12 ms·

Silent Circle's warrant canary is out of date

148 points by scotchmi_st 12y ago

sarciszewski 12y ago
Good catch :)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
astrojams 12y ago
Does that mean they've been served a warrant?
- CSMastermind 12y ago
  Either that or they forgot to update it.
  - TillE 12y ago
    For nearly three weeks. They might just be on vacation or something, but promising weekly updates and letting it go this long is more than a simple oversight.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    [DELETED, wait for an official company response]
    - spacefight 12y ago
      Well, some folks obviously watched out "for not updating it" during the last couple of weeks. From far away, the warrant canary served its purpose well.
      - StavrosK 12y ago
        Yeah, I agree. I think we update it every Friday (it's another team that does it), but I wonder why we missed the last two. Maybe there's just stuff I don't know about.
spacefight 12y ago
Maybe they were indeed slapped with an NSL. What a nice christmas present, huh!? If they failed their own canary - how could you believe them in terms of their warant canaray setup ever again? Not so much at all, I'd say.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  The entire purpose of a canary is to get manually updated. Automating it would defeat the purpose. If the person (or people, but you'd want to keep them as few as possible) was sick, unavailable, etc, it obviously wouldn't get updated. A canary also fails open by design. There's no way for the canary to fail on the side of getting your data compromised. If we forget to update it, you should just be more cautious, until we update it again (if we do).
  - spacefight 12y ago
    Of course it needs to be manually. Fail open? A warrant canary system setup for the sole purpose of telling the whole world (and the clients, of course) that they were hit by not posting "a declaration that, up to that point, no warrants have been served, nor have any searches or seizures taken place". Can there really be a fail-open or fail-safe here? Edit: "not posting" fixed.
    - StavrosK 12y ago
      Yes, forgetting to update the canary = safe. If you had a system that signed stuff until you stopped it, it would fail unsafe, i.e. it would keep telling people they're safe when they weren't.
      - spacefight 12y ago
        You realize, that forgetting to update the canaray gives the same message as "we were hit by a big fucking NSL, don't trust us and our software and systems ever again as their security has been compromised."? From the outside, there is just no way of knowing that it was just a forgotten update or if it was a strong message.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Does the US Patriot Act even apply to them anymore? They moved to Switzerland this year. Still, they should probably look into doing the same kind of thing for Swiss laws. https://blog.silentcircle.com/our-move-to-switzerland/ https://blog.silentcircle.com/our-move-to-switzerland/ If the warrant canary is out of date, though, I wonder if they moved to Switzerland because the US government tried to get to them, and it wasn't just a forward-thinking action.
- toyg 12y ago
  As long as you have a single server in the US, the Patriot Act applies to that server and its administrators, regardless of where they are located.
  - spacefight 12y ago
    Which they have, and they even have offices there. $> whois 199.180.184.6
  - a3n 12y ago
    Even if there are no servers in the US, are any of the principals or employees US citizens? If so, then they're as immune as they have the resources to fight off an assertion by the USG that they're not. Think of Microsoft's current fight over giving up email from one of their Irish servers. Microsoft has the resources to fight this off, and that's the only reason they're still fighting and not complying. Someone small would have to fold or go to jail. If you're small, it doesn't matter if the law is on your side if the USG overwhelms you before the question even gets a hearing.
StavrosK 12y ago
[DELETED, wait for an official company response or canary update]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 12y ago
  That's pointless. It's like allowing an alarm to ring without cause. Next time it rings the canary won't be trusted until you personally vouch for the fact that it wasn't an accident, and if that's the new channel the canary has lost its value. False alarms are lethal for something as important as this. Sorry...
  - spacefight 12y ago
    That's what I exactly tried to convince the parent before and I even got downvoted for it. So it sure looks like, someone has to explain everyone here why Silent Circle has a warrant canary and how we should interpret it....
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      I suspect you got downvoted more because of the tone than because of your intended message. But don't sweat it, I got downvoted more than once in this thread too. What matters is that silentcircle realizes that missing such self-imposed deadlines is something that matters and that everybody is on the same page. Shouting 'you don't have a clue' and 'resign' doesn't help at all, when clearly it is mostly a matter of interpretation.
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    I'm not trying to tell you that it's okay that this happened, I just saw this post while waiting for a deployment and figured I'd comment. Now I'm kind of regretting that.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
dang 12y ago
As long as it's a false alarm, we'll demote this story. Edit: Ok, we restored it with a question mark. That's a more balanced way to handle these; I just forgot about it. Edit 2: Now that I think about it, there's no need for a question mark on a factual statement. Sorry—I'm a little distracted right now! (We can change "is" to "was" if they update it, but someone will have to let us know.) I'm going to detach this subthread now so it can go to the bottom as off-topic.
- spacefight 12y ago
  I'm not so sure if the demotion is valid for this story. The sole issue of a warrant canary is to either feed it weekly (their own decision) or retire it. Not feeding the updates weekly means something... telling everyone false alarm doesn't make me happy.
- lawl 12y ago
  Maybe I'm paranoid. But if is an NSL he obviously couldn't say anything. If really nothing happened the answer should have been shit i'll update it straight away. Everything else would completely defeat the purpose of the canary. Edit: the only thing i'll accept here is an explanation signed with the same PGP key As long as that hasn't happened something happened. Period.
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    Well, not exactly. I'm not in the US, so I can't be served an NSL (or don't really give a crap about them), and I can't update the canary myself. I've messaged both the security officer and the person who updates it (well, I messaged the entire company, really), and I was assured we'll update it ASAP.
    - lawl 12y ago
      Sorry man. Obviously you don't understand how canaries are supposed to work, otherwise you wouldn't have posted in this thread to begin with. I used NSL as a generic term. I'm not american either, doesn't change anything. But seriously please stop posting. You're doing more harm than you help. You can't know IF something happened. Posting a public statement that nothing happened just puts the people that might know under more pressure. There is a good reason you can't update the canary yourself. Because if you could, it wouldn' work. I cannot take your company serious that way. Next time send the SMS without any public statement please.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ThinkBeat 12y ago
Ok, so from a conspiracy perspective: Lets say there was a good reason for the canary not being updated. I the FBI or whichever law enforcement agency was involved in the process noticed that updates were missing, (or saw it because it was pointed out on a well trafficked website) Could the law enforcement agency then compel the employees to post a note that it was just a mistake and it will be rectified soon? And then have them update it? Since not updating it when asked would equal disclosing that the event had taken place, which under certain laws might be illegal? This hurts my head.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- late2part 12y ago
  Yes, they could. A federal judge can compel people to do many, many things.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I would be worried about that long after I'd be worried about people simply striking a deal in some trumped up criminal lawsuit after being suitably intimidated.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Or, since Silent Circle partakes of extremely misleading marketing and claims you can make encrypted calls all over the world, LE can just go tap the VoIP providers they use. Legally, or, since almost all VoIP is unencrypted, just by tapping Ethernet. Seriously, go read the press release for the BlackPhone and tell me you'd trust their CEO at all. Even Mr Zimmerman admits the entire business relies on LE not coming into their office with guns.
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    What? Where is this claimed? As far as I know, all claims are that OCA calls are encrypted to the server. It sounds like you're confusing the PSTN calling offering with the Silent Phone service itself, which is encrypted peer to peer.
spacefight 12y ago
That canary sits in direct reach of a LE (Law enforcement) of the US. $> whois 199.217.106.243 http://myip.ms/view/ip_addresses/3352914432/199.217.106.0_199.217.106.255 http://myip.ms/view/ip_addresses/3352914432/199.217.106.0_19... Edit: Typo law enforcement.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  I'm not sure what a LAE is, but the server doesn't matter much, since we sign the file itself.
read 12y ago
Is a warrant canary even legal? If it isn't, what's the point of having them? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary The US security researcher Moxie Marlinspike states that "every lawyer we've spoken to has confirmed that [a warrant canary] would not work" for the TextSecure server. Direct link: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/whispersystems.org/issues/34#issuecomment-49910725 https://github.com/WhisperSystems/whispersystems.org/issues/...
- pakled_engineer 12y ago
  The main worry for TextSecure is that Google upon receiving a NSL will send you a targeted update for the TS client and GAPPS framework that sends all your msgs to a three letter agency before being encrypted and sent as usual. So Google would need a canary for the play store
  - dublinben 12y ago
    If you're concerned about that threat vector, you wouldn't be using GAPPS/Play. Except that's the only way they'll distribute TextSecure.
  - jlund 12y ago
    Except for the fact that Google does not have the signing keys that are used for the TextSecure binaries. They cannot silently distribute a binary that has been tampered with. This distributed trust system is one of Android's strengths: https://developer.android.com/tools/publishing/app-signing.html https://developer.android.com/tools/publishing/app-signing.h...
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      Though don't they control the code that does the signature checking?
    - petertodd 12y ago
      To clarify, so Google can distribute a binary that has been tampered with, but it'd be trivial to prove that they had in fact done that?
ThinkBeat 12y ago
First off I have no standing here, and I am nobody. I am a customer of Silent Circle though. (or so I claim) I am sure that StavrosK is well known by the community and it is my fault that I dont know his connection with SilentCircle. His profile points to stavros at stochastic dot io. But more importantly HackerNews is not a very secure platform. We have no real way of knowing StavrosK is StavrosK, or if ThinkBeat is the same ThinkBeat as last week. Using Hackernews or any social media as a platform to "override" a warrant canary is ill advised. In fact I think it makes matters worse. Properly signed messages through the announced channel is the way to go.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  Yep, this is definitely true. The only way to get this resolved is to update the canary. I can prove I work there, but it's irrelevant. I also want to note that I didn't try to override anything, dang helpfully tried to temporarily hide this post to avoid causing a panic while we get this resolved, but that doesn't change the fact that this is still a problem we need to resolve.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I think this needs an additional safeguard, such as the destruction of the private key associated by the messages and a defined 'grace period' (defined up front, not after the fact) in case of a missed update as well as a very good procedure to update and check that the update has indeed been made.
    - StavrosK 12y ago
      What sort of grace period do you mean? For which?
      - spacefight 12y ago
        A grace period for the case that you forget to manually update the canary. Say you forget it, but after x amount of days you (or someone else) notice, then you update and continue. That grace period needs to be well defined, announced and properly used. Having a grace period of almost 3x the announced update rate (5 -> 25th of December) is IMHO not acceptable.
CGamesPlay 12y ago
The purpose of the canary is to provide the issuer with a way of saying "I am no longer trustworthy". Since the canary has not been updated, nothing that can be said in favor of Silent Circle should be trusted. When the canary is again updated, it will be Silent Circle saying "I can be trusted again" (subject to the limitations about coercion as described in the canary message). For now, do not trust that Silent Circle has not been compromised despite anything you may read in this thread. When the canary is updated, then you may return to the state that you had before: you can speculate that they are being coerced into lying about the canary, or that they are trustworthy. That choice is an has always been yours to make.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  Oh yes, sorry. Definitely do not take my comments as trustworthy. The canary is the only thing to watch for.
  - spacefight 12y ago
    We're back on page one. This is exactly what some of us have said hours ago already and others have been doing: they watched the canary "die" (in terms of the mining analogy).
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I disagree that the state post a future update of the canary is equal to the state before it failed. New canary, same as the old does not apply, the alarm has rung, it can't be 'un-rung'.
  - jcrawfordor 12y ago
    The warrant canary is not an alarm that an NSL/etc has been served precisely because NSLs do not allow for any such alarm to be raised. The canary is an assertion that this event has not happened up to a certain date, and so one issued at any point whatsoever is as valid (up to its issue date) as any other. It's not practical to release new canaries constantly, so there is always an interrim period between one and the next where it is unclear if the situation has changed. A due date/release schedule is a guideline to users for that interrim period. Last canary within one normal scheduled interval? Everything is normal. Last canary longer back? Now we must worry that the situation has changed, because if it hadn't the canary should have been updated. The release schedule is only that, though, a guideline for deciding during the period since issuance. It changes nothing about the fundamental nature of the canary as a claim up to the specified date. A new canary, early, on time, or late, makes the exact same assertion as each of the older canaries. It being late just prevents user confidence about the state of the service in the time period between 'expiration' and new issuance, the new issuance brings back this confidence. Releasing a canary late is a sin because it creates a time period in which the state of the service is in question, and frequent/lengthy/otherwise egregious incidents should reduce user trust in a service. That time period ends when a new canary is issued, though, as the protection of the canary is once again in place. But perhaps I simply misunderstand your ideas. Could you explain what you mean by a means other than analogy (which is honestly not particularly useful here, as the nature of signed text is different than the nature of birds)? Or a better question, if a new canary is issued, but late, then what is the actual scenario that users are not protected against?
gpm 12y ago
Reading this canary has me worried, it doesn't actually say that "no warrants have been served, nor have any searches or seizures taken place", it only says that a declaration stating that will be provided. Compare this to rsync's (http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt), which this seems to have been based off of. It explicitly states "No warrants have ever been served to rsync.net, or rsync.net principals or employees. No searches or seizures of any kind have ever been performed on rsync.net assets, including:..."
- StavrosK 12y ago
  You're right, it looks like the wording is a bit unclear. I'll talk to the guys to see if we can get it updated, thanks.
raverbashing 12y ago
"As of Thu Dec 25 19:07:56 2014 UTC, here are the current headlines" So it's up again?
- tedivm 12y ago
  Yeah, my guess is that someone at the site saw this and realized that they need to update it. That or they were forced to by law enforcement due to all of the attention this was getting. Turns out warrant canaries are mostly useless.
  - qnaal 12y ago
    Based on a critical reading of the 'Thu Dec 25 19:07:56 2014 UTC' update I'd say it has served its purpose and delivered its only message as loudly and clearly (or absently and morbidly, as the analogy may go) as it can. ps anyone got a link to any previous canary update, or even a copy of the public key? pps the update I read (including signature) had sha1sum 790b9817923137c68bd0a818456f2b47ff25719f
subleq 12y ago
I hadn't heard of Silent Circle before so I looked at their offerings. Is it any different than what you get from TextSecure and RedPhone for free?
spacefight 12y ago
So it looks now, that the canary got updated. No other information given, at least not within the canary itself. https://canary.silentcircle.com/ https://canary.silentcircle.com/
shalmanese 12y ago
It seems to me that a warrant canary being updated after public notice is the most definitive proof we have that Silent Circle hasn't been served with an NSL. If the NSL had the ability to force an update, the canary would have been updated before anyone noticed it was a problem. If the NSL didn't have the ability to force an update, the canary would still remain un-updated.

148 points by scotchmi_st 12y ago

sarciszewski 12y ago

Good catch :)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

astrojams 12y ago

Does that mean they've been served a warrant?

CSMastermind 12y ago
Either that or they forgot to update it.
- TillE 12y ago
  For nearly three weeks. They might just be on vacation or something, but promising weekly updates and letting it go this long is more than a simple oversight.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- StavrosK 12y ago
  [DELETED, wait for an official company response]
  - spacefight 12y ago
    Well, some folks obviously watched out "for not updating it" during the last couple of weeks. From far away, the warrant canary served its purpose well.
    - StavrosK 12y ago
      Yeah, I agree. I think we update it every Friday (it's another team that does it), but I wonder why we missed the last two. Maybe there's just stuff I don't know about.

spacefight 12y ago

Maybe they were indeed slapped with an NSL. What a nice christmas present, huh!? If they failed their own canary - how could you believe them in terms of their warant canaray setup ever again? Not so much at all, I'd say.

StavrosK 12y ago
The entire purpose of a canary is to get manually updated. Automating it would defeat the purpose. If the person (or people, but you'd want to keep them as few as possible) was sick, unavailable, etc, it obviously wouldn't get updated. A canary also fails open by design. There's no way for the canary to fail on the side of getting your data compromised. If we forget to update it, you should just be more cautious, until we update it again (if we do).
- spacefight 12y ago
  Of course it needs to be manually. Fail open? A warrant canary system setup for the sole purpose of telling the whole world (and the clients, of course) that they were hit by not posting "a declaration that, up to that point, no warrants have been served, nor have any searches or seizures taken place". Can there really be a fail-open or fail-safe here? Edit: "not posting" fixed.
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    Yes, forgetting to update the canary = safe. If you had a system that signed stuff until you stopped it, it would fail unsafe, i.e. it would keep telling people they're safe when they weren't.
    - spacefight 12y ago
      You realize, that forgetting to update the canaray gives the same message as "we were hit by a big fucking NSL, don't trust us and our software and systems ever again as their security has been compromised."? From the outside, there is just no way of knowing that it was just a forgotten update or if it was a strong message.

higherpurpose 12y ago

Does the US Patriot Act even apply to them anymore? They moved to Switzerland this year. Still, they should probably look into doing the same kind of thing for Swiss laws. https://blog.silentcircle.com/our-move-to-switzerland/ https://blog.silentcircle.com/our-move-to-switzerland/ If the warrant canary is out of date, though, I wonder if they moved to Switzerland because the US government tried to get to them, and it wasn't just a forward-thinking action.

toyg 12y ago
As long as you have a single server in the US, the Patriot Act applies to that server and its administrators, regardless of where they are located.
- spacefight 12y ago
  Which they have, and they even have offices there. $> whois 199.180.184.6
- a3n 12y ago
  Even if there are no servers in the US, are any of the principals or employees US citizens? If so, then they're as immune as they have the resources to fight off an assertion by the USG that they're not. Think of Microsoft's current fight over giving up email from one of their Irish servers. Microsoft has the resources to fight this off, and that's the only reason they're still fighting and not complying. Someone small would have to fold or go to jail. If you're small, it doesn't matter if the law is on your side if the USG overwhelms you before the question even gets a hearing.

StavrosK 12y ago

[DELETED, wait for an official company response or canary update]

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 12y ago
That's pointless. It's like allowing an alarm to ring without cause. Next time it rings the canary won't be trusted until you personally vouch for the fact that it wasn't an accident, and if that's the new channel the canary has lost its value. False alarms are lethal for something as important as this. Sorry...
- spacefight 12y ago
  That's what I exactly tried to convince the parent before and I even got downvoted for it. So it sure looks like, someone has to explain everyone here why Silent Circle has a warrant canary and how we should interpret it....
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I suspect you got downvoted more because of the tone than because of your intended message. But don't sweat it, I got downvoted more than once in this thread too. What matters is that silentcircle realizes that missing such self-imposed deadlines is something that matters and that everybody is on the same page. Shouting 'you don't have a clue' and 'resign' doesn't help at all, when clearly it is mostly a matter of interpretation.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  I'm not trying to tell you that it's okay that this happened, I just saw this post while waiting for a deployment and figured I'd comment. Now I'm kind of regretting that.
  - jacquesm 12y ago

dang 12y ago

As long as it's a false alarm, we'll demote this story. Edit: Ok, we restored it with a question mark. That's a more balanced way to handle these; I just forgot about it. Edit 2: Now that I think about it, there's no need for a question mark on a factual statement. Sorry—I'm a little distracted right now! (We can change "is" to "was" if they update it, but someone will have to let us know.) I'm going to detach this subthread now so it can go to the bottom as off-topic.

spacefight 12y ago
I'm not so sure if the demotion is valid for this story. The sole issue of a warrant canary is to either feed it weekly (their own decision) or retire it. Not feeding the updates weekly means something... telling everyone false alarm doesn't make me happy.
lawl 12y ago
Maybe I'm paranoid. But if is an NSL he obviously couldn't say anything. If really nothing happened the answer should have been shit i'll update it straight away. Everything else would completely defeat the purpose of the canary. Edit: the only thing i'll accept here is an explanation signed with the same PGP key As long as that hasn't happened something happened. Period.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  Well, not exactly. I'm not in the US, so I can't be served an NSL (or don't really give a crap about them), and I can't update the canary myself. I've messaged both the security officer and the person who updates it (well, I messaged the entire company, really), and I was assured we'll update it ASAP.
  - lawl 12y ago
    Sorry man. Obviously you don't understand how canaries are supposed to work, otherwise you wouldn't have posted in this thread to begin with. I used NSL as a generic term. I'm not american either, doesn't change anything. But seriously please stop posting. You're doing more harm than you help. You can't know IF something happened. Posting a public statement that nothing happened just puts the people that might know under more pressure. There is a good reason you can't update the canary yourself. Because if you could, it wouldn' work. I cannot take your company serious that way. Next time send the SMS without any public statement please.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ThinkBeat 12y ago

Ok, so from a conspiracy perspective: Lets say there was a good reason for the canary not being updated. I the FBI or whichever law enforcement agency was involved in the process noticed that updates were missing, (or saw it because it was pointed out on a well trafficked website) Could the law enforcement agency then compel the employees to post a note that it was just a mistake and it will be rectified soon? And then have them update it? Since not updating it when asked would equal disclosing that the event had taken place, which under certain laws might be illegal? This hurts my head.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
late2part 12y ago
Yes, they could. A federal judge can compel people to do many, many things.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I would be worried about that long after I'd be worried about people simply striking a deal in some trumped up criminal lawsuit after being suitably intimidated.
MichaelGG 12y ago
Or, since Silent Circle partakes of extremely misleading marketing and claims you can make encrypted calls all over the world, LE can just go tap the VoIP providers they use. Legally, or, since almost all VoIP is unencrypted, just by tapping Ethernet. Seriously, go read the press release for the BlackPhone and tell me you'd trust their CEO at all. Even Mr Zimmerman admits the entire business relies on LE not coming into their office with guns.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  What? Where is this claimed? As far as I know, all claims are that OCA calls are encrypted to the server. It sounds like you're confusing the PSTN calling offering with the Silent Phone service itself, which is encrypted peer to peer.

spacefight 12y ago

That canary sits in direct reach of a LE (Law enforcement) of the US. $> whois 199.217.106.243 http://myip.ms/view/ip_addresses/3352914432/199.217.106.0_199.217.106.255 http://myip.ms/view/ip_addresses/3352914432/199.217.106.0_19... Edit: Typo law enforcement.

StavrosK 12y ago
I'm not sure what a LAE is, but the server doesn't matter much, since we sign the file itself.

read 12y ago

Is a warrant canary even legal? If it isn't, what's the point of having them? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary The US security researcher Moxie Marlinspike states that "every lawyer we've spoken to has confirmed that [a warrant canary] would not work" for the TextSecure server. Direct link: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/whispersystems.org/issues/34#issuecomment-49910725 https://github.com/WhisperSystems/whispersystems.org/issues/...

pakled_engineer 12y ago
The main worry for TextSecure is that Google upon receiving a NSL will send you a targeted update for the TS client and GAPPS framework that sends all your msgs to a three letter agency before being encrypted and sent as usual. So Google would need a canary for the play store
- dublinben 12y ago
  If you're concerned about that threat vector, you wouldn't be using GAPPS/Play. Except that's the only way they'll distribute TextSecure.
- jlund 12y ago
  Except for the fact that Google does not have the signing keys that are used for the TextSecure binaries. They cannot silently distribute a binary that has been tampered with. This distributed trust system is one of Android's strengths: https://developer.android.com/tools/publishing/app-signing.html https://developer.android.com/tools/publishing/app-signing.h...
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    Though don't they control the code that does the signature checking?
  - petertodd 12y ago
    To clarify, so Google can distribute a binary that has been tampered with, but it'd be trivial to prove that they had in fact done that?

ThinkBeat 12y ago

First off I have no standing here, and I am nobody. I am a customer of Silent Circle though. (or so I claim) I am sure that StavrosK is well known by the community and it is my fault that I dont know his connection with SilentCircle. His profile points to stavros at stochastic dot io. But more importantly HackerNews is not a very secure platform. We have no real way of knowing StavrosK is StavrosK, or if ThinkBeat is the same ThinkBeat as last week. Using Hackernews or any social media as a platform to "override" a warrant canary is ill advised. In fact I think it makes matters worse. Properly signed messages through the announced channel is the way to go.

StavrosK 12y ago
Yep, this is definitely true. The only way to get this resolved is to update the canary. I can prove I work there, but it's irrelevant. I also want to note that I didn't try to override anything, dang helpfully tried to temporarily hide this post to avoid causing a panic while we get this resolved, but that doesn't change the fact that this is still a problem we need to resolve.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I think this needs an additional safeguard, such as the destruction of the private key associated by the messages and a defined 'grace period' (defined up front, not after the fact) in case of a missed update as well as a very good procedure to update and check that the update has indeed been made.
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    What sort of grace period do you mean? For which?
    - spacefight 12y ago
      A grace period for the case that you forget to manually update the canary. Say you forget it, but after x amount of days you (or someone else) notice, then you update and continue. That grace period needs to be well defined, announced and properly used. Having a grace period of almost 3x the announced update rate (5 -> 25th of December) is IMHO not acceptable.

CGamesPlay 12y ago

The purpose of the canary is to provide the issuer with a way of saying "I am no longer trustworthy". Since the canary has not been updated, nothing that can be said in favor of Silent Circle should be trusted. When the canary is again updated, it will be Silent Circle saying "I can be trusted again" (subject to the limitations about coercion as described in the canary message). For now, do not trust that Silent Circle has not been compromised despite anything you may read in this thread. When the canary is updated, then you may return to the state that you had before: you can speculate that they are being coerced into lying about the canary, or that they are trustworthy. That choice is an has always been yours to make.

StavrosK 12y ago
Oh yes, sorry. Definitely do not take my comments as trustworthy. The canary is the only thing to watch for.
- spacefight 12y ago
  We're back on page one. This is exactly what some of us have said hours ago already and others have been doing: they watched the canary "die" (in terms of the mining analogy).
jacquesm 12y ago
I disagree that the state post a future update of the canary is equal to the state before it failed. New canary, same as the old does not apply, the alarm has rung, it can't be 'un-rung'.
- jcrawfordor 12y ago
  The warrant canary is not an alarm that an NSL/etc has been served precisely because NSLs do not allow for any such alarm to be raised. The canary is an assertion that this event has not happened up to a certain date, and so one issued at any point whatsoever is as valid (up to its issue date) as any other. It's not practical to release new canaries constantly, so there is always an interrim period between one and the next where it is unclear if the situation has changed. A due date/release schedule is a guideline to users for that interrim period. Last canary within one normal scheduled interval? Everything is normal. Last canary longer back? Now we must worry that the situation has changed, because if it hadn't the canary should have been updated. The release schedule is only that, though, a guideline for deciding during the period since issuance. It changes nothing about the fundamental nature of the canary as a claim up to the specified date. A new canary, early, on time, or late, makes the exact same assertion as each of the older canaries. It being late just prevents user confidence about the state of the service in the time period between 'expiration' and new issuance, the new issuance brings back this confidence. Releasing a canary late is a sin because it creates a time period in which the state of the service is in question, and frequent/lengthy/otherwise egregious incidents should reduce user trust in a service. That time period ends when a new canary is issued, though, as the protection of the canary is once again in place. But perhaps I simply misunderstand your ideas. Could you explain what you mean by a means other than analogy (which is honestly not particularly useful here, as the nature of signed text is different than the nature of birds)? Or a better question, if a new canary is issued, but late, then what is the actual scenario that users are not protected against?

gpm 12y ago

Reading this canary has me worried, it doesn't actually say that "no warrants have been served, nor have any searches or seizures taken place", it only says that a declaration stating that will be provided. Compare this to rsync's (http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt), which this seems to have been based off of. It explicitly states "No warrants have ever been served to rsync.net, or rsync.net principals or employees. No searches or seizures of any kind have ever been performed on rsync.net assets, including:..."

StavrosK 12y ago
You're right, it looks like the wording is a bit unclear. I'll talk to the guys to see if we can get it updated, thanks.

raverbashing 12y ago

"As of Thu Dec 25 19:07:56 2014 UTC, here are the current headlines" So it's up again?

tedivm 12y ago
Yeah, my guess is that someone at the site saw this and realized that they need to update it. That or they were forced to by law enforcement due to all of the attention this was getting. Turns out warrant canaries are mostly useless.
- qnaal 12y ago
  Based on a critical reading of the 'Thu Dec 25 19:07:56 2014 UTC' update I'd say it has served its purpose and delivered its only message as loudly and clearly (or absently and morbidly, as the analogy may go) as it can. ps anyone got a link to any previous canary update, or even a copy of the public key? pps the update I read (including signature) had sha1sum 790b9817923137c68bd0a818456f2b47ff25719f

subleq 12y ago

I hadn't heard of Silent Circle before so I looked at their offerings. Is it any different than what you get from TextSecure and RedPhone for free?

spacefight 12y ago

So it looks now, that the canary got updated. No other information given, at least not within the canary itself. https://canary.silentcircle.com/ https://canary.silentcircle.com/

shalmanese 12y ago

It seems to me that a warrant canary being updated after public notice is the most definitive proof we have that Silent Circle hasn't been served with an NSL. If the NSL had the ability to force an update, the canary would have been updated before anyone noticed it was a problem. If the NSL didn't have the ability to force an update, the canary would still remain un-updated.