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ttybirdon IRCv3 Spec round-up

All of the chat protocols that I use are open actually, yet neither I nor you use a client that supports matrix, irc, xmpp, etc at the same time. Clients that supported multiple protocols died for a reason. These were "jack of all traded but madter of none", extremely buggy and lacking in features.

ttybirdon IRCv3 Spec round-up

Dunno about that. XMPP and Matrix seem to have solved this issue. Plus implementing TLS is much more difficult than implementing e2ee so I do not get the argument.

ttybirdon Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

I was not planning to get a paid account there anyway. And regardless I prefer gitlab (due to the ICE stuff).

ttybirdon IRCv3 Spec round-up

If that was the case then \query would not exist.

There are (were) many smaller groups that use private channels. It is also how me and my first bf and some of my friends ended up talking.

ttybirdon IRCv3 Spec round-up

The cost is that it is fragmenting the already fragmented scene of open protocols with an inferior solution. Now I will have to install a 5th chat client in order to talk with the few people that will move to it.

ttybirdon IRCv3 Spec round-up

And yet almost nobody who uses irc uses it, unlike omemo (xmpp) and olm (matrix). Its encryption also predates matrix by a decade, its dh prime is only 1.5k bits big.

ttybirdon IRCv3 Spec round-up

What does this solve that xmpp and matrix do not?

And still no e2ee, after all these years.

ttybirdon Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

Just had this happen to me with my Microsoft/Minecraft account. I had migrated my mojang account 2 days ago and today I was told that apparently they "detected some activity that violates our Microsoft Services Agreement" and locked my account. They did not explain what the violation was and apparently it would magically go away if I verified my phone number (which they did not have before).

Never doing any buissness with ms again.

ttybirdon Threema: Three Strikes, You’re Out

To be more specific, I personally estimate that it will take around 2^108 attempts on average to find one such key, which is much more difficult compared to an aes128 batch attack.

ttybirdon Moving Apollo Federation 2 to the Elastic License v2

Kuhn's post seems to be based solely on ideological arguments and seems to be mostly critisizing the company's actions rather than the license. I will personally disagree regarding the unsatisfiable obligations part. As for restrict how the program can be used for completely legitimate, legal, and ethical purpose I have also heard it about AGPL :p

ttybirdon Threema: Three Strikes, You’re Out

Still though, in order for this to work you also need the specific key of one of their peers, so at the end of the day you still need a second preimage attack. And to be honest while I consider this as a silly decision on their part the fact that it can't be used as a targeted attack makes it relatively useless. Even tor until recently used 80-bit keys (which is much, much worse than the 128 that this app uses).

You previously claimed that this will cost an average of 2^64 key generations, but this is just to find two pks that cause collisions in the 128 bit output space - two pks which most likely are not used by any of their users (which are what, around 2^20 atm?) I would be interested in an updated estimate of how long such a collision would take when keeping this in mind.

ttybirdon Threema: Three Strikes, You’re Out

Just to verify that we are on the same page. Are you claiming that given spacific x (and thus also h(x)) for a cryptographic hash function with output length n bits you can compute a y so that h(x) = h(y) in time 2^(n/2) with a reasonable probability of success without controlling the value of x? If so I would love to see a proof of concept, because I would expect the time to be 2^n/2 = 2^(n-1).

ttybirdon Threema: Three Strikes, You’re Out

instead of (3ma_id, pk) the compromised server sends Dave (3ma_id, pk') where (SHA256-128(pk) == SHA256-128(pk'))

I can't see how the server can create pk' just with a collision attack in this case if pk is not controlled by them. Looks to me like they need a 2nd preimage attack.

But maybe I am just stupid.

ttybirdon Threema: Three Strikes, You’re Out

Full disclosure is the only responsible disclosure method. I am glad that they decided to be public about it.

ttybirdon Threema: Three Strikes, You’re Out

You are correct in a very technical sense. However this is only applicable if your friend is the one that is attacking... themselves. All that a collision attack can do in this case is to get you to think that the public key that your friend generated is the same as another key that they generated. This is really a non-issue.

The only thing that matters here is 2nd preimage resistance, which still has 128 bits of security.

As for /dev/random, I only mentioned it because your advice is outdated.

Some other comments: yes, if you do not provide a password then your key won't be encrypted and anyone in possesion of your phone will be able to extract it. Seems normal to me. As for pbkdf/sha, meh, nothing can replace a good password, but sure, argon2 would be better but this seems like an extremely minor issue, kinda like complaining about how signal uses aes128 instead of 256.

ttybirdon Moving Apollo Federation 2 to the Elastic License v2

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL

It is allowed.

ttybirdon Moving Apollo Federation 2 to the Elastic License v2

I believe that they do.

This attack is unwaranted and without substance or explanation.

ttybirdon Moving Apollo Federation 2 to the Elastic License v2

SSPL is a free software license, just like AGPL but slightly stricter.

ttybirdon Moving Apollo Federation 2 to the Elastic License v2

AGPL is both capitalist and socialist at the same time, depending on the developer. "Oh, you want to use my software for a nonfree internet service? Sure! You just got to negotiate a license with me :)"

I can't see anything anticapitalist here.

ttybirdon Threema: Three Strikes, You’re Out

There are many issues with this article. First of all the fact that the hashes are truncated does not matter, collision attacks are not an issue in this case, preimage attacks are. Secondly, in recent linux kernel versions /dev/random is basically the same as urandom but better as it blocks at boot until enough entropy has been collected, although i can see this being an issue in older android devices. There is also a lot of nip-picking which is sadly common in soatok articles, but I will agree with the conclusion, there are better meesagers out there.

ttybirdon MangoDB: An open-source MongoDB alternative

Sure you can, just like the AGPL versions of mongodb. You just need to follow the terms of the license.

ttybirdon MangoDB: An open-source MongoDB alternative

I do not know about OSI but SSPL most certainly fits the FSF free software definition.