The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts

I get a lot of credit for the stuff that Open Whisper Systems does, but it's not all me by a long shot. Trevor Perrin, Frederic Jacobs, Christine Corbett, Tyler Reinhard, Lilia Kai, Jake McGinty, and Rhodey Orbits are the crew that really made all this work happen.

&gt;Unfortunately, if Mr. Marlinspike’s encryption scheme can be applied to imagery, then childporn collectors thank him too.<p>And there we go, highest voted comment on the article: a strawman about child pornography. Think of the keeeds

I&#x27;ve had a ton of respect for Marlinspike ever since he published sslstrip, an incredibly simple defeat of HTTPS.[1]<p>It&#x27;s a perfect demonstration of the fundamental insecurity of the web thus far. When an insecure communication mode (HTTP) is the default and perfectly ok most of the time, the browser has no idea when you are <i>supposed</i> to be operating on a secure channel (HTTPS) but have been tricked into downgrading by a man in the middle attack.<p>I can&#x27;t prove it but I believe his work is a significant factor behind the shift towards deprecating HTTP in favor of HTTPS all the time. That is the only real solution.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thoughtcrime.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;sslstrip&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thoughtcrime.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;sslstrip&#x2F;</a>

Moxie and Frederic and Christine and the rest definitely deserve a lot of credit.<p>Half of me is really happy every time I see Signal getting more popular. The other half is more like OH GOD THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW WHAT IF I MADE AN EXPLOITABLE MISTAKE BETTER RE-READ SOME CODE.<p>But seriously, you should read the code. It&#x27;s there, open for anyone to audit after all. Maybe start somewhere random in the guts [1][2][3] and check for things like &quot;ereh 2# roodkcab&quot;?<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WhisperSystems&#x2F;Signal-iOS&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;Signal&#x2F;src&#x2F;network&#x2F;rtp&#x2F;zrtp&#x2F;ZrtpResponder.m" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WhisperSystems&#x2F;Signal-iOS&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;Sig...</a><p>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WhisperSystems&#x2F;Signal-iOS&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;Signal&#x2F;src&#x2F;crypto&#x2F;EvpSymetricUtil.m" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WhisperSystems&#x2F;Signal-iOS&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;Sig...</a><p>3: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WhisperSystems&#x2F;Signal-iOS&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;Signal&#x2F;src&#x2F;textsecure&#x2F;Util&#x2F;Cryptography.m" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WhisperSystems&#x2F;Signal-iOS&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;Sig...</a>

The sailing documentary they briefly mention in the article is called Hold Fast. If there are any HN readers that are into sailing I highly recommend it.<p>You can watch it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;15351476" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;15351476</a>

Interesting quotes:<p>&gt; President Barack Obama called [protected-messaging apps] “a problem.”<p>but<p>&gt; Encrypted messaging was viewed [by the U.S. State Department] as a way for dissidents to get around repressive regimes. With help from Mr. Schuler, Radio Free Asia’s Open Technology Fund, which is funded by the government and has a relationship with the State Department, granted Mr. Marlinspike more than $1.3 million between 2013 and 2014, according to the fund’s website.

Great article, not paywalled.<p>Here&#x27;s the thing that Moxie recognizes, that many other programs don&#x27;t (in any domain):<p><pre><code> He says he wants to build simple, “frictionless” apps, adopting a Silicon Valley buzzword for “easy to use.”</code></pre>

Interesting article and interesting guy. I like the work he and his team does on these apps. Unfortunately, they typically run on the type of endpoints that everyone from script kiddies with money to High Strength Attackers can hit. Usually alongside apps not as strong as theirs on TCB&#x27;s that can at best be described as insecure foundations.<p>I recommend against such apps and platforms for anything other than stopping the riff raff. That&#x27;s what I use them for. I pointed out the difference between secure code and secure systems in this [1] writeup. Shared much of my framework for analyzing or designing-in security in the process. The TCB of most solutions today is ridiculous: people are building on foundations of quicksand. There&#x27;s only a few exceptions I&#x27;ve seen such as GenodeOS (architecturally) or Markus Ottela&#x27;s Tinfoil Chat. Markus has been unusually alert to our concerns and updated his app appropriately even for covert, channel suppression. Quick question: which of the many crypto apps on the market can deliver a covert channel analysis to you at app and system level? Answer: few to none despite it&#x27;s importance over decades with a rediscovery in past 5+ years in mainstream security.<p>Strong security is hard. Moxie seems awesome as a coder and good to great in both crypto and OPSEC. Thing is, his offerings break the decades old rule of having a strong TCB. Just like most of the rest. It&#x27;s why they&#x27;re usually bypassed or broken by strong attackers. Gotta do the whole thing with concern for each aspect of the system. TFC is a clever cheat on that even more than my MILS scheme with a KVM and a highly-assured guard. If you don&#x27;t cheat around it, you better do it right or your users will suffer the consequences. Those <i>trying</i> to contain vulnerabilities of mainstream OS&#x27;s and components with any success are expending literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of labor per year. It&#x27;s why I push for clean-slate, hardware and software platforms like DARPA and NSF have been funding recently (eg SAFE, CHERI processors). Alternatives using COTS tech are pretty complex and most users will probably fail to secure them to be honest.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schneier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;essay_on_fbi-ma.html#c1102869" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schneier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;essay_on_fbi-...</a>

I still can&#x27;t get over Moxie wanting Google and Apple and Microsoft to be gatekeepers of what you can and can&#x27;t do with your device and calling sideloading &quot;that old broken desktop security model&quot;.<p>I admire your work Moxie, but sadly we stand on different sides of war on general purpose computing. I can&#x27;t help but be saddened that &quot;the other side&quot; got someone so talented and dedicated.

Didn&#x27;t TextSecure stop encrypting SMS a while back? If you lose data connectivity you&#x27;re sending in the clear, right?

Sweet article! The movie about Moxie fixing up and sailing a boat was actually was super fun to watch! I&#x27;m feeling grateful the comments section hasn&#x27;t turned into a massive argument over TextSecure dropping SMS support like the whisper systems mailing list alwayssss is...

Moxie gave a great high-level talk on cryptography and Open Whisper Systems at Webstock this year too, for anyone that&#x27;s interested: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;124887048" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;124887048</a>

I was a great fan of TextSecure until a few days ago. I had encouraged a bunch of friends to install it. One of them couldn&#x27;t get rid of a notification from TextSecure about an unread message despite there being none, and eventually they uninstalled it. Then, for the next 4 months TextSecure blackholed every message I sent this friend without warning either them or me. They never received a single message from me. After discovering that I uninstalled it.

Not that I really want to steal any of Moxie&#x27;s thunder, but if you&#x27;re reading this comment thread you might also be interested in SC4:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Spark-Innovations&#x2F;SC4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Spark-Innovations&#x2F;SC4</a><p>Strong encryption that runs in a browser. Recently completed its first security audit.

Kudos to moxie and team for their work and their example of positively enabling others to speak freely, for inspiring others to build better alternatives, and for being the change they wish to see in the world.<p>Also wanted to share one of the most provocative moxie-isms I&#x27;ve heard in recent years from him, in reference to WL:<p>&quot;What about the truth has helped you?&quot;

So it looks like I might have understood something wrong regarding TextSecure.<p>Installed it, used it, uninstalled it.<p>Years later, a contact asks me that he &quot;saw me in TextSecure&quot;, sent me a message.<p>Obviously, I didn&#x27;t get that message.<p>Why - o why - was&#x2F;is TextSecure pretending to not know about metadata when it does? Why could that happen? Moxie?

Note that Open Whisper Systems is hiring: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9813309" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9813309</a>.

Address book based social networks are nice to get a bit of bootstrapping, but becomes pretty bad when you want to add someone as a text secure contact, or you want to run a version without using SMS gateways. It gets pretty complicated pretty fast compared to &#x27;what is your username&#x27;.<p>I hope text secure gets usernames one day that you can associate with phone numbers &amp; emails.<p>The web-browser version is a good development, it shows that desktop and multi-device versions are on the way.

It&#x27;s awesome seeing so many privacy and secure messaging apps spring up. The tough part is getting people to use them. I&#x27;ve been using Wickr (I know the black box arguments, but they have a reasonable bounty in place) and it doesn&#x27;t require number, contact info or addy. The phone call feature of Signal sounds interesting so I&#x27;ll check it out.

I tried installing TextSecure recently but it wouldn&#x27;t work without the Google Play services.<p>I hadn&#x27;t herd of their new app Signal. Has anyone tried it? I&#x27;m really interested in hearing anyone&#x27;s experience using it.<p>BTW, I ended up installing Telegram ...and it may be mere co-incidence, but I started noticing some weird things happening that I&#x27;ve never seen before. I connect to the internet exclusively via tethering to my phone and while tethered I started seeing messages in Firefox from my desktop machine giving warnings that were something like &quot;Could not establish secure connection because the server supports a higher version of TLS&quot;. My guess is that it was some sort of MITM attack... and I was possibly targeted due to the traffic to Telegram servers.<p>One other thing regarding Telegram: I really don&#x27;t like that it reads my contact list and uploads it to their server to check if my contacts have a Telegram account. I&#x27;ve blocked the permission for now.

I already knew this would be an article about Moxie before clicking the link.

Thank god this man exists.

Where&#x27;s the authentication process in TextSegure? Totally MITM&#x27;able. Not secure at all.

Obama&#x27;s &quot;problem&quot; is a &quot;solution&quot;.

There is not any evidence of encryption on WhatsApp, source code is closed so you can never be safe.

I am thinking about why encryption was only used by the military in the first place, back when the infamous Bell monopoly on phone service existed. I think cracking encryption was one of the reasons computers was created in the first place, right?

This guy is not part of the solution. He is part of the problem. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;posts&#x2F;security-notice-textsecure&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;posts&#x2F;security-notice-textsecure&#x2F;</a>