A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
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A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
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Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#2If they were to release the plaintext of Alice's (or, in their case, Paul's) message, wouldn't that include the secret email address?
FWIW, I agree the contest is a sham for the reasons moxie & others listed here and elsewhere.
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#3tl;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 improve the OSS TextSecure implementation.
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#4Another 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
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#5Another 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
you sure seem to like Telegram. Also please don't use "butthurt".
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#6Even 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 processing and cryptography.
All of Moxie's projects, on the other hand, have always been completely open source.
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#7If they were to release the plaintext of Alice's (or, in their case, Paul's) message, wouldn't that include the secret email address? FWIW, I agree the contest is a sham for the reasons moxie & others listed here and elsewhere.
The contest is only set up that way to make it look more secure, there's really no reason that you would have to prove yourself in that way. If there's an actual cryptographic break then a researcher can prove it without all of the "send email to this address" nonsense.
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#8Even 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.
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#9Another 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 they're identical through a description.
http://telegram.org/img/key_image.jpg
I wager that if they did allow a tampering eavesdropper in their bounty contest, it would be in the same conversation that has already done a key exchange and verification, making it yet more snake oil. You can hardly call something secure when you don't allow real-world MITM attacks in testing.
Re: A Crypto Challenge For The Telegram Developers
#10Even 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…
Wait the crypto is done server side? I haven't really looked into Telegram much, but that's fucking silly. Lavabit all over again.