List of Archived Posts

2002 Newsgroup Postings (10/12 - 11/09)

additional pictures of the 6180

Tweaking old computers?

SRP authentication for web app

Tweaking old computers?

Tweaking old computers?

Tweaking old computers?

Tweaking old computers?

Tweaking old computers?

Tweaking old computers?

Asynch I/O

Coherent TLBs

Wanted: the SOUNDS of classic computing

Tweaking old computers?

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

So how does it work... (public/private key)

Tweaking old computers?

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

updated security glossary & taxonomy

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

Tweaking old computers?

Tweaking old computers?

Tweaking old computers?

Sandia, Cray and AMD

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

why does wait state exist?

why does wait state exist?

why does wait state exist?

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

why does wait state exist?

why does wait state exist?

why does wait state exist?

Opera 6.05 resources problem?

VR vs. Portable Computing

VR vs. Portable Computing

VR vs. Portable Computing

VR vs. Portable Computing

CMS update

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

Home mainframes

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

VR vs. Portable Computing

public-key cryptography impossible?

RFC 2647 terms added to merged security glossary

Tweaking old computers?

Tweaking old computers?

Tweaking old computers?

Tweaking old computers?

EXCP

History of HEX and ASCII

Computing on Demand ... was cpu metering

SHARE MVT Project anniversary

SHARE MVT Project anniversary

ibm time machine in new york times?

REVIEW: "Internet Security Dictionary", Vir V. Phoha

SHARE MVT Project anniversary

IBM S/370-168, 195, and 3033

IBM S/370-168, 195, and 3033

Follklore

Who wrote the obituary for John Cocke?

PLX

Help me find pics of a UNIVAC please

PLX

Follklore

Mainframe Spreadsheets - 1980's History

Mainframe Spreadsheets - 1980's History

merged security glossary updated with glossary from CIAO

merged security glossary updated with glossary from CIAO

The Forrest Curve (annual posting)

bps loader, was PLX

bps loader, was PLX

Home mainframes

Everything you wanted to know about z900 from IBM

additional pictures of the 6180

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: additional pictures of the 6180
Newsgroups: alt.os.multics
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 02:02:00 GMT

"Hugo Drax" writes:

Thats sad, you would think people would have taken pictures of these
machines for documentary purposes. its almost like a whole generation of
computing history will dissapear without any visual documentation for
younger generations. I never seen a 6180 and when I sat that pic on the
multicians.org site my jaw dropped I thought what a cool looking system Now
thats a real computer :)  I can see how people in the 60's,70's were
intimidated by computers thinking they were going to take over the world and
the human race. seeing something like that to a layperson would definately
leave an impression. Vs todays miniscule mainframes with its 1 power switch
and 1 power light.

i remember taking a bunch of slides of the machine room on the 2nd
floor in the early '70s (of course it wasn't GE645 ... that was on the
upper floor) ... but can't seem to find them now ... i may have sent
some of them off to melinda for some reason or another
http://www.princeton.edu/~melinda/

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Tweaking old computers?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tweaking old computers?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 15:03:43 GMT

Charles Richmond writes:

What all these speed-up and volume-increasing stories shows
is that the companies liked getting something for nothing.
They are playing with the idea of "perceived value", and
trying to support the spectrum of their computer offerings
without actually creating a spectrum of computer models.

ISTM, that this is a hideous way to do business, and certainly
screws the customer backward!!! How can you build up trust
with a customer when you treat them like this??? As I said
before, this shows bad business practice and poor professional
ethics on the part of the companies that engaged in this.

another facet is that way back when a lot of the data processing
equipment was leased ... not sold; the customer was paying for the
degree/amount of service ... they didn't own the equipment.

as somewhat implied in other posts ... was that many of these
operations had huge up-front costs and manufacturing/delivery costs
were lower percentage (there tended to be significantly lower volumes
than some of today PC volumes). I believe some aspect of that has been
in the news related to high costs of drugs ... significant percentage
is the up-front costs.

a frequent scenario was that the device was designed and priced based
on full capacity and the projected volumes for that design point. Then
you get a bunch of customers saying that they would buy it if it was
only cheaper/slower (they didn't need all that capacity anyway). This
original design point may represent 80 percent of the market size.

There may be an emerging/entry market that wants half the capacity at
half the price but the size of this market is only 1/5th the original
target market. Cutting the price in half for everybody in order to
pick up 20 percent more sales could fail to recover the up front costs
(and in some cases might violate some gov. decree that products not be
priced at less than costs).

The size of the emerging, entry level market may not be sufficient to
justify designing a totally different product because in order to
recover independent up-front costs the product might have to be priced
four times that of the standard product. Sometimes the problem is that
there is a misimpression that because something is 1/2 something else
that it costs 1/2; and/or that entry level market is significantly
larger than mainstream market.

So in a product market that is extremely price sensitive to up-front
costs (design, manufacturing setup, etc represents significant large
percentage of the price), there may be a tendency to try and amortize
those costs over a larger market segment and that may require (or the
gov. effectively demand) tiered pricing of effectively the identical
product for different parts of the market (or not serve that market at
all).

A more recent example might be the 486DX/486SX .... the 486SX was
effectively the same chip at a lower price with floating point
(permanently) disabled. The cost of taking basically a 486DX and
disabling floating point is likely to have been significantly less
than designing a 486SX chip from scratch.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

SRP authentication for web app

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: SRP authentication for web app
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 15:27:08 GMT

Paul Rubin <phr-n2002b@NOSPAMnightsong.com> writes:

It doesn't seem that important.  Just use an SSL connection and do
password authentication over it.  Or are you afraid of somebody using
a forged server certificate?

doesn't have to be a forged server certificate ... it can just be a
valid server certificate in the case of domain name take-over.

one of the major reasons for SSL domain name server certificates are
trust issues regarding the domain name infrstructure ... and can you
trust the domain name infrastructure to correctly point you at the
server you want to be pointed at.

however, what happens when a trusted third party certification
authority gets a request for a server domain name certificate .... it
has to go verify that the requester is valid for that domain name
... in order to do validate information that is "bound" in a
certificate it is to issue, it must check with the authoritative
agency for the information it is certifying. For domain names, the
authoritative agency is the domain name infrastructure. This creates
sort of a catch-22 ... the same agency that everybody is worried about
trust issues ... and generates the requirement for SSL domain name
certificates ... is also the same agency that the CAs rely on for
effectively the same information.

So it is possible to attack the domain name infrastructure and result
in individuals getting bad information and point to the wrong server.
It is also possible to attack the domain name infrastructure, apply
for a valid certificate, get the certificate and result in individuals
getting bad information and point to the wrong server. All of this is
frequently obscured by discussions regarding the integrity of the
mathematical process that protects the information in a certificate.
In some cases the obfuscation can be distraction that the
trust/quality of the information directly from the domain name
infrastructure and the trust/quality of the information in a
certificate is nearly the same (so what that it is extremely difficult
to attack the integrity of a certificate once it has been created ...
if it much simple to attack the integrity of the source of the
information that goes into a certificate).

So the CA businesses have a requirement to improve the integrity of
the domain name infrastructure .... so that not only can the integrity
of certificates can be trusted ... but also the integrity of the
information in a certificate can be trusted. The catch-22 here is that
improving the integrity of the domain name infrastructure so that
information from the domain name infrastructure can be trusted (by
CAs) ...  also significantly reduces the requirement for needing SSL
domain name certifictaes (since others will also better trust the
information from the domain name infrastructure).

So the question isn't just about being afraid of a forged server
certificate (aka the integrity of the certificate itself) but also
things like spoofed domain name (the integrity of the information in
the certificate, valid certificate, bad information).

misc. refs to various domain name exploits:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fraud
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#sslcerts

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Tweaking old computers?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tweaking old computers?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 16:12:12 GMT

also in somewhat related scenario (that i'm more familiar with) is the
transition days starting to charge for software.

at hundred thousand foot level, one of the processes was to select
high, medium, and low price and then do volume forcast (market size)
at those prices. one check was that (gov. requirement?) forcast volume
times price had to be greater than costs. Higher price tended to be
lower volumes, lower price tended to be higher volumes (of course
there is the vodka maker tale about 30 percent price increase doubled
the volume).

For the most part (at this point in time), software manufacturing and
distribution costs were pretty volume insensitive ... vast majority of
the costs are up-front with development, organizational setup, etc
(fixed up front training costs of field support people might be as
much as development). Anyway in this transition period ... some
software projects found that there was no forcasted price point where
development costs could be recovered ... and they couldn't go to
market.

also to hardware scenario an equivalent entry level analogy these days
(with software) is with demo/freeware where you have the full product
but it is crippled (or not full function) pending paying (additional)
money and getting an unlocking key.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Tweaking old computers?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tweaking old computers?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 18:59:47 GMT

Steve O'Hara-Smith writes:

Wouldn't some of these be rejects with failures in the FP
circuitry thus increasing the effective yield of the line ?

i also heard that the intel electronic solid-state disk was totally
populated with memory chips that had failed the standard acceptance
tests. That many of these failed chips could be compensated for with
circuitry that assumed higher latency and large block transfers (at
least compared to random access memory operational characteristics).

this assumes that there is some yield issues to begin with .... if
there happens to be nearly 100 percent yield ... using the product to
implement other products with different operational characteristics
wouldn't help (assuming the alternative products are lower cost).
Another kind of yield is sorting for max. operational frequency where
the chips show a significant variance.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Tweaking old computers?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tweaking old computers?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 17:33:44 GMT

note many of these issues come up related to trying to make the
transition from an early agrarian/gathering society to an industrial
society. the economic model in the agrarian/gathering society is
frequently that there is almost a linear, simplistic relationship
between the delivered product and the work effort/value (and tends to
contribute to the simplesting economic view by members of such
societies).

in the transition to industrial (and even information) society there
are frequently signficiant up front, fixed costs that are relatively
independent of the actual item delivered. As a result it becomes a lot
more complicated to demonstrate a linear economic relationship with
one specific item in isolation from the overall infrastructure.

The fixed, up front infrastructure costs contribute to significantly
increased efficiencies compared to the linear econcomic relationships
found in the early agrarian/gathering infrastructures ... assuming
some specific product delivery volumes. However, if such huge up front
infrastructures were developed and delivered only one item ... it is
pretty obvious that it wouldn't be economically viable compared to an
earlier agrarian/gathering infrastructure (with a strictly linear
relationship). It is only being able to amortize such up-front
infrastructures & costs across a large volume that the economic
benefit accrures to the participants of such infrastructures. A more
simplistic explanation is that in such environments, the cost of
producing five times as many items is typically a lot less than a
factor of five (which would be the case in the earlier
agrarian/gathering societies). As a result there is much more
atttention given to a pricing paradigm that recovers the cost of the
up-front infrastructures (which is frequently more complex than the
more simplistic agrarian/gathering societies that are just looking at
economic recovery of the linear costs associated with per item
production).

I remember in the early '80s looking at devices produced strictly for
the computer industry with a price per unit in the $6k range. Similar
items with similar capability (actually more advanced) that had been
produced for the consumer electronic business were in the $300-$600
dollar range (between a 10:1 to 20:1 price reduction). The direct
linear work effort that went into production of the different items
were nearly the same.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Tweaking old computers?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tweaking old computers?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 18:55:20 GMT

Steve O'Hara-Smith writes:

Which is in itself something of a pain if you have a big fat
box that wou would like to burden additionally with a little light use of
some tool. You find yourself choosing between a dedicated single CPU box
(perhaps 5% loaded), a 20 CPU license or (my favorite at this point) some
other tool. But yes that is indeed a probable gotcha.

mainframes have even gotten more interesting ... as more and more
virtual machine assists were dropped into the hardware/m'code ... it
became possible to do a virtual machine offering subset as a direct
hardware offering ... aka LPARS (Logical PARtitions). So you can "buy"
a box with certain hardware enabled and effectively spares warehoused
right on site (it use to be that customers paid extra to have spares
and/or upgrade hardware warehoused in near proximity ... or in some
cases provided rooms right off the main machine room ... now
technology is such that additional hardware can be packaged right
inside each box).

So you can have physical machine with N number of processors enabled,
running LPARs where each LPAR can have some number of logical
processors where it is possible to specify the CPU utilizatin target
for that LPAR (finer granularity than whole processors), and within an
LPAR you can also have a virtual machine operating system ... that can
provide even finer granularity.

I think that was the 40,000 copies of linux from two years ago,
running in a modest sized LPAR under vm (aka VM was providing 40,000
virtual machines for 40,000 different copies of linux and VM was
running in an LPAR that was less than the whole machine.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Tweaking old computers?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tweaking old computers?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 19:56:15 GMT

note as manual service costs increased, first there was a migration to
FRUs and then actually packaging for spares or sparing. lots of the
sparing ... the customer would pay more for the availability. This obviously
seen in the HA configurations ... my wife and I did ha/cmp
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

various ha/cmp configurations would be simple 1+1 fall-over where
spare idle machine was just sitting there waiting to take
over. Customer was typically paying more than two times a simple
non-ha configuration (at least for the hardware .... but possibly got
by with just a single-copy application software licenses).

I believe one of the other factors was lots of gov. contracts started
specifying field upgradable hardware (gov. regs that made it
significantly easier to get new hardware as upgrades than as
replacement).

So ... tied into industrial non-linear production ... a combination of
work already going on in sparing ... and at least the gov. market
segment being big driver in field upgrading ... a natural evoluation
would be field upgradability built in at time of original
manufacturing (compared to cost of having physical person appear).

This industrial-age paradigm is somewhat out of synch with the linear
process found in the early agrarian/gathering cultures (the book
flatlanders also comes to mind as a possible analogy).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Tweaking old computers?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tweaking old computers?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 16:00:21 GMT

jmfbahciv writes:

I don't know if each board had a serial.  Gawd...we had enough
problems just trying to keep track of software edit levels.  I have
no idea how the hardware half kept track of their parts.  Boards
might be possible but not components on boards.

one of the things that a lot of (involving larger hardware components)
startups learned as the evolved from technology to service ... is that
that they needed to know the EC-level of the components ... even
consumer electronics have serial numbers for warrenty purposes ... but
also for EC-level/manufacturing date stuff. there are manufacturing
quality control stuff related to all pieces in same lot/batch ... but
there are also design/implementation bugs which get changed/upgraded
over time.

I have heard of people talk about nightmare situations after they got
the first 100 (or 1000) units to customers and a proper tracking
system hadn't been set-up before hand. Then along comes field service
and begins to really confuse what level are the components at any
specific customer location.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Asynch I/O

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Asynch I/O
Newsgroups: comp.arch,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 16:44:25 GMT

"John S. Dyson" writes:

It would be interesting to see the report, because the idea that Berkeley
wasn't so good at disk I/O might or might not be true, depending upon
which version of AT&T it was being compared with.   The 'standard'
SVR3 AT&T had horrid disk block fragmentation in the standard filesystem,
but SVR4 (and later versions of SVR3) used the Berkeley FFS scheme.

i have copy of margo's papers from tr-ftp directory long ago and far away:

  18844 Jun  1  1993 jobs.slides.ps.gz
  91160 Jun  1  1993 usenix.1.93.ps.gz
  84246 Jun  1  1993 txnsim.tar.gz
 338106 Jun  1  1993 thesis.ps.gz
 102210 Jun  1  1993 andrew.tar.gz

she did a lot of work on FFS, log-structured ... and if i remember
correctly there were comparisons between FFS, log-structured, Sprite
and some others (she also consulted on some ha/cmp issues after she
graduated).

I also archived many of the Raid papers from the same time.

somewhat as total aside
http://hyperion.cs.berkeley.edu/

has announcement of the RAID Project 10-year reunion (for members of
the raid project only)

old raid stuff from their site

    56607 Mar  2  1996 raid5stripe.ps.gz
    27235 Mar  2  1996 nossdav93.ps.gz
    23779 Mar  2  1996 mss93rama.ps.gz
   185174 Mar  2  1996 ieeetocs93.ps.gz
    91530 Mar  2  1996 algorithmica.ps.gz
    90941 Mar  2  1996 tech93_778.ps.gz
   456694 Mar  2  1996 tech93_770.ps.gz
    82033 Mar 29  1993 tech91_616.ps.gz
   141166 Mar 29  1993 winter93usenix.ps.gz
    89675 Mar 29  1993 sigmetrics93.ps.gz
    44589 Mar 29  1993 vlsisys93.ps.gz
      763 Mar 29  1993 journal.bib.gz
     6047 Mar 29  1993 raid.bib.gz
    40624 Mar 29  1993 ipps93.ps.gz
     2029 Mar 29  1993 README.gz
   119689 Jul 25  1992 measureSOSP91.ps.gz
    41298 Jul 25  1992 benchUsenix90.ps.gz
    22541 Jul 25  1992 zebra.ps.gz
   141279 Jun  6  1992 asplos91.ps.gz
   172963 Jun  6  1992 tech90_573.ps.gz
   174414 Jun  6  1992 tech91_660.ps.gz
    62023 Jun  6  1992 tech92_672.ps.gz
    81019 Jun  6  1992 sigmetrics91.ps.gz
    45582 Jun  6  1992 sigarch90.ps.gz
    69140 Jun  6  1992 sigmetrics90.ps.gz
    33854 Jun  6  1992 usenix90.ps.gz
    76536 Jun  6  1992 superComputing91.ps.gz
    76194 Jun  6  1992 tech91_638.ps.gz

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Coherent TLBs

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Coherent TLBs
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 08:21:40 -0600

iain-3@truecircuits.com (Iain McClatchie) writes:

One possible scheme to improve SMP TLB flushes is to architect a
global TLB flush operation.  The CPU informs all other CPUs to flush
TLB entries corresponding to a given virtual address.  The difficulty
here is that other CPUs may have allocated the address space a
different ASID, so that the flush operation either operates across all
processes (generating multiple hits in the TLB and requiring hardware
to deal with that).  For large SMPs, this scheme requires coherency
traffic scaling as the square of the number of CPUs, which is bad.

original 370 architecture had global PTLB, ISTO, ISTE, & IPTE machines
that would invalidate all TLBs in complex.

PTLB .... purge all TLB entries in all TLBs
ISTO .... purge all TLB entries for a STO (segment table origin, aka
          address space) in all TLBs
ISTE .... purge all TLB entries for a STE (segment table entry) in
          all TLBs, in addition turn on the invalid bit in the STE
IPTE .... purge TLB entry for a PTE (page table entry) in all TLBs,
          in addition turn on the invalid bit in the PTE

because the selective invalidates would have resulted in delaying
virtual memory hardware for the 370/165 by six months (and delayed 370
virtual memory for the whole product line), initial 370 only announced
and shipped PTLB (even tho some of the other 370 machine models had
already implemented all four).

The 370s TLBs (for the TLBs that supported multiple concurrent address
spaces) were STO associative, which was the (consistent) real address
of the segment table origin, the same across all processors.

The IPTE selective invalidate finally appeared with the 3033 model in
the late '70s.

with or w/o selective invalidate ... the sequence still required a CPU
signal broadcast; typical scenario was turn on the invalid bit in the
PTE (either with IPTE or an OI followed by PTLB) and then broadcast
because there was kernel code (running in parallel) that might be
operating on the virtual memory page using its real address. Some of
the implementations tended to try and batch up a whole slew of page
invalidates at a single time ... amortizing the broadcast that
"drained" any kernel operations in progress that were using real
address. There was some trade-off regarding relatively short-lived
kernel operations getting locks on the address space as a means of
serializing any page invalidates against that address space.

There was also a lot of discussion in the 1970 time-frame about
advantages of STE-associative TLBs (rather than STO-associative) to
improve invalidates in the case of segment sharing. An IPTE on a PTE
in a shared segment ... might possibly involve multiple different TLB
entries in a STO-associative (aka address space associative) TLB. For
a STO-associative TLB, the choices were having logic at TLB entry load
time to not allow multiple TLB entries for the same PTE (aka real
address) ... or software cycled invalidates for all possible STOs (aka
address space) ... or the software punts and just does a PTLB
(whenever it dealt with page that might be in multiple different
address spaces).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Wanted: the SOUNDS of classic computing

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Wanted: the SOUNDS of classic computing
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.pdp10
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 21:52:09 GMT

Charles Richmond writes:

Re-reading what Brian Inglis wrote, I can see how you got the
idea that he meant removing all "can't happen" checks. My
reading understood that he meant cleaning out "dead code"...
that was what I was meaning with my reply. Surely, checks for
"can't happen" often need to be left in.

In the past, I've made different assertions ... that to take an
application and turn it into a service ... can result in 4-10 times
additional programming as the original application ... lots of it
checking for can't happen scenarios. Sometimes it is only 3 times as
much code ... but ten times as hard ... because it is trying to
predict all the impossible conditions and handle before they happen.

part of this i gave at keynote for nasa high assurance conference last
year ...  pointer at:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html

something similar was done in support of the original stuff for what
is frequently now called e-commerce.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn1 Assurance, e-commerce, and some x9.59 ... fyi
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn2 Assurance, e-commerce, and some x9.59 ... fyi
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn3 Assurance, e-commerce, and some x9.59 ... fyi
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn4 assurance, X9.59, etc

misc past postings on industrial/commercial strength computing:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#44 bloat
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/98.html#4 VSE or MVS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001d.html#70 Pentium 4 Prefetch engine?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#1 Alpha:  an invitation to communicate
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001l.html#4 mainframe question
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001l.html#14 mainframe question
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#90 Buffer overflow
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#91 Buffer overflow
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#93 Buffer overflow
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#24 Buffer overflow
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#26 Buffer overflow
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#28 Buffer overflow
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#32 Buffer overflow
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#38 Buffer overflow
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#23 Computers in Science Fiction

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Tweaking old computers?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tweaking old computers?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 21:59:25 GMT

jcmorris@mitre.org (Joe Morris) writes:

Just ask any IBMer who was with the company during the antitrust litigation,
when Edelstein ordered that EVERYTHING be preserved.

there was joke in POK about 705/706 building when everything else was
full ... they started vacating a row of offices and filling them at
the rate of one or two per day ... at least until the floor loading
rating became a serious issue. I remember walking down an isle of scuh
offices.

It must have made an impression on me ... because i also started
backing things up ... frequently in triplicate (although I had
situations where all three copies got scratched because of operator
error).  some of mine (and others) fanaticism for backing everything
up ... leaked into things like email products (which may have
contributed to issue at the white house in the early '80s).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Help! Good protocol for national ID card?
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 21:33:20 GMT

Jay Miller <jnmiller@@cryptofreak.org> writes:

A (non-homework!) problem: suppose you were designing an ID card.  You
want it to be useful in readers all over the world, but you do not
want to grant holders the right to modify or create their own cards
even if they are given the physical pieces necessary to do so. (ie.
on-card data must be encrypted.)

Is there any solution that doesn't require every reader in the world
be either 'special' in the sense that it physically holds the key or
networked such that it can download the key on demand?

If not, can the key be split somehow to minimize the destructiveness
of a single reader being reverse-engineered (a la. CSS)?

Or if so, can the algorithm be made public?

look at the AADS chip strawman
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#aads

it isn't an identification chip ... it is an authentication chip (and,
yes there can be significant difference).

in conjunction with x9.59 and aads
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959

the objective was purefly to provide strong authentication in an
otherwise untrusted environment.

the chip can be 7816 contract, 14443 contactless, usb, 2-way combo
(7816+usb, 7816+14443, 14443+usb) or 3-way combo.

no keys required in the reader for the card to perform the
authentication operator. basically the card is at a known integrity
level and relying party can choose to trust something at that
integrity level.

the reader is an integrity issue however ... not so much for correct
chip operation ... but for correct business process operation; some of
that shows up in the EU finread stuff. the issue is not whether the
AADS chip provides correct authentication ... in straight
authentication business processes .... but there are business process
that have both authentication & approval facets; aka a chip is used
to demonstrate both authentication and approval; like a financial
transaction, the person is both authenticating themselves and agreeing
to pay a merchant some amount of money. While an untrusted reader
can't spoof the authentication ... an untrusted reader may transmit a
transaction to the card for $5000 when only displaying $50 (the person
thinks they are authenticating and approving a $50 transaction, not a
$5000 transaction).

one approach is to potentially have the reader also sign any
transaction, the relying party can then evaluate the integrity of the
authentication chip, and also evaluate the integrity of any reader
that may have also signed the transaction ... with respect to
performing any operation.

misc finread &/or intention related stuff:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm11.htm#4 AW: Digital signatures as proof
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm11.htm#5 Meaning of Non-repudiation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm11.htm#6 Meaning of Non-repudiation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm11.htm#7 Meaning of Non-repudiation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm11.htm#9 Meaning of Non-repudiation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm11.htm#13 Words, Books, and Key Usage
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm11.htm#23 Proxy PKI. Was: IBM alternative to PKI?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#0 maximize best case, worst case, or average case? (TCPA)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#13 anybody seen (EAL5) semi-formal specification for FIPS186-2/x9.62 ecdsa?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#18 Overcoming the potential downside of TCPA
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#19 TCPA not virtualizable during ownership change (Re: Overcoming the potential downside of TCPA)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#24 Interests of online banks and their users [was Re: Cryptogram:  Palladium Only for DRM]
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#30 Employee Certificates - Security Issues
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#46 Security Issues of using Internet Banking
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#55 Security Issues of using Internet Banking
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#69 Digital signature
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#13 Biometric authentication for intranet websites?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#77 Does Diffie-Hellman  schema belong to Public Key schema family?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#29 mailing list history from vmshare
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#24 Two questions on HMACs and hashing
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#28 Two questions on HMACs and hashing
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#38 Convenient and secure eCommerce using POWF

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

So how does it work... (public/private key)

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: So how does it work...  (public/private key)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2002 03:53:26 GMT

Carlos Moreno writes:

Unless...  Wait...  I guess encrypting per se with
the private key makes no sense (if you can use the
public key to decrypt it, then who are we hiding
the information from?)...  So, if it's just a matter
of guaranteeing that some information comes from
me, then I guess I could take some data, make it
visible, and then decrypt that data with my private
key?  (then, others can use my public key to encrypt
what I decrypted and see if it gives the same data
I made visible?). Would that be fool proof?  Can't
data be falsified with such approach?

digital signatures (taking the hash of the contents and then
encrypting the hash) provides "integrity" and "authentication" ...
while not (necessarily) providing confidentiality (i.e. the actual
encryption of the data itself).

FIPS186-2 is one such digital signature algorithm that uses FIPS180,
SHA-1 (and now SHA-2).
http://csrc.nist.gov/cryptval/dss.htm

in any case issues are (at least):

integrity
authentication
confidentiality

some cases integrity and authentication are sufficient w/o actually
requiring confidentiality.

one of the most common scenarios on the internet is electronic
commerce in conjunction with SSL. A major function of SSL is to
encrypt the credit card number and keep it confidential. Note however,
that the PAN (aka primary account number, aka credit card number) is
needed in a large number of business processes ... and therefor while
SSL provides confidentiality for the number while in transit/flight ...
it doesn't do anything for the number while at rest. most of the
credit card exploits have been involved with some part or another
of the business process where the number is in the clear. misc.
fraud/exploit refernces (including some card related stuff):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#fraud

the x9a10 financial standards working group was to devise a standard
for all electronic retail payments (credit, debit, stored-value, etc)
that preserved the integrity of the financial infrastructure
... regardless of the environment (pos, internet, etc). The result
was x9.59
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959

in this scenario ... the analysis was that the fundamental problems
was the credit card number had to be both a shared-secret (needing
confidentiality) as well as open and pretty freely available because
of the various business process. The x9.59 solution wasn't to try and
add more levels of confidentiality (and there never would be enuf) and
instead change things so the credit card number was no longer a
shared-secret and therefor didn't require confidentiallity (or
encryption). Basically x9.59 defines transactions that are always
digitally signed (providing both integrity and authentication) and the
PAN used in a x9.59 transaction can never be used in a non-X9.59
(non-authenticated) transaction. That business rule ... then removes
(x9.59) PAN from the category of shared-secret (since knowing the PAN
is not sufficient to perform a fraudulent transaction). Since the PAN
is no longer a shared-secret ... it no longer requires confidentiality
(encryption) to protect it. Integrity and authentication (i.e. digital
signature) is sufficient. Furthermore since the PAN is no longer a
shared-secret .... its exposure in a multitude of other business
processes is also no longer a risk.

A slightly related posting regarding PAN as a shared-secret ... and
the issue of the necessary level of security (and confidentiality)
that would be proportional to the fraud risk:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#61 Net banking, is it safe????

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Tweaking old computers?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tweaking old computers?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2002 21:06:46 GMT

Eric Smith <eric-no-spam-for-me@brouhaha.com> writes:

Might have been true for some later models, but the 155 and 165, which
were introduced before the 370 Principles of Operation defined address
translation, needed a major retrofit to add that feature.  Almost but
not quite a "forklift upgrade".

while it was already in the 135 & 145 and was just a m'code change at
announcement ...there is the story about customers at SHARE asking
what the "XLT" label was on the roller lights on the front panel (aka
translate).

there was also the (pentagon paper-like) scenario involving the
leakage of a virtual memory document to somebody in the press some
months before announcement .... big investigation and a result that
all comapny copying machines were retrofitted with a serial number on
the glass that printed thru on all copies.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Help! Good protocol for national ID card?
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2002 21:35:37 GMT

there there is the alternative explanation.

you craft a public key and take it to these mystical organizations
called certification authorities. They laboriously create an object of
great power called a certificate and grant it great magical powers.
The certificate is used to create a digital signature and it only
performs this duty when you have thoroughly understood and agreed with
the meaning contained in the computer binary bits that are being
digitally signed. Such digital signatures now carry the attribute of
non-repudiation ... that it is impossible for you to later claim
that you don't fully agree with the terms and conditions expressed in
any computer binary bits that carry your digital signature.

some past discussions on the subject of ssl domain name certificates
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#sslcert

some recent refs to non-repudiation and such stuff
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#0 maximize best case, worst case, or average case? (TCPA)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#5 NEWS: 3D-Secure and Passport
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#13 anybody seen (EAL5) semi-formal specification for FIPS186-2/x9.62 ecdsa?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#18 Overcoming the potential downside of TCPA
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#19 TCPA not virtualizable during ownership change (Re: Overcoming the potential downside of TCPA)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#24 Interests of online banks and their users [was Re: Cryptogram:  Palladium Only for DRM]
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#30 Employee Certificates - Security Issues

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

updated security glossary & taxonomy

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: updated security glossary & taxonomy
Newsgroups: comp.security.misc
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 17:04:52 GMT

i recently updated merged security glossary at
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#glossary

with nstissc glossary:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nstissc.gov/Assets/pdf/4009.pdf
notes on other sources:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#glosnote

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Help! Good protocol for national ID card?
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 20:18:35 GMT

Jay Miller <jnmiller@@cryptofreak.org> writes:

A chip-card of this sort would probably solve this problem, but I'm
afraid I'm limited to hardware independent solutions.  Also, the data
must be assumed both readable and writable publicly (e.g. assume it's
a floppy disk).

Note AADS is general framework that can use any media ... 5-6 years ago
when I started on it ... the standard was private key in an encrypted file
(required password/pin to use). The file could be on floppy, hard disk,
cdrom, etc.

I joked that wasn't sufficient integrity for many purposes ... so I
joked that I wanted to take a $500 mil-spec part, cost reduce it by
more than two orders of magnitude and at the same time increase the
integrity/security ... that basically is the aads chip strawman.

aads and the aads chip strawman aren't synonymous ... but it looked
like trying to put together a high integrity chip would be an
interesting exercise.

I gave a talk about the effort in the TCPA track on assurance at the
intel developer's conference two years ago ... slides at
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#aads

a little further down in the screen.

I somewhat joked that the TPM specification at that time was such that
the aads chip strawman could meet all of the TPM requirements; The
other part of the joke (from somebody in the audience) was that I came
to the design almost three years earlier than TCPA because i didn't
have 200 people in committees helping me with the design.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Help! Good protocol for national ID card?
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 21:46:36 GMT

Christopher Browne writes:

People that haven't thought things through imagine that maybe having
an "Alien Visitors Card" would prevent terrorists from entering the
US.  But they fail to grasp that it only prevents this if there is a
/perfect/ screening process that gives cards to "safe" people and
denies access to "terrorists."

the supposed magical properties of id cards are also frequently
attributed to (id/x.509) certificates as well ... re previous posting
in this thread ... not only id'ing ... but empowered with other
mystical properaties like non-repudiation.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#16

misc privacy/identification/biometrics and authentication vis-a-vis
identification
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#privacy

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Help! Good protocol for national ID card?
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 23:24:06 GMT

Jay Miller <jnmiller@@cryptofreak.org> writes:

From what I've seen, this system seems very solid on practical
grounds.  From a theoretical point of view, however, it seems that if
the algorithm becomes well known the system may have a weakness.  That
is, that anyone might create her own card with whatever information
she likes including a private key of her own choosing (encrypted with
a password/pin of her choosing).  It would therefore be vulnerable to
forgery.  I suspect this might be the reason for the military grade
hardware?  Or am I way off base?

so how strong integrity do you want?

1) anybody generates their own public/private key however ... and
registers it with relying parties ... the relying parties use some
process to make sure that the person presenting the public key
... actually can do corresponding digital signatures (lets use ec/dsa,
fips186-2, as an example). that has one level of integrity. the
institution is responsible for making sure that the person presenting
the public key for registration corresponds to whatever they are
registering. if it is purely opening a bank account ... then it can be
analogous to tearing a dollar bill in half and giving one half to the
bank ... and telling them not to honor any requests unless the
matching half can be presented.

2) institutions get chips/cards from the foundary ... the chips do
on-chip key gen ... the private key never leaves the chip, the public
key is exported. any digital signature algorithm will do from a
framework standard, but for some mundane purposes can again select
ec/dsa, fisp186-2. the institution has done some FIPS/EAL
certification on the chip ... and so trust it to whatever level it is
certified to.  these chips are given to their end users. institutions
only trust & register public keys from chips they get directly from
the foundary. lots of corporate employee stuff has various kinds of
hardware tokens (door badge system, login system, etc) ... it doesn't
have to be just military. also there are all sorts of chip cards
(especially in europe) for financial transactions. for the financial
they would possible like the highest possible integrity at the lowest
possible costs. again it doesn't have to military ... just anything of
value.

OK, so in the case of institutional delivered tokens ... they have a
high level of confidence in the integrity of the delivered/registered
tokens. By contrast, it can be relatively difficult for an institution
to trust a random consumer-presented token. As you have pointed out
many infrastructures are subject to counterfeit/mimic chips that can
be programmed to talk like, smell like, look like and be accepted as
valid chips.

So an interesting opportunity is how can trust be created for a token
that is presented (whether it is card format, or dongle/key-fob
format, or whatever). There are a couple steps here that are somewhat
orthogonal. If a random token is presented ... on what basis does a
institutional organization for trusting the token to be a "valid"
token (for some degree of valid).

Once they get past can the trust the token ... then they have other
business processes that they go thru that establishes some
relationship between that token and other attributes ... so that
whenever the token is presented in the future ... that the token
represents the equivalent of all the business processes that
previously equated the token to some set of attributes.

The attributes could be identity ... something like whoever uses this
card probably has some specific fingerprint and/or DNA. The attributes
might not be identity ... the attributes might just be that the person
is allowed to make financial transactions against a specific bank
account (and totally divorced from whether or not the financial
institution has a separate process relating the account to some
identity ... like SSN). The attribute might be that this is a valid
employee (w/o actually having to indicate which employee) and the
front door should open.

The higher the risk ... the larger the amount that the bad guys will
be willing to spend on exploits off the infrastructure (counterfeit
cards for instance). This goes somewhat to past statements about the
amount of security proportional to risk (actually this frequently
degenerates to the cost of security proportional to risk ... there
isn't necessarily a strick linear relationship between security cost
and security strength).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Tweaking old computers?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tweaking old computers?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 16:06:04 GMT

jdallen2000@yahoo.com (James Dow Allen) writes:

National Semi built a series of 158 lookalikes which could supposedly
be upgraded to the more expensive model by adding a jumper.  I was told
this by a NatSemi FE.  I don't know if he ever followed through on his
plan to sell the jumper-upgrades personally.

you could unlatch the front panel on 155 and swing it out. on the back
was a switch that could disable/enable the cache. If you disabled the
cache ... the 155 ran possibly slower than a 145. the 155/165 had main
storage that was significantly slower (2mic) than the 145 (aka the
cache was suppose to compensate for the slower memory).  it wasn't
until the 158/168 that the higher end models got memory that was
compareable speed to 145.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Tweaking old computers?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tweaking old computers?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 16:07:48 GMT

jdallen2000@yahoo.com (James Dow Allen) writes:

National Semi built a series of 158 lookalikes which could supposedly
be upgraded to the more expensive model by adding a jumper.  I was told
this by a NatSemi FE.  I don't know if he ever followed through on his
plan to sell the jumper-upgrades personally.

weren't they actually hitachi ... or was that only after becoming
NAS?

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Tweaking old computers?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Tweaking old computers?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 16:13:14 GMT

jdallen2000@yahoo.com (James Dow Allen) writes:

No.  A 370-nn5 could be upgraded to look like a nn8 (after which it
was called a "165 Model II" or "nn5-3") but in most cases the change
was massive, with a large percentage of the circuit boards replaced.

the 165 mod II was upgrade that added virtual memory. the 165 still
had the slower memory. it wasn't until 168 (& 158) that it got the
faster memory. virtual memory upgrade was significant hit to 165.
also as per other postings .... the claim that implementing the
selective invalidates would have added another six months to getting
out the virtual memory support (and six month delay in announcing
virtual memory for 370). the decision was to drop the selective
invalidates and not incur the six month delays.

the other going from 165 to 168 was that m'code was reworked (and some
hardware added) that reduced the avg 370 instruction from 2.1 machine
cycles (on 165) to 1.6 machine cycles (on 168).

some selective invalidate posts:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#8 Minimalist design (was Re: Parity - why even or odd)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#48 ... the need for a Museum of Computer Software
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#2 Handling variable page sizes?

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Sandia, Cray and AMD

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Sandia, Cray and AMD
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 16:41:49 GMT

Robert Myers writes:

U.S. Taxpayer questions:

1. Why aren't they doing this with TCP/IP over ethernet? 8^}.

2. Are you imagining that AMD will lose any of its proprietary
rights by having Uncle Sam pay the bill?

Who knows what machinations may be behind this one.  The US DoD is
even less comfortable with single source situations than IBM was.

we could even revive why did gov pay for tcp/ip and the internet in
the first place and why is the us gov. allowing so many people around
the world to use it (and some still even make money off it)

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Help! Good protocol for national ID card?
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 16:30:48 GMT

Jay Miller <jnmiller@@cryptofreak.org> writes:

I'm surprised that Chaum's psydonym system hasn't been mentioned more
in this context - I'd never even heard of it.  It would solve several
(not all) of the problems talked about in BS's bit and the earlier
post by Mr. Browne. (Mr. Browne actually noted as much.)

note that aads chip strawman (with biometrics and match on card)
accomplishes effectively something similar ... but from a different
approach ... a judicious application of authentication ... rather
confusing indentification with authentication. in that respect it is
identity agnostic ... aka any identity is dependent on other business
processes that might (or might not) relate authentication to
identification

The chip can establish (authenticate) whether or not the owner had
rights to perform certain operations ... like withdrawing money from a
bank account. no identification is involved and the chip is identity
agnostic. any identity would require the business to establish a
mapping between the entity that had rights to withdraw from an account
with some identity (but totally outside the scope of the chip).

many of the biometrics systems flow the information up to a central
repository where the match is done. in that sense these systems not
only involve identity but turn the biometric value into a
shared-secret (similar to previous postings about cc account
number is a shared-secret). match on card eliminates biometrics
as a shared-secret. the problem with many of the current generation
of biometric chips with match on card ... is that they've been
designed for offline environment. biometrics tend to be very fuzzy
with some assceptable scoring threshold sent (i.e. percent match) for
whether or not the card works or doesn't work (also leading to the
whole notion of false positives and false negatives). the issue is
that in an area somewhat related to security proportional to risk
... the threshold values are somewhat tuned to the value of the
operation. For an environment that migrated to chip-based biometrics
across a broad range of envirnments with a broad range of values and
risks ... that could lead to a very fat wallet filled with different
cards.

random biometrics:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm2.htm#privacy Identification and Privacy are not Antinomies
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm3.htm#cstech2 cardtech/securetech & CA PKI
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm3.htm#cstech4 cardtech/securetech & CA PKI
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#shock revised Shocking Truth about Digital Signatures
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#shock2 revised Shocking Truth about Digital Signatures
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm6.htm#terror12 [FYI] Did Encryption Empower These Terrorists?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm7.htm#rhose9 when a fraud is a sale, Re: Rubber hose attack
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm8.htm#softpki8 Software for PKI
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm9.htm#carnivore2 Shades of FV's Nathaniel Borenstein: Carnivore's "Magic Lantern"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#tamper Limitations of limitations on RE/tampering (was: Re: biometrics)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#biometrics biometrics
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#bio1 biometrics
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#bio2 biometrics
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#bio3 biometrics (addenda)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#bio4 Fingerprints (was: Re: biometrics)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#bio5 biometrics
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#bio6 biometrics
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#bio7 biometrics
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#bio8 biometrics (addenda)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#keygen2 Welome to the Internet, here's your private key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#24 Interests of online banks and their users [was Re: Cryptogram:  Palladium Only for DRM]
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay3.htm#passwords Passwords don't work
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay4.htm#comcert Merchant Comfort Certificates
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay6.htm#cacr7 7th CACR Information Security Workshop
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay7.htm#3dsecure 3D Secure Vulnerabilities? Photo ID's and Payment Infrastructure
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay7.htm#3dsecure2 3D Secure Vulnerabilities? Photo ID's and Payment Infrastructure
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay10.htm#5 I-P: WHY I LOVE BIOMETRICS BY DOROTHY E. DENNING
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay10.htm#8 FSTC to Validate WAP 1.2.1 Specification for Mobile Commerce
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay10.htm#15 META Report: Smart Moves With Smart Cards
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay10.htm#20 Security Proportional to Risk (was: IBM Mainframe at home)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#160 checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#166 checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#172 checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#235 Attacks on a PKI
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#57 RealNames hacked. Firewall issues.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#60 RealNames hacked. Firewall issues.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#30 PKI and Non-repudiation practicalities
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#39 PKI and Non-repudiation practicalities
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#42 PKI and Non-repudiation practicalities
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001c.html#60 PKI and Non-repudiation practicalities
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#11 FREE X.509 Certificates
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#38 distributed authentication
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#53 Net banking, is it safe???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#16 Net banking, is it safe???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#25 Net banking, is it safe???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#52 Are client certificates really secure?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#1 Are client certificates really secure?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#6 Is VeriSign lying???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#61 I-net banking security
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#39 Buffer overflow
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#18 Opinion  on smartcard security requested
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#36 Crypting with Fingerprints ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#38 Crypting with Fingerprints ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#22 Biometric Encryption: the solution for network intruders?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#32 Biometric Encryption: the solution for network intruders?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#45 Biometric Encryption: the solution for network intruders?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#56 Siemens ID Device SDK (fingerprint biometrics) ???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#65 Real man-in-the-middle attacks?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#72 Biometrics not yet good enough?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#6 Biometric authentication for intranet websites?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#8 Biometric authentication for intranet websites?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#9 Biometric authentication for intranet websites?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#13 Biometric authentication for intranet websites?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#41 Biometric authentication for intranet websites?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#61 BIOMETRICS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#65 privileged IDs and non-privileged IDs
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002j.html#40 Beginner question on Security
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#38 Backdoor in AES ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#14 fingerprint authentication
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#19 Help! Good protocol for national ID card?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#20 Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Help! Good protocol for national ID card?
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 17:00:14 GMT

Jay Miller <jnmiller@@cryptofreak.org> writes:

You're right that cost versus security is hardly linear.  Schneier's
cement-encased computer is a good example, I think.

Consider a high resource attack.  Normally one might make a passport
factory or a chip factory meant to duplicate to a high degree the ID
token.  The cool thing about Chaum's protocol is that the object of
attack shifts.  Instead of being the weakest link, the token itself is
now the strongest piece of the system and elements that are already
viable targets now (databases, humans, etc.) become the only objects
of attack.

also see security proportional to risk and the credit card databases
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#61

it requires both an infrastructure model and the corresponding
standards operation. the x9.59 protocol removes the credit card number
as the point of attack (and all the large multitude of databases that
contain it in the clear) and effectively moves the attack to the
end-points ... the signing environment and the authentication
environment.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959

the aads chip strawman proposes the best token technology in existance
today at optimized cost-reduced delivery ... for protection of the
private key and the signing operations
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#aads

that moves the attacks & exploits on the signing end point to
different areas ... some addressed by the eu finread stuff (are you
really signing what you thing you are signing):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm9.htm#carnivore Shades of FV's Nathaniel Borenstein: Carnivore's "Magic Lantern"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#keygen2 Welome to the Internet, here's your private key
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm11.htm#4 AW: Digital signatures as proof
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm11.htm#5 Meaning of Non-repudiation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm11.htm#6 Meaning of Non-repudiation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm11.htm#23 Proxy PKI. Was: IBM alternative to PKI?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm12.htm#24 Interests of online banks and their users [was Re: Cryptogram:  Palladium Only for DRM]
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay7.htm#3dsecure 3D Secure Vulnerabilities? Photo ID's and Payment Infrastructure
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#57 Q: Internet banking
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#60 PKI/Digital signature doesn't work
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#61 PKI/Digital signature doesn't work
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#62 PKI/Digital signature doesn't work
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#64 PKI/Digital signature doesn't work
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#25 Net banking, is it safe???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#26 No Trusted Viewer possible?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#0 Are client certificates really secure?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#6 Smart Card vs. Magnetic Strip Market
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#9 Smart Card vs. Magnetic Strip Market
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#10 Opinion on smartcard security requested
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#21 Opinion on smartcard security requested
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#46 Security Issues of using Internet Banking
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#55 Security Issues of using Internet Banking
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#69 Digital signature
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#38 Convenient and secure eCommerce using POWF
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#13 Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

why does wait state exist?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: why does wait state exist?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 20:24:11 GMT

gah@UGCS.CALTECH.EDU (glen herrmannsfeldt) writes:

There is a discussion on the Hercules list about some features
of S/3x0 architectures, including wait state.

The wait state is an unusual feature in computer architectures.
Most just loop when there isn't anything else to do.  Multitasking
OS have a "null" task that gets all the time when there is nothing
else to be done.

easy ... machines were leased and charged for based on meter running.
the meter ran whenever the cpu was executing or channels were active.
pure side note that the meter actually coasted (at least on the 370),
if the cpu/channel was active at any time within a 400ms window the
meter ran for 400ms (or take the view that the meter tic resolution
was 400ms). I'm sure totally unrelated to all this was that the MVS
SRM had a 400ms wake up interval.

one of the big things that CP/67 did in the late '60s was switch to
"PREPARE" sequence on terminal lines.

CP/67 was precursor to VM/370 (which survives today as both LPAR
support and zVM ... my guess that the LOCS in LPAR microcode are
compareable to the LOCS in the original CP/67 kernel). CP/67 and CMS
were pretty much an evoluation of CTSS time-sharing system ... done by
some of the same people that worked on CTSS ... and done in parallel
and in the same building as other people (that had also worked on
CTSS) doing Multics.

In any case, CP/67 was doing all this super-optimized time-sharing,
time-slicing, dynamic adaptive workload management, fastpath kernel
optimization, near optimal page replacement algorithms, lot of the
precursor stuff to what became capacity planning, etc, etc.

However one of the major things that allowed CP/67 to transition into
the time-sharing service bureau was the change to use PREPARE in the
terminal CCW sequence. CP/67 was already going into wait state when
there wasn't anything to do ... and not waking up gratuitously ... but
the terminal I/O sequence still had the channel active and ran the
meter.

one of the requirements for offering cp/67 service bureau ... was
being able to provide 24x7 service ... and be able to recover costs of
the operation. Going into wait state helped with stopping the meter
under off-shift low useage scenarios. But it wasn't until the PREPARE
CCW sequence change was made that the meter actually totally stopped.
At that point, just leaving the system up and running continuously
became much more cost effective.

another issue (at least during the start up phases) time-sharing
service bureau stuff was various automated operator stuff and
automated recovery & reboot in case of failures.

In any case, somewhat after CP/67 was announced at the spring '68
SHARE meeting in houston (coming up 35 years)... two CP/67
time-sharing service offerings spun off.

misc. other pieces of ctss, timesharing, cp/67, vm/370, and virtual
machine lore at:
http://www.princeton.edu/~melinda/

these days ... with time-sharing by both virtual machine kernel and
the microcode ... the issue isn't the (leasing) meter running .... but
not unnecessarily using processor that could be put to better use by
some other component.

random other posts related to the subject
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#179 S/360 history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#64 distributed locking patents
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#44 20th March 2000
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#72 Microsoft boss warns breakup could worsen virus problem
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#40 360 CPU meters (was Re: Early IBM-PC sales proj..
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000e.html#9 Checkpointing (was spice on clusters)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000f.html#52 TSS ancient history, was X86 ultimate CISC?  designs)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000g.html#4 virtualizable 360, was TSS ancient history
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#30 Did AT&T offer Unix to Digital Equipment in the 70s?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#35 Did AT&T offer Unix to Digital Equipment in the 70s?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001g.html#52 Compaq kills Alpha
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#14 Installing Fortran
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#35 D
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001h.html#59 Blinkenlights
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001k.html#38 3270 protocol
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#47 TSS/360
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#49 TSS/360
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#54 Author seeks help - net in 1981
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001m.html#55 TSS/360
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#39 195 was: Computer Typesetting Was: Movies with source code
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#79 a.f.c history checkup... (was What specifications will the standard year 2001 PC have?)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#1 Microcode? (& index searching)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#44 cp/67 (coss-post warning)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#48 Speaking of Gerstner years
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#27 moving on
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#47 Multics_Security
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#17 Blade architectures
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#59 Blade architectures
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002h.html#34 Computers in Science Fiction
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#21 CDC6600 - just how powerful a machine was it?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#62 subjective Q. - what's the most secure OS?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#63 Hercules and System/390 - do we need it?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#64 Hercules and System/390 - do we need it?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002k.html#64 History of AOL
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#66 10 choices that were critical to the Net's success
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#61 The next big things that weren't

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

why does wait state exist?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: why does wait state exist?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 20:33:32 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:

CP/67 was precursor to VM/370 (which survives today as both LPAR
support and zVM ... my guess that the LOCS in LPAR microcode are
compareable to the LOCS in the original CP/67 kernel). CP/67 and CMS
were pretty much an evoluation of CTSS time-sharing system ... done by
some of the same people that worked on CTSS ... and done in parallel
and in the same building as other people (that had also worked on
CTSS) doing Multics.

actually LPARs might be slightly be more like CP/40. Prior to
availability of 360/67 (a 360/65 with virtual memory support), the
group modified a 360/40 with virtual memory support and built CP/40 to
run on it. The virtual memory support had a TLB for each of the 64 4k
pages in the machine (i.e. 256kbyte machine) and a 4bit process-id
that it did an associative lookup on (i.e. maximum of 15 processes
support by cp/40). The limitations of CP/40 is possibly more analogous
to the LPAR limitations. In any case, when 360/67 became available ...
CP/40 was ported and became cp/67 (and when 370s becamse available it
was ported and became vm/370).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

why does wait state exist?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: why does wait state exist?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 15:19:23 GMT

pa3efu@YAHOO.COM (Jan Jaeger) writes:

One other thing that comes to mind is that a cpu in a wait state would
not require any bandwith to memory, and as such channel access to memory
might be better if a cpu is in a wait state.
oltp systems such as tpf do not use the enabled wait, they loop, I think
because going into and coming out of the wait state is rather expensive.
This to improve response times, wheras mvs is (or at least was) batch
oriented, and thougput is more importand then response.

i believe the overhead for the SIO instruction was much worse than
interrupt (one of the reasons for the introduction of SIOF). also much
of the hardware interrupt overhead was achieving a consistent state of
the machine (aka happening at an instruction boundary) ... which sould
imply that it would be slightly/somewhat more expensive if instruction
was executing rather than in wait state (aka no imprecise interupts).

much of the interrupt overhead ... wasn't in the hardware ... it was
how the operating systems implemented first level intherrupt handler
(FLIH). I have claim that (as undergraduate) i had optimized the CP/67
FLIHs that they were possibly ten times faster than mvt/mft (even tho
I had done lots of MFT/MVT optimization work also). minor refs
to presentation at fall '68 SHARE in boston (both lots of work modifying
MFT14 for standalone production work, lots of work modifying CP/67,
and lots of work modifying MFT14 for running under cp/67):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#18 CP/67 & OS MFT14
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#20 CP/67 & OS MFT14

lots of FLIH and i/o initiation tended to be with non-standard, anomolous,
fault handling ... but it was still possible to build a bullet-proof
infrastructure that was still very optimized (work done for the disk
engineering lab):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

as mentioned in another posting to this thread ... various other
machine architectures provided for vectored interrupts ... which would
shave a couple instructions off FLIH. The big savings in some
real-time architectures was that they had rings & vectored interrupts
... and interrupt into "better" ring ... suspended execution of
"poorer" ring (each ring had its own regs, etc ... so FLIH didn't have
to save & restore). This tended to be special case for small number of
things.

On cache machines, asynchronous interrupts can imply task switching and
cache trashing. One of the little special twists that I did for VM/370
was some dynamic adaptive code that under heavy interrupt load would
run user processes disabled for I/O interrupts ... but with a managed
timer interrupt. I/O interrupts tended to be slightly delayed ... and
then batch drained with an interrupt window in the kernel. Properly
tuned (on heavily loaded 370/168) it actually improved interrupt
processing (since tended to have very good cache hits on the kernel
interrupt code since it was being repeatedly executed) and application
execution (since it didn't have a lot of asynchronous interrupts
trashing the cache).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002l.html#25 Do any architectures use instruction count instead of timer

Large part of the I/O features for XA ... was to offload a lot more of
the kernel I/O processing into dedicated asynchronous processors (over
and above already provided by the channel architecture). Part of this
was justified on the significantly painful long MVS pathlengths (and
in some sense ... it was easier to rewrite from scratch in a new
microprocessor than try and cleanup existing spaghetti code, although
I had demonstrated it was possible with the work supporting the disk
engineering lab). One of the ancillary issues of outboarding more of
the I/O function allowed asynchronous queuing of new requests and
dequeuing of completed requests ... with dedicated processors being
able to handle things like device redrive ... processing the
completion of the current requests and immediately redriving the
device with the next queued request ... w/o impacting the cache
locality of the main processor.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Help! Good protocol for national ID card?
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 15:52:28 GMT

"Tony T. Warnock" writes:

Of course, Police Undercover Agents, would have fake ID's for getting
their criminal jobs and true ID's for their real jobs.

the cards wouldn't be fake ... the cards might refer to identification
that was somewhat manufactured. identity theft has to do with getting
valid ID "cards" ... for the wrong person. There are a number of
different kinds of vulnerabilities and exploits ... at least

 counterfeit/invalid cards (either valid or ficticious persona)
 valid cards for somebody else's (valid) persona (identity theft)
 valid cards for ficticious persona

also ... who is the authority that decides what are valid persona and
what are ficticious persona?

lots of privacy stuff going on (like GLB) ... big issues are
institutional "mis-use" of privacy information ... as well as criminal
"mis-use" of privacy information (identity theft).

one of the (effective) claims regarding x.509 "identity" certificates
is that they can represent major privacy violation issues ... and
therefor some past transition to relying-party-only certificates (aka
effectively authentication-only certificates). Note however, that
traditional certificates are like letters of credit from one
institution to another institution. In general writting a letter of
credit for somebody to yourself can frequently be shown to be
redundant and superfluous (aka dear me, please accept my assurance
that the holder of this document is good for $10,000, signed me).

that then strays into the semantics of identification and
authentication. rather than looking at cards as identification
... embodying a persona ... they are part of some authentication
schema ... aka 3-factor authentication

 something you have (aka hardware token or card)
 something you know (password or PIN)
 something you are (biometrics)

now within the structure of 3-factor authentication semantics ... in
conjunction with cards ... something you know and something you
are can either represent "secrets" or shared-secrets.
shared-secrets is that the information is registered someplace else (like
mother's maiden name) and somebody is responsible for presenting it A
"secret" is that the information is registered in the token and
correct presentation affects the operation of the token. With properly
designed authentication token, a non-shared-secret paradigm tends to
be at least privacy agnostic.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

why does wait state exist?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: why does wait state exist?
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 18:34:57 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:

lots of FLIH and i/o initiation tended to be with non-standard, anomolous,
fault handling ... but it was still possible to build a bullet-proof
infrastructure that was still very optimized (work done for the disk
engineering lab):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

at the time that i started the bullet-proof rewrite in the above refs,
the MTBF (system crash) for MVS running a single testcell in the
engineering lab was on the order of 15 minutes. eventually things got
to the point where they could simultaneously operate 6-12 testcells on
the same machine with no failures (significant improvement in
productivity since they had to previously resort to doing everything
stand-along with dedicated time per testcell).

anyway ... i did a (corporate classified) paper on what was needed and
the changes & restructuring. then there was a letter from somebody in
POK RAS management ... which effectively wanted to fire me; not for
fixing everything ... but the document could be interpreted (if you so
desired) as a list of things that had needed fixing (which then could
be construed as reflecting on the RAS group, especially if you were
totally focused on image building).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

why does wait state exist?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: why does wait state exist?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 23:19:15 GMT

Jeff Raben writes:

I thought that the early 2701 with its limited number of lines was the
only machine without the 'prepare' command.

The 2703 and the its little buddy 2702 both had these 'wake up on
data' (and lose 'em) commands (also good on the old contention-type
communication).

The 2701 manuals reference the /30 thru the /75 (including the 44 and
67).  The 'major updated' 2703 manuals predate TSS release by about a
year.

I didn't say that the machines didn't have them. the machines had them
... it just that the software didn't use them originally. the software
was then changed to use prepare (just because the hardware had it
and/or the hardware availability predated the software availability,
didn't mean that the original designers thot to use the feature). one
of the major reasons justifying changing (the software) for the
prepare command was to stop the meter tic'ing.

the 2702 had other problems ... which resulted in a project that i
worked on as an undergraduate that reversed engineering the channel
interface and we built our own controller ... using an interdata/3 as
a base microprocessor. supposedly this originated the pcm controller
business (something that CPD wasn't too happy with me for).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#360pcm

as for the extraneous reference to TSS ... some other extraneous
refernces. the discussion was specifically about change to cp/67
resulting in the meter to not tic ... especially off shift with
possible low activity ... and enhancing the ability for some service
bureaus to offer cost effective cp/67 time sharing service.

at approximately the time the prepare command change was done in cp/67
... i believe the cp/67 & cms ibm group was somewhere around 12
people. I was told that at about the same time the tss/360 ibm group
numbered around 1200 people (two orders of magnitude more). All sorts
of discussions could be had about whether it was better to have had
just 12 people or 1200 people. there are also discussions about the
subsequent tss/370 (on 370s with virtual memory than 360/67)
activities may have possible done better with only a 20 person group
(rather than the original 1200).

While there were a number of commercial cp/67 (and later vm/370) time
sharing service bureaus ... i'm not aware of there having been any
commercial tss/360 time sharing service bureaus (as well as a
significantly larger number of 360/67s running cp/67 than tss/360).

as an aside ... almost 20 years later ... i tried to do another CPD
controller replacement/clone using a series/1 (peachtree) migrating to
RIOS ... but was somewhat less succesful than the original effort
(that is orthanganol to an earlier attempt to have original 3705 be
based on peachtree (s/1) rather than uc.5 microprocessor.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#63 System/1 ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#64 Old naked woman ASCII art
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#66 System/1 ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#67 System/1 ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#70 Series/1 as NCP (was: Re: System/1 ?)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#106 IBM Mainframe Model Numbers--then and now?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#155 checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#165 checks (was S/390 on PowerPC?)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#239 IBM UC info

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | lynn@garlic.com - http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

why does wait state exist?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: why does wait state exist?
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,bit.listserv.ibm-main
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 00:09:59 GMT

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#32 why does wait state exist?
another somewhat extraneous ... interdata was bought up by
perkin/elmer which continued to offer the product. 5-6 years ago
(nearly 30 years after we built the original) i was in a large oltp
data center and there was a p/e box handling a significant amount of
the load.

i didn't get to examine that box in detail ... but i've talked to some
people that were selling p/e boxes into the federal gov. in the early
'80s and they said that the channel interface was still a wire-wrap
board ... possibly unchanged since we built the original board.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Opera 6.05 resources problem?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Opera 6.05 resources problem?
Newsgroups: opera.general
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 23:34:17 GMT

possible totally unrelated to any other problem ... i normally run
with javascript disabled ... unless i have to absolutely turn it on
for some website.

i found with linux firewall ... displaying transmission activity ...
that after having turning on javascript in conjunction with visiting a
website (doesn't seem to be any correlation with any specific site)
... constant relatively low-level arriving packet rate starts, even
when absolutely nothing (that i know of) is going on. turning off
javascript has no affect. killing/dropping the link and then
restarting the link does succesfully interrupt it tho.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

VR vs. Portable Computing

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: VR vs. Portable Computing
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch,comp.society.futures,rec.arts.sf.science,soc.history.science
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 02:30:22 GMT

Keith R. Williams writes:

Not so tiny.  IBM has a class-A domain (indeed I have two 9-dot
fixed addresses in my office).

Not so bizarre either.  It's an indication of where things are
(Intra/Inter).

Not so important.  Who the hell cares what people call 'www'?
...and why is it still there?

i remember at the time that ibm got the class-a domain (somebody i had
worked with applied and got it), i was somewhat surprised that one was
available. note that this was still not that far removed from when the
internal network was still larger than the (whole)
arpanet/internet. random ref:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm

also note that GML was done at the science center ... which begot SGML
and then HTML ... possibly in large part because CERN was a vm/cms
installation ... and had been running it since the (infamous) cern
mvs/vm bake-off. i believe its sister location, slac (also was a large
vm/cms installation) claims to have the web site that has been around
the longest (i don't know if they are claiming the original web site,
but i believe they are at least claiming the earliest one still
around).

during much of the 70s & 80s slac hosted the bay area vm user group
(baybunch) meetings ... there were some at the 30th anniv. party for
vm/370 at share 99 in san fran (this past aug).

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

VR vs. Portable Computing

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: VR vs. Portable Computing
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch,comp.society.futures,rec.arts.sf.science,soc.history.science
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 02:56:34 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:

i remember at the time that ibm got the class-a domain (somebody i had
worked with applied and got it), i was somewhat surprised that one was
available. note that this was still not that far removed from when the

totally unrelated ... but at another time & place this person had
been the "catcher" in endicott for system/r (original rdbms) ... which
then became sql/ds. and then to stray even further afield, one of the
people at the following meeting had been the endicott->stl sql/ds
catcher for what became db2.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

VR vs. Portable Computing

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: VR vs. Portable Computing
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch,comp.society.futures,rec.arts.sf.science,soc.history.science
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 06:53:42 GMT

Anne & Lynn Wheeler writes:

also note that GML was done at the science center ... which begot SGML
and then HTML ... possibly in large part because CERN was a vm/cms
installation ... and had been running it since the (infamous) cern
mvs/vm bake-off. i believe its sister location, slac (also was a large
vm/cms installation) claims to have the web site that has been around
the longest (i don't know if they are claiming the original web site,
but i believe they are at least claiming the earliest one still
around).

actually i believe the report was tso/cms comparison (i.e. interactive
computing). it was somewhat infamous in that the (public) share report
was internally classified corporate confidential - restricted (aka
available on a need to know basis only). apparently it wasn't possible
to restrict customers from reading how bad tso was ... but at least it
was possible to try and keep employees from finding out.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

VR vs. Portable Computing

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: VR vs. Portable Computing
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch,comp.society.futures,rec.arts.sf.science,soc.history.science
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 07:12:15 GMT

Keith R. Williams writes:

Not so tiny.  IBM has a class-A domain (indeed I have two 9-dot
fixed addresses in my office).

another total aside ... about the time one location was getting the
class-a ... several other locations were getting one or more class-Bs
each. this was all before the 10-net rfc (and the request to return
unused nets). from:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

1597 -
Address Allocation for Private Internets, DeGroot G., Karrenberg D.,
Moskowitz R., Rekhter Y., 1994/03/17 (8pp) (.txt=17430) (Obsoleted by
1918)

1627 -
Network 10 Considered Harmful (Some Practices Shouldn't be Codified),
Crocker D., Fair E., Kessler T., Lear E., 1994/07/01 (8pp)
(.txt=18823) (Obsoleted by 1918)

1917
An Appeal to the Internet Community to Return Unused IP Networks
(Prefixes) to the IANA, Nesser P., 1996/02/29 (10pp) (.txt=23623)
(BCP-4)

1918
Address Allocation for Private Internets, DeGroot G., Karrenberg D.,
Lear E., Moskowitz R., Rekhter Y., 1996/02/29 (9pp) (.txt=22271)
(BCP-5) (Obsoletes 1597, 1627)

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

CMS update

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 02:08:27 -0600
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.vmesa-l
Subject: CMS update

long, long ago ... when some guys come out to install CP/67/CMS at the
university ... the method was basically

update fn assemble a fn update a

where the fn update file had ./ i number, ./ r number <number>,
./ d number <number>

where number were the sequence number in cols 73-80 of the assemble
file.

you then could assemble the resulting temporary file from update
(actually update could be used against any kind of file as long as it
had sequence numbers in 73-80)

periodically the temporary file would be taken and used to replace the
permanent assemble file (normally resequencing the assemble file when
that was done ... but not always). The convention was that you also
needed to manual type in the sequence numbers into the update file in
cols 73-80 ... appropriately choosing the numbers you typed. all the
updates I was doing ... it really got to be a pain to constantly type
in those numbers. So i wrote a little preprocessor routine ... it
would read the update file and look for dollar sign on the ./ control
cards. If it found one ... it would take that as indication to
automatically generate the sequence numbers in the cards it
output. "$" could have nothing following it ... in which case it did
the default ... or it could have an optional starting number and an
optional increment following the dollar sign. This is was all still
one level update.

Later in the "L", "H", and "I" time-frame (distributed development
project implementing virtual 370 support in cp/67 running on real
360/67) ... the work was done at cambridge for multi-level update. As
mentioned in one of melinda's notes ... I was able to resurrect this
original infrastructure and send her a copy.

basically it was all still plain update command but driven by exec
that iterated one for every update specified in the control file. this
multi-level update exec started out looking for files of the form
UPDGxxxx where xxxx could be specified in the CNTRL file. For every
UPDGxxxx it found, it would run it thru the dollar preprocessor and
generate a UPDTxxxx (temporary) file ... which was than applied to the
assemble file resulting in a temporary assemble file. Any subsequent
UPDG files it found in the specified search order would be run thru
the "$" process, generate the UPDT file and then applied (iteratively)
to the resulting assemble file. Finally when it exhausted all UPDG
files, it would assemble the resulting assemble file.

Then there was some really fancy stuff done by an MIT co-op that
attempted to merge multiple parallel update threads and resolve
conflicts between the parallel development threads. That fairly
sophisticated work eventually fell by the way-side. In the mean time,
the development group (which had split off from the scientific center
by this time) had a need for PTF/APAR files. They took the CNTRL/UPDG
structure developed by the science center and added "aux" file support
to the CNTRL file ... i.e. the update exec instead of looking for a
update file of the form UPDTxxxx ... would look for a "aux" file that
contain lists of update files ... giving the full filetype name of
each file to be applied.

Eventually, the exec code for supporting control file loop and the "$"
sequence number processing was incorporated into the standard update
routine, aka update would read the assemble file into memory and
iteratively execute the control file loop applying all update files it
found ... before writing out the resulting updated assemble file. Even
later, support was extended in the editor ... that it would 1) do the
iterative CNTRL file update operation prior to editing sessions
... and on file ... instead of writing out the complete file
... generate the appropriate update file reflecting all edit changes
(prior to that, the update file had to be explicitly edited
... including all the ./ control commands ... instead of having the
editor automatigically generate them for you).

The other part was after the assemble process .... the resulting
TEXT/binary file was appropriately renamed to reflect the highest
level update that had been applied and "comments" card were added to
the front of the TEXT file ... one comment line for each file involved
.in the process ... with full name, date, time, etc ... the original
assemble, file, all the update files applied and all the maclib files
involved in the assembly.  And then there was the VMFLOAD process
which took the CNTRL file and looked for TEXT files in the appropriate
search order for inclusion in the runtime image. And of course when
the loader read the runtime image and generated the load map ... it
output as part of the loadmap process each one of the comment cards
that it ran across.  It could somewhat reconstruct what pieces were
part of a CP kernel routine by all the comments cards in the load map.

So i was in madrid sometime in the mid-80s. This was to visit the
madrid science center ... they had a project that was imaging all
sorts of old records ... preparing stuff that would be a comprehensive
cdrom getting reading for the 500th annv of 1492. So while i'm there,
I visit a local theater. They have this somewhat avant guard short
done at the university that runs about 20 minutes. A big part of the
short was a apparently a hotel room or apartment that had a wall of
possible two dozen TVs ... they all appeared to be scrolling some text
at 1200 baud ... the same text on all TVs (looks like all TVs are
slaved to the same computer output). The dardest thing was that I
recognized it as a CP kernel load map that was being scrolled ... and
what is even worse, I recognized the release and PLC level from the
APAR/PTF comments.

In any case, it is nice to have all the individual updates around for
some kinds of audit processes ... compared to effectively the
"downdates" of RCS & CVS ... the rest of CVS support is a lot more
comprehensive.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler      lynn@garlic.com,  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Help! Good protocol for national ID card?
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 17:07:02 GMT

Christopher Browne writes:

I haven't seen the Chaum proposal; I gather it involves having digital
signatures on a whole bunch of assertions so that you'd have a digital
signature on things like:
- Age > 18
- Driver's licence = Class "G"
- Driving Requirements = "With Corrective Lenses"
???

careful that you don't confuse two different digital signatures. this
is effectively institutionalized in x.509 identity certificate
paradigm. all of this information about you resides in a certificate
that is digitally signed by a trusted agency ... not the person
themselves (aka people may have reasons for not being totally
truthfull regarding details about themselves).

the certificate then contains something that can be used to validate
the entity that the information is about.

everybody carries with them the public key of the trusted agency ...
so the validaty of the certificate (and its assertions) can be
validated.

in the traditional x.509 identity digital certificate ... the entity
validation information is a public key ... the entity is asked to
digital sign some arbitrary information (aka like a
challenge/response) and then the public key in the certificate is used
to check the response. Assuming that the trusted agencies public key
validates the certificate and that the public key in the certificate
validates the challenge/response) ... then it is assumed that the
attributes in the certificate correspond to the entity signing the
challenge/response.

in variations on this ... rather than having the entities public key
"bound" in the certificate ... there is biometric information or
digitized picture of the person ... or some other way of validating
the entity and the certificate are bound together.

The driver's license analogy was frequently used as the business case
for justifying huge x.509 identity digital certificate business cases.

Note that the digital signature on the certificate/credential is that
of the authoritative agency that is trusted for the information of
interest.  The public key of the trusted/authoriative agency is then
used to validate that digital signature. Any public key in the
certificate/credential is then used to validate some digital signature
generated by the entity of interest. This is somewhat the hierarchy
trust model of PKI ... you have to first validate the correctness of
the credential/certificate and then validate the binding to the entity
that the credential/certificate information is about.

Note that this is all a paradigm developed for the offline world
before police had radios, portable computers, and checked real-time
databases. Effectively the suggested solution tried to make up for the
difficiency in the offline world by creating read-only stale copies of
the real-time authoritative information. This was the offline, hardcopy
model translated to the offline, electronic world.

However, to some extent the world has moved on ... typically the
online connectivity is such that for anything of real importance or
value ...  if it is electronic ... it is possible to directly query
the authoritative agency for the real-time information .... instead of
relying on stale, static copies of the information. The driver
license information (and almost all other information) works for
offline, stale, static hardcopy ... when there isn't access to
electronic and online. However, it is becoming such that if there is a
reason for the electronic (rather than the hardcopy) ... and the issue
involves anything of importance or value ...  then it is
electronic&online ... and not electronic&offline. In the driver's
license case ... the officer except for cursory checks ... can check
the picture and the number ... and then calls in the number for
real-time, online transaction.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Home mainframes

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Home mainframes
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 20:14:16 GMT

jmaynard@thebrain.conmicro.cx (Jay Maynard) writes:

VM and MVS are both good OSes, but for different things. VM is better for
interactive computing. MVS is better for day-in, day-out workhorse DP where
the same tasks need to be done over and over - a perfect description of
batch processing. VM sucks at batch, as does Unix. The facilities MVS
provides are much more manageable, and much more robust. The tradeoff is
that it's less friendly to interactive use, and harder to develop for.

not just batch but MVS is reasonable platform for almost any kind of
service offering.  It provides a lot of robust infrastructure
functions to automate almost anything that might need to be done in a
data processing system. Many of these automated functions are hidden
behind arcane JCL ... making it a horrible delivery vehicle for
personal computing.

However, if you have requirement for nearly any sort of automated
delivery service that needs to run repeatedly day-in, day-out ... with
little or no hands on required ... things like payroll, check
clearing, financial transactions, etc. it is very dependable work
horse. In that sense it is more like some of the big 18 wheelers on
the highway ... people looking for something simple like a small
two-seater sports car are going to find a big 18 wheeler with a couple
trailers somewhat unsuited.

One of the intersection points in the current environment ... is that
a large number of web services have requirements for 7x24, reliable,
totally automated operation (even dark room). Lots of users around the
world don't care why either the ATM machine is down or their favorite
web server is down ... they just want it up and running all the time.

a couple years ago ...one of the large financial services claimed a
major reason for 100 percent uptime for the previous six years was
automated operations in MVS ... aka people effectively were almost
never allowed to touch the machine ... because people make mistakes.

Hardware had gotten super reliable ... software was getting super
reliable ...  but people weren't getting a whole lot better.

--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler   | lynn@garlic.com -  http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/

Help! Good protocol for national ID card?

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Subject: Re: Help! Good protocol for national ID card?
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 21:27:07 GMT

Christopher Browne writes:

I haven't seen the Chaum proposal; I gather it involves having digital
signatures on a whole bunch of assertions so that you'd have a digital
signature on things like:
- Age > 18
- Driver's licence = Class "G"
- Driving Requirements = "With Corrective Lenses"

basically this type of information is designed at providing some sort
of trusted information between two parties that otherwise have no
knowledge of each other. in order to support such an infrastructure
there is a need for trusted third institutional parties that are
trusted by the majority of the target population that these kinds of
certified information is targeted for.

then from another facet, it is possible to divide the business and
institutional solution space into four quadrants offline/online and
electronic/hordcopy