Crowd steps up to fund 'NSA-proof' app
stream.aljazeera.com
stream.aljazeera.com
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
I propose it as an option, not a default.
[1] - http://threema.ch/en/
If anyone has room to make an informed comment here, it's Moxie...
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/ Looks great and I'll be trying it out when it comes to iOS. Thanks for helping people stay secure.
The NSA has had several 10s of $B a year, every year, basically since World War II. This is far greater than the entire public data security sector.
By now they likely have sophisticated internal tools for reversing and analysis. I doubt that it would take long at all for them to develop an exploit for an buggy amateur crypto app. They probably have plenty of new hires and contractors looking for trivial projects to practice on.
Don't get into a war of resource attrition with the most well-funded military on the planet.
Wars of attrition seem to have worked very well for a lot of people opposed to the best equipped military on the planet. Actually I think asymmetric warfare is a great analogy here; it's far harder to defeat a war amongst the people than to defeat a standing army, and part of what makes it difficult is there is no central point to attack, no clear lines of control, and no organisation(s) which you can shut down.
Re a buggy amateur crypto app, I'm sure some of them will be buggy, and some of them will be hard to break or use existing crypto which is hard to break. It's a tough subject and not one I'd like to tackle, but I absolutely don't object to others trying, because the alternative is for us to use products from large companies who we have seen will do whatever the US government asks them and call it legal.
Your attitude seems to be that we should just roll over and let the NSA/GCHQ/etc take whatever they want. I disagree.
This is basically the ignorant old "NSA has so much data they won't know what to do with it" argument in a slightly different form.
My attitude is that a handful of secure apps is infinitely better than a plethora of bad ones. I'm pretty sure the NSA would prefer the latter.
I was thinking of Afghanistan (21stC, 19thC), but Vietnam would serve. It was your analogy, and the only valid comparison is tactical, not concrete.
I'm not supporting this particular app and wouldn't use it myself (I just use GPG on trust), but do think it's important we have a lot of people trying to work in this space, if only to have sufficient choice to prevent the field narrowing. The worst possible outcome from my point of view is to have just a few apps worldwide for crypto, not just for technical reasons but for political ones.
My attitude is that a handful of secure apps is infinitely better than a plethora of bad ones. I'm pretty sure the NSA would prefer the latter.
I'm not sure that's really the choice we have (a few secure apps OR lots of insecure ones, I'd have an AND in there and some grey area between secure and insecure), and how many crypto apps is too many? 200? 20? 10? 1?
Given the evidence from the PRISM program, which relies on tech infrastructure being localised in a few prominent US companies to give the NSA easy access which they have found very useful, I disagree about a handful of apps being the worst outcome for the NSA. Ultimately the security of cryptography is also dependent on things outside the cryptographers' control (politics, laws, corporate policies in a specific country), and I'd rather have too many cryptographers than too few in the world. Crappy amateur apps, as you put it, is part of that because some of those people might then learn why and how their apps are insecure and make better ones.
Yes, I agree with that. As long as we aren't encouraging people to actually use experimental learning projects for critical stuff, or thinking that a diversity of half-baked crypto apps is anything but a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese for the NSA.
Now you know why for tha last 18 years it was "illegal" to photograph soldiers' coffins. The ban was lifted some time ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/world/americas/27iht-photo...
> Your attitude seems to be that we should just roll over and let the NSA/GCHQ/etc take whatever they want. I disagree.
That's not at all what is being said. Many good cryptography products are open source. They have companies behind them because crypto is expensive - you need programmers and researchers and attackers and people to respond to security advisories.
"Don't use crappy kludgey crypto for serious uses; use established products instead" is not at all "Roll over and let GCHQ / NSA do what they want".
I don't think there's any harm in pursuing this as long as expectations are realistic.
I'm really interested in seeing one of the recently peer-reviewed secure, anonymous DHT e-mail systems (such as [1]) brought to life beyond an academic paper. I think such systems are pretty promising (i2pbote is similar).
1. http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2668
EDIT: It occurs to me that I don't know enough about i2pbote to confidently call it "alpha" or "beta". So on retrospect, I'll just call it relatively new. But both i2pbote and bitmessage are definitely worth keeping an eye on.
https://torrentfreak.com/dotcoms-mega-debuts-spy-proof-messa...
I mostly agree. I'm not so keen on the idea of some broken programs being around. Look at the number of people who install spyware browser toolbars or purple monkeys or etc.
But if people are going to do anything creating front ends for existing software, or creating much better easier documentation for existing software would be good.
> So I think that security is a graded scale, not binary,
This is sort of true. People need to risk assess. If they just want to protect their angsty poetry they don't need to do as much work as they would if they were protecting a stash of images of child sexual abuse.
> 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.
The message isn't "avoid all crypto all the time", but "don't kludge together some crypto project and push it into production".
I think we can all agree on that, however because all the big companies who hire experts and provide cryptography services, like Microsoft, Blackberry, Apple and Google, seem willing to give back doors to intelligence services in many countries and undermine the point of using cryptography, there are not many open choices left. I wouldn't really trust a project like the one linked, and see why people have reservations about it. Which projects would you recommend, as I'm genuinely interested? I use GPG for my own limited use, but would love to see a project for end to end encryption for email for example which also handles plain emails. The trick is in getting other people to use it, and that's all in the interface I think, not the cryptography.
I do think (as a sometime user of cryptography for mundane uses) it's worth having other options, and that will mean quite a few partially broken offerings as it's apparently a very subtle and complex topic and very easy to get wrong - I don't see any way round that if use becomes widespread - even the users will undermine it by mistake by not protecting keys etc. However without widespread adoption and easier interfaces for open cryptography, we won't have any choices but very secure encryption which is pre-signed with an NSA_KEY or otherwise backdoored for the NSA's convenience.
(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)
https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/wiki/Protocol
https://github.com/WhisperSystems/RedPhone/wiki/Encryption-P...
What else would you suggest?
Disclosure: I am the original author of ChatSecure, the only open source OTR+XMPP app for iOS devices.
Souce: https://twitter.com/brokep/status/354608029242626048
Edit: But they will still control the server. (It's audited by third parties, but... yeah)
> Distributing to other servers makes it impossible to give any guarantees about the security.
Not sure what they're referring to.
I hope this isn't another Jabber/OTR implementation because those would be full of metadata the NSA wants in order to identify social networks. Once identified, and if they look interesting enough they want to listen in, they would then go to town on your device, car, or home with surveillance equip to read your screen as you type, or just sneak inside the project's servers using nginx shell exploits or linux/bsd exploits none of us know about yet to inject code into the apk for download which will still pass signature tests. http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/512362/proof-of-concep...
Another problem is most devices are carrier built so can't be trusted not to have a new CarrierIQ-like rootkit, and they can just send an OTA update that can basically do whatever it is they want it to do including recording the screen whenever this app get's turned on. Maybe these carriers leave their build keys lying around and the NSA gets a hold of them and sends you their own OTA update. Or maybe their agents volunteer to work on this project and sabotage it like the NIST Special Publication 800-90 that recommended an inferior deterministic random bit generator that researchers assumed were deliberately made standard so a federal skeleton key could determine the random numbers and unlock the encryption.
The best NSA proof cell accessory is thermite to melt your phone so you stop using it to communicate stuff the NSA might want to find out. If you're not a terrorist, Snowden, or Assange then you can use Gibberbot only with a .onion jabber server because of SSL problems, and even then your device is still wide open, and Tor sacrifices traffic analysis timing prevention for usability so technically still vuln to metadata analysis by gigantic spy agencies like the NSA
the best way to keep anything secure as it relates to your phone is to not use it. in fact, keep your phone well away from where you work and have important conversations. there is a reason certain ppl are not allowed to bring their cellphones to work: it's because they're not even remotely secure.
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/10/2/what-happened-to-the-f...
It's a detailed look at the failure of Diaspora, the secure, privacy-preserving app that raised $200K during the height of Facebook privacy concerns, but fell apart, with the founder eventually committing suicide.
I bring it up not because I think hemlis is doomed to the same fate, but precisely because the differences between what the OP aims to achieve compared to Diaspora makes it much more likely to succeed...if it's just a messaging app, rather than a social network that has certain infrastructure challenges, then it should definitely be doable (it goes without saying that the Pirate Bay co-founder probably has a lot more experience than the Diaspora founders)
This is an incredibly narrow vision of the future. We need an interoperable network that supports a variety of encryption technologies. Users should be able to select the apps they prefer with the features they need.
Locking the social graph into a single service and a single app which like most applications will eventually have vulnerabilities is a tremendous liability.
Hemlis is founded by The Pirate Bay co-founder.
These devices and OS-s are provided by companies that are part of PRISM so they have a track record of collaboration with law enforcement.
So running secure software on them is like putting a steel lock on a mosquito net.
Heh... I don't think so!
Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) (also called complete packet inspection and Information eXtraction - IX -) is a form of computer network packet filtering that examines the data part (and possibly also the header) of a packet as it passes an inspection point, searching for protocol non-compliance, viruses, spam, intrusions, or defined criteria to decide whether the packet may pass or if it needs to be routed to a different destination, or, for the purpose of collecting statistical information. There are multiple headers for IP packets; network equipment only needs to use the first of these (the IP header) for normal operation, but use of the second header (TCP, UDP etc.) is normally considered to be shallow packet inspection (usually called Stateful Packet Inspection) despite this definition.
There are multiple ways to acquire packets for deep packet inspection. Using port mirroring (sometimes called Span Port) is a very common way, as well as optical splitter. Deep Packet Inspection (and filtering) enables advanced network management, user service, and security functions as well as internet data mining, eavesdropping, and internet censorship. Although DPI technology has been used for Internet management for many years, some advocates of net neutrality fear that the technology may be used anticompetitively or to reduce the openness of the Internet.
DPI is currently being used by the enterprise, service providers, and governments in a wide range of applications.
http://www.adax.com/products/dpi.html
http://www.infonetics.com/pr/2013/2H12-Service-Provider-DPI-...
With DPI encrypted comms can be routed to storage, from there the encrypted data can be sent to the supercomputers for further analysis. Just what can, and can not, be cracked is open to conjecture, as I don't really know the specific capabilities of the supercomputers in use by the alphabet gang. However, with the rapid decline of storage prices it would be safe to assume that what cannot be cracked today, may be broken in the not too distant future.
I'm wondering if there actually is any currently known encryption which cannot be broken in the unforeseeable future...
Whichever way it is, I wish this venture luck and success.
This would stop FRA since they are not allowed to look at domestic traffic, only traffic crossing the border.