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Another vector is I won't really be able to respond to requests from law enforcement because as soon as the chat is over (or on request of the creator of the ch

Another vector is I won't really be able to respond to requests from law enforcement because as soon as the chat is over (or on request of the creator of the chat) I wipe the key from memory. Leaving only encrypted blobs in the database that are then purged themselves at a later time. The key is never written to the disk to prevent forensic analysis there as well. As a bonus, I can handle a decent number of users with a small amount of hardware as most of the hard work is done client side. Lastly, I'm planning on implementing all of the best protections we have against man in the middle attacks currently like subresource integrity and HSTS. If the browser committees give me something better (maybe some sort of resource signing that can be verified on a secondary secure channel?) I'll implement it. So it may protect against more in the future.

bigiain 10y ago
That kind of policy didn't work out so well for Ladar Levison at Lavabit when they wanted to subvert the entire userbase's security just to get access to Snowden's email account... If you piss off important enough people - law enforcement won't just go away when you say "the system isn't capable of doing that", they'll say "so re-write the system so it is, and if you tell anybody we'll put you in jail forever". The FBI have seized and continued to run a child porn website before to gather evidence - do you _really_ think they'd hesitate before taking over your encrypted chat servers if they thought it'd get them a career-advancing prosecution? Do you think you'd fight as hard as Ladar did when the guys with guns come knocking at your door? (I have no doubt I'd cave pretty quickly - I've got a lot of respect for Ladar's resistance to selling out his users...)
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  I thought of that, the project will be FOSS and I'm going to encourage people to run their own servers. The primary server will mostly be a reference implementation and for casual chatting.

bigiain 10y ago

That kind of policy didn't work out so well for Ladar Levison at Lavabit when they wanted to subvert the entire userbase's security just to get access to Snowden's email account... If you piss off important enough people - law enforcement won't just go away when you say "the system isn't capable of doing that", they'll say "so re-write the system so it is, and if you tell anybody we'll put you in jail forever". The FBI have seized and continued to run a child porn website before to gather evidence - do you _really_ think they'd hesitate before taking over your encrypted chat servers if they thought it'd get them a career-advancing prosecution? Do you think you'd fight as hard as Ladar did when the guys with guns come knocking at your door? (I have no doubt I'd cave pretty quickly - I've got a lot of respect for Ladar's resistance to selling out his users...)

cmdrfred 10y ago
I thought of that, the project will be FOSS and I'm going to encourage people to run their own servers. The primary server will mostly be a reference implementation and for casual chatting.