1994-06-03 - Re: Faster way to deescrow Clipper

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From: wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com +1-510-484-6204)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: 80496c7032088ac9b04d6190488bebfcf297a8b4216587a5166acf375096ca1d
Message ID: <9406031703.AA23517@anchor.ho.att.com>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1994-06-03 17:04:50 UTC
Raw Date: Fri, 3 Jun 94 10:04:50 PDT

Raw message

From: wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com +1-510-484-6204)
Date: Fri, 3 Jun 94 10:04:50 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Faster way to deescrow Clipper
Message-ID: <9406031703.AA23517@anchor.ho.att.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> >   ...not be able to decrypt the communications, but they still get your ID.
> >"your ID"?  You mean your phone's ID.  Goodness gracious, if you were
> >a criminal, you wouldn't go out and steal someone else's Clipper
> >phone, would you?  Let's not get too high tech here, just because we
> >have the ability.
> 
> Or you could just steal someone else's LEAF, by keeping a copy of it, and use
> that for spoofing.  Then you could have a valid IV too...

The IV is session-dependent, and both ends generate it.
We don't know where in the LEAF the chipid is, but if they
use a fixed format and don't do a key-dependent permutation of the LEAF bits,

it shouldn't be hard to figure out (unless the checksum comes first
and they use a block-chaining encryption, in which case you know you lose.)

That would let you create rogue LEAFs with known users' chipids,
which would be interesting - does anyone want to make 65536 calls to
clipperphone@whitehouse.gov :-) ?  (Yeah, it's not quite that simple.)
(If you do need a lot of data, cellphones are a good source,
since the cellphone operators' chipids are likely to be wellknown, 
though rapidly tapped.)

Paranoid-speculation-mode: Of course, if you can forge LEAFs with
their chipid, they can forge LEAFs with yours, which could be used
to manufacture interesting evidence....

			Bill





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