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>No, contrary to what you're saying, virtually all the work done in retail cryptography over the last several years has been in secure messaging. That is not c
by xoa 8y ago
>No, contrary to what you're saying, virtually all the work done in retail cryptography over the last several years has been in secure messaging.
That is not contrary to what I'm saying, that is exactly what I'm saying. Much of the world, both corporate and private, do not want "messaging", they want "email". I use scare quotes for the latter because I want to distinguish between email as in existing technical standards dating all the way back to RFC 561 and email as-in that kind of information transfer service and format, distinct from messaging. Messaging has its place too, but there is clearly a desire for an electronic version of sending a piece of mail. It fits human and cultural psychology. It produces a different kind of consideration and formatting, which has both its merits and demerits. But messaging is not a replacement for email. You can insist that it is but I don't think you will be successful, and you should know better then most that security which isn't used isn't useful security.
>Don't send secrets over email
Back here on Planet Earth sending all sorts of secrets over email and using it for authentication of incredibly important accounts is the regrettable rule, not the exception. Like use of passwords. It is the reality in which we live. I see no sign of it changing either unless there is a direct in-place upgrade available. Which there is not.
>replace email with this thing that requires a phone number and is not like email
No.
>replace email with this thing that didn't even bother to add e2e crypto until 2016, claims to be agpl/gplv3 but then adds a bunch of other random crap on top, etc. Also not email.
No.
- baby 8y agoThe problem with emails is that you have to deal with a thousand different clients implementing things differently. There is no win there.
- tptacek 8y agoI think you misunderstood his argument. It was, "no".
- xoa 8y agoYour argument is "everybody on the planet including all corporations and governments should instantly abandon email for an instant messenger thing instead of which there are many and no federation" which is a bullshit argument and you damn well know it. FFS, how often over the decades in security have we had to make do with highly suboptimal solutions that were the lesser of evils? When did you of all people become a head-and-feet-in-the-clouds pure idealist? It's like coming into a global warming discussion and demanding everyone forgo personalized point-to-point mechanized transportation because of inherent inefficiencies vs mass transport. Or saying IRC is shit and therefor everyone should move to mailing lists or whatever. It's worse then even suggesting moving to something that's still "groups in 'rooms' with instant messaging" which at least is a technical feature match, it's suggesting dropping an entire UX. It's not happening. Path dependency is a thing, and so are specific desirable features that can be used alongside other channels for different tasks. I gave reasons. You're the one implying everyone who doesn't dump a straight forward, desirable UX global standard for a bunch of silo'd different formats are idiots/old fogies/don't care about security/privacy at all. The very simple fact that even accepting dumping that UX for messaging service you still couldn't simply say "switch to this only" but had to list a couple of things further highlights the whole problem. Is every individual and organization on the planet also supposed to support every single secure messenger? If not what is the winner vs the losers tptacek? Saying I had no argument but"no" and ignoring everything else is insulting sure, but I also think it's not a helpful attitude to making the world a more secure place period.
- tptacek 8y agoYes, us head-in-the-clouds idealists with our pie-eyed demands that encrypted message protocols not leak the contents of our messages to anyone who can intercept them. What will we demand next, forward secrecy? We should climb down from our ivory towers.
- xoa 8y ago>Yes, us head-in-the-clouds idealists with our pie-eyed demands that encrypted message protocols not leak the contents of our messages to anyone who can intercept them. That's not what you're demanding. You're demanding the end to a UX. That's entirely orthogonal to security, and my whole point is that's very different from pushing people to go from an insecure version of a UX to a more secure version of a UX (or at least a strict superset of that UX). It's straight forward to argue "don't use HTTP, use HTTPS", or "don't use SMS, use {secure messenger}"[1], or "don't use POP, use POPS or IMAPS" or even "don't use an 8 character password that is the name of your dog on a website, use something random and preferably a password manager". But that's not your argument. 1. Though again, the basic fact that I can't just tell anyone in the world, on any device at all, what {secure messenger} vs "SMS" should be is inherently suboptimal though less so.