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1997-10-06 - Re: Secure phone

Header Data

From: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
To: frantz@netcom.com
Message Hash: 8d5137a749bde85b927af815356d90efc792a472210c1cc9c815925bc333db06
Message ID: <199710061757.SAA01293@server.test.net>
Reply To: <v0300784db05ec180b158@[207.94.249.144]>
UTC Datetime: 1997-10-06 18:23:45 UTC
Raw Date: Tue, 7 Oct 1997 02:23:45 +0800

Raw message

From: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 1997 02:23:45 +0800
To: frantz@netcom.com
Subject: Re: Secure phone
In-Reply-To: <v0300784db05ec180b158@[207.94.249.144]>
Message-ID: <199710061757.SAA01293@server.test.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com> writes:
> At 6:25 PM -0700 10/5/97, Adam Back wrote:
> >On the other hand, using persistent key public key crypto, Tim has
> >been signing his posts recently, and I have an ancient public key of
> >his stashed away which his new key is signed with.  If we were able to
> >construct a protocol to bolt on top of the reading of hashes, we could
> >have much greater protection against MITM.
> 
> Of course if you can use PGP as well as the secure phone, you can use PGP
> to exchange a pad of one-time passwords.

The passwords alone don't do you any good: if you read them out over
the phone, Eve can just repeat them.

You need to combine the password with the part of the D-H parameter
hash displayed on the dinky little secure phone display in such a way
that Eve can't fake it without knowledge of your password.  It would
be nice if you didn't need a computer to perform this operation, but I
guess you could live with needing a computer.  It would also be nice
if the number of digits you had to read was relatively short.

XOR doesn't work, because Eve can undo that; XOR isn't very easy to do
mentally anyway.

Encrypting the display value with a symmetric cipher and a key formed
from the password and reading out a selection of digits from the
ciphertext would do.  But most/all symmetric ciphers worth speaking of
are beyond doing in your head, or with a piece of paper in a
reasonable amount of time.

How many digits are on the display of one of those phones?  It seems
that you should be able to concoct something which is easy to compute,
and offers as much surety as the few digits on the display.

Adam
-- 
Now officially an EAR violation...
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

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