7 ms·
DARPA Is Looking For the Perfect Encryption App
- mtgx 10y agoWhat, no backdoors? How are we supposed to catch the government criminals then?
- eganist 10y agoI get the snark, but I'll bite. lol If this is the military, it would make sense that they'd rather avoid backdoors if at all possible simply because... you know, it's the military.
- ejcx 10y agoMany people held in high regard by HN for "encryption apps" received DARPA grants for similar work (through CFT). For example, moxie [0]. DARPA does good work and I'm sure they are very interested in having a bullet proof secure messaging system for battlefields and tons of other applications as well. The software quality delivered by defense contractors and the like is much much lower than something like signal, so it's probably a huge need. 0 - http://opencatalog.darpa.mil/CFT.html http://opencatalog.darpa.mil/CFT.html
- Aelinsaar 10y agoI don't think that changes the reality that they're part of a government that's increasingly ham-fisted in its attempts to remove even the veneer of privacy from its citizens. One can accept that DARPA does good work, and also accept that it works for bad people.
- ejcx 10y agoThe point is they have consistently given money to people who are trustworthy and asking them to do their best work. Not all branches of government share the same goal.
- losteric 10y agoThe government is not one entity... DARPA's aligned with the military/battlefield technology, unlike the NSA's vague sigint focus. Heads would roll if there was any kind of backdoor here, because it puts soldier's lives at risk with no justification.
- morgante 10y agoGovernment is not a monolith and different branches often have competing goals. It makes total sense that the military would prioritize developing and maintaining ways of keeping their communications secure (favoring strong encryption) while intelligence sees the wide availability of SIGINT as essential to their mission (thus favoring weak encryption).
- nxzero 10y agoDARPA's notice looking for proposals: https://sbir.defensebusiness.org/topics#topic27859 https://sbir.defensebusiness.org/topics#topic27859
- pkill17 10y agoI'm glad there's at least one government agency that's competent and technical enough to further our encryption tech. I'm worried the FBI and DOJ will try to spin this DARPA notice into somehow justifying that 'perfect encryption should be a military-only technology'.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoThe very concept of a "perfect encryption app" seems flawed to me. Maybe it's just my ignorance talking, but the more important the information you're trying to encrypt, the more of an active and constant process it is to protect it over the long term. In this case, a "perfect app" would probably be a dedicated department of human beings overseeing the ongoing development and proactive defense of whatever encryption scheme they settle on.
- Animats 10y agoThat's Vice talking, not DARPA. What DARPA apparently wants is a way to hide messages in a broadcast medium. USENET alt binary groups, PornHub, and Twitter would be suitable. It should be something that gets through the Great Firewall of China, probably.
- daveguy 10y ago>USENET alt binary groups, PornHub, Twitter... Do those things get through the Great Firewall? Does HN?
- progressive_dad 10y agoI would say this is more of a steganography challenge than a cryptography challenge per-se. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-hide-one-image-in-another-An-introduction-/ http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-hide-one-image-in-ano... If common image formats get through, then yes, there is a network broadcast format that you can use to securely communicate through the great firewall.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- __jal 10y agoDoesn't meet all of the requirements, but the Cypherpunks-era "darknet" - PGP + Usenet - is a lot closer than a lot of current tools, particularly in terms of deniability.
- rtkwe 10y agoMost current tools have made some trade-offs to make them more user friendly so they'll actually be used. A perfectly secure messenger isn't very useful if it's so hard to use that no one does.
- DarthChucks 10y ago"time to live/self delete for messages" on a "Customized blockchain implementation" seems to be contradictory. Any data deleted from a block will invalidate all blocks made after the deletion.
- nxzero 10y agoDARPA appears to be aware of the paradoxes in their request. >> " Q2. The criteria for "time to live/self delete for messages" is impossible to achieve with a Blockchain. Is that a problem for this challenge? A2. [Response Pending]" Source: https://sbir.defensebusiness.org/topics#topic27859 https://sbir.defensebusiness.org/topics#topic27859
- manav 10y agoThose are user posted questions. You can also get in contact with the DARPA program manager directly.
- dsp1234 10y agoWhen mining the block chain, it is possible to have different miners temporarily working on a chain that will later be invalidated because it's not the longest chain. Maybe it would be possible to somehow use that behavior to encode a self delete?
- maxerickson 10y agoWhat problem do they have that a blockchain solves? The big win for bitcoin is that the consensus blockchain can be chosen without trust. I would think the military wouldn't be worried about manufacturing consensus among untrusted nodes. I guess if the messages are stored in the blockchain, a device would be able to delete the key and other information needed to access the message, effectively deleting the message from the device, protecting the user of the device from having to answer for the content of the message.
- Matt3o12_ 10y agoBut the military can't always use secure connections. That's why the invented the tor project.
- darkhorn 10y agoWhatsapp for sure.
- deleted 10y ago
- chatmasta 10y ago> Frederic Jacobs, an independent security researcher who has worked as a developer for the encryption messaging app Signal I thought he worked for Apple now? [0] EDIT: nevermind, I stand corrected... To make this comment non-useless, let me add to the discussion by saying that the linked DoD website is very cool. Has anyone here applied for a grant via this website (or the underlying DoD protocols)? It seems very foreign and convoluted to me, I'm wondering what the application process is like. [0] http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/25/apple-hires-developer-behind-signal-edward-snowdens-favorite-secure-chat-app/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/25/apple-hires-developer-behin... [1] https://sbir.defensebusiness.org https://sbir.defensebusiness.org
- nxzero 10y agoThe article you linked to says he's joining Apple "this summer" - which means he's currently not at Apple; what's unclear?
- moxie 10y agoYou're right, Fred doesn't work at Open Whisper Systems. He's a student at EPFL, and is doing a summer internship at Apple this year. Since the article mentions Signal, I think the author just wanted to make it clear that Fred's quotes come with a potential bias since he worked on Signal in the past. But we're hiring if you want to be quoted in future Motherboard articles on private messaging! =) https://whispersystems.org/workworkwork/ https://whispersystems.org/workworkwork/
- Nutomic 10y agoI am currently developing a decentralized messenger that might fit this description. I've developed Ensichat [1] as a messenger that works over Bluetooth and Internet, by sending messages peer to peer. At the moment, I'm adding additional functionality to this app as part of my Bachelor thesis (improved routing, and relays that hold messages while the destination is not reachable). Does anyone have experience with DARPA projects, and if individuals can apply for it? (I'm not from the US) Edit: My app does not use a blockchain because the data, bandwidth and power usage aren't an option for mobile devices. [1] https://github.com/Nutomic/ensichat https://github.com/Nutomic/ensichat
- nxzero 10y ago>> "Q1. Are applications of non-US based institutions/companies accepted? A1. [Response Pending]" Source: https://sbir.defensebusiness.org/topics#topic27859 https://sbir.defensebusiness.org/topics#topic27859
- vezycash 10y agoUpdate the github page. Right now it does not say that it works on both Bluetooth and Internet.
- Nutomic 10y agoThanks, fixed!
- manav 10y agoMost things having to do with encryption are usually restricted. Strong cryptography has export restrictions so that could be an issue.
- Nutomic 10y agoBut that would only be a problem if I lived in the USA, right?
- eloisius 10y agoNeat. I doubt I'm DARPA material, but I've been working on a side project that shares a lot of these goals. I'm implementing a DHT based on Mainline (Bittorrent) to serve as a p2p transport layer for sending asynchronous messages. Then, I want to use the Signal protocol on top of it. https://github.com/zacstewart/comm https://github.com/zacstewart/comm
- mkhpalm 10y agoThats cool... for the government. But are we allowed to use perfect encryption in the United States anymore?
- kbaker 10y agoI had an idea like this a bit ago, where essentially you would dump your tiny (PGP) message in a giant noise haystack at a random, or generated offset. These messages would get rolled up into a big torrent that gets served every so often. This is similar to PGP over Usenet, but has the advantage of fooling traffic analysis as well. It is actually more like dead drops, storing something secret or obfuscated in a very public place, and agents check it only every so often. Since it would just look like a giant torrent, it would be very hard to detect legitimate torrent mirroring from also pulling information out. Only problem is still the message expiration, which I don't really believe is possible except when using a third party server.
- Matt3o12_ 10y agoThis doesn't scale well and is impossible if you want to send any media. If such an app were to become as popular as iMessage, it would need to handle 200k message per second. I can't download so many messages per second on my phone. You could send blocks with 2000 messages but you could easily be deanonymized (look, out of those 2m messages, he requested 5 blocks with the same author. I think they talk to each other). Don't get my started with kilo to megabyte big images. If you would not want to scale the app, you could also be deanonymized because you're talking with a niche that has less then 10,000 users. I wish there was an easy solution to this problem but we already see how badly Bitcoin scale and there are great articles why Bitcoin with its current design can't be used in the real world simply because the block chain has a pretty low limit on transactions per second.
- banach 10y agoSo... FreeNet?
- vezycash 10y agoThis morning, I thought of using public keys as an address - like an email address. What do you guys think?
- jamesdwilson 10y agolike bitmessage?
- jfeser 10y agoThat would make it tricky to change your keys if, for example, your laptop got stolen.
- kobayashi 10y agoDoesn't miniLock do something like that?
- Nutomic 10y agoA public key is pretty long for an address (eg ~500 bytes for RSA-4096). Instead, you can use a hash of the public key for an address. That's what I'm doing for Ensichat [1] [1] https://github.com/Nutomic/ensichat https://github.com/Nutomic/ensichat
- strgrd 10y agoWhat a novel idea... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID-based_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID-based_encryption
- kobayashi 10y agoThe Grugq has a better (IMO) article on the topic: https://medium.com/@thegrugq/anonymous-messaging-3032319192b6#.a82vicvik https://medium.com/@thegrugq/anonymous-messaging-3032319192b...
- manav 10y agoI saw this a few days in the DARPA SBIR/STTR release. My understanding is that they do not want to use a public blockchain, instead just utilize blockchain technology across DoD servers to make them less susceptible to a attack, while also giving clear transaction logs for certain military requests that have compliance needs. The private blockchain will give them state machine replication, some kind of method of encrypted authentication, and a platform for transaction verification across military/dod (or whatever the specific use cases are). The communication bit could work as well since they don't have to store the messages themselves in the blockchain. Since the blockchain is private, this also somewhat solves the problem of transaction speed. There would probably be some lag, but probably just a few seconds or even less if optimized. Something like Ethereum (with whisper and and swarm) could work if they were looking to use a public blockchain, but they specifically reference Hyperledger.org in their publication.
- paavokoya 10y agoIf the source code to this encrypted database were to be released publicly (say by "leakers") what would stop them from accessing and writing to said database (err excuse me, "blockchain")
- dogma1138 10y agoNetwork access and presumably some centralized key hierarchy. Same thing that would prevent some one from writing to the private blockchains banks are setting up for clearinghouse purposes. If your the security of your cryptographic system is dependent on anything but the secret keys being secret it's time to go back to the drawing board. Bitcoin works because it uses proof of work as a gating mechanism to prevent abuse, closed blockchains usually rely on other mechanisms as the parties involved in them can negotiate the terms via other means.
- paavokoya 10y ago>Network access and presumably some centralized key hierarchy. How is that different from what is used currently?
- jbpetersen 10y agoClosest they're gonna get to self-destructing messages on a blockchain is trusting the recipient to delete the decryption key after a certain amount of time, along with pruning expired messages from the chain (not perfect, probably good enough). To their merit, blockchain based messaging is an easy way to prevent a great deal of traffic analysis.
- cdevs 10y agoI think the server "wall concept" is easy, the client or ease of use is the real problem. it's not hard to keep encrypting until everything is "ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt" that for example could be hi to one person and goodbye to another even though they are all the same letter, the problem is always in keys or the need for them/transferring.
- malandrew 10y agoDARPA wants “a public wall anyone can monitor or post messages on, but only correct people can decrypt.” Great related talk "Defcon 21 - De-Anonymizing Alt.Anonymous. Messages" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tj6c2Ikq_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tj6c2Ikq_E https://ritter.vg/p/AAM-defcon13.pdf https://ritter.vg/p/AAM-defcon13.pdf
- swax 10y agoI built a totally decentralized and secure P2P/DHT communications platform a long time ago called DeOps - https://github.com/swax/DeOps https://github.com/swax/DeOps It let's members of a group create a totally private darknet with a hierarchy of trust among themselves using a chain of signed trust tokens. All packets are encrypted with the key of the receiver and signed by the sender. It even uses random ports and sends filler traffic between nodes to prevent finger printing. I built on top of it services like IM, VOIP, chat rooms, a versioned file system, mail, message boards, etc.. I had a lot of free time lol. The nodes automatically manage the storage of data around the DHT.
- Apofis 10y agoWhy not try to pitch them the flatform? Or maybe even make the requested changes to it so that it fits the spec more closely to show you're serious. Could be good money.
- aaronhoffman 10y agoIs this a honey pot scam?