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There's a split in the HN community on this issue. The split seems to be: - Some people are OK with compromise for usability - Others think being uncompromis

by feral 10y ago

There's a split in the HN community on this issue. The split seems to be: - Some people are OK with compromise for usability - Others think being uncompromising is the only way to eventually achieve security. (This group is also, rightly imo, suspicious of WhatsApp/Facebook or any centralized product) I do understand the latter mindset. Often the only way to get high security is dogged attention to detail, letting nothing slide. Attackers love to promote products which provide the illusion of security, but contain flaws or backdoors; and often the illusion of security is worse than nothing. But I'm with the group that favors usability compromise here. Open source projects have successfully built high security products, but rarely gotten mass consumer adoption, precisely because of an unwillingness to make concessions to usability. Without usability concessions, we end up with 30 character random login passwords - written on stickies on the terminal. Even if you don't agree with the particular compromises in this case, please engage with those who do. There's no reason to think they are shills trying to undermine security. Favoring usability here is at least reasonable, with the same shared end goal of increased security for end users - this should be acknowledged, especially given the mass adoption success of WhatsApp/OWS.

lmm 10y ago
If we don't care about being secure against an attacker who controls Facebook then what was the point of end-to-end encryption in the first place? If you're going to "compromise" that far you might as well just use any number of centralised messengers with transport encryption. > There's no reason to think they are shills trying to undermine security. Moxie's comments about OpenPGP are ample reason. And in any case our response needs to be robust against the possibility that they are. > this should be acknowledged, especially given the mass adoption success of WhatsApp/OWS. The mass adoption is precisely why it's so important.
- stouset 10y ago
  People aren't using WhatsApp to replace GPG with a carefully-curated web of trust. They're using it to replace SMS which can be surveilled both en masse by governments and telecoms, and surveilled by individuals savvy enough to set up a fake cell tower. WhatsApp is an unqualified success in this regard. That it makes trade-offs unsuitable for dissidents of world governments does not diminish this.
  - lmm 10y ago
    To the extent that it's displacing SMS, great - anything with transport encryption is better than SMS. To the extent that it's displacing Skype/Facebook Messenger/..., meh - if it's not actually secure against a hostile Facebook (and they have no intention of fixing the flaw) then it's not really any better than anything that uses SSL. To the extent that people using it assume it's secure against a hostile Facebook when it isn't, that is terrible. Fake security is worse than no security.
    - stouset 10y ago
      > To the extent that it's displacing SMS, great This is reassuringly the overwhelming majority of the market that WhatsApp is eating into. > To the extent that it's displacing Skype/Facebook Messenger/..., meh And in this case, it's at least not worse. Although I will argue it's still much better. As has been discussed elsewhere ad infinitum, this tradeoff in WhatsApp still allows savvy users to enable notifications. And the fact that some people will do this (and it stands to reason, the people who do this are precisely the ones who are likely to be targeted) is an effective deterrent for doing it at all. > To the extent that people using it assume it's secure against a hostile Facebook when it isn't, that is terrible. Fake security is worse than no security. Security is not a boolean. It is unequivocally more secure than Facebook Messenger, which we can assume is not E2E encrypted. Facebook or governments with appropriate authority can surveil this en masse. They can not do this for WhatsApp messages. Attempts to surveil these messages even at a small scale carry a high risk of tipping their hand that they're doing this surveillance at all. 1/7th of the world's population is now using E2E-encrypted messaging thanks to collaboration between WhatsApp and OWS. The number of people who need to consider Facebook or governments with control over it an active threat against them perhaps number in the hundreds to low thousands, and this affords good (if not perfect) protection even to them through a toggle, and some protection even to those who don't enable the toggle. Anyone who is in this last group is either aware of these limitations, or is completely fucked anyway because achieving practical security against a determined, well-funded governmental adversary is frighteningly difficult and requires ongoing effort and attention.
      - 10y ago
- feral 10y ago
  > If we don't care about being secure against an attacker who controls Facebook then what was the point of end-to-end encryption in the first place? As a user of WhatsApp, I'd prefer if it was fully robustly end-to-end encrypted, in an auditable App, if it was still usable enough I could talk to my family with it. I think all the more privacy conscious folk on HN could agree with that ideal. But I don't think we (yet) know how to achieve that ideal. [The hard part being getting family/friends on it reliably]. What is on offer is: End-to-end encryption which has some usability tradeoffs, that leaves it vulnerable to[0]: - A code backdoor of some form in the App - [As in this issue] an attack where the server MITMs it in limited circumstances by switching recipient keys for undelivered messages. First off, this secures against mass passive monitoring on the wire, or even in the internal data center infrastructure, which the non-e2e transport encryption you mention does not. Second, exploiting either of these issues en masse would run the risk of FB/WhatsApp getting caught. Maybe through a black-box audit of the App, or someone detects mass MITM'ing because they have key change notifications turned on. [Lets leave out the scenario of someone internal leaking what's happening.] So my best judgement, as a user, is that these attacks are not likely to be happening en masse, because they would result in a large business risk to WhatsApp. > If you're going to "compromise" that far you might as well just use any number of centralised messengers with transport encryption. In that case [without e2e] the server would see all the messages in the clear. Absent a leak, there's no way they would be caught supporting a mass-monitoring program. They could allow their infrastructure to be passively monitored, giving plausible deniability while cooperating. That's clearly a different threat model. I don't see why WhatsApp would have introduced this feature, and then compromised it in a way that risks getting caught. That would be a huge business risk for dubious benefit. I could see they could be forced to do an attack on a limited number of individuals, risking getting caught. Again, I'm hoping that is an expensive enough business risk that it doesn't happen often, if ever. But in this model, 1B peoples messages will be secure the vast majority of the time against pervasive monitoring. [0] based on my understanding of these issues; obviously as a spectator I don't claim to have an exhaustive list of vulnerabilities/issues.

by feral 10y ago

lmm 10y ago

If we don't care about being secure against an attacker who controls Facebook then what was the point of end-to-end encryption in the first place? If you're going to "compromise" that far you might as well just use any number of centralised messengers with transport encryption. > There's no reason to think they are shills trying to undermine security. Moxie's comments about OpenPGP are ample reason. And in any case our response needs to be robust against the possibility that they are. > this should be acknowledged, especially given the mass adoption success of WhatsApp/OWS. The mass adoption is precisely why it's so important.

stouset 10y ago
People aren't using WhatsApp to replace GPG with a carefully-curated web of trust. They're using it to replace SMS which can be surveilled both en masse by governments and telecoms, and surveilled by individuals savvy enough to set up a fake cell tower. WhatsApp is an unqualified success in this regard. That it makes trade-offs unsuitable for dissidents of world governments does not diminish this.
- lmm 10y ago
  To the extent that it's displacing SMS, great - anything with transport encryption is better than SMS. To the extent that it's displacing Skype/Facebook Messenger/..., meh - if it's not actually secure against a hostile Facebook (and they have no intention of fixing the flaw) then it's not really any better than anything that uses SSL. To the extent that people using it assume it's secure against a hostile Facebook when it isn't, that is terrible. Fake security is worse than no security.
  - stouset 10y ago
    > To the extent that it's displacing SMS, great This is reassuringly the overwhelming majority of the market that WhatsApp is eating into. > To the extent that it's displacing Skype/Facebook Messenger/..., meh And in this case, it's at least not worse. Although I will argue it's still much better. As has been discussed elsewhere ad infinitum, this tradeoff in WhatsApp still allows savvy users to enable notifications. And the fact that some people will do this (and it stands to reason, the people who do this are precisely the ones who are likely to be targeted) is an effective deterrent for doing it at all. > To the extent that people using it assume it's secure against a hostile Facebook when it isn't, that is terrible. Fake security is worse than no security. Security is not a boolean. It is unequivocally more secure than Facebook Messenger, which we can assume is not E2E encrypted. Facebook or governments with appropriate authority can surveil this en masse. They can not do this for WhatsApp messages. Attempts to surveil these messages even at a small scale carry a high risk of tipping their hand that they're doing this surveillance at all. 1/7th of the world's population is now using E2E-encrypted messaging thanks to collaboration between WhatsApp and OWS. The number of people who need to consider Facebook or governments with control over it an active threat against them perhaps number in the hundreds to low thousands, and this affords good (if not perfect) protection even to them through a toggle, and some protection even to those who don't enable the toggle. Anyone who is in this last group is either aware of these limitations, or is completely fucked anyway because achieving practical security against a determined, well-funded governmental adversary is frighteningly difficult and requires ongoing effort and attention.
    - 10y ago
feral 10y ago
> If we don't care about being secure against an attacker who controls Facebook then what was the point of end-to-end encryption in the first place? As a user of WhatsApp, I'd prefer if it was fully robustly end-to-end encrypted, in an auditable App, if it was still usable enough I could talk to my family with it. I think all the more privacy conscious folk on HN could agree with that ideal. But I don't think we (yet) know how to achieve that ideal. [The hard part being getting family/friends on it reliably]. What is on offer is: End-to-end encryption which has some usability tradeoffs, that leaves it vulnerable to[0]: - A code backdoor of some form in the App - [As in this issue] an attack where the server MITMs it in limited circumstances by switching recipient keys for undelivered messages. First off, this secures against mass passive monitoring on the wire, or even in the internal data center infrastructure, which the non-e2e transport encryption you mention does not. Second, exploiting either of these issues en masse would run the risk of FB/WhatsApp getting caught. Maybe through a black-box audit of the App, or someone detects mass MITM'ing because they have key change notifications turned on. [Lets leave out the scenario of someone internal leaking what's happening.] So my best judgement, as a user, is that these attacks are not likely to be happening en masse, because they would result in a large business risk to WhatsApp. > If you're going to "compromise" that far you might as well just use any number of centralised messengers with transport encryption. In that case [without e2e] the server would see all the messages in the clear. Absent a leak, there's no way they would be caught supporting a mass-monitoring program. They could allow their infrastructure to be passively monitored, giving plausible deniability while cooperating. That's clearly a different threat model. I don't see why WhatsApp would have introduced this feature, and then compromised it in a way that risks getting caught. That would be a huge business risk for dubious benefit. I could see they could be forced to do an attack on a limited number of individuals, risking getting caught. Again, I'm hoping that is an expensive enough business risk that it doesn't happen often, if ever. But in this model, 1B peoples messages will be secure the vast majority of the time against pervasive monitoring. [0] based on my understanding of these issues; obviously as a spectator I don't claim to have an exhaustive list of vulnerabilities/issues.