You have a moral obligation to use crypto

http://blog.easydns.org/2014/02/11/you-have-a-moral-obligation-to-use-crypto/

by peteforde • 12 years ago

92 89 12 years ago

blog.easydns.org

rwg• 12 years ago

Safari can't verify the identity of the website "blog.easydns.org".

The certificate for this website is invalid. You might be connecting to a website that is pretending to be "blog.easydns.org", which could put your confidential information at risk. Would you like to connect to the website anyway?

Karunamon2• 12 years ago

As usual, misconfiguration causing scary warnings, useless to the end user, but the connection is still encrypted.

I really wish we'd divorce the identity assurance part of PKI from the encryption part. I have no idea how it would be done, but.

GauntletWizard2• 12 years ago

HTTPS Encryption is virtually useless without the identify verification part. Anyone can run a valid HTTPS server with a self-generated public key. Anyone could then place a MITM, and without the identity bit, you're just as compromised.

If we had dropped the identity bit, every ISP would be running a MITM proxy, because they want control. Already, plenty of businesses enable poor hygiene by including transparent squid proxies that strip SSL.

wtbob2• 12 years ago

Encryption without identity assurance really doesn't mean anything though--one might be a victim of a MITM attack.

The issue is that XPKI is _really_ easy to get wrong, but there are alternatives.

sparkie3• 12 years ago

Moxie introduced http://www.convergence.io/ a while ago now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N4sb-SEpcg), which could offer significant advantages over the PKI if it became widely adopted. Although it's not an end-all solution to identity, it's a step in the right direction (using web-of-trust ideas).

csense• 12 years ago

Namecoin

dguaraglia• 12 years ago

'crypto', because typing 'cryptography' is too hard. This and 'cyber' grind my gears. Specially when politicians/opinion makers throw the terms around without really understanding what they mean.

pjscott• 12 years ago

Do "memo" and "pub" irritate you as well?

saraid216• 12 years ago

Never going to get tired of self-identified libertarians making statements about moral obligations.

baddox3• 12 years ago

I would probably self-identify as a libertarian (although I would be eager to qualify that), and I am very tired of statements about moral obligations.

dfc6• 12 years ago

Empty and unjustified statements about moral obligations.

malka• 12 years ago

libertarian obligation meh.

Zigurd6• 12 years ago

The Internet services who are complaining should start coding, instead, or in addition to complaining. Secure key exchange, secure real time communication, secure storage, and secure email payload would blind the surveillance state. All surveillance states.

Even if you think your own surveillance state is less than harmful, there are dozens of others which are patently evil or thoroughly corrupt. And yet, while we do business all over the planet, even business cloud services are almost all unencrypted.

Meeting this moral obligation is something Yahoo, Google, and others could make much easier. At some point, we have to ask why not?

tptacek4• 12 years ago

Google has done more to securely encrypt Internet traffic than any other company in the world. Among other things, they are the pioneering standard-bearer for ECC forward secrecy and for certificate pinning, the two most important Internet encryption advances in the last 10 years.

Zigurd6• 12 years ago

That's nice. But putting our email, IM, and VoIP out of reach of snooping would actually change things.

Actually, you can stop being obtuse here rather than farther down the thread.

Canada2• 12 years ago

Those things are very significant, much needed improvements, but would you agree that we need more user controlled, end to end crypto? I'm talking about things like ZRTP here. I'm not expecting solutions like that to come from Google because it has a vested interest in mining your data. Possibly even more so than NSA does.

oafitupa• 12 years ago

Says the Google employee...

ronaldx• 12 years ago

OK. I'm prepared to agree with the headline in principle.

However, here's the deal/problem:

I am willing to encrypt outgoing mail only in cases where I can identify that the recipient are capable of decrypting it (with 0 friction at any stage).

It's (still) more important to me that my e-mail is read by the recipient, than that it's not read by any other party.

jimmaswell• 12 years ago

Do email sites not already use HTTPS?

jedbrown2• 12 years ago

Transfer between servers is over SMTP, which is not encrypted by default and almost always subject to degradation attacks (the MITM can claim not to support STARTTLS). In any case, the user cannot verify or demand that STARTTLS be used and many hosts don't support it at all. Meanwhile, PGP does not require any trust of intermediate entities, but relatively few people you might want to email have PGP keys and even those with keys might not have them on the device from which they intend to read your email. S/MIME is in a similar position to PGP, with a CAs trust model instead of Web of Trust.

abemassry• 12 years ago

I'm working on this small project, it might be less friction, probably not zero. I'd be interested if you had any thoughts on how to improve it. It's using GPG for end to end encryption.

https://github.com/abemassry/wsend-gpg

robertfw• 12 years ago

Reposting my comment on the blog:

I can't comment on which encryption schemes are still strong, but one advantage to using protection for general use is providing strength in numbers. Right now, using Tor or strong encryption is a bright beacon saying "this person has something to hide!" and the NSA et al hone in by default.

If, however, using Tor and strong encryption was the norm, it is easier for those who need it - whistle blowers, dissidents, etc - to hide underneath the regular noise.

edit: keep getting flagged for spam! Perhaps I have the wrong keywords?

anovikov• 12 years ago

That won't work because Tor is too slow. I'd use only if i was a terrorist - it's too slow even for pedophiles. If we want people to use crypto en masse, we have to give them something faster.

But the general idea is correct.

dispense• 12 years ago

Perhaps it's been a while since you've last used Tor, but at least in my experience, the speed really isn't that bad, especially for tasks that aren't time critical. Speeds of hundred or several hundred KB/s are not uncommon. The latency is a couple of seconds at most, in most cases. You won't be streaming in HD over Tor, sure, but fetching your email over Tor is not significantly more tiresome than over a direct connection. There is usually no noticeable lag for instant messaging either. YouTube video streams in the Tor browser also works with no delays most of the time.

x1024• 12 years ago

Wait, did you just call yourself a pedophile?

Joeboy2• 12 years ago

This is why I heretically believe that bad crypto may in some sense be preferable to no crypto, unless you really have something to hide (eg. you're a defense contractor or an opponent of a tyrannical government).

dfc6• 12 years ago

The title certainly makes an emotional appeal to me. However I could not find justification/explanation of any moral obligation in the text.

I could understand a moral obligation to fight unjust surveillance, but that is not what was presented. Why am I morally obligated to increase the cost of surveillance? If society accepts the unjust surveillance the only consequences of increasing surveillance costs are economic waste and most likely justifications for new encroachments on personal liberty.

funinobu• 12 years ago

It will become, if it is not already, a practical obligation. Why should anyone in the rest of the world trust American products that enable "justified" surveillance?

dfc6• 12 years ago

I am not really sure what any of your comment means and/or why you directed it to me? Is the practical obligation the same thing as financial incentive? And what does "enable 'justified' surveillance" mean? Existing in the world enables surveillance. I have no problem with just and legal surveillance, my problem is with unjust surveillance.

jmnicolas3• 12 years ago

I understand it as this : your moral obligation as a technical person is to protect your less computer-savvy users / kinfolks from being unjustly spied.

By increasing the cost of surveillance you force intelligence agencies to make a choice : given widespread enough encryption they would have to decrypt only the real threats and not ordinary citizens.

There is no reason to spy everybody unless you want to model your nation's citizen to be able to influence / control them.

My 2 (euro) cents ;-)

shurcooL• 12 years ago

I don't know how to best phrase this, but...

I still don't understand why I should worry about preventing non-recipients of my messages from being able to read them.

Canada2• 12 years ago

But the idea that we are somehow "out of reach of the NSA" is definitely not one of them. Sure, we're not actively collaborating with them, as many US businesses are, but as we've said before: we just assume the pipes going into and out of our major network exchange points are being vacuumed en masse.

Maybe easydns isn't, but the Telcos are definitely collaborating. We've had intercept equipment directly under the control of CSIS installed in major datacenters since the early 2000s. (I really do mean CSIS, not CSEC.)

I've seen it myself and I have multiple sources with direct, first hand knowledge of it.

None of them are interested in coming forward though, and I have no proof to offer myself.

What would necessitate cooperation of easydns anyway? They can't possibly get transit or peer with anyone of significance in Canada that doesn't have the surveillance equipment installed, so I don't see why any of the spooks would bother contacting them.

jmnicolas3• 12 years ago

For people wondering :

CSEC means Communications Security Establishment Canada

CSIS means Canadian Security Intelligence Service

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

If encrypting our communications were a moral imperative, wouldn't someone have suggested our telephone calls or postal mail be encrypted some time in the past 40 years? We've had the capability to do so as private citizens for years, but who the hell cares? And it's not like your bank is going to start sending your bank statements in the mail with a one-time pad.

If we didn't have to think about crypto, everyone would be using it. It is just not easy to ensure the secrecy and integrity of all your data. And Joe Blow does not really care so much about his security or integrity to go out of his way to use more crypto.

Joeboy2• 12 years ago

If encrypting our communications were a moral imperative,
wouldn't someone have suggested our telephone calls or
postal mail be encrypted some time in the past 40 years?

Mass surveillance of those things wasn't really a threat, in most places anyway.

Pxtl• 12 years ago

Then everybody implements crypto, and then we get another 20 articles on Hacker News about how "your crypto is wrong and broken and you're a terrible person!".

I'd be interested in joining the fight to hide information from the NSA if it didn't seem functionally impossible for folks who haven't made it into a career.

jmnicolas3• 12 years ago

This.

I have a web-app project for which encryption would be ideal.

However I have already a hard time finding an encryption capable database.

PostgreSQL has a pg-crypto but it looks like an after fought module.

Right now the best solution I can find is each user gets an encrypted SQLite database on my server. But what happens when 2 or more users need to share data that are in their respective databases ?

Fasebook• 12 years ago

You have a moral obligation to ignore "moral obligations" from dubious sources.

danbmil99• 12 years ago

You have a moral obligation to make end-to-end encryption, authentication, key exchange and validation and so on so easy to use a fucking moron could manage it, or my Mother.

You have a moral obligation to use crypto

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