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> The obvious remedy for this problem is just to store secret keys with the service provider itself. This is convenient, but completely misses the whole point o
by michaelt 1y ago
> The obvious remedy for this problem is just to store secret keys with the service provider itself. This is convenient, but completely misses the whole point of end-to-end encryption, which is that service providers should not have access to your secrets! Storing decryption keys — in an accessible form — on the provider’s servers is absolutely a no-go.
OK, so Twitter themselves are our adversary.
> One way out of this conundrum is for the user to encrypt their secret key, then upload the encrypted value to the service provider. [...] Most human-selected passwords and PINs make for terrible cryptographic keys. [...] you need some mechanism to limit the number of guessing attempts that the user makes, so an attacker can’t simply run an online attack to work through the PIN-space.
As I understand it, this stuff is all implemented in-browser, using javascript that's 100% under Twitter's control.
Wouldn't it be a simple matter for them to save your message's plaintext (or indeed your password) by just saving a copy while it's in plaintext form?
- Calavar 1y agoI think the relevant scenario here isn't one where Twitter itself is malicious, but one where Twitter gets a law enforcement order requiring it to hand over decryption keys. If you don't have decryption keys, you can't hand them over.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- delusional 1y ago> OK, so Twitter themselves are our adversary. The worry people generally have about these sorts of systems isn't that they distrust the substrate NOW, as you say all bets are off at that point unless you're a cryptography expert and programmer yourself, but rather that they want protection of the data they produce now from being read in the future. Basically, If twitter wanted to read my data today, they could do so. If they decided in 2 years to read my data now, it would be too late because it was encrypted. With the encryption key, that's trivial. If they have to save the plain text, well that's too late now.
- echoangle 1y agoBut as long as they can still get you (or the person you’re communicating with) to log in, they can still get the encrypted data in two years.