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Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1994-12-28 - Re: Why I have a 512 bit PGP key

Header Data

From: Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu>
To: eric@remailer.net (Eric Hughes)
Message Hash: 264de48afcb8dd735cd9f3a886fdbe000359311170a72ee2f73b00e2a2c8769c
Message ID: <199412280306.WAA25310@bwh.harvard.edu>
Reply To: <199412280240.SAA02061@largo.remailer.net>
UTC Datetime: 1994-12-28 03:06:49 UTC
Raw Date: Tue, 27 Dec 94 19:06:49 PST

Raw message

From: Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu>
Date: Tue, 27 Dec 94 19:06:49 PST
To: eric@remailer.net (Eric Hughes)
Subject: Re: Why I have a 512 bit PGP key
In-Reply-To: <199412280240.SAA02061@largo.remailer.net>
Message-ID: <199412280306.WAA25310@bwh.harvard.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Eric wrote:

|    From: "Ian Farquhar" <ianf@sydney.sgi.com>
| 
| re: personal account tripwire
| 
|    The problem is that although you can protect the data file of
|    hashes (by using a pass phrase to encrypt it), protecting the
|    binary which does the checking is rather more difficult.
| 
| Why not recompile the binary?  All it needs to be is something like
| md5.c.

	Or leave the binary on a floppy (assuming you can access
floppies, or some other removable media.)  The problem reduces pretty
quickly to a variant of trusting trust.  root can hack the kernel, the
math libraries, your shell, or several other points to make life
difficult.  Can you go through a set of steps so convoluted as to
catch this?  Probably.  But in all likelyhood, its easier to get a
personal machine on which to store private files.

Adam

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
						       -Hume

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