The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts • Hacker News Board

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#11

Post by mirimir » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:08 AM UTC

moxie wrote: post #5

I get a lot of credit for the stuff that Open Whisper Systems does, but it's not all me by a long shot. Trevor Perrin, Frederic Jacobs, Christine Corbett, Tyler Reinhard, Lilia Kai, Jake McGinty, and Rhodey Orbits are the crew that really made all this work happen.

Maybe you could answer a few questions? That'd be cool.

Is there much hope for strong privacy and anonymity using smartphones? Even with secure apps, there's the baseband, controlled by the cell provider. Can it be isolated?

What are the chances for open-source hardware?

What are the main pros and cons of iOS and Android?

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#12

Post by PhantomGremlin » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:09 AM UTC

Great article, not paywalled.

Here's the thing that Moxie recognizes, that many other programs don't (in any domain):

   He says he wants to build simple, “frictionless”
   apps, adopting a Silicon Valley buzzword for
   “easy to use.”

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#13

Post by lisper » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:12 AM UTC

Not that I really want to steal any of Moxie's thunder, but if you're reading this comment thread you might also be interested in SC4:

https://github.com/Spark-Innovations/SC4

Strong encryption that runs in a browser. Recently completed its first security audit.

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#14

Post by jrcii » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:13 AM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #11

moxie wrote: post #5

I get a lot of credit for the stuff that Open Whisper Systems does, but it's not all me by a long shot. Trevor Perrin, Frederic Jacobs, Christine Corbett, Tyler Reinhard, Lilia Kai, Jake McGinty, and Rhodey Orbits are the crew that really made all this work happen.

Maybe you could answer a few questions? That'd be cool. Is there much hope for strong privacy and anonymity using smartphones? Even with secure apps, there's the baseband, controlled by the cell provider. Can it be isolated? What are the chances for open-source hardware? What are the main pros and cons of iOS and Android?

For a sandboxed baseband check out the Neo900 project.

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#15

Post by gault8121 » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:13 AM UTC

moxie wrote: post #5

I get a lot of credit for the stuff that Open Whisper Systems does, but it's not all me by a long shot. Trevor Perrin, Frederic Jacobs, Christine Corbett, Tyler Reinhard, Lilia Kai, Jake McGinty, and Rhodey Orbits are the crew that really made all this work happen.

Great job Open Whisper Systems team!

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#16

Post by iamthebest » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:19 AM UTC

I tried installing TextSecure recently but it wouldn't work without the Google Play services.

I hadn't herd of their new app Signal. Has anyone tried it? I'm really interested in hearing anyone's experience using it.

BTW, I ended up installing Telegram ...and it may be mere co-incidence, but I started noticing some weird things happening that I've never seen before. I connect to the internet exclusively via tethering to my phone and while tethered I started seeing messages in Firefox from my desktop machine giving warnings that were something like "Could not establish secure connection because the server supports a higher version of TLS". My guess is that it was some sort of MITM attack... and I was possibly targeted due to the traffic to Telegram servers.

One other thing regarding Telegram: I really don't like that it reads my contact list and uploads it to their server to check if my contacts have a Telegram account. I've blocked the permission for now.

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#17

Post by jchrisa » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:22 AM UTC

moxie wrote: post #5

I get a lot of credit for the stuff that Open Whisper Systems does, but it's not all me by a long shot. Trevor Perrin, Frederic Jacobs, Christine Corbett, Tyler Reinhard, Lilia Kai, Jake McGinty, and Rhodey Orbits are the crew that really made all this work happen.

What do you think about the options for baking key based reputation systems into next gen social software like Federated Wiki, Snow, etc?

I'm dreaming up a crypto currency where the scare resource is human creativity rather than CPU time. It is a little like key based identity taken through the looking glass. Quick read: http://thenewstack.io/why-art-could-become-currency-in-a-cry...

I asked a similar question of vbuterin the other day. Thanks for any response: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3ai4pm/the_humans...

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#18

Post by btczeus » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:23 AM UTC

There is not any evidence of encryption on WhatsApp, source code is closed so you can never be safe.

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#19

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:24 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#20

Post by tw04 » Fri, Jul 10, 2015, 2:24 AM UTC

moxie wrote: post #5

I get a lot of credit for the stuff that Open Whisper Systems does, but it's not all me by a long shot. Trevor Perrin, Frederic Jacobs, Christine Corbett, Tyler Reinhard, Lilia Kai, Jake McGinty, and Rhodey Orbits are the crew that really made all this work happen.

Given that we have the man himself onboard - can I urge you to ask the WSJ to remove the comment at the start of the article about WhatsApp implementing your encryption schema? Unless I've missed something, there's absolutely no way for an end-user to determine if their messages are being encrypted (with whatsapp). Or how they're being encrypted for that matter. I feel like WhatsApp latched onto your groundwork (potentially even with good intentions) - but never actually has opened up about the implementation, opened the code to audit, or been forthright about exactly who/how many users are covered.

I fear articles like this just make the average joe think "oh, whatsapp == secure" when recent events have proven that's far, far from the truth.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/intercepted-whats...