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I take no solace in typical cryptography as it does nothing to hide most metadata. Who I talk to, when, how often (and the same for websites visited) is way mor
by ballenf 9y ago
I take no solace in typical cryptography as it does nothing to hide most metadata. Who I talk to, when, how often (and the same for websites visited) is way more sensitive in the collective than the contents of any single one of those interactions.
Signal type apps hide both and are valuable, but without widespread adoption is meaningless to most people.
I'm not against any of the progress you cite, but so long as people can be targeted based on metadata they are at risk. Once targeted, it becomes child's play to bypass the encryption that most people employ, whether through social engineering or side channel attacks (beyond Spectre-type) or governmental requests/threats to cloud providers.
- cryptonector 9y agoCrypto does nothing to prevent rubber hose attacks. And as you note, it is very difficult to prevent traffic analysis, that being the only thing the government really needs to find what it's looking for anyways.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zrm 9y agoThe thing that protects metadata is onion routing. It's somewhat understandable why that isn't already used for everything. The latency impact is not small and it's unlikely the network could take the load if everyone actually started using it for everything. But it's unfortunate it isn't being used more widely for messaging, where neither of those things are major problems.