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uTox – Free, Secure Instant Messaging

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Re: uTox – Free, Secure Instant Messaging

#31

Post by RottenHuman »

astonex wrote: post #23

I would use Tox and any of its clients with caution. At one point in time, your friends would be able to execute arbitrary shell commands on your PC if you were running utox and accepted a file download. Even with large security concerns like this, the lead developer believes Tox and uTox is secure because he reads the code he wrote himself (none the less git history is filled with bug fixes he clearly missed in his…

And your opinion is based on what? What you just said is true for any software. Any reason why you pick out tox in particular?

Re: uTox – Free, Secure Instant Messaging

#32

Post by tux3 »

astonex wrote: post #23

I would use Tox and any of its clients with caution. At one point in time, your friends would be able to execute arbitrary shell commands on your PC if you were running utox and accepted a file download. Even with large security concerns like this, the lead developer believes Tox and uTox is secure because he reads the code he wrote himself (none the less git history is filled with bug fixes he clearly missed in his…

>I would use Tox and any of its clients with caution.

It's hard to argue with that given that Tox is still in alpha, and this is generally a good idea for any software you use if you have reasons to believe that an adversary is trying to exploit your computer.

Re: uTox – Free, Secure Instant Messaging

#33

Post by Jfreegman »

astonex wrote: post #23

I would use Tox and any of its clients with caution. At one point in time, your friends would be able to execute arbitrary shell commands on your PC if you were running utox and accepted a file download. Even with large security concerns like this, the lead developer believes Tox and uTox is secure because he reads the code he wrote himself (none the less git history is filled with bug fixes he clearly missed in his…

uTox was not originally written by the main toxcore dev. However he and a few other brave volunteers have made a big effort to clean up uTox's code over the past few months. That's why this thread was created now and not 6 months ago.

Re: uTox – Free, Secure Instant Messaging

#34

Post by seagreen »

bobdole1971 wrote: post #18
tetrep wrote: post #9

I wonder if we'll ever get to the point where projects start advertising what methods they use to weed out memory management bugs (i.e. static analysis, fuzzing, etc) because an adversary that can execute arbitrary code on my machine is far more intimidating than one that can eavesdrop (imo).

Speaking of that, I wonder why uTox & Tox weren't made in memory safe languages in the first place. There could be many possible reasons, so I won't bother speculating.

Developer malpractice. Nothing security critical should be written in non-memory safe languages, unless you have no other option (like some embedded systems code).

I'm not saying this to be mean. I've written lots of bad bugs myself. Humans are fallible-- that's why we have guards on saws, count pills twice in the pharmacy, and use modern languages when we're not in a sandbox.

Re: uTox – Free, Secure Instant Messaging

#35

Post by bobdole1971 »

chc wrote: post #29
bobdole1971 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need UBsan as well, and even that doesn't catch everything. Regarding memory usage/slowness: why not OCaml, D, or Rust?

Rust only recently hit 1.0, so it's pretty obvious why somebody would not have built their software using that.

Yes, my mistake.

Re: uTox – Free, Secure Instant Messaging

#36

Post by Jfreegman »

chc wrote: post #29
bobdole1971 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need UBsan as well, and even that doesn't catch everything. Regarding memory usage/slowness: why not OCaml, D, or Rust?

Rust only recently hit 1.0, so it's pretty obvious why somebody would not have built their software using that.

Also, current benchmarks show Rust to be about ~3x slower than C, making it more comparable to Go or Java.

Re: uTox – Free, Secure Instant Messaging

#37

Post by detaro »

adwf wrote: post #7

I've been using this for the last 6 months or so. Seems pretty good as a client. Stable on the comms side, although short of an audit, I'm just having faith in the security side of things. What it really needs is some way of having a roaming profile though. Currently you have to have multiple accounts, one for each device. So my friends list has a lot of duplicates depending on whether they're on their work computer,…

Yeah, way to many messengers seem to assume "Well, everyone has just 1 phone anyways, and where else would you want to use a messenger". I get that desktop clients etc are not the first thing on the priority list, but still it is very annoying (and the first one which gets that right I'm pushing everybody to.)

(Threema actually recommends a workaround: "Just create a groupchat for each of your contacts with all your devices in it and always use that")

Re: uTox – Free, Secure Instant Messaging

#38

Post by chc »

Jfreegman wrote: post #36
chc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust only recently hit 1.0, so it's pretty obvious why somebody would not have built their software using that.

Also, current benchmarks show Rust to be about ~3x slower than C, making it more comparable to Go or Java.

Interesting. Do you know of any good, recent benchmarks of Rust? I haven't seen a whole lot. The Benchmarks Game mostly appears to show Rust being closer than that in general, though the Rust benchmarks seem to be kind of crap.

Re: uTox – Free, Secure Instant Messaging

#39

Post by nickpsecurity »

tux3 wrote: post #25
tetrep wrote: post #9

I wonder if we'll ever get to the point where projects start advertising what methods they use to weed out memory management bugs (i.e. static analysis, fuzzing, etc) because an adversary that can execute arbitrary code on my machine is far more intimidating than one that can eavesdrop (imo).

I think that this is a very important point, and I'd like to quote Bruce Schneier in agreeing that "practical cryptography is rarely broken through the mathematics; other parts of systems are much easier to break" [0]. As a developer of a Tox client (qTox), I personally use a combination of static analysis (Coverity, CppCheck, Clang's scan-build) as well as dynamic analysis (notably the various *Sanitizers) to comple…

Consider using something such as SoftBound that transforms your code into one that defends itself against most memory attacks. There's a significant performance hit but immunity by design is better than hunting for every bug. Still try to code well, anyway, as the tools are usually limited to select platforms and you might want more portability.

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/acg/softbound/

Re: uTox – Free, Secure Instant Messaging

#40

Post by rgovostes »

RottenHuman wrote: post #31
astonex wrote: post #23

I would use Tox and any of its clients with caution. At one point in time, your friends would be able to execute arbitrary shell commands on your PC if you were running utox and accepted a file download. Even with large security concerns like this, the lead developer believes Tox and uTox is secure because he reads the code he wrote himself (none the less git history is filled with bug fixes he clearly missed in his…

And your opinion is based on what? What you just said is true for any software. Any reason why you pick out tox in particular?

The comment you replied to seems to be a fairly specific and verifiable criticism of uTox, which, like all security software, deserves to have its claims approached with skepticism.
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