81–90 of 176 posts
Travel to russia, get big wrench and hit Durov with it until he gives up his password. Win 200k. In all seriousness, im interested to see if anyone can crack this.
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Agreed, but the tone of the previous discussion was definitely more along the lines of "This could never work, you guys don't know what you're doing." If it proves resilient over 2.5 months of highly motivated attacks (motivated by both the money / "I-Told-You-So" factor), I think that's a fairly strong statement in their favor.
Not quite 2.5 months.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, but the tone of the previous discussion was definitely more along the lines of "This could never work, you guys don't know what you're doing." If it proves resilient over 2.5 months of highly motivated attacks (motivated by both the money / "I-Told-You-So" factor), I think that's a fairly strong statement in their favor.
i have a day job and i'm not going to drop everything for the chance i won't make any money at all... told-you-so factor or not.
This is such a sham. Here, I'll offer $2000 to break my plaintext crypto. Every morning, in the shower, I'll say a secret word. Email me the secret word and I'll send you $2000 in BTC.
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We already know the system is hopelessly vulnerable to server side MITM attacks, it makes no effort to defend against that attack model. It's mentioned in the comments that they might do manual key verification in the future, but that doesn't happen now. Compromise is silent.
Let me respectfully disagree with you here. Secret Chats in Telegram provide users with a way to detect a server-side MITM attack. http://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-are-telegram-users-pr...
When they do enabled it for the first time, we can instantly MITM them using the attack against the "image verification" I mentioned lower down (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932053), and we can assume that the conversation is worth our while listening in on. The user will hopefully expose themselves in the belief that they are safe, and the game is over.
Cryptography Snake Oil Warning Sign #9: Cracking contests. https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9902.html (1999)
Our Twofish cryptanalysis contest offers a $10K prize for the best negative comments on Twofish that aren't written by the authors. There are no arbitrary definitions of what a winning analysis is. There is no ciphertext to break or keys to recover. We are simply rewarding the most successful cryptanalysis research result, whatever it may be and however successful it is (or is not). Again, the contest is fair because…
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It will allow you to conduct a man-in-the-middle attack on all encrypted traffic though, which would certainly be enough to read messages in plaintext.
http://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-are-telegram-users-pr...
This is still vulnerable to server-side _key_ MITM. It's the hushmail/iMessage/etc silent escrow key attack.
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http://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-are-telegram-users-pr...
This is irrelevant - the "secret chat" mode is not the default (according to someone else in this thread) and you're just shoving the key verification process off on to the user with these silly graphic patterns (which, if OTR is any indication, the user won't verify anyway). This is still vulnerable to server-side _key_ MITM. It's the hushmail/iMessage/etc silent escrow key attack.
http://telegram.org/img/key_image.jpg
Blue in the top and bottom, white line through the middle. So little information that anybody could simply brute force the keys until they found one that matched the description well enough.
I'd happily write a little attack for that, but it's clearly not "breaking" the system enough for the bounty.
