5 ms·

2017 Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography

141 points by ergot 10y ago

dlevine 10y ago
should be "RWC Levchin Prize" (the reddit article is also incorrect).
tptacek 10y ago
Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin. Most of the novel cryptography in Signal Protocol is Trevor's; it's good for people to know who he is. Reprising a previous thread: The prizes went to Joan Daemen, for AES and SHA-3 (on stage, Levchin pointed out that his interest in cryptography had been piqued by a xeroxed copy of DES when he was in school, and that it was an honor to present an award to one of the people who replaced the DES), and --- more notably, I think --- to Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin for their work on Signal. Last year's winners were Phil Rogaway (a cryptographer of repute comparable to that of Daemen) and the miTLS team (of Triple Handshake, SMACK, FREAK, Logjam, and SLOTH fame).
- dom0 10y ago
  Trevor Perrin also went on and created the Noise protocol framework (of which some protocols are quite similar to Signal).
  - RRRA 10y ago
    Interesting, didn't know he was also involved with that one. Has anyone seen a table comparing Noise, Axoltl & OTRv4?
    - tptacek 10y ago
      Those aren't comparable. Noise is a metaprotocol, a framework of patterns for building secure transports. Axolotl is a cryptographic ratchet construction, for continuously modifying encryption keys as messages are transmitted. OTRv4 is a complete message cryptosystem, like Signal Protocol.
niftich 10y ago
Not OP, but I sense perhaps a limitation of HN; articles with comments where the comment is the submission get conflated with submissions about the article itself. (EDIT: the submission's URL has now been changed from a particular reddit comment at https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlinspike_receives_rwc_levchin_price_2017/dc11s2h/?sh=c7c0de08&st=IXZ2E3ZY https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlin... to a different announcement about the prize. The rest of my post as it originally stood follows.) Reproducing the subject matter of the submission for discussion's sake: dionyziz says: I think Moxie decided not to be recorded for his acceptance speech. He said something very nice during his speech however, and I'll try to phrase it like he did: If you watch videos of politicians giving speeches in the 1930's, you observe the fascist leaders who gladly accept an applause from the audience because they have earned it. They feel they are responsible for it, that they are the creators of history. On the contrary, if you observe a communist leader, they will applaud with the audience in every chance. This is because they have a different belief system, that of historical materialism, that history is a force of its own, unstoppable and inevitable, that drives what is happening in the world equipped with the momentum of what has happened in the past. These leaders feel they are simply the bearer of history, the tool that history chose to run its course, so they applaud together with the audience for history. Similarly, today, we have a similar force, and that is technology. I once had the chance to meet Mark Zuckerberg. When I met him, a thought occurred to me: I could, right there... kill him. [audience laughs] I never thought I would get so close. But would that really change anything? Us technologists are the bearers of technological momentum. We make things happen, because the time has come for them to happen. And now is the time for strong encryption and crypto. [audience applauds together with Moxie]
- woah 10y ago
  I shouldn't judge based on a remembered, secondhand, out of context quote, but this sounds kind of... pretentious.
  - justinpombrio 10y ago
    You might have read it backwards: the message was very humble. Moxie was saying that he didn't deserve credit for what he had built, because if he had not built it someone else would have. So his work was best thought of as a product of history, rather than a product of Moxie.
scandox 10y ago
What I struggle with, especially when it's someone that clearly has great integrity, is the apparent need to favour one group of tyrants over another. The idea that communist leaders felt any different at all to the fascist ones seems delusional to me. They simply had different tropes, different conventions. I had the same feeling seeing everyone praise Fidel Castro while simultaneously gnashing their teeth about Trump. Why can't we just accept that tyrants are tyrants, regardless of the particular ideology that has catapulted them into position? If we did perhaps we'd accept the need to overcome our primitive attitudes to leadership and charisma.
- justinpombrio 10y ago
  Moxie was contrasting the different perspectives that communist and fascist leaders had about what caused their success, for the purpose of an analogy. He was not contrasting communism with fascism. Please learn to distinguish the two.
  - scandox 10y ago
    I'm very clear in my comment: a. "The idea that communist leaders felt any different...". In other words "the different perspectives" they had about what caused their success. I do not believe they had different perspectives, except externally. b. I think it's pretty clear that Moxie favours what he perceives as the superior point of view of one group over the other and he reinforces that by himself clapping with the audience in emulation of the preferred group. I'm not for a moment suggesting that he's got simplistic ideas about Communism and Fascism. I actually don't know his politics. I understand that he talking more about the concept of historical materialism, of being part of a movement rather than being a mover. On the other hand I think a reasonable reader would infer that this goes beyond mere analogy.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      They're distinguishable at least by their respective utopian conclusions. A ideological fascist utopia looks very different than a communist one. One may rightly gripe that in practice there is no difference, or that those in the respective governments did not believe in the ideas they espoused and instead worked towards different ends. But I can't believe that 100% of those following the ideologies ignored their tenets.
tptacek 10y ago
Mods: a more appropriate title is "Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin win 2017 RWC Levchin Prize for Signal", and a more appropriate link would be to pretty much anything but an individual Reddit comment; how about this one? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2017-levchin-prize-real-world-cryptography-max-levchin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2017-levchin-prize-real-world...
- sctb 10y ago
  Thanks! We've updated the link from https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlinspike_receives_rwc_levchin_price_2017/dc11s2h/?sh=c7c0de08&st=IXZ2E3ZY https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlin... and the title from “Moxie Marlinspike Receives RWC Levchin Prize 2017 for Signal Protocol Invention”.
Unman 10y ago
While applauding the stated mission of Open Whisper Systems to make cryptography usable by large numbers of people I think it is fair to hold Moxie & Co. to the same high standards to which they held PGP: https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/ https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/ The journalists who depend on it struggle with it and often mess up (“I send you the private key to communicate privately, right?”), the activists who use it do so relatively sparingly (“wait, this thing wants my finger print?”), and no other sane person is willing to use it by default. Even the projects that attempt to use it as a dependency struggle. Breaking this up into constituent parts and trying to guess whether those standards are met seems to leave us somewhere in this territory: 1) Journalists communicating with WhatsApp struggle with it and mess up. Given the confusion around under what circumstances one can communicate securely with WhatsApp ("Is it OK if I have two checkmarks? Is it OK because Facebook would never let a government have access to the RedPhone part?") 2) Activists who use WhatsApp do so relatively sparingly. I have no idea on this one. I hope they're using Signal and/or GPG with all their attendant bother, complexity and confusion though. 3) No other sane person is willing to use WhatsApp by default. Hmmm.. more confusing value judgements. Is someone that uses a communication method open to abuse by corporations and governments "sane"? 4) Dependency struggle. AFAICS no other projects can piggy-back off WhatsApp because it's proprietary and closed. So the user base can't scratch their own itches. OK, so what about Signal? Sounds like the dependency on Google Cloud Messages and Play Services can be hacked around with great difficulty. I dunno. Fair play to Moxie and Perrin for what they've done, but so far GPG looks like a better bet for actual secure end-to-end communication, using an already existing, widespread distribution mechanism which is widespread and redundant: email. Reports of GPG's death may have been grossly exaggerated.
- tptacek 10y ago
  Can you find a single practicing cryptographic engineer who will go on the record as saying that PGP (in any of its incarnations) and email is better than Signal Protocol for message encryption?
  - ethbro 10y ago
    If one is going to be paranoid, then one should at least be consistently paranoid. v1 of the internet as used now seems wildly naive of state surveillance. v2 may be better, but if most traffic goes encrypted, then there are going to be a lot more attacks (both legal and extra-legal) against the nuances of implementations. v2 is certainly an improvement on v1. But one of the reasons v1 was deployed is because we believed things like "The US government would never tap traffic at the backbone" or "The US government would never tap private links between data centers." Valuing both, I think it's important to keep eyes on the future so in 10 years we don't look back on statements like "The US government would never compell Google / Microsoft / Facebook / Whisper to distribute a poisoned version of their application" with the same amount of surprise.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
yeukhon 10y ago
Always wondered how Trevor Perrin looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A9Eto9iqww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A9Eto9iqww

141 points by ergot 10y ago

should be "RWC Levchin Prize" (the reddit article is also incorrect).

Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin. Most of the novel cryptography in Signal Protocol is Trevor's; it's good for people to know who he is. Reprising a previous thread: The prizes went to Joan Daemen, for AES and SHA-3 (on stage, Levchin pointed out that his interest in cryptography had been piqued by a xeroxed copy of DES when he was in school, and that it was an honor to present an award to one of the people who replaced the DES), and --- more notably, I think --- to Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin for their work on Signal. Last year's winners were Phil Rogaway (a cryptographer of repute comparable to that of Daemen) and the miTLS team (of Triple Handshake, SMACK, FREAK, Logjam, and SLOTH fame).

dom0 10y ago
Trevor Perrin also went on and created the Noise protocol framework (of which some protocols are quite similar to Signal).
- RRRA 10y ago
  Interesting, didn't know he was also involved with that one. Has anyone seen a table comparing Noise, Axoltl & OTRv4?
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Those aren't comparable. Noise is a metaprotocol, a framework of patterns for building secure transports. Axolotl is a cryptographic ratchet construction, for continuously modifying encryption keys as messages are transmitted. OTRv4 is a complete message cryptosystem, like Signal Protocol.

niftich 10y ago

Not OP, but I sense perhaps a limitation of HN; articles with comments where the comment is the submission get conflated with submissions about the article itself. (EDIT: the submission's URL has now been changed from a particular reddit comment at https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlinspike_receives_rwc_levchin_price_2017/dc11s2h/?sh=c7c0de08&st=IXZ2E3ZY https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlin... to a different announcement about the prize. The rest of my post as it originally stood follows.) Reproducing the subject matter of the submission for discussion's sake: dionyziz says: I think Moxie decided not to be recorded for his acceptance speech. He said something very nice during his speech however, and I'll try to phrase it like he did: If you watch videos of politicians giving speeches in the 1930's, you observe the fascist leaders who gladly accept an applause from the audience because they have earned it. They feel they are responsible for it, that they are the creators of history. On the contrary, if you observe a communist leader, they will applaud with the audience in every chance. This is because they have a different belief system, that of historical materialism, that history is a force of its own, unstoppable and inevitable, that drives what is happening in the world equipped with the momentum of what has happened in the past. These leaders feel they are simply the bearer of history, the tool that history chose to run its course, so they applaud together with the audience for history. Similarly, today, we have a similar force, and that is technology. I once had the chance to meet Mark Zuckerberg. When I met him, a thought occurred to me: I could, right there... kill him. [audience laughs] I never thought I would get so close. But would that really change anything? Us technologists are the bearers of technological momentum. We make things happen, because the time has come for them to happen. And now is the time for strong encryption and crypto. [audience applauds together with Moxie]

woah 10y ago
I shouldn't judge based on a remembered, secondhand, out of context quote, but this sounds kind of... pretentious.
- justinpombrio 10y ago
  You might have read it backwards: the message was very humble. Moxie was saying that he didn't deserve credit for what he had built, because if he had not built it someone else would have. So his work was best thought of as a product of history, rather than a product of Moxie.

scandox 10y ago

What I struggle with, especially when it's someone that clearly has great integrity, is the apparent need to favour one group of tyrants over another. The idea that communist leaders felt any different at all to the fascist ones seems delusional to me. They simply had different tropes, different conventions. I had the same feeling seeing everyone praise Fidel Castro while simultaneously gnashing their teeth about Trump. Why can't we just accept that tyrants are tyrants, regardless of the particular ideology that has catapulted them into position? If we did perhaps we'd accept the need to overcome our primitive attitudes to leadership and charisma.

justinpombrio 10y ago
Moxie was contrasting the different perspectives that communist and fascist leaders had about what caused their success, for the purpose of an analogy. He was not contrasting communism with fascism. Please learn to distinguish the two.
- scandox 10y ago
  I'm very clear in my comment: a. "The idea that communist leaders felt any different...". In other words "the different perspectives" they had about what caused their success. I do not believe they had different perspectives, except externally. b. I think it's pretty clear that Moxie favours what he perceives as the superior point of view of one group over the other and he reinforces that by himself clapping with the audience in emulation of the preferred group. I'm not for a moment suggesting that he's got simplistic ideas about Communism and Fascism. I actually don't know his politics. I understand that he talking more about the concept of historical materialism, of being part of a movement rather than being a mover. On the other hand I think a reasonable reader would infer that this goes beyond mere analogy.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    They're distinguishable at least by their respective utopian conclusions. A ideological fascist utopia looks very different than a communist one. One may rightly gripe that in practice there is no difference, or that those in the respective governments did not believe in the ideas they espoused and instead worked towards different ends. But I can't believe that 100% of those following the ideologies ignored their tenets.

tptacek 10y ago

Mods: a more appropriate title is "Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin win 2017 RWC Levchin Prize for Signal", and a more appropriate link would be to pretty much anything but an individual Reddit comment; how about this one? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2017-levchin-prize-real-world-cryptography-max-levchin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2017-levchin-prize-real-world...

sctb 10y ago
Thanks! We've updated the link from https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlinspike_receives_rwc_levchin_price_2017/dc11s2h/?sh=c7c0de08&st=IXZ2E3ZY https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlin... and the title from “Moxie Marlinspike Receives RWC Levchin Prize 2017 for Signal Protocol Invention”.

Unman 10y ago

While applauding the stated mission of Open Whisper Systems to make cryptography usable by large numbers of people I think it is fair to hold Moxie & Co. to the same high standards to which they held PGP: https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/ https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/ The journalists who depend on it struggle with it and often mess up (“I send you the private key to communicate privately, right?”), the activists who use it do so relatively sparingly (“wait, this thing wants my finger print?”), and no other sane person is willing to use it by default. Even the projects that attempt to use it as a dependency struggle. Breaking this up into constituent parts and trying to guess whether those standards are met seems to leave us somewhere in this territory: 1) Journalists communicating with WhatsApp struggle with it and mess up. Given the confusion around under what circumstances one can communicate securely with WhatsApp ("Is it OK if I have two checkmarks? Is it OK because Facebook would never let a government have access to the RedPhone part?") 2) Activists who use WhatsApp do so relatively sparingly. I have no idea on this one. I hope they're using Signal and/or GPG with all their attendant bother, complexity and confusion though. 3) No other sane person is willing to use WhatsApp by default. Hmmm.. more confusing value judgements. Is someone that uses a communication method open to abuse by corporations and governments "sane"? 4) Dependency struggle. AFAICS no other projects can piggy-back off WhatsApp because it's proprietary and closed. So the user base can't scratch their own itches. OK, so what about Signal? Sounds like the dependency on Google Cloud Messages and Play Services can be hacked around with great difficulty. I dunno. Fair play to Moxie and Perrin for what they've done, but so far GPG looks like a better bet for actual secure end-to-end communication, using an already existing, widespread distribution mechanism which is widespread and redundant: email. Reports of GPG's death may have been grossly exaggerated.

tptacek 10y ago
Can you find a single practicing cryptographic engineer who will go on the record as saying that PGP (in any of its incarnations) and email is better than Signal Protocol for message encryption?
- ethbro 10y ago
  If one is going to be paranoid, then one should at least be consistently paranoid. v1 of the internet as used now seems wildly naive of state surveillance. v2 may be better, but if most traffic goes encrypted, then there are going to be a lot more attacks (both legal and extra-legal) against the nuances of implementations. v2 is certainly an improvement on v1. But one of the reasons v1 was deployed is because we believed things like "The US government would never tap traffic at the backbone" or "The US government would never tap private links between data centers." Valuing both, I think it's important to keep eyes on the future so in 10 years we don't look back on statements like "The US government would never compell Google / Microsoft / Facebook / Whisper to distribute a poisoned version of their application" with the same amount of surprise.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

yeukhon 10y ago

Always wondered how Trevor Perrin looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A9Eto9iqww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A9Eto9iqww