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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

#241

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #224
tialaramex wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Informed speculation is all I have. I will say in passing that it's weird to keep picking VBR AAC in your examples, the document says they used SILK, which would make sense because SILK was designed (by Skype many years ago) for this application. AAC is from a different era (it turns out we were trying to be too clever back then) and targets a different application. This bothers me because even if ECB was good enough…

Everything that isn't authenticated (like CTR mode, which is what was supposedly "recommended" here) admits the potential of an oracle attack, so what's interesting to me here is what's distinctively bad about ECB in this setting. And: I'm not saying ECB is OK in this setting. I'm saying "it's not PenguinVision simple" and "what makes it not OK is probably interesting". You know more about the codec situation here th…

[deleted]

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

#242

Post by baq »

pdwcyl wrote: post #211
thrwaway69 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first, the site attracted about sixteen hundred daily visitors, and Graham moderated and maintained it himself. Today, around five million people read Hacker News each month, and it’s grown more difficult to moderate. The technical discussions remain varied and can be insightful. But social, cultural, and political conversations, which, despite the guidelines, have proliferated, tend to devolve. A recent comment t…

I find that the opposite is true. Most comments are emotional, and I have to search for controversial comments to find anything objective/worth reading. Like Reddit, this site is biased to the political left (USA). I wish we could just avoid all politics in tech.

People are political animals. The only way to avoid politics is to avoid people. Not exactly a workable proposition if you want to change the world with a billion dollar unicorn.

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

#243

Post by chvid »

If I were to design a video conference platform my focus would be usability, video quality, speed.

Because those are the things that matters to end-users; if it gives up some security because there is a server somewhere that decrypts, converts and reencrypt the traffic then that is a trade-off but so be it if the goal is to create a popular widely used platform.

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

#244

Post by DeathArrow »

cyphar wrote: post #231
pdwcyl wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that the opposite is true. Most comments are emotional, and I have to search for controversial comments to find anything objective/worth reading. Like Reddit, this site is biased to the political left (USA). I wish we could just avoid all politics in tech.

I don't think it's possible to avoid politics in any profession. Teachers care about education reform, which is a political subject. Doctors care about the healthcare system, which is a political subject. Civil engineers care about building codes and safety regulations, which are political subjects. Accountants care about tax laws, which are an incredibly political subject. Social workers care about welfare programs,…

I don't express my political beliefs here because I think I would be massively down voted. I think that's true for lots of other users.

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

#245

Post by DeathArrow »

baq wrote: post #242
pdwcyl wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that the opposite is true. Most comments are emotional, and I have to search for controversial comments to find anything objective/worth reading. Like Reddit, this site is biased to the political left (USA). I wish we could just avoid all politics in tech.

People are political animals. The only way to avoid politics is to avoid people. Not exactly a workable proposition if you want to change the world with a billion dollar unicorn.

So, if we can not avoid politics it is ok to encourage some views while discouraging the opposite views?

How can we know for sure we are right or even on the good side, whatever "good" means?

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

#247

Post by deltron3030 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #245
baq wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are political animals. The only way to avoid politics is to avoid people. Not exactly a workable proposition if you want to change the world with a billion dollar unicorn.

So, if we can not avoid politics it is ok to encourage some views while discouraging the opposite views? How can we know for sure we are right or even on the good side, whatever "good" means?

First we'd need to establish a general frame of reference, a perspective, which could be a human one.

From that perspective, the lowest common denominator is that bad is what harms humanity, e.g. by disregarding human rights. Human rights then becomes the new frame of reference, meaning that something can't be good if it's not within that frame.

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

#248

Post by opusrules »

sdenton4 wrote: post #205
tptacek wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know audio well enough to answer this, but you can play with it directly; it took about 7 minutes for me to throw a trivial Go program together to AAC-encode a WAV of half a minute of speech; the only repeated 16-byte blocks I got were a couple runs of zeroes. The trick with ECB is that you're relying on 128-bit blocks of plaintext repeating with perfect alignment, and, to do anything useful with it, those re…

For audio, you don't want to send a wav file over the line, as it's incredibly wasteful. Once it's reasonably encoded, you necessarily end up with a lower entropy steam... So should still have some version of "solid blocks of color", especially for silence. (Exact details depend on the codec, though.)

Opus is probably the right codec for some things. I've heard good things about it.

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

#249

Post by [deleted] »

DeathArrow wrote: post #244
cyphar wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's possible to avoid politics in any profession. Teachers care about education reform, which is a political subject. Doctors care about the healthcare system, which is a political subject. Civil engineers care about building codes and safety regulations, which are political subjects. Accountants care about tax laws, which are an incredibly political subject. Social workers care about welfare programs,…

I don't express my political beliefs here because I think I would be massively down voted. I think that's true for lots of other users.

[deleted]

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

#250

Post by tmpaccount1221 »

thrwaway69 wrote: post #168
Leary wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you wait for his response: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

At first, the site attracted about sixteen hundred daily visitors, and Graham moderated and maintained it himself. Today, around five million people read Hacker News each month, and it’s grown more difficult to moderate. The technical discussions remain varied and can be insightful. But social, cultural, and political conversations, which, despite the guidelines, have proliferated, tend to devolve. A recent comment t…

>The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns.

Ah yes, I remember this article. Oddly enough, this is a major reason why I still enjoy browsing HN. There are few places left that cover a variety of topics while also encouraging this open style of discussion.

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