Steve Bellovin

A good starting place to think about the CALEA system (besides, as other comments mention, looking at CALEA itself) is this paper from Matt Blaze and his students: http://www.crypto.com/blog/calea_weaknesses/ Also interesting is Steve Bellovin et al.'s excellent report on security implications of extending CALEA to VoIP: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/CALEAVOIPreport.pdf Steve Bellovin is now the FTC's Chief Technologist and spends his days trying to bring technical sanity to the government in various ways.

You’re probably better off just reading the paper he links to: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/age-verify.pdf I think it shows the difficulty of implementing it for everyone. But Apple and Google’s cell phone implementations would probably cover most people in some countries when finished, and then there will be a long tail of people who will need cheats and workarounds. You’d be screwed if you didn’t have any friends who could help you cheat.

Related, "The Early History of Usenet, Part I: Prologue": * https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14.html * Discussion Feb 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39408657

> First, running exactly one open port per IP (443 or 80) is the worst use of resources. The whole "crisis" could be solved with simple browser support of something like SRV records. TLS SNI[1] and the HTTP Host: header[2] already do this. Enabling multiple HTTP(s) serving ports with something like SRV wouldn't give us any additional capacity here. > These institutions have exactly 0 business knowing how many physical devices are behind a firewall. These institutions can already analyze TTL, source port, IPid, and other packet metadata to enumerate hosts behind NAT.[3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_hosting#Name-based [3]: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/fnat.pdf

This was posted on HN several days ago: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14.html Usenet didn't start out by running over TCP/IP.

I knew that the decentralized structure of Usenet was born from necessity, but I didn't realize how hard it was just to get a modem back then. Can decentralized services work on the modern Internet? Even setting aside how spam and illegal content destroyed Usenet as a discussion medium, in its late stages it became a playground for kooks and trolls at the expense of legitimate posting. Killfiles didn't work as the bad actors could easily change names and email addresses; get them thrown off one server and they'd just sign up on another one. The only way to ban someone from a newsgroup and make it stick is with a court order - and that happened at least once. Another post from the same blog details why the troll problem was technologically impossible to solve: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2018-02/2018-02-23.html

Strangely enough, people like Matt Blaze are out beating the "don't blame the victim" drum by stating the exact opposite, giving a pass to large enterprises under the "patching is hard" mantra: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2017-05/2017-05-12.html

The same author recently published a paper about the work Vernam and Mauborgne were doing: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog//2014-05/2014-05-16.html It didn't get any traction when I submitted it. (I'm copying and pasting those names, I think this sort of history is neat to look at but certainly don't know much of it)

Why stop at just a single-hop proxy? Just go full out onion routing. Here's a paper for an anonymous physical delivery system, named APOD, based on that model: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/APOD_PETS09.pdf

This blog item appears to have been plagiarized from Steve Bellovin's page: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/nsam-160/pal.html

The article also contains a link to a detailed discussion of PALs - "Permissive Action Links" - that control arming and detonation, and guard against tampering. See: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/nsam-160/pal.html

slides: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/talks/farewell.pdf

>For one thing, a /64 issued to a house is a pretty daunting search space for the scanning worms of yesterday. Eh... ----- We have outlined a number of techniques that scanning worms can use in an IPv6 Internet to locate potential targets. These techniques are equally applicable to the current IPv4 Internet, albeit not as efficient as random scanning. Although “conventional” address-space scanning is prohibitively expensive in that environment, we believe that the diversity of sources we discussed (which is by no means exhaustive) guarantees a rich target set for worms. --- https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/v6worms.pdf A lot of them do rely on getting that first host infected though, but that's not exactly dissimilar to IPv4 networks as well. >Finally, having remote desktop shouldn't be a problem if people don't know your password, no? It's not like there is a firewall stopping baddies from guessing your Gmail password. That actually begs an interesting point. IPv4 allows for services to block use IP profiling to limit an attacker's attempts to brute-force / semi-brute-force a password or other attacks like a DDoS. What would be IT / Security processionals response when an attacker can just jump to another IPv6 address and resume the attack?

This is an ingenious idea, one that becomes obvious only in retrospect. To me this feels like a merger of the ideas in projects like magic-wormhole, Wormhole.app, and the (defunct) Mozilla Send. But then it adds a kind of sharchive twist using the browser as a runtime. The original paper I saw called it Password Authenticated Key Exchange. https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/neke.pdf But I think the general form is now called something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password-authenticated_key_agreement?wpr… Anyway I’m posting all this not to show my erudition (I’m really stupid about cryptography) but that there’s lots of precedent for this kind of tool and maybe with a few tweaks can even be made standards-compliant. (RFC 8188 seems to contemplate some ideas like this, but the file isn’t “self-expanding”.) Some obvious issues: sitting on a thumb drive, the file is vulnerable to unlimited attacks. And since the decryptor is in “plaintext” it could be MITMed in a way, since the decryption code can be tampered with, and a browser environment with localhost access can be tricked into doing lots of things, including sending decrypted contents to the attacker. In a SaaS there’s no MITM given transport security, and you can notice you’re getting attacked, or expire links after a number of tries / some amount of time. But so what; the whole point here is to provide really good security with a different channel.

Before the introduction of permissive action links (PAL), nuclear weapons could be operated and detonated by almost anyone. > The exact details are hazy, but the broad contours are clear: the inspection team found the control of the forward-based nuclear weapons inadequate and possibly illegal. In Germany and Turkey they viewed scenes that were particularly distressing. On the runway stood a German (or Turkish) quick-reaction alert airplane (QRA) loaded with nuclear weapons and with a foreign pilot in the cockpit. The QRA airplane was ready to take off at the earliest warning, and the nuclear weapons were fully operational. The only evidence of U.S. control was a lonely 18-year-old sentry armed with a carbine and standing on the tarmac. When the sentry at the German airfield was asked how he intended to maintain control of the nuclear weapons should the pilot suddenly decide to scramble (either through personal caprice or through an order from the German command circumventing U.S. command), the sentry replied that he would shoot the pilot; Agnew directed him to shoot the bomb. https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/nsam-160/pal.html The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were a wild time. Tens of thousands of deadly devices in the hands of two superpowers armed to the teeth, and not a single rogue general. Not one single device sold to terrorists on the black market. It's a miracle we made it out alive.

This is a piece by On the Media's Brooke Gladstone from before the AM database leak, June 24, intervewing Paul Ford (of "What is Code" fame). There's audio if you prefer here: http://www.onthemedia.org/story/what-can-we-learn-ashley-madison/ It's an intelligent piece and hits on many of the themes revealed since: Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that at it's heart, this problem with protecting our data stems from, essentially, a conflict between the centralized and decentralized Internet, and that we've always been at one end or the other, swinging like a pendulum ... Paul Ford: See, I read this book in 2002 called Translucent Databases by a guy named Peter Wayner. It's a short book and it just describes an approach to obscuring data inside of a data base so that it's still useful in some ways. You might know the zip code but not know the street address and so on. The user of the website, they might have full access to it. They can update their name, they can change their address, whatever. They can make decisions about how they want that information to be used as well, but what it really does is scramble the eggs. It's an approach to just hiding and obscuring as much by default as possible, adding lots of garbage and then hashing that all together into a big mess. B: So this idea has been around for a while but these big centralized sites have not picked up on it, I assume because it runs counter to their desire to market the information they've assembled or to market to…

More consenting adults being arrested for consenting. More taxpayer dollars being spent on imprisonment and enforcement than less expensive treatment, not to mention the opportunity cost of lost profits from taxation. When are we going to realize that the drug war for most drugs is fucking bullshit? DPR may have gone away but if the law doesn't change eventually, the nerds WILL figure this problem out. You say the weakness this time was the postal system? Well here comes APOD, Anonymous Physical Object Delivery https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/APOD_PETS09.pdf And lest we forget, here's a statement from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Commission_on_Drug_Policy : In June 2011, the Global Commission on Drug Policy released a critical report on the War on Drugs, declaring "The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and years after President Nixon launched the US government's war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed."

The core material is the important part if you are, say, Iran or North Korea. However, if you are in a cave with a box of scraps and no Tony Stark, there's a lot more to it. Exactly how PALs work is not really well known. A lot of well-informed speculation can be found here: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/nsam-160/pal.html The most plausible mechanism for how they work is lots of crypto, plus physical-level crypto-like mechanisms wherein detonation requires setting off the various explosives in the bomb at precise and different times, and those times are not stored in the bomb itself, but rather extracted from the PAL code. It's possible to build simple nuclear weapons that don't require a lot of complicated steps to explode. But they're tremendously inefficient, and nobody bothers with them today. A stolen nuke will be an implosion design requiring a virtuoso performance of nanosecond-level timing to detonate properly, and those timings will not be easy to reverse engineer. Build a new weapon using the fissile material from the original bomb would likewise be a massive undertaking (only "easy" if you're Iran etc., not al Qaeda), and really would no longer qualify as a "stolen" weapon as proposed.