"NSA’s Tailored Access Operations is specifically chartered to hack foreign targets (and not domestic ones) for intelligence purposes. By hosting your metadata outside the USA, you’re putting it in scope of the more skilled government-employed hackers."

I do concur with that threat analysis!

"But Tor is a low-latency anonymity network designed for web traffic."

I do not concur with that.

There are reasons Tor is implemented as a SOCKS proxy.

Conflating the Tor Browser Bundle with Tor itself, isn't great?

Admittedly, while I am not a Tor developer, I have known Tor devs in plurality. I have co-habitated and worked with some of them elsewhere. Roger Dingledine crashed on my couch once upon a time, back when I had couches to offer as crash space to others; instead of years of homelessness as in more recent years (decade+?).

It's true that an egregious amount of traffic is web based though; so the Tor Browser Bundle is probably how a lot of folks ever use and/or encounter Tor in practice. Kind of orthogonal to the rest of your discourse.

Having written as much, I think even Roger would be the first to admit that Tor isn't a panacea. It attempts to provide a layer of anonymity predominantly at the IP (v4) layer. There are many other potential pitfalls, even for Tor users.

Giving a shit about which country (or more broadly; I would be concerned about NGOs) might be storing your data is probably still wise? It never sat well with me that Facebook would flag OTR traffic over XMPP as "encrypted message" in their WebUI. To me that screamed: "we are logging your data for future attacks."

Screenshot for reference: flickr.com/photos/artkiver/436…

As if (m)any users ever used OTR over Facebook's XMPP implementation in the first place! sigh

Which is a long winded way of saying: If Facebook/Meta Messenger claims to use the same Axolotl/Double Ratchet Algorithm utilized by Signal (and WhatsApp) and they have already previously demonstrated that they are actively logging ciphertext for potential future offline attacks, they seem to be showing everyone who should know better, that they are to be considered hostile, regardless of what nation state identity they may claim and whether the traffic hitting Facebook/Meta's servers from its ciphertext users ever leaves a nation state level border? It's totally inconsequential as a result. They should be treated as a Mallory.

Everything about Signal rubs me (and many others in the know; though I had a positively enlightening conversation over dinner with someone I met at REcon last month in Montreal who has, for reasons that remain mostly mysterious to me though grokked by someone else at the dinner table, unofficially and repeatedly backported various Signal versions to run on Windows 7 and dug into it more deeply and recently than I would ever care to [e.g. exfiltrated.com/download/signa… ]) the wrong way, and I was cajoled into running Signal when it was still called TextSecure and RedPhone.

I'd love to see you explore something such as SILC (which attempted to defend against malicious server operators, a threat model which is real and still denied by most/all end-to-end encrypted comms systems entirely) or better yet, PSYC2.

I have only encountered one detractor of SILC, who while not particularly outspoken (quite the opposite) was a former coworker of mine with some skills. Unfortunately, that individual has been less than communicative with me after I emailed about a laptop that was gifted to me by that same individual, having had a (U)EFI backdoor that took me considerable time and effort and expense to identify and remediate; just to give you an idea of the level of threats with which I have already contended by those professing to be allies.

I am a terrible judge of character, and much to my own detriment, have given folks the benefit of the doubt, even given past transgressions, since I acknowledge humans make mistakes, and we can learn from such situations! However, some things (at a level below most OSes at a minimum) seem to speak for themselves.

Oh yeah, updating because I meant to mention the deeply dystopian copaganda perspective (perhaps Devil's advocate) of assigning detention time based upon cryptographic key length as posited by Poul-Henning Kamp here: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3703126 (direct link to 308KB PDF here: dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/370…). That certainly isn't a world in which I would ever want to exist, but we already have a planet with fuckwits who have come up with "smart" contracts on the blockchain as an idiotic methodology to try to absolve themselves of attorneys?

Far be it from me to think highly of the "law" given that I was incarnated in a country which seems to have a so-called "justice" system which seems to be predominantly preoccupied with perpetuating carceral slavery in the 21st century, going so far as to apparently have over 90% of its inmates having never even had a jury trial (so much for "due process"!) but there are a lot of individuals with power and riches who likes things as they are, and would probably love a more punitive system as PHK seems to be advocating when it comes to encrypted comms systems. Just as there are, quite obviously from the headlines, governments (e.g. the UK) which are bullying private enterprises (e.g. Apple) into cryptographic backdoors (that will never end well yet they're doing it anyway!).

Having written as much, I think it's rather telling that while PHK pioneered the horridly named "jails" subsystem within FreeBSD, that Apple rather presciently (or more likely, because jkh [Jordan Hubbard], FreeBSD co-founder and also previously "Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies" at Apple for over a dozen years, leaving in 2013 sometime after Steve Jobs passed away [Jordan was CTO at iXSystems while I consulted for them around the same time]) decided not to integrate jails into OS X. Containers may be useful to some degree (Apple certainly eventually implemented their own Hypervisor Framework as an example in related realms), but words matter and PHK seems to have what is, from my vantage, and unhealthy obsession with "rule of law" nomenclature both in FreeBSD's jails subsystem, as well as that ACM writing to which I linked. I've never visited Denmark, maybe every cop and judge is honest there, but here in the USA, ACAB and judges are more likely to be "on the take" than benevolent and unfortunately that must be taken into account with threat modeling as well.

Screen shot 2010-02-18 at 4.40.24 PM

Adding encryption and privacy to facebook chat, two IM clients at a time, thanks to OTR! (one end using bitlbee-otr the other using Adium).

^Flickr

@teajaygrey Wow. Thanks for taking the time to dig that up.

Forwarding the post for anyone else who might be curious.

You are more than welcome!

I had the good fortune to meet bunnie in person at REcon around two decades ago and took a hardware hacking class (back when the Chumby was still in prototype stage) from him at ToorCon as well. We last crossed paths in person in SF probably circa 2010?

I was hoping to see him (and even contemplated bringing a first edition self published "Hacking the Xbox" book for him to sign just in case, but decided I didn't want to lug the extra mass in transit on just a chance), and a bunch of other old familiar faces at REcon this year for the 20th anniversary but aside from Hugo, almost everyone was new to me!

I have been "out of the loop" for a very long time though; I think the last tangential event I attended was Chaos Communications Camp circa 2011?

So for me, a blog post from 2010 probably is still fresher in my neurons. ;)

Maybe I'll catch back to -CURRENT one of these days?

I've got more menial Maslow's hierarchy of needs layers to address first (I seem to have been stuck on the physiological needs being unsatisfactory for well over a decade as well) before loftier ideals! Still seemingly stuck in a "survival" mode. My suspicion: I will require a new (non human) incarnation to transcend my current corporeal maladies.