OkTurtles + DNSNMC: Surveillance-free communication on your favorite websites

by ropable • 13 years ago

97 61 13 years ago

mknits• 13 years ago

So, it seems it's a PGP-based technique? Good.

imho bitcoins technology is amazing and and the near future we will see a lot of new products, such as this one, that are built on bitcoin technology but aren't related to bitcoins.

chippy• 13 years ago

You know, at the moment for me it feels as if this is exciting as if its on the cusp of something great but I'm not sure what it is or how to put it into words. Could you explain why it's amazing?

SectioAurea• 13 years ago

I too have this feeling, and made a post about possibilities for traditional state functions in the blockchain: http://www.wallstreetcrypto.com/2013/12/distributed-anonymou...

It's a very fuzzy concept for now, but I'm sure someone will come along and articulate it better.

97-109-107• 13 years ago

I'm really happy to see this here; I've tried to build a tool based on the very similar concept - initially just as a chrome plugin (I do see the irony), but ran out of time, enthusiasm. http://kaniowski.info/umshade/ Good luck, really want to see this getting popular

Nux• 13 years ago

I'd LOVE for something like this to take off.

zobzu• 13 years ago

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux)

hQEMA/H221DfyGXJAQf+IDMe33H8hz1MgYfqxGta/FauUinOWtXqT+xskkGtt+es wRE1stgcJeKlzFDMHMS99Cvfw1qUis+CMVUnrBJw3yn1tdNo3FV+V0BgMIJwTPGS nkHxeXsxHXcsgcyRhB1PEO2arPaiek9xqxwUehnsDHI8T6oAJaUhteNHo72ybM4S Q1vSY8/Ni6t7Uk5zjpsHPq+Jhi7+QA9L1xaJuNBcm1lQxE2hWyrdXRB7N+HMnvJR LMgZndBjoKeui032cbIV8z/N7n2YT8Vtx0syVkDT0KppcW4EcQyAp6hbRPrgnUMu jDLLwT1xSgPwtH8NPo0iuusGmONa+stGGmjwHnhiLNJxAZWGQM36uE+FA9bXUVDl ikp29kE8qmCijPIHSDUny6SiNUjrEJeQEBq4TJpU7GDEsOQKx2tjchOZyWQFpKWK mBPnU6H9uAAByM+t+ejG5lxxlp/R9eKBs+YSf7QT7H2sLR/KIwyuXNJg+oHBtzKY weo= =bZbG -----END PGP MESSAGE-----

AlexanderDhoore• 13 years ago

So how do we read it?

Edit: I know public key crypto... I meant: where's the key?

coherentpony3• 13 years ago

You need his public key to decrypt it.

itistoday219• 13 years ago

Author here: yes, support for GPG is one way of using @okTurtles (e.g. with OTR off).

Your comment would be instantly readable to whoever the intended recipient(s) are, with no manual intervention on their part. (see also reply 'rakoo': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963081)

salient3• 13 years ago

What type of OTR improvements suggested by Trevor Perrin did you use. The same ones TextSecure will be using?

https://whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/

swombat2• 13 years ago

Website lacks a summary of what this does exactly and how, other than "add turtle buttons that do magic encryption voodoo" - or did I miss it somehow?

MacsHeadroom• 13 years ago

Did you miss the prominently linked to white (ie technical) paper?

swombat2• 13 years ago

I'm not a cryptographer, I'm a potential user. If I was up for reading white papers on this, I wouldn't be interested in having buttons shaped like turtles.

What I'm asking for is a summary of what this thing actually does from a semi-literate layman's perspective...

alan_cx• 13 years ago

Just clicked the link. I just see the usual lazy kit web site, and no prominently linked white paper. No, I didn't scroll or click. I just looked at where I landed. Nothing. Just standard bland marketing stuff, pushing something that comes across as snake oil. It makes fantastic claims that given what we know about the NSA and its tentacles, are very hard to take seriously. If their claim were true, I'd expect to know that straight away from the landing page, and be blown over by the storm such protection would mean. If any one really made it 100% impossible for the likes of GCHQ and the NSA to spy, all hell would break loose.

salient3• 13 years ago

The white paper is down the page a little:

http://okturtles.com/other/dnsnmc_okturtles_overview.pdf

infocollector• 13 years ago

If its something that will work inside gmail/facebook frontends (web ui), isn't it inherently at the mercy of google and facebook?

itistoday219• 13 years ago

See section "6.3 Note on JavaScript Cryptography" in the paper: http://okturtles.com/other/dnsnmc_okturtles_overview.pdf

salient3• 13 years ago

I'd be interested to see another comparison with DNSCurve on your page (http://okturtles.com/#DNSNMC):

http://dnscurve.org/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8EGA834Nok

It seems Aaron Swartz has inspired so many great projects. It makes me sad that he's no longer with us from such a young age. It seems he had a lot of potential to change things for the better.

lukifer• 13 years ago

It's tragic that Aaron won't be around to see (and aid) the coming wave of distributed direct democracy.

rakoo• 13 years ago

I'd have loved if instead of reinventing the wheel, they added support for GPG keys in web-based inputs, and distributed GPG keys in DNSNMC. GPG is already widely deployed (among the crypto-sensible people, of course), it would be sad if we had to restart from scratch.

But this is still a step in the right direction.

itistoday219• 13 years ago

(author here): GPG support for the web can be easily done with @okTurtles, and was part of the plan from the start. It's very easy to do that compared to the rest of the goals of @okTurtles.

One thing about that though, is that GPG-based communication suffers from all the problems described in the OTR docs (and the overview paper on the site, see sections on plausible deniability and PFS). But if you want it, again, it's very simple to transparently support GPG on the web (once the rest of the foundation is implemented), and I can definitely see how people would find that useful for forums, reddit, HN, etc.

itistoday219• 13 years ago

Please note that the site and PDF describe two different, but related projects. DNSNMC, IMO, is actually the more significant of the two, while okTurtles is just one example of the type of app it makes possible. First draft of a complete DNSNMC specification and implementation is being worked on right now and will be pushed to https://github.com/okTurtles soon.

A rudimentary DNSNMC is very simple to implement in something like Nodejs. The version that will be pushed to github will be written in CoffeeScript and NodeJS. At some point my hope is to provide a version that installs easily on Linux via package managers and integrates nicely with PowerDNS.

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

From the whitepaper http://okturtles.com/other/dnsnmc_okturtles_overview.pdf

"The magic doesn’t stop there. DNSNMC isn’t just DNS + NMC, it’s also an HTTP server. DNSNMC provides its clients with secure access to the Namecoin blockchain itself through a RESTful API."

They're planning on shipping this browser extension with a hardcoded list of DNSNMC server IP addresses. Isn't that a central point of failure? (E.g. If an adversary mounts a DDoS against all servers in that list.) Adversaries wouldn't need to render the service unreachable, just slow it down to painfully-slow speeds for average users. Regular DNS is resilient to this because of its hierarchical design, but the paper seems to be proposing a flat list of DNSNMC servers that will be shipped with the extension by default. Since almost all users will stick with the defaults, subverting those servers would disrupt DNSNMC for most users.

Also, it's unclear to me how users or website owners use DNSNMC's REST API to update their blockchain identity entry. Is it password-based? Like, when a user first creates a blockchain entry, do they set a password they must remember? If so, then what happens when they inevitably forget their password or someone steals it via a key logger? It needs to be changeable in case the old password is compromised, but that causes a whole bunch of problem scenarios, like an attacker steals a password then changes it, then modifies the user's blockchain entry. How does a user recover his stolen blockchain identity?

Overall the whitepaper is a comprehensive survey of the current public key infrastructure landscape and embodies some interesting ideas for the future. While there are some very dubious ideas (like tackling all problems with JavaScript crypto) I'm cautiously optimistic about the overall direction this whitepaper is proposing, because something similar to this is a necessity: a distributed DNS system that doesn't rely on certificate authorities, and lets users distribute their public keys in a public way that can't be easily MITM'd. There are unsolved problems, like how users can recover a stolen identity, but this whitepaper takes care to be extremely clear that it's a work in progress, and that it's being made available to get early feedback on the design / to solicit ideas from the community. They don't pretend that they've thought of everything, which is nice.

They're working on an important problem (a future in which CAs are unnecessary + giving everyone a way to distribute encryption keys tied to your public identity) so this kind of research is sorely needed, and I look forward to seeing what their next step is.

itistoday219• 13 years ago

This is a good point. Two things: (1) you stopped a bit short in your quote. Here's a bit more from the paper on that:

"To avoid falling into the same trap that web browsers enjoy today with Certificate Authorities, okTurtles will encourage the user to use their own DNSNMC server, whether it’s one that they have setup themselves, or one that belongs to someone they trust. Defaults are provided to encourage adoption and to make the software function immediately upon install."

(2) That paper is the first public introduction of DNSNMC, and I expect (and really appreciate) everyone who reviews (and has reviewed) it, and pointed out issues like this.

That said, this problem could be solved by something like a DHT [1]. Or, it might be a non-issue and not really need something that complicated. Just a live-updating list of trustworthy IP/fingerprint pairs (with bootstrap servers, protected by something like cloudflare), might be all that is necessary for the defaults (which again, the extension would encourage switching off of).

Also, it's unclear to me how users or website owners use DNSNMC's REST API to update their blockchain identity entry.

Yes, that API is being worked on right now, so your comments are definitely helpful, and you're also very much welcome to provide any and all other feedback. Here's another great place to do it: http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1423

Thanks again for your fantastic feedback! (What a wonderful Xmas present! :)

[1] https://github.com/feross/webtorrent

ama729• 13 years ago

Isn't the same problem than with CA then?

Most people wont have their own server or have someone they trust have one.

Isn't something like Confluence more interesting on this point of view?

nexttimer• 13 years ago

I like seeing people offering solutions against mass surveillance.

What I want to suggest is that you drop the requests you send to 3rd party services like Google. If somebody makes money off of collecting as much data about us as they can, it's Google, Facebook, etc. So, letting them track your users is a contradiction.

itistoday219• 13 years ago

What are you referring to? There's no Google tracking code on the site. The only analytics is Mint (which is local to the server).

colmmacc• 13 years ago

Disclaimer: I've been involved in several DNS implementations, for a long time, and so probably have a bias.

Namecoin and namecoin-derived systems are cool, but they tend to overlook a lot of real-world functionality provided by DNS. As used today DNS is 1) A distributed key-value storage system 2) Incredibly scalable and fault-tolerant and 3) a de-facto internet routing layer for CDNs and GSLB endpoints. Namecoin systems typically provide (1) but overlook (2) and (3), which makes it hard to consider them as viable replacements.

I think it's interesting to look at what existing entities do when faced with DNS MITM and takedowns. The various torrent searchers and anti-censorship entities just diversified the TLDs they depend upon. So when their ".com" or ".net" domain gets taken down or man-in-the-middled, they tell their users to shift to .is , .ch, .se or some other TLD with a different regulatory framework, thus avoiding a single point of failure.

If a new mechanism depends on the inconvenience of a browser extension anyway, why not automate the process people already use? For example "colmmacc.multi" could be intercepted by an extension and translated into 5 DNS requests against say SHA-2("colmmacc").[com|ch|ly|se|is] and the extension could use a simple majority quorum of the answers to defend against a tampered response. Of course it means you have to register and host your domain 5 times, but that's pretty cheap these days.

Other nice properties: works with all existing DNS security mechanisms (including DNSSEC or DNScurve), provides security against registrar or registry level tampering or compromises. Hash of the domain makes it hard for registries to block domains (they have no idea what the name is until it is popular) and also resets the clock on squatters.

OkTurtles + DNSNMC: Surveillance-free communication on your favorite websites

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