5 ms·

Every one of these new chat systems have similar problems with key authentication. they fail in similar ways and try to solve the problem in similar and differe

by cyphunk 12y ago

Every one of these new chat systems have similar problems with key authentication. they fail in similar ways and try to solve the problem in similar and different ways. This articles contribution, while very valid with its "greater than though" tone, is gets on my nerves. I have no idea why it always seems to be a constant when people talk about Telegram without really investigating the dramatic headlines authors claim. Is it that we just hate anything engineered in Russia, China. Its boring already.

dsacco 12y ago
Do you have a data point to suggest real bias against the geographic engineering behind Telegram? All the substantial warnings I have read against it revolve around its lack of a respected crypto team (in fact, not having any experienced crypto team and conflating a bunch of maths PhDs with a real crypto team), not using acknowledged crypto design best practices (and flagrantly ignoring them for counrer-intuitive designs), and most importantly, using a contest instead of a real audit. Contest != audit. An audit has a specialized team of cryptographers who try to break the application in any scenario. A contest has restrictive scope that sets up a strawman and doesn't attract real, serious crypto auditing. As an example, this article's MITM doesn't qualify despite being a real attack. A contest means that you have no real knowledge of whether the crypto is broken if nobody succeeds. An audit means you can be significantly towards certain. You might already know this, but consider that if someone hosts a contest instead of an audit, and has all the other issues stated above, they will be met with hostility.
- cyphunk 12y ago
  Valid criticism but I feel the items you mention get blown out of proportion. The Cryptocat team had similar areas where it was lacking and yet did not suffer the same backlash. This could be because they never ran a competition and worked to find a way to fund an audit several years later instead. The data point(s) that lead me to wonder of a geographic bias have to due with the tone of prior analysis of telegram I've read over the past year. This article included. And also a general, very male, arrogance in the security community that seems to constantly search for any reason to ridicule. I will have to go back and trace the history of my perception to find the tone I mention, which I can do tomorrow if you likewise can provide a datapoint for your understanding that they flagrantly ignored crypt design best practices. In watching the evolution of Pond, Telegram and TextSecure we see that to solve security or usability problems designers are required to venture to some degree into uncharted territory, away from best practices. So I question the flagrant claim. But I agree contests are just marketing ploys, little else. If Telegram wanted to "claim" otherwise they would need to start with paying the analysts from this article the full bounty.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    You might be the first person I've ever heard suggest that Cryptocat didn't have a "backlash". Cryptocat comes pretty close to being reviled. It's 10x more so in private conversations between technical experts, but it's also very visible publicly. (I think the project deserves the flak it takes, and continues to endanger its users today). The "Russia" thing is just dust people throw into the air to thwart reasoned discussion. People don't like Telegram because it is prima facie cryptographically incompetent. There's no one resource that sums up all the brokenness and weirdness --- certainly not Alex's post here, which concerns itself with a specific bug he and Juliano found. You have to collect all the data and paint the picture yourself.
    - darklajid 12y ago
      You're always present when crypto comes up and I honestly usually _wait_ for that opinion. Now, let's ignore Telegram for a second. I haven't installed it, ever, but the feature set seems compelling and the UI (screenshots, demos) is nice. Would you agree that the Better Stuff™ is just less usable and less accessible right now? Is there a way we can fix that? If Telegram gets the UX right, but fails in the underlying implementation, can we take a decent implementation and fix the UX issues? See, Moxie's solution just plain doesn't work. I'm sure it's sound and great, but .. it uses a phone number as the identifier (like WhatsApp, and that's not something I'd like to be compared with). What about my laptop or tablet? What about cross-platform solutions? I'm trying to migrate to FxOS as soon as they fix some mail related shortcomings. There seems to be a Telegram client. No (official) WhatsApp client and I doubt that most of the 'better' alternatives offer something here. If we distill this post into one line: How can we have a decent user experience, without throwing out privacy and security? What would be the best candidate to start from, because .. all of them suck right now?
      - dsacco 12y ago
        This wasn't directed towards me, but I'll participate. >> Now, let's ignore Telegram for a second. I haven't installed it, ever, but the feature set seems compelling and the UI (screenshots, demos) is nice. Agree. I think Telegram has a nice design. >> If we distill this post into one line: How can we have a decent user experience, without throwing out privacy and security? Here is the thing, this is a relatively new ground. The technology for secure messaging systems has been around for a much longer time but it wasn't as popular or fashionable. You can and will have secure messaging built on solid crypto with an attractive user interface and available everywhere. That's Moxie's long-term goal. But this is how you get there (choose your adventure): 1. Build the world's sexiest user interface for secure messaging apps and focus on cross-platform compatibility, while building it on top of an okay crypto system (or worse, a weird custom one that ignores industry practices). Once you have mindshare, gradually improve your crypto (Telegram is demonstrably not doing this by conflating a contest with an audit, but that's another comment). You'll start off with a lot of hype and users, but not much respect from the information security community because, well, you haven't earned it yet. 2. Take a respected crypto team, build out the world's best crypto system for a secure messaging app, leveraging both established best practices and professional peer review. Focus on building a really good prototype in one area with an acceptably attractive and functional user interface, putting other things on the backburner in order to finish a core product. 3. Go for the hail mary and try to build out the most amazing crypto system with the most amazing user interface and the most amazing features running on everything from iOS 4.4 to bleeding edge Debian to please everyone. In a year, burn out and die off because you almost certainly don't have the Herculean development resources this would require in completely orthogonal disciplines. Which of these tracks sounds most like what successful startups do? I acknowledge your point that no offering is perfect right now. But TextSecure focuses on the right things. If I could sum this up entirely: nothing is perfect (yet), but TextSecure is the best offering on the market for a secure messaging application, and if what you want is a secure messaging application, start from solid crypto and work your way to everything else, not from a sexy user interface to okay/passing crypto. Telegram might very well have the best of intentions in mind and it might have solid crypto under the hood. But that's the sort of thing you consider false until proven true, and so far their behavior is similar to a company that promises a fantastic new service in financial trading but prioritizes ubiquity and design without ever auditing the core trading system itself.
woah 12y ago
You really think that people are discriminating against Russia? Damn. What about the fact that they have a bizarre homecooked protocol?
- cyphunk 12y ago
  many of the new secure chat systems have homecooked elements. this is because they are trying to solve usability features that have not been thoroughly dealt with before.
AngrySkillzz 12y ago
The tone is like that because people have been saying that Telegram's protocol was constructed seemingly arbitrarily and includes outdated and mostly-unstudied constructs. No serious cryptographer would build a protocol like that, and many well-known cryptographers have pointed that out. The Telegram team has been hostile to legitimate criticism, and has hosted cracking "contests" as if that in any way demonstrates the security of their protocol. When you roll your own protocol from practically unused primitives, commit most sins in the crypto book, dodge criticism, store your users' messages, and refuse to open-source the server-side code, you deserve that tone.
- cyphunk 12y ago
  When news comes around about Telegram it typically includes the criticism of their team being hostile. I just haven't seen it though. Instead I've seen their team respond to posts with gratitude for the critique and disclosure. I think this is where I get perplexed on this topic. Though maybe I just missed a particularly hostile event. It's just rather dodgy all the criticism. What other secure chat system of late provides the server code? Only Pond comes to mind. What other chat system provides an OSS client, Only Pond TextSecure and Telegram. Cracking contests are either absurd or just asking for people to ridicule you. So I understand part of the animosity.

by cyphunk 12y ago

dsacco 12y ago

Do you have a data point to suggest real bias against the geographic engineering behind Telegram? All the substantial warnings I have read against it revolve around its lack of a respected crypto team (in fact, not having any experienced crypto team and conflating a bunch of maths PhDs with a real crypto team), not using acknowledged crypto design best practices (and flagrantly ignoring them for counrer-intuitive designs), and most importantly, using a contest instead of a real audit. Contest != audit. An audit has a specialized team of cryptographers who try to break the application in any scenario. A contest has restrictive scope that sets up a strawman and doesn't attract real, serious crypto auditing. As an example, this article's MITM doesn't qualify despite being a real attack. A contest means that you have no real knowledge of whether the crypto is broken if nobody succeeds. An audit means you can be significantly towards certain. You might already know this, but consider that if someone hosts a contest instead of an audit, and has all the other issues stated above, they will be met with hostility.

cyphunk 12y ago
Valid criticism but I feel the items you mention get blown out of proportion. The Cryptocat team had similar areas where it was lacking and yet did not suffer the same backlash. This could be because they never ran a competition and worked to find a way to fund an audit several years later instead. The data point(s) that lead me to wonder of a geographic bias have to due with the tone of prior analysis of telegram I've read over the past year. This article included. And also a general, very male, arrogance in the security community that seems to constantly search for any reason to ridicule. I will have to go back and trace the history of my perception to find the tone I mention, which I can do tomorrow if you likewise can provide a datapoint for your understanding that they flagrantly ignored crypt design best practices. In watching the evolution of Pond, Telegram and TextSecure we see that to solve security or usability problems designers are required to venture to some degree into uncharted territory, away from best practices. So I question the flagrant claim. But I agree contests are just marketing ploys, little else. If Telegram wanted to "claim" otherwise they would need to start with paying the analysts from this article the full bounty.
- tptacek 12y ago
  You might be the first person I've ever heard suggest that Cryptocat didn't have a "backlash". Cryptocat comes pretty close to being reviled. It's 10x more so in private conversations between technical experts, but it's also very visible publicly. (I think the project deserves the flak it takes, and continues to endanger its users today). The "Russia" thing is just dust people throw into the air to thwart reasoned discussion. People don't like Telegram because it is prima facie cryptographically incompetent. There's no one resource that sums up all the brokenness and weirdness --- certainly not Alex's post here, which concerns itself with a specific bug he and Juliano found. You have to collect all the data and paint the picture yourself.
  - darklajid 12y ago
    You're always present when crypto comes up and I honestly usually _wait_ for that opinion. Now, let's ignore Telegram for a second. I haven't installed it, ever, but the feature set seems compelling and the UI (screenshots, demos) is nice. Would you agree that the Better Stuff™ is just less usable and less accessible right now? Is there a way we can fix that? If Telegram gets the UX right, but fails in the underlying implementation, can we take a decent implementation and fix the UX issues? See, Moxie's solution just plain doesn't work. I'm sure it's sound and great, but .. it uses a phone number as the identifier (like WhatsApp, and that's not something I'd like to be compared with). What about my laptop or tablet? What about cross-platform solutions? I'm trying to migrate to FxOS as soon as they fix some mail related shortcomings. There seems to be a Telegram client. No (official) WhatsApp client and I doubt that most of the 'better' alternatives offer something here. If we distill this post into one line: How can we have a decent user experience, without throwing out privacy and security? What would be the best candidate to start from, because .. all of them suck right now?
    - dsacco 12y ago
      This wasn't directed towards me, but I'll participate. >> Now, let's ignore Telegram for a second. I haven't installed it, ever, but the feature set seems compelling and the UI (screenshots, demos) is nice. Agree. I think Telegram has a nice design. >> If we distill this post into one line: How can we have a decent user experience, without throwing out privacy and security? Here is the thing, this is a relatively new ground. The technology for secure messaging systems has been around for a much longer time but it wasn't as popular or fashionable. You can and will have secure messaging built on solid crypto with an attractive user interface and available everywhere. That's Moxie's long-term goal. But this is how you get there (choose your adventure): 1. Build the world's sexiest user interface for secure messaging apps and focus on cross-platform compatibility, while building it on top of an okay crypto system (or worse, a weird custom one that ignores industry practices). Once you have mindshare, gradually improve your crypto (Telegram is demonstrably not doing this by conflating a contest with an audit, but that's another comment). You'll start off with a lot of hype and users, but not much respect from the information security community because, well, you haven't earned it yet. 2. Take a respected crypto team, build out the world's best crypto system for a secure messaging app, leveraging both established best practices and professional peer review. Focus on building a really good prototype in one area with an acceptably attractive and functional user interface, putting other things on the backburner in order to finish a core product. 3. Go for the hail mary and try to build out the most amazing crypto system with the most amazing user interface and the most amazing features running on everything from iOS 4.4 to bleeding edge Debian to please everyone. In a year, burn out and die off because you almost certainly don't have the Herculean development resources this would require in completely orthogonal disciplines. Which of these tracks sounds most like what successful startups do? I acknowledge your point that no offering is perfect right now. But TextSecure focuses on the right things. If I could sum this up entirely: nothing is perfect (yet), but TextSecure is the best offering on the market for a secure messaging application, and if what you want is a secure messaging application, start from solid crypto and work your way to everything else, not from a sexy user interface to okay/passing crypto. Telegram might very well have the best of intentions in mind and it might have solid crypto under the hood. But that's the sort of thing you consider false until proven true, and so far their behavior is similar to a company that promises a fantastic new service in financial trading but prioritizes ubiquity and design without ever auditing the core trading system itself.

woah 12y ago

You really think that people are discriminating against Russia? Damn. What about the fact that they have a bizarre homecooked protocol?

cyphunk 12y ago
many of the new secure chat systems have homecooked elements. this is because they are trying to solve usability features that have not been thoroughly dealt with before.

AngrySkillzz 12y ago

The tone is like that because people have been saying that Telegram's protocol was constructed seemingly arbitrarily and includes outdated and mostly-unstudied constructs. No serious cryptographer would build a protocol like that, and many well-known cryptographers have pointed that out. The Telegram team has been hostile to legitimate criticism, and has hosted cracking "contests" as if that in any way demonstrates the security of their protocol. When you roll your own protocol from practically unused primitives, commit most sins in the crypto book, dodge criticism, store your users' messages, and refuse to open-source the server-side code, you deserve that tone.

cyphunk 12y ago
When news comes around about Telegram it typically includes the criticism of their team being hostile. I just haven't seen it though. Instead I've seen their team respond to posts with gratitude for the critique and disclosure. I think this is where I get perplexed on this topic. Though maybe I just missed a particularly hostile event. It's just rather dodgy all the criticism. What other secure chat system of late provides the server code? Only Pond comes to mind. What other chat system provides an OSS client, Only Pond TextSecure and Telegram. Cracking contests are either absurd or just asking for people to ridicule you. So I understand part of the animosity.