magikarp

> There's no real controversy or drama here. There's just one guy who is very vocal.

Isn't that how tech-centered controversies work? Especially in cryptography.

Fantastic work, Chris! It's really great to see that ChatSecure has such an ambitious roadmap.

Well, it is a client-side encryption app. If the encryption, public key authentication, etc. is being done well on the client, then the server's only purpose should be routing garbled ciphertext between users and managing things like login, etc.

The majority of Telegram's source code seems to be released as free software: https://telegram.org/apps (scroll down)

What about the Surface Pro 3?

Fingerprints are for verifying your own identity in the group chat context. They confirm your own identity to others.

It's hard for new users to understand this — the blog post mentions that Cryptocat is trying to make cryptographic authentication less confusing.

> (HN is a YC marketing arm, he runs the website and can do whatever he wants, etc, etc).

HN is much more than a marketing arm — it's one of the most central forums for programmer discussions today. And this makes it YC's responsibility to treat it as such.

What PG is saying is that HN can be used to criticize anyone except companies backed by YC. That's unacceptable.

Everything you've said in your comment is good advice. Once the paper I've mentioned is ready, we will have this kind of implementation.

A Chinese spy manages to steal the last 50MB of the Lisp program governing U.S. missile launches. Fortunately, it was all closing parentheses.

It's true that we don't have a research paper per se for the multiparty protocol, but we do have a specification document [1] as well as implementations in Objective-C, Java and JavaScript. The specification, as well as the implementations, have received both professional audits (from cryptographers) as well as community audits. The reason we don't have a research paper published is simply because we're working on one right now — a redesign of the multiparty protocol based on OTR. We have cryptographers on board from various Canadian universities and are organizing an internal forum to get them to collaborate on this. We expect publishable results by June 2014.

Regarding OTR, we actually switched to that 16 months ago — it's not exactly like we recently wisened up.

[1] https://github.com/cryptocat/cryptocat/wiki/Multiparty-Proto...

nadim@crypto.cat

I'd gladly accept your help with improving our Catalan translations! :-)

Yup! I'm leaving for D.C. tomorrow and will be at that hackathon. Please come and help!

Thank you very much for that comment.

I believe that we've been truly open source, transparent and accountable for our code since day one. There are other projects who are currently similarly open and transparent (I respect TextSecure for this,) but I can't say this is the standard in this field.

We've always solicited and compensated feedback from security enthusiasts, hobbyists and world-famous cryptographers alike. Over the past year, we've had the opportunity to grow into a product that examined what is fundamentally responsibly possible in the browser, and we've even landed ourselves as a primary use-case for the W3C's Web Cryptography working group. We've produced a true, responsible alternative for people who just don't know how to use anything more complicated than Facebook Chat, and we've made it clear that we are not trying to replace PGP or other iron-clad 30-year old solutions. We're trying to help mom and pop users.

Regarding our past vulnerabilities, I can't think of a fuller disclosure than dedicating an entire talk to detailing every single one of them: https://blog.crypto.cat/2013/11/documenting-and-presenting-v...

We also carried out a study to verify whether users were indeed clicking on the security warnings on our website: https://blog.crypto.cat/2013/11/yes-cryptocat-users-are-read...

We want to do things right. We are truly open source, truly honest, transparent and we take immediate steps for mitigation every time. We will continue to solicit audits and feedback for our more experimental browser client, but also hope to have a more grounded product in our upcoming Objective-C (iPhone) and Java (Android) apps.

Overcoming a bad reputation is extremely more difficult than keeping a good one. We have been less lucky than other projects. The fact that we used experimental platforms and coupled that with overly loud disclosure of all the failures those platforms lended us meant that we couldn't keep face as easily as other projects.

But that said, I can't but resent the continued accusation that after three years at this, myself and all other volunteers (a wide range) working on this haven't matured enough to know what we're doing, and haven't proven that we care very much to do it right. It's very relieving to hear that the community at HN can understand this and see that we have been proceeding responsibly for quite some time now.

> How do you manage to afford to finance the audits and bug bounties?

Public donations from our website and funding from public institutions and NGOs. Currently, our audits are funded by the Open Technology Fund: https://www.opentechfund.org

Generally, our funding tends to be very limited though, so sometimes we have to ask someone to do an audit for cheaper than they usually would, seeing as we're an open source project with no source of revenue.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, we have no funding for bug bounties. I pay all bug bounties out of my own pocket. I don't mind, I feel the money is very well-spent.

Good luck with your startup!

Derp. Fixed. Thanks!

Cryptocat's website and the Cryptocat app itself are both fully translated into Catalan, and we maintain a very communicative and open relationship with PuntCAT.

I like to think that the Cryptocat team and myself have matured beyond the point where we consider security disclosures to be punishment, but rather something to be expected when handling a project that wields experimental technology. We're trying to be adults by adopting principles of full disclosure, mitigation, transparency, public involvement, and making sure our process is tweaked to prevent the repetition of past mistakes.

There are currently three Cryptocat clients:

* Cryptocat: The original client. It's a signed browser extension that you download and install in your browser. It offers OTR implemented in JavaScript in a friendly chat interface. We take every precaution to make JavaScript more secure, such as using a signed browser extension to prevent code delivery MITM, using native cryptographically secure random number generation, and so on. More info on our JavaScript approach at my personal blog: http://log.nadim.cc/?p=33

* Cryptocat for iPhone: No JavaScript here! This is an app written in Cocoa Touch/Objective-C that implements OTR and our multiparty group chat protocol. It's really quite a simple app compared to what we had to do to put encrypted chat in the browser. It's new and needs review! Find bugs! Help a cool open source project! We'll send you rewards!

* Cryptocat for Android: No JavaScript here! This is an app written in Java that implements OTR and our multiparty group chat protocol. It's really quite a simple app compared to what we had to do to put encrypted chat in the browser. It's new and needs review! Find bugs! Help a cool open source project! We'll send you rewards!

All three clients are made to be 100% inter-operable.

Cryptocat for Android is particularly unfinished so far. I would be surprised if you don't find bugs inside. Cryptocat for iPhone is currently a lot more mature, but similarly still needs peer review.

We have a commissioned audit for both apps, but it won't be starting for another two weeks. Thanks SO MUCH for your interest. We rely on security enthusiasts for comments and advice.

From my perspective, we've been taking security seriously a year+. Our first commissioned audit was in November 2012, and we've had a bug bounty since then as well: https://crypto.cat/bughunt/

This isn't, of course, to say that there haven't been vulnerabilities. But I have to stand behind our mitigation and disclosure policy as being very highly responsible and transparent.

So far, we've had three paid audits, with two more lined up, and regularly reward community bug-finders. We're planning more competitions for Cryptocat Mobile in March and April, with prizes such as iPhones and Nexus Phones. :-)

Cryptocat's private chat uses OTR. Our group chat function uses an open and studied multiparty protocol. Generally, our security bugs have been implementation errors much more than protocol design errors.

Surely, the best we can do as a community project is open up our code for more volunteers and experts to help and take a look. :-)

Well, everything is automatically encrypted, you can make (encrypted) backups, and you can also save your (encrypted) data to Dropbox. These provide some redundancy for your password db.

The aim is simply to have your notes at hand, and then you just press ⌘3 to switch to your passwords if you need to generate a new one or login to some website.

(By the way, thanks for checking out my app!)

Why hasn't anyone considered that David Miranda's detention could have been orchestrated in order to radicalize Glenn Greenwald, to bring him to "full froth", so to speak? Make him angry, make it personal by abusing his husband, so that his reporting becomes more emotional to the point where he starts risking his legitimacy and moral authority as a journalist. Something very similar happened with WikiLeaks.

I know Glenn and I'm certain he's smarter than this, but this is an explanation I've had in my head since day one and everyone seems to have missed. And, at least for the first couple of days, Glenn certainly did appear quite frustrated and did say he'll publish more aggressively. But isn't acting like this playing into their hands, by giving up his legitimacy as an impartial journalist? He must not allow them to make it a personal fight between him and the NSA.

Everything about this story, right down to the questions, agents involved, luggage inspections and the man's apartment being broken into and searched, fits very well with my own experiences in 2012 with entering the United States. I'm a recent Lebanese immigrant to Canada, male, in my early twenties, and to top it off I work on encryption software. I imagine the only worse thing I could be is an Iranian nuclear scientist.

I was asked questions ranging from whether I am affiliated with Hezbollah to why I was developing encryption software (and one time there was even a technician who asked me about its technical aspects), and specifically detained for questioning more times than I can count.

I was never refused entry, but I just wanted to attest that this man's story is completely credible to me, right down to the fine details he describes.

Possibly an interesting side-story for HN folks: By astronomical coincidence, I bumped into David Petraeus at a strange social event in D.C., after being harassed at the border every single time, and told him conversationally, casually, about my background and what I work on, just to see how he would react, if his reaction would line up with the knee-jerk reaction at the border. He smiled, raised a glass of champagne, and said, "cheers."

This project really needs at least one shred of documentation.

I feel this is something that many a [insert security software in which critical bug was recently found here] has gone through. We've been following full disclosure principles and fixing bugs as they come for the past couple of years. It's really unfortunate that the comments tend to be so dismissive and personal — a quick look at our codebase or blog shows a serious and professional effort. That said, we definitely mess up.

Whether Cryptocat programmers suck or not, I've seen worse errors from better programmers. I'm not sure what's the metric to follow here when it comes to correlating these two items.

As the lead developer for Cryptocat, I must say this is really a great example of how to write a post-mortem for a security bug. Sophos bloggers are always worth reading.