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February 2021

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111 discussions

bantering with punk was Re: What advantage does Signal protocol have over basic public key encryption?
by Karl 01 Feb '21

01 Feb '21

>> > So, I think your understanding of so misleadingly called 'perfect >> > forward >> > secrecy' isn't right. >> >> I don't remember the protocol really well to hold up my end here, > > this isn't only about the signal protocol but about any protocol that > advertises 'perfect forward secrecy' and uses 'public key cryptography' of > the kind that's vulnerable to attacks using 'quantum computers'. Do you mean that it is incredibly misleading to advertise cryptographic safety when there is obviously an increasing degree of unpublished research that counters it? I'm not sure what you're saying here. Wouldn't it be fine to just add a note that those are cryptographic terms, and do not technically guarantee perfect privacy in the face of time travel? >> and i don't really trust that you're relating forthrightly to revisit it >> much. > > yeah well. I think I explained the basic problem twice. You don't need to > 'trust' me but do your own research. Yeesh you removed the quote and stated you had explained it already. I don't remember what we were talking about, but it was clear that if you had done research it yielded very different information than what I see. >> does signal use diffie-helman key exchange? > > yes it does. You're the one pimping it, you shoud know. Blargh, links help here. Okay, my best memory is that you were worried about a key exchange compromise in the face of a website on how dh is dangerous. I'll look it up right now. https://weakdh.org/ is only about SSL and specifically chosen prime numbers. These are implementation errors, not compromises of the protocol or the primtiive. I vaguely recall there is something more serious regarding dh exchange, dunno. What's relevant is that signal is far better than the plain text email we are communicating over right now. It is incredibly helpful to drink not enough water when you are very thirsty. >> does it do it in a >> way that website describes as known to be vulnerable? > > > ...see your first unfounded claim about 'perfect' secrecy. DH is > 'vulnerable' to 'advances in solving the discrete log problem' bla bla. Not only that, once you research personal teleportation devices door locks become very vulnerable, too. It's not hard to make a personal teleportation device. All you need is a bunch of enslaved makerspaces, economists, physicists, and inspirational coaches. Get them to organise themselves into groups based on their skills and passions and force them to focus on inventing personal teleportation for a decade straight. Have a daily check-in where everybody debates whether or not what they are currently doing is the most effective thing they could be doing, for personal teleportation. Also I have a commodity here whose value raises more than the interest rate on loans, every three years or so, so mathematically we should be able to steal all the money from the whole planet. It's growth is reducing, but too slowly to validate physics. >> > What I think is important to understand is that signal is a >> > centralized >> > service and the owners are not to be trusted, at all. Moxie morlonpoke >> >> That's the whole point of end-to-end encryption. > > > Not sure what you mean. So called end to end encryption only encrypts > messages. It doesn't magically solve 'traffic analysis' problems. Neither does decentralisation. I was responding to your mention of centralisation. It is weird that signal uses centralised servers. Maybe to reduce development load. It's always sketchy the compromises made by communities struggling to effect change. It's possible it's just communication issues. The point is that we need an ANONYMOUS BLOCKCHAIN-BASED MESSENGER TO REPLACE SIGNAL in these times of disruption, and signal would pay anybody to contribute the backend in a way they accept ;P >> > perfectly fits the profile of 'progressive' pentagon agent. So maybe >> > the >> >> The only people who believe these people are real agents, and not just >> people secretly drugged and abused by agents, are acting more as the >> agents than they are. > > > bullshit. Yeah? Which is more productive, arguing on a list where nobody replies to what you say or making software that increases privacy? >> > 'end to end encryption' works, but signal remains a US metadata spying >> > operation, 'endorsed' by the likes of the 'ceo' of twatter. Hard to get >> > a >> > bigger red flag than that by the way. >> >> Nah it's more like a bunch of people subjected to international spying >> operations figuring out the charades work that lets them escape a >> little bit. Also, free technology for others! > > > more bullshit. Yeesh! Signal can poison our souls with technology, and dangerously reveal everything we do to the people who want to hurt us (BECAUSE IT RUNS ON A PHONE, NOT BECAUSE OF ITS PROTOCOL), without being some intentional attempt by cryptographers to harm the universe. Before signal people were using NOTHING. NO ENCRYPTION AT ALL. Some of them were using encryption where a corporation and government could freely decryption EVERYTHING, and was lying about it. SOME of them. Caps intended with love and care and embarrassment. I don't deserve to write in caps. >> >> When they say "metadata that the signal servers have >> >> access to" or "does not prevent a company from retaining information" >> >> they are talking about much smaller bits of data than people usually >> >> talk about. >> > >> > .....I think it's rather clear what 'metadata' we're talking about. >> > Signal >> > knows who talks to who and when. >> >> It doesn't sound like it's clear to you. Metadata lives in bytes that >> travel over network protocols and are analysed by algorithms. Anyway, yeah, PGP doesn't encrypt the message subjects and recipients. I don't recall the protocol well, but the way the ratchet protocol works there was a lot more possibility for encrypting per-message metadata. >> Somebody has probably upgraded the concept now that deepfakes and such >> are normal. >> > > what are you talking about Well, I don't know the cryptographic terms, but you're possibly talking about information that can be extracted from messaging by algorithms, like traffic analysis, as comparable to metadata, like the subject on an email or the location tagged on a jpeg photo. Nowadays machine learning is _way_ better at profiling stuff than just traffic analysis. With deepfakes, there is a research war between making fake media, and identifying that media is fake. That's incredibly dangerous. Both groups will split off into private research and nobody will know what is going on, a handful of people believing they do. The research should be around reducing the reasons that people make deepfakes, not around identifying them. But since we can automatically identify whether a photo has very subtle attributes that only happen in reality, while people are actively researching preventing that, we can probably identify who a person is by what kind of things were bought at stores near them, and such, too, because people trying to be anonymous do not have datacenters full of gpus researching how to stay that way.

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