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One of the main reasons that Cryptocat is able to celebrate their high usability is because they didn't even attempt to tackle the most difficult usability prob
by brl 13y ago
One of the main reasons that Cryptocat is able to celebrate their high usability is because they didn't even attempt to tackle the most difficult usability problems in a system for secure communication. There is no such thing in Cryptocat as persistently stored private identity keys, so every time you use Cryptocat new identity keys are generated which you are then expected to manually verify in some out-of-band way (i.e. make a phone call to every other person in a Cryptocat chat room and swap hex encoded fingerprints). If you don't manually verify the keys of every other person you talk to every single time you use Cryptocat then you might judge Cryptocat to be 'usable' and maybe even more usable than other similar software, but the usability trade off is that you and even other people you communicate with who have otherwise verified keys correctly will be vulnerable to having your conversations intercepted and decrypted by an active attacker.
- makomk 13y agoAs far as I can tell without installing it, they don't even support the Socialist Millionaire's Protocol - a mutual authentication technique that OTR uses by default exactly because the developers discovered verifying keys out-of-band isn't practical and most people won't bother. Using Cryptocat in a way that's actually secure is harder than doing the same thing with OTR.