zmanian

We are trying to encourage a very brave small town library to do something important, legal and slightly subversive.

It isn't often that signing an internet petition makes much of difference but this might be the one time.

Please send your moral support by signing the EFF's Letter.

https://act.eff.org/action/support-tor-and-intellectual-free...

Is there any information about what processors support SGX?

Establishing baselines from the users current ip address to their alibi seems like a significant challenge.

If your traffic is being routed for interception, you would only be able to detect that if you had a preexisting baseline with your alibis.

If there are enough users, we could potentially crowd source baselines for different autonomous systems to the alibi network.

What's the name of the profiling tool from the examples?

Seems to follow the pattern of fraudulent uses of the Satoshi identity

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zs564/proof_of_sa...

There are an emerging set of strategies at the local level for mitigating street level surveillance.

It consists of watching your city council agenda for consent to purchase new surveillance technology via Department of Homeland Security grant.

Use this occasion to push for a privacy policy that governs the new equipment as a condition of purchase.

Restore the Fourth SF Bay Area, Oakland Privacy et al are seeing a pattern emerge where the purchase is either delayed or the privacy policy is adopted.

It's often possible to sign up for email alerts of the agenda for city council meetings.

Textsecure has out of band fingerprint verification.

There are that are working on eliminating the need for central server for message delivery and key server roles like

https://briarproject.org/

https://github.com/muttr/whitepaper/blob/master/README.md

Out of band verification of key fingerprints is necessary to protect against a malicious server. Users are encouraged to tweet their public keys and verify in person.

We don't have any mechanism other than trusting Whisper Systems that their client binaries matches the sources.

The truly paranoid could be their own client application from source.

Most of the protocols with forward secrecy and non-deniability also require synchronous communication to agree on ephemeral keys.

Deniability is almost a nice side effect of the asynchronous design. It doesn't seem like it adds tremendous complexity unto itself.

This isn't a great post for explain the simple elegance of Axolotol. There probably needs to be one.

My favorite parts comes from combining of Diffie–Hellman operations on both long term and ephemeral keys to integrate identity verification and creation of deniable shared secret into one operation.

It's a really elegant extension of NaCL's secret box to include Perfect Forward Secrecy.

There are some things that are objectionable.

GPL licensing makes Open Whisper Systems a gate keeper to using the battle tested code base for most users. This is probably unnecessary. It isn't that hard to implement yourself giving a working curve library.

We need to better explain to developers with Ellitic Curve Crypto and Curve25519 aren't scary just because the math is a little unfamiliar and that RSA and integer field Diffie Hellman are code smell.

Is a distributed solution fundamentally hostile to deniability and forward secrecy?

Yes this is the pattern of obsf4 usage.

It makes tor traffic look like https traffic to a bridge node.

Maybe you'll be okay in the UK?

Still avoiding the UK like the plague right now...

http://www.businessinsider.com/uk-government-not-going-to-ba...

One request Keybase friends...

Can we get a forum or mailing list to discuss crypto design decisions, security etc on launch day?

Bos manages the internal tooling team at Facebook. It is little surprise that Facebook's internal tooling is acquiring a functional programming flavor.

One exciting thing about software distribution with ed25519 signatures is that when Ripple finally releases their threshold signature library for their cryptocurrency we get the ability to create public keys that express software signing policies for free!

So Bill Binney is often described as a legendary mathematician inside the NSA, have anyone ever had a technical discussion with him about things like ECC?

As a free software proponent, I've spent most of the time promoting Android to my friends.

Android(Non-Nexus) is a toxic hellstew of surveillance and security vulnerabilities.

I'm currently recommending iPhones or Nexus only to my friends.

Google could do a lot to improve this but the carrier relationship with handset manufacturers allow them to MITM the CA systems through root certs and that is god damn unacceptable.

Unless your policy is that your executives can be arrested, your assets seized and your investors pressured and still you will resist, operating out of a privacy friendly jurisdiction offers no reasonable protections to your users.

Now you can do some clever stuff like setup your software update mechanisms so that updates require a signature from a independently minded individual in a privacy friendly jurisdiction that might offer more effective user protections.

Switzerland is mostly a privacy snake oil in regards to the coercive powers of various legal authorities. Your executives, investors etc are all subject to US law. Swiss law isn't going to protect users.

Switzerland might be a reasonable place to stage civil disobedience from. Phil has credibility in that regard. Would love to see a statement from Silent Circle comparable to Least Authority's https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-October/0053...

Great analysis of the state of play on the Patriot Act

https://medium.com/@pgeddington/is-the-patriot-act-dead-not-...

What are your thoughts on prototype status of NaCL's ed25519 signatures and the updated structure used in libsodium, supercop, ed25519-donna etc....?

Should we prefer curve25519 from NaCL but stick with the finalized ed25519 construction for signatures and long term compatibility?

I believe so

Here is Nadia H's lecture at Stanford from last week. Covers the GCD batch attack and her hypothesis about where the weak RSA keys are coming from.

https://mvideos.stanford.edu/graduate#/SeminarDetail/Spring/...

Seeing the strength of google migrating all their employees to yubikeys

21 is best understood as an attempt by the VC community to break the Chinese Bitcoin mining monopoly. 21 doesn't appear to be working on Lightning Network like layer 2 technologies that would make the Bitcoin micropayments for server bandwidth viable on the blockchain. In fact as useful financial applications of on chain transactions start to materialize, even P2P payments may start to struggle to be included in blocks.

21 faces one of the most profound information security problem faced by any company. They propose to put their companies capital assets into the homes of consumers and then extract value from those assets in a manner adversarial to the consumers interests. End users/attackers can do everything from blackhole the network traffic of the device to modify the firmware to target the hashing power to a new mining pool. Virtually any weakness in the engineering has the potential to be exploited at vast scale. This should terrify them.

The Ethereum project is conceived a crypto mega project which encompases a turing complete shared state machine(blockchain), content distribution and messaging.

The goal of Frontier and the Ethereum blockchain is provide a viable host ledger for non-terminating state machine.

The Bitcoin blockchain hosts state machines but they are guaranteed to terminate. An example of this is a unspent tx output hosted in a multisig smart contract.Spending the UTXO terminates the smart contract.

Ethereum is attempting to build a ledger system where the transactions update the state of smart contract without necessarily terminating it.

Applications:

If successful the Ethereum blockchain and other users of the Ethereum Virtual Machine technology should be able host arbitrary consensus and have updates to the consensus depend on arbitrary sets of cryptographic proofs like signed transactions, votes, zero knowledge proof of votes, attestations signed by pinned keys etc.

Challenges:

1. Gas

Ethereum proposes a gas value to compensate miners who host and compute updates to the ledger state and limit abuse of their computational resources by network users.

Optimizing the gas metric which sums computer,storage and network resources is NP Complete. It is an open question how closely one must approximate the optimum to have a healthy and usable system.

2. Centralization

Ethereum faces centralizing effects around proof of work, memory burden from hosting and updating smart contracts etc. This will likely lead of conservatives about what kinds of transaction the network will accept in practice and limit use cases.

3.Security

The surface area for attacks that trigger blockchain forks is vast and its difficult to full enumerate all the potential attacks and prove security

EFF uses extensive technical and policy measures to protect member privacy. They also require the similar measures when they partner with other orgs on campaigns.

https://www.eff.org/policy

Key thoughts.

It is always important to remember that the Section 215 progam is not a significant authority under which the government conducts surveillance on US citizens. The metadata program is a little used program and the data is not co-mingled with the larger XKeyScore dataset. As a result, the IC does not fight as hard to protection Section 215 authority as it does more significant surveillance authorities.

Because the Section 215 authority is expiring, the IC has every opportunity via the Freedom Act to create stronger statutory authorities under the guise of reform. Straight expiration of the abuse 215 authority is the strongest reform message.