81–90 of 169 posts
For anyone interested in the design and functioning of Intel's security components there is a book freely available by one to the lead engineers here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-6572-6
It doesn't say a word about running inside SGX without the insecure developer mode... or about the use of SGX meaning they're stuck with hardware which has the highly questionable ME layer. SGX as an additive layer for things you can't make strongly private is interesting... though I wonder if it wouldn't have first made sense to implement a private intersection so that signal users wouldn't have to send numbers that…
By the way for those unconvinced that this is a serious issue just lookup this one from 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15298833
https://github.com/WhisperSystems/ContactDiscoveryService/se...
Fooled again!
In case someone from Open WhisperSystems is reading: please add stickers. Seriously, I know so many people who are on Telegram just because of its sticker system and won't consider anything without that feature. This comes up again and again in online discussions where Signal is mentioned, and it hurts to see all the care and effort the OWS team has put into providing real security rejected out of hand because of it.…
In case someone from Open WhisperSystems is reading: please do NOT add stickers and junk to your clean and pretty system. I know a lot of people that would leave the service if it turned into WeChat (including me). Stick to the fundamental engineering of privacy as you are doing, and forget the gimmicks.
Ok so that is a bit tongue in cheek but just how much of signal is OSS and how much can the community contribute (it seems that adding gif transparency would be one of those items - but really I don't "get" the requirements.
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Who are the two users in this case? How did they discover each other? From the OP: > "Very few people want to install a communication app, open the compose screen for the first time, and be met by an empty list of who they can communicate with." Signal needs to bootstrap itself automatically in order to solve this problem. Can you explain how two users doing a private set intersection of their contacts solves this bo…
The two users are two folks who wish to communicate who hold their phones back-to-back and let NFC validate who they each are. Both parties are now able to perform a private set intersection to find people whom they know in common who also use Signal, and are able to then use private set intersection with each of those people to find more. The idea is that users bootstrap via the social graph of folks they physically…
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I'm not an expert, so bear with me. Could this be thwarted by, say, having Signal add a random salt to every registering number and then advertising the hash of (number)+(random salt) as the final contact, invisible to the end user? Or would that involve Signal maintaining too much information on their users? If that's the case, I could see that being a problem.
The problem with salting the hashes is that they then become useless for contact discovery. The only way I can think of to make it work would require sharing the salt with people trying to find you, but then at that point you just share a real user identifier and short-circuit the whole process happening here.
> There are a range of options that don’t work, like using bloom filters, encrypted bloom filters, sharded bloom filters, private information retrieval, or private set intersection. He just takes as a given that private set intersection doesn't work, and in the original 2014 document[0] writes, 'There are cryptographic protocols for performing privacy-preserving set intersections, but they generally involve transmitt…
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SGX attestation involves a key burned into e-fuses on processors at manufacture; the process was designed to prevent Intel from being able to derive keys used for individual enclaves. Obviously, Intel could have a malicious manufacturing process --- but then, that's the case for any piece of merchant silicon you'd use to build any computer.
If I'm reading the documentation [1][2] correctly, you're overselling the security. Verifying an SGX attestation requires trusting not only the integrity of the per-processor secret keys, but the honesty of an Intel-provided online verification API. The API allows you to POST an attestation report to Intel's verification web service, and get back a response saying "OK" or "not OK". You can use TLS to verify that the…
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No, that's a different feature with the same name. That allows you to quickly layer graphics from a built-in set on top of existing photos, like in Snapchat. The "stickers" I'm referring to, in the Telegram/WeChat/LINE sense, are essentially custom emojis, or macros for sending one of a collection of reaction images as its own message. https://telegram.org/blog/stickers-revolution Various communities absolutely rely…
I'm not criticizing you when you say that you need stickers, but please help me understand: how do you rely on stickers to communicate? I can understand them being a nice UI/UX feature that makes the app more fun, but I cannot possibly imagine that people actually rely on stickers to communicate. Maybe you mean something different and I'm misunderstanding you?