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Firefox Send: Private, Encrypted File Sharing

send.firefox.com

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Re: Firefox Send: Private, Encrypted File Sharing

#221

Post by giaour »

zeveb wrote: post #203
giaour wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true; you're trusting Mozilla to deliver secure code. You'd be placing a similar amount of trust in Mozilla by using Firefox, since browsers automatically update themselves these days. What WebCrypto guarantees is that it is truly Mozilla's code that you're trusting, since the WebCrypto APIs are only available in a secure context (HTTPS or localhost).

> You'd be placing a similar amount of trust in Mozilla by using Firefox, since browsers automatically update themselves these days. No, because I use the Debian Firefox, which means that I'm trusting the Debian Mozilla team. I feel much better about that than about directly trusting Mozilla themselves. I don't trust auto-updates.

That's a very different position than the one you staked out above. It's not browser-based crypto you have a problem with, its crypto performed by an application whose patching is done outside of your control.

That's reasonably for a technically savvy user, but the vast majority of users do not use Debian. They use Windows or OSX and rely on trusted corporations like Apple, MSFT, Google, and Mozilla to keep their systems patched.

Re: Firefox Send: Private, Encrypted File Sharing

#222

Post by intherdfield »

hypervis0r wrote: post #202
intherdfield wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> one has to trust Mozilla not to do that. > > Exactly. One has to trust Mozilla every time one visits > the page. They could easily configure it to be malicious > one time out of a million (say); what are the odds that > they would be caught? Bear in mind they also make the web browser.

Sure, but that's open source and you can disable automatic updates, meaning they can't change the code whenever they feel like doing so. And if they do, the code will be kept in the source code control history, and will eventually be caught. It's wildly different from a JS file that's loaded every time you visit the website.

It's pretty close to being the same thing. You're downloading Firefox at some point and not verifying the binaries you get match the source.

Unless Firefox provides fully reproducible builds on your platform from an open source compiler, you have no guarantee that the binary you have is built from the public source code. You have to trust Mozilla.

Without reproducible builds, compiling the source yourself would be the way to go.

Anyway, I agree that it should be clear that this file sharing service, while convenient, essentially requires you to trust Mozilla with your data. The claim "Mozilla does not have the ability to access the content of your encrypted file..." is fragile.

Re: Firefox Send: Private, Encrypted File Sharing

#223

Post by joeframbach »

mplewis wrote: post #194
fefe23 wrote: post #193

Why do the Mozilla people keep doing this sort of thing? Aren't they supposed to be making a good browser? I remember them telling me they are now going back to their core competences. I think it was after Firefox OS failed. Not trying to piss on anyone's parade here, just wondering how this kind of thing keeps happening. I was wondering the same thing when Mozilla added Pocket and now Cliqz to Firefox. What is the r…

The engineers on the product are listed as two interns. There are eight people on it total, and I bet most of them aren't working on it full time. This hardly seems like a massive waste of resources. https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/send

What you're telling me is that I'll see this at the top of HN in another year as the vector of some major security breach.

Re: Firefox Send: Private, Encrypted File Sharing

#224

Post by duncan_bayne »

actionscripted wrote: post #217
potch wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps peruse this: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ Firefox is Mozilla's flagship, and the largest by far way in which we achieve our mission, but our goal is a healthy and open internet. Additionally, this is a great way to determine whether something like this would work well as an in-browser feature, and we've built it in such a way that it works in more browsers than just Firefox on day one.

> ...and we've built it in such a way that it works in more browsers than just Firefox on day one. Sure wish other browser vendors would consider other browsers when releasing their products.

Google won't because the browser isn't their product. Your data and attention are their product, which they acquire in exchange for a free browser.

Re: Firefox Send: Private, Encrypted File Sharing

#225

Post by nneonneo »

The last time this was posted I hacked up a quick and dirty Python client for Send: https://github.com/nneonneo/ffsend. I just updated it for recent Send changes, which streamlined the crypto and removed some redundancy.

Firefox’s JS client requires the whole file be in memory in order to perform the encryption, and has to decrypt the whole file in memory in order to download it. My client doesn’t have that limitation so it could theoretically upload much larger files (subject only to the server’s upload limit).

Re: Firefox Send: Private, Encrypted File Sharing

#227

Post by cyphar »

codebolt wrote: post #182
jhasse wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending the file over an end to end encrypted chat app.

Even then, you are trusting the app to do what it says it's going to do. The only way I feel 100% safe is encrypting the file manually before sending (through whatever platform), and sharing the key through some other medium (preferably word of mouth). As a Windows user I mostly use 7-zip for this purpose, or the encryption plugin in Notepad++ for text.

If the app is free software it can be audited. The problem with web-based crypto is that you're downloading a new program every page refresh and executing it immediately. If you're worried about a free software app not encrypting things properly, I'd be worried about the tools you use manually doing the right thing as well.

While I agree that doing it manually is the only reliable way if you're going to send it over an insecure channel, if the channel is secure then it's much easier for an end-user to just send it in the app.

Re: Firefox Send: Private, Encrypted File Sharing

#228

Post by cyphar »

damnyou wrote: post #198
zeveb wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it is still a considerable improvement. When it's secure, it's an improvement; if Mozilla, a Mozilla employee or a government which can compel Mozilla employees chooses to make it insecure, then it's worse than insecure. At least with something like Dropbox users (should) know that they are insecure and should not transmit sensitive files. > If you have a better solution in mind for the average user crowd, feel…

And re-check them after every update? And trust that Mozilla won't randomly distribute a backdoor to 1/n of users? The means you're suggesting aren't possible to implement for most people today. If you care about real-world impact I would recommend thinking of other strategies.

Reproducible builds effectively solve this problem, by making it possible to actually verify that you got the same binary (from the same source) as everyone else. Not to mention that if you're on Linux, distributions build Firefox themselves and so attacks against users need to be far larger in scale for 1/n attacks.

Re: Firefox Send: Private, Encrypted File Sharing

#229

Post by cyphar »

intherdfield wrote: post #222
hypervis0r wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that's open source and you can disable automatic updates, meaning they can't change the code whenever they feel like doing so. And if they do, the code will be kept in the source code control history, and will eventually be caught. It's wildly different from a JS file that's loaded every time you visit the website.

It's pretty close to being the same thing. You're downloading Firefox at some point and not verifying the binaries you get match the source. Unless Firefox provides fully reproducible builds on your platform from an open source compiler, you have no guarantee that the binary you have is built from the public source code. You have to trust Mozilla. Without reproducible builds, compiling the source yourself would be th…

If you are running on Linux, then Firefox is built by your distribution. So attacks like that are much harder to accomplish, because the distribution of software like Firefox is (for lack of a better word) distributed. I'm not going to get into all of the techniques that distributions use to make these things safer, the crux of the point is that you should always use distribution packages because we generally have much better release engineering than upstream (as we've been doing it for longer).

Re: Firefox Send: Private, Encrypted File Sharing

#230

Post by Spivak »

joeframbach wrote: post #223
mplewis wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The engineers on the product are listed as two interns. There are eight people on it total, and I bet most of them aren't working on it full time. This hardly seems like a massive waste of resources. https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/send

What you're telling me is that I'll see this at the top of HN in another year as the vector of some major security breach.

That would require people actually using it. /zing
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