Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 191 posts

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#71

Post by nickpsecurity »

Interesting article and interesting guy. I like the work he and his team does on these apps. Unfortunately, they typically run on the type of endpoints that everyone from script kiddies with money to High Strength Attackers can hit. Usually alongside apps not as strong as theirs on TCB's that can at best be described as insecure foundations.

I recommend against such apps and platforms for anything other than stopping the riff raff. That's what I use them for. I pointed out the difference between secure code and secure systems in this [1] writeup. Shared much of my framework for analyzing or designing-in security in the process. The TCB of most solutions today is ridiculous: people are building on foundations of quicksand. There's only a few exceptions I've seen such as GenodeOS (architecturally) or Markus Ottela's Tinfoil Chat. Markus has been unusually alert to our concerns and updated his app appropriately even for covert, channel suppression. Quick question: which of the many crypto apps on the market can deliver a covert channel analysis to you at app and system level? Answer: few to none despite it's importance over decades with a rediscovery in past 5+ years in mainstream security.

Strong security is hard. Moxie seems awesome as a coder and good to great in both crypto and OPSEC. Thing is, his offerings break the decades old rule of having a strong TCB. Just like most of the rest. It's why they're usually bypassed or broken by strong attackers. Gotta do the whole thing with concern for each aspect of the system. TFC is a clever cheat on that even more than my MILS scheme with a KVM and a highly-assured guard. If you don't cheat around it, you better do it right or your users will suffer the consequences. Those trying to contain vulnerabilities of mainstream OS's and components with any success are expending literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of labor per year. It's why I push for clean-slate, hardware and software platforms like DARPA and NSF have been funding recently (eg SAFE, CHERI processors). Alternatives using COTS tech are pretty complex and most users will probably fail to secure them to be honest.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/essay_on_fbi-...

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#72

Post by higherpurpose »

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.

Moxie, the progress on TextSecure/Signal integration seems to have slowed down quite a bit (at least as seen from the outside). I think it's been almost a year since Signal for iOS came out - yet still no word on Signal for Android.

What is taking so long, if you don't mind me asking? Is there some sort of Signal 3.0 overhaul planned for all the platforms along with a big launch?

Also, I think you've been quite retreated in the past year or so, I assume so you can focus on working. But I believe you should personally get more involved in promoting your apps (as you do in this piece here). Go on more TV shows, podcasts and so on. Look how much Telegram has grown, not because it's any better than Signal (far from it), but because they've actively promoted themselves and took a more pro-active role in building a community.

More mainstream users need to know that "Skype is not secure, but Signal is" - which reminds me - I hope Signal will eventually get encrypted video-chat support as well, to make it a true alternative to Skype (and of course a desktop app, but I know your team has been working on that).

To monetize the apps have you considered trying to get Signal into enterprise, as a much more secure alternative to what enterprise customers are currently using, and then get paid for support? Or do you believe that would complicate things too much and make the apps worse off in the end?

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#73

Post by jsprogrammer »

tw04 wrote: post #20
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 (pote…

> there's absolutely no way for an end-user to determine if their messages are being encrypted (with whatsapp)

Watch the network traffic with Wireshark?

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#74

Post by jsprogrammer »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #60
davisr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Absolutely no way"? I'm sorry to be impolite about it, but that's a bit of an exaggeration: one could jailbreak their phone, pull the binary into their computer, decompile it, and inspect it for implementation structures that would be coherent with how the two or three most popular encryption algorithms are commonly implemented. The expertise to be able to accomplish it doesn't come cheap, but it's certainly in the…

So you've probably just broken the law by doing so. And you have to do this everytime the app gets updates. And you have to be sure that the encryption is actually getting used on every message. And that the key is strong and not known to Whatsapp. And also that the recipients copy of the app is behaving the same as yours. So I guess the question is, if you had something to hide would you bet your life on it? Whereas…

>So you've probably just broken the law by doing so.

By modifying your own device? I don't think so.

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#75

Post by jsprogrammer »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #71

Interesting article and interesting guy. I like the work he and his team does on these apps. Unfortunately, they typically run on the type of endpoints that everyone from script kiddies with money to High Strength Attackers can hit. Usually alongside apps not as strong as theirs on TCB's that can at best be described as insecure foundations. I recommend against such apps and platforms for anything other than stopping…

Anyone have a glossary?

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#76

Post by jsprogrammer »

sergiotapia wrote: post #39

>Unfortunately, if Mr. Marlinspike’s encryption scheme can be applied to imagery, then childporn collectors thank him too. And there we go, highest voted comment on the article: a strawman about child pornography. Think of the keeeds

What if a military could fight its way into another country, capture it's people, torture them, and take sexually humiliating pictures of them that will be broadcast around the world?

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#77

Post by nickpsecurity »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #75
nickpsecurity wrote: post #71

Interesting article and interesting guy. I like the work he and his team does on these apps. Unfortunately, they typically run on the type of endpoints that everyone from script kiddies with money to High Strength Attackers can hit. Usually alongside apps not as strong as theirs on TCB's that can at best be described as insecure foundations. I recommend against such apps and platforms for anything other than stopping…

Anyone have a glossary?

My bad. Glad I caught it before I went to sleep. Trusted Computing Base (TCB): everything in a system that the security argument depends on. Bigger and more complex the worse. Tinfoil Chat (TFC). MILS = separation kernels, basically. A more secure form of microkernel. KVM = Keyboard-Video-Mouse switch for separate, physical devices. COTS is commercial tech and FOSS is often developed with similarly low-quality methods. Hope that helps in your translation of the comment.

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#78

Post by btczeus »

theGimp wrote: post #27
btczeus wrote: post #22

This guy is not part of the solution. He is part of the problem. https://f-droid.org/posts/security-notice-textsecure/

For those interested in the rationale: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/127#issu...

From https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/53

Moxie: "I'd like to avoid distributing APKs outside of the Play Store"

Why give a single entity the power to push a malicious update anytime?

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#79

Post by leni536 »

lcampbell wrote: post #48
reagency wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is thst possible, in general? If someone published an open source app to Play, could I compare the Play downloaded app to a local build, and set config appropriately, and get a match?

> Is thst possible, in general? (Deterministic|reproducible) (compilation|builds) are a fairly recent endeavor; though they're not yet common they are technically feasible. The two efforts I'm aware of are Debian[1] and Chromium[2], though I'm not sure what state they're currently in. From their site, Chromium appears to include Android builds. There may be Android-specific concerts w.r.t the JVM's JIT, but if you ca…

F-droid[3] is supposedly working on reproducible builds for Android too.

[3] https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/Deterministic,_Reproducible_Bu...

Re: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

#80

Post by hlru »

higherpurpose wrote: post #72
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.

Moxie, the progress on TextSecure/Signal integration seems to have slowed down quite a bit (at least as seen from the outside). I think it's been almost a year since Signal for iOS came out - yet still no word on Signal for Android. What is taking so long, if you don't mind me asking? Is there some sort of Signal 3.0 overhaul planned for all the platforms along with a big launch? Also, I think you've been quite retre…

I used to be a "fan" of TextSecure, but have become disillusioned lately. The development have always been slow. Very few people use it, even among my geek friends. Convincing people to use it is hard as well. Confusion over what it does, having to give out their phone number and no desktop client doesn't help. When I'm actually in need of encryption it doesn't even work, since Google Play services are blocked in China. I personally agree with the team behind hemlis, it's to late to become mainstream. Not that I expect most people to care. TextSecure fulfills it role as a political and technical wank.
Post reply on HN