[9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[ron minnich]

not saying it is "good" or "bad", just wanted people to see it


https://www.signup4.net/UPLOAD/STRA10A/DARP31E/CRASH%20Proposer%20Day%20v2.pdf


ron

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Ethan Grammatikidis]

On 28 Jun 2010, at 23:32, ron minnich wrote:

> not saying it is "good" or "bad", just wanted people to see it
>
>
> https://www.signup4.net/UPLOAD/STRA10A/DARP31E/CRASH%20Proposer%20Day%20v2.pdf
>
>
> ron
>

I really like the anti-monoculture statements.

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Wes Kussmaul]

ron minnich wrote:
> https://www.signup4.net/UPLOAD/STRA10A/DARP31E/CRASH%20Proposer%20Day%20v2.pdf
>

Innate or adaptive, it's all based upon the flawed premise that it's
possible to determine the intentions of the sender of a stream of bits.
It is not possible to determine the intentions of the sender of a stream
of bits.

This is the pointless electronic countermeasures race all over again.

The solution was well developed, then obscured by the telephone century.
http://quietenjoyment.net/slides2j.swf

Wes Kussmaul

--
Learn about The Authenticity Economy at

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1419344994607129684&hl=en#

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Stanley Lieber]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 9:28 PM, Wes Kussmaul <wes@authentrus.com> wrote:
> ron minnich wrote:
>>
>>
>> https://www.signup4.net/UPLOAD/STRA10A/DARP31E/CRASH%20Proposer%20Day%20v2.pdf
>>
>
> Innate or adaptive, it's all based upon the flawed premise that it's
> possible to determine the intentions of the sender of a stream of bits. It
> is not possible to determine the intentions of the sender of a stream of
> bits.
>
> This is the pointless electronic countermeasures race all over again.
>
> The solution was well developed, then obscured by the telephone century.
> http://quietenjoyment.net/slides2j.swf
>
> Wes Kussmaul
>
> --
> Learn about The Authenticity Economy at
> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1419344994607129684&hl=en#

Anywhere legitimate identification is used, legitimate identification
can be purchased.

-sl

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Wes Kussmaul]

Stanley Lieber wrote:
> Anywhere legitimate identification is used, legitimate identification
> can be purchased.

There are imperfect but very good ways to protect against that
vulnerability. They vary with the needs (and budgets) of relying parties.

--
Learn about The Authenticity Economy at

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1419344994607129684&hl=en#

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Devon H. O'Dell]

2010/6/29 Wes Kussmaul <wes@authentrus.com>:
> Stanley Lieber wrote:
>>
>> Anywhere legitimate identification is used, legitimate identification can
>> be purchased.
>
> There are imperfect but very good ways to protect against that
> vulnerability. They vary with the needs (and budgets) of relying parties.

I'm pretty sure you can't solve the problem. At the end of the day, it
boils down to client-side security and what a person is willing to
defend with their life. It's perfectly feasible to assume that
identity information in a PKI world can be coerced and stolen as
easily as physical identity information such as drivers licenses and
social security cards. The security always breaks down at the personal
level, and most private individuals aren't willing to die to protect
this information.

But you can do at least as good as these forms of ID. PKI requires
knowledge of some sort of passkey. (I just worry about identification
for people who are not smart enough to pick a good key. Which,
unfortunately, is also most people.

--dho

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Steve Simon]

> But you can do at least as good as these forms of ID. PKI requires
> knowledge of some sort of passkey. (I just worry about identification
> for people who are not smart enough to pick a good key. Which,
> unfortunately, is also most people.

My understanding is a passkey just needs sufficent entropy in order to be strong.

This can be a few characters drawn from a larger characterset - your password must
be no more than 16 chars and must contain upper and lower case numbers and punctuation.

Alternatively it could be a long string made up of a restricted character set - your
pass phrase can consist of any text characters but must not contain long repitations
and be of at least 200 characters long (say).

Thus a passphrase may be a quote from your favorite movie, a lyric or the like. This
can then be hashed into a higher entropy string (is this statement true?) used for
authentication.

I don't understand why modern security systems have an upper limit on passphrase length.

(waits for people who know better to tell him he is dumb).

-Steve

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Devon H. O'Dell]

2010/6/29 Steve Simon <steve@quintile.net>:
>> But you can do at least as good as these forms of ID. PKI requires
>> knowledge of some sort of passkey. (I just worry about identification
>> for people who are not smart enough to pick a good key. Which,
>> unfortunately, is also most people.
>
> My understanding is a passkey just needs sufficent entropy in order to be strong.

Sure. But you can still brute-force a 4-character passkey in a
reasonably short time.

> This can be a few characters drawn from a larger characterset - your password must
> be no more than 16 chars and must contain upper and lower case numbers and punctuation.
>
> Alternatively it could be a long string made up of a restricted character set - your
> pass phrase can consist of any text characters but must not contain long repitations
> and be of at least 200 characters long (say).

This works, but tends to be easy to get out of people or figure out
about people if you know a bit about them.

> Thus a passphrase may be a quote from your favorite movie, a lyric or the like. This
> can then be hashed into a higher entropy string (is this statement true?) used for
> authentication.
>
> I don't understand why modern security systems have an upper limit on passphrase length.

Because people can't remember passwords, and companies don't like
employing full-time password changers.

--dho

> (waits for people who know better to tell him he is dumb).
>
> -Steve
>
>

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[erik quanstrom]

> > I don't understand why modern security systems have an upper limit on passphrase length.
>
> Because people can't remember passwords, and companies don't like
> employing full-time password changers.

i don't understand this comment.  the length of a password
is only vaguely related to memorability.  long english phrases
are easy to remember.  unfortunately, they are also easy to
harvest automaticly, so "four score and seven years ago" might
be a bad password.

- erik

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Devon H. O'Dell]

2010/6/29 erik quanstrom <quanstro@labs.coraid.com>:
>> > I don't understand why modern security systems have an upper limit on passphrase length.
>>
>> Because people can't remember passwords, and companies don't like
>> employing full-time password changers.
>
> i don't understand this comment.  the length of a password
> is only vaguely related to memorability.  long english phrases
> are easy to remember.  unfortunately, they are also easy to
> harvest automaticly, so "four score and seven years ago" might
> be a bad password.

The problem is two-fold:

a) Lay-people are told by all their "computer guru" friends to choose
a password that is difficult to guess. Add numbers, capital letters,
punctuation. Most people don't think in this sort of context, and it
is difficult to remember.

b) People don't regard the idea as particularly important. I know many
people who routinely forget 6-8 character passwords.

The length of the phrase is actually in fact tied explicitly to
memory. The longer a string of characters, the more difficult it is to
remember. That's just fact. You have to practice to recite a
monologue; most people can't just read it once and commit it to
memory. In a similar fashion, most people must either write down a
password (which is dumb) or recite it for a fairly lengthy period of
time to remember it. Noting that places having an upper bound on
password length usually also have other password policies (like "must
contain at least one of each: capital letter, lowercase letter, and
number"). This either means things like initials and important dates
(birthdays, anniversaries, etc) or random gibberish. People are told
not to use something that can be socially engineered, so random
gibberish it is. And people at large just don't get it. It's easily
forgettable.

When talking about symmetric cryptography, "four score and seven years
ago" would probably be a great key. There is no convenient rainbow
table upon which to do a hash lookup. It's sufficiently expensive to
brute-force. The only thing that would give you any sort of advantage
is knowing it was an english phrase and trying all of them.
Misspellings, punctuation, capitalization, and the like can all throw
this off. So picking something directly out of song lyrics, quotes, or
a book of idioms is likely to be useless. Adding in a single period,
comma, or some creative capitalization is fantastic.

But we all know about passwords here.

--dho

> - erik
>
>

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[erik quanstrom]

> The length of the phrase is actually in fact tied explicitly to
> memory. The longer a string of characters, the more difficult it is to
> remember. That's just fact

repeating this doesn't make it true, but it does make
the phrase easier to remember.  so i think your argument
is its own defeat.  the gettysburg address is fairly easy for
me to remember.  but i don't think i'd have such an easy
time on a randomly-choosen 285-word phrase.

clearly something this long is not necessary.  i'm sure you
have made-up phrases with non-words you tell our dog.
that should be easy to remember, not on the internet, and
have the added bonus that you get to smile while typing your
password.

> When talking about symmetric cryptography, "four score and seven years
> ago" would probably be a great key. There is no convenient rainbow
> table upon which to do a hash lookup. It's sufficiently expensive to
> brute-force.

i'm not convinced of this.  here's why.  i was reading yesterday
about a research-project that built a machine that could try 1 billion
rsa keys/sec.  now consider such a machine in the possession of bad
guys.  for them it would make sense to harvest nearly every phrase
you can find on the internet and try it.  the hard part would be
crawling the net.

- erik

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Devon H. O'Dell]

2010/6/29 erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>:
>> The length of the phrase is actually in fact tied explicitly to
>> memory. The longer a string of characters, the more difficult it is to
>> remember. That's just fact
>
> repeating this doesn't make it true, but it does make
> the phrase easier to remember.  so i think your argument
> is its own defeat.  the gettysburg address is fairly easy for
> me to remember.  but i don't think i'd have such an easy
> time on a randomly-choosen 285-word phrase.
>
> clearly something this long is not necessary.  i'm sure you
> have made-up phrases with non-words you tell our dog.
> that should be easy to remember, not on the internet, and
> have the added bonus that you get to smile while typing your
> password.

You're taking this slightly out of context. I said that this is
coupled with the fact that peers encourage the use of randomness in a
password, and companies enforce password policies that corroborate
this need. I'm not suggesting there's a set length at which point
people have difficulty remembering something, but there is certainly a
correlation: you certainly aren't going to argue the chances of
remembering "fsd&e" are much greater than remembering
"amsdagk3881((@!3ll1..dags8" are you? Similarly, you wouldn't argue
that at some point you spent time learning the Gettysburg Address --
it's not simply something you read once and recalled. (If so, this is
impressive, and you shouldn't argue this as "normal".) Length of the
phrase is certainly tied to the ability to commit it to memory. Yes,
I'm repeating this using empirical evidence as I'm slightly too lazy
to go look up any of the several articles I've read about how we
memorize things and how "brain storage" actually works. There are ways
to bypass this to some degree: adding music or tune, creating rhyme,
setting to iambic pentameter (or any "rhythmization" for that matter).

As computing systems continue to get stronger, the necessity of longer
passphrases will increase -- or slower secure algorithms will need to
be developed. (Or possibly more fitting algorithms, given the
possibility of quantum computing, which may intrinsically provide
solutions to some implementation issues following PKI).

>> When talking about symmetric cryptography, "four score and seven years
>> ago" would probably be a great key. There is no convenient rainbow
>> table upon which to do a hash lookup. It's sufficiently expensive to
>> brute-force.
>
> i'm not convinced of this.  here's why.  i was reading yesterday
> about a research-project that built a machine that could try 1 billion
> rsa keys/sec.  now consider such a machine in the possession of bad
> guys.  for them it would make sense to harvest nearly every phrase
> you can find on the internet and try it.  the hard part would be
> crawling the net.

I certainly have several nonsensical words / names for my cats. None
of them contain numbers or punctuation or anything associated with a
strong passphrase. The longest of these is probably about 12
characters. And a system that can try a billion RSA keys per second is
going to quickly exhaust the relatively short combination of these,
even brute forcing. And you're right -- as I also alluded above, the
continued computing and mathematical advancements made by society at
large will continue to obsolete any statements about what a "good pass
phrase" is.

Right now, it's length and perceived randomness.

People have enough difficulty remembering short passwords. Or creating
"good" passwords in the first place. Upper bounds along with enforcing
permutations are placed to reduce peoples' likelihood of forgetting
them while still providing some level of security. It's not the best
approach, but until people start treating passwords like an ATM card
with a PIN, it's not going to matter much anyway. (Ignoring that PINs
for most cards are only have 9990 or fewer permutations.)

--dho

> - erik
>
>

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[erik quanstrom]

> I certainly have several nonsensical words / names for my cats. None
> of them contain numbers or punctuation or anything associated with a
> strong passphrase. The longest of these is probably about 12
> characters. And a system that can try a billion RSA keys per second is
> going to quickly exhaust the relatively short combination of these,
> even brute forcing. And you're right -- as I also alluded above, the

assuming the attackers have a dictionary of only 500000 words that
contains your nonsense words and assuming unicase and no spaces
or other punctuation you get 18.9 bits/word.  for a neat 3 word phrase,
that's 56.8 bits.

for a login, that's plenty since there should be some protection
against password guessers.  general slowness or just a slow connection
should be enough to prevent 1e9 guesses/sec.

> People have enough difficulty remembering short passwords. Or creating
> "good" passwords in the first place. Upper bounds along with enforcing
> permutations are placed to reduce peoples' likelihood of forgetting
> them while still providing some level of security. It's not the best
> approach, but until people start treating passwords like an ATM card
> with a PIN, it's not going to matter much anyway. (Ignoring that PINs
> for most cards are only have 9990 or fewer permutations.)

people will learn.  real computer passwords have not
been common for very long.

also, an atm card is a 2-factor authentication scheme.  and
you get 3 guesses.  assuming you can steal the card your chances
of success are about 3/10000.  (wiki says 6/10000 due to unused
numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pin_number#PIN_security)

a better attack might be to shoulder surf and then socially
engineer the bank into sending you a card.  say by stealing
it out of the mailbox.

- erik

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Wes Kussmaul]

erik quanstrom wrote:
> also, an atm card is a 2-factor authentication scheme.  and
> you get 3 guesses.  assuming you can steal the card

Assuming you are a member of the main source of Net fraud, that is, a
customer of one of the botnet builders doing 30 thousand victims at a
time from your command center in Estonia, what are the chances of
stealing 30,000 physical cards per round of theft?

> a better attack might be to shoulder surf and then socially
> engineer the bank into sending you a card.

Onesies, how quaint. Almost a lost art.

wk


--
Learn about The Authenticity Economy at

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1419344994607129684&hl=en#

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Devon H. O'Dell]

2010/6/30 erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>:
>> I certainly have several nonsensical words / names for my cats. None
>> of them contain numbers or punctuation or anything associated with a
>> strong passphrase. The longest of these is probably about 12
>> characters. And a system that can try a billion RSA keys per second is
>> going to quickly exhaust the relatively short combination of these,
>> even brute forcing. And you're right -- as I also alluded above, the
>
> assuming the attackers have a dictionary of only 500000 words that
> contains your nonsense words and assuming unicase and no spaces
> or other punctuation you get 18.9 bits/word.  for a neat 3 word phrase,
> that's 56.8 bits.
>
> for a login, that's plenty since there should be some protection
> against password guessers.  general slowness or just a slow connection
> should be enough to prevent 1e9 guesses/sec.

As networks get faster, it becomes more of an issue. Luckily, most
places that have information about you / your money will lock your
account after N invalid login attempts within a certain time period.
The places that don't probably don't matter. But usually there are
easier ways to get that information anyway.

>> People have enough difficulty remembering short passwords. Or creating
>> "good" passwords in the first place. Upper bounds along with enforcing
>> permutations are placed to reduce peoples' likelihood of forgetting
>> them while still providing some level of security. It's not the best
>> approach, but until people start treating passwords like an ATM card
>> with a PIN, it's not going to matter much anyway. (Ignoring that PINs
>> for most cards are only have 9990 or fewer permutations.)
>
> people will learn.  real computer passwords have not
> been common for very long.
>
> also, an atm card is a 2-factor authentication scheme.  and
> you get 3 guesses.  assuming you can steal the card your chances
> of success are about 3/10000.  (wiki says 6/10000 due to unused
> numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pin_number#PIN_security)
>
> a better attack might be to shoulder surf and then socially
> engineer the bank into sending you a card.  say by stealing
> it out of the mailbox.

What people do these days is put magnetic readers on the outside of
the reader you're putting your card through. They store information
about N cards, and then write their own cards based on that
information. There's little guesswork involved; there are plenty of
online shops that don't check CVV or shipping address, especially
internationally.

Then you also have keyloggers and screen scrapers. Lots of ways to get
all that information, very, very easily. Social engineering, indeed,
works charms.

> - erik
>
>

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Wes Kussmaul]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1495 bytes --]

Devon H. O'Dell wrote:
> 2010/6/29 erik quanstrom <quanstro@labs.coraid.com>:
>
>>>> I don't understand why modern security systems have an upper limit on passphrase length.
>>>>
>>> Because people can't remember passwords, and companies don't like
>>> employing full-time password changers.
>>>
>> i don't understand this comment.  the length of a password
>> is only vaguely related to memorability.  long english phrases
>> are easy to remember.  unfortunately, they are also easy to
>> harvest automaticly, so "four score and seven years ago" might
>> be a bad password.
>>
>
> The problem is two-fold:
>
> a) Lay-people are told by all their "computer guru" friends to choose
> a password that is difficult to guess. Add numbers, capital letters,
> punctuation. Most people don't think in this sort of context, and it
> is difficult to remember.
>
> b) People don't regard the idea as particularly important. I know many
> people who routinely forget 6-8 character passwords.
>

Many banks still use 4 digit PINs on their ATM cards, without problem.
Possession is a very important factor.

The token that will prevail of course is the phone - even though it
denies relying parties the billboard value of a card.

Now, will developers be smart enough to isolate the private key from the
phone's porous OS? The jury is out on that.

wk

--
Learn about The Authenticity Economy at

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1419344994607129684&hl=en#


[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2362 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Steve Simon]

> Many banks still use 4 digit PINs on their ATM cards, without problem.
> Possession is a very important factor.

well, posscession and the fact that you only get three attempts to enter
the PIN (in the UK at least), so brute force attacks are a non-starter,
so limited kyspace is much less of a problem.

-Steve

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Wes Kussmaul]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2601 bytes --]

Devon H. O'Dell wrote:
> 2010/6/29 Wes Kussmaul <wes@authentrus.com>:
>
>> Stanley Lieber wrote:
>>
>>> Anywhere legitimate identification is used, legitimate identification can
>>> be purchased.
>>>
>> There are imperfect but very good ways to protect against that
>> vulnerability. They vary with the needs (and budgets) of relying parties.
>>
>
> I'm pretty sure you can't solve the problem. At the end of the day, it
> boils down to client-side security and what a person is willing to
> defend with their life. It's perfectly feasible to assume that
> identity information in a PKI world can be coerced and stolen as
> easily as physical identity information such as drivers licenses and
> social security cards. The security always breaks down at the personal
> level, and most private individuals aren't willing to die to protect
> this information.
>
> But you can do at least as good as these forms of ID. PKI requires
> knowledge of some sort of passkey. (I just worry about identification
> for people who are not smart enough to pick a good key. Which,
> unfortunately, is also most people

It's true, people give up their ATM card PINs at gunpoint. Guns are a
problem, especially where people tend to still use currency. Online, not
so much.

Possession is still the most effective factor. As our site points out,
------------------------------------------------------------------------
After spending millions of dollars on network security, corporations
still have major security problems.

Meanwhile, your ATM card allows your bank to dispense cash with
confidence from a machine on a city sidewalk.

The technology used by your ATM card is more ancient than the floppy
disk. So why are bank ATM networks generally secure, while corporate
information networks, in spite of continuous investment in the latest
security technology, are barely able to keep ahead of intruders?

The difference is not about technology. The difference is about
assumptions and architecture.

Your bank's ATM network starts with the premise that knowing who you are
is the foundation of security.

If a trusted co-worker asked you to share your ATM card and associated
PIN, what would you say? Of course, they would never ask in the first place.

If that co-worker asked you for your network password, what would you
say? In many companies, collaborative work gets done by sharing access
credentials, in spite of rules against it.


--
Learn about The Authenticity Economy at

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1419344994607129684&hl=en#


[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3453 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[erik quanstrom]

> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1419344994607129684&hl=en#

i suppose the format string should have been %llud not %lld.

- erik

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Akshat Kumar]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 3:32 PM, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
> not saying it is "good" or "bad", just wanted people to see it
>
>
> https://www.signup4.net/UPLOAD/STRA10A/DARP31E/CRASH%20Proposer%20Day%20v2.pdf

Perhaps I am oversimplifying, but the proposed resolution seems to be:

Abstract MINIX.


Best,
ak

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[hiro]

> not saying it is "good" or "bad", just wanted people to see it

So is it now "bad" to say what you think?

If you live in a hostile environment, with rules too complex to
understand, it's clever to be also unpredictable.
Computer networks are different. Discrete electronics haven't been
invented to create entropy...

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[erik quanstrom]

> Computer networks are different. Discrete electronics haven't been
> invented to create entropy...

my air conditioner begs to differ!

- erik

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[ron minnich]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 2:14 AM, hiro <23hiro@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> not saying it is "good" or "bad", just wanted people to see it
>
> So is it now "bad" to say what you think?

Nope, I just have my own opinions on this but don't want to corrupt anyone :-)

ron

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[Gabriel Díaz]

hello


I do like their aim, let's see what they end with :), if that's disclosed someday. . . :), 
also seems they will end with something too complex to be of general usage

slds.

gabi



----- Original Message ----
From: ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
Sent: Tue, June 29, 2010 12:32:29 AM
Subject: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

not saying it is "good" or "bad", just wanted people to see it


https://www.signup4.net/UPLOAD/STRA10A/DARP31E/CRASH%20Proposer%20Day%20v2.pdf


ron

Re: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement

[hiro]

To me it seems that their aim is complexity.

On 6/29/10, Gabriel Díaz <gdiaz@rejaa.com> wrote:
> hello
>
>
> I do like their aim, let's see what they end with :), if that's disclosed
> someday. . . :),
> also seems they will end with something too complex to be of general usage
>
> slds.
>
> gabi
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>
> To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
> Sent: Tue, June 29, 2010 12:32:29 AM
> Subject: [9fans] offered without comment or judgement
>
> not saying it is "good" or "bad", just wanted people to see it
>
>
> https://www.signup4.net/UPLOAD/STRA10A/DARP31E/CRASH%20Proposer%20Day%20v2.pdf
>
>
> ron
>
>