The government has progressed from banning encryption to trying to subvert it :/
Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption
51–60 of 220 posts
Re: Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption
#52Re: Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption
#53Assuming this isn't just PR, in some ways this is scary and disheartening. But my first reaction was "Cool, our government really cares, is creative and has the necessary power to get things done." For those of you who've worked with government, you've seen how insanely difficult the procurement process is. Being as specific as needing to get competitive bids for toilet paper purchases, etc. So the fact that they cou…
> LetsEncrypt
Let's Encrypt is CA and tools and mostly by 3rd parties.
Centralized CA system is imperfect, but certainly can't have "backdoor" in it especially now when Certificate Transparency is heavily enforced.
Re: Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption
#54Read the replies from all the serious crypto security people on twitter and you will see the overwhelming consensus is that the FSB/Spetssviaz and FBI/NSA probably love Telegram for its roll-your-own-crypto and server mediated group chats. One also has to wonder if the FBI consider the Telegram team to be essentially undeclared Russian agents, and hence fair game.
That's why the UK is trying to ban Telegram because they can't seem to decrypt the secure chats of British and other terrorists...
I know they wouldn't tell us if they would have cracked telegram, but there's no reason to believe they have... They would find all of the homegrown terrorists so fast if they could (there are many sources confirming most of ISIS chats are over secure telegram chats)
Re: Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption
#55Re: Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption
#56"a few months later i was offered an interview for a position at the fbi office for cyber-warfare in nyc who as well offered to fix my immigration status" and, "before going to monterey and while exploring the beauty of san francisco i was contacted once by a us navy intelligence officer who seemingly unintentionally appeared next to me at the bar" http://mickey.lucifier.net/b4ckd00r.html
Would you mind clarifying what your quotes and the linked wall of text have to do with the story?
Seems to be a similar story by a security guy who wrote crypto code for OpenBSD. The larger quote:
> about the same time at the bazaar show in nyc i was contacted by a representative of us-ins and a ukrainian millitary attache at un. both investigating my involvement with openbsd. a few months later i was offered an interview for a position at the fbi office for cyber-warfare in nyc who as well offered to fix my immigration status (or none thereof at the time ;) with a greencard. nonetheless for the lack of credibility from the future employer i refused to talk to them as for me deportation did not sound like an acceptable worst-case scenario.
> before going to monterey and while exploring the beauty of san francisco i was contacted once by a us navy intelligence officer who seemingly unintentionally appeared next to me at the bar. later on my way back during a short stay in chicago also randomly appearing fbi agent. fellow was ordering food and beer for me and just like his navy pal gave me a warning to keep my mouth shut!
He was a foreign national visiting the US who probably got targeted by various agencies after attending some security conferences.
Re: Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption
#57Assuming this isn't just PR, in some ways this is scary and disheartening. But my first reaction was "Cool, our government really cares, is creative and has the necessary power to get things done." For those of you who've worked with government, you've seen how insanely difficult the procurement process is. Being as specific as needing to get competitive bids for toilet paper purchases, etc. So the fact that they cou…
"Do we know that [...] Cisco VPN, Juniper, etc don't have backdoors?"
Wasn't it published in NSA leaks that Cisco and Juniper do/did have backdoors?
We can trust particular crypto algorithms, but I'd bet money that for all complex, popular software there are not only vulnerabilities found by various agencies, but also vulnerabilities intentionally inserted there.
Looking back at known historical intelligence operations from the cold war, it'd be ridiculous to assume that noone has tried and succeeded to get some technician (or manager) to insert some backdoors for them. Compared to other intelligence activities, the required effort for that is so small and the benefit so large, that I'd assume that multiple nationstates have inserted their own backdoors in various key components of global infrastructure.
Re: Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption
#58>"It would be naive to think you can run an independent/secure cryptoapp based in the US." This seems to be a shot at WhatsApp and Signal, implying that they have loopholes that allow the FBI to snoop in. I'm not sure how true that is. This might be an attempt to deflect from the fact that Telegram uses a home-baked encryption protocol which might be insecure, while WhatsApp uses the OWS protocol.
If I'm not mistaken Telegram has already been proven insecure once in the past. WhatsApp is a zuck property now, you can consider it insecure.
> WhatsApp is a zuck property now, you can consider it insecure.
Another day on HN...
Re: Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A Russian Russophobia seems to be the only acceptable form of Xenophobia these days. And a wildly popular one, at that.
Is it bad to be afraid when there is reason to be?
> Is it bad to be afraid when there is reason to be?
We also have a reason to connect "American company" with "NSA Spy"... and it's probably not really true for all US companies is it? :)
It's kind of ironic that Telegram is being attacked for being Russian by people coming from US of all places.
Re: Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bingo. The CEO of Telegram likes to spread conspiracy theories that are good for business. In a recent tweet he claimed that Signal is "funded by the US government", [1] citing a ridiculous hit piece on OWS and Moxie. [2] [1] https://twitter.com/durov/status/872891017418113024 [2] https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/government-backed-privac...
Even wikipedia say it's founded by the governement ... As of October 2016, the project has received an unknown amount of donations from individual sponsors via the Freedom of the Press Foundation.[100] Open Whisper Systems has received grants from the Knight Foundation,[101] the Shuttleworth Foundation,[102] and the Open Technology Fund,[103] a U.S. government funded program that has also supported other privacy proj…
Yes, OWS received funding from the US government via the Open Technology Fund, which is organized under Radio Free Asia.
I assume that "founded" is a typo, but to be clear, there is no evidence that the US government either encouraged the creation of OWS or contributed any actual work/code to OWS.
The conspiracy-theory part here is that taking funding from the US government (any part of the US government, whether the NSA or Radio Free Asia) means that your protocols or your implementations have backdoors, even if those protocols and the source code implementing them are public and well-reviewed.