.
In article <C5w9qw.5pB@acsu.buffalo.edu> mckee@cs.Buffalo.EDU (Douglas McKee) writes: >In article <1993Apr22.014646.28445@ucsu.Colorado.EDU>, andersom@spot.Colorado.EDU (Marc Anderson) writes: >|> In article <1993Apr21.001707.9999@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> andersom@spot.Colorado.EDU (Marc Anderson) writes: >|> [...] >|> >(the date I have for this is 1-26-93) [...] >|> >        WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The War on Drugs is about to get a fresh [...] >|> I just found out from my source that this article was a joke.  Heh heh..   >|> It seemed pretty damn convincing to me from the start -- I just didn't >|> notice the smiley at the end of the article, and there were a few other >|> hints which I should of caught. > >Well, isn't this just a hoot! :)  All I read on this group is a bunch >of ppl fearing the misuses of information by the big bad evil govt. >This just happens to be a case of an ordinary-joe-netter, who decided >that he would create and/or distribute some misinformation.  Ppl buy >into BS posts like this (I know, because I forwarded a copy of the >post to my office mate, who turned around and was (although he won't >admit it...sorry Joe!) ready to get in a fight about F-O-R-F-E-I-T-U-R-E!!!) >Please, if we're going to hold our govt (which admittedly has had and >still has its problems) to high standards, then mustn't we follow these >too?  Electronic Freedoms only go so far.  Again -- I'm extremely sorry about this..  I got this message several  months ago (quite a bit before the clipper chip proposal) when it was posted to a different newsgroup.  It was very startling to me as well, and I guess I should of verified the source at least to some extent before reposting..  Aaack..
Good points.  In addition, I would point out that now is one of the best times to fight this political battle, with much of the opposition in disarray -- an FBI director (Sessions) on his way out, an Attorney General (Reno) who has only been in long enough to find the office coffee machine two tries out of three (and, between slow confirmations and Clinton's Saturday Night Massacre, hasn't much of a staff in place). If we really get lucky, both of the above will be too busy trying to keep their feet from being held to the Waco fire to spend much effort insisting on their alleged right to spy on the American people.
jfc@athena.mit.edu (John F Carr) writes: >In article <19930419.155204.305@almaden.ibm.com> >	ameline@vnet.IBM.COM (Ian Ameline) writes: > >>  I also believe that someone will reverse engineer the clipper chip, >>and knowlege of the algorithm will likely be fairly widespread. > >The chip and algorithm are classified.  If you reverse engineer it and >tell people, you are likely to go to jail.  Well, I'm not a lawyer, but from what I can tell this is completely and utterly untrue.  You see, this country has this thing called a "constitution".  If you legitimately aquire the device, and you yourself are not a government employee or otherwise encumbered, I don't think they can stop you from revealing anything about the device you can determine. Remember the Pentagon Papers precedent? The First Amendment applies here.  The U.S. does NOT have an official secrets act. We do have laws that will punish you for revealing what classified information you learned in your capacity as a government official, contractor, etc, and we have laws that prohibit stealing such information. However, if they sell you the chip, I can't see that they can make reverse engineering it and revealing the details illegal.  -- Perry Metzger		pmetzger@shearson.com
From: pmetzger@snark.shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger)  	You obviously haven't read the information about the system. The chips 	put out serial number infomation into the cypher stream to allow 	themselves to be identified. The system does not rely on registering 	people as owning particular phone units.  And probably as a back door to allow re-generation of the secret key.  Have we determined yet that S1 and S2 don't ever change?
In article <jhesseC5Ltt5.IMC@netcom.com> jhesse@netcom.com (John Hesse) writes:    Stupid me. I believed the Democrats stood for principles of personal    privacy while it was the Neanderthal Republicans that wanted into every    aspect of our lives.     Clinton is just more clever than the other guy. Looks like gun control for    privacy technology. One small step at a time.  Remember "Defend Firearms - Defeat Dukakis", followed by Bush's soon-after- election support for gun-control?   This is the Democrats' version "Defend Free Speech - Reject Republicans" followed by speech control.     Wait a minute....  Let me think about this.     Hmmm, I feel better now. I believe the White House when they tell us    this first step is, in fact, the final step. All is OK. We've nothing to fear.    They're here to help us.   God bless America.   Hey, like the grrreat J.R. "Bob" Dobbs says, you've got to pull the wool over your *own* eyes!
You should probably use numbers much larger than 64-bits.  Also, you may want to include some randomly-generated bitstrings in your protocol. This way, if someone should find the shared key you and another person use on one day, they won't be able to guess it for the next day....      Ie A sends G**A mod P and random string R0       B sends G**B mod P and random string R1         Both find (G**A mod P)** B mod P = Shared Key, then both calculate         Session Key = Hash(R0,Shared Key, R1)      Also, you will want to make sure that you're getting the right public key value G**A mod P.  Someone with the power to intercept and change messages can oterwise spoof you by sending both of you *his* public key, and then acquiring a session key with each of you....
In article <1993Apr21.001707.9999@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> andersom@spot.Colorado.EDU (Marc Anderson) writes: [...] > >(the date I have for this is 1-26-93) > >note Clinton's statements about encryption in the 3rd paragraph..  I guess >this statement doesen't contradict what you said, though. > >--- cut here --- > >        WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The War on Drugs is about to get a fresh >start, President Clinton told delegates to the National Federation >of Police Commisioners convention in Washington. >        In the first speech on the drug issue since his innaugural, >Clinton said that his planned escalation of the Drug War ``would make >everything so far seem so half-hearted that for all practical [...]  I just found out from my source that this article was a joke.  Heh heh..   It seemed pretty damn convincing to me from the start -- I just didn't notice the smiley at the end of the article, and there were a few other hints which I should of caught.  Anyway -- I guess this 'joke' did turn out to resemble Clinton's true  feelings at least to some extent.    Sorry about that...
In article <1993Apr20.192105.11751@ulysses.att.com> 	smb@research.att.com (Steven Bellovin) writes: > > [ responding to claims about Skipjack cracking engines ] > >Thousands?  Tens of thousands?  Do some arithmetic, please...  Skipjack >has 2^80 possible keys.  Let's assume a brute-force engine like that >hypothesized for DES:  1 microsecond per trial, 1 million chips.  That's >10^12 trials per second, or about 38,000 years for 2^80 trials.  Well, >maybe they can get chips running at one trial per nanosecond, and build >a machine with 10 million chips.  Sure -- only 3.8 years for each solution. >  	I think I should also point out that the mystical DES engines are known plaintext engines (unless you add a ton of really smart hardware?)  	The 'plaintext' is digitized voice, and exists for a very short time, probably in a couple inches of copper, tops. It's flatly not available -- your bug in my office can hear my voice, and even digitize it, but it's going to get a different bitstream.  	It is horribly naive to suppose that regular folks can figure out how to crack skipjack, or clipper based telephones. I'm certainly not devoting a great deal of thought to it.
>From: denning@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu >                     THE CLIPPER CHIP: A TECHNICAL SUMMARY  >                               Dorothy Denning  >                           Revised, April 21, 1993  >The chips are programmed by Mykotronx, Inc., which calls them the >"MYK-78."  The silicon is supplied by VLSI Technology Inc.   >All Clipper Chips are programmed inside a SCIF (Secure Compartmented >Information Facility), which is essentially a vault.  The SCIF contains >a laptop computer and equipment to program the chips.  About 300 chips >are programmed during a single session.  The SCIF is located at >Mykotronx.  >ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND DISTRIBUTION NOTICE.  This article is based on >information provided by NSA, NIST, FBI, and Mykotronx.  Permission to >distribute this document is granted.  So, who is Mykotronx, Inc.?  It would be nice to know that they were not a front company used by an intelligence or other agency of the  U.S. government.  Trusting the fox to guard the chickens, and all that. Seems suspicious when the rest of the sources are foxes.  While we are at it, the chip design(s) should be examined and verified against silicon to insure no trap doors or hidden protocols exist in silicon, regardless of the security level of the encryption algorithm.  It would be a  shame if some three letter agency had the ability to interrogate my chip, when all I'd know is that someone rang, and when I attempted to go off hook the line went dead.  Could be even worse if the chip were intended to connect directly to a modem.  The design examination should be done to the gate level.  Does anyone have a good idea how to tell if there is a piggyback design on silicon?  The model would be extra logic sharing pins with the advertised function.  Tip offs would be circuitry that would ignore incoming data if formats or sequence is not right.  I can think of only two ways an output pin could be used, and its possible that might be noticed, but could be edited from the netlist. I think the silicon itself needs to be investigated.  Imagine a design done in two layer metalization, yet finding a third layer under the microscope.