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r foreign policy after all states have been using modest subsidies to attract control and regulate industries london provides a favourable regime for finance and greece has good provisions to attract tourism thus it is conceivable that a nation may choose to attract and then benefit from such a control over proof of work cryptocurrencies what is certain is that proof of work is far from being the silver bullet against centralization and potential state control posted by george danezis filed in uncategorized leave a comment the poverty of crypto and empire against a narrowing of the politics of cryptography 7 april 2016 one of the rare joys of being a live author is the ability to interpret your own works as well as to help others when they try to do so in that context it was as ever a pleasure to read gürses et al recent article on crypto and empire the contradictions of counter surveillance advocacy and reflect on the insights it provides it is also nice to be in a position to highlight that a number of thesis it puts forward are in fact artefacts of preconceptions and selective reading of events while this is useful to abstract and present a clear argument it is unhelpful when it results in misleading conclusions and interpretations broadly speaking the article argues that the distinction between mass surveillance and targeted surveillance sweeps under the carpet questions of political legitimacy of current forms of targeted surveillance it also ignores the fact that mass electronic surveillance as revealed by edward snowden was in fact targeted towards select populations for specific political reasons i think this is insightful although i like this straight forward formulation better than the one from the original article which makes broad assertions linked with a specific us centric view of identity politics are the mass surveillance programs selecting on a racial gendered classed and colonial basis per se or simply on the basis of the national and economic interests of the nations that implemented them current geopolitical priorities and the needs of political elites that commissioned them i find the latter explanation simpler although i have written in some length about how control of technology among certain nations could lead to a new form of cyber colonialism so i may be partly to blame for inspiring this to which i will return read the rest of this entry posted by george danezis filed in uncategorized leave a comment a technical reading of the himr data mining research problem book 3 february 2016 boing boing just released a classified gchq document that was meant to act as the sept 2011 guide to open research problems in data mining the intended audience heilbronn institute for mathematical research himr is part of the university of bristol and composed of mathematicians working for half their time on classified problems with gchq first off a quick perusal of the actual publication record of the himr makes a sad reading for gchq it seems that very little research on data mining was actually performed post 2011 2014 despite this pitch i guess this is what you get trying to make pure mathematicians solve core computer science problems however the document presents one of the clearest explanations of gchq s operations and their scale at the time as well as a very interesting list of open problems along with salient examples overall reading this document very much resembles reading the needs of any other organization with big data struggling to process it to get any value the constrains under which they operate see below and in particular the limitations to o n log n storage per vertex and o 1 per edge event is a serious threat but of course this is only for un selected traffic so the 5000 or so tor nodes probably would have a little more space and processing allocated to them and so would known botnets i presume secondly there is clear evidence that timing information is both recognized as being key to correlating events and streams and it is being recorded and stored at an increasing granularity there is no smoking gun as of 2011 to say they casually de anonymize tor circuits but the writing is on the wall for the onion routing system gchq at 2011 had all ingredients needed to trace tor circuits it would take extra ordinary incompetence to not have refined their traffic analysis techniques in the past 5 years the tor project should do well to not underestimate gchq s capabilities to this point thirdly one should wonder why we have been waiting for 3 years until such clear documents are finally being published from the snowden revelations if those had been the first published instead of the obscure misleading and very non informative slides it would have saved a lot of time and may even have engaged the public a bit more than bad powerpoint read the rest of this entry posted by george danezis filed in anonymity policy traffic analysis uncategorized tags analysis gchq leaks snowden leave a comment the social construction of trust in cryptographic systems 3 february 2016 this is an extract from my contribution to harper richard introduction and overview trust computing and society ed richard h r harper 1 st ed new york cambridge university press 2014 pp 3 14 cambridge books online web 03 february 2016 http dx doi org 10 1017 cbo9781139828567 003 cryptography has been used for centuries to secure military diplomatic and commercial communications that may fall into the hands of enemies and competitors kahn 1996 traditional cryptography concerns itself with a simple problem alice wants to send a message to bob over some communication channel that may be observed by eve but without eve being able to read the content of the message to do this alice and bob share a short key say a passphrase or a poem alice then uses this key to scramble or encrypt the message using a cipher and sends the message to bob bob is able to use the shared key to invert the scrambling or decrypt and recover the message the hope is that eve without the knowledge of the key will not be able to unscramble the message thus preserving its confidentiality it is important to note that in this traditional setting we have not removed the need for a secure channel the shared key needs to be exchanged securely because its compromise would allow eve to read messages yet the hope is that the key is much shorter than the messages subsequently exchanged and thus easier to transport securely once by memorizing it or by better physical security what about the cipher should the method by which the key and the message are combined not be kept secret in la cryptographie militaire in 1883 auguste kerckhoffs stated a number of principles including that only the key should be considered secret not the cipher method itself kerckhoffs 1883 both the reliance on a small key and the fact that other aspects of the system are public is an application of the minimization principle we have already seen in secure system engineering it is by minimizing what has to be trusted for the security policy to hold that one can build and verify secure systems in the context of traditional cryptography in principle this is just a short key kerckhoffs argues that only the key not the secrecy of the cipher is in the trusted computing base but a key property of the cipher is relied on eve must not be able to use an encrypted message and knowledge of the cipher to recover the message without access to the secret key this is very different from previous security assumptions or components of the tcb it is not about the physical restrictions on eve and it is not about the logical operations of the computer software and hardware that could be verified by careful inspection it comes down to an assumption that eve cannot solve a somehow difficult mathematical problem thus how can you trust a cipher how can you trust that the adversary cannot solve a mathematical problem to speak the truth this was not a major concern until relatively recently compared with the long history of cryptography before computers encoding and decoding had to be performed by hand or using electromechanical machines concerns such as usability speed cost of the equipment and lack of decoding errors were the main concerns in choosing a cipher when it comes to security it was assumed that if a clever person proposes a cipher then it would take someone much cleverer than them to decode it it was even sometimes assumed that ciphers were of such complexity that there was no way to decode messages without the key the assumption that other nations may not have a supply of clever people may have to do with a colonial ideology of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries events leading to the 1950s clearly contradict this ciphers used by major military powers were often broken by their opponents in 1949 claude shannon set out to define what a perfect cipher would be he wanted it to be impossible to solve the mathematical problem underlying the cipher shannon 1949 the results of this seminal work are mixed on the positive side there is a perfect cipher that no matter how clever an adversary is cannot be solved the one time pad on the down side the key of the cipher is as long as the message must be absolutely random and can only be used once therefore the advantage of short keys in terms of minimizing their exposure is lost and the cost of generating keys is high avoiding bias in generating random keys is harder than expected furthermore shannon proves that any cipher with smaller keys cannot be perfectly secure because the one time pad is not practical in many cases how can one trust a cipher with short keys knowing that its security depends on the complexity of finding a solution for about thirty years the united states and the uk followed a very pragmatic approach to this they kept the cryptological advances of world war ii under wraps they limited the export of cryptographic equipment and know how through export regulations and their signal intelligence agencies the nsa and gchq respectively became the largest worldwide employers of mathematicians and the largest customers of supercomputers additionally in their roles in eavesdropping on their enemies communications they evaluated the security of the systems used to protect government communications the assurance in cryptography came at the cost of being the largest organizations that know about cryptography in the world the problem with this arrangement is that it relies on a monopoly of knowledge around cryptology yet as we have seen with the advent of commercial telecommunications cryptography becomes important for nongovernment uses even the simplest secure remote authentication mechanism requires some cryptography if it is to be used over insecure channels therefore keeping cryptography under wraps is not an option in 1977 the nsa approved the ibm design for a public cipher the data encryption standard des for public use it was standardized in 1979 by the us national institute for standards and technology nist the publication of des launched a wide interest in cryptography in the public academic community many people wanted to understand how it works and why it is secure yet the fact that the nsa tweaked its design for undisclosed reasons created widespread suspicion in the cipher the fear was that a subtle flaw was introduced to make decryption easy for intelligence agencies it is fair to say that many academic cryptographers did not trust des another important innovation in 1976 was presented by whitfield diffie and martin hellman in their work new directions in cryptography diffie hellman 1976 they show that it is possible to preserve the confidentiality of a conversation over a public channel without sharing a secret key this is today known as public key cryptography because it relies on alice knowing a public key for bob shared with anyone in the world and using it to encrypt a message bob has the corresponding private part of the key and is the only one that can decode messages used with the public key in 1977 ron rivest adi shamir and leonard adleman proposed a further system the rsa that also allowed for the equivalent of digital signatures rivest et al 1978 what is different in terms of trusting public key cryptography versus traditional ciphers both the diffie hellman system and the rsa system base their security on number theoretic problems for example rsa relies on the difficulty of factoring integers with two very large factors hundreds of digits unlike traditional ciphers such as des that rely on many layers of complex problems public key algorithms base their security on a handful of elegant number theoretic problems number theory a discipline that g h hardy argued at the beginning of the twentieth century was very pure in terms of its lack of any practical application hardy snow 1967 quickly became the deciding factor on whether one can trust the most significant innovation in the history of cryptology as a result a lot of interest and funding directed academic mathematicians to study whether the mathematical problems underpinning public key cryptography were in fact difficult and how difficult the problems were interestingly public key cryptography does not eliminate the need to totally trust the keys unlike traditional cryptography there is no need for bob to share a secret key with alice to receive confidential communications instead bob needs to keep the private key secret and not share it with anyone else maintaining the confidentiality of private keys is simpler than sharing secret keys safely but it is far from trivial given their long term nature what needs to be shared is bob s public key furthermore alice need to be sure she is using the public key associated with the bob s private key if eve convinces alice to use an arbitrary public key to encrypt a message to bob then eve could decrypt all messages the need to securely associate public keys with entities has been recognized early on diffie and hellman proposed to publish a book a bit like the phone register associating public keys with people in practice a public key infrastructure is used to do this trusted authorities like verisign issue digital certificates to attest that a particular key corresponds to a particular internet address these authorities are in charge of ensuring that the identity the keys and their association are correct the digital certificates are signed using the signature key of the authorities that anyone can verify the use of certificate authorities is not a natural architecture in many cases if alice and bob know each other they can presumably use another way to ensure alice knows the correct public key for bob similarly if a software vendor wants to sign updates for their own software they can presumably embed the correct public key into it instead of relying on public key authorities to link their own key with their own identity the use of public key infrastruct...