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FrankTrollman
QUOTE (hyzmarca)
If a prepaid card is lost, the bank can issue you a new one and you won't lose anything. If a stored value card is lost, your money is gone, just as if you had lost hard cash. More importantly for Shadowrun, the stored value card is not in anyone's name and not tied to any account. It can be used by anyone at any time, and it can be transferred freely in whole.

Does no one here ride the Hong Kong subway often enough to understand this?


We got the same system here in Czechia. We call it "OpenCard" but it doesn't work worth a damn and everyone just uses paper tickets. And yeah, you can hack an OpenCard. It's not super difficult, but once you do all that lets you do is ride mass transit for free. Do that for a year and you'll have saved a little over 200 Euros. Congratulations.

The problem here is that Shadowrun is asking us to believe in stored value devices worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of nuyen that are multinational and not even theoretically tied to a real person's ID. And there is seemingly no reason you couldn't hack one of them the same way you'd hack an OpenCard. Only instead of committing crime to get yourself a moderately decent hourly wage you'd be entitling yourself to a life of luxury that you could freely spend anywhere on Earth.

So seriously, why would anyone go hack a mainframe full of black ice in the middle of a dangerous extraterritorial compound full of armed guards when they can get paid better by hacking their own anonymous bus pass while they are in the comfort and safety of a Faraday cage in their apartment?

-Frank
Heath Robinson
QUOTE (Cthulhudreams @ May 25 2009, 11:33 AM) *
Sure, but the fact that Ares is actually murdering dozens of people with alien spirits who then want to kill everyone else is A) Known by many more people and B) somewhat worse for Ares PR that the abolition of one product line that is already noted as going the way of the dodo.

I didn't say no defectors, I just said no defectors who knew anything really important. Like someone knows the full details of Ares wetwork and illegal operations. Is that person going to defect? The information is worth way more than 1 product line - you could destory the entire corporation.



Why? Agents can crack the system in their spare time. Its not like they get bored. They won;t need a second check.

Anyway the system explictly doesn't work like that, otherwise I couldn't make forgeries of nuyen. Which I can. If they are checking at a central database every time I do anything, I couldn't, because it would be instantly detected.


Ares has something called PR. For the people who care and actually belive that Ares does bug experiments they just pull out the PR and claim it's just animals and it's tightly controlled with tons of security. They're doing it to better understand the alien menace that (oh so very conveniently) demonstrated just how terrible it was when it took an entire city out of the blue with no prior warning. They're doing SCIENCE, and anyway everyone's still alive.

The key fact is that the Bugs happen to other people, and people messing around with spirit horrors are nothing new - Aztech does it all the time and some people know. People are either unwilling to hear it, or they feel that Aztech has the best interests of everyone at heart. Who knows, perhaps they do. Ares is doing things with bugs in isolated areas and it happens to other people. It's never going to touch us, right?

Those who actually don't trust Ares realise that Ares isn't going to dump it's waste where it eats. Those bugs aren't an actual threat, even if they're using metahumans for it. If you're deep enough in the shadows to know that, you're most likely a cynical, horribly jaded human being that only really wants to look out for yourself and those around you. You can't meaningfully change what Ares is doing, so why worry about it?


I'm going to bet that someone who has a pretty good idea of the full scope of the Ares wetwork operations has likely been extracted. That kind of organisational talent is pretty useful to another Corp. Denying Ares that talent is even better. The thing is, that talent is going to another Mega who will pay them more. They won't be leaking the info they got during their Ares run because they're actually getting a promotion by getting themselves headhunted by another Mega. They may also have a completely different ID now, with Ares revoking their SIN entirely and claiming that they're dead. Kinda seems a bit dodgy when someone who is officially dead claims to be working for another corp and has important information for the public.

You can't employ a dump of details from a Data Mining system by itself. It's only information. It's only value is in how it informs your actions and how much it can be sold on for. That's all. It will just get passed around if it actually has use. You can't deny the right kinds of data, and even if you want to it's going to nag at you. You'll just change credsticks to be sure.


The stick goes out of signal periodically. Like, when you sleep and it's only accessable through the secured home node. If a connection can't be cracked because it's only open for a single IP before it gets re-encrypted (RAW this works) then becoming unavailable before the 24 hour interval is up can interrupt a Crack Encryption action.

Either way, this is more a game necessity. Discussing how you can make Credsticks impossible to crack whilst employing only non-optional rules is beyond the scope of this discussion. These things exist if you want to delve deeply enough. That they exist is sufficient to ensure cryptographic security. Dramatic Encryption is just a way of telling people that they shouldn't waste their time going after pointless ends.


Yes, the system I've presented is very non-canonical. I'm perfectly happy with this - wasn't it clear all along? AH has argued for the canonical system all along. Frank and I appear to be in agreement that we don't like the smell of the canonical system and we've both adopted the same broad kind of system to solve the problems we see in the canonical system.
Cthulhudreams
Mhm, Sorry, thought we were discussing the actual ruleset - I imagine you also houserule out forging nuyen.

But anyway, I disagree on the extraction thing - because someone that important being extracted could be used to sink the corporation - who cares if Ares claims they are legally dead, you can always point out why and this guys biometrics will match the deceased SIN - which other people have to have had if he ever left an Ares compound at any point ever. The fact that Ares has declared him dead when he patently isn't is going to actually make ares look worse.

Why use him for upping the efficiency of your operation a bit, maybe, if he is slightly better than your spy master when you can just blow up a competitor. However, this guy would be extremely important, so he'd be heavily guarded and probably be extremely wealthy in his current position.
hyzmarca
I'm thinking more of the eCache's system, which involves the use of discrete encrypted certificates that can between users and redeemed for money. If eCache has any sense, then each certificate is unique and can only be redeemed once. If they had any sense then they would also use an encryption algorithm of sufficient strength with a key of sufficient size that breaking it before the heat death of the universe is very near impossible.

Using unique packets of data that can each only be redeemed once as money, henceforth referred to as electronic coins, with instant online verification makes consumer fraud impossible and merchant fraud difficult.

The only method of fraud that is possible in a totally online e-coin system is for a merchant to copy and deposit coins that the customer did not authorize him to take, without modifying the consumer's card, so that the fraud will only be detectable at the consumer's next transaction. If the e-coin purse, whichever it might be, only has limited processing power, this might be possible. It might even be easy.

The solution is to create a purse devices and programs that only release coins when explicitly authorized to do so by the consumer using the purse's own interface rather than the reader's, since the reader could be hacked by a merchant.
Thus the credstick would, indeed, have a display and buttons, though not many.

It can also be made anonymous, or near that, by the use of certain obfuscation techniques.


The e-coin scheme I present, however, also permits offline transactions, in which verification does not occur until after the transaction is completed. One can easily determine that the coins in question were signed by ZOG, as any electronic purse would have the group's public key. Outright forgery is impossible without ZOG's private key. But copying and double-spending is still an issue with offline transactions, one with cannot easily be overcome.

The easiest way to prevent such double-spending is to only authorize certain proprietary devices to hold the electronic coins. These devices would be designed to be highly tamper resistant and would automatically delete any spent coin.
That would be credsticks. It might also be certified cred handling software for comlinks, but this is less likely due to the fact that such software would be much easier to hack.

The biggest advantage for banks and businesses is that consumers bear all risk in this scheme. If a credit card is stolen or copied, which is fairly easy to do, the banks and the merchants are ultimately the ones who pay. If a device containing electronic coins is stolen, then the only one who loses is the device's owner.
FrankTrollman
QUOTE (hyzmarca)
The e-coin scheme I present, however, also permits offline transactions, in which verification does not occur until after the transaction is completed. One can easily determine that the coins in question were signed by ZOG, as any electronic purse would have the group's public key. Outright forgery is impossible without ZOG's private key. But copying and double-spending is still an issue with offline transactions, one with cannot easily be overcome.


Right. See, if the credsticks call home to submit that they have spent a nuyen or received a nuyen, then the system is not anonymous. There's a data trail at the bank it is calling home to. If the credsticks don't call home after a transaction, then you can reset your credstick after every expenditure and spend it as many times as you like. Even once your credit gets flagged as fake it will still check out as good to anyone who doesn't themselves call back to a bank with the credit.

The best compromise I can come up with is the Z-O compromise: credit all has to call home, but the bank it's calling home to doesn't know or care who owns the individual accounts and wouldn't tell any law enforcement agency even if it knew that information. That seems to do most of what people want money to do in Shadowrun.

But the secure anonymous offline transactions thing is just not workable.

-Frank
Chrysalis
QUOTE (FrankTrollman @ May 25 2009, 05:15 PM) *
But the secure anonymous offline transactions thing is just not workable.



No, that's what I would expect for precious metals with the right seals and old fashioned paper currency.


-Chrysalis
kzt
There is no "system". "In other words, if more than one copy of any give e-coin gets put into the system, all except for the first are invalidated." There are just banks who work for mutually hostile corporations and by cannon don't collaborate at all, even when it is their clear interest to do so.

There also are no e-coins.

If you make up enough stuff that doesn't exist in the setting and contradict enough of the basic cannon by doing stuff like providing nuyen with unbreakable encryption and serial numbers, assuming that money only really lives in banks and assuming real-time 100% collaboration between every bank in the entire world you can get some sort of half-assed explanation. Except that with real-time 100% collaboration you can't actually make it work either, as it means you can query state, transaction and ownership info on any arbitrary nuyen at any arbitrary point in time and you will get accurate answers.
Aaron
You seem to be forgetting about divisible electronic currency. It satisfies the Big Four requirements for anonymous electronic cash (no tracing, no forging, no overspending, no swindling) just fine. The nifty part is that it becomes traceable only if you overspend a coin.

And before you say "but encryption in SR4 is a joke!" remember that as long as a coin isn't fully spent, an attacker would have incomplete information on the coin, and therefore the traceability of the currency.

If you still have a "yeah but ..." then please google "divisible digital cash" and do some reading if you're not familiar with the research; the first link I found isn't bad. Beyond that, if you have anything you'd like me to address directly, please feel free to PM me (or better yet, catch me in person at a convention). This is pretty much all I can offer in this venue; trolls bore me and I feel like I can't offer adequate service to the sincerely curious on a forum (I'm used to explaining things in front of a whiteboard, or at least on a napkin =i).
hyzmarca
QUOTE (FrankTrollman @ May 25 2009, 10:15 AM) *
Right. See, if the credsticks call home to submit that they have spent a nuyen or received a nuyen, then the system is not anonymous. There's a data trail at the bank it is calling home to. If the credsticks don't call home after a transaction, then you can reset your credstick after every expenditure and spend it as many times as you like. Even once your credit gets flagged as fake it will still check out as good to anyone who doesn't themselves call back to a bank with the credit.

The best compromise I can come up with is the Z-O compromise: credit all has to call home, but the bank it's calling home to doesn't know or care who owns the individual accounts and wouldn't tell any law enforcement agency even if it knew that information. That seems to do most of what people want money to do in Shadowrun.

But the secure anonymous offline transactions thing is just not workable.

-Frank


Anonymity in an online scheme can be achieved by using a cryptographic blinding scheme such that the bank is able to determine that a coin is unique but is unable to identify it or give it a consistent identity.

QUOTE (Aaron @ May 25 2009, 02:53 PM) *
You seem to be forgetting about divisible electronic currency. It satisfies the Big Four requirements for anonymous electronic cash (no tracing, no forging, no overspending, no swindling) just fine. The nifty part is that it becomes traceable only if you overspend a coin.

And before you say "but encryption in SR4 is a joke!" remember that as long as a coin isn't fully spent, an attacker would have incomplete information on the coin, and therefore the traceability of the currency.

If you still have a "yeah but ..." then please google "divisible digital cash" and do some reading if you're not familiar with the research; the first link I found isn't bad. Beyond that, if you have anything you'd like me to address directly, please feel free to PM me (or better yet, catch me in person at a convention). This is pretty much all I can offer in this venue; trolls bore me and I feel like I can't offer adequate service to the sincerely curious on a forum (I'm used to explaining things in front of a whiteboard, or at least on a napkin =i).


That works.

Anonymity of that system can be increased further by not having user accounts, but rather having everything tied to devices which aren't directly tied to any individual.
kzt
No it doesn't because the underlying secure infrastructure doesn't exist and can't exist due to the decrees of Aaron and the developers. I'd cite Aaron's document, but he decided to link to a postcript document and it's way too much effort to deal with raw postscript.

"The authenticity features are attained via key management. Key management is carried
out using a certification authority(CA) (see section 2.12), a trusted agent who is
responsible for confirming a user’s identity. Without a trusted CA and a secure infrastructure,
the security features of digital cash will be practically impossible over an
entrusted transmission medium like Internet."

The blind clinging to the idea that cryptography doesn't work also means that most of the matrix infrastructure doesn't work. Digital Currency is just an important subset. It also involves basic things things like phone calls - is that your fixer or Lone Star using edit to impersonate your fixer? How can you tell? Or you want to meet in a "secure matrix conference" with Mr J. Secure how? In SR4 a 12 year old can impersonate Damien Knight in a "secure matrix conference" perfectly as long as they have access to a credit card and it amuses them to do so.
Cthulhudreams
http://www.simovits.com/archive/dcash.pdf has a good overview of the properties of divisible digital cash, calls out some research and points to the fundamental problem that any defense of integrity sacrifices anonymity. So does any move to allow transparency.

Particularly, if you don't have online checking of every transaction, the system is vulnerable to multiple spending of each coin (even without forgery), and if you have online validation of every transaction, the system loses anonymity (though it can preserve it from some parties via strong encryption.. which doesn't work in shadow run, thus anonymity is not preserved.)

The other problem is transferability - if you want that in shadowrun (i.e. the ability to have any sort of transaction other than Issuing Bank -> Credstick -> Issuing Bank), and you want to be able to catch multispenders, you have to sign each transaction with encryption... which doesn't work in shadowrun - because either your losing anonymity or you lose the ability to catch multispenders.

Hooray. And if you don't have transferability, the issuing bank owns both sides of the transaction.

But what I'd actually do if I was a bastard was just sign all my transactions as the Bank of America with encryption taking long enough to decrypt that when I was 'busted' double spending, hey, it wasn't me that signed it.
hyzmarca
QUOTE (Cthulhudreams @ May 25 2009, 07:04 PM) *
http://www.simovits.com/archive/dcash.pdf has a good overview of the properties of divisible digital cash, calls out some research and points to the fundamental problem that any defense of integrity sacrifices anonymity. So does any move to allow transparency.

Particularly, if you don't have online checking of every transaction, the system is vulnerable to multiple spending of each coin (even without forgery), and if you have online validation of every transaction, the system loses anonymity (though it can preserve it from some parties via strong encryption.. which doesn't work in shadow run, thus anonymity is not preserved.)

The other problem is transferability - if you want that in shadowrun (i.e. the ability to have any sort of transaction other than Issuing Bank -> Credstick -> Issuing Bank), and you want to be able to catch multispenders, you have to sign each transaction with encryption... which doesn't work in shadowrun - because either your losing anonymity or you lose the ability to catch multispenders.


The key is to use a cryptological system designed in such a way that the spender can only be revealed if he himself creates two copies of the same coin.

QUOTE
But what I'd actually do if I was a bastard was just sign all my transactions as the Bank of America with encryption taking long enough to decrypt that when I was 'busted' double spending, hey, it wasn't me that signed it.


In order to do that, you'd need to know Back of America's private key. If you knew that, then you'd be able to make valid currency. And they'd change their key the second they noticed that someone else was using it.


The best assumption is that the nuyen system uses the optional dramatic encryption rules, thus forcing anyone who wishes to defeat the anonymity of the system to obtain an original copy of one of Leonardo Da Vinci's handwritten notebooks corrently contained in a high security vault within ZO itself guarded by cyberzombies, cyborgs, and hardcore void-trained magicians which has an obscure unbreakable written underneath the cover on the spine in invisible ink that can only be activated using the oil from a specific breed of now-extinct flower.
kzt
It's worse than that. Without encryption someone can just sniff the connection and steal the money as you put it onto your credstick and spend it as you. But a lot faster than you, so you are the one spending duplicate money.
Cthulhudreams
QUOTE (hyzmarca @ May 25 2009, 07:02 PM) *
In order to do that, you'd need to know Back of America's private key. If you knew that, then you'd be able to make valid currency. And they'd change their key the second they noticed that someone else was using it.


Sure, but remember, this is shadowrun. P = NP & I can derive BoA's private key from its public key with the decrypt program.

Its like you're not keen to accept that Encryption does not retain its current strength in SR-verse when the cannocial fact is that it it has lost it.

Kzt makes a great point though. You could do that at any point of sale for that matter.
kzt
In real time too. You can also reverse password hashes, break block ciphers in real time, and etc which essentially make it impossible to keep private anything on the matrix or passing through the matrix, or to believe that anything on or passing through the matrix is what it says it is, or by who it says. It's also impossible to tell whether it has been intercepted or altered by a 3rd party.

Somewhere at the top of this thread I said you have to push the "I believe" button. I wasn't kidding. There isn't any possible way to make the idiocy that is the SR computer rules actually logically work as the canon requires it to.
hyzmarca
QUOTE (Cthulhudreams @ May 25 2009, 07:08 PM) *
Its like you're not keen to accept that Encryption does not retain its current strength in SR-verse when the cannocial fact is that it it has lost it.


The vast majority of it doesn't. That obvious.

However, the dramatic encryption optional rule found in Unwired permits the GM to establish an arbitrarily strong encryption system that cannot be broken using cryptanalysis tools.

Unbreakable encryption does exist in Shadowrun, that's canon. It appears in On The Run.

Given how important the monetary system is, it just makes sense that ZOG would invest the time and effort required to use these unbreakable GM fiat plot-device encryption schemes rather than making due with the run-of-the-mill stuff.
kzt
QUOTE (hyzmarca @ May 25 2009, 06:08 PM) *
Given how important the monetary system is, it just makes sense that ZOG would invest the time and effort required to use these unbreakable GM fiat plot-device encryption schemes rather than making due with the run-of-the-mill stuff.

Um, so this unbreakable encryption is usable by cheap throwaway credsticks but not by expensive comlinks or really expensive mainframes? Because, after all, encrypting your transferring 5 nuyen to stuffershack is far more important than encrypting files containing evidence of a mass murder conspiracy that you are part of?
Method
Well being totally within the realm of GM fiat, its up to GM to decide what all dramatic encryption is used on, right? In other words, if the "file containing evidence of a mass murder conspiracy" is central to the plot, then the GM can say it's encryption is unbreakable as well.

Maybe not a game I'd enjoy playing in (and a slippery slope IMHO) but as hyzmarca has pointed out it is cannon.
kzt
Cool. Then it's OK if I say it's used on everything. smile.gif
Method
Eh. Slippery slope. Slippery cliff. Whatever. wink.gif
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