Using an NSA backdoored RNG is pretty redundant. A cell phone cannot be secured against NSA. They'll just activate their keylogger and grab the plaintext before it has even been encrypted.
A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
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Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#12Even if Telegram's explanation did stand up to scrutiny and was ran by experienced cryptographers, the fact that its core code is closed source makes it utterly worthless from a security perspective. They can tout their own security all they like, but if no one else can independently verify it then it means nothing. So far they've only published the source to their client, but their servers do all of the actual proce…
It's really not even enough to open source their server software because you would still have to trust that they ran that open source software unmodified on their machines.
If you host your own server with their server software, you can verify it's running unmodified.
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#13I have been saying this a couple of times in similar threads, but I think Threema [1] deserves a little more attention. Complete end-to-end encryption using NaCl. The interface they created is simple and gets the point across. Also, they're actually saying "don't trust us!", which ironically makes me trust them.
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#14Another guy has butthurt from Telegram. As I read somewhere telegram guys said that after 1st march 2014 they somehow will allow to perform MITM in that crypto challenge
If they allow man in the middle attacks then the system is completely and demonstrably broken. The out of band public key verification uses deterministic images to confirm that the keys are the same, which can be easy forged given the relatively bad comparison engines in use (humans describing what a pixelated 16px image looks like). At no point is the real key shown to the user, so it's impossible to verify that the…
How is the key image impossible to describe?
There are only 4 possible colors per cell. You just describe it like 0,1,2,3,2,0, etc Just as if you were reading off the real key.
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's really not even enough to open source their server software because you would still have to trust that they ran that open source software unmodified on their machines.
If you host your own server with their server software, you can verify it's running unmodified.
They don't provide the server-side code, nor a way to ensure that your client is talking to a specific server. The only authentication is via a 5 digit code sent via SMS, so it's presumably very easy to spoof and control messages. You need on average 5000 attempts to log into another users account (they are send a "new device added" notification message though), which could be done reasonably easily if you knew a person would have their phone off for a period of time when you wanted to attack their account.
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#16Even if Telegram's explanation did stand up to scrutiny and was ran by experienced cryptographers, the fact that its core code is closed source makes it utterly worthless from a security perspective. They can tout their own security all they like, but if no one else can independently verify it then it means nothing. So far they've only published the source to their client, but their servers do all of the actual proce…
It's really not even enough to open source their server software because you would still have to trust that they ran that open source software unmodified on their machines.
Yep, that's also absolutely true. You'd have no idea if their servers were actually running the code they published.
Moxie's TextSecure on the other hand does full end-to-end encryption, with no work done by any server. Same with OTR and similar message encryption plugins. It baffles me why people are sticking to the "everything on the server" route for applications that focus on user privacy and security in this day and age, especially when there are a lot of good alternatives that don't.
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#17Using an NSA backdoored RNG is pretty redundant. A cell phone cannot be secured against NSA. They'll just activate their keylogger and grab the plaintext before it has even been encrypted.
That's making the assumption that all phones in the US have NSA keyloggers on them, which is pretty unlikely.
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#18tl;dr: moxie uses ancient, known broken crypto primitives (Dual_EC_DRBG, RSA with 896 bits, MD2 and XOR) to construct a chat protocol which is unbreakable if framed in the same way the Telegram developers did with their challenge. "If they can’t demonstrate a break in this obviously broken protocol using the same contest framework they’ve setup, then we’ll know that their contest is bullshit." Also, a call to arms to…
Well, not entirely the same framing.
For $200k one could probably brute-force an 896-bit RSA key. ;)
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#19Another guy has butthurt from Telegram. As I read somewhere telegram guys said that after 1st march 2014 they somehow will allow to perform MITM in that crypto challenge
People need to stop posting his shit here, it's basically linkbait he's using to pimp his Whisper service. He's the worst kind of troll.
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#20tl;dr: moxie uses ancient, known broken crypto primitives (Dual_EC_DRBG, RSA with 896 bits, MD2 and XOR) to construct a chat protocol which is unbreakable if framed in the same way the Telegram developers did with their challenge. "If they can’t demonstrate a break in this obviously broken protocol using the same contest framework they’ve setup, then we’ll know that their contest is bullshit." Also, a call to arms to…
I still don't get it.
If an insecure protocol with an insecure implementation can send messages that others can't read, how is it insecure?