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I'd been wondering when the explosive kickstarter campaign that leverages the NSA news would appear. My feelings about projects like these are always complicat

by moxie 13y ago

I'd been wondering when the explosive kickstarter campaign that leverages the NSA news would appear. My feelings about projects like these are always complicated. Even though it's encouraging to see that people are excited about building secure communication platforms, my initial reaction to announcements like these is typically extreme dread. There is a small community of people who have been working on secure mobile messaging for years, and unfortunately newcomers to secure communication generally fuck it up. Not only is that bad for users, but it's bad for those of us who have put years of effort into this, because it sets a tone where users begin to assume that all apps which attempt to provide secure communication must have done it incorrectly, so it's not worth using any of them. I think there are probably enough apps in this space now (TextSecure, ChatSecure, Gibberbot, Silent Circle) that these folks could have probably just partnered with or contributed to an existing project in order to meet their needs. Despite the article's subtitle, this will be far from "the first secure mobile messaging system."

MikeCapone 13y ago
Anyone who knows this stuff can provide additional feedback on apps like ChatSecure and Gibberbot? Are they considered to be good crypto implementations? Update: I installed ChatSecure on my iPad and it's very easy to set up. So easy in fact that I'm thinking there must be something wrong with it, because otherwise it would probably be recommended more often in these types of threads... One of the things that seems problematic is that the background session expires after a few minutes, so if someone tries to just randomly message you, chances are you won't be logged in, so this can't be a replacement for IM.
- chrisballinger 13y ago
  Hahaha, perhaps because we don't have a fancy graphic designer, marketing budget or PR firm? Version 2.x does have some bugs that we are working out, stemming from a large refactor to use Core Data. However, we actually don't touch the crypto ourselves and delegate all of it to the official libotr library. If you want to come help improve it, come check out the source: https://github.com/chrisballinger/Off-the-Record-iOS/ https://github.com/chrisballinger/Off-the-Record-iOS/
  - MikeCapone 13y ago
    Thanks. One suggestion I would make: Once your things are set up, you shouldn't have to go to the settings screen to log in. Maybe there could be an 'account' button on the main screen or on the buddy list and from there you could sign in and out directly. I think that would make it more friendly to non-techies.
- thaweatherman 13y ago
  Time out on chatsecure is a draw back of iOS. It forces app to close after 10 minutes of inactivity. Very annoying. I'm with moxie. There are already plenty of good encryption apps out there. That 100,000 could have gone to existing apps that do what they say they do rather than an app that might not turn out as promised.
  - nthj 13y ago
    I never quite understood this. Certainly you don't want to send an unencrypted notification message (“Matt says: here are the meeting times”) to Apple's notification servers. But do you really have to be that verbose? I'm not terribly concerned about the NSA logging “you have $n new messages!” notifications.
    - DanBC 13y ago
      > I'm not terribly concerned about the NSA logging “you have $n new messages!” notifications. But you can appreciate that as part of risk assessment some people might have a valid reason to be concerned about leaking even that much information? GCHQ / NSA are good at finding patterns in data, so a collection of "You have $n new messages!" notifications can provide insight into the organization of a group.
      - nthj 13y ago
        Yes, I certainly understand. Most people wouldn't be concerned—and would be far more likely to use the technology if they could enable a feature like "You have $n new messages." I propose it as an option, not a default.
  - iuguy 13y ago
    I've been using threema[1] for a few days and that uses notifications pretty well. [1] - http://threema.ch/en/ http://threema.ch/en/
    - thaweatherman 13y ago
- dobbsbob 13y ago
  Gibberbot is wide open to practical mitm SSL attacks and of course timing analysis to see who you're talking to. If you use it or any other jabber w/OTR, you would want to use it tunneled through another layer of encryption like Tor, so if you and your associates use .onion XMPP servers (and they aren't traffic analysis honeypots or run by incompetent admins/badly configured) then you get an extra layer of encryption to defeat future attacks should there be found a major bug in Gibberbot's OTR implementation and agencies just go back to all the traffic they collected and archived and use the bug to decrypt your old messages.
cdsrv 13y ago
we have been thinking the same thing.. the gap here is between the public that knows nothing and developers and integrators that DO. unfortunately, its all about marketing, and marketing is often a bunch of lies
aedocw 13y ago
You should mention your tremendous contributions to this space (https://whispersystems.org/ https://whispersystems.org/). Thank you for all the great ongoing work you're doing! If anyone has room to make an informed comment here, it's Moxie...
grey-area 13y ago
One really good thing about having lots of apps though is that it makes it harder for the NSA to subvert the apps or developers and develop attacks. If there are so many of them from around the world springing up all the time, that makes it a lot more difficult for any one national agency to control the space and become omniscient, and more difficult for them to develop attacks which will work globally. If there is one thing I'd take from this NSA/GCHQ debacle it's that encryption is the only way to stop numerous agencies from accessing the content of your communications and storing them indefinitely. They already want to store everything. If you encrypt they'll have to decrypt first before parsing and your messages, and that's impractical for them on a large scale. I'd love to see a replacement for email that used local encryption to send information completely encrypted (including metadata) from point to point, with no keys on the server, or perhaps no server at all. Encryption is a way to keep things secret for some time, not forever, it won't keep things safe forever even if it is considered perfect at point of use, as usually flaws are found in protocols eventually, and new ones adopted for that reason. Even if there is an established attack on a given chat program, agencies would have to take the time to attack and decrypt communications specifically, rather than just intercepting them at providers or with line taps. It would prevent a great deal of casual snooping and make things considerably more difficult. So the more protocols and apps the better I think. In addition to this, I don't think there's anything wrong with people developing chat or encryption front-ends as long as they use established encryption programs to do their actual encryption. That should be the message that is given to people, not that they shouldn't bother using encryption in their products at all, because they're idiots and will get it wrong. Many will get it wrong, but some won't. I wouldn't trust this particular program (no source for a start), but other new entrants might be trustworthy. I don't think there are enough apps in this space now, the more the merrier, and if some of them are broken, that doesn't make it any harder to evaluate a good one if you are an expert in the field, and it will still make things more difficult for security agencies. If you're not an expert, you'll have to rely on the opinions of people you respect about which programs are trustworthy. I'd love to hear Binney speak for example on which encryption methods he would trust nowadays, as he's likely to have very good knowledge of which ones are harder to break. The most I've seen from him is that they are "on the verge of breaking a key encryption algorithm." which just underlines that what is considered trustworthy today will not be tomorrow. So I think that security is a graded scale, not binary, and to insist that only experts should ever get involved with encryption just narrows the field to a small number of companies/experts that government agencies hostile to you can easily subvert. PS Just seen downthread that you're responsible for this app - https://whispersystems.org/ https://whispersystems.org/ Looks great and I'll be trying it out when it comes to iOS. Thanks for helping people stay secure.
znq 13y ago
There's also Threema http://threema.ch http://threema.ch using NaCl for their crypto (open source). It works on iOS and Android and has a very good UI. Encryption can be verified, for those who care: http://threema.ch/validation/ http://threema.ch/validation/ (I'm not affiliated, I just really like the product and it's the first one I was able to convince family and friends to use)
mtgx 13y ago
Any reason why you're still only using AES-128? Is that secure enough for the time being? https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/wiki/Protocol https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/wiki/Protocol https://github.com/WhisperSystems/RedPhone/wiki/Encryption-Protocols https://github.com/WhisperSystems/RedPhone/wiki/Encryption-P...
- 9h1d9j809s 13y ago
  If quantum computing shows up, AES-256 will remain secure. Otherwise there is no advantage at all.
- gngeal 13y ago
  Any reason why you're still only using AES-128? What else would you suggest?

by moxie 13y ago

MikeCapone 13y ago

Anyone who knows this stuff can provide additional feedback on apps like ChatSecure and Gibberbot? Are they considered to be good crypto implementations? Update: I installed ChatSecure on my iPad and it's very easy to set up. So easy in fact that I'm thinking there must be something wrong with it, because otherwise it would probably be recommended more often in these types of threads... One of the things that seems problematic is that the background session expires after a few minutes, so if someone tries to just randomly message you, chances are you won't be logged in, so this can't be a replacement for IM.

chrisballinger 13y ago
Hahaha, perhaps because we don't have a fancy graphic designer, marketing budget or PR firm? Version 2.x does have some bugs that we are working out, stemming from a large refactor to use Core Data. However, we actually don't touch the crypto ourselves and delegate all of it to the official libotr library. If you want to come help improve it, come check out the source: https://github.com/chrisballinger/Off-the-Record-iOS/ https://github.com/chrisballinger/Off-the-Record-iOS/
- MikeCapone 13y ago
  Thanks. One suggestion I would make: Once your things are set up, you shouldn't have to go to the settings screen to log in. Maybe there could be an 'account' button on the main screen or on the buddy list and from there you could sign in and out directly. I think that would make it more friendly to non-techies.
thaweatherman 13y ago
Time out on chatsecure is a draw back of iOS. It forces app to close after 10 minutes of inactivity. Very annoying. I'm with moxie. There are already plenty of good encryption apps out there. That 100,000 could have gone to existing apps that do what they say they do rather than an app that might not turn out as promised.
- nthj 13y ago
  I never quite understood this. Certainly you don't want to send an unencrypted notification message (“Matt says: here are the meeting times”) to Apple's notification servers. But do you really have to be that verbose? I'm not terribly concerned about the NSA logging “you have $n new messages!” notifications.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    > I'm not terribly concerned about the NSA logging “you have $n new messages!” notifications. But you can appreciate that as part of risk assessment some people might have a valid reason to be concerned about leaking even that much information? GCHQ / NSA are good at finding patterns in data, so a collection of "You have $n new messages!" notifications can provide insight into the organization of a group.
    - nthj 13y ago
      Yes, I certainly understand. Most people wouldn't be concerned—and would be far more likely to use the technology if they could enable a feature like "You have $n new messages." I propose it as an option, not a default.
- iuguy 13y ago
  I've been using threema[1] for a few days and that uses notifications pretty well. [1] - http://threema.ch/en/ http://threema.ch/en/
  - thaweatherman 13y ago
dobbsbob 13y ago
Gibberbot is wide open to practical mitm SSL attacks and of course timing analysis to see who you're talking to. If you use it or any other jabber w/OTR, you would want to use it tunneled through another layer of encryption like Tor, so if you and your associates use .onion XMPP servers (and they aren't traffic analysis honeypots or run by incompetent admins/badly configured) then you get an extra layer of encryption to defeat future attacks should there be found a major bug in Gibberbot's OTR implementation and agencies just go back to all the traffic they collected and archived and use the bug to decrypt your old messages.

cdsrv 13y ago

we have been thinking the same thing.. the gap here is between the public that knows nothing and developers and integrators that DO. unfortunately, its all about marketing, and marketing is often a bunch of lies

aedocw 13y ago

You should mention your tremendous contributions to this space (https://whispersystems.org/ https://whispersystems.org/). Thank you for all the great ongoing work you're doing! If anyone has room to make an informed comment here, it's Moxie...

grey-area 13y ago

One really good thing about having lots of apps though is that it makes it harder for the NSA to subvert the apps or developers and develop attacks. If there are so many of them from around the world springing up all the time, that makes it a lot more difficult for any one national agency to control the space and become omniscient, and more difficult for them to develop attacks which will work globally. If there is one thing I'd take from this NSA/GCHQ debacle it's that encryption is the only way to stop numerous agencies from accessing the content of your communications and storing them indefinitely. They already want to store everything. If you encrypt they'll have to decrypt first before parsing and your messages, and that's impractical for them on a large scale. I'd love to see a replacement for email that used local encryption to send information completely encrypted (including metadata) from point to point, with no keys on the server, or perhaps no server at all. Encryption is a way to keep things secret for some time, not forever, it won't keep things safe forever even if it is considered perfect at point of use, as usually flaws are found in protocols eventually, and new ones adopted for that reason. Even if there is an established attack on a given chat program, agencies would have to take the time to attack and decrypt communications specifically, rather than just intercepting them at providers or with line taps. It would prevent a great deal of casual snooping and make things considerably more difficult. So the more protocols and apps the better I think. In addition to this, I don't think there's anything wrong with people developing chat or encryption front-ends as long as they use established encryption programs to do their actual encryption. That should be the message that is given to people, not that they shouldn't bother using encryption in their products at all, because they're idiots and will get it wrong. Many will get it wrong, but some won't. I wouldn't trust this particular program (no source for a start), but other new entrants might be trustworthy. I don't think there are enough apps in this space now, the more the merrier, and if some of them are broken, that doesn't make it any harder to evaluate a good one if you are an expert in the field, and it will still make things more difficult for security agencies. If you're not an expert, you'll have to rely on the opinions of people you respect about which programs are trustworthy. I'd love to hear Binney speak for example on which encryption methods he would trust nowadays, as he's likely to have very good knowledge of which ones are harder to break. The most I've seen from him is that they are "on the verge of breaking a key encryption algorithm." which just underlines that what is considered trustworthy today will not be tomorrow. So I think that security is a graded scale, not binary, and to insist that only experts should ever get involved with encryption just narrows the field to a small number of companies/experts that government agencies hostile to you can easily subvert. PS Just seen downthread that you're responsible for this app - https://whispersystems.org/ https://whispersystems.org/ Looks great and I'll be trying it out when it comes to iOS. Thanks for helping people stay secure.

znq 13y ago

There's also Threema http://threema.ch http://threema.ch using NaCl for their crypto (open source). It works on iOS and Android and has a very good UI. Encryption can be verified, for those who care: http://threema.ch/validation/ http://threema.ch/validation/ (I'm not affiliated, I just really like the product and it's the first one I was able to convince family and friends to use)

mtgx 13y ago

Any reason why you're still only using AES-128? Is that secure enough for the time being? https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/wiki/Protocol https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/wiki/Protocol https://github.com/WhisperSystems/RedPhone/wiki/Encryption-Protocols https://github.com/WhisperSystems/RedPhone/wiki/Encryption-P...

9h1d9j809s 13y ago
If quantum computing shows up, AES-256 will remain secure. Otherwise there is no advantage at all.
gngeal 13y ago
Any reason why you're still only using AES-128? What else would you suggest?