A really nice job by iSec, though.
Always be sure of what you are doing, rely on external review and never, I repeat, _never_ overstate the security of your crypto system.
That being said, you and I both know that people are using Cryptocat in dangerous situations. And having worked on both medical imaging and secure messaging systems, I have a healthy respect for the consequences of implementation failure. As such, I feel that your disregard for these consequences in broadly releasing such broken software would displease any professional review board, and I frankly doubt you'd ever attain such a license given such a history of poor professional judgment.
In short, I take my profession damn seriously, and jokers like you are why nobody trusts software.
That's both not true, and misleading; even comparing it to applications that have had serious published flaws, this one has vulnerabilities of a number and magnitude that distinguish it.
Please make sure to read our blog post and Github discussions to see the kind of open discussion we're hoping to lead so that our software can benefit.
That being said, I suppose comments like yours are why I've been having recurring suicidal thoughts for the past two years. I don't know what else to say at this point.
I urge you to talk with somebody.
While I agree that the degree of openness your team has maintained is highly desirable, repeatedly shipping bugs which adherence to industry best practices such as "don't use fixed IVs" or "always use constant-time compares" would have avoided makes it difficult to believe that your team possesses the competence you claim as well as undermining the credibility of your communication about such issues. Thus my failure to be impressed by a post which only proposes band-aids and completely fails to apologize for the lapses in judgment which led to this state of affairs.
I don't take using this level of harshness in a public forum lightly, and I'm truly sorry to contribute to your unhappiness as a result. Please do talk to somebody, even if it's not a professional, I've found it always helps.
For example. We didn't simply "re-use fixed IVs". We know not to do that. The resulting bug was the series of a much more complicated and hard to spot issue with the re-keying mechanism. Understand you might not have the full picture here.
Simply put, I refuse the assertion that Cryptocat's team has not dealt with its software development in a competent, professional, responsible and honest fashion.
I want to discuss this further with you. I want to convince you of my point of view. Please email me at nadim@nadim.cc so I can have the opportunity to discuss with you and hopefully convince that your perspective isn't exactly right on this.
I appreciate your willingness to continue this discussion, dropped you an email.
This audit report is another fascinating read to see all the mistakes I would probably have made as well. Secure crypto is so incredibly difficult to get right...
Are you saying that it's good news because they tested something that you weren't ever going to release in that state? That's a tougher row to hoe, unless you're going to claim that your team inevitably would have found the same set of vulnerabilities that Scott, David, Alban, and Zooko's team found.
For a typical application --- yours isn't typical for any number of reasons --- prerelease or not, the state the application is in when a pentest team gets it is, from the perspective of security, the application customers would have received.