Someone needs to design a super dumb and robust system where I can safely store all my keys on all devices I use an account. The fact that whatsapp, signal and other platforms tend to have a primary device for keys is bonkers to me. A primary device that can randomly die, get stolen or fall in a lake.
I have lost chat histories more times than I can remember, and I have to be extra diligent about this these days.
I don’t even want to think about pgp when I have to manually take care of this problem. Not because of my own skills, but because I could never make it reliable for my family and friends on their side.
Signal's threat model is that everything around you is hostile to you, except the parties you interact with. You are an undercover rebel in a totalitarian sect which would sacrifice you to Cthulhu if they see your chat history. Losing it is much better than disclosing it.
Your threat model is likely random black hat hackers who would try to get into your communication channels and dig some dirt to blackmail you, or to impersonate you to scam your grandmother out of several thousand dollars. Signal protects quite well against it. But the chance of this happening even in an unencrypted channel is low enough. You don't mind making the security posture somehow weaker, but preserve the possibility to restore your chat history if your secure device is lost or destroyed.
I suppose the problem could be solved by an encrypted backup with a long key which you keep on a piece of paper in your wallet, and / or in a bank in a safe deposit box. Ideally it would be in the format that the `age` utility supports.
But there is no way around that paper with the long code. If this code is stored on your device, and can be copied, it will be copied by some exploit. No matter how inconspicuous a backdoor you are making, somebody will find it and sneak into it. Should it happen in a publicized case, the public opinion will be "XYZ is insecure, run away from it!".
> I have lost chat histories more times than I can remember, and I have to be extra diligent about this these days.
As per Signal’s diehard proponents, losing chat history is a feature, not a bug (I’m not being facetious when saying this, and you can see comments of this kind in Signal related threads here).
Edited to add: I don’t agree with that premise and have long disliked losing chat history.
I know you are not being facetious. My problem is random Joe on the street sees it as a bug. He really does care more about actually being able to talk with his wife than Signal’s mathematically correct principles. He needs it to be reliable first, secure second.
My company recently really cut back on slack retention. At first I was frustrated, but we all quickly got over it and work carried on getting done at the same pace as before and nothing really got impacted like many of us imagined it might.
That bears little resemblance to the Signal issue. The reason people are worried about losing their messages is not because of lost productivity.
It's also not even really the same situation. A more apt analogy would be, if switching work laptops sometimes meant you could no longer read any Slack history.
I set up automatic backups of WhatsApp to my self-hosted Nextcloud once. Since you need 'tested backups', I tried to decrypt these WhatsApp backups independent of my phone, but this was not possible. You need the original device. There are some hacks online, but they are always out of date.
I am tending now to running Mautrix Whatsapp bridge and backing up my data through this.
Proton doesn't provide public APIs for retrieving the public GPG keys associated with their users' accounts, nor do they provide a way to send encrypted mail to their users' accounts without using their official apps.
Ergo, Proton is not really working to further the state of cryptography for email, they're only working to compel users to use their proprietary software (and ultimately their paid services).
If services which do automated sending of emails to their subscribers/users have no way to encrypt those emails for its users who are on proton mail, I don't understand how Proton can claim to care about encryption.
Proton still appears to suffer from Lavabit's pathologies in several ways because it ultimately stores GPG private keys, hasn't had their "zero-access encryption" audited by an independent third-party, it hosts servers in privacy-hostile jurisdictions that can be seized, and they've already handed user data to authorities over 30k times. [0] Proton Mail is a simulacra of privacy as a service that lies to its customers.
At present time, the best way to assure privacy is to lease (using cryptocurrency) VPS instances in a neutral, privacy-respecting country and self-host a web-mail stack oneself. There isn't really a practical way around this because powerful nation states are able to demand access to customer data from almost every cloud/VPS provider in their jurisdiction.
It's weird. Almost all web traffic is now https - even though very little of it is sensitive. Email, on the other hand, is quite often sensitive, and yet...no one cares.
Unfortunately, those are 2 different problems. It’s easy to have servers store encryption keys to make https work. You only need to encrypt trafic between you and a server for 5 seconds at a time.
It’s hard for personal communications. The server shouldn’t know the keys, and they need to survive for decades.
Yeah, at some point people are going to work out that the problem isn't Johnny, it's email. Email is distinctively hostile to secure messaging. No matter what software Johnny uses, "secure" email will always be inferior to alternative options.
I’ve got hundreds of emails from the early 2010s between a couple of coworkers and myself that I can no longer read because they were S/MIME encrypted and I’ve got no idea what happened to my keys or even if my current client supports it anymore.
I wish the client stored it decrypted once received.
I consider e-mails to be digital versions of postcards. Both are obsolete but have some usage scenarios. There is no need to use private communication in obsolete postcard type messaging, so there is no need for encryption. For private communications there are other better(easier) means which people use.
Maybe Johnny doesn't have a need to encrypt. The post card in India was just a card with message written on both sides, fully visible in plain text. It's very common that a postman would read out the letter to recipients sometimes, when they deliver it. Privacy is not an universal need.
Poor are those people who are forced to hide their message in encrypted formats,
The point is, why not let people to have freedom of not having to encrypt? And why such freedom is considered as poor? This is like forcing everyone to have a smart phone, car, passport, zillions of IDs, internet profiles and calling their shackled life as rich.
The other day someone was shocked to see that I don't have FB and instagram accounts. When did people lose their freedom not have social media accounts?
Because if the default is unencrypted, you'll accidentally send secrets in plaintext one day. And if the default is encrypted and works well - why would you ever take time to explicitly disable that? What's the situation where you want to say "just in case someone intercepts this message, I want them to be able to read it"?
I have lost chat histories more times than I can remember, and I have to be extra diligent about this these days.
I don’t even want to think about pgp when I have to manually take care of this problem. Not because of my own skills, but because I could never make it reliable for my family and friends on their side.
Signal's threat model is that everything around you is hostile to you, except the parties you interact with. You are an undercover rebel in a totalitarian sect which would sacrifice you to Cthulhu if they see your chat history. Losing it is much better than disclosing it.
Your threat model is likely random black hat hackers who would try to get into your communication channels and dig some dirt to blackmail you, or to impersonate you to scam your grandmother out of several thousand dollars. Signal protects quite well against it. But the chance of this happening even in an unencrypted channel is low enough. You don't mind making the security posture somehow weaker, but preserve the possibility to restore your chat history if your secure device is lost or destroyed.
I suppose the problem could be solved by an encrypted backup with a long key which you keep on a piece of paper in your wallet, and / or in a bank in a safe deposit box. Ideally it would be in the format that the `age` utility supports.
But there is no way around that paper with the long code. If this code is stored on your device, and can be copied, it will be copied by some exploit. No matter how inconspicuous a backdoor you are making, somebody will find it and sneak into it. Should it happen in a publicized case, the public opinion will be "XYZ is insecure, run away from it!".
As per Signal’s diehard proponents, losing chat history is a feature, not a bug (I’m not being facetious when saying this, and you can see comments of this kind in Signal related threads here).
Edited to add: I don’t agree with that premise and have long disliked losing chat history.
I have edited my previous comment to reflect that I don’t like losing chat history.
Than he should use something else. I need signal to be secure first, second and third and reliable in edge cases like this a distant number.
It's also not even really the same situation. A more apt analogy would be, if switching work laptops sometimes meant you could no longer read any Slack history.
I am tending now to running Mautrix Whatsapp bridge and backing up my data through this.
Proton doesn't provide public APIs for retrieving the public GPG keys associated with their users' accounts, nor do they provide a way to send encrypted mail to their users' accounts without using their official apps.
Ergo, Proton is not really working to further the state of cryptography for email, they're only working to compel users to use their proprietary software (and ultimately their paid services).
If services which do automated sending of emails to their subscribers/users have no way to encrypt those emails for its users who are on proton mail, I don't understand how Proton can claim to care about encryption.
At present time, the best way to assure privacy is to lease (using cryptocurrency) VPS instances in a neutral, privacy-respecting country and self-host a web-mail stack oneself. There isn't really a practical way around this because powerful nation states are able to demand access to customer data from almost every cloud/VPS provider in their jurisdiction.
0. https://proton.me/legal/transparency
Why?
This article is about encrypting the body of the email which is easy* but no widely implemented standard exists.
* Stupid easy for two nerds to email securely.
* Stupid hard to work with multiple people and non-nerds.
It’s hard for personal communications. The server shouldn’t know the keys, and they need to survive for decades.
https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypte...
I wish the client stored it decrypted once received.
Issue 2: Making it easy to encrypt
Issue 3: Popularizing encryption or getting more people to do it
Poor are those people who are forced to hide their message in encrypted formats,
Most people keep their emails behind a password for a reason...
The other day someone was shocked to see that I don't have FB and instagram accounts. When did people lose their freedom not have social media accounts?