Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future • Hacker News Board

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#41

Post by sillysaurus2 » Sun, Dec 22, 2013, 2:06 PM UTC

paveldurov wrote: post #39

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applaud their effort at putting out a secure chat app that everyone can use. They aren't making a reasonable effort to put out a secure chat app. If they were, then they would use some of that $200k to hire a company like Matasano to fly out and audit their architecture for flaws. Matasano probably would've caught this bug, because it was a pretty basic mistake.

Not sure hiring a US security firm is a safer approach than crowdsourcing using the power of the global community. After all, Matasano's tptacek obviously did spend some of his time inspecting and criticizing Telegram this week. However, he overlooked the 100K vulnerability that was later discovered by a Russian guy who considers himself a newbie in cryptography. The other reason that makes me somewhat reluctant to s…

Hiring a security firm to audit your architecture is safer than crowdsourcing your app's security. Why do you believe otherwise?

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#42

Post by deepuj » Sun, Dec 22, 2013, 2:06 PM UTC

If Telegram is a non-commercial project, who is funding this bounty?

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#43

Post by m_mueller » Sun, Dec 22, 2013, 2:07 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #37

m_mueller wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does. Show me another non-profit Open Source (mostly) IM service that invests this heavily in seamless encryption and I'll change my opinion. The weakness that they found could have easily been brushed off as non-exploitable, yet they didn't, instead encouraging more security experts to become involved by paying out immediately.

Investing heavily is meaningless if you're investing badly. Building an encrypted IM service with bad crypto is like investing in blacksmiths in the early 1900s.

The question whether their Crypto is bad is still out IMO - these recent findings still don't seem to be that big of a deal to me - as with all other IM services I have to trust the service provider for their integrity - yet here I have an alternative provided by a non-profit organization with some scientific credentials that offer an open API - as opposed to Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook et al. We currently use Skype for business purposes, but Microsoft's investment away from P2P makes me think that for privacy reasons alone, it's a bad idea. I'm always open for suggestions, but so far I haven't found anything really viable (well designed clients, well integrated encryption, open APIs). That's why I'm excited for Telegram.

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#44

Post by m_mueller » Sun, Dec 22, 2013, 2:10 PM UTC

techquery wrote: post #26

m_mueller wrote: post #15

These latest news have convinced me that Telegram currently has the highest potential to be the right IM tool at my current workplace. I have one question that doesn't seem to be covered anywhere (FAQ, Google): What about Offline messages? I'd like to be able to send encrypted messages even when people are offline - on smartphones it could make use of push notifications, on the Desktop it would just wait until the cl…

Messages in secret chats are stored on server until downloaded by recipient. So there is no such problem like in Skype. Push notifications also work fine there, except on iOS they don't contain any message data, just "You have a new message", probably because server doesn't know what's inside encrypted message. Although havent tried their android client.

Great info, thanks. I didn't expect the message to be visible in Push notifications, it's obvious to me that this couldn't work - especially with client side encryption. Whether 'Secret Chats' are truly client side encrypted is another question (see the discussion with one of your siblings).

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#45

Post by ceejayoz » Sun, Dec 22, 2013, 2:11 PM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #43

ceejayoz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investing heavily is meaningless if you're investing badly. Building an encrypted IM service with bad crypto is like investing in blacksmiths in the early 1900s.

The question whether their Crypto is bad is still out IMO - these recent findings still don't seem to be that big of a deal to me - as with all other IM services I have to trust the service provider for their integrity - yet here I have an alternative provided by a non-profit organization with some scientific credentials that offer an open API - as opposed to Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook et al. We currently use Skype fo…

What's wrong with encrypted Jabber?

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#46

Post by reginaldjcooper » Sun, Dec 22, 2013, 2:11 PM UTC

paveldurov wrote: post #39

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applaud their effort at putting out a secure chat app that everyone can use. They aren't making a reasonable effort to put out a secure chat app. If they were, then they would use some of that $200k to hire a company like Matasano to fly out and audit their architecture for flaws. Matasano probably would've caught this bug, because it was a pretty basic mistake.

Not sure hiring a US security firm is a safer approach than crowdsourcing using the power of the global community. After all, Matasano's tptacek obviously did spend some of his time inspecting and criticizing Telegram this week. However, he overlooked the 100K vulnerability that was later discovered by a Russian guy who considers himself a newbie in cryptography. The other reason that makes me somewhat reluctant to s…

I'm with you on not trusting US companies, fine.

But you somehow expected tptacek to inspect and criticize Telegram with such scrutiny that he finds all of the problems pro bono? That's ridiculous.

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#47

Post by im3w1l » Sun, Dec 22, 2013, 2:13 PM UTC

sifarat wrote: post #12

Bravo Son! you have earned respect for your this deed. Appreciated. On a side note, I am still not sure, if i will ever use this app. This is primarily because, I act on the internet in the same fashion as i do in real life. I won't do anything online, what I can't do in real life. Hence I don't and perhaps would never need an app like this. As for sending someone 'secret' message, I always whisper that in the ears.…

If someone takes a photo in the street, and you are in the photo, then you will probably not mind. But if someone follows you around everyday and takes thousands of photos, then that is slightly creepy.

For me it is the same with my chat messages. If someone reads one or two, I don't mind: they aren't very sensitive. But I don't like it if someone can find everything I've ever written.

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#48

Post by makomk » Sun, Dec 22, 2013, 2:20 PM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #35

makomk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? They just announced that one of the main advertised features of their IM software - the secret chat functionality - was so badly broken that it was worse than not having it at all. It provided absolutely no protection against them eavesdropping on their users, yet those users were chatting under the illusion that they were secure against such eavesdropping. Worse, it seems like the Telegram developers consider t…

That's interesting, I didn't interpret the news this way. I haven't seen secret chat functionality mentioned anywhere yet - I was assuming that secret chat shouldn't be affected by these nonce messages since the secret key shouldn't touch their servers according to their documentation. Do you have any source on this?

The linked blogpost actually says that the attack is against secure chat and explains what it does, it just underplays how serious it is.

Basically, when setting up a secret chat the two parties use something called a Diffie-Hellman key exchange to agree on a secret encryption key without eavesdroppers being able to tell what the key is. However, the parties can't tell whether they've securely agreed on a key with the right person - the Telegram server could do a man-in-the-middle attack by doing the other side of the DH key exchange with each party itself so that it knows all the keys, and then decrypt log, and re-encrypt all the messages between them. The fairly standard solution Telegram uses is to allow both parties to manually check that they agreed on the same keys - with normal Diffie-Hellman, this is enough to ensure no-one has MITMed the connection. Unfortunately, their protocol is modified from normal DH in a way that makes this check useless. The server can launch a MITM attack that causes both parties to agree on the same key, so they think they've securely agreed on a key that no-one else has when the server's got a copy too and is decrypting all their messages.

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#49

Post by blahbl4hblahtoo » Sun, Dec 22, 2013, 2:27 PM UTC

Wow...Telegram. The only thing you will ever get from engaging the "public" on forums like HN is heartache. You will never get them to like you...they just aren't that in to you.

Contact people that are actually in the crypto community and go the normal route. Once their betters tell them to love you there is actually nothing that you could do to make them stop.

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#50

Post by jzwinck » Sun, Dec 22, 2013, 2:28 PM UTC

deepuj wrote: post #42

If Telegram is a non-commercial project, who is funding this bounty?

For the original "$200K" bounty, it was stated that it would be paid out in bitcoin. So it's quite possible that the person or organization funding the bounty simply has some old bitcoin laying around, and it cost them next to nothing to get it initially, and it might even be difficult for them to exchange for their preferred fiat currency today. So don't think of it as "Somebody just spent $100K," think of it as "A bitcoin speculator just traded some coins that were not worth much two years ago for something that is pretty darn valuable today."