Keybase.io

Cryptoparty Marseille cryptomars at cryptoparty.fr
Tue Jun 24 23:16:50 PDT 2014


On 24/06/2014 14:15, Cathal Garvey wrote:
>> So, as I told, a little bit of paranoya is good, and this "feature" 
>> makes me believe a little less in Keybase, unfortunatelly. The main 
>> idea is pretty good and I'm trying to implement this culture in
>> Brazil for a long time, but I use to say that ordinary people don't
>> like computers: they like Skype, Facebook, Instragam... So, people
>> don't care about privacy. If the same people see that movie about
>> Asange, or read his book, or see the last news about privacy and
>> Google and start to learn about cryptography, they will store private
>> keys with lame passwords, and we'll have this fraudulent
>> cert risc.
> I'm not against cloud-keys as long as they're encrypted, and I've
> thought of services that make use of cloud-stored keys in the past. But
> the critical ingredient to getting this right is CPU/RAM-hard key
> generating functions to make "bad" passwords "barely acceptable", and
> "userland" code that rejects stupid passwords entirely.
> Of course, hackers will be able to circumvent
> shitty-password-restrictions, but we hope that the band of people
> competent enough to circumvent password quality checks yet stupid enough
> to use a bad password is small.
>
> The problem with Keybase is that the infrastructure they're based upon,
> PGP/GPG, is probably not using modern key generation algorithms by
> default for symmetric encryption of keys.
What do you mean by that precisely?
I don't think PGP/GPG/OpenPGP is meant to encrypt private keys on
servers. In what way OpenPG or GnuPG would be linked with keybase.io
private key encryption scheme or algorithms choice? I don't know
everything about OpenPGP standard but I'm pretty sure it doesn't deal
with such things.
>  So, how many keys are
> encrypted using key algos that are easily cracked? If they were using
> hard keygen algos, then even bad-but-not-terrible passwords would be
> not-entirely-trivial to crack. But keybase can't even enforce that,
> because the PGP infrastructure is too legacy-laden.
Again, what has PGP/GPG/OpenPGP to do with keybase.io good or bad
choices (you don't seem to know anything about that either by the way
:-) regarding encryption of secrets on their servers? I don't get it.
>
> On 24/06/14 12:57, MrBiTs wrote:
>> On 06/24/2014 08:28 AM, Cathal Garvey wrote:
>>> Wait, do you *have* to keep your private keys in keybase? I
>>> thought it was mostly pubkey operations?
>>> I'm much more skeptical if they keep private keys, that's dark 
>>> stuff. Imagine how many private keys are protected with terrible 
>>> passwords, and what damage you could do to the WOT if you could 
>>> just quietly crack enough keys in the WOT and use them to sign a 
>>> fraudulent cert?
>>
>> You don't HAVE to, but they give this possibility. You can (if you 
>> want) store your private key in Keybase. They ask you to cypher your 
>> private key locally and send it to Keybase's servers. If you don't 
>> store your private key in its databases, you are unable to use some 
>> online services they offer, like to sign documents. You only will be 
>> able to do that using his NodeJS tool. But, your point is my point.
>> I believe serious security professionals or people that understand
>> the importance of cryptography first don't will send the private keys
>> for Keybase and, second, if they do, they will use a strong password.
>> We never must forget http://xkcd.com/936/
>>
>> But, we know average people uses very weak passwords and only one 
>> password for everything. So, as I told, a little bit of paranoya is 
>> good, and this "feature" makes me believe a little less in Keybase, 
>> unfortunatelly. The main idea is pretty good and I'm trying to 
>> implement this culture in Brazil for a long time, but I use to say 
>> that ordinary people don't like computers: they like Skype,
>> Facebook, Instragam... So, people don't care about privacy. If the
>> same people see that movie about Asange, or read his book, or see the
>> last news about privacy and Google and start to learn about
>> cryptography, they will store private keys with lame passwords, and
>> we'll have this fraudulent cert risc.
>>
>> In my opinion, nothing will replace a good key signature party, 
>> anyway.
>>
>>
Pontifex
www.cryptoparty.fr

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