Re:Introducing Keybase Chat
by oconnor663 on Thursday February 09, 2017 @12:38PM
(#13608905)
To be clear, all of Keybase's client-server traffic goes over TLS and benefits from TLS's forward secrecy on the wire.
Re:Introducing Keybase Chat
by Natanael_L on Thursday February 09, 2017 @03:57PM
(#13610900)
Please see this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13605873
Nothing stops you from going full PFS.
In fact, you could even flip it around and let a shared notepad connected to the chat represent what you want to remember permanently, while the chat could remain ephemeral.
This makes for more accurate expectations and less risk of user error.
It'd be like arguing that by enabling PFS also creates a social contract that the receiver guarantees that their device isn't compromised. Or that webservers that use PFS in TLS don't log most/all of the details for the requests they receive. I don't believe either of these to be true.
You seem to have extrapolated some social properties from a purely technical property and assumed everyone must think about it in the same way as you. But in doing so, you've made your protocol weaker against realistic attacks.
Oh, and the likelihood of an attacker stealing a device with WhatsApp installed and only being able to extract the identity keys and not the cached messages seems absurdly improbable.
Personally, I wish you'd either tried to work with OWS/WhatsApp/whoever to integrate in what makes keybase.io great (providing identity verification - something that all these could use) and not gone about adding to the already crowded area of chat providers.