Eric Hughes (cypherpunk)

Last updated

Eric Hughes is an American mathematician, computer programmer, and cypherpunk. He is considered one of the founders of the cypherpunk movement, alongside Timothy C. May and John Gilmore. [1] [2] He is notable for founding and administering the Cypherpunk mailing list, [3] authoring A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, [4] [5] creating and hosting the first anonymous remailer, [1] [6] [7] [8] and coining the motto, "Cypherpunks write code". [6]

The May/June 1993 issue (vol. 1 no. 2) of Wired featured a cover photo, credited to Larry Dyer, of three masked cypherpunks, of which Hughes was one. [1] [9]

On September 27, 2012, Hughes delivered the keynote address, Putting the Personal Back in Personal Computers, at the Amsterdam CryptoParty. [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

Ryan Donald Lackey is an entrepreneur and computer security professional. He was a co-founder of HavenCo, the world's first data haven, and operated BlueIraq, a communications company. He speaks at numerous conferences and trade shows, including DEF CON and the RSA Data Security Conference, on various topics in the computer security field, and has appeared in a Wired magazine cover story and in numerous television, radio, and print articles, concerning HavenCo and Sealand.

A cypherpunk is any individual advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Originally communicating through the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, informal groups aimed to achieve privacy and security through proactive use of cryptography. Cypherpunks have been engaged in an active movement since at least the late 1980s.

An assassination market is a prediction market where any party can place a bet on the date of death of a given individual. This incentivises assassination, as parties with foreknowledge of an assassination can profit by placing bets on the time of the death. Because the payoff is for accurately picking the date rather than performing the assassination, it is substantially more difficult to assign criminal liability.

An anonymous remailer is a server that receives messages with embedded instructions on where to send them next, and that forwards them without revealing where they originally came from. There are cypherpunk anonymous remailers, mixmaster anonymous remailers, and nym servers, among others, which differ in how they work, in the policies they adopt, and in the type of attack on the anonymity of e-mail they can resist. Remailing as discussed in this article applies to e-mails intended for particular recipients, not the general public. Anonymity in the latter case is more easily addressed by using any of several methods of anonymous publication.

A cypherpunk anonymous remailer, also known as a Type I remailer, is a type of anonymous remailer that receives messages encrypted with PGP or GPG, follows predetermined instructions to strip any identifying information, and forwards the messages to the desired recipient.

The Penet remailer was a pseudonymous remailer operated by Johan "Julf" Helsingius of Finland from 1993 to 1996. Its initial creation stemmed from an argument in a Finnish newsgroup over whether people should be required to tie their real name to their online communications. Julf believed that people should not—indeed, could not—be required to do so. In his own words:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Len Sassaman</span> American technologist and cryptographer (1980–2011)

Leonard Harris Sassaman was an American technologist, information privacy advocate, and the maintainer of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer code and operator of the randseed remailer. Much of his career gravitated towards cryptography and protocol development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crypto-anarchy</span> Political ideology

Crypto-anarchy, crypto-anarchism, cyberanarchy or cyberanarchism is a political ideology focusing on the protection of privacy, political freedom, and economic freedom, the adherents of which use cryptographic software for confidentiality and security while sending and receiving information over computer networks. In his 1988 "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto", Timothy C. May introduced the basic principles of crypto-anarchism, encrypted exchanges ensuring total anonymity, total freedom of speech, and total freedom to trade. In 1992, he read the text at the founding meeting of the cypherpunk movement. Most Crypto-anarchists are anarcho-capitalists but some are anarcho-mutualists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Chaum</span> American computer scientist and cryptographer

David Lee Chaum is an American computer scientist, cryptographer, and inventor. He is known as a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies, and widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash. His 1982 dissertation "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups" is the first known proposal for a blockchain protocol. Complete with the code to implement the protocol, Chaum's dissertation proposed all but one element of the blockchain later detailed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. He has been referred to as "the father of online anonymity", and "the godfather of cryptocurrency".

Timothy C. May, better known as Tim May was an American technical and political writer, and electronic engineer and senior scientist at Intel. May was also the founder of the crypto-anarchist movement. He retired from Intel in 1986 at age 35 and died of natural causes at his home on December 13, 2018 at age 66.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Onion routing</span> Technique for anonymous communication over a computer network

Onion routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a computer network. In an onion network, messages are encapsulated in layers of encryption, analogous to the layers of an onion. The encrypted data is transmitted through a series of network nodes called "onion routers," each of which "peels" away a single layer, revealing the data's next destination. When the final layer is decrypted, the message arrives at its destination. The sender remains anonymous because each intermediary knows only the location of the immediately preceding and following nodes. While onion routing provides a high level of security and anonymity, there are methods to break the anonymity of this technique, such as timing analysis.

An anonymous P2P communication system is a peer-to-peer distributed application in which the nodes, which are used to share resources, or participants are anonymous or pseudonymous. Anonymity of participants is usually achieved by special routing overlay networks that hide the physical location of each node from other participants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Goldberg</span> Cryptographer

Ian Avrum Goldberg is a cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is best known for breaking Netscape's implementation of SSL, and for his role as chief scientist of Radialpoint, a Canadian software company. Goldberg is currently a professor at the Faculty of Mathematics of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science within the University of Waterloo, and the Canada Research Chair in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. He was formerly Tor Project board of directors chairman, and is one of the designers of off the record messaging.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matt Blaze</span> American researcher

Matt Blaze is an American researcher who focuses on the areas of secure systems, cryptography, and trust management. He is currently the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University, and is on the board of directors of the Tor Project.

Johan "Julf" Helsingius, born in 1961 in Helsinki, Finland, started and ran the Anon.penet.fi internet remailer.

Sameer Parekh is the founder of C2Net Software, Inc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hal Finney (computer scientist)</span> Cryptograph and cypherpunk

Harold Thomas Finney II was an American software developer. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. He later worked for PGP Corporation. He was an early Bitcoin contributor, and received the first Bitcoin transaction from the currency's creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

CryptoParty (Crypto-Party) is a grassroots global endeavour to introduce the basics of practical cryptography such as the Tor anonymity network, I2P, Freenet, key signing parties, disk encryption and virtual private networks to the general public. The project primarily consists of a series of free public workshops.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tor Mail</span> Defunct Tor email service

Tor Mail was a Tor hidden service that went offline in August 2013 after an FBI raid on Freedom Hosting. The service allowed users to send and receive email anonymously to email addresses inside and outside the Tor network.

The Pirates Center of Belarus is a community of people who support freedom of knowledge, reform of copyright, privacy of personal information and transparent government.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Rid, Thomas (20 July 2016). "The cypherpunk revolution". Christian Science Monitor. Archived from the original on 2019-09-29.
  2. Manne, Robert (16 February 2011). "The Cypherpunk Revolutionary: Julian Assange: the unknown story". The Monthly (published 18 March 2011). pp. 17–35. Archived from the original on 24 November 2023. Retrieved 2023-09-17.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  3. Levy, Steven (1 June 1994). "Anonymously Yours — How to Launder Your E-mail". Wired. Vol. 2, no. 6. Archived from the original on 29 April 2017. Retrieved 6 March 2017.
  4. Hughes, Eric (9 March 1993). "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto". Activism: Cypherpunks. Archived from the original on 2023-09-17. Retrieved 2012-09-18.
  5. Stewart Cheifet; Andrew deVries; Jane Wither (1996). Politics on the Web. The Internet Cafe . Additional contributors: supervising producer: Sara O'Brien; producer: Annaliza Savage; videographers: Phil Azzopardi and Ken Butler; audio: Chris Fenwick; utility: Hanns Ullrich; Cyberblast producer: Robbin M. Ray; segment director: Tom van Horn; editor: Robert E. Meyer; post production audio & graphics Kris Richardson; computer technician: Buzz Hague; Cyberblast engineer: Fred Heineman; engineer: Gregg Chadwick; production associate: Tom Schauer; production assistants: Adolfo Leiva, Kevin Long, and Elana McCoy; assistants to the producers: Lisa Pilkin, Mary Anne Sirois, and Tammy Wilson; hair/makeup: Annie Jenkins; executive producer: Stewart Cheifet. CyberSmith internet cafe, Palo Alto, California: PCTV, Inc. Event occurs at 0m31s to 0m35s (teaser) and 9m54s to 16m22s (main content).
  6. 1 2 Bartlett, Jamie (March–April 2016). "Cypherpunks Write Code". American Scientist. 104 (2): 120. doi:10.1511/2016.119.120. Archived from the original on 2023-11-24. Retrieved 2023-09-17. From The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld, by Jamie Bartlett. Copyright © 2015 by Melville House. Used by permission of the publisher.
  7. Jennings, Tom (10 October 1992). "Thoughts on Security and Authentication for Email Systems". FidoNews . 9 (41) (published 12 October 1992): 8–12. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. "Anyways, security is more than cryptographic strength. Turns out, there's a way around this: anonymous remailers. In a private Internet mailing list Eric Hughes came up with a trick to anonymously remail messages…"{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link) – Also available at: https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/FidoNet/Fido-FidoNet-folder.zip Archived 2023-09-17 at the Wayback Machine path Fido-FidoNet-folder/FILES/fidonet-history/publicke.art, https://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1992/10/msg00078.html, http://textfiles.serverrack.net/bbs/FIDONET/JENNINGS/STANDARDS/keys.doc.txt Archived 2023-09-17 at the Wayback Machine , and https://www.scribd.com/document/203979356/Cypherpunk-Mailing-List-1992 Archived 2022-07-28 at the Wayback Machine (starting at page 115).
  8. May, Timothy C. (11 November 1992). "Hackers Conference Report". lists.cpunks.org Mailing Lists, Cypherpunks archives 1992-2013. Archived from the original on 2022-01-27. Retrieved 2023-09-17. Eric Hughes, a mathematician who worked briefly for David Chaum's 'DigiCash' outfit, described anonymous remailers implemented in Perl and now running.
  9. Alexander, Anna Goldwater (9 October 2018). "Our Favorite 25 WIRED Covers of All Time". WIRED . ISSN   1059-1028. Archived from the original on 18 December 2022. Retrieved 18 December 2022.
  10. Reißmann, Ole (9 October 2012). "Cryptoparty-Bewegung: Die Cypherpunks sind zurück". Der Spiegel (in German). ISSN   2195-1349. Archived from the original on 2023-08-08. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  11. cryptoanarchy.wiki (17 June 2018). 2012-09-27 Eric Hughes Keynote at Amsterdam Cryptoparty (audio recording). Archived from the original on 2022-12-05. Retrieved 2023-09-17 via SoundCloud. Eric Hughes, the author of A Cypherpunk's Manifesto nearly two decades before, delivered the keynote address, Putting the Personal Back in Personal Computers, at the Amsterdam CryptoParty on 2012-09-27.
  12. Hildebrandt, Larissa (17 November 2012). "Amsterdam joins the 'CryptoParty'". Unlike Us. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Archived from the original on 2022-12-05. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  13. Hughes, Eric (2012). Cryptoparty Keynote (audio recording). Cryptoparty 2012 Amsterdam Technologia Incognita. Archived from the original on 2023-09-17. Retrieved 2023-09-17 via CryptoHub.nl.
  14. Şenalp, Örsan (8 July 2013). "/chapter: A-Cryptoparty-History-Party-Like-Its-1984 / CryptoParty Handbook". Social Network Unionism. Archived from the original on 2015-10-16. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  15. Stumpel, Marc (2 October 2012). "Eric Hughes' keynote address to #CryptoParty Amsterdam: 'Putting the Personal back in Personal Computers.' http://cryptohub.nl/cryptoparty/eric_hughes_cryptoparty.ogg via @drwhax". X (formerly Twitter). Archived from the original on 2024-04-04. Retrieved 2023-09-17.