Darknet Messenger Briar Releases Beta, Passes Security Audit

The authorities probably just have to flip a switch to put you under closer surveillance if they see you use Tor. Or they'll just send someone to your registered address and see whats going on.

What I really think would be cool would be a protocol based on massive steganography and obfuscation. You would have kernels which tell it how to wrap data in an innocent looking container (HTTPS traffic, SMT, IRC, Cat pictures and recipies over plain HTTP, DNS, ICMP pings, ...). Ideally, you would have dozens. And they would be shareable between nodes. You could define them in a DSL, and make them sandboxed and provable (that they round-trip, i.e. can decode what they encode, and terminate properly - that restricts what you can do in them though). You could even autogenerate the kernels. The last two points would require a bit of R&D of course.

The goal would be to be able to create new "protocols" faster than authorities can learn to detect them. Then wrap a regular encrypted protocol in this obfuscation layer.

Money quote from a tox dev: "Tox provides some strong security guarantees. We haven't got to the point where we can enumerate them properly, given the general lack of understanding of the code and specification."

https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426

I do wonder what plans are in place for migrating user data and identities - of all electronic devices, the one most likely to be lost, stolen, broken has to be the phone - and it's not really great if loss of the device means loss of access to the network and built-up web-of-trust.

I see there's a mechanism to introduce contacts to each other - perhaps that could be implemented (technically) similar to pgp key signing/web-of-trust - that would still require a means to backup ones secret key, in order to regain access though.

There are certain certifications with falsifiable conditions that can be marked pass/fail. But, as I'm sure many folks here are aware, these are incomplete and often completely dubious. They don't purport to be "security audits".

What a real security audit tells you is that of the (probably 2-4) consultants that looked at a product for a few weeks (probably 2-6), these were the security bugs they found.

That alone contains little information, because the skill level and domain expertise varies greatly among consultants and companies. I can guarantee that if these results were withheld, and they gave the same codebase to another reputable outfit, the set of findings would be very different. There would likely be some overlap, particularly in the most obvious types of bugs, but bug hunting is way closer to art than science.

I know nothing about this project, and my intent is not to create doubt, but users of secure messaging apps should understand what an audit is and what it isn't.

Like other commenters, I was surprised to see 3 days of looking at crypto. It could be that the crypto is extremely simple and uses a few well understood APIs in a straightforward way, so this isn't a guaranteed red flag by any means, but it's a bit unusual.

And like any software, this is a 1 line patch away from being blown wide open. With every commit, an audit becomes increasingly meaningless. Just ask cperciva!

And perhaps I'm being cynical, but I always felt like the "conclusions" section of the audit report has an unspoken purpose of walking back from calling their baby ugly and keeping a decent rapport to ensure the possibility of future business. Not that I think what Cure53 wrote was not genuine, but there are natural incentives to be a little generous there. Again, I'm speaking from experience writing those sections as well.

Edit: Basically what tptacek said.