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France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service
- Davidbrcz 9y agoComment from a French insider: It will not work. The last two IT projects the government ordered I have in mind are the ears dropping facility for the police and SAIP, an application to warn citizens in case of a dramatic event such as a terrorist attack. Both are failures. On the first one, the police complains of crashes, slowness, and not fulfilling its missions. The second simply does not warn people when there is an attack... The worst is that it will cost tax payers millions
- barbs 9y agoLets hope it's not as bad as this French government project: https://projectfailures.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/project-from-hell/ https://projectfailures.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/project-fro...
- afsina 9y agoAll government projects goes wrong (I was in several of them). But man this was extreme.
- conradfr 9y agoAnd SAIP was budgeted for at least 78M€ ...
- Davidbrcz 9y agoThat seems insane, even for the French government. Do you have a source ? I can't find anything with a 2 minutes search.
- hadrien01 9y agohttp://www.itespresso.fr/saip-application-alerte-attentat-ecorchee-senat-167666.html http://www.itespresso.fr/saip-application-alerte-attentat-ec... That actually was the estimated cost; it grew at least at 81,5M€. (there's also a story in the article about one of the components of that seemingly simple app being 37 months late)
- Davidbrcz 9y ago81.5 for the whole project SAIP (broadcasting warnings on several mediums (phone, ad panels, radio, TV,...), not only the SAIP app.
- tangue 9y agoYou forgot Louvois which was used to pay the soldiers' salary. The project costed 500 millions € before being cancelled and a new contract bid was won ... by the company that was unable to write the software in the first place ...
- Arathorn 9y agoAs someone using it already, it works pretty well actually ;p
- isolli 9y agoSuch a comment is meaningless without context. How often do corporate IT projects fail? How often do government IT projects fail?
- icebraining 9y agoHow is the corporate failure rate relevant?
- coldtea 9y agoIt is if the grandparent meant to disparage government IT projects (compared to corporate IT projects) -- which is a possible reading. (It's also relevant because because we pay corporations with subsidies, tax cuts, tax evasion, research grants, public procurement, specialty laws favoring them, etc -- sometimes even more than we pay governments).
- isolli 9y agoIt is relevant because IT projects are inherently difficult, and many of them fail. Just because the French government failed at two projects mentioned in the original comment does not mean that a) it's particularly bad at IT projects or b) it will necessarily fail again. Having the corporate failure rate as a baseline could help assess the proficiency of governments around the world.
- loup-vaillant 9y agoThe problem is not really about corporate vs government, it's about size. These folks tend to think big. Everything else stems from that. What they really need is a little app with simple messaging, end to end encryption, and a server that doesn't log anything they don't want it to log. What they are likely to get if they pay some big shot contractor big money to do it is a Swiss army knife the size of a kitchen sink. With bugs.
- briandear 9y agoSAIP has never sent an alert to me. But I get alerts from International SOS. So a third party emergency app does a better job than the official French app. Quelle surprise!
- dehef 9y agoYes let not forget the unifed medical record.
- BrandoElFollito 9y agoOr the phones nobody in our gouvernement wants to use (slow, old tech, freezes alk the time).
- ersiees 9y agoWhat about using Signal? Will they do something else then using the Signal protocol? If so, this might be either pretty expensive or could go wrong.
- barbs 9y agoI thought about that too...if their concern is that they want the server to remain on French soil could they not spin up an instance of their own Signal server? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- VMG 9y ago"Surveillance Risk" means that there is a risk that somebody other than the French government can do surveillance. > If so, this might be either pretty expensive or could go wrong. Keep in mind that they also wasted millions on building a "Google Competitor": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero For the people receiving the money it didn't go wrong though.
- pmlnr 9y agoSignal doesn't work with desktop _only_ (without ever touching a smartphone). Matrix and XMPP does.
- Vinnl 9y agoI've seen (at least in a dev build) support for activating an account on desktop, i.e. you enter a confirmation code sent via SMS to a phone number you chose. That phone number needn't necessarily only be accessible through a smartphone, I'd presume.
- alt678 9y agoAfaik they would still need Google Services, based in the US obviously, to run Signal. There's technically an APK on the Signal website without Gapps, but it's not officially supported by the development team. On their issue tracker they "leave it to the open source folks", i.e. ignore serious bugs like massive battery life degradation and Signal silently not updating for hours.
- edhelas 9y agoWell looks like our government (I'm French) is having the NIH syndrome as well. Why not reusing existing solutions like XMPP + OMEMO? They can invest a few thousands euros in those projects and in a couple of open source clients. Plus this will also allow the citizen to have a nice, government funded, encrypted solution. But hey, it's not "sexy" enough. So they'll drop some public money to a big company that knows "what they are doing" and deliver a crappy platform that no one will use :) It already happened too many times.
- danielbarla 9y agoThe article was pretty light on details, but isn't it more a case of "Not Hosted Here"? This is the only relevant parts I could find: > We need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not encrypted by the United States or Russia and > The French government’s encrypted app has been developed on the basis of free-to-use code found on the Internet. I'm hoping this means they are using a mature, open implementation for most of it.
- puszczyk 9y ago+1 on that. Based on the article I hope they’re using signal or some other reputable crypto. Ideally they’ll host it in France and provide a good UI
- Davidbrcz 9y agoI think it is intended for the government only, you'll never see it as a citizen.
- Arathorn 9y agoAs per another comment, the project is 100% FOSS (other than the operational bits) and is built on Matrix.org
- skocznymroczny 9y agoBecause it's not about building an encrypted solution, it's about building "our" encryption solution, so that we can break it when needed and infringe on privacy of citizens. Western European countries are going full speed ahead on censorship and surveillance, so no wonder they are trying to fight 'pesky' foreign encryption schemes.
- Arathorn 9y agoThis isn’t a case of NIH; France has adopted Matrix for the project, which is a lightweight fork of Riot.im combined with a large private federation of Matrix servers. The whole thing is open source (although not public yet, as it is very early days) and open standards based. At Matrix.org we’ve been providing some support to them :) It’s very exciting to see open government projects which actually grok open source and open standards.
- jlpom 9y agoAs I understand Matrix is not a fork of Riot, Riot is just a client for a Matrix synapse server (there are others like WeChat) provided by the devs.
- Vinnl 9y agoThat's great; this other article I read about this kept mentioning Telegram and how Macron used that during his campaign, so this is much better than I expected :)
- Arathorn 9y agoyes, the point of the project is to provide a secure and self hosted (yet interoperable for intra- and inter-government purposes) alternative to Telegram for state comms :)
- tenryuu 9y agoWhat would appear in a lightweight fork of Riot though? Do you just remove a lot of the fluff to make it a bit more accessible for the public/general consumer?
- benevol 9y agoWhen tax dollars go into open source, it's just an endless chain of win-win-win-win-... News like this is just great. :-)
- dagaci 9y agoI hope its a win for good old capitalist competition and diversification (if it makes it into the public) even though its state sponsored :)
- nickik 9y agoYeah its a total win for the french tax payer who will spend a bunch of money on a service that they neither need nor want.
- benevol 9y agoWhich means you already have conducted a nation-wide poll on the question?
- grive 9y agoIt seems that the source have already been published and is using open protocols. I'm actually greatly pleased that my taxes are spent on an app that is actually accessible from the public, and will benefit open source project. This should be the standard way for most government development projects.
- VMG 9y agoSee also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
- draugadrotten 9y agoThe spin here is funny. The article pretends this is done to prevent eavesdropping, while it is probably closer to the truth that this is done to ensure eavesdropping by the DGSI.
- Aissen 9y agoIf you're talking about the metadata, yes, probably. It 's the same kind of eavesdropping capability you'd have from Signal servers (i.e: not much). Also: from what we've seen of Macron's team, they've proven that they have good-enough internal technical advisors; so it remains to be seen if they'd use a solution that can be eavesdropped.
- cm2187 9y agoUnless you can verify the deployed build against an open source code, whether the code is open source or not is irrelevant, you trust all the intermediaries. Which is ok for a corporate actor but probably not when you are a sovereign actor and know you are dealing with a keen NSA. How could you control that Apple or Google wouldn’t patch the app before it gets deployed or after it has been deployed?
- netsharc 9y agoA known Ken Thompson speech: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358210 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358210 (has a link to the full text as PDF). 4 paragraph summary: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/back-door.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/back-door.html
- Arathorn 9y agoI imagine you’d run your own OS with reproduceable builds all the way down.
- cm2187 9y agoAll the way down to the hardware manufactured in China. Life sucks for paranoid intelligence services.
- cm2187 9y agoWhat’s amusing is that foreign secret services are not the only ones snooping on French politicians. French secret services have a whole department (formally called RG) in charge of collecting files on every domestic public figure (own file is a interesting ritual read for a newly promoted minister of interior). The justice dept had also an interesting interpretation of attorney client privilege where it argued recently that it was ok to snoop if retroactively a wrongdoing is found (the Sarkozy case). If I was a tech savvy French politician I would try to use something that is neither in control of French authorities nor foreign. But French politicians are almost exclusively political science graduates, lawyers, doctors and teachers, not typically tech savvy.
- blauditore 9y ago> But French politicians are almost exclusively political science graduates, lawyers, doctors and teachers, not typically tech savvy. I think this applies to politicians worldwide, at least in western countries.
- icebraining 9y agoWe have a non-insignificant number of engineers as politicians in Portugal. E.g. the current Secretary-General of the UN is one of our ex-PMs, and is an ex-assistant professor of Telecommunication Signals after having graduated in Physics and Electrical Engineering. Considering our political panorama, I don't think this has helped much, though.
- adventured 9y ago> If I was a tech savvy French politician I would try to use something that is neither in control of French authorities nor foreign. What's the domestic app in France that comes closest to fulfilling that?
- baud147258 9y agoThe RG are dead, but now it's the DGSI (Direction générale de la Sécurité intérieure aka General Directorate for Internal Security)
- _jomo 9y ago> Both WhatsApp and Telegram promote themselves as ultra secure because all their data is encrypted from start to finish. Sigh. I wish they had added that Telegram is not "encrypted from start to finish"
- ArmandGrillet 9y agoI wish I would have seen a GitHub repo opened by the French government (à la Keybase) instead of an article from Reuters telling me that 20 officials beta-test an app developed by "we don't know who" using the taxes that pay my parents and friends. Show, don't tell.
- Arathorn 9y agoSo there is an open github repo, and I’m a bit surprised they’re not linking to it - I think this reflects more on the government comms processes than the FOSS side of things. On the Matrix side we’re seeing what we can do to help.
- sl956 9y agohttps://github.com/dinsic-pim https://github.com/dinsic-pim
- stesch 9y agoWasn't PGP illegal in France in the 1990s? Do they expect people to trust them?
- klmr 9y ago> Wasn't PGP illegal in France in the 1990s? Essentially yes (and not just PGP), strong cryptography fell under arms regulations and required, essentially, the equivalent of a firearms license (but was, by contrast, almost impossible to obtain). Import and export of cryptography technology are still regulated, though [1]. > Do they expect people to trust them? I’m not sure what you mean by that: This isn’t a trust issue, the French government is/was completely upfront about these restrictions. [1] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000000801164#LEGISCTA000006136109 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFT...
- emiliobumachar 9y agoThe trust issue is whether to trust the French government to care about the privacy of individual citizens over its own surveillance capability towards those citizens, when it made the opposite tradeoff in the past. Though I agree it's not as bad as if they had been caught lying on the topic. Still, are they specifically saying the tool will protect people from the government itself?
- loup-vaillant 9y agoWait a minute, does this means what I have done with Monocypher¹ is illegal? I live in France, and I clearly provided and exported "cryptographic means", and I haven't written a word to our prime minister. Same goes for Libsodium by the way, I doubt Franck Denis bothered to ask permission as well. [1]: https://monocypher.org https://monocypher.org
- klmr 9y agoAs far as I understand (I haven’t lived in France since 2004), the import and export restrictions are essentially unenforced, and nobody cares (as long as you’re not actively trading with embargoed nations). But if you’re working in cryptography, it might be worth talking to other local experts. There are surely user groups that know the legal situation inside out — at the very least, publicly funded researchers should be able to point you to resources.
- nkkollaw 9y agoWould it not have been enough to pass a law that prohibited survaillance? It's a wonderful initiative, but I doubt the average user will switch.
- gman83 9y agoI remember when they tried to build a Google rival: http://www.spiegel.de/international/quaero-qu-est-ce-que-c-est-franco-german-rival-to-google-flops-a-455775.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/quaero-qu-est-ce-que-c-e...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kaustyap 9y agoI don't quite get the need of messaging service for the government when there are already other secure/official means of communication. Would any corporate promote messaging app over official email communication channel for employees?
- baud147258 9y agoI though we already had such a service, used by top-level government executives.
- amelius 9y agoWhen are they rolling their own CPUs, in light of Intel ME and associated surveillance risk?
- bertolo1988 9y agoUntil there is an open source micro chip i won't believe that any security protocol is not being cheated.
- briandear 9y agoAre these communications preserved for open records purposes? This seems like a good way for government officials to avoid scrutiny from the public or history.
- motohagiography 9y agoIs there a reason a crypto messenger team wouldn't seem to publish their protocol specs using BAN notation that people can objectively reason about, and then verify the implementation of it in the code? As in, if you can't explain it this clearly, what's the problem? http://www.lsv.fr/Software/spore/table.html http://www.lsv.fr/Software/spore/table.html Having worked on some crypto projects, the admonition to, "just read the code," is disingenuous, because without a formal spec, you have nothing to compare the code to or evaluate the code against.
- Arathorn 9y agothe crypto specs are https://git.matrix.org/git/olm/about/docs/olm.rst https://git.matrix.org/git/olm/about/docs/olm.rst and https://git.matrix.org/git/olm/about/docs/megolm.rst https://git.matrix.org/git/olm/about/docs/megolm.rst (amongst others).
- motohagiography 9y agoNow that's how it's done. Nice.
- baud147258 9y agoIt's funny how I'm learning things about my government first on NH and not on national news. Edit: and I've learned a few other things (SAIP, Quaero)
- rb808 9y agoWhat is the best Matrix/Riot Android app right now? I see Riot only has 50k downloads which I'm not sure if is a mistake or reality.
- mxuribe 9y agoAsking for "the best" might be a bit subjective, no? Early on, the Matrix Console Android client was ok; i had no problems with it. Though i think it was intended merely as a reference implementation. The Riot client (it used to be called Vector client) gained alot of attention since the beginning, so its got plenty more polish. I honestly have not used any of the other clients - since happily sticking with Riot (web client). But the matrix.org site does have a list of clients/apps (and the list is much longer than I recall since the last time I checked): https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html You lose nothing in giving a few of them a try. Cheers!
- mxuribe 9y agoThis is awesome to see! My only wish was that matrix and riot were clearly mentioned. This would have significantly raised the profiles of both projects that I'm a big fan of. To @Arathorn and any other members of matrix and riot teams, kudos on this news, and great job! Next step - of course, beyond the tech work already being done on the platforms - is to promote the heck out of this news!! ;-) EDIT: Ok, there's at least some other promotion elsewhere which mentions matrix and riot; cool: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/france-alternative-whatsapp-telegram-spying-concerns,36898.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/france-alternative-whatsap...
- Arathorn 9y agothanks :) the problem here is that the government comms guys simply don’t know about Matrix or care about the underlying protocol, hence lack of reference to Matrix. Hopefully the word will get out anyway!