Re: [liberationtech] Google Unveils Tools to Access Web From Repressive Countries | TIME.com
On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 8:00 PM, Jillian C. York jilliancy...@gmail.comwrote: Since I already have more skepticism of Google Ideas and Jared Cohen than I need, let me pose this question: With the understanding that uProxy provides no anonymity protections, *is it providing anything that other circumvention tools do not already?* What's unique about it? No anonymity protections is a bit of a stretch if anonymity includes browsing from a country that tries, but fails to snoop on your traffic. But sure, it doesn't pretend to be a cookie blocker, or Tor. uProxy, as far as I can tell, provides an easy way to use fast connections you trust. Very strong emphasis on easy and fast (i.e. noncongested.) So, you can browse securely from a coffee shop or Iran without the hassles that come with most other similar tools (difficult setup for self-hosted VPN servers, trusting a third-party provider for hosted VPN services, lacking usability/non-intuitive setup and interface for many pieces of privacy software, and very variable speed for services like Tor.) On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Dan Staples danstap...@opentechinstitute.org wrote: And keep in mind, the uProxy project doesn't seem to be trying to provide anonymity, only uncensored internet access. There are many challenges to anonymity that a simple browser plugin can't solve. Browsers are extremely easy to fingerprint, which is why Tor is now being packaged as an entire browser bundle. What I'm most curious about is how much information about the users of uProxy will be collected and analyzed by Google and shared with its partners. Dan On 10/21/2013 06:09 PM, Sacha van Geffen wrote: On 21-10-13 22:49, Nick wrote: Despite the provenence of the story, I'm still suprised there was no mention of Google's cooperation with repressive elements of its own government through PRISM and the like. Or (though this is probably far too optimistic) a mention of whether surveillance as overarching paradigm is compatible with the sort of self-representation they offer here. google is a many headed dragon, like the US government, with one head canceling out some actions of others. It is a shame that those heads are not all the same size (like DoD vs State). Still I would encourage the small heads to go on and do their work. I also wonder how anonymous it is for the relay side - whether it's really just an interface to Tor bridge nodes, and therefore the relay can't see everything their friend is up to, or if it's a straight proxy. I would guess the latter as their emphasis seems to be completely about helping people hop out of their country's repressive internet policies. Seeing the description and the involvement of brave new software I assume it is related to or a rename of Lantern, lantern is a proxy software that uses the google social graph to find access. Maybe someone from BNS could elaborate In terms of threat model it would be reasonable to trust the 'friend' in this scenario, I would be more concerned with adversary externaly observing the connections, seeing that a group of people from within country X are connecting to the same ip in country Y , thus relating those people in that group as sharing a node in a social graph, so to eachother, while they might not have seen them as related before.. Cheers, Sacha -- Dan Staples Open Technology Institute https://commotionwireless.net OpenPGP key: http://disman.tl/pgp.asc Fingerprint: 2480 095D 4B16 436F 35AB 7305 F670 74ED BD86 43A9 -- Liberationtech is public archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu. -- *Note: *I am slowly extricating myself from Gmail. Please change your address books to: jilliancy...@riseup.net or jill...@eff.org. US: +1-857-891-4244 | NL: +31-657086088 site: jilliancyork.com http://jilliancyork.com/* | * twitter: @jilliancyork* * We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality - *Vaclav Havel* -- Liberationtech is public archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu. -- Liberationtech is public archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
Re: [liberationtech] Is Dropbox opening uploaded documents?
On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 1:20 PM, Ryan Getz ry...@getzmail.com wrote: On Thursday, September 12, 2013, Joe Szilagyi wrote: Found online: http://www.wncinfosec.com/**dropbox-opening-my-docs/http://www.wncinfosec.com/dropbox-opening-my-docs/ -- Joe Szilagyi Interesting, thanks for sharing that. Has anyone else tried to reproduce these results? I'm curious what others have seen. I tried this yesterday, only with the .doc file. I haven't been able to reproduce those findings. I tested Dropbox (client and web), SugarSync (client only), and Amazon Cloud Drive (web only). 20 hours later I still don't have any buzzes. Regards, Ryan Dropbox's response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6377712 -- Liberationtech is public archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
Re: [liberationtech] World's Most Private Search Engine?
If we have learned anything from PRISM it's that words are cheap, and not complying is difficult to impossible (without shutting down your business). You should probably be using Tor regardless of which search engine you're using if you're worried about your privacy. On Aug 19, 2013 9:00 AM, LilBambi lilba...@gmail.com wrote: I have used ixquick.com and startpage.com (both from the same folks) for years. More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixquick Ixquick is a metasearch engine based in New York and the Netherlands.[2] Founded by David Bodnick in 1998, Ixquick is owned by Dutch company, Surfboard Holding BV, which acquired the internet company in 2000.[3] On July 7, 2009 Ixquick launched Startpage.com to offer a new service at a URL that is both easier to remember and spell. Startpage.com fetches its results straight from the Google search engine without saving the users' IP addresses or giving any personal user information to Google's servers. I had been using ixquick.com for quite a while when StartPage.com came out and was being promoted by Spy Chips author Katherine Albrecht and CASPIAN advocate. Startpage.com info on how it protects you: https://startpage.com/eng/prism-program-exposed.html Here's the content of that page: --snip-- No PRISM. No Surveillance. No Government Back Doors. You Have our Word on it. Giant US government Internet spying scandal revealed The Washington Post and The Guardian have revealed a US government mass Internet surveillance program code-named PRISM. They report that the NSA and the FBI have been tapping directly into the servers of nine US service providers, including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo, YouTube, AOL and Skype, and began this surveillance program at least seven years ago. (clarifying slides) These revelations are shaking up an international debate. StartPage has always been very outspoken when it comes to protecting people's Privacy and civil liberties. So it won't surprise you that we are a strong opponent of overreaching, unaccountable spy programs like PRISM. In the past, even government surveillance programs that were begun with good intentions have become tools for abuse, for example tracking civil rights and anti-war protesters. Programs like PRISM undermine our Privacy, disrupt faith in governments, and are a danger to the free Internet. StartPage and its sister search engine Ixquick have in their 14-year history never provided a single byte of user data to the US government, or any other government or agency. Not under PRISM, nor under any other program in the US, nor under any program anywhere in the world. Here's how we are different: StartPage does not store any user data. We make this perfectly clear to everyone, including any governmental agencies. We do not record the IP addresses of our users and we don't use tracking cookies, so there is literally no data about you on our servers to access. Since we don't even know who our customers are, we can't share anything with Big Brother. In fact, we've never gotten even a single request from a governmental authority to supply user data in the fourteen years we've been in business. StartPage uses encryption (HTTPS) by default. Encryption prevents snooping. Your searches are encrypted, so others can't tap the Internet connection to snoop what you're searching for. This combination of not storing data together with using strong encryption for the connections is key in protecting your Privacy. Our company is based in The Netherlands, Europe. US jurisdiction does not apply to us, at least not directly. Any request or demand from ANY government (including the US) to deliver user data, will be thoroughly checked by our lawyers, and we will not comply unless the law which actually applies to us would undeniably require it from us. And even in that hypothetical situation, we refer to our first point; we don't even have any user data to give. We will never cooperate with voluntary spying programs like PRISM. StartPage cannot be forced to start spying. Given the strong protection of the Right to Privacy in Europe, European governments cannot just start forcing service providers like us to implement a blanket spying program on their users. And if that ever changed, we would fight this to the end. Privacy. It's not just our policy, it's our mission. Sincerely, Robert E.G. Beens CEO StartPage.com and Ixquick.com --snip-- Hope that helps some Yosem. On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 2:18 PM, Yosem Companys compa...@stanford.edu wrote: RT @bytesforall: World's Most Private Search Engine http://ixquick.com/eng/. Anyone evaluated this? #Pakistan #Privacy #NetFreedom #Google @PrivacySurgeon -- Liberationtech is a public list whose archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change
Re: [liberationtech] Is spideroak really zero-knowledge?
On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 1:35 AM, Percy Alpha percyal...@gmail.com wrote: @Tom, For this amount of time your password is stored in encrypted memory but to actually use the key, the key has to be in plain-text form for sometime, during which it can be (forced to )intercepted. If they can force Lavabit to intercept users' emails, why can't they ask spideroak to secretly intercept users' moible app login? They (or somebody else) can. So don't use mobile login. Curious why the regular client logic can't run on mobile. Too intensive to decrypt metadata maybe? -- Liberationtech is a public list whose archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
Re: [liberationtech] And now for some completely different flame... Chrome + password management
On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 9:22 PM, Shava Nerad shav...@gmail.com wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6166886 Chrome security guy takes it up with the Mashable article author. Chrome guy: This is what users expect! They expect to see their passwords in plain text. You are expecting us to provide them with a false sense of security. um... alrighty then... yrs, SN He is being quite condescending, but that's not what he's saying. He's saying that masking the password would make it seem safer than it really is, i.e. that it's not as trivially obtainable by a simple piece of software. That's not an intuitive concept for users, but it's a choice the Chrome team deliberately made so as to not mislead them. This is a fine stance, and not one deserving of so much bad press. On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Kyle Maxwell ky...@xwell.org wrote: On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Patrick Mylund Nielsen cryptogra...@patrickmylund.com wrote: On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 8:56 AM, Kyle Maxwell ky...@xwell.org wrote: Must every app data store reinvent the wheel rather than use operating system functionality? Agree in theory, but do all operating systems have standard data stores that are encrypted with the user's password? They don't. Understood and point taken - but in general I'd rather point users towards better password management than the browser in any case, whether that's something like Lastpass / Keepass or something else entirely. *insert pointless rant about how passwords are a terribly broken model in the first place* -- @kylemaxwell -- Liberationtech list is public and archives are searchable on Google. Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- Shava Nerad shav...@gmail.com -- Liberationtech list is public and archives are searchable on Google. Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- Liberationtech list is public and archives are searchable on Google. Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
Re: [liberationtech] And now for some completely different flame... Chrome + password management
Encrypting the passwords with a master passphrase wouldn't be useless. At the very least it makes it harder to extract plaintext passwords from a discarded harddrive. On the other hand, a master passphrase doesn't offer nearly as much security as users think it does when they enable the feature. It doesn't make it safe to let another person use your computer, for example. (Even if the attacker is an illiterate shouldersurfer, they can download tools that trivially extract the passwords after the store has been decrypted--not to mention that there are many other ways the passwords can be compromised where it simply doesn't matter that you have a master password, or that the store is encrypted.) As you said, both sides are right, and both sides are being dicks about it. A master password gives a false sense of security, but it also defeats the most rudimentary oh let's log into his/her Facebook and post a stupid message, lol! I know how to see their passwords!. We want people to lock their screens/log out/shut down their computer when they don't use it is an respectable and beneficial position of Google to take, and I can only shake my head in response to them getting this much bad press for it. (Virtually all the press I've seen has made it sound like other browsers don't in fact store passwords in a reversible format when clearly this is necessary for the autofill/autologin feature to work at all.) On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 10:04 PM, Brian Conley bri...@smallworldnews.tvwrote: Are they being irresponsible or aren't they? http://mashable.com/2013/08/07/chrome-password-security/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link That is a serous question in interested to hear a variety of opinions on, both for and against Google's position, OK go! Spoiler alert, I think both players are being jerks and not considering the importance of outreach and how users learn... -- Liberationtech list is public and archives are searchable on Google. Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- Liberationtech list is public and archives are searchable on Google. Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
Re: [liberationtech] Convergence: does anyone use it?
On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 1:03 PM, Yan Zhu y...@mit.edu wrote: It seems to be the browser extension http://convergence.io/ that everyone talks about but nobody uses. For one, the original repository isn't actively maintained, and I found at least one unpatched issue that keeps it from working in recent Firefoxes (see https://github.com/moxie0/Convergence/issues). Is anyone running it? Thoughts on whether it's worth forking and patching? Perspectives, on the other hand, is a similar project that is quite active but seems to get less mentions: http://perspectives-project.org/ -Yan Unfortunate, since Convergence is based on the research done in the Perspectives project. Moxie deserves credit for sure, but he seems to be getting (almost) all of it. An Ubuntu-and-Debian-esque situation, if you will. Why is neither used by the masses? Because nobody changes their settings: https://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/09/07/convergence.html That's going to be a hard problem to solve. -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
Re: [liberationtech] Resources on electronic voting
On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Marcin de Kaminski mar...@dekaminski.sewrote: Dear all, Sorry to ask such a general question but I need input on the issue of electronic voting. Is there any comprehensive collection of resources or (preferably academic) research already out there? Take a look at http://www.demtech.dk/wiki/Publications -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
Re: [liberationtech] Is Most Encryption Cracked?
On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 1:54 PM, Collin Anderson col...@averysmallbird.comwrote: Wait, forgive me Libtech for amusing myself at the cost of your collective inboxes but, is it just me or is the security page on what purports to be a security tool empty? https://unsene.com/security.html Military-grade encryption, huh? That phrase always makes my spider sense tingle. From their descriptions: • AES – a symmetric key that is considered to be very strong. We’re using the 256 bit version for the free version of our site, which is the maximum bit key size for this algorithm. We believe this is broken by the NSA and we believe it’s either real time or near real time decrypt-able. • XAES – a more secure and advanced version of AES, ours goes up to 4096 bits, which is über-strong. Unlikely to be broken as this has been customized from standard code libraries that aren’t widely known. Crypto mistake #1: Our algorithm is secure because nobody knows how it works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs's_principle Cool project, but I'm highly doubtful it'll be secure. They're making some fundamental mistakes, like confusing RSA X-bits with AES X-bits, and assuming their stuff won't be broken if they don't tell anyone how it works. On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Collin Anderson col...@averysmallbird.com wrote: So, AES-128 is what they're using? Mo' money, mo' key length. *What’s the difference between the free version and the premium version?* *The free version provides 256-bit AES encryption and 2GB of free encrypted storage and allows sharing of files of up to 50MB. The premium version provides up to 1048-bit AES encryption and 50GB of encrypted storage and allows sharing of files of up to 40GB. Also, the key in the free version is pre-generated and stored on our servers, while with the premium version the user has the option to generate his own key and store it locally for even greater security. Keep in mind there is no “password recovery”, so you definitely won’t want to forget your passphrase!* On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 1:38 PM, liberationt...@lewman.us wrote: On Wed, 17 Jul 2013 10:18:44 -0700 Collin Sullivan coll...@benetech.org wrote: http://unsene.com/blog/2013/06/15/is-most-encryption-broken/ haystack called and wants its media pitch back They say AES is broken and yet, Military-grade security protects your important private messages, photos and videos, everywhere. It's so strong that we can't export it to Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and North Korea. So, AES-128 is what they're using? I believe you can only export 64-bit or less keys without a license. This entire thing is dripping in snakeoil. -- Andrew http://tpo.is/contact pgp 0x6B4D6475 -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- *Collin David Anderson* averysmallbird.com | @cda | Washington, D.C. -- *Collin David Anderson* averysmallbird.com | @cda | Washington, D.C. -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
Re: [liberationtech] Resources on electronic voting
This file is particularly interesting: https://github.com/vvk-ehk/evalimine/blob/098ff93f9f159c977d60584606a1dabce755f5f1/ivote-server/hes/vote_analyzer.py On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 9:37 AM, phryk in...@phryk.net wrote: No clue if it was already covered in this thread, but Estonia just opened up the code of their e-voting system: http://news.err.ee/politics/0233b688-b116-44c3-98ca-89a4057acad8 There's also a nice TED-Talk called E-voting without fraud: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fraud.html Cheers, phryk -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
Re: [liberationtech] DecryptoCat
If it's so easy, go ahead and produce a more secure alternative that people will use. Talking about how exceedingly easy it is in Internet forums doesn't contribute much. On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 5:55 AM, Maxim Kammerer m...@dee.su wrote: On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Michael Rogers mich...@briarproject.org wrote: Google and Mozilla wouldn't have to run competitions to find holes in their own browsers. There wouldn't be a multi-million-dollar 0day black market. You are talking about huge projects with complex design, where the architecture itself is a source of security issues. Not to mention that WebKit and Mozilla weren't engineered for security to begin with. It wouldn't be possible for the NSA (according to Snowden) to simply own the computer of any person of interest. Offtopic, but I didn't see any indication in that last paragraph of Jacob's interview that Snowden talks about exploiting computers. In general, Snowden for some reason is usually terribly vague for someone who apparently exhibits excellent command of English language (from my non-native speaker's POV). Writing secure software is much, much harder than simply writing comments, writing tests and coding defensively. This is a thread about Cryptocat. Cryptocat is a web frontend for a couple of protocols. Yes, it is that easy. -- Maxim Kammerer Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
Re: [liberationtech] DecryptoCat
Sorry, when I wrote scare normal users away from e.g. MSN, I meant scare normal users away from switching from e.g. MSN On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 12:31 PM, Patrick Mylund Nielsen cryptogra...@patrickmylund.com wrote: What I hear from you is a common idea: it is the idea is that people who don't build those systems don't have a right to voice negative or critical views. Absolutely not. If this is how I came across, I apologize. Let me try to express myself a little more clearly, and not via a phone. Your second reply resonated quite well with my underlying thoughts. When we degrade others for their criticisms by suggesting that they only get to speak if they've met some arbitrary bar for entry is dis-empowering. I know that we all do this but perhaps it isn't the best way to move forward? To be clear, the only thing I take objection to in this thread are the snarky, semi-arrogant replies that imply that e.g. Veracode's code reviews are useless, and that all the developers behind X are incompetent, while not actually providing a lot of constructive commentary. (Admittedly, I am already slightly annoyed from reading other comment threads about this same issue where the response was a fairly unanimous Omg, Cryptocat sucks! What a bunch of amateurs!, so this is more of a response to that collectively than to the comments of Maxim, specifically. That being said, I care very little for arguments from authority, unless they make sense.) There may be a language barrier, but despite being a non-native speaker myself, the comments still came across quite negatively. By no means should Cryptocat be immune to criticism--it's clear that it isn't--and there is no reason why somebody with knowledge on a subject can't comment on deficiencies, even if they don't make a competitor, or prove that they are able to. But there are several ways to do so--a few that I've seen recently in connection with Cryptocat are: 1. To turn to the developers of the software and/or contributing to the software itself, 2. By flaming the software and its authors on mailing lists and on blogs, in discussions that are most closely analogous to lol, noobs., and 3. A combination: finding vulnerabilities, informing the developers, and posting about it on blogs with added opinions that all the developers are incompetent. Obviously, I think #1 is the most useful. #3, while harsh, still is, since the vulnerabilities will inevitably be patched, whether or not you provide a solution. (Indeed, the history of responsible disclosure shows that this is often the only way to get something fixed.) #2 is entirely useless, in my opinion. So when I say if it's so easy, make a better one, I really mean why don't you switch from #2 to either #1 or #3. There obviously is a limit: where the authors of a piece of software are so incompetent, or the software is so badly written, that it should be avoided at all costs. I don't think that Nadim, et al, and Cryptocat are at or past that point, for several reasons: - They very clearly communicate that this is experimental software, that you shouldn't put your life on the line using it, and that it hasn't undergone a lot of scrutiny - Whenever there's been a new feature or new release, the main request from the authors themselves has been that people take a look at it and come to them if they see any problems. The authors recognize that they are not infallible experts on the subject. (Contrast with Silent Circle where their whole argument is that we are crypto experts and Navy SEALs, and you should trust our closed source software, but the software still has serious problems.) - Cryptocat is helping bring OTR to the masses I'm not sure if you're away but Maxim did exactly this many years ago. He wrote a system called cables: I was aware of its existence, although I'll admit I haven't used it recently. While I appreciate and recognize your description of its ease-of-use, I will say that I think most people aren't going to run a custom Linux distribution to communicate securely--and when I say most people, I mean the masses, not liberationtech. Which leads me to my main point... Usability is absolutely critical - but we're not looking to build usable software without any security - if we were, we'd all be using Facetime, Skype, GChat and so on, without any complaints. This is where your reply is in agreement with what was (granted, deeply) between the lines of my initial replies, where I continuously highlighted usability as a critical feature. I want secure software. I want something that lets me communicate with others securely. But when I, a fairly paranoid person by my own judgement, and somebody who writes cryptography and privacy software for a living, disable my Android device encryption because it doesn't let you use something other than the encryption passphrase to unlock the screen (even though it doesn't actually
Re: [liberationtech] DecryptoCat
I see a ton of people criticizing left and right, conveniently leaving out that this didn't apply to the OTR implementation. I don't see a lot of people producing more secure or as-easy-to-use alternatives, which presumably they're more than capable of. Criticizing is easy. It's okay to feel bad that you made a mistake, but you don't really have anything to answer for. You clearly stated that you shouldn't put your life on the line using cryptocat, and that not enough eyes had looked at it yet. For the open source vs. proprietary argument: Proprietary is clearly better, PR-wise at least, as long as you don't have enough eyes. Open source means nothing if you don't have more qualified good people looking at it than bad people. Virtually everyone in the history of cryptography engineering, as with software engineering in general, has made mistakes. Critics should lay off the holier-than-thou nonsense, and spend more time looking at the code so any outstanding issues can be fixed responsibly. On Sun, Jul 7, 2013 at 4:34 PM, Nadim Kobeissi na...@nadim.cc wrote: On 2013-07-07, at 2:25 PM, CodesInChaos codesinch...@gmail.com wrote: So introductory-level programming course mistakes are right out. In my experience it's quite often a really simple mistake that gets you, even when you're an experienced programmer. I'm quite afraid of simple off-by-one bug, places which I didn't fix in copypaste, basic logic mistakes etc. IMO Nadim's main mistake wasn't the actual bug, mistakes like that can happen to anybody, but it was designing a really weird API that invites mistakes. Nobody sane return decimal digits from a cryptographic PRNG. That's not what the CSPRNG does exactly, but we routed it through an all-purpose function that wields it to present types of data on demand, be it random ASCII lowercase, random ASCII uppercase, random digits, random bytes. And then I messed up and asked it to produce random digits instead of random bytes and BOOM — security disaster, end of the world etc. For the record, I feel deeply ashamed about this blunder. But I can't give up this project simply because bugs like this are bound to pop up for any project with this kind of goals and ambition, and our goals are, in my view, deeply necessary. NK For example a really basic cryptography mistake is reusing a nonce in AES-CTR. Still it happens to people experienced in both coding and cryptography. For example Tarsnap had since vulnerability for several versions, despite a competent developer. http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-18-tarsnap-critical-security-bug.html In my own programs I'm really careful about nonces and randomness, but still I wouldn't be surprised if a trivial bug slipped through in that area. Writing tests which detect such mistakes is really hard. -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
Re: [liberationtech] secure download tool - doesn't exist?!?
How do you apply to this to pages? Do you hash all their elements, or just the page? If it's the former: in what order do you do it? What if the author of a product decides to release a bug fix version? Your link will stop working, and make the software seem malicious when it's probably not. How do you handle interstitial download pages? What about 302 redirects to specific versions of a binary? Not to mention media types that are autoplayed by browser plugins. I agree that it's interesting--probably the most appealing so far, but there are many common cases in which it would not work, or its behavior would be ambiguous. You'll also take on (/ take from the author) a fairly significant maintenance burden if you want to stay up-to-date with links directly to the latest versions (which probably have severe vulnerabilities patched) -- that is, of course, assuming your target host allows linking to files with an outside Referrer header. On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 9:28 PM, Martin Uecker uec...@eecs.berkeley.eduwrote: Owen Barton o...@civicactions.com wrote: This is roughly what I was suggesting with the http header (fetching the hash with a TLS HEAD request even if the download itself is not TLS). I think this may be preferable to encoding the hash with the link, as it would work even with 3rd party links. This has weaker security properties. The user has to trust: - everybody who has access to the server - that the server has not been compromised - a CA has not been compromised - TLS is working correctly - the source of the link Compare this with self-certifying links: Having the hash in the link guarantees that you got exactly the file the link specifies. This secures an easy-to-understand and fundamental property of a link. The user only has to trust the source of the link. Martin Getting support in the browser or OS is critical, I agree - apart from the convenience factor, installing a secondary secure download tool is a catch 22 for the user. - O On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Martin Uecker uec...@eecs.berkeley.edu wrote: Jacob Appelbaum ja...@appelbaum.net wrote: ... We need a secure downloading tool, we need it to be built into every OS by default and until then, we'll have to rely on tricks to hack it - preloading certs in browsers, having a website to download it from and so on. What we need are backwards compatible self-certifying URLs or hyperlinks, e.g. something like this: a href=./mysoftware.tgz hmac=sha1:da19d18ef86f4fb8fe8b61323806ec1764f9bf00My software/a a href=./mysoftware.tgz#sha1:da19d18ef86f4fb8fe8b61323806ec1764f9bf00My software/a And something similar to specify a public key. This would need to be standardized and supported by all major browsers. Martin -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
Re: [liberationtech] Secure and Cheap Provider in Sweden or Iceland?
Sweden isn't much better when it comes to wiretapping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law. Iceland is probably a good choice. On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai lorenzo...@gmail.com wrote: Hey guys, In lieu of the recent NSA leaks, I'm going to transfer my website to a new provider in either Sweden or Iceland (because well, you never know). Griffin Boyce suggested I use moln.is, do you guys have any other suggestion? Any other kind of advice? Thanks! -- *Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai *Mashable http://www.mashable.com Junior US World Reporter lore...@mashable.com | lorenzo...@gmail.com #: (+1) 917 257 1382 Twitter: @lorenzoFB http://www.twitter.com/lorenzoFB Skype: lorenzofb8 OTR: lorenz...@jabber.ccc.de www.lorenzofb.com -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
