61–70 of 136 posts
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.
That's making the assumption that all phones in the US have NSA keyloggers on them, which is pretty unlikely.
Whichever way you view Telegram, they haven't developed it to make a quick buck on the ignorance of the masses, nor are they in it to deceive people and entice them to use a knowingly broken crypto.
Granted, they have an attitude problem, they clearly have no experience talking to the crypto community and they made dumb move with this contest thing, but in the end of the day they and Moxie(s) are on the same damn side.
Antagonizing things further is just plain stupid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moxie? He is kind of a real expert in everything crypto and, instead of using the phrase "military grade encryption", WhisperSystems actually explains what they do and how they do it. His posts are very well written and understandable, even for non pros (with a pinch of sarcasm, but that's how I like it). So, where exactly is he trolling?
I think you'd be more likely to find him trolling on the ocean. http://www.blueanarchy.org/holdfast/
Another 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
So, any system that claims to be secure must factor in MitM.
More information on this, and how easy it is to trick devices can be found at Troy Hunts website [0] and at Wifi Pineapple [1]
[0]: http://www.troyhunt.com/2013/04/the-beginners-guide-to-break... [1]: https://wifipineapple.com/
I must be missing something, but isn't this easy to attack by exploiting the periodicity of the XOR function? Or is the message 32 bytes long as well?
Perhaps in response to my requests (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933179 , https://twitter.com/zooko/status/413552420522708993 , https://twitter.com/zooko/status/413552466748133376 ), your FAQ (http://core.telegram.org/contestfaq) now says:
------- Q: Does Paul send the same message to Nick every day?
No, just as in real life, Paul‘s messages to Nick can be different each time. The only thing that doesn’t change is the secret email address in his daily messages.
Q: Could you provide an example of a Paul's message to Nick?
Sure. The message may look like “Hey Nick, so here is the secret email address for the bounty hunters – {here goes the email}”. -------
There are some things that I don't understand about the structure of this contest. Why is the target secret an email address rather than a magic word like "squeamish ossifrage"?
I asked for an “examples of the actual message”, and you posted an possible example, but what I meant to ask for was actually the exact text of one of the messages. Except, of course with the target string (the email address) replaced by X's.
For redditors following along, getting a (partial) copy of the exact message that was sent would be an example of what cryptographers call (partial) "known plaintext". If your cryptosystem is secure against Known Plaintext Attack, then it doesn't matter if an attacker (me) gets copies of some of the messages. If your cryptosystem is insecure in this model, then your users have to be careful with what they type into their messages. For example, they might need to be careful not to cut and paste long strings from other sources, or to otherwise insert strings into their messages that their attacker might guess.
All good, modern cryptosystems are secure in the Known Plaintext Attack model! (And, in fact, all good, modern cryptosystems are secure in much more rigorous models in which attackers get more powers beyond peeking at plaintext.)
So if the makers of Telegram are confident in the security of their protocol, they should have no problem posting the complete, verbatim text of the first message that Paul sent to Nick, with the target email address replaced by "XXX"'s.
Is there a decent “Crypto Not For Dummies But For Reasonably Competent Programmers Who Have Thus Far Taken It For Granted But Want To Get Up To Speed Fairly Quickly On Concepts And Implementation” text?
I must be missing something, but isn't this easy to attack by exploiting the periodicity of the XOR function? Or is the message 32 bytes long as well?
The plaintext is the same length as the hash, so each byte of the hash is xored into only one other byte.