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Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

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Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#111

Post by EdHominem »

andrewflnr wrote: post #27
a3_nm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the fault of the people making that policy, not the fault of the people licensing the code under GPL.

Pointing the finger somewhere different doesn't change the practical reality. The only question there is how likely a GPL ban is to actually affect you (seems small to me, to be honest, but I don't know).

If your policy is the bug it doesn't help you if we don't point it out.

And, if it does affect you, get a better job. Businesses with stupid policies should fail but there's no reason for them to take you down too.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#112

Post by jjnoakes »

tptacek wrote: post #106
jjnoakes wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is "GCM may reveal more to Google than one would expect from using an E2E encryption application (like metadata, and more than one would initially assume)". The person I initially replied to was talking about Google, GCM, E2E encryption, and that metadata won't reveal anything to Google except time/date of a single message and the message size. I pointed out there may be more information there. I have no d…

That's only a meaningful answer if simple traffic behavior wasn't already revealing the same information. Was it, or wasn't it? I feel like I'm having a hard time getting a straight answer.

Does Google already have simple traffic behavior? If yes, then this information is nothing new to Google. If no, then this information may be new to Google.

Form a straight question and you'll get a straight answer.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#113

Post by jjnoakes »

pureIDEOLOGY wrote: post #101
jjnoakes wrote: post #87

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.

More worried about NSA correlating the two after getting the data from Google, but the one good thing about their centralization model probably is that with millions of users to a central server (and something you do as often as texting) this makes timing analysis extremely difficult.

I have no data to back this up, but I bet patterns would reveal much more than you would intuitively think.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#114

Post by tptacek »

jjnoakes wrote: post #112
tptacek wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only a meaningful answer if simple traffic behavior wasn't already revealing the same information. Was it, or wasn't it? I feel like I'm having a hard time getting a straight answer.

Does Google already have simple traffic behavior? If yes, then this information is nothing new to Google. If no, then this information may be new to Google. Form a straight question and you'll get a straight answer.

Again: what exactly is it that the NSA learns from the GCM messages that they can't learn from the message traffic itself?

I'm beginning to suspect the answer is "nothing", and that this whole thread is really just a superstitious allergy to GCM.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#115

Post by xg15 »

rashkov wrote: post #94
xg15 wrote: 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.

But my point is that the way end-to-end encryption is implemented currently doesn't even accomplish that: Either you trust your messenger provider not to be complicit in any surveillance or data mining activities, then plain TLS (with key-pinning) is enough to save you from being snooped - or you don't trust them, then you're not actually protected as they could push an update at any time to sidestep the encryption.

There are certain cases were current end-to-end encryption brings more security - e.g. if a provider's data center is compromised but the provider itself isn't. But those seem like edge cases to me that don't justify the attention the feature is currently getting.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#116

Post by jjnoakes »

tptacek wrote: post #114
jjnoakes wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google already have simple traffic behavior? If yes, then this information is nothing new to Google. If no, then this information may be new to Google. Form a straight question and you'll get a straight answer.

Again: what exactly is it that the NSA learns from the GCM messages that they can't learn from the message traffic itself? I'm beginning to suspect the answer is "nothing", and that this whole thread is really just a superstitious allergy to GCM.

Are you in the right thread? The discussion here is about what information Google can get from GCM messages, not what the NSA can get from GCM messages.

And even though your question is off-topic, I already answered it above.

Why would you accuse someone of being allergic to a technology when they are simply answering questions about it? If you disagree with the actual topic of discussion - that Google (not the NSA) might get more than just "message sizes and timestamps" out of an E2E-encrypted app which uses GCM messages - then have a normal conversation about it instead of bringing up the NSA repeatedly.

And if not, then stop making baseless and inflammatory accusations.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#117

Post by xg15 »

simoncion wrote: post #56
tombrossman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is your assumption that the perceived threat is a 'nation-state', not mine. Personally I'm not to worried about them and I'm more concerned with advertisers and data brokers. Let's take that brief dig into those 'malware' reports, shall we? Here's one from the Wall Street Journal[0] from last year. Some choice quotes: "Security-software maker Avast called out a trio of malicious Android apps that were, until recen…

> It is your assumption that the perceived threat is a 'nation-state'... ... That was the opening sentence of my paragraph that demonstrated that there is no such thing as "guaranteed security". If you think that there is such a thing, then you're going to be confused about many things when you think about security matters. To the rest of your comment: You need to keep things in perspective. [0] * On Windows, Mac, an…

> It is your assumption that the perceived threat is a 'nation-state'... ... That was the opening sentence of my paragraph that demonstrated that there is no such thing as "guaranteed security". If you think that there is such a thing, then you're going to be confused about many things when you think about security matters.

If we can agree that this sort of thing won't protect against nation-states (if you even wanted that), what exactly does it protect against that a plain TLS connection doesn't?

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#118

Post by simoncion »

makomk wrote: post #67
simoncion wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...it must be noted that this isn't a guarantee of security. Yes, and if a nation-state is after you , you almost certainly don't have the OPSEC discipline required to keep your computing devices secure. Security isn't binary, it's a gradient. Ever more secure devices require ever higher costs, whether they be monetary costs, lost time, or procedural complications. > A quick search of 'Google Play malware' returns…

It's also important to remember that anyone who can compromise your Google account or put legal pressure on Google can remotely install software on your device without interaction from you, and that there have been attacks in the past that have hijacked credentials in suck a way that the attacker doesn't even need to do that.

Sure, sure. It's also important to remember that there are often chips in phones that are remotely accessible and have privileged access to the memory in the device. The consumer hardware security situation is... not the best.

> ...put legal pressure on Google can remotely install software on your device...

Given their actions in the past, I expect that Google would refuse to do this. That would be a bad precedent to set, given that Google operates in some countries with rather questionable reputations in regards to civil liberties.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#119

Post by simoncion »

tombrossman wrote: post #61
simoncion wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is your assumption that the perceived threat is a 'nation-state'... ... That was the opening sentence of my paragraph that demonstrated that there is no such thing as "guaranteed security". If you think that there is such a thing, then you're going to be confused about many things when you think about security matters. To the rest of your comment: You need to keep things in perspective. [0] * On Windows, Mac, an…

At issue further up the thread was whether insisting on using Google Play to distribute Signal for security reasons was sound logic, right? Forgive me if I missed the point but I thought that's what we were debating. That's why I provided the specific example above which showed malware distributed via the Google Play store. this advanced my position that an app insisting on distribution via Google Play store exclusiv…

> At issue further up the thread was whether insisting on using Google Play to distribute Signal for security reasons was sound logic, right?

No. The assertion was that Moxie only wished to distributed on the Google Play store. I addressed this complaint. From my first comment in this sub-thread:

>> He only wants distribution via Google...

> Untrue. He only wants distribution through channels that provide the same security assurances and deployment features that Google does through the Play Store. [0][1][2]

You then went off on a tear about how the Play Store doesn't provide "guaranteed security", with the strong _implication_ that this fact means that distribution through either the Play Store or the App Store is no better than distributing through a Market that performed no malware scanning, stripped the developer-provided signature from the software they distributed, signed all software distributed in the Market with the same signing key, and (because their code signing system was automated, rather than manually run) kept that signing key online and on an Internet-accessible computer, rather than in cold storage that gets occasionally attached to an airgapped computer.

The difference in procedures is crucial.

> I have to say it isn't helping to persuade me...

Your rhetorical style strongly indicates that you're more interested in verbal sparring than transfer of information. Maybe some months or years down the road you'll go back, revisit conversations like this one, and grow to understand something new about computer security.

[0] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/127#...

[1] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/281#...

[2] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/127#...

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#120

Post by simoncion »

xg15 wrote: post #117
simoncion wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is your assumption that the perceived threat is a 'nation-state'... ... That was the opening sentence of my paragraph that demonstrated that there is no such thing as "guaranteed security". If you think that there is such a thing, then you're going to be confused about many things when you think about security matters. To the rest of your comment: You need to keep things in perspective. [0] * On Windows, Mac, an…

> It is your assumption that the perceived threat is a 'nation-state'... ... That was the opening sentence of my paragraph that demonstrated that there is no such thing as "guaranteed security". If you think that there is such a thing, then you're going to be confused about many things when you think about security matters. If we can agree that this sort of thing won't protect against nation-states (if you even wante…

You've missed the reason for that opening statement.

tombrossman said "...it must be noted that this isn't a guarantee of security." [0] (emphasis mine). I used the pretty-much-worst-case attacker in the first sentence of my opening paragraph to support the second sentence in my opening paragraph, namely:

> Security isn't binary, it's a gradient.

There is not a "guarantee of security". There are only "things that a given security strategy will protect against, and things that it won't protect against". If you want to expand the set of things that a security strategy protects against, you always need to pay the costs mentioned in the third sentence in that paragraph.

Now, to address your comment:

I'm not sure what the "this sort of thing" to which you refer in your comment is. Would you be so kind as to clarify?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673722

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