Re: Harvard and MIT Students Launch ‘NSA-Proof’ Email Service | Betabeat

[Anthony Martin]

[image: Inline image 1]
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20140527.png


On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 5:13 AM, Cathal Garvey <cathalgarvey at cathalgarvey.me
> wrote:

> > lavaboom.com and protonmail.ch both appear deliver you their
> > code (javascript) on the fly to run in your browser. Yeah, that's
> > secure.
>
> I have long thought that it's high time to implement JS code signing
> that can be verified by the client, either innately or through an
> extension.
>
> A quick addition to the comment-metadata system devised to provide
> licensing information (and parsed by an FSF extension to inform you
> whether the code your browser is running is libre or not) could be used
> for this purpose; what's left, then, is to establish a way to translate
> code signatures into trust.
>
> For a monolithic system like a zero-knowledge email host, that's easy;
> when you sign up, you install their pubkey into your extension,
> preventing MITM attacks on the JS payload. At best, that's an additional
> layer over SSL, or it could be used instead of SSL (a crypto-AJAX engine
> run in browser for sending and receiving data; could be handy for shared
> hosting where SSL isn't an option).
>
> However, it falls down vs. NSLs, etcetera, because hosts can be
> compelled to send you malware signed with their keys. You need
> trustworthy third parties who can sign and verify that code is shipped
> intact. It'd be nice if you could hack a system like this to use the PGP
> web of trust as a first port of call, and then to fall back to a wider
> set of "trusted" people if that fails.
>
> As a way to further enhance security, having people with these
> extensions installed send hashes of the JS payloads they receive to a
> comparison server would be nice. Might even detect some attacks that fly
> under the radar at present, like people being sent tailored-attack
> versions of major third-party libs like JQuery, etcetera. When an
> anomalous hash arrives that doesn't match any "official" releases of the
> lib, alarm bells should ring.
>
> On 27/05/14 05:27, grarpamp wrote:
> > On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 11:05 AM, Kelly J. Rose <iam at kjro.se> wrote:
> >> Which is totally subverted if you are American citizens or located in
> the
> >> us. Simply by the national security letters.
> >>
> >> You could have the sexiest cryptosystem ever and the NSL attack will
> still
> >> beat you if you put it on American soil.
> >
> > If you operate a machine upon which plaintext 'email' for users
> transits/sits
> > on their behalf, you will still be subverted and beaten (literally or
> > not)... either
> > remotely by cooperative agreements (or simply giving), or your own local
> > mitm, [extra]legal force major, etc. The only way out of the mess is
> either:
> > a) basically start street protesting to change global law and practice
> > and somehow manage to create utopia.
> > b) defend in depth and bury all user messaging within secure p2p darknet
> > overlay networks where only Alice and Bob are parties to the plaintext
> content.
> > And the code you run to get on it is developed and audited by separate
> > groups, be they well known nyms on such nets, or real world.
> >
> > Any proposed messaging system that is centralized, not pay anonymous,
> > not open, works by you giving up key material you shouldn't, or you
> needing
> > to demandload their code instead of running your own trusted copy...
> isn't
> > worth your time. Otherwise stick with plain old email, text, and whatever
> > the fad of the day is. And don't try to call either of them secure.
> >
> >> This kind of problem should be tackled by some honest idealists from
> either China, Russia
> >
> > Yet people applaud eliminating such idealists, even eg:
> > Iraq, Iran, Cuba, DPRK, Venezuela, Israel, etc.
> > Keep on wiping out your only counter voices and you'll
> > get what you asked for next. None of these suggested places/people
> > are immune either, only alternatively 'hard'[er] under some
> > given threat models.
> >
> > lavaboom.com and protonmail.ch both appear deliver you their
> > code (javascript) on the fly to run in your browser. Yeah, that's
> > secure.
> >
>
> --
> T: @onetruecathal, @IndieBBDNA
> P: +353876363185
> W: http://indiebiotech.com
>
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