On 08/17/2013 06:47 AM, Faidon Liambotis wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 08:04:24PM -0400, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>> Hi, I'm a grad student at CMU studying network security in general 
>> and censorship / surveillance resistance in particular. I also used 
>> to work for Mozilla, some of you may remember me in that capacity. My 
>> friend Sumana Harihareswara asked me to comment on Wikimedia's plans 
>> for hardening the encyclopedia against state surveillance.
>> <snip>
> 
> First of all, thanks for your input. It's much appreciated. As I'm sure 
> Sumanah has already mentioned, all of our infrastructure is being 
> developed in the open using free software and we'd be also very happy to 
> accept contributions in code/infrastructure-as-code as well.
> 
> That being said, literally everything in your mail has been already 
> considered and discussed multiple times :), plus a few others you didn't 
> mention (GCM ciphers, OCSP stapling, SNI & split certificates, 
> short-lived certificates, ECDSA certificates).  A few have been 
> discussed on wikitech, others are under internal discussion & 
> investigation by some of us with findings to be posted here too when we 
> have something concrete.
> 
> I don't mean this to sound rude, but I think you may be oversimplifying 
> the situation quite a bit.

Thanks to both of you, and to everyone on these threads, for thinking
about and working on these issues.  I apologize for not quite briefing
Zack enough before asking him to share his thoughts -- I presumed that
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/future-https-wikimedia-projects/ ,
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/378169 and
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/378940 , and the
"NSA" and "Disinformation regarding perfect forward secrecy for HTTPS"
threads in
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-August/thread.html
would be enough for him to get started with.  I probably should have
done more research.

> We'll keep wikitech -and blog, where appropriate- up to date with our 
> plans as these evolve.

I suggest that we also update either
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/HTTPS or a hub page on
http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/ or
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_auditing_and_response with
up-to-date plans, to make it easier for experts inside and outside the
Wikimedia community to get up to speed and contribute.  For topics under
internal discussion and investigation, I would love a simple bullet
point saying: "we're thinking about that, sorry nothing public or
concrete yet, contact $person if you have experience to share."

> In the meantime, feel free to dive in our puppet 
> repository and see our setup and make your suggestions :)

You can browse that repository at
https://git.wikimedia.org/summary/?r=operations/puppet.git and you can
learn how to contribute a patch at
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Puppet_coding (using Git and Gerrit
the way we do per https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Tutorial ).

> Best,
> Faidon
> (wmf ops)

Thanks again!

-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

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