NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT 5.0-CURRENT IS SLOW: FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT has many debugging features turned on, in both the kernel and userland. These features attempt to detect incorrect use of system primitives, and encourage loud failure through extra sanity checking and fail stop semantics. They also substantially impact system performance. If you want to do performance measurement, benchmarking, and optimization, you'll want to turn them off. This includes various WITNESS- related kernel options, INVARIANTS, malloc debugging flags in userland, and various verbose features in the kernel. Many developers choose to disable these features on build machines to maximize performance.
OpenBSD has not had any crypto support like this ever, and as far as I know, no other Open Source OS does either.
I will admit that OpenBSD has had some crypto support, but it suffers from a lot of shortcomings, in particular in the usability area. (try to change your password for instance).
I don't know why you think I won't let people change phkmalloc, it's under beer-ware license, so go right ahead. In fact I'm working with an OpenBSD'er right now to get some of their stuff back into the FreeBSD version.
I also have no idea how you could get the idea I wrote devd, and I suggest you send any comments you have about it to the author.
Considering your level of clue here, I will happily admit that I am arrogant enough to be glad you're now not using FreeBSD.
The setup I describe is how a "plausible denial" scheme could be set up. The bit about making a windows boot run over the GBDE data is just normal paranoia, it is not in any way related to or material to the plausible denial argument.
I don't personally give much for "Plausible denial", finding a cover story for even a few megabytes of uncompressible bits will be very
hard if not impossible with a skilled adversary.
Therefore I focused in GBDE on giving the user
leverage to a defensible non-disclosure stance.
For instance by wiping out the master sectors if given enough seconds of warning.
And in particular I wanted to make sure the user were never put in an indefensible position of compliance like for instance StegFS can do.
For me it is important that people realize that GBDE is not a solution, it is a tool to implement solutions. With crypto there is no "one size fits all", only hard work and careful planning.
Lets see: NIH, OpenBSD, compatibility and all that.
The paper explains this at length (but I guess that the respondent
didn't actually read the paper).
The primary focus in GBDE was usability and deployability.
Most of the prior art in this space cannot even change the pass-phrase
without reencrypting the entire disk (which can easily take an entire day).
I wanted to do better than that, and I think I did. By a wide margin.
RSA vs. SHA.
Correct, that is a typo, it is SHA2 which is used.
AES, zero IV etc.
An important part of GBDE is that there is no two-way leverage on any crypto
component. This is realized by the use of single-use random bit sector keys.
With no two-way leverage and single-use keys, the IV is no longer important.
The comment about the "plausible denial" setup being useless because an
intelligent adversary would always take a mirror copy first: That
does not affect the plausible denial aspect.
I'll be more than happy to discuss any aspect of GBDE, and would very much like to hear peoples experience and ideas.
But I would prefer email (if need be by setting up a mailing list)
The MD5 based password scrambler I wrote for FreeBSD in 1994 uses a 64 bit salt, and has subsequently been adopted by NetBSD, OpenBSD, Cisco GLIBC and pressumbably MAC OSX.
There is no immediate future for a table driven attack on this algorithm (Which can be recognized by the '$1$...' prefix.
HP-UX, Solaris and AIX, however still use the old 12 bit salted DES derived passwords.
Nobody but old fashioned "enterprise" UNIXes like HPUX, AIX, Solaris use 12 bit salt.
FreeBSD started using 64 bit salt and MD5 scrambled passwords back in 1994 (when I wrote the code) and since then NetBSD, OpenBSD, Cisco, GLIBC and presumably MAC OSX have adopted that code.
Look for the tell-tale "$1$..." magic marker.
(The fact that GLIBC doesn't correctly attribute the algorithm is somewhat sad, but they refused to do so, even when asked directly).
All I can say is that there were a lot of similar reasons why the FreeBSD project went from a self-elected core team to a core team elected by the committers.
Reading Wexelblats email where he basically tells people that this is none of their business, is like hearing an echo of the argumentation launched against new bylaws in the FreeBSD project.
If David is not actively contributing to XFree86, he has no business telling anyone how to run the project.
I think the active developers of XFree86, both committer and non-committers, should grab a copy of the FreeBSD bylaws and elect a new core team.
The FreeBSD bylaws are far from perfect, but it would be enough to get started and once the dust has settled, a revision to more closely match the needs of the new project can be made.
A fair number of the journalists and reviewers have been rather underwhelming in their thrill about the Z100.
A common conclusion have been something like "Yeah, it looks like windows a bit, yeah, it can do some nice things but it is not really an good as pda, it takes 40 seconds to start and it is not a very nice telephone either."
A few reviews have contained rather nasty hints that it was *painfully* obvious that Microsoft was involved (original emphasis).
Faced with that, I'd probably cancel the product too, jump ship and be happy I didn't end up with an inventory of 100000 phones I couldn't sell.
I don't know where the 50% figure comes from, but it is certainly not official Danish policy.
We're currently producing 10-15% of all electricity in Denmark with wind-energy and nobody wants that number to increase currently due to the problems we are facing.
The main problem is that we actually get so much wind-generated electricity during a storm that we cannot get rid of it, this unbalances the power-grid and results in voltage and frequency instabilities.
The secondary problem is that you also need electricity when the wind does not blow.
This could mean keeping large centralized power-plants around, paying a lot of maintenance costs, waiting for the wind to die.
Various suggestions abound, and the Engineers weekly newspaper here in Denmark has been the home of a fierce debate for the last couple of months about the merits of these and wind-generation in general.
The fact that all sorts of micro-plants and co-generation is popping up like mushrooms is in fact a very interesting problem for the electrical grids: How do you balance supply and demand, when you have almost as many suppliers as consumers ?
Actually Denmark is doing pretty well wrt to broadband penetration, despite the former monopolys determined efforts to stiffle competition.
256/128 is about $45/month, 2048/512 is $110/month, and around 90% of exchanges in the country are provisioned for xDSL by the monopoly (TDC.dk) and a competitor (Cybercity.dk).
The total number of xDSL lines installed is not precisely known (the bastards wont tell:-) but we are probably close to 100k lines in a 5m population.
Ohh, and you didn't get your Shakespeare quote right either:-)
17USC 105. Subject matter of copyright: United States Government works
Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.
The most intriguing finding so far is a dramatic, century-long lull in the 1700s.
This is actually a very interesting detail, the 1700s amongst other things had
"the small ice-age" where temperatures in europe were significantly lower than normal.
Considered together with the traditional wisdom of "hot tempers" in southern climates, (the middle east being the poster boy), this points to the obvious solution to world peace: Move everybody to Mars where the temperature is lower than on this war-ridden planet.
Appearantly, the meeting was set up by Heisenberg in an effort to make it clear to the germans in Denmark that Niels Bohr was important and should not be touched, arrested or harrassed.
There was an official event at a german "cultural" institute which Bohr as he says "of course could not attend" followed by this private meeting at the Niels Bohr institute.
Also do not forget that there were another person in the meeting, and while his "memory" is as suspect as Heisenbergs, his recollection is the same.
Niels Bohr provably had possesed the data to indicate that a bomb would be possible for at least one year at the time, but was not in any way in contact with the allied program until he escaped from Denmark via Sweden shortly after and partly because of the meeting with Heisenberg.
It is also important to remember that Hitler did not appreciate science, engineering yes, but not science. It is unconceiveable that he would have dedicated the necessary funds to create a german bomb, without some pretty hard evience and demonstrations.
The claim that the nazi program was mostly for power-generation therefore sounds very credible.
Heisenberg were fully aware of these things, in particular that even if physically possible, the bomb would be politcally out of reach.
Therefore one cannot easily dismiss the claim that Heisenberg, convinced by nazi propaganda that the nazis would win, was merely tried to protect his old friend Bohr by getting him onto the victors bandwagon.
In other words: Heisenberg probably tried to say something between the lines and Bohr missed it, and Bohr being better informed about the real standing of the war was unlikely to be swayed anyway. (Bohr could listen to BBC, Heisenberg could not for instance).
I think the fact that no evidence has been found which indicates that Heisenberg actually did anything more than think about the bomb should be credited him, as for being convinced by the nazi propaganda, he was already punished more than fair is for that.
We have actually used a signature of "a lot of spaces and 5-7 random characters, possibly in []" at the end of Subject as a very successful spamfilter for over a year.
Will the real Andre Hedrick please come forward and tell us that this is a fake, please ?
I can't for the life of me imagine that the Linux community would rely on something as crucial as ATA drivers being written by somebody with such a childish attitude.
Just in case this is a genuine message:
1. FreeBSD has a well established procedure for handling GPL code: we put it in a separate directory subtree where people can easily find it (src/sys/gnu for instance): Just because something is GPL doesn't mean it cannot be part of FreeBSD.
2. I hope for Linux' sake that Linux get a more mature ATA developer RSN.
Slashdot Mirror
From /usr/src/UPDATING:
NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT 5.0-CURRENT IS SLOW:
FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT has many debugging features turned on, in
both the kernel and userland. These features attempt to detect
incorrect use of system primitives, and encourage loud failure
through extra sanity checking and fail stop semantics. They
also substantially impact system performance. If you want to
do performance measurement, benchmarking, and optimization,
you'll want to turn them off. This includes various WITNESS-
related kernel options, INVARIANTS, malloc debugging flags
in userland, and various verbose features in the kernel. Many
developers choose to disable these features on build machines
to maximize performance.
Hi Alan, do I know you ?
OpenBSD has not had any crypto support like this ever, and as far as I know, no other Open Source OS does either.
I will admit that OpenBSD has had some crypto support, but it suffers from a lot of shortcomings, in particular in the usability area. (try to change your password for instance).
I don't know why you think I won't let people change phkmalloc, it's under beer-ware license, so go right ahead. In fact I'm working with an OpenBSD'er right now to get some of their stuff back into the FreeBSD version.
I also have no idea how you could get the idea I wrote devd, and I suggest you send any comments you have about it to the author.
Considering your level of clue here, I will happily admit that I am arrogant enough to be glad you're now not using FreeBSD.
The setup I describe is how a "plausible denial" scheme could be set up. The bit about making a windows boot run over the GBDE data is just normal paranoia, it is not in any way related to or material to the plausible denial argument.
I don't personally give much for "Plausible denial", finding a cover story for even a few megabytes of uncompressible bits will be very hard if not impossible with a skilled adversary.
Therefore I focused in GBDE on giving the user leverage to a defensible non-disclosure stance. For instance by wiping out the master sectors if given enough seconds of warning. And in particular I wanted to make sure the user were never put in an indefensible position of compliance like for instance StegFS can do.
For me it is important that people realize that GBDE is not a solution, it is a tool to implement solutions. With crypto there is no "one size fits all", only hard work and careful planning.
The paper explains this at length (but I guess that the respondent didn't actually read the paper). The primary focus in GBDE was usability and deployability. Most of the prior art in this space cannot even change the pass-phrase without reencrypting the entire disk (which can easily take an entire day).
I wanted to do better than that, and I think I did. By a wide margin.
RSA vs. SHA.
Correct, that is a typo, it is SHA2 which is used.
AES, zero IV etc.
An important part of GBDE is that there is no two-way leverage on any crypto component. This is realized by the use of single-use random bit sector keys. With no two-way leverage and single-use keys, the IV is no longer important.
The comment about the "plausible denial" setup being useless because an intelligent adversary would always take a mirror copy first: That does not affect the plausible denial aspect.
I'll be more than happy to discuss any aspect of GBDE, and would very much like to hear peoples experience and ideas. But I would prefer email (if need be by setting up a mailing list)
There is no immediate future for a table driven attack on this algorithm (Which can be recognized by the '$1$...' prefix.
HP-UX, Solaris and AIX, however still use the old 12 bit salted DES derived passwords.
FreeBSD started using 64 bit salt and MD5 scrambled passwords back in 1994 (when I wrote the code) and since then NetBSD, OpenBSD, Cisco, GLIBC and presumably MAC OSX have adopted that code.
Look for the tell-tale "$1$..." magic marker.
(The fact that GLIBC doesn't correctly attribute the algorithm is somewhat sad, but they refused to do so, even when asked directly).
Reading Wexelblats email where he basically tells people that this is none of their business, is like hearing an echo of the argumentation launched against new bylaws in the FreeBSD project.
If David is not actively contributing to XFree86, he has no business telling anyone how to run the project.
I think the active developers of XFree86, both committer and non-committers, should grab a copy of the FreeBSD bylaws and elect a new core team.
The FreeBSD bylaws are far from perfect, but it would be enough to get started and once the dust has settled, a revision to more closely match the needs of the new project can be made.
What good is it to be able to afford rental-blondes if you can't use them for anything ?
A common conclusion have been something like "Yeah, it looks like windows a bit, yeah, it can do some nice things but it is not really an good as pda, it takes 40 seconds to start and it is not a very nice telephone either."
A few reviews have contained rather nasty hints that it was *painfully* obvious that Microsoft was involved (original emphasis).
Faced with that, I'd probably cancel the product too, jump ship and be happy I didn't end up with an inventory of 100000 phones I couldn't sell.
We're currently producing 10-15% of all electricity in Denmark with wind-energy and nobody wants that number to increase currently due to the problems we are facing.
The main problem is that we actually get so much wind-generated electricity during a storm that we cannot get rid of it, this unbalances the power-grid and results in voltage and frequency instabilities.
The secondary problem is that you also need electricity when the wind does not blow. This could mean keeping large centralized power-plants around, paying a lot of maintenance costs, waiting for the wind to die.
Various suggestions abound, and the Engineers weekly newspaper here in Denmark has been the home of a fierce debate for the last couple of months about the merits of these and wind-generation in general.
The fact that all sorts of micro-plants and co-generation is popping up like mushrooms is in fact a very interesting problem for the electrical grids: How do you balance supply and demand, when you have almost as many suppliers as consumers ?
Actually Denmark is doing pretty well wrt to broadband penetration, despite the former monopolys determined efforts to stiffle competition.
256/128 is about $45/month, 2048/512 is $110/month, and around 90% of exchanges in the country are provisioned for xDSL by the monopoly (TDC.dk) and a competitor (Cybercity.dk).
The total number of xDSL lines installed is not precisely known (the bastards wont tell :-) but we are probably close to 100k lines in a 5m population.
Ohh, and you didn't get your Shakespeare quote right either :-)
17USC 105. Subject matter of copyright: United States Government works
Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.
To release source code under the GPL, you have to hold the copyright to the code.
The US Government (in this case represented by NSA) cannot hold a copyright, the law does not allow for it.
No copyright, no GPL, end of story.
But I have no doubt that M$ whined too.
This is actually a very interesting detail, the 1700s amongst other things had "the small ice-age" where temperatures in europe were significantly lower than normal.
Considered together with the traditional wisdom of "hot tempers" in southern climates, (the middle east being the poster boy), this points to the obvious solution to world peace: Move everybody to Mars where the temperature is lower than on this war-ridden planet.
It is actually much more complicated.
Appearantly, the meeting was set up by Heisenberg in an effort to make it clear to the germans in Denmark that Niels Bohr was important and should not be touched, arrested or harrassed.
There was an official event at a german "cultural" institute which Bohr as he says "of course could not attend" followed by this private meeting at the Niels Bohr institute.
Also do not forget that there were another person in the meeting, and while his "memory" is as suspect as Heisenbergs, his recollection is the same.
Niels Bohr provably had possesed the data to indicate that a bomb would be possible for at least one year at the time, but was not in any way in contact with the allied program until he escaped from Denmark via Sweden shortly after and partly because of the meeting with Heisenberg.
It is also important to remember that Hitler did not appreciate science, engineering yes, but not science. It is unconceiveable that he would have dedicated the necessary funds to create a german bomb, without some pretty hard evience and demonstrations.
The claim that the nazi program was mostly for power-generation therefore sounds very credible.
Heisenberg were fully aware of these things, in particular that even if physically possible, the bomb would be politcally out of reach.
Therefore one cannot easily dismiss the claim that Heisenberg, convinced by nazi propaganda that the nazis would win, was merely tried to protect his old friend Bohr by getting him onto the victors bandwagon.
In other words: Heisenberg probably tried to say something between the lines and Bohr missed it, and Bohr being better informed about the real standing of the war was unlikely to be swayed anyway. (Bohr could listen to BBC, Heisenberg could not for instance).
I think the fact that no evidence has been found which indicates that Heisenberg actually did anything more than think about the bomb should be credited him, as for being convinced by the nazi propaganda, he was already punished more than fair is for that.
From Denmark,
We have actually used a signature of "a lot of spaces and 5-7 random characters, possibly in []" at the end of Subject as a very successful spamfilter for over a year.
Ever since they first got the idea, Fusion energy has been exactly a decade away. Never more, never less, always exactly "in the next decade".
If you doubt me, check your historical sources so see just _how_ often that has been predicted. Even Scientific American has started to notice...
One is apt to wonder if that isn't the right safety-distance for a fusion power plant: one decade into the future...
Poul-Henning, Old enough to remember...
Will the real Andre Hedrick please come forward and tell us that this is a fake, please ?
I can't for the life of me imagine that the Linux community would rely on something as crucial as ATA drivers being written by somebody with such a childish attitude.
Just in case this is a genuine message:
1. FreeBSD has a well established procedure for handling GPL code: we put it in a separate directory subtree where people can easily find it (src/sys/gnu for instance): Just because something is GPL doesn't mean it cannot be part of FreeBSD.
2. I hope for Linux' sake that Linux get a more mature ATA developer RSN.
Poul-Henning
Wouldn't it carry a lot more weight if Søren said that it was resolved ?
Poul-Henning Kamp
The other Danish FreeBSD viking