Month: July 2001

Wau Holland is dead. Obituaries: Lutz Donnerhacke, published at Spiegel Online / Chaos Computer Club.

When you sign a (public key, user ID) couple using a V3 RSA key, gnupg will create a V3 signature. This includes the case of local signatures. Bad enough, there is no such concept as a local V3 signature, which implies that using “lsign” with a V3 RSA key is equivalent to “sign”, and produces an exportable(!) signature.

This, in turn, can lead to considerable embarrassment (and loss of reputation) of the signer, and to bad judgement by others who rely on such signatures.

This patch fixes this problem by adding a minimum version parameter to make_keysig_packet(), and makes sure that local signatures are always at least V4.

You can download e-book versions of ICANN’s articles of incorporation and bylaws. In order to use them, you need PalmReader.

An extensive analysis of the Code Red Worm is available here. Includes animations.

Mutt-1.3.20 is available since yesterday. This is the latest development version. Download: patch / full source.

Lance Spitzner of the Honeynet Project writes: The Honeynet Project is excited to announce the release of a new paper, “Know Your Enemy: Statistics”. The paper is based on eleven months of data we have collected, and covers two areas.

1. Aggressiveness. We show a variety of statistics, based on eleven months of Honeynet data, that demonstrate just how aggressive the blackhat community can be. Even more revealing is it appears the threat is getting worse.

2. Early Warning and Prediction. We present proof of concept that attacks can be predicted. The research is still preliminary, but based on statistical analysis, 7 out of 8 attacks could be predicted last year. Two different team members took two different statistical approaches, yet they findings were almost identical. Most of the attacks made against the Honeynet could be predicted two to three days in advance.

As this research is part of the Honeynet Project, all eleven months of data are also publicly released for review and further analysis.

There was an exchange of letters between ICANN and New.net.

new.net to ICANN / ICANN to new.net

As was reported in comp.mail.mutt, there’s an interoperability problem between mutt and Eudora when it comes to PGP/MIME encrypted messages. Apparently, Eudora expects that the first MIME header within the encryption envelope contains a MIME-Version: 1.0 field. This is a bug. For details, read the Usenetr thread.

The ALSC has made available its Dicussion Paper #1. You can download an e-book version for PalmReader here.

M. Drew Streib has posted an updated PGP key ring analysis. This version only takes signatures on self-signed user IDs into account, and it offers extended information on where individual keys sit within the web of trust.