I have been contemplating deleting my facebook for 6 months. I finally pulled the trigger just now. I don't trust the company at all. Too many smokes and mirrors in what they do.
There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'
291–300 of 437 posts
Re: There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
This allows WhatsApp to MITM. Whatapps can rekey both Alice and Bob, decrypt both their messages from that point onwards (incl unsent messages) and forward them re-encrypted with their real keys. The only notification might be that rekeying warning, if the users have turned it on. In this scenario even the double-checkmarks are present. This is contrary to WhatsApp's claim that even they cannot snoop. PS: I just chec…
> This allows WhatsApp to MITM. Whatapps can rekey both Alice and Bob, decrypt both their messages from that point onwards (incl unsent messages) and forward them re-encrypted with their real keys. The only notification might be that rekeying warning, if the users have turned it on. In this scenario even the double-checkmarks are present. This is contrary to WhatsApp's claim that even they cannot snoop. You've just d…
It's rather disappointing UX and something that trains users to accept key changes of their contacts that Signal doesn't support affirmations of key continuity.
If you get a new phone without having lost the old one, it would be good to have a feature where Signal on the new phone shows its public key as a QR code, you scan it with Signal on the old phone and Signal on the old phone generates a protocol message to contacts indicating legitimate key roll-over without "key changed but you don't know why" UX.
Re: There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Key changes in a messenger are totally different. They happen under normal conditions This doesn't have to be the case. If you stop coupling a key to a device and instead couple a key to a person (generating a key deterministically from a password for example), they can be changed far more rarely.
this requires humans to be able to generate and remember passwords with decent entropy
That was just an example. You could also pair the key to a person by some other method, such as storing a copy of it on a storage medium other than their phone.
Re: There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That defense, which happens to be the only defense, is turned off by default in WhatsApp. > You seem to argue they do so because it's bad UX to present such notification by default. That's - in my humble opinion - like suggesting browsers should turn off TLS chain errors by default because it's bad UX and just proceed with the connection as if nothing happened... One thing we've learned over the years is that secur…
At one of my jobs the network team uses a thing called "Forcepoint's TLS inspection" (aka Websense) (aka Raytheon). My browser happily let's that network team MITM me all day long without a peep, and logs & archives all my TLS traffic for who knows how long. The funny thing is a VM I setup from my same laptop tried to make an https:// connection and the browser outright refused, without any possible workaround until…
This is absolutely standard in the UK financial services industry, and ultimately required for compliance with financial regulators.
The alternatives are running agents on your machine that capture everything you do (which most shops I've been at do as well) and removing local administrative rights to prevent users from removing auditing software and deploying workarounds like your VM (also the norm now).
This has absolutely no bearing on the security of HTTPS/TLS as a whole, the chain of trust is working exactly as it's supposed to in this instance. It's distasteful as an end-user (and even more distasteful as one of the network engineers deploying it, wondering why it's not Information Security's job instead), but you can always quit that job and find another one (yep, that's what I did).
Re: There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That defense, which happens to be the only defense, is turned off by default in WhatsApp. > You seem to argue they do so because it's bad UX to present such notification by default. That's - in my humble opinion - like suggesting browsers should turn off TLS chain errors by default because it's bad UX and just proceed with the connection as if nothing happened... One thing we've learned over the years is that secur…
>TLS certificate errors are not something that should happen under normal circumstances. When a TLS certificate fails to validate, something is really wrong. As we've gotten better about ensuring those conditions, browsers have made it harder and harder to get past the warnings, because they're not warnings anymore -- they're error conditions. Not paying Verisign your rent? That's an "error condition". (Here of cours…
> Not paying Verisign your rent?
Would have been a fair statement a couple of years ago, but we live in a day when you can get free annual certs manually (Startssl) and free 90 day certs automatically (Letsencrypt).
Re: There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by verifiablity? If you are using a casual, inspection = verification definition then I think most would agree that it is true that open source is easier to inspect. But "verified" software often means formal mathematical verification, and that is orthogonal to if the source is open.
> But "verified" software often means formal mathematical verification, and that is orthogonal to if the source is open. I think there may be cross-talk here related to who's doing the verifying too. I think the parent is assuming "verification" would imply that a 3rd party could verify the software in question. AFAIUI it's currently nowhere near practical for a 3rd party to verify closed-source software of any non-t…
Downthread tptacek talks about how his company does verification of binary images. I assume there are limits to what is possible, but that's really the same as any verification approach.
I do agree that 'who is verifying' is a valid way of looking at it too.
Regardless, it's pretty clear that tptacek means formal verification.
Re: There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by verifiablity? If you are using a casual, inspection = verification definition then I think most would agree that it is true that open source is easier to inspect. But "verified" software often means formal mathematical verification, and that is orthogonal to if the source is open.
> But "verified" software often means formal mathematical verification, and that is orthogonal to if the source is open. I think there may be cross-talk here related to who's doing the verifying too. I think the parent is assuming "verification" would imply that a 3rd party could verify the software in question. AFAIUI it's currently nowhere near practical for a 3rd party to verify closed-source software of any non-t…
If whatsapp allows few experts or companies access to code they can always verify but the issue is centrally hosted , that is the issue not open or close. If i can build software on and host on my server that might be better
Re: There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by verifiablity? If you are using a casual, inspection = verification definition then I think most would agree that it is true that open source is easier to inspect. But "verified" software often means formal mathematical verification, and that is orthogonal to if the source is open.
> But "verified" software often means formal mathematical verification, and that is orthogonal to if the source is open. I think there may be cross-talk here related to who's doing the verifying too. I think the parent is assuming "verification" would imply that a 3rd party could verify the software in question. AFAIUI it's currently nowhere near practical for a 3rd party to verify closed-source software of any non-t…
If whatsapp allows few experts or companies access to code they can always verify but the issue is centrally hosted , that is the issue not open or close. If i can build software on and host on my server that might be better
Re: There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That defense, which happens to be the only defense, is turned off by default in WhatsApp. > You seem to argue they do so because it's bad UX to present such notification by default. That's - in my humble opinion - like suggesting browsers should turn off TLS chain errors by default because it's bad UX and just proceed with the connection as if nothing happened... One thing we've learned over the years is that secur…
> Key changes in a messenger are totally different. They happen under normal conditions This doesn't have to be the case. If you stop coupling a key to a device and instead couple a key to a person (generating a key deterministically from a password for example), they can be changed far more rarely.
Whatsapp became popular because they worked out a way to not have to have people create an account and a password, you're overestimating humans
Re: There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This allows WhatsApp to MITM. Whatapps can rekey both Alice and Bob, decrypt both their messages from that point onwards (incl unsent messages) and forward them re-encrypted with their real keys. The only notification might be that rekeying warning, if the users have turned it on. In this scenario even the double-checkmarks are present. This is contrary to WhatsApp's claim that even they cannot snoop. You've just d…
So, The problem with key notifications being off is for those users who really want to be secure, and downloaded Whatsapp because they wanted E2E, but didn't know they had to go into settings and turn it on. The problem with key notifications on-by-default is that regular users see warnings they don't understand and get warning-fatigue. So how about making a default-on notification that is understandable for all user…
they'd get that message every few weeks to month from me, as i flash a new ROM....