Unsolicited messages on Keybase

https://www.whiskey-tango.org/2019/11/keybase-weve-got-privacy-problem.html

by galaxyLogic • 7 years ago

127 96 7 years ago

Hmm, I just had people contact me out of the blue. I wonder if someone is taking advantage.

pythux• 7 years ago

I used to love keybase and used it for a while, but somehow since the crypto coins donations I started getting followed by random people and getting some "spam". So nowadays I avoid it and stick to Signal. I really like the idea behind it though and I hope they manage to solve of these issues eventually!

hs86• 7 years ago

The spam folder in my Fastmail account usually got only one or two spam mails in a month but recently it went up to ~10 per day. The only change that happened around the same time was that Keybase added some crypto-play money to my account which is associated to that Fastmail account.

I know that correlation does not imply causation but this stellar addition after the fact left a sour taste in my mouth. :(

rbritton• 7 years ago

Do you use Fastmail’s aliases? Those are one way to pinpoint which service revealed your email address if you’re diligent about creating them.

vips7L• 7 years ago

Not related to the article, but that background is terrible and flickers everytime I scroll on Firefox.

lucb1e10• 7 years ago

No such issues on the latest stable Firefox on Linux here.

The background is one of those that looks like it might cause issues while scrolling with a lot of monitors though, are you sure it's the site / some software and not your hardware?

Edit: similar to these patterns: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/inversion.php#invpattern

jakelazaroff2• 7 years ago

Women have been complaining about this for ages. See for example:

https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/1171615043387109376

https://twitter.com/geekygirlsarah/status/116636030680693964...

https://twitter.com/aredridel/status/1171824207069614081

geofft11• 7 years ago

I appreciated this later thread from the third person you linked: https://twitter.com/aredridel/status/1201348525499523072

Quoting in part:

The onslaught of sexual harassment on platforms like early Twitter (and later twitter for people of notability), @KeybaseIO, every naive social network is an attack on the right to exist in public. It is the inverse of a privacy problem.
But the conceiving of this as a privacy problem brings the wrong solutions. It means we are offered tools to remove ourselves from public view, to restrict our public personas, to retreat from public life. It means women are again confined to private sphere, denied civic life.

asjw• 7 years ago

Women also close the doors of their homes for safety and privacy.

It doesn't deny their civic life, it simply blocks uninvited guests from entering their homes.

We don't need police, when a door is more than enough

buzzkillington3• 7 years ago

But the conceiving of this as a privacy problem brings the wrong solutions. It means we are offered tools to remove ourselves from public view, to restrict our public personas, to retreat from public life. It means women are again confined to private sphere, denied civic life.

Yes, welcome to real life.

Where I can't say I'm an atheist back home because I will get beheaded. Or say what I think of capital accumulation in SF because I will never work again.

And if you take the cowards way out of "We should only protect people for what they are and not what they do", being a woman in this day and age is a choice on par with being blond or a socialist.

beaner• 7 years ago

Not denying this happens on the internet but it seems like these people weren't aware that the crypto currency incentive on keybase was creating this kind of spam for everyone and not specifically them.

jakelazaroff2• 7 years ago

It's a different kind of spam. These women weren't receiving scammy cryptocurrency messages, they were (are) receiving "hey beautiful" catcall-esque messages.

It obviously is partially a function of popularity, but this happens on basically every platform that doesn't provide effective countermeasures. (Ask your female friends whether they've ever gotten unwanted messages on Instagram or Facebook!)

The broader point is that if Keybase had listened to its female users and implemented anti-harassment tools in the first place, it might not have ever gotten to the point where cryptocurrency spam was endemic on their service.

souterrain• 7 years ago

Keybase seems to be enjoying an identity crisis. On one hand, it’s a tool that makes a lot of sense for team collaboration, particularly with its low-effort encrypted git implementation. I even know a couple teams doing software development for the US government using Keybase for collaboration.

On the other hand, the Stellar (cryptocurrency) wallet and the “feature” referenced in this article are something... else. Granted, Keybase is $0/month per user currently, so it’s no surprise it is the founders’ personal sandbox for experimentation.

I thought Keybase were on the right track in the past with their feature conservatism. Now, not so much.

prophesi• 7 years ago

Feature conservatism has never been Keybase; their identity crisis has been going on for quite some time. What first started as a simple messaging app became a file-sharing service, then a Slack competitor, and now a cryptocurrency wallet.

Adding a simple toggle to block unsolicited messages doesn't sound like too much in that respect.

api• 7 years ago

All messengers do this. They start out good and add features until they are bloated junk. It's a law of nature dating back to the 90s.

flurdy• 7 years ago

To me, it first started out as a key sharing and identity verification service.

That was quite useful to me.

Then they pivoted to a chat app. I had no need for yet another chat app.

Then lately this messy cryptocurrency integration which so far just seems shady.

I am not sure Keybase provides to me any value anymore.

mundo2• 7 years ago

I feel like the #1 thing they ought to be doing is opening it up as a platform.

I think their original mission was: build a better keyring. They've done that, it works great! But the idea that they will follow that up by building a chat app better than Slack or Teams seems like hubris, akin to trying to win two roulette spins in a row.

If, OTOH, they opened up KB as a platform, I'm not sure what exactly would happen, but it could be pretty cool. It's not hard to imagine, say, a distributed social media app built on exposing a feed of files your KB friends have posted in their public KBFS, or indie game devs using Keybase as a cheap and fast way to add authentication and in-game chat to their games. I'm not sure how they would monetize that exactly, but it seems like a better problem to have than "let's beat Slack and Teams with five developers and a several-years-late-start".

kick2• 7 years ago

It's not that hard to beat Slack and Teams.

IRC + viewing history + image preview + 99% uptime + lighter client gets you there, anything else is icing on the cake.

Already__Taken• 7 years ago

Don't all platforms with added messaging make this mistake at a certain size? Well done to keybase I suppose. I'm sure I read about github having the same exploit years ago, anyone could add you to a repository and it would just show up on your profile.

I think it was Zed;

HN 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601342

working link: https://web.archive.org/web/20111202200335/http://sheddingbi...

jrockway• 7 years ago

It is somewhat unfortunate to watch what's happening to Keybase. I read /r/keybase over on Reddit and every single post is whining about how they didn't get enough free bullshitcoins or how some people are exploiting the system to get too many free bullshitcoins. It is the highest concentration of whining I've ever seen on the Internet... and I read my own posts ;)

I think there are some fundamental conflicts that are going to be difficult to resolve. Back in the old days of the Internet, everyone could message everyone else. This was great, except for all the spam. Ultimately, by putting our email in a central place, capturing the text of every email message, and analyzing it, we got a world where you could use email and largely be free of spam. But it did come at a great privacy cost; the same access that allows ML to categorize your email allows anyone to read your email; server administrators, hackers, law enforcement.

(This problem plagues every open network, not just email. You are not the only one that gets 6 phone calls a day about how Microsoft needs to be updated or the Internal Revenue Service will come get you, or something.)

This all blows up with end-to-end encryption. There is no centralized place for messages to be classified, so no spam filtering can be done. It is the wild wild west. The mistake I think Keybase made was not realizing that having easy discovery AND private messaging was going to result in a lot of spam. You can have easy discovery and then analyze every message to make sure it's not abuse. Or you can have great privacy, and require everyone to exchange a 1024-bit secret key in person before they can talk to each other. Keybase has a kind of middle-of-the-road approach that is the spammer's dream platform. You can find all the information you need to message me right on my HN profile, and I can't do anything to stop you.

They also made it worse by giving people free money. Now people are conditioned to think that a message announcing they just got some free money is legit. (The first I heard about the airdrop thing was when I had received my first drop.)

You hate to see it, but I think that secure messaging and showing your investors exponential growth are basically mutually exclusive. As long as Keybase pays people to have their account open, they'll have users... but I wonder what their plan is after that.

the_duke• 7 years ago

I would love for Keybase to focus on building a product out of their messaging, file storage and git product. It is something I would happily pay for.

But apparently that hole set of functionality was more of a bootstrapping phase for whatever crypto weirdness they are up to.

dr_win• 7 years ago

Back in the old days if the Internet, there was no cryptocurrency. I strongly believe (crypto)payments can be used as a pretty effective anti-spam measure in the future.

alwillis3• 7 years ago

Agreed; the goal is to make it too costly to spam.

feanaro• 7 years ago

Ultimately, by putting our email in a central place, capturing the text of every email message, and analyzing it, we got a world where you could use email and largely be free of spam. But it did come at a great privacy cost; the same access that allows ML to categorize your email allows anyone to read your email; server administrators, hackers, law enforcement.

I'd just like to offer a counterpoint here. I've been running an email server for myself and some friends for more than five years now and I've been surprised with the low amount of spam we were getting.

Two of the users eventually got caught in a more obnoxious torrent of spam so I configured rspamd. It uses a variety of techniques, including a Bayesian filter score, blackhole lists and greylisting. It resolved all spam issues with zero false positives. Either our spam is an extreme outlier (it doesn't look like it) or filtering spam doesn't require as much ML we're led to believe.

rgoulter• 7 years ago

The client is here, right? https://github.com/keybase/client I'd prefer to see "discuss on a GitHub issue" or "open a pull request" to "send +1s to these email addresses". (The author does discuss how annoying it is to receive unsolicited messages, after all).

I'd think "contacting is as frictionless as email or phonecalls" sounds reasonable for messaging. (EDIT:although email avoids 'unsolicited messages' with spam control, phones with "phone number is secret"; so perhaps not). Another suggestion: Maybe UI would help this; on FB messenger I can't see messages from strangers unless I go into the "messages from strangers" tab. That seems like it'd solve annoyances from unsolicited messages.

ViViDboarder• 7 years ago

I think the author got it right. Yes, those other platforms allow anyone to message you, but they don’t consider those features anymore. The way we are trying to mitigate is spam filters everywhere. Spam is a much harder problem. It’s far simpler to have a double opt in.

geofft11• 7 years ago

Frictionless phone calls worked for decades until automation made telemarketing possible, at which point we had laws that stemmed the tide for a bit, and then further automation made anonymous telemarketing / scamming possible, and we're on the edge of a cultural shift to not picking up the phone when you don't recognize the caller. The latest version of iOS already has a checkbox to block all calls from people not in your address book (24/7, this is a separate feature from "Do not disturb").

Frictionless email had this problem since the very early days. A huge amount of algorithmic effort goes into identifying spam, and there are still large numbers of false negatives and false positives.

These were architectural mistakes, and it's not a credit to a new messaging platform that it doesn't see this as a problem worth solving from day 1.

jlgaddis2• 7 years ago

The latest version of iOS already has a checkbox to block all calls from people not in your address book (24/7, this is a separate feature from "Do not disturb").

Thank you! I have been wanting exactly this for a long time now -- my phone is pretty much always on DnD for this reason. I guess I'll finally upgrade to 13 now.

rocqua• 7 years ago

I'm not sure this counts as a privacy problem. Freedom from harassment is important, but it does not fall under privacy. I'd even say that it is more important than privacy. Privacy is about what others can learn about you, not what they can do to you.

rtkwe• 7 years ago

Yeah... spam sucks and Keybase should probably shunt unfollowed messages into a second screen or do something like Instagram where the first message comes with a "do you want this person to be able to message you?" prompt where you can easily block them, but there's no private information being leaked here.

ahnick7• 7 years ago

Completely agree.

byproxy3• 7 years ago

I believe they're going to address this with an update?

https://keybase.io/blog/dealing-with-spam

mundo2• 7 years ago

Agreed, the tone of this post is "I'm unveiling an exploit KB refuses to patch" but the content is "I asked KB to add a feature and they added it."

davidham• 7 years ago

Yes. I am 100% in sympathy with the people who are concerned about unwanted messages and team adds, but the nuclear option at the bottom of the post seems to cover it:

`[ ] Only let someone message me or add me to a team if...`

The only thing I can think of that would be better than this would be to enable this by default.

KallDrexx• 7 years ago

While the updates here are good, the bigger thing I'm surprised they aren't addressing is spam messages requiring attention.

Just split the messages into folders of "people I have contacted and/or whitelisted" and "Strangers". Any incoming message of a non-whitelisted person or someone I haven't contacted previously should not trigger a notification and should be nothing more than a notification bubble in the folder with a number of unread messages.

This means that I only forced to deal with messages by known people, and when I get bored I can peruse messages from strangers and decide if I want to deal with them or not.

hombre_fatal• 7 years ago

Facebook Messenger does this. e.g. google "facebook other inbox".

geofft11• 7 years ago

It's fascinating that the two example spammers in that post have women personas, whereas a huge chunk of the problem is men (generally actual men, not fake personas) trying to hit on women. It's not clear to me Keybase believes that's actually a problem or, as the original article says, working as designed.

dewey• 7 years ago

100% of the spam messages I receive on various platforms (Especially IG) are fake women personas so I'd say their example is pretty spot on.

buzzkillington3• 7 years ago

It's fascinating that you think the problem of being uncomfortable is worse than the problem of cat phishing.

asdkhadsj2• 7 years ago

Glad to see this. Recently I was debating using Keybase for chat at home over Telegram. For now I guess I'll need to use something else.

edit: oh never mind, looks like they started to address it: https://keybase.io/blog/dealing-with-spam

iudqnolq2• 7 years ago

FYI, Telegram is insecure by default, run by unsavory characters, and possibly compromised.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15281788

asdkhadsj2• 7 years ago

Indeed, that's why I wanted to migrate from it

octocode• 7 years ago

I'm a bit confused, this blog post is written as if it's an exploit, but it looks like it's the intended functionality? Am I missing something?

lucb1e10• 7 years ago

Indeed, it's intended functionality that you can talk to anyone and spammers are apparently just discovering the platform, and Keybase is reacting to it (see the recent blog post mentioned in other comments). The article is written a bit confusingly.

brunoqc2• 7 years ago

Is there a way to convert that useless crypto money they gave us into real money?

ceejayoz• 7 years ago

I got mine out via Coinbase.

(I had to use the pro offering, at https://pro.coinbase.com/, as apparently Stellar isn't available in the main app for US users yet, but it worked fine.)

alwillis3• 7 years ago

I have some Stellar on my regular Coinbase account, so I imagine I could use it to get my Stellar out if I wanted to.

brunoqc2• 7 years ago

Thank you

mfer• 7 years ago

From the keybase update:

As a bonus, their profile pic will get covered in Poo.

This is in reference to accounts that have been blocked.

If more people see this than the person who blocked it’ll be ripe for abuse.

This seems entirely unprofessional and a bit childish. Says something about the culture at keybase.

byproxy3• 7 years ago

If you've read any of their blog posts you'll see that that's their general vibe: irreverence

geofft11• 7 years ago

Is that supposed to make it better? "It's okay they don't take things seriously, they make a practice of not treating things seriously, so you should use their service?"

(And, like, I get it, I have a good knack for being a troll and annoying all my friends, but at least I'm aware that this isn't a good thing and if I were running a business, I'd find someone else who could keep my instincts in check!)

jedieaston• 7 years ago

Suddenly I'm less confident in Stellar. wonder if this is really helping the foundation if Keybase is being this unprofessional in public communication.

AdmiralAsshat• 7 years ago

A solution like "you have to opt into being added to a team" is really ugly from a UX perspective and harms the service for honest people. We have thought tons of this.

Clearly, this person has never been involuntarily added to a chatty group MMS conversation.

nemild• 7 years ago

More in this post too:

https://vicki.substack.com/p/keybase-and-the-chaos-of-crypto

All of a sudden, I started receiving lots of random messages from people without profile pictures.
These were people I didn’t know contacting me on a pretty frequent basis, and I had no way to opt-in to their messages. Pretty ironic for a platform built on privacy.
I wasn’t the only one. After asking around, it seems that everyone I knew on Keybase was getting these. But of course, women with female names and profile pictures got a lot more than most men I knew. Other women online were experiencing it, too.

hughpeters• 7 years ago

One of the companies I do contract work for uses Keybase to share credentials between engineers. Like database credentials, AWS access keys, ect. Including production credentials. I felt like it was a security risk when they started sharing creds with me over Keybase but didn't know enough about Keybase at the time to feel comfortable saying something so just followed their process.

Does anyone here use Keybase for this use case? Is it secure?

creativipy• 7 years ago

I've used 1Password for this in the past. Maybe you should ask they switch to that?

jedberg• 7 years ago

I've used it for this use case. When I onboard new employees, I add them on Keybase and have them add me, and then I send them their AWS keys via Keybase chat.

I've also used it to exchange AWS keys and other credentials when consulting.

I chose keybase because it was the easiest chat to set up with end-to-end encryption that works on the desktop, where I generally needed to be to copy/paste the keys.

It's certainly not the most secure way to share keys, but it's fairly secure and a decent trade off since I consider the credentials I'm sharing on there to be medium value at most.

meddlepal• 7 years ago

I've used it for this purpose before at a tiny startup. It's nice because you can script around directories in the Keybase Filesystem.

That said our threat model and security concerns were minimal... we didn't store any PII for example.

The team really appreciated it because of the tools low barrier to entry and ease-of-use.

ahnick7• 7 years ago

Yes, and yes it is secure. That is to say the data is encrypted and only you and the person(s) you are sending to have access to it.

I have used it for credential sharing and use kbfs (Keybase's encrypted file sharing) for a simple secret storage mechanism for shell scripts. I map my encpass (https://github.com/plyint/encpass.sh) directory to kbfs.

lucb1e10• 7 years ago

It depends. If you use the official app, then it's sort-of end to end encryption but with an asterisk that you have to trust their servers not to mess with you from the beginning. They can't start intercepting at will, though, they have to target you from the beginning, and if the server did that with everyone, odds are that someone caught on by now. So it's probably fine.

If you use a client where you can view the crypto keys for out of band verification (I think the command line client can do this, but it's awful to use as daily driver), then it is actually end to end encrypted, and you should only have to do this once.

Verifying your key in the command line client and then using the app will not do, since the server can selectively lie to your app. I'm not saying it's likely, but when speaking of sending keys to the kingdom through it, it can be a reasonable precaution to verify crypto keys for the client you're using, depending on your company and threat model (if you're in the USA, well, so is Keybase so that's less of an issue than when you're in Iran and you think Keybase is magically end to end encrypted with no verification needed, as their docs suggest). Since all devices connected to your account receive a copy of the data, it doesn't matter which device you use to send or receive the secret keys.

floatingatoll• 7 years ago

The issue described in this post is the same issue that drove me to stop using IRC and XMPP.

I’m all for open protocols and interop, but I’ve had an online stalker since dialup (Winsock). Building a system where anyone can message anyone is the same problem in each system.

Anti-spam is not the solution. Harassment (and spear phishing) issues will not be solved by anti-spam.

ahnick7• 7 years ago

As a Keybase user for a number of years I'm very happy with the platform. I'm probably part of the silent majority who use Keybase and have been genuinely happy with it and don't speak up when others have complaints. I use it for personal messaging and for my business and it has been great.

I think Keybase's position on this is on point. This is spam and needs to be dealt with as such. It's no more an issue than with email. Anyone can send you a virus or harassing message in your email, but where is the angry mob of people beating down the doors of every email provider?

There is certainly a problem that needs to be addressed, but lets not blow this up into something it is not. Keybase's spam controls will continue to mature as it grows.

lucb1e10• 7 years ago

Is there any reason you chose Keybase over other solutions? From my perspective, it's like Wire but without the video calling or end to end encryption, or like WhatsApp but without the network effect, or like Slack but without a number of features. I don't really understand Keybase's selling point.

Gaelan3• 7 years ago

like Wire but without the video calling or end to end encryption

I'm not quite sure what you mean here, but Keybase does have end to end encryption—I think they're trying to position themselves as "Slack with end-to-end encryption."

ahnick7• 7 years ago

There is no video calling, but I already have other solutions that I use for that. Keybase is end-to-end encrypted as mentioned in the other comment, has good multi-platform support, and is free. The fact that the user can revoke a device if it is compromised is excellent. I also have intentions for using it as a secure SSO ID across company applications using the API(https://keybase.io/docs/api/1.0/intro). (Basically replacing how some companies use Active Directory)

For me the secure identity and communication part of Keybase is a critical base layer that no one else really gets right. I can have a new hire create a Keybase account and use that to securely exchange documents (e.g. w-4 allocation, health insurance, etc.) two weeks before they are even part of the company.

The only long-term downside to Keybase for me is it is a centralized cloud service run by a single company and the application is not open source. What I really want is a decentralized open source version of Keybase that's operated as a global network that lots of companies/individuals ran nodes for and you paid for your use of the network. That way I'd be more certain that it will be around in 10 years time.

Porthos9K• 7 years ago

I deal with email spam by dumping all emails from non-whitelisted addresses in the spam folder. My phone has an app to auto reject calls and texts from non-whitelisted numbers. If somebody wants to contact me, they can damned well get my consent first. If they can't be bothered to do that, then they have nothing of value to say to me.

xref• 7 years ago

Discord has a similar problem where crypto scammers come on any public servers and mass message all the users. There are no controls except to block them after the fact one by one.

Unsolicited messages on Keybase

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