In your message, you wrote: >1. I have to *run* it to get the hash of the application from the help >page. That is already a leap of faith to run unverified code.
Good point. A counterfeit copy of the page might lead to a different server, and the help page thus obtained would display a different code which, of course, would check out all right. Both the active code and the help page come via TLS, but maybe this is not enough. In any case, this would be just about the same risk that anyone incurs when loading any page via https, so almost every crypto app out there would have the same security flaw.This is why I added the video verification, anyway. It's a lot harder to fake a video. >2. I have to verify the hash code with a spoken message in a youtube >video. The message is spoken by someone I've never met, so how do I >verify that it is you who's saying it and not an actor hired by a spooky >agency? Or just dubbed with a new audio score. Hollowood can do that >without a blink. I'm not Justin Bieber (thank God) and there's nothing I can do about that. But maybe someone in this forum knows a privacy-conscious celebrity who could be persuaded to do the reading. It should be possible to find one. Actors are into all kinds of causes these days... Concerning faking a video. Sure, it can be done too, but mere dubbing won't work because you have to sync the lips. Chopping the video into little pieces and reassembling it to make a different code won't be easy to pull off, either, especially with background music to serve as a sort of "tamper-evident paper". I'd like to see more discussion on this. >3. How can I validate that the youtube url is correct? They are all >gibberish to me. Again could be a fake by some adversary. This mail was >not encrypted and validated. Well, the URL leads to me (or a famous actor, in the future ;-) reading the hash for a particular version. If the guy in the video says something else, you know you don't have the right video. I think videos have great potential for authentication, since they are so much richer, and harder to fake, than a mere piece of text. >> There?s no legal action that can shut down PassLok because it consist of > >pure code, and pure code is speech, protected from government >> interference under the 1^st amendment to the US Constitution. >Theoretically you are correct. In practice, we've seen the value of your >US constitution... Lavabit and Silent Mail have shut down due to legal challenges rooted in US law. The same laws cannot be used to force a website (or many websites, for there should be mirrors) to stop delivering a certain document, unless it is pornographic or hate speech, because of the 1st Amendment. So far, free speech has been quite successfully protected in the USA. Thanks! -- Francisco Ruiz Associate Professor MMAE department Illinois Institute of Technology PL13lok=WsH3zTgZn8V3hnIqjdbfPus+5YF5n+LBRPuH9USMMp8izPv+hsLoZKv+jaCFMapJFfiA11Q9yJU1K1Wo0TbjXK/=PL13lok get the PassLok privacy app at: http://passlok.com
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