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I appreciate that it may be somewhat tongue in cheek, but is that a riff on the US accusing Huawei of being a national security threat[0], or do Huawei phones have a track record of known security vulnerabilities?
[0]http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/us/us-panel-calls-huawei-a...
I work on two of the apps Matthew reviews here (RedPhone and TextSecure). What I didn't expect when I started working on these types of projects is that the cryptography is the easy part. I'm really honored to hear that my code has the ability to make Matthew Green drool, but that ZRTP stack was a two or three day project three years ago, and hasn't changed much since. The bulk of the work over the intervening period…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's not what he wrote. Read that part of the review again.
""" Overall code quality: Who knows Should I use this to fight my oppressive regime? Yes -- if your fight consists of sending dirty self-portraits to your fellow comrades-at-arms. Otherwise, probably not. """ Am I missing something?
> While Cryptocat is written in Javascript (aaggh!) Is there something inherently insecure about using JavaScript or is this not meant to actually be relevant?
I work on two of the apps Matthew reviews here (RedPhone and TextSecure). What I didn't expect when I started working on these types of projects is that the cryptography is the easy part. I'm really honored to hear that my code has the ability to make Matthew Green drool, but that ZRTP stack was a two or three day project three years ago, and hasn't changed much since. The bulk of the work over the intervening period…
It doesn't make how many calls or emails I encrypt if nobody I talk to can receive them. It is encouraging to hear people 1) understanding security isn't really a differentiator and 2) trying to solve the real problems securely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
""" Overall code quality: Who knows Should I use this to fight my oppressive regime? Yes -- if your fight consists of sending dirty self-portraits to your fellow comrades-at-arms. Otherwise, probably not. """ Am I missing something?
His answer to "should I use this to fight my impressive regime" was the same for all the tools, just with different wording.
* Everything is tunneled over OpenSSL and (increasingly) NaCL.
* We do not use the CA infrastructure... we ship our server's public key
in the app
* Communication channels are established by a face-to-face "bump", and
the parties must mutually consent that the suggested "match" was their
intended counter party (they must validate name and mug).
* Subsequent communications can happen asynchronously at a distance
on this channel
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's some sort of key fingerprint. You know the key you sent to the other party, and the other party can compute the fingerprint of the key they received from "you." If they don't match, someone changed keys in transit.
Does this assume that the voice channel can't be doctored? But couldn't a MITM attacker do just that — compute the "correct" fingerprint and speak it to the recipient?
To be sure, the voice channel establishes before the verbal authentication. I see your fingerprint is "banana", you see "kitchen". We can chat and I can say "alright so banana, right?" and you say "yep, in the kitchen". An attacker would need to remove banana and kitchen from that voice conversation and put their own fingerprint words in.
I think that level of realtime audio modification is pretty out of reach for now, although I suppose if you introduced a lot of latency, you might be able to pull it off. It'd probably be noticeable, and you can keep chatting and confirming the phrase, so an attacker would have to be really on-the-ball.
Plus, this only happens the first time. After that, the client saves the keys, so you know you're good.
I work on two of the apps Matthew reviews here (RedPhone and TextSecure). What I didn't expect when I started working on these types of projects is that the cryptography is the easy part. I'm really honored to hear that my code has the ability to make Matthew Green drool, but that ZRTP stack was a two or three day project three years ago, and hasn't changed much since. The bulk of the work over the intervening period…
moxie, I'm curious how the "short authentication string" prevents MITM attacks — can you shed some light on this or point me to existing documentation? Thanks!
Then the boring part kicks in and the way the algorithms works is that if you are convinced that you are talking to the right person, then the way the secret key is generated won't be infer-able to an eavesdropping party.
Now, if I remember correctly NSA has published a paper where they allegedly fooled this system by using voice disguise and a voice actor to basically play a man in the middle attack. Now this is highly subjective and based on the context, so take that with a grain of salt.
A minor point of curiosity: one of the captions says "Using SilentCircle on a Huawei complete negates the point of using SilentCircle." I appreciate that it may be somewhat tongue in cheek, but is that a riff on the US accusing Huawei of being a national security threat[0], or do Huawei phones have a track record of known security vulnerabilities? [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/us/us-panel-calls-huawei-a...
Now there are these things : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module that should help with the issue but I am not sure if there are any phones that ship with them.