According to sources, there was recently a meeting held in a government I won't name at which the press secretary demanded all his staffers put their cell phones on the table so they could be examined to see if they had any apps loaded that might be used to leak. Needless to say, news of the meeting leaked almost immediately.
Since I do cryptography, I am of course interested in meeting the needs of whistleblowers working for dictatorial authoritarian governments that have scant concern for rule of law. At present I am working on a scheme called the Mathematical Mesh which is designed to make cryptography easier to use. This requires an app but for configuration of the device, not for cryptography per-se. The aim is to get this embedded by platform providers. http://prismproof.org/ When I talk about this problem there is always someone who immediately says, 'well that is good but we absolutely must have a unicorn for it to be worth having'. By which they mean absolutely perfect endpoint security. No, its a stupid requirement to put on a communications protocol because it isn't a communications issue, it is purely orthogonal. So putting aside demands for the impossible, what can we do to support the whistleblowing minions of Kim Jon Un, Putin, Erdogan, Trump, Mugabwe, etc. ? Inspired by the coloured boxes of the phone phreaks: Red Crypto: Communication application provides transport layer security but not end to end security, is vulnerable to server compromise. (e.g. TLS) Blue Crypto: Communication application provides end to end security but does not protect against traffic analysis (e.g. OpenPGP, S/MIME) Magenta Crypto: Communication application providing Red + Blue features. Black Crypto: Communication capability provides Magenta crypto but does not require application loaded on end point device Gold Crypto: As for Black but runs in secure partition on trustworthy hardware. Unicorn Crypto: As for gold but guarantees hardware is not compromised in fashion that end user can verify without any third party attestation whatsoever. Is Black crypto possible? I think so. We need to extend the javascript APIs a bit though and use capabilities like the ones I am developing for the Mesh. The way I would do it is the user creates a Personal Mesh Profile and connects their devices to it. This should not be in any way unusual in itself, its just the way to configure devices to share passwords, etc. Each device that is connected to a Mesh profile has a device key (a set actually). Let us imagine that we have a Javascript mechanism that allows a JavaScript application to access a device key if and only if they are signed by a signing key that is authorized for this purpose in the user's personal profile. That would appear to be sufficient to meet the 'appless security requirement' and it is very close to what we have already in next gen javascript. What the sketch does not do is to provide complete deniability as Mallet can look at the personal profile and see that it grants access. But that is a detail that can be cleared up with some smart crypto. The name Spicer seemed like a good one for the app if it is written.
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