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GUADEC: Danny O'Brien on privacy, encryption, and the desktopGUADEC: Danny O'Brien on privacy, encryption, and the desktopPosted Aug 4, 2010 16:15 UTC (Wed) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048)Parent article: GUADEC: Danny O'Brien on privacy, encryption, and the desktop Sometimes security is locked in a trade-off with convenience. But often it's not: In most cases you can have some security (if not maximal security) without any impact on convenience at all. This is especially relevant for the developers of protocols. Any protocol can be designed to transparently use and mandate encryption. The work required to develop this is small because there are already many libraries that implement the hard parts, and the computation required is irrelevant for most protocols. And yet... we often don't bother "if the user needs crypto, they can tunnel it" but thats rubbish, the user doesn't understand all the risks they face and even if they do it's unlikely that everyone that they communicate with shares the same concerns. Even without authentication, which can't be provided without at least a small imposition on the user, automatically keyed encryption provides enormous protection: It forces any attacker into an active attack which are much more easily detected, prosecuted, or avoided and much harder to implement. Simple unauthenticated encryption also greatly frustrates panopticon-style monitor-everything surveillance. If you're worried the encryption without authentication may give the user a false sense of security then simply _don't tell the user that they have encryption_. Protection is still valuable even if the user doesn't know about it, it discourages the creation of unlawful eavesdropping infrastructures by reducing their value so used widely enough it even protects people who don't use it. The OTR protocol is a great example of this mindset (ignoring the bug with multiple logins). Painless, transparent, always on encryption plus optional authentication which is very easy to use. HTTP security as implemented in browswers today an example of a failed attempt. No security at all for the vast majority of connections because getting security is costly and annoying. Worst, In spite of compromising basic privacy for sake of always getting authentication it's still completely vulnerable to an active attacker because users usually begin on a HTTP page and won't notice the lack of encryption. As developers I think we have an ethical obligation to bake these kinds of mandatory security measures into our applications and protocols. Asking the user to take the cost of using these security measures and convincing all their friends to use them is little better than not having them at all. In the past the Telepathy developers have responded to calls for OTR support in a shameful manner: Mocking people that ask for it as paranoids and pushing some cumbersome certificate based alternative which doesn't provide the right security properties and doesn't provide them in a way which will be useful for anyone. I hope Danny's presentation made some progress in convincing people in the error of their ways.
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GUADEC: Danny O'Brien on privacy, encryption, and the desktop Posted Aug 4, 2010 16:40 UTC (Wed) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] Thing is that at a deeper level, we have IPSec. It has issues in a NATted world that need fixing (whether by enhancing NAT traversal of IPSec, or by going to IPv6 and removing NAT while we're at it), but it should in theory let all protocols that don't care use encryption by default, whether it's part of the protocol or not. Authentication is harder to solve (due to the inherent need for some sort of out-of-band proof of identity). And once you've solved the encryption problem once (by having all data that goes over IP encrypted in IPSec, even if it's then encrypted again inside the protocol for authentication purposes, ala HTTPS), there's no need for protocol designers to care.
GUADEC: Danny O'Brien on privacy, encryption, and the desktop Posted Aug 4, 2010 17:16 UTC (Wed) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link] Due to the pervasiveness of NAT (as you mention) and layer-4 firewalling opportunistic user to user IPSEC isn't just a dream it's pure fantasy. It also has fairly high per-packet overhead while connection oriented security protocols like TLS have very little overhead past the initial setup.Even on the IPv6 internet it isn't there and doesn't appear to be forthcoming. Hell Path mtu discovery is absolutely mandatory with IPv6 because routers can't fragment and yet many sites which should know better (e.g. ISC) have been blocking needs fragment packets. IPSEC doesn't even have a chance. I support the notion of host-to-host IPSEC but we live in the real world and need to deal with real issues, and today IPSEC is a non-solution. And because it wasn't made mandatory with IPv6 it will likely always be vulnerable to downgrading attacks: simply block IPSEC and it will be disabled (either automatically and without the users knowledge or manually) and you can even plausibly claim an honest misconfiguration caused the blocking. Proposing that we solve this by using IPSEC is like proposing we boil the oceans. Effectively there is no party in control of IP, just a loose collective of voices at the IETF, and getting principled ethical action out of a consortium of many interests approaches impossible as the number of participants increases. Especially when some of those voices are, in fact, very interested in preserving an environment where surveillance is easy and cheap. But for applications there are single people and small groups with the power to make the right choices. They ought to stand up and make them, rather than waiting for the IP folks to solve it for them. Even in a future world where it IPSEC is viable the application level security still provides value because IPSEC's location in the network stack precludes it from providing the same security properties, you mention authentication which is a big one but their are additional properties like OTR's anti-non-repudiation which requires specialized interaction between authentication and crypto. Or many other cases where transport security isn't enough like email where the material should be stored in a secure form... so effort spent securing our applications will not be wasted.
GUADEC: Danny O'Brien on privacy, encryption, and the desktop Posted Aug 4, 2010 20:30 UTC (Wed) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] On the other hand, the vast majority of protocol and application designers just don't care. "Boiling the oceans" by making IPSec work everywhere isn't easy - but it's a one-off big cost. Trying to round off every grain of sand by getting both protocol developers (who don't always see why it's important) and application developers (who often see it as extra work for no gain) to handle encryption in the protocol is similarly hard - but it's a lot of small costs, and we keep paying them day-in, day-out as we try to fix everything. Further, the nature of IPSec is that it gets implemented once per OS, and then it's not an issue for any application that uses that OS - indeed, I can blithely write encryption unaware code using the old BSD sockets API like I've always done, and benefit. If I have to get encryption right, not only is that extra effort that I'm going to fight back against (naturally - like most programmers, I'm lazy), but it also opens up lots of ways for me to get it wrong, whether we're talking design flaws like WEP's flaws, or implementation failures like the Debian OpenSSL flaw, which rendered keys effectively 16-bits long. At least with IPSec, people with more clue than I'll ever have have checked the design for mistakes, and another group of very clueful people will implement it, and fix the flaws found in the wild. And note that I'm not wedded to IPSec; if there was (say) a library that I could just link against and get all the nice security properties IPSec offers, that'd do just as well.
GUADEC: Danny O'Brien on privacy, encryption, and the desktop Posted Aug 4, 2010 21:42 UTC (Wed) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
Well thats why I made the statement above. They ought to care, and I think we have an ethical obligation to care. Some do care though by far not enough.
Host to host IPSEC is currently going nowhere, as has been the case for the past decade. Even with working support in the OS (and I don't believe that _any_ major operating system has working IPSEC OE out of the box, at least not without manually configuring certs for everything you want to talk to!), getting it enabled and getting the network to stop breaking it is a major challenge. I don't see how you can claim that something which is effectively vaporware has "nice security properties"
At least with the application oriented model we can make progress by winning one application at a time. Either way we have to win over people who don't care but winning over developers gives incremental progress all along the way, while trying to win over people running networks and people configuring hosts doesn't get you much until its done everywhere.
There are libraries that give you a sockets like interface to TLS, it's simple enough that many things support it optionally. To be immune to downgrading attacks it needs to be made mandatory.
GUADEC: Danny O'Brien on privacy, encryption, and the desktop Posted Aug 5, 2010 10:52 UTC (Thu) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] But the people responsible for end-host software (Linux distro developers, for example) also ought to care about their users' privacy. Practically speaking, I've yet to come across a library that's a transparent replacement for BSD sockets (as in LD_PRELOAD or equivalent) so that I don't have to care about encryption - it just works. Instead, I have to remember to not use the libraries I've used for years, because if my quick hack becomes important, it might matter. At least with IPSec OE (which still needs work to fix, hence not ruling out other libc/kernel level routes), it doesn't matter if I forget to put in the SSL layer - it still gets encrypted. And if I need more complex solutions (authentication, repudiability etc), I can still put it in in the application layer. In the end, whether you try and tackle application and protocol developers one at a time, or distro developers, you're facing an uphill struggle - not least because (by and large), people don't see encryption as important. I believe that we're better off putting the effort into making all communications encrypted by default using some form of opportunistic encryption (not necessarily IPSec - an automatic SSL layer that just happens without application intervention would work, too, as would any other form of OE that doesn't require application developer support). And, of course, you are claiming that genuine vapourware (as in doesn't exist at all) has nice security properties. I am claiming that current deployments of IPSec have nice security properties, and I don't see how OE (the vapourware) breaks them.
GUADEC: Danny O'Brien on privacy, encryption, and the desktop Posted Aug 5, 2010 19:12 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link] Mocking people that ask for it as paranoids... Check the date on that entry. I really don't think it was intended as mocking anyone.
GUADEC: Danny O'Brien on privacy, encryption, and the desktop Posted Aug 5, 2010 19:43 UTC (Thu) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
In the context of the long standing argument a lot of people perceived it that way.
I probably should have mentioned that this dispute regarding OTR in Telepathy vs the decision to promote certificate based XMPP-only security had been going on for a year prior to that "joke" post across several mailing lists and bug trackers.
To see the dramaz for yourself, google around or start at http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16891
GUADEC: Danny O'Brien on privacy, encryption, and the desktop Posted Aug 6, 2010 0:49 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
Thankfully they finally relented and are no longer opposed to adding it.
GUADEC: Danny O'Brien on privacy, encryption, and the desktop Posted Aug 19, 2010 10:18 UTC (Thu) by robot101 (subscriber, #3479) [Link]
We were never opposed to adding support for end to end encryption, and we completely understand the reasons for wanting it. We were just reluctant to embrace a technology like OTR which was not integrated into the protocol but instead dropped on top of only the messaging part. With an XMPP connection in Telepathy we build many different forms of communication - including presence, geolocation, voice and video calls, file transfers, collaborative applications - and with OTR all of these would go unencrypted, and only the messages are protected. Given our involvement in the XMPP standards process, we preferred to support an end-to-end encryption mechanism which was implemented in the protocol itself and would handle all of these use cases.
(And, let's be clear: The exact details of the XMPP encryption are fairly irrelevant to this discussion - although "certificate based" - this is just a technical convenience to allow us to use existing TLS libraries. A certificate is just a key in a certain format - it does not impose any requirement on how those certificates are signed or verified. So they don't need CAs or governments to sign them or whatever, you can still do SSH / OTR style "leap-of-faith" and manually verification of fingerprints/identities if you wish, which is how we always planned to present it in the UI.)
However, we had a discussion with some EFF members who explained to us the problem with our approach, which is nothing to do with any technical details or any type of encryption being "more bettar" than another - it's simply that by not supporting the use of OTR in Telepathy, we were reducing the existing privacy of the currently deployed OTR users in the cases they were talking to Telepathy users. This reasoning was explained to us clearly and in a level-headed manner, and we were inclined to agree.
We therefore adjusted our plans to allow both the XMPP and OTR style encryption to be presented through a similar Telepathy API (and also therefore, a similar UI in the client application, presenting a hopefully better-integrated and smoother experience for the user whichever technology is in use). We currently do not have many spare resources to work on an OTR implementation of this API, although we would be very happy to support somebody who was interested in working on it, and would be happy to add support in the Empathy UI if this API was implemented.
(speaking as a co-founder of the Telepathy project, although I contribute in more of a hand-wavy direction-setting way now :D)
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