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ASK HN: How Does Edward's Dead Man Switch(EDMS) Function? How? So, there are these remote backups/sites out there, encrypted. Say, every week ES has somebody
by e3pi 13y ago
ASK HN: How Does Edward's Dead Man Switch(EDMS) Function?
How?
So, there are these remote backups/sites out there, encrypted. Say, every week ES has somebody Bob post a keyword somewhere, a forum, pastebin, etc. The owner(s) Alice, Doreen, Glen, etc... of these backup sites manually or 'auto-crontab' for this keyword, or coded sequence of keywords, if so, fine, steady as Edward goes.
If not, .... ES released his hand(See hyperventilated Dyson's DMS in Terminator II film) sprung trigger. NOT good:
This interrupts the auto-cron periodic keyphrase(word) update and the toothpaste tubes are vigorously flattened, and you can't get the toothpaste back in.
(How? ie, How does EDMS trigger release become known to remote system trigger manager Bob or crontab daemon?)
Neighbor Bob check's local lampposts for Ed's new white tape once a week?
Can Bob be automated?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jlgreco 13y agoThis is needlessly complex. Just find people that you trust to hold onto the key, and a few other people to hold onto the file. People who's priorities are aligned properly and are use to being leaned on (journalists and/or activists). When they read in the New York Times that Edward Snowden is dead, some or all of them publish. If you are worried about one of those people colluding with another to get the secret sauce too early, then split the secret. Give it to 50 people and require any 10 of them to release their material. Or whatever, you can tune it how you like depending on how many people you trust and how much you trust them. Automation is unnecessary.
- fixxer 13y agoUm, well, er... no, I prefer crontab. It has let me down far fewer times than mortals. EDIT: An agent running on some VM somewhere isn't that tough to implement. You could do it from a friggin' R-Pi. If the "all clear" isn't posted where it is supposed to be, let the monkeys loose. (Kids in the Hall" reference, fwi)
- e3pi 13y ago> I prefer crontab. It has let me down far fewer times than mortals. This opens lifestyle guidance for our aspiring youth: Prefer crontab. It will let you down far fewer times than mortals. Choose bitcoin over any Ben Bernake or Alan Greenspan currency. Believe Snowdenspeak over Clapperspeak, Kieth Alexander's mouth moving, or any Obama-ism. Go to lunch with Richard Stallman before that mean looking bald-headed angry man with that desperate hunted rictus fixed to his face, who works at Microsoft, but not for much longer.
- staunch 13y ago# cat /etc/cron.daily/dead-man-switch #!/bin/bash wget -O latest https://raw.github.com/asdf/feab/data.txt if [ ! grep `date +%m%d%Y` latest ] ; then echo "The key is uRYB9vCT53jCSkjzaf9b" | mail -s "I'm dead." glenn.greenwald@... fi Wouldn't be hard to run this on a few random computers around the world pretty anonymously. The NSA getting the key isn't too big of a deal. Of course, you'd want to test this and make it more fault tolerant.
- jlgreco 13y agoIt could work, but I know that if I were in Snowden's place I would be more keen on relying on people, and not having to "phone home" (I am fairly confident that news of his demise or "disappearance" would eventually become public).
- danbruc 13y agoFind one, know the page, obtain the logs who accessed the page, find all. Or catch Snowden and keep updating the page yourself. Not that it can not be done in a similar way but it is non-trivial to get it right.
- pyre 13y ago| it is non-trivial to get it right. But malware writers / botnet owners have been doing it for a while.
- e3pi 13y agoPOST EDMS triggered launch, a simmering autonomous viral botnet, foisting ES plaintext onto infected email address lists, pastebin, etc., anything else it can fool CAPTCHA registration, with generating SHA256 signatures, new passwords, the whole open source kitchen sink of paranoidal-crypto-craft to effect public-at-large propagating whistle-blaring incriminating secrets, successfully leaked.
- e3pi 13y agoRubber Hose Cryptanalysis: "Good morning Mr Snowden? How was your sleep last night? Oh yes, that's right, you didn't get any. So to begin with, No I will not get that light out of your face, What was this you or Mr Greenwald mentioned about having your distributed files securely backed up, and have you a deadman switch Mr Snowden, you understand, in case of your demise? .... a bash shell script? Why the hell you didn't you use python?! This is going to be a problem. How are we going to fix it?"
- InclinedPlane 13y agoGive group A the encrypted data. Give group B the encryption keys. Give group C the email addresses of group A and group B. Give them all their instructions on when to "pull the trigger", either through a period of lack of communication or events in the media or something else.
- jlgreco 13y agoYep, group C is a good addition. Ideally they would also have a way of authenticating themselves with groups A and B as authentic members of group C.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoYou could just have all of them as pre-canned messages that have been digitally signed by the primary person.
- btilly 13y agoIf you are worried about one of those people colluding with another to get the secret sauce too early, then split the secret. Give it to 50 people and require any 10 of them to release their material. Or whatever, you can tune it how you like depending on how many people you trust and how much you trust them. Automation is unnecessary. This is, in fact, practical to do with Reed Solomon codes.
- jlgreco 13y agoI don't know if it is the state of the art, but there is also Shamir's Secret Sharing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing There is a nice implementation in Debian called 'ssss'. Edit: nifty demo: http://point-at-infinity.org/ssss/demo.html http://point-at-infinity.org/ssss/demo.html
- btilly 13y agoThat is much better solution than the one that I thought of.
- chacham15 13y agoI agree this is wayyy complicated. All you do is send the encrypted data to whomever you want and then have some servers check an email every day to see if it got an email from snowden indicating the date. If its there repeat tomorrow else email key to journalists/publish on the internet.
- e3pi 13y agoES is vulnerable if physically must be connected. Ideally, if he does a single-bit "I'm alive today" `annnuciator flag', say, once a week, and if this get's interrupted, his total autonomous bot wakes up swinging email, postings, and HWALL w3-wide `Guardian-class Bombshells'.
- antocv 13y agoIts too complicated. I believe any organization worth its salt that has NSA/CIA as enemy would have thought of something better and easier for a fail-safe device, an insurance on their lives if you will. Wikileaks has an insurance of this form. Post encrypted file to everyone. Probably there is several VMs checking in or even scraping most news sites for "Assange dead", and if that happens, pastebin the keys. And even this is complicated. If I would need a dead-man switch, Id include people I trust to release the keys, or parts of the keys in case I need to trust several people to be in agreement at the same time. A technological solution in case I cant trust anyone, then I would run several php scripts on those free hosting sites, or get a plan with heroku or redhats openshift, all of which check for updates from my sock puppet accounts on facebook, g+ and email, weekly or so. Say every other update on at least one of the public services must contain a secret codeword in hidden form like first letter of each sentence or rot3 of those. If no updates are found for three weeks on all the sites, or if the codeword is not there two times, pastebin the keys all over the internets.
- e3pi 13y ago>... like first letter of each sentence or rot3 of those. After all these years, that is the first interesting application I have seen of rot13(I think you intended?). ty