mahemm

Sounds like insufficient testing to me. This kind of deep/far reaching issue should have been crashing tests written before others would have seen it.

Assuming that there is some testing in their work (if not; there's the answer), my guess would be that it's largely sanity testing of each functionality in a vaccuum. The coaching would probably be to demonstrate more integration-style testing, possibly using whatever tests caught system-level issues that the dev has pushed in the past.

Not a legitimate complain at all--the jury is still out as to whether it will ever be possible to create a quantum computer capable of breaking current asymmetric primitives.

Why not use Signal? Better privacy guarantees and the same underlying protocol.

In case this dies: https://archive.fo/f4RHX

If that's the case then you haven't been working with good auditors.

That said, the opportunity to do this (scrub reports) is a driving decision behind many companies' choice to work with more permissive firms. If you want a rubber stamp, you can certainly get it, but if you want a true partner who will find and exploit issues you can get that too.

I have personally been a part of security audits that have found critical vulnerabilities in some of the best-known tech companies on the globe.

Just because there exists a world of auditors who function as rubber stamps does not mean we all do.

A counterpoint to this is the billion dollar success of cryptocurrencies such as IOTA and Verge that are fundamentally broken from a cryptographic point of view.

Something that scares me here--where is the awareness of emergent security errors arising from multi-threaded cryptography?

As an example, consider a multithreaded streaming crypto API which consumes a symmetrically-encrypted data stream with an HMAC at the end. If multiple threads are simultaneously decrypting this stream, then how do they synchronize and verify their respective HMACs (let alone one shared one)? Frequently, in my experience, the answer is never--they just pass results blindly to an application thread which then operates on this data. By the time some last thread has belatedly realized that the entire stream was forged,the attacker has already been able to force the application to run malicious code.

It absolutely is! Which is why I felt like it was important to bring more attention to the much lesser security stance of others in the space.

What's your quip for plaintext group chat

I worded that poorly and have edited the OP to reflect that.

I was referring to the recently re-discovered paper about group chats (e.g. https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2018/01/11/whatsapp-signal-g... paper here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/713.pdf)

Following all of the negative press Signal has gotten recently, I feel it's unethical to let a Telegram post pass without a reminder that they don't even bother to encrypt group chats, and that there is still no proof whatsoever that their protocol is secure.

Not true. In order to make sure there isn't a run on their fake currency, they need to ensure that the balance tips towards buying bitcoin rather than cashing out holdings. If the price goes too low, people will start trying to convert tethers to real money, triggering a crash.

It's mind boggling to me that anyone takes IOTA seriously anymore. The fact that it's in ternary should be enough to convince the more risk-averse technical people of the folly of its design. More optimistic techies should have been convinced when researchers showed that its hash function was trivially broken. Everyone else should've jumped ship when it was revealed that all of their "corporate partnerships" were made up to pump the coin.

It goes to show that anyone with good marketing can make a killing in the cryptocurrency world.