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BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology

labs.bittorrent.com

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Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology

#101

Post by hershel »

sirsar wrote: post #72
hershel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What i don't see (maybe haven't looked hard enough) are another security review/s. Until bitmessage is thoroughly reviewed by serious people ,and results are displayed in a prominent place, it would be hard to trust.

The dev team would love if you know someone with expertise and a bit of time to spare. We make no claims of perfection or even safety at this point. From the homepage: Bitmessage is in need of an independent audit to verify its security.

I believe that they need to link to the security review i linked , not hide it in forums.

There was also someone who deanonimized bitmessage. They should link this too in a prominent place.

If they solved any of those problems , they should link to solutions and a possible review.

Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology

#102

Post by makomk »

x0054 wrote: post #68
tokenizerrr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that would defeat the point of opening the source, the part we're interested in is the security of the transport not how that pretty UI is made.

If the UI module does encryption and decryption, and if the said encryption is good enough, why would you care if the transport layer steals your encrypted data?

The transport layer is running on the same computer at the same trust level as the encryption layer, which means it can intercept the unencrypted data. Even if the developer's 100% honest it's easy for them to accidentally create a remote code execution vulnerability that allows an attacker to do this.

Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology

#103

Post by fooqux »

Shish2k wrote: post #85
fooqux wrote: post #8

I like that this and Tox are tackling this issue, but they seem to be missing a huge piece of the puzzle: the so-called metadata. If you can hide who the messages are being sent to, you can protect yourself against them spying on who your friends are, which to me, is just as important. Also, if you don't know who the recipient of an encrypted block of text is, it makes it near-impossible to brute force the private ke…

> they seem to be missing a huge piece of the puzzle: the so-called metadata. I wonder if the broadcast approach would help there? Be constantly throwing out GPG encrypted data to the entire network, anyone with the private key can pick it up. No "to" or "from" headers, and traffic analysis is hard since the flow of traffic is constant: https://github.com/shish/firehose (Very alpha) The main downside there is that ba…

I don't know how bad the bandwidth requirements would actually be. A few thousand bytes a second is an awful lot of text. Granted, you won't be able to do anything else like VOIP.

I've been thinking of ways to combat this as well, and I admit it's an interesting problem. You either have to do some kind of Tor-like onion protocol (which has its own problems), or send every message to every client in the world. Sending your message to [your friend] + X random people would still allow an attacker to eventually gather a very detailed map of your friends by looking at which come up most often.

Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology

#104

Post by Shish2k »

fooqux wrote: post #103
Shish2k wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they seem to be missing a huge piece of the puzzle: the so-called metadata. I wonder if the broadcast approach would help there? Be constantly throwing out GPG encrypted data to the entire network, anyone with the private key can pick it up. No "to" or "from" headers, and traffic analysis is hard since the flow of traffic is constant: https://github.com/shish/firehose (Very alpha) The main downside there is that ba…

I don't know how bad the bandwidth requirements would actually be. A few thousand bytes a second is an awful lot of text. Granted, you won't be able to do anything else like VOIP. I've been thinking of ways to combat this as well, and I admit it's an interesting problem. You either have to do some kind of Tor-like onion protocol (which has its own problems), or send every message to every client in the world. Sending…

> send every message to every client in the world

That's what I do, as I can't think of any alternative that is equally analysis-resistant

> A few thousand bytes a second is an awful lot of text

I was planning for ~500 bytes / sec so that traffic spikes wouldn't block up the send queue, but now that I think about it you're probably right -- even at 50 bytes/sec, the network speed cap would still be a fairly small factor compared to the amount of time spent typing...

Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology

#105

Post by lawnchair_larry »

saurik wrote: post #78
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound reasonable. I don't care who you are, auditing the source version is orders of magnitude easier than auditing the binary version. I say this as someone who has been reverse engineering binary code for well over a decade. This doesn't even account for the fact that requiring reverse engineering skill already eliminates the majority of potential auditors, whether due to ability or due to lack of time…

Look, I'm sorry, but let's take an extreme example here to demonstrate how you are arguing something different than I am: if you are seriously trying to tell me that you have an easier time analyzing the source code for "grep" vs the binary for "false", something is seriously seriously wrong; the binary for false can seriously be less than 50 bytes large. If you show me an open source system and a closed source syste…

I think I agree with most of what you say, but the point is, not being open source is a non-starter right out the door. Open source doesn't give anything a pass, but without that at a bare minimum, we can't even begin to take it seriously.

But I wouldn't really be worried about backdoors for something like this, just incompetence. I don't think anyone is taking it seriously anyway.

Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology

#106

Post by MaulingMonkey »

omegant wrote: post #93
xenonite wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more than that, if one wants to insert backdoors in OOS, one could easily do that getting barely noticed. A program might be open source, still the binaries offered for download might be compromised. Who is able to notice that now? You might compile the software yourself, but the majority of users wont. You might have reverse engineered a closed source software, but I guess you won't do that for the OSS binaries…

Honest question: if the source code is compiled with the same compiler (although different computer), will it give a different binary with a different hash?

Even compiling the source code with the same compiler, same build options, and same computer will generally generate a different binary with a different hash! Special effort is required to generate "deterministic builds", sometimes seen for e.g. verifying the integrity of gambling software. Here's what one fellow has been going through in an effort to accomplish that:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1180852/deterministic-bui...

Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology

#110

Post by kozikow »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #21
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I have with Tox is that it's 90% hype and 10% product. They spent all their time working on a nice website and building hype. That "screenshot" on the front page is a mockup, the Tox project isn't even close to that degree of completion. I'd love to see them succeed, but I doubt it will. Especially with the recent falling-out among their primary developers.

Development is actually going fairly well. It's just that there's a whole bunch of changes that haven't been pulled to the main repository, but there's definite progress with streaming media and other aspects.

http://www.tox-chat.com/2013/08/tox-developer-fed-up-quits.h... - in this rant he sounded like there are some security issues that are irrecoverable. Have something changed since his rant?
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