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Comment by eyeareque | Hacker News Reader

I trust Moxie more than governments or companies, so this really makes me happy. If you've read things on his website (http://www.thoughtcrime.org) you'll know how important remaining secure from the government is to him. This is a huge step in the right direction. I'd also like to congratulate WhatsApp on their decision, I have a lot more respect for them now.

Congrats Moxie and team. You guys are doing a great thing for humanity.

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Absolutely agreed. I didn't see this one coming - WhatsApp have earned a very poor reputation for security in the past. But this is an unexpectedly very good choice, and a very solid step forward.

As closed-source, I still couldn't recommend WhatsApp above Signal/TextSecure, but this means that the squillions of WhatsApp users out there right now will hopefully get strong protection and probably won't even notice - and that's fantastic.

Makes me wonder if perhaps other clients for the TextSecure protocol are viable, maybe even possibly standardisable (although please let's not start going design-by-committee on it, don't allow any changes that haven't been security-reviewed). A desktop TextSecure client is something I would like to have right now.

Especially curious what happens if you properly plug together TextSecure, a DHT (or two), and a mixnet like Tor. (Are you listening, Project Tox?)

i really am a fan of what moxie et al are doing with textsecure. i am less of a fan of redphone, but that's another matter (zrtp, woof).

while i trust textsecure, it is hard to trust any mobile OS and mobile hardware.

Does this mean that Whatsapp users could send encrypted messages to Textsecure users and viceversa?

Someone in the article's comment thread posted Moxie's reply to that very same question: "Very unlikely".

According to moxie, that's unlikely.

Source: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/534757705466908673

It would be ideal, but let's face reality. If they stay separate, there's a chance Whatsapp, Hangouts and let's say Skype (long stretch here, especially after Microsoft worked so hard to make it wiretappable back in 2009 [1]) would all adopt this solid and secure protocol. But if they have to interop, they'd never agree to it. Google even removed XMPP support so Microsoft can't build Gtalk support into Outlook/Skype (among other reasons).

[1] - http://www.computerworld.com/article/2509604/data-privacy/mi...

Google has not removed XMPP support, although it's true that some new Hangout features have no XMPP equivalent.

Google Hangouts does not support federated communications. This means that users on XMPP-compatible networks cannot communicate with Google Hangouts users.

All you can do for now is to connect to Google Hangouts with an XMPP client, which doesn't mean much, doesn't work so well and given that Hangouts is explicit in its lack of support for XMPP, we don't know for how long this will last.

You mean like group chat? One of the key features of Hangouts?

Oh well, it's Google's loss, we've moved to Slack where I work instead.

XMPP support is alive and well. I don't know why microsoft didn't integrate it, but that's another matter (it may be argued that the google video chat never truly worked on open standards, and rather than implement a "broken" IM they just preferred to leave it out )

Anyhow, the only real reason to stay separate would be to compete with each other, with the slim chance to push the competition out of the market (at every services' users expense), and I agree how this has come to be a sad reality

Google Hangouts does not support XMPP federation, meaning the ability to connect people on Google Hangouts to people that are not on Google Hangouts.

Ironically, in May 2013 at Google I/O it was Larry Page that was expressing his dissatisfaction with the state of the industry for the lack of interoperability with messaging, lambasting Microsoft. But then just after Microsoft announced their support of XMPP in Outlook.com, Google announces Hangouts.

I guess that was provided as an excuse for dropping XMPP support. Well, welcome to the club Google, now you're part of the problem.

It's a pretty sad state of affairs: both facebook chat and google support xmpp, but neither support federation.

I just tried right now and federation is still "working". Or at least I can send messages to people on other networks, but I cannot receive them.

I wonder if Google is truly phasing it out, or if it's just an issue with the service I'm using.

This is somewhat complicated. I'm sure Moxie would agree with me that the trust and glorification of individuals in the context of cryptography is ridiculous. Open algorithms and protocols make trust obsolete. Please ignore webs-of-trust for a second — I'm talking mostly about end-to-end encryption. I'm not saying you shouldn't or can't trust people, but I'm quite happy that it's optional.

I don't mind a healthy distrust in governments either, but it's hard to ignore that WhatsApp, Apple and Google are US companies bound to US laws. In other words, while end-to-end cryptography protects you against dragnet surveillance it certainly doesn't solve any of the other, and arguably much bigger, problems we're facing.

When it comes to respect for WhatsApp I'm still undecided. A huge win for WhatsApp is that they actually have a business model, but on the other side they took a decentralised system (XMPP/Jabber) and centralised it.

Effectively what we have here is XMPP/Jabber with TextSecure on top of it instead of XMPP/Jabber with OTR on top of it, which has been around for quite some time now. Maybe that's not terribly impressive but it's great to see big companies join the privacy-by-design camp.

>Effectively what we have here is XMPP/Jabber with TextSecure on top of it instead of XMPP/Jabber with OTR on top of it, which has been around for quite some time now. Maybe that's not terribly impressive but it's great to see big companies join the privacy-by-design camp.

The TextSecure protocol, based on the Axolotl Rachet, is a significant improvement on OTR, both in terms of cryptographic capability and usability.

You think you may have misunderstood me. I never said that the TextSecure protocol itself isn't impressive.

What about Telegram?

All of that work is irrelevant unless we have an open baseband and an open SIM card.

Without that, your carrier owns you at a bit by bit level in the memory of "your" computer.

It is a good step in the right direction. I agree though, we need to fix those issues as well.

All of that work is not irrelevant.

Ok. I do go a bit overboard sometimes with the rants about closed baseband firmware.

But it needs to be stressed that these kind of things are not the magic fix for mobile phone comms that people think they are.

A lot of use cases in our current world involve state owned telecom entities and Joe-Arab-Spring-Six-Pack should not be confused into thinking this solves that problem.

I pointed this out in a comment a few days ago, but the era in handset design when basebands were unilaterally trusted is over. I believe modern Qualcomm basebands are firewalled off from the rest of the device using MMUs, they do not have the ability to do DMA and their firmware is significantly hardened using techniques like ASLR, stack canaries and even using a proprietary VLIW instruction set that is barely documented.

Handset makers and carriers all have strong financial incentives to harden the basebands against hacks because they don't want people unlocking their phones, which was often being done by exploiting bugs in basebands. Also, they need the airwaves to have integrity and mobile protocols are all based on the assumption of trusted endpoints that don't violate the rules. Now that DIY GSM base stations have become a reality, carriers face a nightmare scenario of someone running a buggy or malicoius "tower" that infects basebands of any phones that enters into range and starts them doing some kind of horrible attack against the carrier infrastructure. E.g. you can imagine an extortion attempt that works this way. It's in their best interests for their devices to behave predictably and be controlled only be themselves.

But what if the MMU is backdoored???

oh, you mean like VT-d etc on intel cpus.

what reason could you possibly have to suspect that the IOMMUs from a company named "intel" are backdoored? :)

Does someone seriously think the IOMMUs on Intel CPUs are backdoored?

this work from 2011 by IVT doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/05/following-whi...

Sure, but getting an IOMMU right on a complicated platform that didn't historically lean on IOMMUs is different than "the IOMMU is backdoored".

Why this isn't just a nit is, if you believe (say) VT-d is backdoored, a lack of IVT research projects isn't evidence of the absence of backdoors. Presumably, if the NSA is serious enough to backdoor Intel chipsets, they'll do it in a manner that a couple of independent security researchers can't black-box.

ARM TrustZone. It controls access to various hardware. Other software, including the kernel and baseband isn't supposed to be able to even observe its state. There's a base set of functions which handset vendors can add to. Of course, it has vulnerabilities too.

I haven't heard of any process hardening going on though. Do you have a source for that? I want to learn more about it.

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5618_-_en_-_...

Have carrier attacks from the baseband been seen in the wild?

By comparison, application-based encryption of messages addresses a bunch of real threats. The NSA is not the only threat; malicious wifi operators, for example.

> malicious wifi operators

Malicious GSM operators as well.

"Fake cell towers" are rampant across America and operate without warrants. Thats why the police are trying to hard [0] to protect their existence. There is a new project today announced to track all the IMSI catchers around America: https://www.indiegogo.com/p/1016404

These tend to be used to track locations of people but they can also be used to intercept SMS and mobile internet traffic.

[0] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-...

What do fake cell towers have to do with baseband firmware?

They're vectors for layer-2 attacks. The (valid) implication is that you don't have to assume Verizon is colluding with NSA to be concerned about attacks on the baseband.

Not just the NSA, but anyone with the motivation and resources to attack cell phones (e.g. organized crime).

Good point. But at the same time, a secure, bug free baseband won't save you from a fake cell tower that's intercepting and recording your text messages.

No, but it would save you from layer-2 attacks that corrupt memory and can thus read encrypted text messages.

Yes, but a secure, bug free open baseband would, since the first use cases that would be addressed is verification of towers, not blindly camping to the strongest signal, and monitoring your cipher strength.

With an open baseband you could do much more useful and sophisticated firewalling and ACL of your interaction with the cellular network.

As it stands now, you just camp to the strongest signal and do whatever it tells you - including download and run arbitrary java apps to run on your sim card (probably without your knowledge).

And isn't the message encrypted before it gets to the baseband?

The baseband has direct access to the application processor's RAM in many (most?) mobile designs.

That's... horrible... why?!

Partly because, historically (e.g. on feature phones), the GSM baseband serves as the primary processor (with real-time responsiveness requirements), with "applications" as a subordinate function. The concept of GSM being "just" a modem peripheral is a more recent development, coming more from the laptop arena; pushing that model down into phones (especially cheap phones) will take work.

Even on top of that, the concept of not trusting your peripherals is a recent one as well. Ideally, all hardware peripherals would have no more permissions than they need; for instance, no ability to DMA except to specific pre-arranged regions. In practice, most systems don't actually set up that level of security.

Is this true of say, the iPhone? It seems like a wifi iPad or iPod Touch is exactly the same as an iPhone, but without the baseband. If the baseband were a peripheral of the A8 SoC, this would seem like a trivial difference. But it seems if that's not the case, the iPad A8 would have considerable architectural differences compared to the iPhone one.

It's less true in some modern smartphones (disclaimer: not an expert on the iOS/iDevice architecture in particular), but a shocking amount of code still ends up on the baseband, and the baseband still has as much trust as the kernel. For example, the baseband processor often serves as an offloading engine for power efficiency reasons, to avoid waking up the main processor; thus, the baseband processor might have direct access to the audio hardware, so that phonecall audio doesn't need to wake up the host CPU.

@nsxwolf because surprisingly the baseband is actually the main processor in most modern designs, the application processor (your quad core snapdragon or whatever) is a slave to the baseband and receives events and data it

good luck detecting baseband attacks in the wild. i hope you've got a transceiver with you and a rainbow table for cracking the A5/1 etc on your cell link.

How would you see a baseband attack in the wild without access to the baseband? It is a circular problem. The main issue is "we just don't know," the baseband is unverifiable from a security standpoint.

Actually there are quite a few ways to detect funny business from the tower (or someone impersonating the tower):

https://opensource.srlabs.de/projects/mobile-network-assessm...

(scroll down to the IMSI catcher detection table)

- No encryption after using encryption with the same operator before

- Cell is not advertising any neighbor cells

- Receive a silent text message

    - No encryption after using encryption with the same operator before

    - Cell is not advertising any neighbor cells

How do you get this information in a regular phone?

If you have a phone with an Intel XGOLD baseband (Samsung S3 Intl version) you can read log output https://github.com/darshakframework/darshak/blob/master/READ...

German police and intel agencies sent 440,000 sms type0/stealth attacks to trace phones last year, FBI sent an OTA to a suspects internet stick to broadcast his location, and something shady is going on at airports according to Cryptophone GSMK who's radio 'firewall' goes off whenever you get near an airport. Besides that Samsung backdoor found by Replicant Mod that has access to /data and /sdcard haven't heard of other directed attacks yet.

Of course google can install whatever they want on your device if given a NSL including a modified WhatsApp that sends in plaintext straight to the police everything you type but haven't heard of that yet either.

Since Facebook makes money harvesting data wonder if WhatsApp grabs advertising keywords first then sends via textsecure layer.

I disagree.

While there is no doubt you are correct that a baseband attack is possible, it's a much, much harder task for a Telco to get control of your baseband, start poking around in it and reading your private messages via this channel. Has there been any released code that exploits this?

They easily have the technology now to read all your SMS and capture all the data you send. If you can crypt this, you're much better off from a privacy and security perspective than if you don't.

That's what's important about this announcement.

Your BIOS might be spying on your, or your hard disk, or your wifi card, your video card.

This offers good, strong protection for a lot of the attacks your data can be subject to. Not every attack, but the majority.

Release to where? Only the carriers have access to the GSM network, you can't run that code anyway.

Yes, thinking about it more that was a rather stupid thing to say.

There are targeted attacks, and there are dragnet attacks. If the NSA wants to own you specifically, I don't think you can hide.

Moves like this one, though, are fantastic at making mass surveillance much harder, and I applaud them with as many hands as I can borrow.

Or something like a Nexus 7 and then something like Portal. I (perhaps unwisely) mostly trust USB between two devices I control, and even wifi between two devices I control. If I can put the baseband shit on a USB stick plugged into Portal and then use wifi or usb to my tablet, I'm a lot happier.

That is very true and often overlooked. You get Google and SELinux enabled and security domains and such and all is good except for that fact that there is this little brick stuck on on the motherboard running proprietary code, accessing any memory on the phone and talking to the outside world.

Maybe it makes sense for non-baseband enabled devices, tablets, phones with baseband chips disabled somehow (physically).

Somewhat, but not entirely, ameliorated if one were to somehow ensure the baseband and other open components don't share RAM. This is how the Neo900 plans to attack this problem.[1]

[1] http://neo900.org/faq#privacy

Well, asop/cyanogen on a tablet w/o gsm/4g should be pretty safe. About as safe as computing gets these days... now with play services, you obviously add a backdoor to an otherwise reasonably trustworthy system...

> how important remaining secure from the government is to him

Can you provide examples? Or explain his alleged reasons? I glanced through couple of his posts and failed to see anything on that matter.

He believes in anarchy.

Where is his website?

http://www.thoughtcrime.org

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