Re: [liberationtech] TrueCrypt Alternatives?

2014-10-06 Thread Lucas Gonze
Deniability is not inherently better. Of course it has advantages. But a world 
that only had deniable cryptography would be worse than one which also had 
systems like TrueCrypt whose presence is not hidden.

It makes no sense to argue that an improved version of TrueCrypt is no better 
if it’s not deniable. Maybe there will be a rubber hose attack, maybe not. Many 
attackers are not in a position to do that. And deniability has costs which may 
lower resistance to other types of attack.


On October 6, 2014 at 11:54:03 AM, Danny O'Brien (da...@eff.org) wrote:

On Mon, Oct 06, 2014 at 05:56:59PM +0100, Eleanor Saitta wrote:  
 On 2014.10.06 01.56, Bill Cox wrote:  
  I will have an impact on the code going forward. Also, I am  
  entirely a pragmatist. I am an engineer, not a cryptographer, and  
  I build stuff that works in the real world. Can you explain a  
  deniable crypto-system that fits the real world?  
  
 It's unclear that there is one. I'd feel far happier recommending a  
 (new, continued development, audited, etc.) version of Truecrypt with  
 no deniability features at all. Using the features in such a way that  
 you don't leave traces of the container has always been really, really  
 difficult -- if you read the docs page on what's required to evade  
 forensic detection, it should be pretty clear how unsuitable this  
 feature is for regular users. Yes, some of those might be removable  
 with significant developer effort, but I'm not sure why that's worth  
 it, given the larger issues.  
  

I think one of the challenges here is that, to the extent that deniable  
crypto-systems are used and understood in the real world, the switch  
from we will use our ingenious forensic tools to detect your  
subterfuge to we will beat you up until you tell us the password is  
prompted by Truecrypt's presence and notoriety, rather than any feature  
of the software. By that, I mean that the one data point I have is  
talking to activists who say that if their laptop or devices are  
inspected, having Tor and Truecrypt visibly installed is a signal for  
further interrogation.  

So we're really in a position where hiding the application from casual  
inspection is more important than the cryptosystem, because the  
cryptosystem is going to be bypassed by rubberhose cryptoanalysis once  
noticed. Security developers hate this, I think, because hiding an  
application's traces on a standard OS is an endless task with no  
guarantee that we haven't left some sort of fingerprint which is  
trivially detectable with the right kind of tool. This is one of the  
reasons why practical advice seems to be moving more towards the have a  
secure device which you hide rather than use secure software on your  
visible everyday device.  

A hidden, cordoned device allows us to make a much stronger assertion  
about the safety of its contents, and a much clearer moment to describe  
when its contents may be breached. Under this design, deniability really  
isn't something you implement in software. Deniability comes from  
physically hiding the device. There's no deniability *within* Truecrypt  
because Truecrypt use itself is already perceived as an indication of  
guilt.  

d.  






  
  I think we who are trying to keep TrueCrypt alive could use your  
  advice.  
  
 Happy to chat more.  
  
 E.  
  
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Re: [liberationtech] Mapping out physical surveillance across a city

2014-06-24 Thread Lucas Gonze
If anybody comes up with a such a map for the bay area, I'd love to see it.
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[liberationtech] self signing certs by default

2014-03-14 Thread Lucas Gonze
Let's say web servers auto generated self-signed certificates for any
domain that didn't supply its own certificate, likely one from an authority.

What that would accomplish is to make the stream unreadable over the wire,
unless the attacker was willing and able to do an MITM with their own auto
generated self-signed certificate.

It would not be hard to do that MITM, but it would be orders of magnitude
more expensive than copying unencrypted bytes off the router. It would not
be practical to do the MITM against a large portion of traffic. The
attacker would have to pick their targets.

Thoughts?
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Re: [liberationtech] self signing certs by default

2014-03-14 Thread Lucas Gonze
The MITM is much more expensive, so would make it unfeasible to maintain
current levels of surveillance.

The MITM can't be done in secrecy. The client can publish the certificate
that it received. This would force the surveillance apparatus to reveal
itself.


On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 2:45 PM, John Adams j...@retina.net wrote:

 You misunderstand the signing practice if you think this is a good idea.

 Granted, it provides a low level of encryption for clients but it does not
 provide Non-repudiability to those users, opening them up to MitM attacks.

 Sent from my iPhone

  On Mar 14, 2014, at 16:35, Guido Witmond gu...@witmond.nl wrote:
 
  On 03/14/14 19:56, Julian Oliver wrote:
  ..on Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 10:46:30AM -0700, Lucas Gonze wrote:
  Let's say web servers auto generated self-signed certificates for any
  domain that didn't supply its own certificate, likely one from an
 authority.
 
  What that would accomplish is to make the stream unreadable over the
 wire,
  unless the attacker was willing and able to do an MITM with their own
 auto
  generated self-signed certificate.
 
  It would not be hard to do that MITM, but it would be orders of
 magnitude
  more expensive than copying unencrypted bytes off the router. It would
 not
  be practical to do the MITM against a large portion of traffic. The
  attacker would have to pick their targets.
 
 
  Thoughts?
 
 
  It would be good if Debian and other popular GNU/Linux LAMP
 distributions made
  OpenSSL/TLS key generation (and set up of a VirtualHost template for
 :443) an
  encouraged option during an Apache installation (OpenSSL is a dependency
  anyway). It could be a simple walkthrough with Qs for CN and admin
 email,
  abstracting over the classic and ungainly:
 
 openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out
 /etc/ssl/localcerts/apache.pem -keyout /etc/ssl/localcerts/apache.key
 
  One could also automatically derive the DNSSEC-DANE TLSA record from
  that server certificate and mail it to the sysadmin. Include a paragraph
  that explains that by publishing that record, the site has stronger
  protections against MitM-attacks than possible with CA-bought
 certificates.
 
  (the downside is that user need to install the Extended-DNSSEC-Validator
  plug in).
 
 
 
  Regards, Guido.
 
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[liberationtech] espionage as plain old corruption

2013-10-30 Thread Lucas Gonze
The shoes left to drop:

1) NSA insiders using privileged information for investments. It's hard to
imagine this doesn't happen.

2) How precisely do businesses get the NSA and CIA to create competitive
advantages? How do they convince the Trade Representative that they deserve
government intervention on behalf of their shareholders, and how does the
Trade Representative then pass back information? How does one business get
this benefit and not another?
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Re: [liberationtech] quid pro quo

2013-09-11 Thread Lucas Gonze
Again, the cash payments are a deception. They are in no way enough to
compensate these companies. Operational expenses associated with processing
data requests are a small part of the overall cost.


On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 10:36 AM, Joseph Lorenzo Hall j...@cdt.org wrote:



 On 9/10/13 4:51 PM, Kyle Maxwell wrote:
  In general, as has been well documented, the telcos and other firms
  charge the government for data records. While possibly distasteful
  (they're making money off of giving our data to the gov!), it makes
  sense from an operational point of view: there are real, concrete
  costs associated with storing, retrieving, and providing those data to
  valid requests, not to mention the process of handling sensitive
  requests in the first place. So I'm not sure the counter approach
  (provide it to us for free) is a good idea, either.

 Yes, some of the reporting in the last weeks about the NSA's black
 budget teased out these compensation relationships a bit, e.g.:

 NSA paying U.S. companies for access to communications networks

 http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-29/world/41712151_1_nsa-national-security-agency-companies

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[liberationtech] quid pro quo

2013-09-10 Thread Lucas Gonze
Let's say major corps like ATT and Chase are doing favors for NSA. Why
would they if not for a quid pro quo?

And if they are getting favors in return, isn't that illegal?

I wonder if there is evidence to show what the payback is.
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Re: [liberationtech] quid pro quo

2013-09-10 Thread Lucas Gonze
My thought is that the reported payments to compensate big corps aren't
enough to justify the opportunity cost.

For example, Room 641A. No doubt NSA is putting some cash in, but the
actual revenue is probably 1/1000th the cost to ATT. Renting rooms and taps
to governments is not a business ATT would enter. It's just too small. They
need revenues in the tens of millions to even consider a product, and it's
unlikely NSA is paying that much.

Where ATT can justify the cost is within its lobbying budget.



On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Seth Woodworth s...@sethish.com wrote:

 It's not legal to pay for preferential treatment from the government,
 that's bribery.  Why would it be illegal for the NSA to pay ATT  Chase?




 On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 3:27 PM, Lucas Gonze lucas.go...@gmail.comwrote:

 Let's say major corps like ATT and Chase are doing favors for NSA. Why
 would they if not for a quid pro quo?

 And if they are getting favors in return, isn't that illegal?

 I wonder if there is evidence to show what the payback is.


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Re: [liberationtech] quid pro quo

2013-09-10 Thread Lucas Gonze
The other pressure you mention is just what I was thinking of.

On the one hand there is a threat. Cooperate with NSA or DOD won't
consider your bids. On the other hand there is an offer. Cooperate with
NSA and DOD will favor your bids.

About the cash payments, operational costs are a small part of business
logic. A company on the scale of Google doesn't enter cash businesses like
this. If the NSA offers to pay a hundred bucks for a few thousand items a
year, it's not meaningful in comparison to costs for lawyering, real
estate, management, etc.




On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Kyle Maxwell ky...@xwell.org wrote:

 In general, as has been well documented, the telcos and other firms
 charge the government for data records. While possibly distasteful
 (they're making money off of giving our data to the gov!), it makes
 sense from an operational point of view: there are real, concrete
 costs associated with storing, retrieving, and providing those data to
 valid requests, not to mention the process of handling sensitive
 requests in the first place. So I'm not sure the counter approach
 (provide it to us for free) is a good idea, either.

 That said, you do have all sorts of other pressure. Imagine a company
 that does a lot of federal work being told that all their contracts
 would have to be reviewed if they don't cooperate: the loss of a
 significant (read: material) amount of revenue is a serious motivator
 for profit-driven entities. It can get nastier from there:
 investigations, regulatory filings, etc. They have lots of leverage to
 apply to private organizations, even large powerful ones.

 (Disclosure: I work for a telco but I don't speak for them and I damn
 sure don't share their opinions on any of this stuff. And I'm not
 involved with any sharing of personal data to the gov or anybody else.
 I can't even access it.)

 On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Seth Woodworth s...@sethish.com wrote:
  It's not legal to pay for preferential treatment from the government,
 that's
  bribery.  Why would it be illegal for the NSA to pay ATT  Chase?
 
 
 
 
  On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 3:27 PM, Lucas Gonze lucas.go...@gmail.com
 wrote:
 
  Let's say major corps like ATT and Chase are doing favors for NSA. Why
  would they if not for a quid pro quo?
 
  And if they are getting favors in return, isn't that illegal?
 
  I wonder if there is evidence to show what the payback is.
 
 
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Re: [liberationtech] Designing Fairness for DMCA

2013-07-16 Thread Lucas Gonze
On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 1:00 PM, John Adams j...@retina.net wrote:
 We call this The trust and safety departments at most major companies.

 It already exists. You're getting wrapped up in a technical implementation
 which would normally be handled by large teams. The level of integration you
 describe is more than just a simplistic database table.


I spent much of last year working on a project similar to
@RiptideTempora's. What I found is that organizations which get enough
takedown requests to need administration tools are pretty big. For
them, Zendesk already does a good job. There is an abuse department
within the organization, which is part of customer support and which
implements policy set by an attorney.

For an organization smaller than this, executives typically handle
DMCA takedown requests manually. They usually comply with all
requests, because that is the essence of the safe harbor.

To help users, I believe the best approach is legal assistance. Users
need to know what their options are, how to file a counter notice, why
the shouldn't file counter notices when they really are infringing,
what infringement means, and so on.

 Additionally, your order of operations doesn't match the DMCA workflow that
 is required by law. Have a look at this helpful infographic and rethink the
 flow..

 http://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/files/2012/02/infographic-dmca-process1.png

This infographic is to help third parties understand the notice and
takedown process. It is not a workflow for online service providers.

-Lucas Gonze
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Re: [liberationtech] Terry Winograd and Evgeny Morozov

2013-07-02 Thread Lucas Gonze
 of the
 reasons why we at Stanford Liberationtech conduct interdisciplinary research
 and engage the world at large through our various activities, online and
 off.  And it is also why we are supportive of the efforts of people like
 Evgeny Morozov and others in journalism who seek to improve public
 discourse.

 On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 9:34 AM, Lucas Gonze lucas.go...@gmail.com wrote:

 I find Morozov's critique of silicon valley intellectual fads
 worthwhile. The thinking coming from famous bloggers and tech industry
 conferences is for the most part hype for the sake of commerce.
 Morozov's writing is to puncture that hype bubble. This is a valuable
 goal and he does it well.


 On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 11:51 PM, Soenke Zehle s.ze...@xmlab.org wrote:
  maybe EM's style is more like a 'firstism' (make it sound like you're
  the first to make a particular point, obscuring other more or less
  readily available forms of critique)
 
  EM: Let's get the Nazis out of the way first. There's a considerable
  body of serious scholarship looking at the technological thought of
  the Nazis. They had plenty of engineers and scientists and some had
  rather ambitious theoretical ambitions. (Not to mention that Carl
  Schmidt and Heidegger, whatever their relationship to Nazism, wrote
  about technology).
 
  Yes Heidegger wrote about technology. But that's one of the places
  where firstism just won't do - to read Heidegger and his philosophy of
  technology in 'solutionist' terms ends up discrediting the
  anti-solutionist project imo. Funny Foucault quote: 'For me, Heidegger
  has always been the essential philosopher. My whole philosophical
  development was determined by my reading of Heidegger.'
 
  Soenke
 
  2013/7/2 Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes alps6...@gmail.com:
  On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 6:26 PM, x z xhzh...@gmail.com wrote:
  Morozov
 
  Well, to Morozov's credit, that's why philosophers prefer German,
  French, Spanish, etcetera, to English! :D
 
  Best Regards | Cordiales Saludos | Grato,
 
  Andrés L. Pacheco Sanfuentes
  a...@acm.org
  +1 (817) 271-9619
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Re: [liberationtech] Internet is designed for surveillance

2013-06-26 Thread Lucas Gonze
Bob, can you give examples alternatives to pipes owned by service providers?

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Bob Frankston
bob19-0...@bobf.frankston.com wrote:
 I realize it's very hard to give up on the idea of networks but they are no
 more necessary for communicating than railroads are for travels. Nice options
 but not the only ones.

 As you note the idea of rent-seeking is at the heart of the matter. Being
 around when the fathers and mothers of the Internet were putting it together
 gives me useful perspective -- I know that Ethernets are not really networks
 and that we have connections between islands of connectivity.

 This means that connectivity is not a service -- just something we do with
 what we find lying around. The hierarchies, DNS, backbone were expedient
 engineering hacks that are not at all fundamental. We stay with them because
 we are stuck with the idea that we communicate within pipes like we did with
 telegraph wires but the Internet gives as an alternative (as I wrote in
 http://rmf.vc/NotSuper and go into far more detail in
 http://rmf.vc/RefactoringCE).

 In http://rmf.vc/CISustainable I provide an alternative funding model which
 doesn't require today's constructs merely to make bits billable.

 Once we aren't confined to pipes we can then do very decentralized protocols
 and view mechanisms like the DNS as applications rather than plumbing.

 Intercepts and all that may be legal -- but we aren't obliged to talk into
 their microphones.

 Bob Frankston
 http://frankston.com

 -Original Message-
 From: Bernard Tyers - ei8fdb [mailto:ei8...@ei8fdb.org]
 Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2013 15:15
 To: liberationtech
 Cc: Bob Frankston
 Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Internet is designed for surveillance

 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1

 Hello Bob,

 I agree with you on the whole but I'm going to argue some of your points.

 On 26 Jun 2013, at 17:03, Yosem Companys wrote:

 From: Bob Frankston bob19-0...@bobf.frankston.com

 The current implementation of the Internet is hierarchical in that we get IP
 addresses from provides and then use a DNS that is rooted.

 Well, its decentralised hierarchical I guess. To be fair, there is nothing
 from stopping you or I from running our own DNS servers. However, at some
 point, I guess it will have to get its answers from root servers.


 We go even further in requiring that we conform to conditions on our intent
 (AKA our use) of connectivity in order to get a temporary lease on something
 so fundamental as our identity in the guise of a DNS name. We go further by
 accepting the idea that we communicate within pipes owned by service
 providers who can dictate terms in order to extract a rent.

 Someone has to build, maintain and expand the backbone infrastructure. I'm not
 for one minute saying the Verizon's, ATT, Vodafone's of the world are the
 best to do this. But it is expensive. Nowadays telecoms operators are more
 interested in sponsoring sports stadia, or film events than paying for the
 hardware needed. Thankfully this is causing their destruction.

 David Burgess from Open BTS said this about telecoms last year:

 will be served by companies that look and work a lot more like Red Hat
 than like Nokia-Siemens. I see that vision too, and I see products (not
 projects, products) like OpenBTS and OpenBSC.having places in that world.
 If we are correct about this vision of the future, then that small gathering
 of hackers.may have held the seeds of a revolution that will fundamentally
 change a multi-trillion dollar industry. [1]

 These are the kinds of projects are the way of the future, but they still rely
 on infrastructure companies to carry packets to reach maximum range.


 Once you accept such an architecture and such rules it seems disingenuous to
 act surprised when those whom we've put in charge take advantage of this
 control for whatever purpose whether for advertising or for our safety (real
 or imagined).

 Why so?

 We pay them for a service to provide us connectivity. We do not pay them to
 facilitate worldwide surveillance with no basis.

 Governments and LEA enforce legal interception protocols and build in
 requirements for any nation who wants to build a 3GPP standard mobile phone
 network to install legal interception equipment. By this I don't mean
 Finfisher or other sickening weapons of mass surveillance.

 Advances in communications technologies like LTE/SAE (4G) have built into
 their core Deep Packet Inspection. This is there for network management
 purposes, but lets be honest, it can (and is) used for other reasons.

 I would be amazed if any private individual asked ETSI (European telecoms
 Standards Institute) or ITU (International Telecoms Union) to require telecoms
 providers to install surveillance equipment. This is a legal battle.


 We may ask for restraint on the part of those who enforce the rules but
 every time there is an outrage (often called terrorist 

[liberationtech] diseconomies of scale

2013-06-14 Thread Lucas Gonze
It occurs to me that Prism exclusively targets large providers. This
suggests that it relies on economies of scale. Which suggests a defense
against Prism: use small providers, because there are diseconomies of scale.

Thoughts?
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Re: [liberationtech] New Anonymity Network for Short Messages

2013-06-12 Thread Lucas Gonze
the ideal would be to hit a high enough rate that it makes real-time
analysis of content (by a human) impossible. By the time the service hit
that rate of chats, it will be nigh-unusable by people.  

Every client could broadcast a message on a timer. Sometimes the message
would be wheat and sometimes chaff.

Then the downsides would be:

1) Additional latency between composing the message and the next timer
pulse. In terms of UX, slower sends.

2) A bigger buffer, flushing more often.

Problem #2 could be ameliorated with something like sharding. If there were
S shards and M messages total, a peer would buffer M/S messages.




On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 11:42 AM, Griffin Boyce griffinbo...@gmail.comwrote:

 Sean Cassidy sean.a.cass...@gmail.com wrote:

 First is that if the load on the network is high enough, conversations
 can hide in the noise. This is helped by dummy message generation
 either by clients or servers (preferably clients to protect against
 attackers that can monitor every node).


   Unless I'm missing something (entirely possible): From your standpoint,
 the ideal would be to hit a high enough rate that it makes real-time
 analysis of content (by a human) impossible. By the time the service hit
 that rate of chats, it will be nigh-unusable by people.  This is more or
 less why chat channels (eg, IRC) were created in the first place.  And that
 doesn't preclude outside observers from storing and correlating the chats.

 ~Griffin

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