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Comment by daviddahl | Hacker News Reader

Kloak's threat model is advertisers and data-miners. It is an experiment in private social networking. It is part of a set of new applications we are building at SpiderOak. Kloak is more or less a lab experiment in the UX of private systems.

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I can't tell you how excited I am to see it. It seems to me that there is no good reason end users shouldn't control their social networking info, to use (e.g., via third party apps, to backup, to migrate) and share as they see fit.

> threat model is advertisers and data-miners

So many threat models I see are hackers and malware. Those are important, but much more widespread are the threats you identify.

> It is part of a set of new applications we are building at SpiderOak.

This has me much more intersted in SpiderOak. What else is in the pipeline, if you can share?

> Kloak is more or less a lab experiment in the UX of private systems

Great. Even if Kloak itself doesn't work out (and I hope it does) it could be a step forward for everyone. It seems like the path to building non-private system is very well-established, but those who want to give their users privacy have much more to invent on their own. So thanks for making it open source too.

I dont think the NSA is the 99% threat model. It is data miners who are building up dossiers on all of us to sell to the highest bidder which will raise costs for all of us in the long run. think Insurance companies raising rates on how often you visit the online whiskey store.

We also released a password manager called Encryptr, but there is a larger project underway that I won;t say anything about yet as I am not in Marketing, etc:)

> I dont think the NSA is the 99% threat model. It is data miners who are building up dossiers on all of us to sell to the highest bidder which will raise costs for all of us in the long run. think Insurance companies raising rates on how often you visit the online whiskey store.

If we banned life insurance companies from considering age or medical status, rates would not go down for everyone--they would go down for the elderly and the very sick, and up for everyone else. In exactly the same way, insurance company "dossiers" would not "raise costs for all of us"--they would raise costs for the risky and decrease costs for the less risky.

> they would raise costs for the risky and decrease costs for the less risky

That assumes their risk model is correct.

Regardless, I don't want all my behavior evaluated and judged. You may feel otherwise, but it should be my choice.

In theory? Sure.

In practice?

Well, I wouldn't want to be, to pick one example out of millions, a med student, in an age when looking up medical knowledge damages your credit rating. It's not a very distant age.

If I may be so blunt - how are you planning on paying the bills for Kloak?

Don't get me wrong, it looks really, really interesting - but you still need money for it, where will it come from?

How does Kloak handle metadata? If people can see who you communicate with, they can get access to your social network, which contains a lot of information.

By seeing my location dozens of times, a company can figure out where I live. They might not know what bar I went to last night but they will be able to know that I visit Chipotele frequently.

It's better than nothing, but it seems like strong analytics could still access most of the important information.

You must approve all contacts who get a copy of your feed. There is no way to just follow others. It is a white-listed system. Analytics can only be performed by those you trust

I was about to ask a lot of these questions of how deep the metadata layer really goes - including using SpiderOak as the threat. It seems this is built on Crypton, linked below; however, the paper itself [1] goes into a lot of detail on what metadata SpiderOak could see, and what they can infer from it.

I am personally curious why p384/ECDSA was chosen; vs. p521 or Curve25519+Ed25519. I assume this is because p384 is standardized and recommended in NSA Suite B.

[1] https://crypton.io/crypton.pdf

p384 is the standard, yes, however, any future implementation of Crypton will, I hope, move to Curve25518

This is a centralized service, not distributed or decentralized?

Have you given any thought to making it compatible with federated social networks like Diaspora?

Would love to, which will require a bit of engineering on Crypton's server

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