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Actually, I'd entirely support your right to do that.

And his to tell you to fuck off and ignore you from then on if you did.

I think all you should ask of them is honesty, if their track record has truly been this bad.

"Here is our secure product for all" vs "Help us make our product secure for all"

If someone is learning crypto for fun and enjoyment they should seek advice of experts no matter how much of a jerk the expert may be. This isnt really the same level of a random github project 'convert your old php into haskell with 1 click!' I don't think anyone has expectations of that being 100% accurate.

People on HN flipped out over Linode, they made a mistake, they fessed up. People just want honesty.

Also, everyone has any right to complain, at least until prism comes a knockin

> Like I said, the developers seem to be earnestly trying to improve their product based on the feedback they are getting.

Cryptographic software isn't something that you can improve by a process of gradual refinement.

Crypto can have small, subtle, bugs. Those bugs could mean that the product is worthless.

A skilled, knowledgeable researcher could audit the code closely, and report any bugs they find. Cryptocat could fix all of those bugs. Does that mean it's secure? No - because crypto is hard.

> What more can you ask of them?

I ask that they make the disclaimers much bolder and bigger. I ask that they emphasise the experimental, untested, unscrutinised nature of Cryptocat.

> "You there. Stop. You shouldn't be building this because we the superior internet community think you're a terrible person who will never learn anything, so we're putting our foot down."

That's a mischaracterisation of the criticism they've got.

"You there. Stop! Cryptography is very hard. Don't roll your own; or do but don't release it as a product for end users."

followed by

"You there. Stop! We suggested that you didn't release it for end users, but you did. Well, here's a list of bugs. Don't just fix these and think everything is good, there are probably other bugs and the whole thing is based on weird wrong ideas."

followed by

"You there. Stop! No, really, just stop. Here's a list of bugs. These are not subtle hard to find bugs. These are obvious bugs that anyone doing crypto really should have been aware of. The presence of these bugs demonstrates lack-of-clue. Please, stop hyping the product as secure, stop distributing as a tool for end users to use."

People get exasperated. It doesn't help that some of the responses from the developers were defensive and aggressive and dismissive.

tl;dr have fun with crypto and building stuff. Just don't think it's secure, and especially don't release it as secure. Especially don't release it as a browser plugin ready for naive end users.

I think I do understand what you're saying Dan, but do you really believe that cryptographic software isn't something you can gradually improve on?

How do you explain the fact that the majority/all of the crypto libraries we rely on today have been gradually improved over time, fixed as bugs have been found, etc?

I think you've severely mischaracterised the way crypto software is developed.

You fix the bugs and you move on. That's the only way to progress, and that's exactly what the developers have been doing. I can't fault them for that.

There is a difference between starting with a reasonably well written core and fixing issues that are discovered, and starting with a product that demonstrates essentially no understanding of cryptography beyond the bare minimum and trying to debug a working cryptosystem into existence. It's bad enough to try that with regular software, but doing it with crypto is insane.

He's not mischaracterizing the way crypto software is developed. You are.

Please characterize the proper way for us of the uninformed...

All software has bugs. There's no piece of real-world general-purpose software that you can't look at and say "this was improved incrementally as bugs were found".

But not all software has the same sensitivity. In the weeks before Netscape Navigator shipped in the mid-90s, Jamie Zawinski slept under his desk at work trying to make it reliable. The builds from the night before launch crashed! Nobody thought they'd make it. That's a story anyone on a commercial dev team can probably tell you; it's the oldest story in product development.

That kind of incremental development works fine when you're shipping the first web browser, or even the first version of a new web browser.

It does not work when you are shipping cryptography. Nate Lawson is fond of saying, "plan to budget 10x for the validation of a new cryptosystem as you to implementation". You probably can't actually be doing that when your whole cryptosystem changes 4 times in 2 years.

The difference is between handling bugs and expecting bugs. Netscape expected bugs. Crypto software can't do that.

You haven't explained anything about how crypto software is developed. You have told us how other software is developed and then told us that it isn't okay for crypto software.

Spend 10x the resources on verification as on implementation. Spend 10x the resources on design as on implementation.

Nobody does this with normal software.

And ultimately the biggest thing to do is that when you find a bug, don't just fix that one bug and call it a day.

If you find a bug in your crypto code through your testing and validation, that means your development process screwed up and allowed that bug to slip through. What you need to do is figure out how that bug got through your development process, change your development process so it wouldn't slip through next time, and then have a thorough audit of your already-written code to make sure no other bugs have slipped through the same way.

Developing must-not-fail critical software is the exact opposite of the traditional launch-fast-and-iterate model that most people use to produce web applications and such. This is a big reason that when web app developers try their hand at developing critical software like cryptography, they get it horribly wrong.

This seems similar to way the people who developed the software for the space shuttle worked. Finding a bug was a huge deal, as it meant something was wrong in their process. It wasn't just fix the bug, but fix what caused the bug, and look to see where that faulty process may have caused other bugs. Google 'they write the right stuff' for a good article on it.

Another domain where you have things like this is embedded systems related to safety, ie, the micro-controller managing pressure equipment.

Reading that it seems as if this space is almost, positively, stacked against any solo or small group dev. Thanks for the insight, but if crypto is hard and there's issues on both ends of the spectrum (commercial space generally ships for monetary reasons, small groups ship for notoriety / political discourse rationale / tinfoil hat.

So who is building great crypto software that's built right from the ground up? OpenSSL AND OpenSSH struggle with this on a continual basis yet they seem to be the prime examples of doing it right. The problem, however seems to be unless every release is a complete rewrite eventually you will be working off of some foundational compromised base component.

Thoughts?

This space is positively stacked against any solo or small group dev.

The way you deal with that is, you pick a credible crypto project with traction and build on top of it.

The world badly needs a GPG UX that ordinary people can use without thinking about it. Bonus: nobody knows what that UX is! It's an open problem! And you can tackle it without getting anyone killed, because the GPG/PGP team has spent decades getting the "might get someone killed" problems addressed.

If the user is placing their trust in the UX's ability to validate that PGP/GPG is working correctly and has not been tampered with, that sounds exactly like something that could get someone killed.

You can say the same thing about any piece of software; if Excel forgets how to multiply numbers, think of the horrible things that could happen! The difference is that multiplying two numbers isn't hard compared to getting a cryptosystem right, and neither is accurately displaying a key fingerprint.

So what you're saying is, for cryptography software, "Agile" development doesn't work. For cryptography software you need very careful, deliberate, up-front design. You need careful, deliberate implementation that does not deviate from the design. You need careful deliberate validation.

What we may be seeing is that we have roughly a decade now where "Agile" has been drummed into developers as the best way to write software. Perhaps it's the only approach they knew to take.

That a much better way to put it than mine.

> The difference is between handling bugs and expecting bugs. Netscape expected bugs. Crypto software can't do that.

I dont know if I believe this. I have never had a software system that was completely bug-free (independent of whether or not it had anything to do with crypto). Furthermore, I would argue that one of the main ideas behind SSL was to expect there to be flaws in the underlying crypto that it used and therefore be able to deal with switching out one algorithm for another. You might argue that there exists a difference between a bug and an algorithmic flaw, but realistically they both have the same effect. Therefore, I argue that the superior method is not to write code expecting no flaws, but to write code which does expect them and has a way to deal with them.

That is not to say that you should release your code knowing that there exists a security flaw, but rather to acknowledge that you're not the smartest guy in the room and that the best way to harden a security system is by letting people attack it. Now, you cant force people who are good at crypto to attack your system in order to improve it. Hopefully though, security through obscurity will help. I.e. if your product is not well known it is not worth it for someone experienced to spend a lot of time to crack it. On the other hand, if it is, you then need to worry about the nature of the person attacking it. Is this person a researcher (in which case he will hopefully reveal his findings) or a threat? If you are a big product, you can hopefully afford to make this person a researcher who will give you his results. For the other case, I think that this is where auditing helps. Even if you have a broken system (which you can almost always safely assume you do), you can at least possibly detect a hack and then try to reverse engineer it. Lastly, to provide a solid example of 'bugs' which have been fixed in crypto code which everyone relied on, you need to look no further than unix's crypt.

Note that, assuming the security model proposed by cryptocat, every time it's broken a few hundred peaceful protesters against a brutal regime end up against the wall. The brutal regime obviously doesn't bother to tell the world to stop using the software in question.

(In reality, it's not that bad because quite a lot of people distrust cryptocat. Still, "patch and move on" doesn't cut it for critical software, which almost all crypto software is.)

My knowledge of this topic is limited but I believe if you are saying that the majority of crypto libraries have had major bugs, in the sense that they are made trivial to break, that you are overreaching.

On the other hand if you are including minor bugs, that have a low impact on security, then you are surely right but this doesn't mean much. Minor bugs get caught even in audits of the code for nuclear power plants.

The idea is that they should, instead of continuing to write that software and endanger the public, go and study crypto in deep detail. Just how you don't build a production-ready nuclear reactor by "learning while doing", and instead go and study many fields of engineering first and actively run prototype designs by many peers before publishing, should the cryptocat dev have done the same.

I'd say it's akin to me building a high-speed car that randomly stops braking, severely endangering whoever uses it. As long as it's just me and other high-speed car enthusiasts playing around with it, that's fine.

But if I package it up as a DIY package, ready for the real world, and lots of people start building/using my faulty car, I would consider it quite important to add a huge disclaimer.

> What right do you have

A first amendment right.

> You have absolutely no right to complain

Freedom of speech includes freedom to complain.

> in much the same way I don't have any right to look at your Github repo

...per the fourth amendment for my private repros. I'll assume you're referring to my public repros instead of trying to compare as "the same" something that goes directly against someone's constitutional rights, with something that's explicitly protected by someone's constitutional rights.

> tell you you're a terrible developer and you should never touch a computer again.

...but this part is well within your first amendment rights as well. And if you think I've been undermining the pursuit of life and liberty as much as broken crypto can, repeatedly, despite fair warning, I'd dearly hope you'd exercise said rights. Rudeness and hurt egos are more survivable than broken crypto. Learning crypto is fine, but not at the expense of those who's lives may depend upon it. Whether or not they'll learn isn't the question: learning takes time, period, full stop. Time that cannot be afforded by those who would depend on said crypto.

Not everyone lives in the USA. Your amendments are utterly irrelevant to Europeans, for example.

> Not everyone lives in the USA.

And?

The same ideals and rights embodied within our constitution can be found as similarly protected rights well outside of the USA. Even ignoring that, the point would still stand: The blanket statement that "you" (generalizing to all those harshly critiquing the continued development of Cryptocat) "don't have the right" is incorrect.

If you suppose that freedom of speech isn't a universal human right, you could argue that not everybody has the right. But I would disagree with that assertion, as would the signatories of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

> Your amendments are utterly irrelevant to Europeans, for example.

They are utterly relevant not only in history, and how they affect those you may interact with, but also -- as is occurring here -- in the discussion of what rights one should (or shouldn't) have, by pointing out what rights were deemed worthy of enshrining in the highest laws of one of the largest countries of this world.

They may not be law in Europe, but that's a far cry from being irrelevant.

Jeez dude. Stop oppressing Europeans by discussing speech rights.

Everyone has right to their personal opinion. Not everyone has right to professional opinion.

If these people were humble and would admit that this is just software for them to learn about cryptography. They would receive help and support.

What they are doing is promoting cryptocat as maintained secure system.

No one's saying they aren't earnest, people are saying they aren't competent.

The complaints aren't posh "we disapprove" rants, they are legislate concerns. Imagine a Web server that didn't understand the Http from IE. You'd call them incompetent.

Because people's lives could/are at stake.

Learning to enjoy & build crypto? Awesome. Trying to improve your product? Awesome. Promoting your product as secure when the security experts say otherwise? Not awesome.