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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Also: speaking in no "official" capacity whatsoever, I'd advise you to stay away from the forks of Truecrypt.

Unless something new has come to light since last I looked, the licensing situation on the TC code is weird:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/distributions/2008-Oct...

... which means there is a pretty strong disincentive for people with serious crypto and systems expertise to invest their time and energy building on it. You don't want to trust crypto platforms with built-in adverse selection problems.

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Wow those are serious concerns, thank you for linking that.

Maybe they have an email list of the original donors and can propose some multiple choice options:

1 - bug bounty

2 - attempt to hire someone at a steeply reduced rate for the audit

3 - use the money to seed a complete replacement or a clean room rewrite if possible (this is a can of worms but given the license issues seems like the only realistic way forward... might need the help of FSF or ASF or the like)

There is pretty much zero chance that the TC audit project is going to sponsor a rewrite of Truecrypt. That's a project that would cost much more than the TC project has to spend.

If only the design/architecture would be contracted to experts and the actual implementation be written by the community how expensive would that be?

The experts shouldn't write any line of code, use the community as code monkeys, only accepting pull requests and merge them in the project(basically what Linus does this days). Would that not be feasible?

So you're proposing keeping elite crypto expert(s) on the payroll for--what, years?--as they patiently wait for the community to build something that meets their standards? I'm not going to say such a person or people don't exist, but Linus is a rare sort; considering the market value of crypto experts' talents I think chances of finding someone willing to serve in such a role are rather slim.

I don't think this would work. The details of how block-level crypto work are intimately connected to a bunch of fiddley systems programming details like bootup, power saving, and memory management. It's not nearly enough just to propose a workable design for how to make a virtual hardware-encrypted disk with XTS; you need to evaluate a lot of raw code, too.

@ghostly_s

I don't see this as the roadblock. They (the experts) could bill by the hour. The most intensive period is the initial specification/design/architecture. After the burst period they just have to review the commits for security pitfalls and merge them if OK. The community could have some volunteer reviewers for triage.

I have no idea if this actually works and I also didn't heard anything like this done before, so take it with a grain of salt. That's why I asked more knowledgeable people how feasible this could be.

It just seems futile to spend the money on TC. I get the number of users of it is huge and the money was donated for this specific purpose. Users of TC should already be looking to move away from it whether there's a vulnerability or not. Even if a vulnerability is found, how is it legally patched? Is it almost better not to know?

With the money left, maybe a smart fund-raiser could get some conversations started with bigger donors who could match grants and go in a large round. The money might buy you the time of a Bruce Schneier or Richard Stallman to advise and promote the project in its infancy. And non-profit software orgs are underpaid and work on shoestring budgets already that this is real money to them.

The money was contributed for a specific purpose, and Matthew and Kenn are scrupulous about ensuring that it gets used for that purpose. They actually can't take the money and use it as a seed for a different project. It isn't a slush fund.

Can we still safely use TC 7.1a?

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