There are a great many cryptographic libraries available, but many of them suffer from poor documentation, cluttered APIs, bad interfaces, or unwise addition of platform-specific code (Counterpane, Inc., isn't immune, either -- your Yarrow code is strictly MSVC++ and hence, Win32 only).
Would the cause of secure algorithms be furthered by the construction of a cross-platform crypto toolkit, open sourced, peer reviewed, clean and well-documented, which could be reused across different platforms and projects? Or would this create hindrances, since each project may need ever-so-slightly different features from its cryptographic infrastructure?
(And if anyone's got a clean, standalone El Gamal library, *please* EMail me at the above address. The El Gamal code in GPG is just plain frightening.)
(Permission is granted to JANE'S and/or others, as designated by JANE'S, to reprint this posting, in whole or in part, provided that any editing is made clear in the final printed result and that Robert J. Hansen, rjhansen@inav.net, is attributed as the original author. If anyone wishes to contact me regarding information warfare issues, please feel free to use the abovementioned EMail address. My public key is available at the usual keyservers, and also here on Slashdot.)
Q: What's the accepted terminology -- "cyberterrorism"? A: Most hackers avoid anything "cyber" like the plague; I prefer "information security" for what I do, which is defending systems from information warfare. Besides, "chemical, biological, radiological and information warfare" sounds better than using "cyberterrorism".
Q: Using CT/Information Warfare, how easy or otherwise is it to bring down or attack vital systems? A: It depends a great deal. A lot of it depends on whether an attacker wishes to target a specific vital system/subsystem, or whether an attacker is going after targets of opportunity. Many vital targets are inappropriate for information warfare. For instance, although an IW attack against a sewer-treatment system could devastate entire cities with plague and disease, very few sewer-treatment systems have their vital components hardwired into the Net. Unfortunately, a great many systems are both appropriate and not in any substantial way secured against IW. The telephone network, for instance, is a prime example of a system which substantially under-secured.
Q: What sort of skills would be needed to do so, and are they common/teachable? A: Bruce Schneier (schneier@counterpane.com, public-key available from the usual servers) once said that "only the first person has to be smart, everyone else can just use software". The skills needed to invent and/or discover new attacks against networks are substatial, somewhat rare, and are very demanding to learn. However, once the attack has been invented/discovered, software can be written to vastly simplify the task of executing this attack. It took Cult of the Dead Cow months of hard work to develop Back Orifice and Back Orifice 2000, but after they developed this software it was available to the community at large. CDC are ethical hackers who released Back Orifice as a way to embarass Microsoft into patching their awful security model, but there are thousands of wanna-bes who are now attempting to use Back Orifice for unethical and criminal ends.
Q: Commercial-off-the-shelf software: can it really do CT? A: It's not sold at Fry's or Best Buy, so it's not exactly "commercial, off-the-shelf software". There is a significant software black market, though, and software to conduct IW can easily be found on this market. There's no real guarantee of software quality, though; for every skilled engineer who designs a tool, there are a dozen half-trained monkeys who think they can do the same thing. That's true in both the commercial and underground software markets.
Q: Which systems are actually attackable? A: If it's got a connection to the Net, it's attackable. Some systems are just more attackable than others.
Q: Can a recovery be made from such attacks? A: Sure. Hiroshima is a booming, bustling city today. If Hiroshoma can recover from the savage insult of The Bomb, then I'd have a hard time believing that a community, state or nation couldn't recover from an IW attack.
Q: Can a recovery be made quickly from such attacks? A: In theory, absolutely. But you need to prepare for post-incident recovery before you're actually attacked. Most places don't have any kind of post-incident procedure in place, and those that do frequently forget all about their post-incident procedures.
Q: Is it likely to improve/get worse? A: I think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. People tend to view computers as magic boxes; you plug them in and they go. Very few people really want to think about how many individual components go into a computer, and how much more complex a computer network is than a single computer. You wouldn't dream of driving your car 10,000 miles without changing the oil; we've been taught that this is a Bad Thing. Many people lack the technological savvy to realize when they're doing the technological equivalent of driving 10,000 miles without an oil change.
Q: What sort of preventative work would you recommend them to carry out? A: There are some very good computer security firms out there. Hire these outside, independent contractors to perform audits of your security. When they talk, listen -- don't fall into the trap of "we didn't come up with it, therefore, it's inferior". Secondly, only use open, peer-reviewed protocols, algorithms and operating systems. Many people think that if a system is open it's insecure, since an attacker can see how it's put together and determine how to best attack it. This logic is faulty. Open systems are designed to be secure even if the attacker has perfect knowledge of the system; closed systems are designed to be secure only if the attacker has minimal knowledge of the system. And any attacker worth his salt is going to have intimate knowledge of the system he's attacking, which means that closed systems operate at a distinct disadvantage.
Q: Any last words? A: Yes. Please, please, please do the hacker community a favor. Please learn the distinction between "hacker" and "cracker", and bring up this distinction in your publication. Jane's is an esteemed, respected publication, and I would be delighted to see some well-known source explain to its readers that, contrary to media usage, hackers are usually ethical individuals with a high degree of technological savvy; crackers -- criminal hackers -- are fiends and malcontents who deserve nothing but condemnation and scorn from society.
... For some reason, I'm skeptical of the claims made by all the different companies in the article. It wasn't too long ago that the DKL LifeGuard -- DynaKinesio Laboratories or something like that; I may be off on the name -- was advertising a product which was making the same claim, except that their technology worked by picking up the radio signal emanated by a heartbeat.
Never mind that with a radio wave at one or two hertz you'd need an antenna that would reach a fair bit of the distance between the Earth and moon. U.S. officials leaped at the chance to have a "heartbeat sensor". A lot of money was plunked down on the DKL LifeGuard before Sandia National Laboratories proved that it was a complete, total and absolute hoax.
DKL even managed to fool Tom Clancy. When someone on Usenet pointed out to Clancy that the physics of picking up the radio signal of a human heart was "difficult", Clancy responded that he didn't know physics, he was just a writer, but DKL had let him have time with the LifeGuard and damn if it didn't work.
Clancy is now trying very hard to forget that he ever mentioned the DKL LifeGuard in his book Rainbow Six, and he's going to be living it down for decades to come.
Moral of this story: the last time we had these kinds of way-cool widgets, they all turned out to be bogus. Let's all be skeptical for right now, so that we don't get fooled again.
I'm employed as a software engineer at a major international telecommunications firm. In order to keep my job, I'm not going to say which -- but if you live in America, it's decent odds that we're your long-distance carrier.
Around here, software development is an extremely procedural thing; it's almost as if there's an algorithm in place for software development. Unfortunately, this algorithm is buggy as all hell. I'm detailing it here so that (hopefully) others can avoid the same pitfalls.
1. An MBA type has a meeting with a client, at which point the client tells the MBA type what they want. The MBA type makes a judgment as to whether or not it's feasible, and how much it will cost.
2. The MBA types up a Requirements document, which (in theory) outlines only what the client requires from the software package. In practice, every MBA thinks they're qualified to make technical decisions, so at least one or two bits of brain damage pop into the project here.
3. The MBA sits down with representatives from Development (who writes the code) and QA (who verifies the code) and goes over the requirements document. Theoretically, Development or QA can veto the project at that point (if it's impractical to code, or impractical to verify). In reality, the MBA is above them on the food chain, and if the Developer or QA representatives veto it, someone's ego will get hurt and... well, office politics ensues.
4. Development is required to write a Design document which outlines how they're going to write the software project. This is a lot more than an 8x11 sheet scrawled with a few sketches and diagrams; design documents run fifty pages at the minimum. A recent project a friend was working on ran to 400 pages and took up two three-ring binders. Everything must be specified in these Design documents; if it's not in Design, then it doesn't exist.
5. Development meets with QA and the MBA-type to go over the design document. QA can veto the Design document if QA feels that it's designed in a way which would be, well, hazardous. In reality, this never happens. The developers and QA people are generally pretty cool (a lot of them are hackers), but the problem is by this time the deadline is approaching and there isn't time to come up with a new design.
6. While Development is writing the code, QA is writing a Test Plan. The Test Plan is a bridge between the Design and Requirements document; it explains how the Design is going to be tested to verify that it meets Requirements.
7. In theory, the Test Plan is finished a few days before the coding is. THIS IS AN ENORMOUS MISTAKE. There is no good metric to use to plan how long a software project will take. The rule of thumb is 100 lines of code per coder per day, but there's so much variation there that the rule of thumb is about useless. In practice, the Test Plan is usually finished considerably before the coding is -- and the few otherwise occasions, the coding is finished weeks before the Test Plan is.
8. QA sits down with the MBA-type and the Developer representative to go over the Test Plan. Development can veto the Test Plan if they feel that it's not adequately testing the program. This, of course, never happens because by this time the deadline is looming.
9. Development hands off the code to QA. QA gets to spend a week getting the damn code to run. (No, I'm not kidding. More than half the time the code QA gets will not execute.) QA bounces the code back to Development. Development fixes it and bounces it back to QA. Repeat this dance a few times until the deadline is in your face.
10. QA rubberstamps the project. QA never gets to look at the source; QA never gets to check to see that every malloc() is free()d, that every pointer is accounted for. All that matters is (a) deadline gets met and (b) Requirement gets fulfilled. Good code is purely optional.
CAST may not be all it's cracked up to be: if I recall correctly, Schneier said that CAST wasn't much more secure with larger keysizes. Then again, Schneier's Twofish is a competitor for AES; I don't think that would skew his opinions, but it warranted being said.
Zimmerman is not a cryptanalyst or cryptographer, incidentally. He (formerly) wrote applications to implement established cryptography algorithms. He's certainly very knowledgable, but since he doesn't have a background in either creating ciphers or breaking them, I don't think his opinion carries very much weight as to whether or not CAST is secure.
PDF files are trivially easy to generate. If Hasty Pudding's authors submitted their algorithm in straight ASCII when the committee specified PDF as the format, then it's the fault of the Hasty Pudding team. Don't complain about the existence of reasonable rules; don't complain about people enforcing reasonable rules. Complain about the people who don't comply with reasonable rules.
3DES is based on 56-bit keys, but it has the equivalent of between 112 and 114 bits of keysize (depending on who you talk to). A 112-bit key is pretty darn tootin' good.
DES is the world's most thoroughly examined algorithm and has had no successful attacks against it (save for brute force and ignorance). 3DES is still a very good choice for an algorithm, due to (a) the large effective keysize and (b) the incredible scrutiny which it has passed.
Schneier himself has said that if you're really paranoid about security, use 3DES instead of Blowfish, IDEA or anything else.
1. Every time you use the word "geek", I have the sudden urge to throw myself into the middle of traffic. Not everyone is a geek. Hell, most of the cool people in the world aren't geeks. There are people who are exquisitely cool who are complete computer illiterates; what, should we ignore them? "Take a Geek Kid to a Restricted Movie Day". Good grief.
2. You're actually advocating theft of intellectual property just because you feel like being petulant? You're the journalist, so you should be able to answer this question: who does it hurt? Does it hurt the theaters, or does it hurt the studios who make the movies, and who have nothing to do whatsoever with the policies of theaters?
If you make it unprofitable for networks to show Buffy (because everyone's downloading bootlegged videos off the Net), then the networks will simply stop buying Buffy altogether... in which case, there'll be nothing left for "geek kids" to download.
If you make it unprofitable for networks to show South Park -- same reasoning -- then the theaters will just stop showing South Park and use that screen to show the latest chintzy Nicolas Cage action film. The theaters won't get hurt; the creators of South Park will get hurt. Very ethical and highminded of you, you know, hurting people who haven't done anything wrong.
3. You are taking this waaaaaaaaaaay too seriously. There are a great many social and societal ills out there, and you're encouraging us to petition movie theaters about their enforcement of the R rating?
Isn't it the MPAA which assigns R ratings? Why aren't you encouraging people to petition the MPAA to get with the times, instead of encouraging people to harass pimply-faced sixteen year olds working at the theater who are just trying to make an honest buck?
If you must spend your efforts and energies in a futile "Damn The Man!" protest against the movie Powers That Be, then for God's sake, become a Big Brother to some disadvantaged kid. You can take your Little Brother to all the R-rated films that you want, and you might actually make a difference in his life instead of only making a difference in your vague ideology of First Amendment freedoms.
4. Take a Constitutional Law course, for crying out loud. THIS IS NOT A FIRST AMENDMENT ISSUE. Don't make it out to be some horrid infringement of your civil liberties when you don't even know what your civil liberties are, and are not.
SHA was created by the NSA. SHA-1 wasn't. The original SHA had a potentially exploitable problem which was found pretty quickly once SHA's algorithm was opened up to the civilian cryptographic community. The fix, SHA-1, is the most heavily scrutinized and peer-reviewed algorithm out there. If there's a back door in SHA-1 which permits "eccentric" behavior like what you're proposing, then the back door is in public view and it's only a matter of time until it's discovered and the NSA is embarassed.
Besides that open-source argument, there's also a pragmatic one: the NSA has no interest in forging hashes. The CIA would, but the NSA is a signals intelligence operation. It's actually in the NSA's best interests, from a signals-intelligence perspective, for secure hash algorithms to exist.
Remember: the NSA is not necessarily the enemy. Every now and again the NSA's goals coincide nicely with our goals, and when that happens, you'll find them to be some of the best friends a cryptofreak can have.
Remember how I've been going on about 3DES, how it's been examined for two decades without any successful attacks against it? It's based on DES, which is widely considered to be just about the Holy Grail of algorithm design[1]. Who designed DES (and by extension, 3DES)? IBM, with a lot of assistance from the NSA's cryptographers.
[1] DES's design is elegant, secure, and in many ways a thing of beauty. It can be cracked, but only by brute force. Good design != unbreakable.
Anyone know anything about PGP and how it is regulated? I just might have to start using it since i Dont feel like having Big Sam reading my emails.
Zeroth -- I am not a lawyer.
First -- do you really care if it's regulated or not? It's your privacy; if your local jurisdiction has laws against possessing strong encryption (nowhere in the U.S. does, but other nations may not be so fortunate) then you have to decide which is more important: abiding the law, or protecting your civil liberty.
Second -- PGP is still, last I checked, export-controlled software. That means that PGP cannot be exported in binary form outside the United States or Canada. Source code is much different and, if recent Federal court decisions are upheld, legal to export. Hardcopy of source code is covered under the First Amendment and legal to export.
Third -- if you live in the U.S., check out http://www.nai.com to download the latest version of PGP, free (as in free beer) for noncommercial use. If you live outside the U.S., first, check your local laws to see if PGP is permitted. If it's permitted, then download it from http://www.pgpi.org. If it's not, then make your decision on whether or not to use PGP; it's still downloadable from the same site.
The one-time pad, when implemented properly, is provably perfectly secure. Not even the space aliens from planet Zarbnulax with their advanced technology can attack it.
Properly implemented cryptography will not stop a dedicated attacker, true. It will make the attacker choose to get the information in some other way than attacking the crypto, though.
If you want a secure symmetric cipher, use 3DES. Nobody's even come close to making any kind of a real dent in it; odds are the spooks can't, either.
First, being "adamantly opposed to abortion" doesn't make anyone an enemy of civil liberties. We are a nation of civilized people (or, at least, we claim to be), and civilized people can disagree on controversial topics.
Years ago, we had a Supreme Court Justice who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. This Justice (can't remember his name, unfortunately) turned out to be a rabid and zealous defender of First Amendment freedoms, one of the loudest voices in defense of the First Amendment that the Court has ever possessed. Being on the wrong side of the prevailing political climate has nothing to do, whatsoever, with whether someone is a suitable defender of the liberties of the people.
I know Scalia and Thomas (met them briefly a couple of years ago), and have listened to Scalia's opinions both from the bench and from when he's addressed college students. I think both of them would disagree (emphatically, in Thomas' case) that they are "anti-sexual privacy". I think both of them would like nothing more than for Congress to pass laws elaborating on the privacy rights of the American people. It's accepted without question that these privacy rights exist, but Congress has done painfully little to give the courts guidance in these matters.
Unfortunately, the current law of the land -- the Fourth Amendment -- says nothing, absolutely nothing about sexual privacy; only that people have the right to privacy in their persons, papers and effects. Moreover, the Fourth Amendment only applies to the government -- the Federal Government in particular. (The Fourteenth Amendment forces state governments to adhere to the Fourth Amendment as well.)
Scalia and Thomas are very conservative, strictly constructionist justices. They read the law and apply the law, only the law, nothing but the law, while reading as little into it as possible.
The materials of life are very special. There is a world of difference between living and mere existence; if you have difficulty understanding this, go walk through a hospital ward sometime. Look at the people who are in persistent vegetative states; that's what it means to "exist". Then look at a skydiver who's dropping like a falling bird, laughing the entire way before deploying his parasail; that's what it means to "live".
Can modern science bring a human being into existence? Well... maybe. Probably, even. Can modern science bring a human being into life? No. Absolutely not.
If it could, then there would be a hell of a lot more happy, well-adjusted people out there. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis are devoted to giving people their life back, and they've had a very dodgy history.
So are the "religious kooks" who think the "materials of life are 'special'" wrong? No, I don't think so. In fact, I have much more respect for them than I do for advocates of the cold "science" of psychiatry/psychanalysis.
At least those with religious inclinations acknowledge that they have no proof and take it on faith.
The National Security Agency is part of the Department of Defense; they're really more of a military intelligence and signals intelligence operation than they are Cryptographers 'R' Us. The NSA is (nominally) under the authority of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), but in reality they're pretty much left to their own devices.
The Central Intelligence Agency is its own authority and is staffed exclusively by/civilians/, not military personnel (although some paramilitary units probably do exist on the CIA payroll). They're a much more comprehensive intelligence-gathering unit than the NSA is; they do just about anything and everything intelligence-related, from spy satellites to human intelligence to signals intelligence. Virtually everything the NSA does, the CIA also does (although perhaps on a smaller scale).
I work for one of the Big Three telcos (AT&T, MCI-WorldCom, or Sprint -- won't say which, for reasons which I hope are obvious). I'm currently doing QA work on mainframes, analyzing and approving software written in COBOL and JCL designed to run under TSO.
Nevermind the fact that my background is in UNIX, C/C++, Java, networking and security. This is where the corporation "needs me", so here is where I am.
On the next floor there are eight openings for C developers in an AIX environment. I applied for a transfer, only to have the project lead up there tell me that although he had openings, he had no budget with which to pay me. There goes that opportunity to escape from the hell of IBM Big Iron.
When I first started here, the work week was 37.5 hours. The policy was that "we work hard all week, so everyone gets Friday afternoon off." On top of that, there was a liberal flextime policy. I accepted a $38,000/yr job here over some mid-$40K jobs elsewhere due to the great corporate policies and benefits.
After six months, policies changed.
It's now become a 48-hour-a-week-minimum shop. We've been told that, due to the upcoming Y2K bug, that no vacations will be approved for the rest of the year. (And what if, like me, you were planning on using your vacation for your honeymoon? Forget it. You get married, you show up at work the next day or else your job won't be here when you get back. And if you don't use up your vacation by the end of the year? Sorry -- no carryover.)
There's increasing pressure on us to put in more and more hours. 60-hour weeks are now standard in my division. We've been told that come the end of June it'll revert back to a 40-hour week; we don't know whether or not it's true. I imagine it's not.
We're losing people due to the awful work conditions. A friend who's a couple of cubes over has accepted employment elsewhere. He's trying to convince me to jump ship, too. I'm giving it a lot of thought.
After all, layoffs are on the horizon, too.
60-hour weeks, no vacations, reduced benefits, and the threat of impending layoffs just do wonders for employee morale.
Slashdot Mirror
In sci.crypt a while ago he said that although IDEA was still a good algorithm, he wasn't anywhere near as enamored of it as he was a few years ago.
There are a great many cryptographic libraries available, but many of them suffer from poor documentation, cluttered APIs, bad interfaces, or unwise addition of platform-specific code (Counterpane, Inc., isn't immune, either -- your Yarrow code is strictly MSVC++ and hence, Win32 only).
Would the cause of secure algorithms be furthered by the construction of a cross-platform crypto toolkit, open sourced, peer reviewed, clean and well-documented, which could be reused across different platforms and projects? Or would this create hindrances, since each project may need ever-so-slightly different features from its cryptographic infrastructure?
(And if anyone's got a clean, standalone El Gamal library, *please* EMail me at the above address. The El Gamal code in GPG is just plain frightening.)
(Permission is granted to JANE'S and/or others, as designated by JANE'S, to reprint this posting, in whole or in part, provided that any editing is made clear in the final printed result and that Robert J. Hansen, rjhansen@inav.net, is attributed as the original author. If anyone wishes to contact me regarding information warfare issues, please feel free to use the abovementioned EMail address. My public key is available at the usual keyservers, and also here on Slashdot.)
Q: What's the accepted terminology -- "cyberterrorism"?
A: Most hackers avoid anything "cyber" like the plague; I prefer "information security" for what I do, which is defending systems from information warfare. Besides, "chemical, biological, radiological and information warfare" sounds better than using "cyberterrorism".
Q: Using CT/Information Warfare, how easy or otherwise is it to bring down or attack vital systems?
A: It depends a great deal. A lot of it depends on whether an attacker wishes to target a specific vital system/subsystem, or whether an attacker is going after targets of opportunity. Many vital targets are inappropriate for information warfare. For instance, although an IW attack against a sewer-treatment system could devastate entire cities with plague and disease, very few sewer-treatment systems have their vital components hardwired into the Net. Unfortunately, a great many systems are both appropriate and not in any substantial way secured against IW. The telephone network, for instance, is a prime example of a system which substantially under-secured.
Q: What sort of skills would be needed to do so, and are they common/teachable?
A: Bruce Schneier (schneier@counterpane.com, public-key available from the usual servers) once said that "only the first person has to be smart, everyone else can just use software". The skills needed to invent and/or discover new attacks against networks are substatial, somewhat rare, and are very demanding to learn. However, once the attack has been invented/discovered, software can be written to vastly simplify the task of executing this attack. It took Cult of the Dead Cow months of hard work to develop Back Orifice and Back Orifice 2000, but after they developed this software it was available to the community at large. CDC are ethical hackers who released Back Orifice as a way to embarass Microsoft into patching their awful security model, but there are thousands of wanna-bes who are now attempting to use Back Orifice for unethical and criminal ends.
Q: Commercial-off-the-shelf software: can it really do CT?
A: It's not sold at Fry's or Best Buy, so it's not exactly "commercial, off-the-shelf software". There is a significant software black market, though, and software to conduct IW can easily be found on this market. There's no real guarantee of software quality, though; for every skilled engineer who designs a tool, there are a dozen half-trained monkeys who think they can do the same thing. That's true in both the commercial and underground software markets.
Q: Which systems are actually attackable?
A: If it's got a connection to the Net, it's attackable. Some systems are just more attackable than others.
Q: Can a recovery be made from such attacks?
A: Sure. Hiroshima is a booming, bustling city today. If Hiroshoma can recover from the savage insult of The Bomb, then I'd have a hard time believing that a community, state or nation couldn't recover from an IW attack.
Q: Can a recovery be made quickly from such attacks?
A: In theory, absolutely. But you need to prepare for post-incident recovery before you're actually attacked. Most places don't have any kind of post-incident procedure in place, and those that do frequently forget all about their post-incident procedures.
Q: Is it likely to improve/get worse?
A: I think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. People tend to view computers as magic boxes; you plug them in and they go. Very few people really want to think about how many individual components go into a computer, and how much more complex a computer network is than a single computer. You wouldn't dream of driving your car 10,000 miles without changing the oil; we've been taught that this is a Bad Thing. Many people lack the technological savvy to realize when they're doing the technological equivalent of driving 10,000 miles without an oil change.
Q: What sort of preventative work would you recommend them to carry out?
A: There are some very good computer security firms out there. Hire these outside, independent contractors to perform audits of your security. When they talk, listen -- don't fall into the trap of "we didn't come up with it, therefore, it's inferior". Secondly, only use open, peer-reviewed protocols, algorithms and operating systems. Many people think that if a system is open it's insecure, since an attacker can see how it's put together and determine how to best attack it. This logic is faulty. Open systems are designed to be secure even if the attacker has perfect knowledge of the system; closed systems are designed to be secure only if the attacker has minimal knowledge of the system. And any attacker worth his salt is going to have intimate knowledge of the system he's attacking, which means that closed systems operate at a distinct disadvantage.
Q: Any last words?
A: Yes. Please, please, please do the hacker community a favor. Please learn the distinction between "hacker" and "cracker", and bring up this distinction in your publication. Jane's is an esteemed, respected publication, and I would be delighted to see some well-known source explain to its readers that, contrary to media usage, hackers are usually ethical individuals with a high degree of technological savvy; crackers -- criminal hackers -- are fiends and malcontents who deserve nothing but condemnation and scorn from society.
... For some reason, I'm skeptical of the claims made by all the different companies in the article. It wasn't too long ago that the DKL LifeGuard -- DynaKinesio Laboratories or something like that; I may be off on the name -- was advertising a product which was making the same claim, except that their technology worked by picking up the radio signal emanated by a heartbeat.
Never mind that with a radio wave at one or two hertz you'd need an antenna that would reach a fair bit of the distance between the Earth and moon. U.S. officials leaped at the chance to have a "heartbeat sensor". A lot of money was plunked down on the DKL LifeGuard before Sandia National Laboratories proved that it was a complete, total and absolute hoax.
DKL even managed to fool Tom Clancy. When someone on Usenet pointed out to Clancy that the physics of picking up the radio signal of a human heart was "difficult", Clancy responded that he didn't know physics, he was just a writer, but DKL had let him have time with the LifeGuard and damn if it didn't work.
Clancy is now trying very hard to forget that he ever mentioned the DKL LifeGuard in his book Rainbow Six, and he's going to be living it down for decades to come.
Moral of this story: the last time we had these kinds of way-cool widgets, they all turned out to be bogus. Let's all be skeptical for right now, so that we don't get fooled again.
I'm employed as a software engineer at a major international telecommunications firm. In order to keep my job, I'm not going to say which -- but if you live in America, it's decent odds that we're your long-distance carrier.
... well, office politics ensues.
Around here, software development is an extremely procedural thing; it's almost as if there's an algorithm in place for software development. Unfortunately, this algorithm is buggy as all hell. I'm detailing it here so that (hopefully) others can avoid the same pitfalls.
1. An MBA type has a meeting with a client, at which point the client tells the MBA type what they want. The MBA type makes a judgment as to whether or not it's feasible, and how much it will cost.
2. The MBA types up a Requirements document, which (in theory) outlines only what the client requires from the software package. In practice, every MBA thinks they're qualified to make technical decisions, so at least one or two bits of brain damage pop into the project here.
3. The MBA sits down with representatives from Development (who writes the code) and QA (who verifies the code) and goes over the requirements document. Theoretically, Development or QA can veto the project at that point (if it's impractical to code, or impractical to verify). In reality, the MBA is above them on the food chain, and if the Developer or QA representatives veto it, someone's ego will get hurt and
4. Development is required to write a Design document which outlines how they're going to write the software project. This is a lot more than an 8x11 sheet scrawled with a few sketches and diagrams; design documents run fifty pages at the minimum. A recent project a friend was working on ran to 400 pages and took up two three-ring binders. Everything must be specified in these Design documents; if it's not in Design, then it doesn't exist.
5. Development meets with QA and the MBA-type to go over the design document. QA can veto the Design document if QA feels that it's designed in a way which would be, well, hazardous. In reality, this never happens. The developers and QA people are generally pretty cool (a lot of them are hackers), but the problem is by this time the deadline is approaching and there isn't time to come up with a new design.
6. While Development is writing the code, QA is writing a Test Plan. The Test Plan is a bridge between the Design and Requirements document; it explains how the Design is going to be tested to verify that it meets Requirements.
7. In theory, the Test Plan is finished a few days before the coding is. THIS IS AN ENORMOUS MISTAKE. There is no good metric to use to plan how long a software project will take. The rule of thumb is 100 lines of code per coder per day, but there's so much variation there that the rule of thumb is about useless. In practice, the Test Plan is usually finished considerably before the coding is -- and the few otherwise occasions, the coding is finished weeks before the Test Plan is.
8. QA sits down with the MBA-type and the Developer representative to go over the Test Plan. Development can veto the Test Plan if they feel that it's not adequately testing the program. This, of course, never happens because by this time the deadline is looming.
9. Development hands off the code to QA. QA gets to spend a week getting the damn code to run. (No, I'm not kidding. More than half the time the code QA gets will not execute.) QA bounces the code back to Development. Development fixes it and bounces it back to QA. Repeat this dance a few times until the deadline is in your face.
10. QA rubberstamps the project. QA never gets to look at the source; QA never gets to check to see that every malloc() is free()d, that every pointer is accounted for. All that matters is (a) deadline gets met and (b) Requirement gets fulfilled. Good code is purely optional.
11. The code gets shipped out the door.
CAST may not be all it's cracked up to be: if I recall correctly, Schneier said that CAST wasn't much more secure with larger keysizes. Then again, Schneier's Twofish is a competitor for AES; I don't think that would skew his opinions, but it warranted being said.
Zimmerman is not a cryptanalyst or cryptographer, incidentally. He (formerly) wrote applications to implement established cryptography algorithms. He's certainly very knowledgable, but since he doesn't have a background in either creating ciphers or breaking them, I don't think his opinion carries very much weight as to whether or not CAST is secure.
PDF files are trivially easy to generate. If Hasty Pudding's authors submitted their algorithm in straight ASCII when the committee specified PDF as the format, then it's the fault of the Hasty Pudding team. Don't complain about the existence of reasonable rules; don't complain about people enforcing reasonable rules. Complain about the people who don't comply with reasonable rules.
3DES is based on 56-bit keys, but it has the equivalent of between 112 and 114 bits of keysize (depending on who you talk to). A 112-bit key is pretty darn tootin' good.
DES is the world's most thoroughly examined algorithm and has had no successful attacks against it (save for brute force and ignorance). 3DES is still a very good choice for an algorithm, due to (a) the large effective keysize and (b) the incredible scrutiny which it has passed.
Schneier himself has said that if you're really paranoid about security, use 3DES instead of Blowfish, IDEA or anything else.
1. Every time you use the word "geek", I have the sudden urge to throw myself into the middle of traffic. Not everyone is a geek. Hell, most of the cool people in the world aren't geeks. There are people who are exquisitely cool who are complete computer illiterates; what, should we ignore them? "Take a Geek Kid to a Restricted Movie Day". Good grief.
2. You're actually advocating theft of intellectual property just because you feel like being petulant? You're the journalist, so you should be able to answer this question: who does it hurt? Does it hurt the theaters, or does it hurt the studios who make the movies, and who have nothing to do whatsoever with the policies of theaters?
If you make it unprofitable for networks to show Buffy (because everyone's downloading bootlegged videos off the Net), then the networks will simply stop buying Buffy altogether... in which case, there'll be nothing left for "geek kids" to download.
If you make it unprofitable for networks to show South Park -- same reasoning -- then the theaters will just stop showing South Park and use that screen to show the latest chintzy Nicolas Cage action film. The theaters won't get hurt; the creators of South Park will get hurt. Very ethical and highminded of you, you know, hurting people who haven't done anything wrong.
3. You are taking this waaaaaaaaaaay too seriously. There are a great many social and societal ills out there, and you're encouraging us to petition movie theaters about their enforcement of the R rating?
Isn't it the MPAA which assigns R ratings? Why aren't you encouraging people to petition the MPAA to get with the times, instead of encouraging people to harass pimply-faced sixteen year olds working at the theater who are just trying to make an honest buck?
If you must spend your efforts and energies in a futile "Damn The Man!" protest against the movie Powers That Be, then for God's sake, become a Big Brother to some disadvantaged kid. You can take your Little Brother to all the R-rated films that you want, and you might actually make a difference in his life instead of only making a difference in your vague ideology of First Amendment freedoms.
4. Take a Constitutional Law course, for crying out loud. THIS IS NOT A FIRST AMENDMENT ISSUE. Don't make it out to be some horrid infringement of your civil liberties when you don't even know what your civil liberties are, and are not.
SHA was created by the NSA. SHA-1 wasn't. The original SHA had a potentially exploitable problem which was found pretty quickly once SHA's algorithm was opened up to the civilian cryptographic community. The fix, SHA-1, is the most heavily scrutinized and peer-reviewed algorithm out there. If there's a back door in SHA-1 which permits "eccentric" behavior like what you're proposing, then the back door is in public view and it's only a matter of time until it's discovered and the NSA is embarassed.
Besides that open-source argument, there's also a pragmatic one: the NSA has no interest in forging hashes. The CIA would, but the NSA is a signals intelligence operation. It's actually in the NSA's best interests, from a signals-intelligence perspective, for secure hash algorithms to exist.
Remember: the NSA is not necessarily the enemy. Every now and again the NSA's goals coincide nicely with our goals, and when that happens, you'll find them to be some of the best friends a cryptofreak can have.
Remember how I've been going on about 3DES, how it's been examined for two decades without any successful attacks against it? It's based on DES, which is widely considered to be just about the Holy Grail of algorithm design[1]. Who designed DES (and by extension, 3DES)? IBM, with a lot of assistance from the NSA's cryptographers.
[1] DES's design is elegant, secure, and in many ways a thing of beauty. It can be cracked, but only by brute force. Good design != unbreakable.
Anyone know anything about PGP and how it is regulated? I just might have to start using it since i Dont feel like having Big Sam reading my emails.
Zeroth -- I am not a lawyer.
First -- do you really care if it's regulated or not? It's your privacy; if your local jurisdiction has laws against possessing strong encryption (nowhere in the U.S. does, but other nations may not be so fortunate) then you have to decide which is more important: abiding the law, or protecting your civil liberty.
Second -- PGP is still, last I checked, export-controlled software. That means that PGP cannot be exported in binary form outside the United States or Canada. Source code is much different and, if recent Federal court decisions are upheld, legal to export. Hardcopy of source code is covered under the First Amendment and legal to export.
Third -- if you live in the U.S., check out http://www.nai.com to download the latest version of PGP, free (as in free beer) for noncommercial use. If you live outside the U.S., first, check your local laws to see if PGP is permitted. If it's permitted, then download it from http://www.pgpi.org. If it's not, then make your decision on whether or not to use PGP; it's still downloadable from the same site.
The one-time pad, when implemented properly, is provably perfectly secure. Not even the space aliens from planet Zarbnulax with their advanced technology can attack it.
Properly implemented cryptography will not stop a dedicated attacker, true. It will make the attacker choose to get the information in some other way than attacking the crypto, though.
If you want a secure symmetric cipher, use 3DES. Nobody's even come close to making any kind of a real dent in it; odds are the spooks can't, either.
First, being "adamantly opposed to abortion" doesn't make anyone an enemy of civil liberties. We are a nation of civilized people (or, at least, we claim to be), and civilized people can disagree on controversial topics.
Years ago, we had a Supreme Court Justice who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. This Justice (can't remember his name, unfortunately) turned out to be a rabid and zealous defender of First Amendment freedoms, one of the loudest voices in defense of the First Amendment that the Court has ever possessed. Being on the wrong side of the prevailing political climate has nothing to do, whatsoever, with whether someone is a suitable defender of the liberties of the people.
I know Scalia and Thomas (met them briefly a couple of years ago), and have listened to Scalia's opinions both from the bench and from when he's addressed college students. I think both of them would disagree (emphatically, in Thomas' case) that they are "anti-sexual privacy". I think both of them would like nothing more than for Congress to pass laws elaborating on the privacy rights of the American people. It's accepted without question that these privacy rights exist, but Congress has done painfully little to give the courts guidance in these matters.
Unfortunately, the current law of the land -- the Fourth Amendment -- says nothing, absolutely nothing about sexual privacy; only that people have the right to privacy in their persons, papers and effects. Moreover, the Fourth Amendment only applies to the government -- the Federal Government in particular. (The Fourteenth Amendment forces state governments to adhere to the Fourth Amendment as well.)
Scalia and Thomas are very conservative, strictly constructionist justices. They read the law and apply the law, only the law, nothing but the law, while reading as little into it as possible.
The materials of life are very special. There is a world of difference between living and mere existence; if you have difficulty understanding this, go walk through a hospital ward sometime. Look at the people who are in persistent vegetative states; that's what it means to "exist". Then look at a skydiver who's dropping like a falling bird, laughing the entire way before deploying his parasail; that's what it means to "live".
Can modern science bring a human being into existence? Well... maybe. Probably, even. Can modern science bring a human being into life? No. Absolutely not.
If it could, then there would be a hell of a lot more happy, well-adjusted people out there. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis are devoted to giving people their life back, and they've had a very dodgy history.
So are the "religious kooks" who think the "materials of life are 'special'" wrong? No, I don't think so. In fact, I have much more respect for them than I do for advocates of the cold "science" of psychiatry/psychanalysis.
At least those with religious inclinations acknowledge that they have no proof and take it on faith.
The National Security Agency is part of the Department of Defense; they're really more of a military intelligence and signals intelligence operation than they are Cryptographers 'R' Us. The NSA is (nominally) under the authority of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), but in reality they're pretty much left to their own devices.
/civilians/, not military personnel (although some paramilitary units probably do exist on the CIA payroll). They're a much more comprehensive intelligence-gathering unit than the NSA is; they do just about anything and everything intelligence-related, from spy satellites to human intelligence to signals intelligence. Virtually everything the NSA does, the CIA also does (although perhaps on a smaller scale).
The Central Intelligence Agency is its own authority and is staffed exclusively by
Does this make it clear as mud yet?
I work for one of the Big Three telcos (AT&T, MCI-WorldCom, or Sprint -- won't say which, for reasons which I hope are obvious). I'm currently doing QA work on mainframes, analyzing and approving software written in COBOL and JCL designed to run under TSO.
Nevermind the fact that my background is in UNIX, C/C++, Java, networking and security. This is where the corporation "needs me", so here is where I am.
On the next floor there are eight openings for C developers in an AIX environment. I applied for a transfer, only to have the project lead up there tell me that although he had openings, he had no budget with which to pay me. There goes that opportunity to escape from the hell of IBM Big Iron.
When I first started here, the work week was 37.5 hours. The policy was that "we work hard all week, so everyone gets Friday afternoon off." On top of that, there was a liberal flextime policy. I accepted a $38,000/yr job here over some mid-$40K jobs elsewhere due to the great corporate policies and benefits.
After six months, policies changed.
It's now become a 48-hour-a-week-minimum shop. We've been told that, due to the upcoming Y2K bug, that no vacations will be approved for the rest of the year. (And what if, like me, you were planning on using your vacation for your honeymoon? Forget it. You get married, you show up at work the next day or else your job won't be here when you get back. And if you don't use up your vacation by the end of the year? Sorry -- no carryover.)
There's increasing pressure on us to put in more and more hours. 60-hour weeks are now standard in my division. We've been told that come the end of June it'll revert back to a 40-hour week; we don't know whether or not it's true. I imagine it's not.
We're losing people due to the awful work conditions. A friend who's a couple of cubes over has accepted employment elsewhere. He's trying to convince me to jump ship, too. I'm giving it a lot of thought.
After all, layoffs are on the horizon, too.
60-hour weeks, no vacations, reduced benefits, and the threat of impending layoffs just do wonders for employee morale.