Re:iMessage's 'End-To-End' Encryption Hardly Better Than TLS
by r00fus on Saturday August 13, 2016 @11:27AM
(#12281808)
The article suggests to replace iMessage with Signal protocol but fails to describe exactly how Signal is better.
If that's the "fix" you can see why it hasn't been done and we instead have several mitigations instead.
Re:iMessage's 'End-To-End' Encryption Hardly Better Than TLS
by hannob on Saturday August 13, 2016 @01:21PM
(#12282212)
The article explains in great length what the problem of iMessage is. It has no forward secrecy and uses no authenticated encryption. Signal does both.
The flaw Matthew Green's team found is precisely due to the fact that iMessage is not using authenticated encryption (as are tons of other crypto flaws). As said: They added some band aid, they have not fixed the problem.
Re:iMessage's 'End-To-End' Encryption Hardly Better Than TLS
by ejcx on Saturday August 13, 2016 @01:33PM
(#12282262)
Signal would be an improvement, but the status of signal as open source, and the details of what you get security wise is not very transparent with all of these new "signal integrations" that open whisper is doing.
Signal is definitely moving things in the right direction but I wish there was more research in this "signal integration" space. Do you know of any research here?
The underlying problems have not been fixed. They added some band aids to prevent the specific attack Green found, yet the protocol is still a big mess, an ad-hoc design that is doing a couple of things that every cryptographer who knows a thing about modern crypto designs knows to avoid.