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Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights

blog.torproject.org

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Re: Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights

#51

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

tptacek wrote: post #32
daurnimator wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is also an archive of communications with vendors, shops and government departments. Signal doesn't let you migrate chat history to your desktop. Trying to migrate between phones while retaining your Signal history is too hard for most people. Signal is not at all a suitable replacement, and I believe that forward secrecy is an anti-feature for an email-like usecase.

You know you're in trouble when people start talking about forward secrecy being problematic. What you're saying about the "email-like use case" for cryptography is that it's unserious protection, because a lack of forward secrecy practically guarantees full decryption of the entire history of messages, for any ordinary participant in the system.

>a lack of forward secrecy practically guarantees full decryption of the entire history of messages, for any ordinary participant in the system.

Can you elaborate?

Re: Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights

#52

Post by wolf550e »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #51
tptacek wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know you're in trouble when people start talking about forward secrecy being problematic. What you're saying about the "email-like use case" for cryptography is that it's unserious protection, because a lack of forward secrecy practically guarantees full decryption of the entire history of messages, for any ordinary participant in the system.

>a lack of forward secrecy practically guarantees full decryption of the entire history of messages, for any ordinary participant in the system. Can you elaborate?

Eventually a private key will leak, and without forward secrecy, that private key will probably decrypt all past messages to that person, and all future messages to that person, until they give all their correspondents a new key.

With email, because people quote when replying, you'll get the other side's messages too.

Like, the simple PGP-like system where sender encrypts message using recipient's public RSA key.

And of course it's not improved by switching from RSA to ECIES.

You need to ratchet the key, or double ratchet like Signal protocol.

Re: Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights

#53

Post by nonrandomstring »

schoen wrote: post #31
nonrandomstring wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E2EE overrides current controls in place There are no controls in place. This line is becoming quite a pattern in UK (Tory) government rhetoric. They forcefully state wishful thinking as if it were a fact. There are no controls because there is no possibility of controls, as a matter of mathematics. But by exploiting ignorance, the tories managed to beast parliament into an intractable "just imagine if..." clause i…

> There are no controls because there is no possibility of controls, as a matter of mathematics. This is kind of true because, for example, the one-time pad is information-theoretically secure, and anyone could choose to use a one-time pad with anyone else given prior arrangements. Or anyone could choose to use RSA for confidentiality with anyone else given a mutual desire to communicate confidentially and an authent…

> there are some historic cases where populations were subject to official military censorship in wartime,

That's fine, and those may have been legitimate needs at the time. Overcoming the Nazis meant stilling loose lips.

But are we at war? I mean officially according to UN declarations? And if we are not at war, or in an official state of emergency and official censorship re-emerges we need a rethink.

So long as decent people acknowledge that we are under illegitimate censorship accordant with a tyrannical/fascist regime, then they must reposition with respect to resistance and toppling that regime.

What's problematic for me (and everybody else here I think) is the double-think - a widespread belief that we remain in a liberal democracy while in reality de-facto censorship has snuck in.

Re: Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights

#54

Post by iggldiggl »

alwayslikethis wrote: post #6
Metus wrote: post #5

One of the largest holes in encrypted communication is still the fact that the vast majority of email is still neither digitally signed, nor encrypted. And even if they are, the usual schemes do not encrypt the subject line. I wish there was something like Let's encrypt but for email. Just make it trivial to sign and encrypt your mail. Also, mail clients should give a huge warning for unencrypted and/or unsigned mail…

I agree with the sentiment, but I question how useful this would really be. Most people nowadays unfortunately use web clients, so the keys are going to have to be stored somewhere else, since backing up a browser's local storage is no easy task. If you don't have sole access to keys, but rather the keys are controlled by the same entities that control your email, I don't think there will be any benefit.

Search is another problem, because instead of simply being able to rely on server-side full text search, every client needs to download all mails, decrypt them all and then create and maintain its own local search index.

Re: Global Encryption Day: Encryption's Critical Role in Safeguarding Human Rights

#55

Post by tatersolid »

Metus wrote: post #26
XorNot wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal has no concept of trust delegation: also, the verification API is extremely hidden and sucks (i.e. my brother working at a FAANG had no idea it existed or what it did - it's also extremely confusing when you open it). This creates two problems: (1) is that Signal functionally operates as "trust on first use", and (2) Signal has no system by which you can communicate to "conceptual entities" - i.e. companies. T…

> (2) Signal has no system by which you can communicate to "conceptual entities" - i.e. companies. This has always kind of bugged me with email as compared to physical mail: While with a physical mailbox I can write a letter "to whom it may concern" and throw it in, with email I need to find out if the special, general purpose inbox is info@, contact@, hello@, or whatever other address the company uses, assuming they…

There is a standard for this, most US companies I encountee over 100 people seems to support at least the security, info, postmaster, and support mailboxes at least.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2142

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