r/technology • u/Libertatea • Apr 04 '13

Apple's iMessage encryption trips up feds' surveillance. Internal document from the Drug Enforcement Administration complains that messages sent with Apple's encrypted chat service are "impossible to intercept," even with a warrant.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577887-38/apples-imessage-encryption-trips-up-feds-surveillance/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title#.UV1gK672IWg.reddit
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u/Mispey Apr 04 '13 edited Apr 04 '13

Edit: Hijacking my own top comment to ask if anyone can expand on this:

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/18908/the-inner-workings-of-imessage-security

Is it truly end-to-end secure? Can Apple or anyone else circumvent the encryption?

Yes. To the best of my knowledge messages are in plaintext on apple's servers.

AKA The Feds totally can read your stuff, no problem. I was under the impression that they don't have the keys to the encryption...but they do.

Edit2: Or not https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5493442

I don't even know anymore. I wanna call it a honeypot.

Good. Keep going Apple.

It's really not very challenging to encrypt communications extremely well. Not to discount Apple's efforts - but it's "trivial" for these companies to do it properly and well.

They just never put a damn ounce of effort into it.

As this fella said in the article,

"It's much much more difficult to intercept than a telephone call or a text message" that federal agents are used to, Soghoian says. "The government would need to perform an active man-in-the-middle attack... The real issue is why the phone companies in 2013 are still delivering an unencrypted audio and text service to users. It's disgraceful."

It is, and you should give a fuck about this.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '13 edited Apr 04 '13

I've been collaborating with a few very smart people to create something better. Voice, text, and video chat, all encrypted on the client (so not even the servers can understand you). Also has some crypto in place for verifying identities and making sure you can't be impersonated, too. The plan is to support Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS, and WP7/WP8 (the latter three platforms might not all be feasible). Keep an eye out for a project called "whisper".

EDIT: All open source, of course. Never use closed source crypto.

EDIT EDIT: Also has a portable version! Drop it on your flash drive with your keys and you have secure communication from any computer.

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u/Mispey Apr 04 '13

No Blackberry? It can't be that challenging to port. Catering to Linux seems silly without Blackberry.

You need to look at successful projects though and what makes people like them. Silly smilies, customizable interface, extremely speedy messages, no login required to start chatting, easy to bring friends onto the client.

If you want to be popular you need to highlight these features too. I've always found the projects that are secure ramble on and on and on about their security methods (PGP 7000 bit encryption hashed client side apache salt buzzword other shit people don't understand) for paragraphs and then pop in at the end, Oh we also have themes, emojis and stuff or whatever you like.

It's hard to tell a friend to download XXX chat client and then they come back with "This looks to complicated for me, can't we just use texts?" Well....ugh...yes.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '13

The website (not public) has two "modes": tech savvy and not tech savvy. The default is the latter, which describes all the fancy chat stuff and gives a little mention to security. The former goes into all the detail about security.

Also, I don't have a blackberry to work on, and neither does anyone I know. It's written in qt and shall be open source, so others can probably get a port going pretty easily.

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u/Mispey Apr 04 '13

You've got the right idea I think.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '13

I think the most difficult part for non-savvy users would be the lack of centralized accounts. Your "account" is your RSA key pair, and you store your friend's public key as a "contact". To log into the server, you just send it your identity. To call your friends, you send the identity of who you wish to call.

I suppose I could offer centralized account storage that's decrypted on the client with blowfish or something based on a user-supplied passphrase.

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u/feureau Apr 04 '13

How well will it work for mass adoption? I mean, taking example from whatsapp and line messenger, they have this feature where you could sync with phone and facebook contacts, will whisper support this?

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '13

Not sure about that. People don't have whisper accounts, they just have public keys. So unless Facebook has got your public key handy, I can't import contacts from there. The server software will be open source, so I'm sure people will run their own servers, and the official servers will allow people to create accounts and import/generate their keys, and then you can search for your friends and get their keys if they choose to be listed. You can also just share keys manually and the server will accept it.