From freeaiweiwei@yahoo.ca Fri Jul 6 02:35:36 2018 From: Ai Weiwei To: cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org Subject: [cryptography] OTR and deniability Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2018 02:35:36 +0000 Message-ID: <172289083979.3849117.13732835496871993131.generated@mail.pglaf.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============6458800832468678946==" --===============6458800832468678946== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hello list, Recently, Wired published material on their website which are claimed to be l= ogs of instant message conversations between Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo = in that infamous case. [1] I have only casually skimmed them, but did notice = the following two lines: (12:24:15 PM) bradass87 has not been authenticated yet. You should authen= ticate this buddy. (12:24:15 PM) Unverified conversation with bradass87 started. I'm sure most of you will be familiar; this is evidence that a technology kno= wn as Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) [2] was used in the course of these alle= ged conversations. I apologize if this is off topic or seems trivial, but I think a public discu= ssion of the merits (or lack thereof) of these alleged "logs" from a technica= l perspective would be interesting. The exact implications of the technology = may not be very well known beyond this list. I have carbon copied this messag= e to the defense in the case accordingly. If I understand correctly, OTR provides deniability, which means that these a= lleged "logs" cannot be proven authentic. In fact, the OTR software is distri= buted with program code which makes falsifying such "logs" trivial. Is this c= orrect? On a related note, a strange message to Hacker News at about that time [3] se= ems to now have found a context. Not to mention talk of "compromised" PGP key= s: the prosecution witness created a new key pair June 2, 2010 (after 6 month= s with no keys for that email address -- why precisely then?), and replaced t= hese a day less than one month later -- citing "previous key physically compr= omised." [4] Note the arrest in the case occurred in between these two events= , with encrypted emails purportedly having been received in the meantime: [5] "Lamo told me that Manning first emailed him on May 20 ..." What do you think? First the prosecution witness turns out less than credible= , [6] now the key piece of evidence is mathematically provably useless... [1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/manning-lamo-logs/ [2] http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ [3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3D1410158 [4] http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=3Dadrian+lamo&op=3Dvindex&fing= erprint=3Don [5] http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/18/wikileaks [6] http://www.google.com/search?q=3Dlamo+drugs _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- --=20 Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE --===============6458800832468678946==--