Facebook Messenger begins testing end-to-end encryption using Signal Protocol

Re:Facebook Messenger begins testing end-to-end encryption u... by tptacek on Friday July 08, 2016 @11:23AM (#12056152)

Cyph's solution for this, last I saw it, is a Rube Goldberg machine of rolling HPKP pins used in attempt to keep the application from reloading itself from its own servers. It's incredibly complicated. And no matter how much asm.js you use, it's still crypto running in a browser instance. There are other very significant problems with browser crypto --- problems that even affect Chrome Applications.

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Re:Facebook Messenger begins testing end-to-end encryption u... by eganist on Friday July 08, 2016 @11:29AM (#12056190)

You and I+Cure53+others will probably always disagree on this topic since you've always been the primary catalyst for dissent on this, but it's not at all complicated nor deserving of the analogy to a Rube Goldberg machine.

It's been well vetted enough. It might be a hack, but it's a sufficiently effective hack. We can agree to disagree :)

You coming to either Black Hat or DEF CON? Let me at least connect the two of you after the AppSec Glory talk.

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Re:Facebook Messenger begins testing end-to-end encryption u... by tptacek on Friday July 08, 2016 @11:32AM (#12056222)

I can't tell if you're talking about browser crypto (in which case my perspective is shared by a large number of crypto engineers) or Cyph's weird caching scheme, in which case a couple people from Cure53 are the only ones who have ever tried to evaluate it.

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Re:Facebook Messenger begins testing end-to-end encryption u... by buu700 on Friday July 08, 2016 @11:42AM (#12056289)

I think he was only (or mostly) talking about the latter, which I would agree isn't very complicated at all (it's just deleting and regenerating keys/certs on an interval).

As to the former, are you referring to specific known side channel attacks against asm.js/wasm, or just the usual XSS risk?

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Re:Facebook Messenger begins testing end-to-end encryption u... by tptacek on Friday July 08, 2016 @11:46AM (#12056321)

One would hope that the founder of the company trying to bring that weird secure caching attempt to market would believe that it wasn't very complicated. :)

Of course, if you've filed for patents on this, as was suggested upthread, that somewhat cuts against that argument, doesn't it?

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Re:Facebook Messenger begins testing end-to-end encryption u... by buu700 on Friday July 08, 2016 @11:57AM (#12056427)

lol, I'm definitely biased given that I'm long since familiar with the idea and wrote the implementation, but I think it's more conceptually counterintuitive/clever/weird than it is actually complicated in terms of having many moving parts.

WebSign does have a patent pending on it (I think it's fair enough to say that the whole system of accomplishing in-browser code signing this way was non-obvious), but HPKP Suicide itself doesn't. Bryant (eganist) and I are actually disclosing and open sourcing implementations of a few non-code-signing applications of HPKP Suicide at Black Hat and DEF CON next month.

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Re:Facebook Messenger begins testing end-to-end encryption u... by cyphar on Saturday July 09, 2016 @09:36AM (#12061255)

> WebSign does have a patent pending on it (I think it's fair enough to say that the whole system of accomplishing in-browser code signing this way was non-obvious),

Yay, another technology to boycott entirely.

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