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Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

citizenlab.ca

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Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#61

Post by lutorm »

thedudeabides5 wrote: post #48
jasonv wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of it as a warning to future companies who take these kind of liberties...

I mean, isn't this stuff they can fix? Like good that the market is stressing them on their security, at $30bn they should be able to engage with that feedback and then loop. On the other hand, tried to use Skype lately? Product has barely evolved since they were bought out by MSFT. Guess google does videoconferencing too, but they know enough about us all already....

They can fix the code, but would people trust them when they say that the code is fixed? Trust needs to be earned.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#62

Post by AshamedCaptain »

Seriously, all people who are surprised about this type of news should really understand that most "successful" (as in, popular) tech/.com/SV "startups" these days are like this.

If you "waste" time on the real important stuff such as a good design, user security, or the like, you will lose over to a competitor who didn't and therefore was able to spend more time on marketing.

If you waste your time on user privacy you will be totally crushed by that competitor whose definition of "privacy" was "how much can I pester this user until he gives me access to his address book so I can spam his friends?".

I don't think this is good. I think this is very sad. But it is what it is.

I still remember the Whatsapp founders coming into the jabber mailing lists with "please let me configure my server"-type questions, for god's sake.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#63

Post by _snsh »

gen3 wrote: post #2

This is honestly the best “Zoom is bad” summery I’ve seen so far. While I certainly believe some of the Zoom hate is blown out of proportion, this article does a good job explaining to someone who isn't a security expert what the issues are. I've been getting questions about the company from family and friends, and will be forwarding this to them. Well done.

This is a great article, but as an educational provider it fails to answer one question: Why should I care?

The only concerning thing for me is, why would they lie about using AES-256 when none of my users (and I assume most of their users) would care in any way about AES-256 vs. AES-128 in ECB mode. Why would they lie?

Even after this, having my users conducting university lessons over something that might be decrypted in China is honestly not that big of an issue. I would of course prefer it if these meetings would be private from the PRCs scrutiny but at least in my situation (and I think most educational contexts) this is not really that important.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#64

Post by herodotus »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #62

Seriously, all people who are surprised about this type of news should really understand that most "successful" (as in, popular) tech/.com/SV "startups" these days are like this. If you "waste" time on the real important stuff such as a good design, user security, or the like, you will lose over to a competitor who didn't and therefore was able to spend more time on marketing. If you waste your time on user privacy y…

Agree, but I want to add something: the usability of Zoom is good, even for casual computer users. Strategically, they focussed on what they considered to be the things that would give them sales. Not saying it is good, but it certainly worked for them (at least until now).

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#65

Post by basch »

_snsh wrote: post #63
gen3 wrote: post #2

This is honestly the best “Zoom is bad” summery I’ve seen so far. While I certainly believe some of the Zoom hate is blown out of proportion, this article does a good job explaining to someone who isn't a security expert what the issues are. I've been getting questions about the company from family and friends, and will be forwarding this to them. Well done.

This is a great article, but as an educational provider it fails to answer one question: Why should I care? The only concerning thing for me is, why would they lie about using AES-256 when none of my users (and I assume most of their users) would care in any way about AES-256 vs. AES-128 in ECB mode. Why would they lie? Even after this, having my users conducting university lessons over something that might be decryp…

Because a company doing an RFP with a checklist of features is going to rank them against their competitors, and it would look bad in the spreadsheet.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#66

Post by restingrobot »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #62

Seriously, all people who are surprised about this type of news should really understand that most "successful" (as in, popular) tech/.com/SV "startups" these days are like this. If you "waste" time on the real important stuff such as a good design, user security, or the like, you will lose over to a competitor who didn't and therefore was able to spend more time on marketing. If you waste your time on user privacy y…

This is a bad point. The difference between using AES-128 and AES-256 from a code standpoint is trivial. The only explanation for this is either gross incompetence or malevolence. Personally I don't use Zoom, nor would I recommend its use for even personal conversation.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#67

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #62

Seriously, all people who are surprised about this type of news should really understand that most "successful" (as in, popular) tech/.com/SV "startups" these days are like this. If you "waste" time on the real important stuff such as a good design, user security, or the like, you will lose over to a competitor who didn't and therefore was able to spend more time on marketing. If you waste your time on user privacy y…

More generally, there is a culture of celebrating rule-breaking or even law breaking within the startup community. As long as you get away with it, and make money off it, then it's totally cool...

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#68

Post by WalterBright »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #62

Seriously, all people who are surprised about this type of news should really understand that most "successful" (as in, popular) tech/.com/SV "startups" these days are like this. If you "waste" time on the real important stuff such as a good design, user security, or the like, you will lose over to a competitor who didn't and therefore was able to spend more time on marketing. If you waste your time on user privacy y…

I more suspect it is a problem stemming from hiring people who are all new to professional programming. Avoiding these issues means hiring some older, experienced professionals.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#69

Post by api »

rzimmerman wrote: post #54
api wrote: post #41

Why can't people bother to construct a minimally secure encryption system given that there are so many good documents and code examples out there? I don't mean anything with ratcheting, forward secrecy, replay protection, nonce reuse resistance, or any other bells and whistles, just basic competent symmetric encryption without gaping holes or ridiculous bizarre design choices? It's not hard! (1) Generate 12 bytes of…

The only thing I can think if is that maybe the protocol Zoom is using precludes prepending the nonce due to the packet format. But surely there's some way to do this with packet counters and user IDs. It's possible this was an intermediate step but I'm really stretching for excuses here.

Yes you can construct an IV from other state, though it's not ideal. Another good fit might be modes designed for disk encryption as those are designed for cases where you can't pad (e.g. disk blocks).

There's also AES-GCM-SIV and its relatives which construct the nonce from a MAC of the plaintext and technically do not require a separate IV, though if you don't use one any duplicate message will be obvious.

Those are somewhat more complex but honestly even if you don't get those perfect it's almost definitely better than ECB.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#70

Post by dpeck »

restingrobot wrote: post #66
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #62

Seriously, all people who are surprised about this type of news should really understand that most "successful" (as in, popular) tech/.com/SV "startups" these days are like this. If you "waste" time on the real important stuff such as a good design, user security, or the like, you will lose over to a competitor who didn't and therefore was able to spend more time on marketing. If you waste your time on user privacy y…

This is a bad point. The difference between using AES-128 and AES-256 from a code standpoint is trivial. The only explanation for this is either gross incompetence or malevolence. Personally I don't use Zoom, nor would I recommend its use for even personal conversation.

the difference is a copy and paste from an older StackOverflow post.
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