341–350 of 369 posts
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Keybase builds a lot on top of saltpack, which works like a saner PGP: https://saltpack.org The underlying cryptography is NaCl, which is referenced in the original post.
I don’t get it. How does Saltpack solve the issue of identity management?
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Telling people to stop using the Internet because it is insecure is bad advice. It is extremely unrealistic, like telling people to stop using cars and trucks because driving kills people every year. However suggesting that we should change things to eliminate the risk is good. We could eliminate car accidents completely if everyone went over the automatic driven cars that communicated as a mesh network. The Swedish…
The PGP team openly and enthusiastically discusses how they've advised dissidents in places like Venezuela, about which just recently the NYT ran an expose of death squads sponsored by the Maduro administration. What they're telling dissidents to do has to work . It demonstrably doesn't . Pretending otherwise, because everyone else does it, is malpractice. I don't understand where the wiggle room people are finding o…
Signal will not make people immune to death squads, nor will any other technology. It was not that long time ago that members of Anonymous went after the cartel and we got pictures of people tortured and killed. It only take one trusted person who know a dissidents real identity or family or friends or community for things to get very ugly very fast.
If the PGP team promised security against state organized death squads then that's their fault. Pretending that technology will protect you against that kind of threat can be a very costly mistake.
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The PGP team openly and enthusiastically discusses how they've advised dissidents in places like Venezuela, about which just recently the NYT ran an expose of death squads sponsored by the Maduro administration. What they're telling dissidents to do has to work . It demonstrably doesn't . Pretending otherwise, because everyone else does it, is malpractice. I don't understand where the wiggle room people are finding o…
The only advice you can semi-safely give to dissidents that face state organized death squads is to hide and get new identities, and never ever reveal the old ones to anyone. Signal will not make people immune to death squads, nor will any other technology. It was not that long time ago that members of Anonymous went after the cartel and we got pictures of people tortured and killed. It only take one trusted person w…
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The problem with this is that a tool that is too generic is itself dangerous, because it creates cross protocol attacks and confusion attacks like in https://efail.de for PGP email. I think that a better approach is to bind identities from multiple purpose built cryptographic protocols.
If you blame gpg for efail you can blame anything really for a virus on one of the endpoints of any form of encryption. Next you will hold rensponsible tech for social engineering and mandate users should not know their own secrets because that causes vulnerabilities in protocols :p
Except the specification is trash.
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You're thinking of PGP web of trust, Signal doesn't have that
you can have contacts send you another contact. There is no way to set up a server of public identities, but you should be able to share your own contacts.
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That is exactly correct. As I'm sure you know, it is Alice that retains her DH key not the email server or anyone else. As I said: > If your security model relies on this difference then your security model is broken. It’s worth noting that Signal does NOT rely on this difference. It relies on participants being mostly online to permit frequent rekeys and not having to retain old keys indefinitely. Signal does not de…
“Bidirectional”. So peers can mostly talk to each other. Do you really want to die on that particular semantic hill? “These Ethernet frames have source and destination addresses eventually”?
Sure. The world of cryptography software is already muddled by misinformation, poor practices and misguided appeals to authority. We shouldn't need to spread misinformation about technologies such as e-mail to get people to stop using it.
Whent talking about alternatives, Signal and WhatsApp get mentioned because they're easy to use. They are. Signal is pretty secure. WhatsApp probably is as well but we can't be sure. That is, until it isn't anymore. WhatsApp already has a key extraction protocol built right in for its Web interface. Signal has a web (Electron) interface as well, and a shitty one at that, where the messages also get decrypted. For Wha…
https://www.actalis.it/products/certificates-for-secure-elec...
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Yeah-ish, but what I mean is an actual set of different tools (so, not one-size-fits-all) but all part of the same suite, rather than a bunch of different implementations of mostly the same idea — i.e., *BSD rather than Linux. One of my numerous hobby projects is exactly that, but … I simply don't have enough Round Tuits.
OK, so you're saying something like: magic send magic receive magic encrypt magic sign ... that ideally all have NaCl at the base but are otherwise one binary that you have to remember? The tricky one there is probably chat.
And yeah, chat is very much not like the rest — but I'd still like my chats to be somehow validated with my magic ID.
I did some "OpenPGP Best Practices" work for a client recently. They don't have a choice, because a third party requires it. The goal was to make sure it was as safe as possible. One thing that struck me is that I have a simplified mental model for the PGP crypto, and reality is way weirder than that. The blog post says it's CFB, and in a sense that's right, but it's the weirdest bizarro variant of CFB you've ever se…
First of all, if you are signing something and want to prove that you are the author, then PGP will allow you to do that. If you want to encrypt something and prove you are the author, PGP will still allow you to do that. Does the author mean that PGP is bad for email specifically? Excel has many of the mentioned properties, such as backwards compatibility and inefficiency, but it gets the job done and you bet it wil…
With "Johnny you're fired", it's clear that many clients don't correctly validate PGP signatures
I don't really know what concrete advice the article gives for me personally. (The only thing I take away from this is to learn libsodium as well, rather than not using PGP.)