Reading that, I still am not sure why anyone would use CryptoCat especially with things like TextSecure on the market that seem to take crypto far more seriously. The only reason I can see for that is that they have clients on more platforms, but if this is similar to the state of all of them, then what's the point?
At a previous company we had to have words with a company that performed a software audit as they failed to find two issues we'd planted to test them. (Of course, they did find several things we didn't know about.)
mandalar12 asks about "the same level of analysis on TextSecure". Since our (Least Authority's) audit and the iSEC audit are public, random people on the internet can know what that level is, without having to know or rely on Least Authority or iSEC to be non-malicious.
With enough eyes all bugs are shallow, but to whom? We need to communicate transparently to achieve this ideal.
Disclaimers: I worked on the Least Authority audit of Cryptocat; I've worked at iSEC in the past; I've met Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin and greatly respect their expertise and motivations; I also don't know if they've been infected by malicious puppetmaster aliens since I last saw them.
My own opinion is that both strong cryptographic and security engineering expertise on the part of designers and implementors, and multiple independent published security audits, are necessary to consider an app trustworthy -- but still not sufficient, given the poor state of platform security and the lack of support most current platforms (operating systems, browsers, etc.) give for isolation between apps.
Disclaimer: I worked on the Least Authority audit of Cryptocat, and in general get paid for similar auditing. I'm also designing a programming language (Noether) that is intended to facilitate security reviews.
Even with 'amazing' contributors, bugs are still there in TextSecure.
You could not have reviewed all open and closed bugs in 8 minutes ;)
Issue 1073: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/1073
Another one: Just sent an encrypted photo to someone? The photo is stored unencrypted on your phone.
Edit: group messages were also sent unencrypted, but this was fixed. https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/32
Edit2: ok, I see your point. Maybe they do crypto well as you say, but they don't seem to do software engineering well, or UI design for secure text messaging well. Sending messages unencrypted, and leaving messages unencrypted on the phone is a big fail in overall security of the app. It's meant to encrypt things, and it doesn't. That it doesn't put in tests for these things, and that it did not publish the independent security audit should cause everyone to reconsider using the TextSecure app for its stated purpose.
A crypto protocol bug is something like "TextSecure tried to implement secure file transfer, used the CTR block cipher mode, and managed to make the keystreams collide, so that passive attackers could recover file contents from encrypted streams".
The general point you made, that all applications have bugs (and thus security bugs) is valid. I'm drawing a line that you're not drawing, between design flaws in cryptosystems and random iOS/Android mistakes.
It's also true that until recently we didn't have an encrypted group chat protocol, but at no point in the past did TextSecure ever indicate that group chat was encrypted. Just the opposite.
It's important to realize that TextSecure is simultaneously a standard unencrypted SMS app as well as an encrypted chat app.
Sorry to bother, but is there any article/blog post/something to read about that?
As XMPP MUCs don't seem to have E2E encryption, mpOTR seems to be in infancy, and I'm unaware of anything else, this sounds really interesting.
I will agree with you about the UI design until the revamp in the latest release, though.