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Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

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Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not how it works. The GCM message is empty, it just wakes up your device which then fetches the actual message from the Signal servers.

You don't think Google could correlate the two? Google knows device A got messages at times X, Y, and Z, and device B got messages at times X+1, Y+2, and Z+1.5. I'd be willing to bet with some statistical analysis over time, some pretty interesting data could be mined from that raw knowledge.

Why don't they know that anyways from basic traffic analysis?

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#92
post #39
post #2

Moxie's been a huge inspiration for me in tech, i first discovered him through his blog post Career Advice: https://moxie.org/blog/career-advice/

I've read this blog post multiple times over the past few months and I wish I knew about it before I went to college. His career advice has so much clarity that I can't find elsewhere (so far). Thanks for sharing the link. I'm about to do a career switch and reading this again is certainly reassuring. He is right. We are what we do for a living. I find his work very inspirational and I hope I'll be able to personally…

If you don't mind me asking, what career are you switching from and to? I'm about to graduate but I'm not looking forward to any of my default career options. I'd be curious to hear about your experience and plans.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#93
To be honest, I don't understand what substantial benefit end-to-end encryption actually brings in an environment of (almost-)mandatory updates.

- If someone from Facebook/Telegram/Signal/etc wants to know what you're writing, they can just instruct their app (via update) to send them your key. For closed-source services, you'd theoretically have to decompile and audit each update to make sure they are not doing that.

- If they want to know what you have written in the past, they can instruct the app to send them the conversation log.

- If Google (or Apple or Microsoft, respectively) want to know what you're writing, they can instruct the OS to send them the data. (Google's "Android Backup Service" for example also backs up "third party settings and data" [1]. I don't know about the details of the backup service, but this shows to me it's quite possible that your key or conversation logs might even land accidentally on some providers' servers without them having any bad intent.)

- If (three letter agency of your choice) wants to get the data, they can just force any of the above companies via NSLs to get it for them.

- If any of the US strategic partners want to get the data, they can likely make a deal with an intelligence agency.

- Lastly, if the messenger company wants to mine or sell user data, they still have a lot of stuff that cannot be encrypted for operational reasons (such as your contact list and the phone numbers of all your contacts).

That leaves to me the only group for which "overlay encryption" brings an actual benefit political activists in a country not at all affiliated with the US - or highly knowledgeable individuals who carefully control which updates they get. Both groups are important to consider but likely had ways to protect their communication before.

To actually protect communication not just from "the government" but also from the private industry, we would at least need some independent party to vet app updates.

[1] https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/2819582?hl=en

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#94
post #93

To be honest, I don't understand what substantial benefit end-to-end encryption actually brings in an environment of (almost-)mandatory updates. - If someone from Facebook/Telegram/Signal/etc wants to know what you're writing, they can just instruct their app (via update) to send them your key. For closed-source services, you'd theoretically have to decompile and audit each update to make sure they are not doing that…

I think the assumption is that any sufficiently motivated attacker will find a way to compromise their target. What e2e encryption accomplishes is the end of dragnet surveillance of entire societies, something that Snowden has exposed in great detail already.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#95
post #93

To be honest, I don't understand what substantial benefit end-to-end encryption actually brings in an environment of (almost-)mandatory updates. - If someone from Facebook/Telegram/Signal/etc wants to know what you're writing, they can just instruct their app (via update) to send them your key. For closed-source services, you'd theoretically have to decompile and audit each update to make sure they are not doing that…

The key is in the penultimate question. If GCHQ/NSA is interested in surveilling a specific individual, you'd need a lot more than this software to communicate securely, because there are just so many vectors.

This solves dragnet surveillance, where the government could potentially just sniff all communication and use various analytical techniques to sniff out potential criminals or people they dislike.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#96
> that has garnered praise by everyone from Snowden to filmmaker Laura Poitras

The idiom "everyone from X to Y" is supposed to demonstrate breadth of support, where X and Y are very different sources, but Snowden and Poitras are most certainly extremely similar sources.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#97
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think Google could correlate the two? Google knows device A got messages at times X, Y, and Z, and device B got messages at times X+1, Y+2, and Z+1.5. I'd be willing to bet with some statistical analysis over time, some pretty interesting data could be mined from that raw knowledge.

Why don't they know that anyways from basic traffic analysis?

This topic was about GCM specifically, which, since it goes through Google servers (unlike, say, my arbitrary browsing, or the network profile of my arbitrary apps), is directly available to Google.

Speculating that Google may have access to my full network profile is a little off-topic, but yeah, if they did have that data, they could certainly do similar analysis on it.

Did anyone say they couldn't?

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're missing some information here. The supplied link says that the applications have been renamed due to legal threats. This seems completely reasonable to me. The names of the apps are trademarks and for a security product, who builds it is important to the integrity of the mark. I'm trying to remember how Android works, but I seem to recall that you need to sign the packages differently on Play and Fdroid…

> He decided not to. That's completely his right. He doesn't go into a lot of detail about why he has decided this, but it's completely up to him. He doesn't like how F-Droid uses centralized signing keys which are stored online: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/127#...

Except that they aren't. Read the responses in that thread from the actual FDroid devs.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#99

Not for people who don't want Google on their device. He only wants distribution via Google, and even went as far to demand that free/libre Play-alternative F-droid removed their build of TextSecure. See: https://fdroid.eutopia.cz/

He can only demand that they don't make builds using the same name or logo. That's his right. Who cares? Stop whining like we're supposed to care that you have to change the name of a piece of free software before you can distribute it.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#100
post #74

Not for people who don't want Google on their device. He only wants distribution via Google, and even went as far to demand that free/libre Play-alternative F-droid removed their build of TextSecure. See: https://fdroid.eutopia.cz/

This also blocks me from using TextSecure/Signal, because they require Google Play Services at run-time. I'm using a BlackBerry OS 10 device, which can run Android apps, and I even have Google Play running on it, but Google Play Services is stubbed for a large part on BB10, making some apps (such as Google Maps, Google Calendar, and Signal) impossible to use. Why a security/privacy oriented application such as signal…

They want more users. Google actually makes special deals with carriers to optimize GCM, so it's best for battery life. It depends on your carrier, but the websockets fork LibreSignal can use up to 5x the battery life. On my phone using the fork bumps battery usage from 1-2% to 2-4% (Sprint), but is totally worth it to avoid Pentagon/Alphabet (I mean Google).
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