Talk – Smart, Private Messaging
path.com
path.com
http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/30/4286090/path-is-spamming-a...
We really need TextSecure on iOS soon to stop the proliferation of all of these silly privacy apps. There needs to be a strong cross-platform alternative.
Wickr is pretty shady about their protocol.
They also make me uneasy because they use the term "military-grade encryption" a couple times on their site. This is a pretty common snake-oil security term...so it makes me uneasy since the protocol details are nowhere to be found.
Just because they’re dealing with private social networks now doesn’t mean they can’t tap into another market, especially now when the private social network thing doesn’t seem to be working out for them.
Also, does anyone know if they're encrypted at all. In this day and age isn't that a requirement for them to be considered private?
People use multiple devices. People get new devices.
Similarly, the recipient polls the server for new messages only when online. Any messages accumulated by the server since the last sync are downloaded. That's the easy part. More interesting is the key exchange that needs to take place between sender and recipient for them to exchange messages securely. The idea being that both parties each create a public/private key pair for each other, and then use each others public key to encrypt the symmetric key that decrypts messages.
Straight-forward enough. The problem here is when you want to exchange messages with Bob, you need to know that you have the real Bob's public key, and not an imposter's key. While an in-person, meatspace exchange will give you the assurance you need, that's not always practical.
Here's a bit more detail on how you might engineer the key exchange: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needham-Schroeder_protocol
Apps like Snapchat, deleting the message as soon as it's viewed, wouldn't work when you want to apply a ton of context in the conversation. Too often I'm having a "conversation" on Snapchat but it's more like small snippets of text and a lot of me questioning what the other person said a few hours ago.
From the article, that's the part where Apple could MITM the communication, because public keys retrieved from Apple would be automatically trusted. They can just silently inject an extra public key for which they have the private key. That said, it seems like the protocol at least has forward secrecy, meaning that if they didn't inject a bad key when the message was sent, there's not much they can do later to decrypt the message (unless they have a backdoor that allows them to force your phone to send them its private key)
(And yeah I know iMessage isn't open source and so this is difficult to verify, but "Talk" isn't open either. Apple published a big PDF about how they do encryption - if this were proved to be false it would destroy all trust in Apple forever, so I believe what they say.)
Big PDF: http://images.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb1... (See page 20)
tl;dr: "Apple does not log messages or attachments, and their contents are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can access them. Apple cannot decrypt the data."
That's a funny way of spelling "we will give all your data to the NSA".
If they really cared about my privacy, then their app would encrypt the data on the way out and automatically decrypt it by the receiver, so that any information on their servers would be unreadable. Oh and their app would also be open source.
Why aren't there more desktop clients ?