Hi Linus,
now I had the time to look at the Mumble project.
I might be incorrect in my assessment. I found some information but it
was mostly irrelevant to make a good assessment about the security and
privacy properties about it.
There seems to be the (wrong) believe that if you publish software as
open source then everyone can look at the code and the quality will be
good.
That's of course not the case. There are a few words here and there
about security but I failed to see enough to even give me enough to say
something meaningful about it.
From what I can tell the software does not interoperate with anything
else other than their own silo, which is bad.
If you use a provider that runs that VoIP service then you have to trust
him like with any other VoIP providers. Of course you can run your own
server but then your friends have to be on your own server as well, if I
understood it correctly. Maybe that's a great idea that everyone should
have their own server and if you want to talk to someone then they
create an account at your server and start communicating with you. (You
could simplify the account creating by using identity federations, even
if they don't have anything to do with VoIP.) Of course, this would be
OK with gaming (which seems to be the main target audience of that VoIP
platform) but not for normal communication use because it would not be
obviously for anyone trying to contact you how to reach you unless you
have a permanent VoIP provider.
From the point of view what we are trying, namely to develop globally
interoperable VoIP solutions, this is obviously a step backwards (maybe
20 years).
What is worse, in my point of view, is that adding Tor to Mumble may not
actually provide you any additional privacy/security benefits.
If you trust the VoIP provider than you could very easily create an
end-to-end security solution. Without Tor the other party would most
likely still see the IP address of your device (or the IP address of
some NAT). That's what Tor (or other tunneling technologies) could hide.
The VoIP provider still knows who you are talking with and, depending on
how the details look like, he may still be able to decrypt the VoIP
communication.
Ciao
Hannes
On 09.09.2013 14:43, Hannes Tschofenig wrote:
Hi Linus,
thanks for the comments.
I have indeed skipped that topic. I will have to read into the Mumble
project to see what security and privacy guarantees it provides.
My current conclusion from using VoIP/IM systems without using Tor is
that you cannot really protect against collecting this transaction data
(i.e., you have to at least trust the two VSPs, our own and then the VSP
of your communication partner). While you can influence routing of the
data traffic to a certain extend it does not work too well when your VSP
is working against you.
With IM you could at least set up your own server (e.g., by using an
XMPP server) but with VoIP that's more complicated because nobody else
will accepted your connection attempts (as explained in the
interconnection part of my write-up).
I will come back to you on that issue.
Ciao
Hannes
On 09.09.2013 14:31, Linus Nordberg wrote:
Hannes Tschofenig<[email protected]> wrote
Mon, 09 Sep 2013 11:26:39 +0300:
| http://www.tschofenig.priv.at/wp/?p=997
|
| It contains a number of recommendations, which are addressed to VoIP
| providers and vendors but have to be enforced by data protection
| authorities.
|
| The recommendations unfortunately highlight some challenges...
Indeed. And still, I miss any mention on protection against collecting
data about who's talking to who.
Without claiming any expertise at all in this area, the closest thing to
something implementing this that I've heard of is Mumble over
Tor. Mumble [0] is not standardised AFAICT. The Guardian Project wrote
[1] about this earlier this year. Some people seem to use it [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumble_%28software%29
[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorifyHOWTO/Mumble
[2]
https://guardianproject.info/2013/01/31/anonymous-cb-radio-with-mumble-and-tor/
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