Ask HN: Any startups working to capitalize on the coming privacy boom? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any startups working to capitalize on the coming privacy boom?

24 pointshoodoof56 comments

Big opportunities are opening up for companies in a position to offer services free of government snooping. Are any startups in the community specifically oriented to this market positioning?

Any big company or non- U.S. government seems likely to ask the question "If we move our tens of thousands of users to service X or service Y (i.e. gmail or Oracle)" will our data be gathered by the U.S. government? If the answer is yes, or "maybe" then surely they'll look for "snoop free" alternatives.

Is anyone working to become the snoop free alternative?

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Is the privacy boom a foregone conclusion? The Internet has a history of overreactive paranoia when it comes to change.

Example #1: I remember a huge privacy backlash when the first social networking site opened. It was a combination of Facebook and Linkedin, yet it was more private than either of them. People were absolutely livid about the privacy implications. This site, Six Degrees, opened in 1998-fifteen years ago, and shutdown soon thereafter. However, over time, the boogeyman many feared never materialized, and people became more open about sharing online.

Example #2: Later, when the DMCA was proposed, it was claimed that it would be the death of the Internet. The DMCA has been law for more than a decade, and the Internet still lives.

So, based on past examples, I predict that people will stop caring about NSA-type programs when no harm ends up coming to them from wholesale data screening on the part of the government. Once can only be afraid of so many things at a time, and new scares will eventually pop up.

We (SpiderOak) have been working on a framework called Crypton[1] for the last few months that allows you to create cryptographically secure web apps. We're trying to get the 0.2 release and new website[2] out this week.

I'm currently the only dev on the project and we could always use more eyeballs. I'm working through a code review right now to improve the existing features, but I'm also half way done implementing shared containers and realtime public key messaging. The idea is that you don't new to understand the crypto if you use the framework. We are in the process of getting a professional security audit.

[1] https://github.com/SpiderOak/crypton [2] https://crypton.io

What about the security of the host your system is running on?

This is obviously an issue. Users are never going to read and verify every line of code that comes over the wire, so in the end it comes down to trust and vigilant sysadmins.

i like the effort guys, but secure web apps is a tall order. the attack surface of a web app is huge and the web was just not built for client-side crypto. the dependency list for most web browsers is gigantic and attacks against even one of the deps could lead to your crypto being blown.

keep in mind that cryptocat had been audited at least once and they totally missed the completely-busted prng. i am betting you guys will do a better job than nadim et al :)

Totally agree. The idea is to provide a centralized place for the crypto work to happen, which while perhaps quixotic is arguably better than 100 developers creating potentially broken cryptosystems independently. We've stayed abreast on the cryptocat issue - we're using SJCL which uses a derivative of the Fortuna PRNG http://bitwiseshiftleft.github.io/sjcl/doc/symbols/sjcl.rand...

I don't think any service can claim to be 100% secure from NSA spying. Are we forgetting the claims that the submarine USS Jimmy Carter is used to tap into under sea fiber optic cables to intercept traffic from numerous web services and communications? Considering military technology is most likely 5 to 10 years ahead of civilian technology, we can't assume anything is secure or private any more. In computing power years, 5 years is a long time to research, test and refine hardware capable of breaking supposedly secure encryption schemes.

So while some startups might claim to be NSA snooping free, they don't control the traffic while in transit, it's that middle-layer that's free game for the NSA to tap into and store without anyone being any wiser.

Having said that I have seen tonnes of services start to capitalise on the whole NSA fiasco, namely Duck Duck Go and their billboard ads propping themselves up as a secure Google alternative. And while they might not store searches, that doesn't stop the Government from doing it...

What you describe is a simple man in the middle attack albeit executed in a very complicated manner. With public key encryption using SSL you have end to end security under two assumptions: the NSA cannot break the public key structure and that the NSA cannot fake a public certificate. The latter is resolved with public key pinning and the former is highly unlikely.

i think it's more like 10-20 years ahead, but point taken :)

Based on...?

Yeah, I didn't know the exact figure. I just knew it was quite ahead of public technology, it's quite a gap when you're talking about hardware and scary as well.

I think it's possible to build services that enable users to evade the dragnet, whether criminal or potentially governmental.

If either of those communities is targeting you in particular, it's much harder. How many people use universal 2FA? How many do it from their phones, which are potentially vulnerable? If not using 2FA, how many have typed passwords in front of security cameras?

And if you are targeted, as someone else pointed out, rubber hose decryption is always possible. The thing that is having people feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis (credits to Tom Lehrer) is the concern about the scope of information capture and the security of the systems and people that have access to that information, and I think one can build sound services to help address that level of privacy.

While there may be more opportunity in focusing specifically on privacy, our startup, Gliph, has explored this space quite a bit. We built Cloaked Email [0], which provides privacy over email. We also built a novel system for connecting with people without revealing personal information. [1]

Focusing specifically on data privacy, we currently provide a robust cross-platform secure messaging tool that allows users to turn off password reset.

Another startup to look at is Abine, though their solutions are not focused on encryption.

I believe that all startups will need to take privacy into account and wrote so much in a guest blog entry for TRUSTe titled "Make Privacy a Strategic Asset for your Startup." [2]

[0] http://lifehacker.com/5935180/gliph-creates-disposable-email...

[1] http://blog.gli.ph/2012/05/31/introducing-gliph-app-version-...

[2] http://www.truste.com/blog/2012/06/06/guest-blog-make-privac...

Happy Birthday, hoodoof - it already exists:

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

Actually I just reread the title. We've been doing this since 2001, so we're not a startup.

Never mind.

Doesn't this beg the question about larger issues, e.g. NSA man-in-the-middle attacks? I think rsync.net's warrant canary is top-notch and a leading example of a good privacy / transparency policy put into practice, but it's just one piece of a much larger set of strategies, no?

Anyone presenting a silver bullet, much less circumstances where trust of another entity is required, is somewhat dubious.

I think answers to said larger strategies are largely missing and the OP's question is probably speaking to these as of yet outstanding issues.

Well, a deeper strategy would be to avoid a suspect technology (SSL, PKI in general) and rely on something both simpler and (we think) more secure: SSH.

Unless your system is rooted, or the NSA is building backdoors into all operating systems, you have good assurance about the safety of your SSH connection.

So, setting aside our firm for a moment, the general case would be a rational endpoint that you control (maybe us, maybe S3, whatever), a secure channel (SSH) and good encryption tools (duplicity, git-annex[1], hashbackup, truecrypt).

So while I was being flip in my original response to the OP, I am now seriously proposing that this all already exists and can be procured from many different providers - a lot of whom can and should be considered "nsa friendly" or even outright hostile.

[1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/encryption/

It's fairly easy isn't it to get access to the hard disk of a hosted machine?

SmartSignin (https://smartsignin.com)is a young startup and has been focusing on Privacy and security since its inception. Most of the security conscious people won't trust any Single Sign-On application as they have single point of failures but with SmartSignin there is no single point of failure. We are so sure about our technology that we even guarantee you 100% privacy and security (literally!!).

How we do it? Firstly, we follow client side encryption. Secondly, we don't store anything in plain text on our server, everything is encrypted (actually we hardly store anything). Thirdly, with the help of our patent pending SmartKey technology we are able to manage encryption keys so effectively that even if a hacker gets into our server he will only find junk and useless data which he won't be able to use.

We have something apart from password called cryptphrase which is required to login and it helps in generating the private key of the user to decrypt his data. As only user knows the cryptphrase no one apart from the user can see his data thus giving him complete privacy. Nobody not even NSA or people at SmartSignin can see the critical information of users. And if you think we are bluffing check the following post: http://blog.smartsignin.com/how-to-troll-nsa-and-take-comple...

It might look cocky if we say we are hackproof but theoretically we are.

Check us out. :)

It's not the U.S. Government you really have to worry about. It's Transnational corporations. You pass a law saying that the U.S. Government can't do the NSA firehouse drinking, it stops.

To stop a corporation you have to consider it's relationship with other companies. Can it get the same info by having a subsidiary or partner elsewhere? So then you ban it from receiving such information in the US. So it moves outside the US, and still does it.

And all the time that their vast databases are generating revenue they have a firehouse. Not of data, but of money for lobbyists, campaign contributions, think tanks, advisers to NGOs and international trade groups, and so on.

And it's not enough for you to say no, even if all the above is true. Your friends want to post a pic of you to facebook. Metadata about everyone you know is also metadata about your interactions with them.

Or heck, maybe you want to say no, but you can't. Your company says you have to friend them as part of your contract.

And I am sure that isn't all the scenarios.

Protection from corporations is where the privacy boom is going to be. Privacy will be something you have to afford. There will be free, targeted ad supported services, perhaps even locked down proprietary devices, and they will be lauded for how they help the poor get online.

Oh and once that data is out there, saying it's anonymous but being about to identify you from your browser profile or whatever, it's never going to be deleted.

A "snoop free alternative" demands a transparent implementation that can be verified. Otherwise, how can we trust the claims of being "snoop free"?

The extent that we can verify a system is the extent to which we can trust it.

This makes me think that free/open source software solutions are going to become an integral piece of whatever solution such companies are attempting to offer.

Going a bit further on the idea of verification, I'm curious why there aren't any organizations or companies I'm aware of which are dedicated to providing this sort of verification of open source systems out in the wild. Is it just that most of the talent for this capability is sequestered into the infosec consulting market, for example, or does it have to do with the difficulty of actually verifying said systems? Are all of these entities instead focusing on the offensive and just selling off 0day exploits?

Finding the problems with FOSS (or really any body of closed or open source or object code) usually requires at least challenging assumptions (not "oh yeah I sort of see what's going on" but digging in) or real creativity.

The thing that seems to drive that is profit or geek-respect motive, so the folks doing said verification would need to be probably not your average bear doing a job or even person pretty interested but multitasking.

I think it'd be hard to find and manage such a work and/or volunteer force at scale well enough to really think that a creative and hard-core security review had been accomplished.

Well I can't say for sure about anything strictly US based, but up here in Canada I happen to know of one effort that is underway to move large corporate clients to a more private setup.

Apologies for being cryptic, but I can't say much more than that. I can say it has big backing, and is designed to take advantage of the fact that Canada's privacy laws haven't quite degraded to where we're in a situation like the US. Not quite yet. The hope is that by doing things somewhat more 'right' now--ahead of the legal curve--down the road clients may not end up in as tight a situation as they are in the US legal framework.

But, yes, people are working on it.

i would not count on the canadian government not running a system that is substantially similar to the usg. intelligence services often aren't concerned with laws, so expecting legal protection matters is a very much misguided path.

Sorry for the delay. I agree. If a powerful government wants to get something, it generally will get it. However, I think there are a couple of small differences here:

1. This venture is backed by a private fibre network. This means that all (most) of the traffic for these large clients will still be very accessible nationwide, but will not be subject to internet backbone taps (within Canada or otherwise).

2. Canada's legal system is still a ways away from the US, although Harper is trying his damnedest to change that. To my knowledge, it's still significantly harder to obtain legal wiretaps, especially blanket wire taps, than it is in the US. Naturally, legals systems can change, but for now people are trying to work within the system and stay ahead of the curve.

3. Again, a private network. This means that even in the eventuality that intelligence services were doing illegal surveillance, it's a bit harder for them to access the network without the companies and their clients knowing.

That said, if Canada keeps going in the direction it is going, it probably won't matter. I'm just mentioning that people are indeed trying something in this space. Like all ventures, they are by no means guaranteed success.

A friend of mine told me about Unsene: https://unsene.com/

They are a chat service that does in-browser encryption of messages.

They have an Indiegogo project: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/unsene-secure-and-private-...

(I am NOT affiliated with the project, but have played with it and heard about it from a friend who knows some of the people working there.)

Unsene is comical.

http://unsene.com/blog/2013/06/15/is-most-encryption-broken/...

"4096-bit XAES", and 2048 bit RSA.

Thanks for asking the question and interested in the discussion, but something tells me the startup community is going to be relearning the dynamics of "regulatory risk" with this one.

Move fast.

I don't understand, can you explain?

Perhaps that any attempt to subvert snooping by the government will simply be made illegal?

Maybe the startup opportunities will now be in Europe.

Perhaps the silicon valley capital will see the scale of the opportunity and fund euro companies that can live outside the U.S regulatory domain.

Don't think that Europe is so much better, Tempora is bigger and more powerfull then Prism and the germans have a hacker paragraph* for example.

* https://www.fbi.h-da.de/fileadmin/gruppen/FG-IT-Sicherheit/P...

Was mainly commenting that we don't how THE MAN will react. New Congress soon, new President soon enough...all could quickly change and new legislation could kill/amplify any business going after this "problem". Maybe it's systemic and ripe for disruption. Maybe Bernie Sanders will have a smackdown this week and the privacy issue is moot. We don't know what lawmakers might do = regulatory risk.

Was just suggesting investors might use that lens...if that's the route a startup takes.

Elections never truly change anything though.

Companies with hundreds of billions in cash in the bank do change things.

History time: France had some pretty onerous crypto regulations back in the 90ies. Europe can and does stupid stuff too.

Also, it remains to be seen whether people care enough about this to vote with their wallets.

The thing is, even non-US governments appear to be snooping on their people and companies (as we have learnt, following the NSA scandal), so I am sure if there is really a safe haven out there? And as someone else said, governments make laws, and can declare it illegal to prevent snooping from their secret agencies. The best you can do is use strong encryption, but even that is not 100% sure it's enough.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Kim Dotcom’s Mega yet.

https://mega.co.nz/#privacycompany

We are working on a simple end-to-end encrypted email solution with the encryption being nearly completely transparent to the user (i.e. simple enough for the average person to use). Furthermore, with our solution, if the government ordered us to help, we couldn't. Even more, if they steal your computer, plant malware, or do any number of other shady tactics they wont be able to access your email.

is there a landing page to follow?

will it work on every device out there?

> is there a landing page to follow?

Not yet. We are a couple of months away from an alpha.

> will it work on every device out there?

It currently builds for Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu but we will expand this in the future to include Andriod and iOS.

Don't under-estimate rubber hose cryptography.

I'm under no doubt whatsoever that if the NSA show up and grab all my hardware, and wave their $5 wrench menacingly, I'll give them all the keys/passphrases they ask for.

I'm "sure enough" though, that they can't read my EncFS/GPG/TrueCrypt protected data without me knowing about it. Not even the data synced to Dropbox/GoogleDrive/Jottacloud.

> I'm under no doubt whatsoever that if the NSA show up and grab all my hardware, and wave their $5 wrench menacingly, I'll give them all the keys/passphrases they ask for.

True enough, but we could also implement a duress code which would wipe data of your choosing and unlock the rest. There has also been some research into learned passwords (passwords which you dont consciously know, but rather exist in a mannerism of yours. e.g. the path your eyes take when trying to read some lines of code). That aside, no solution today protects against this including your truecrypt partition.

> I'm "sure enough" though, that they can't read my EncFS/GPG/TrueCrypt protected data without me knowing about it.

If they plant malware on your computer (without you knowing about it) would you still be so sure?

Over at @ http://curvechat.com/ we have are developing custom communication protocols using vetted cryptography practices and collaboration from http://cryptocode.com/about.html

Right now we focus on private solutions but may make the transition to more public options soon.

The real opportunity here is probably in the other direction: companies to feed the U.S. government's insatiable appetite for private data.

So perhaps all startups should include in their pricing table a "Direct feed/backdoor" option (*only available to NSA) for millions of dollars?

It's a morally bad idea, but from a business plan perspective a really good idea if anyone were to do such a thing...

Never ending demand, and practically limitless budget - sounds like the perfect customer.

Then again not such a good idea. The NSA monitors the cloud hosting that the startup's servers are hosted on so they get all the data for free anyway. :-(

At StartHQ (https://starthq.com) we've added the country and hosting company, as well as a list of alternatives, to every SaaS provider in our directory. So, while we're still hosted on Amazon in the US ourselves, we are helping users find snoop free alternatives to services they're using today.

Perhaps a set of carefully thought out assertions/documentation that suppliers are required to sign to guarantee their services are not monitored. Maybe there is a commercial opportunity in facilitating that.

For havenco.com we are thinking that a cooperating group of privacy-concerned service operators could audit each others' assertions. The specific concern is that it's really untested whether one could be compelled legally to keep updating warrant canaries. However, external auditing if it can be done without compromising the security or privacy of the systems at hand could give an extra level of certainty that the provider is trustworthy the claims that they are certifying.

For modern devops-y infrastructure deployed from repositories of code and configs, it should be doable to have some level of auditing that the infrastructure as deployed represents the desired config state.

That is how Akamai, for example, ran/runs its ESSL network - auditing that the deployed machines are per config, no local disk logging or core dumping, auditing before keys are deployed to let machines come into the system. Yes, there are also cameras and intrusion detection on the cabinets but it's really the software layer that provides the security.

And now with chef, puppet, salf, cfengine, etc it is probably possible to build something to bring this level of auditing to almost any modern web service.

A friend just told me about zenmate.io , however, i dont see their advantage over a vpn, aside that it's free for now. big drawback: you dont control it, so you have to Trust them with security..

The privacy boom won't happen, sorry. Most people have already forgotten about the NSA snooping.

But anyway, here you go: https://heml.is/

At latakoo (http://latakoo.com) we're building video codecs with built-in strong encryption, for enterprise use.

havenco.com just released a web site for its relaunch. First services (coupon codes going out starting next week) will be VPN with web proxy today and then adding a ToR-like but commercially supported option, and storage with plans that include combined storage in S3-compatible buckets as well as private LAFS clusters. Distributed hosting in a secure way to support private mail, IM, rss, discussion, and other apps is on the table after that.

We have been working on HushTunnel since SOPA.

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