Need PGP-awareness in common utilities

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<flame="medium">
<!-- thin-skinned, insecure people don't read this.  If you are
taking medication or are a pregnant woman, consult your doctor
before participating. -->


I just got a letter back from majordomo@thumper.vmeng.com 
because my easy-PGP script had clearsigned my outgoing message
to it, and majordomo didn't know what to do with the clearsigned
message.


I really don't see why programs like majordomo, UseNet
moderation-bots, and most noticeably the PGP key distribution
program are PGP-unaware.


Okay, fine.  Having waited for FIVE YEARS or however long it has
been, you who are responsible for such handy dandy programs may
now convincingly argue that you might as well wait for another
few months to get PGPlib.  But I sincerely hope that once PGPlib
arrives we don't wait another five years before using it.


(There is another argument that people sometimes make-- that
it is too complicated to ensure pubkey<->True Name.  SO WHAT!  
Pubkey<->True Name mapping is an advanced feature that depends
upon the existence of some kind of public key infrastructure.
Many people, myself included, wouldn't even USE pubkey<->True
Name mapping if we had it!  Just implement some basic
privacy/authentication functions (trivial, using PGP 2.6 under
Unix) and MitCH be damned!  If we had started with the simple
stuff five years ago we might HAVE a complete, secure
infrastructure by now.)


As an example of this sad state of affairs, no less of a
cryptographic enthusiast than Robert Hettinga runs a mailing
list (several actually) which breaks every PGP clear-signature
that it encounters.


Really pitiful, that even our own mailing lists are incompatible
with PGP.


Regards,

Bryce

PGP sig follows:  [If you see garbage beyond this line, it means you are an 
anachronistic troglodyte.  If you see a "PGP sig okay!" it means you are hi-
tech.  If you see "PGP sig not okay!" it means some mail-handling software 
between me and you is written/maintained by anachronistic troglodytes.  :-)]

</flame>




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bryce@digicash.com wrote:
> I really don't see why programs like majordomo, UseNet
> moderation-bots, and most noticeably the PGP key distribution
> program are PGP-unaware.

My moderation bot STUMP is not only PGP-aware, it is also doing
a lot of PGP-related things. Among them: 

1) For posters who voluntarily chose additional protection, STUMP allows
only messages with a valid PGP signature to be posted. All posts from
these people that do not have a PGP sig or have an invalid sig, are
automatically rejected. It protects them from forgeries.

2) All exchange between my modbot and human moderators is PGP-signed
(and encrypted when necessary), to insure integrity of moderation
email traffic.

3) All message approved for posting to usenet get signed with Greg
Rose's PGPMoose program.

4) There is an additional service for those who post through anonymous
remailers BUT want to have an identity and reputation. The idea is that
they submit their PGP keys to the robomoderator, and later robomod
takes the user id from the PGP key, replacing meaningless anonymous
addresses with their identity.

We currently have at least two posters whose real life identities are
unknown, who use this feature and have sent us their PGP keys.

STUMP is currently working in production mode seemingly with no problems.

For details, look at 

	http://www.algebra.com/~ichudov/usenet/scrm/robomod/robomod.html

	- Igor.

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An entity calling itself ichudov@algebra.com probably wrote 
something like:
>
> My moderation bot STUMP is not only PGP-aware, it is also doing
> a lot of PGP-related things. Among them: 
> 
> 1) For posters who voluntarily chose additional protection, STUMP allows
> only messages with a valid PGP signature to be posted. 
<snip>
> 2) All exchange between my modbot and human moderators is PGP-signed
> (and encrypted when necessary)
<snip>
> 3) All message approved for posting to usenet get signed with Greg
> Rose's PGPMoose program.
<snip>
> 4) There is an additional service for those who post through anonymous
> remailers BUT want to have an identity and reputation.
<snip>  <Great idea!>
> We currently have at least two posters whose real life identities are
> unknown, who use this feature and have sent us their PGP keys.
> 
> STUMP is currently working in production mode seemingly with no problems.


Okay Igor, that is an impressive list of features!  Now what 
I want to know (and what I want other people here to hear) is:
_How_ difficult was it to incorporate these PGP features into
your software?  My guess is that it was a simple matter of
making a couple of system calls to PGP, plus maybe extra 
defense against replay attacks (you _do_ have defense against
replay attacks don't you?) and the fact that you have more
debugging work because you have more features.


Regards,

Bryce



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Subject: Re: Need PGP-awareness in common utilities
To: bryce@digicash.com
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 12:53:02 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com, e$@thumper.vmeng.com
Reply-To: ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov)
In-Reply-To: <199607061311.PAA08700@digicash.com> from "bryce@digicash.com" at Jul 6, 96 03:11:48 pm
From: ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home)
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Content-Type: text

bryce@digicash.com wrote:
> I really don't see why programs like majordomo, UseNet
> moderation-bots, and most noticeably the PGP key distribution
> program are PGP-unaware.

My moderation bot STUMP is not only PGP-aware, it is also doing
a lot of PGP-related things. Among them: 

1) For posters who voluntarily chose additional protection, STUMP allows
only messages with a valid PGP signature to be posted. All posts from
these people that do not have a PGP sig or have an invalid sig, are
automatically rejected. It protects them from forgeries.

2) All exchange between my modbot and human moderators is PGP-signed
(and encrypted when necessary), to insure integrity of moderation
email traffic.

3) All message approved for posting to usenet get signed with Greg
Rose's PGPMoose program.

4) There is an additional service for those who post through anonymous
remailers BUT want to have an identity and reputation. The idea is that
they submit their PGP keys to the robomoderator, and later robomod
takes the user id from the PGP key, replacing meaningless anonymous
addresses with their identity.

We currently have at least two posters whose real life identities are
unknown, who use this feature and have sent us their PGP keys.

STUMP is currently working in production mode seemingly with no problems.

For details, look at 

	http://www.algebra.com/~ichudov/usenet/scrm/robomod/robomod.html

	- Igor.

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bryce@digicash.com wrote:
> An entity calling itself ichudov@algebra.com probably wrote 
> something like:
> >
> > My moderation bot STUMP is not only PGP-aware, it is also doing
> > a lot of PGP-related things. Among them: 
> > 
> > 1) For posters who voluntarily chose additional protection, STUMP allows
> > only messages with a valid PGP signature to be posted. 
> <snip>
> > 2) All exchange between my modbot and human moderators is PGP-signed
> > (and encrypted when necessary)
> <snip>
> > 3) All message approved for posting to usenet get signed with Greg
> > Rose's PGPMoose program.
> <snip>
> > 4) There is an additional service for those who post through anonymous
> > remailers BUT want to have an identity and reputation.
> <snip>  <Great idea!>
> > We currently have at least two posters whose real life identities are
> > unknown, who use this feature and have sent us their PGP keys.
> > 
> > STUMP is currently working in production mode seemingly with no problems.
> 
> 
> Okay Igor, that is an impressive list of features!  Now what 

thanks

> I want to know (and what I want other people here to hear) is:
> _How_ difficult was it to incorporate these PGP features into
> your software? 

Almost nothing is dufficult, in general. In particular, implementation
of these features was easy. Coming up with how they should work was
not that easy. Thanks to members of Cypherpunks list for their
suggestions, by the way.

You know, this stuff is easy to do in perl and sh.

> My guess is that it was a simple matter of
> making a couple of system calls to PGP, plus maybe extra 
> defense against replay attacks (you _do_ have defense against
> replay attacks don't you?) and the fact that you have more
> debugging work because you have more features.

Depends on what replay attacks you are talking about. If you are
more specific, I can talk about it.

Some of it is discussed at

	http://www.algebra.com/~ichudov/usenet/scrm/robomod/robomod.html

	- Igor.

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You know, Igor...


(It has been a few months since I was hot on this idea, but
hearing about your practical PGP successes has gotten me
interested again...)


If you have a moderation bot for a Usenet group (and could it be
pressed into service as a mailing list handler I wonder?), this
would be a nice tool to start with in order to implement
full-fledged content/author ratings.  Anybody wanna hack a perl
script or two to produce/consume content/author ratings for
cypherpunks (it could surely use some!).  We can use my dormant
mailing list, c2punks@c2.net, as a parallel channel to transmit
cypherpunk (and maybe other) ratings.


Let me know.  We _could_ adopt the ridiculously simple NoCeM
protocol, or the ever-mutating public key certificates being
designed in a nearby mailing list, or some protocol of our own.
(Shouldn't be too hard to come up with an implementable, useful
protocol.)


(And of course we can mix Ecash(tm) in...)


Bryce

P.S.  Look for demo in a second.




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bryce@digicash.com wrote:
> You know, Igor...
> (It has been a few months since I was hot on this idea, but
> hearing about your practical PGP successes has gotten me
> interested again...)
> 
> If you have a moderation bot for a Usenet group (and could it be
> pressed into service as a mailing list handler I wonder?), this

Yes, it can be. When I was writing it I had in mind that I want
to write a general moderation bot that can be _applied_ to USENET.

There is a script processApproved which is called when a message 
should get posted. If you replace the usenet version of processApproved
to mailing list version, you will be done.

> would be a nice tool to start with in order to implement
> full-fledged content/author ratings. 

Well, STUMP is a generic moderation tool.

> Anybody wanna hack a perl
> script or two to produce/consume content/author ratings for
> cypherpunks (it could surely use some!).  We can use my dormant
> mailing list, c2punks@c2.net, as a parallel channel to transmit
> cypherpunk (and maybe other) ratings.

So, what you want is a tool that accepts "unmoderated" cpunks list,
selects messages by authors with high ratings, and forwards only
these into the "filtered" list? That's neat _if_ ratings are done
by people whose tastes are similar to mine..

> Let me know.  We _could_ adopt the ridiculously simple NoCeM
> protocol, or the ever-mutating public key certificates being
> designed in a nearby mailing list, or some protocol of our own.
> (Shouldn't be too hard to come up with an implementable, useful
> protocol.)

?????

	- Igor.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

An Igor-like entity wrote something like this:
>
> Yes, it can be. When I was writing it I had in mind that I want
> to write a general moderation bot that can be _applied_ to USENET.
> 
> There is a script processApproved which is called when a message 
> should get posted. If you replace the usenet version of processApproved
> to mailing list version, you will be done.


Nice design.  :-)


> > Anybody wanna hack a perl
> > script or two to produce/consume content/author ratings for
> > cypherpunks (it could surely use some!).  We can use my dormant
> > mailing list, c2punks@c2.net, as a parallel channel to transmit
> > cypherpunk (and maybe other) ratings.
> 
> So, what you want is a tool that accepts "unmoderated" cpunks list,
> selects messages by authors with high ratings, and forwards only
> these into the "filtered" list? That's neat _if_ ratings are done
> by people whose tastes are similar to mine..


Hm.  That might be an interesting addition to my plan, but the 
first step is to generate ratings and to consume them at each
individual's mail-handling site.  So I, for example, would run a
script every time I received mail (or every hour, or every day,
etc) which looked for ratings certificates, PGP-verified them,
and saved the rating in a database.  Then I would run another
script (every time I received mail, or every hour, etc.) which
identified incoming messages and _did_ something to them if 
there were sufficient ratings in the database to merit _doing_
something to them (e.g. delete, promote to a "well-rated"
folder, demote to a "poorly-rated" folder, forward to my
friends, forward to my enemies, etc.).


Now as you astutely note, this is only valuable if you like the
ratings.  Thus it is necessary to have meta-ratings.  The
simplest meta-rating is "rate raters by hand".  That is, you
manually make a list of (potential) raters and put their public
key ID and a coefficient indicating how much you value their
ratings into a meta-ratings database.


More complicated meta-ratings include "how often did I agree
with them", true (acquired from other people) meta-ratings,
and... um..  automated textual analysis or whatever other whacky
heuristic you want to plug in.


This could be so much fun...


Bryce

P.S.  Oh yeah... The demo.  Just a sec.



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Message-Id: <199607062132.QAA00782@manifold.algebra.com>
Subject: Re: Need PGP-awareness in common utilities
To: bryce@digicash.com
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 16:32:38 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: ichudov@algebra.com, cypherpunks@toad.com, e$@thumper.vmeng.com
Reply-To: ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov)
In-Reply-To: <199607062117.XAA25154@digicash.com> from "bryce@digicash.com" at Jul 6, 96 11:16:59 pm
From: ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home)
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X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME7]
Content-Type: text

bryce@digicash.com wrote:
> You know, Igor...
> (It has been a few months since I was hot on this idea, but
> hearing about your practical PGP successes has gotten me
> interested again...)
> 
> If you have a moderation bot for a Usenet group (and could it be
> pressed into service as a mailing list handler I wonder?), this

Yes, it can be. When I was writing it I had in mind that I want
to write a general moderation bot that can be _applied_ to USENET.

There is a script processApproved which is called when a message 
should get posted. If you replace the usenet version of processApproved
to mailing list version, you will be done.

> would be a nice tool to start with in order to implement
> full-fledged content/author ratings. 

Well, STUMP is a generic moderation tool.

> Anybody wanna hack a perl
> script or two to produce/consume content/author ratings for
> cypherpunks (it could surely use some!).  We can use my dormant
> mailing list, c2punks@c2.net, as a parallel channel to transmit
> cypherpunk (and maybe other) ratings.

So, what you want is a tool that accepts "unmoderated" cpunks list,
selects messages by authors with high ratings, and forwards only
these into the "filtered" list? That's neat _if_ ratings are done
by people whose tastes are similar to mine..

> Let me know.  We _could_ adopt the ridiculously simple NoCeM
> protocol, or the ever-mutating public key certificates being
> designed in a nearby mailing list, or some protocol of our own.
> (Shouldn't be too hard to come up with an implementable, useful
> protocol.)

?????

	- Igor.

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