Something I don't understand about this argument, which has been made before, is you can tie JavaScript to a specific hash with SRI. So you release the cryptographic code in public where it can be audited and then what runs in the browser verifies that was what loaded.
The host could inject malicious JavaScript from the host or change libraries but I feel like this is an avoidable problem because it can be audited much more easily than expecting users to audit JavaScript every time. People could even build known, trusted, web frontends. So I think there are mitigations if not ways to assure the browser is running trusted code.
> A cryptosystem is incoherent if its implementation is distributed by the same entity which it purports to secure against.
This is both true, and also useless: pretty much any E2E system is falling under this definition.
By definition you can't protect yourself from the entity that provides you the software you use, because you have now way to guarantee that they aren't going to backdoor you.
That doesn't mean it's snake oil though, as the entity you want protection against is generally not the software provider but a third party. Using e2e from a US-based entity means you are prone to spying from the US government, but at least you know you're reasonably secure against the IRGC, the Chinese intelligence service, the FSB, and so on.
It also means you are safe from data leaks, which are by far the most common threat today.
No system can be secure unconditionally, it's always secure under a particular threat model. And in practice “the attacker is able to deploy arbitrary code on your behalf for an extended period of time without being detected ” is a much narrower attack surface than “the attacker is able to obtain read-only access to your DB or your backups for at least a few minutes”. In the former case, the encryption being broken is also the least of your concern, as you've basically given remote access to all of your user's devices at this point…
> By definition you can't protect yourself from the entity that provides you the software you use, because you have now way to guarantee that they aren't going to backdoor you.
But with repro builds and system transparency, hiding backdoors is impractical.
Not really, time and time again people have abused their position/influence to build backdoors almost into everything for good or bad reasons. The whole idea of third party audits was to ensure that there are checks and balances. Then again the auditors are lowest paid to get stuff done and they take word of the company for most part.
On other hand its quite natural, security is not really getting you direct revenue so business is least motivated in investing it or say continuously investing in it. The ones that do are doing partial lip service for most part.
One thing you can do is have your adversary put their money where their mouth is and use the very same products, sourced independently, that they use to protect their own sensitive information.
There are limits to this of course. You can’t buy a TACLANE[1], but you can buy many of the other products[2] USG uses to protect its own classified information.
The obvious counterexample is NOBUS[0] vulnerabilities, and intentional backdoors like the Clipper Chip[1] or Dual_EC_DRBG[2]: if you genuinely believe you are the only one who could possibly exploit it, there's no reason to avoid using it.
A more modern example is probably the NSA aggressively pushing[3] for replacing classical encryption with post-quantum encryption, rather than taking the more conservative and probably-more-secure approach of layering the two - while at the same time mandating the use of two layers of those same algorithms for their own use[4]!
> Using e2e from a US-based entity means you are prone to spying from the US government, but at least you know you're reasonably secure against the IRGC, the Chinese intelligence service, the FSB, and so on.
You don't need E2E for that, using https/TLS for transport and servers hosted in the US would be enough.
> By definition you can't protect yourself from the entity that provides you the software you use, because you have now way to guarantee that they aren't going to backdoor you.
That's not completely true. If I can control when (and if!) the software updates and if there is some kind of vetting process to verify that the version I'm currently running does not contain a backdoor, I can treat it like a third party with respect to the server.
I agree with you though that most current software that are made to auto-update at any time without any oversight do not fall under this umbrella. Web apps definitely don't fall under it.
> the entity you want protection against is generally not the software provider but a third party.
This. The author is dismissing the whole web-based cryptography, or any end-to-end cryptography for that matter, on the basis of a one-dimension analysis.
But claiming that your system is end to end encrypted means that you are claiming protection from you and your system. This is mainly a truth in advertising issue.
>...pretty much any E2E system is falling under this definition.
The definition is quite clear. It does not apply when the implementation is not distributed by the same entity that creates it for example. There are other related issues but the message here is that web based cryptography has a particular weakness when it comes to things like end to end encrypted messaging which makes it so bad as to be worthless.
> This is both true, and also useless: pretty much any E2E system is falling under this definition.
This is not true. I can build Signal from source from GitHub, and use Signal-the-service with the client (which did not come from Signal, but GitHub/my compiler).
Many cryptosystems are like this. In any case, if you are getting something from the App Store, you can get it once and disable autoupdates, which prevents the service provider (presuming they are the same as the people who published the app) from backdooring you at some point in the future. Alternately, even with updates, unless Apple is colluding with them to serve only you* a specific backdoored app, you can at least be reasonably confident that it's not specifically backdooring only you* in an undetectable fashion.
> This is not true. I can build Signal from source from GitHub
Sure, but can you find an NSA-designed backdoor in the source code?
> you can get it once and disable autoupdates
Try doing that with Signal, and you'll be unable to connect to the main network in just a few days because you get out of sync. Also, what do you do if there's a high severity CVE on the program? You still don't update or you re-audit all the new code?
What you describe may be possible for an intelligence agency, but completely out of reach for an individual.
> unless Apple is colluding with them
Given the most likely adversary is the US intelligence with a warrant, it's absolutely not far fetched to assume that in your threat model.
> you can at least be reasonably confident that it's not specifically backdooring only you
The author is basically saying if you participate in any part of the encryption process, you're deceiving users in saying things are e2e encrypted.
Isn't this conflating encryption with trust? Of course whoever claims to encrypt your data needs to be trustworthy, and whether they actually are is another matter, but If my app allows you to generate a client side key, export it and use it to encrypt data client side and we only get the encrypted data, that is verifiably valid encryption.
I could be malicious and also send a copy of your actual plaintext to the server as well, but that is trivial to check (unless I'm being targeted and I am the only user that gets the malicious code, still, I can check). It's a risky proposition for an organization with vested interest in being seen as pro privacy.
But I get it, different conversation if the government coerces you, and the outcome depends on your bank account and ability to handle pressure.
Absolutely, and the claim is somewhere between nonsense and pedantry bordering on nonsense.
The exact same thing is true for, say, Signal. The provider delivers the client, and they aggressively block non-official clients from participating. So the “ends” in end-to-end are ultimately controlled by Signal. But as long as you trust the Signal company not to insert a backdoor into your client, it’s still true that the company can’t read your texts.
Signal does not aggressively block non-official clients. I constantly use a modified version of Signal Desktop containing a small set of my own patches, and it always works fine. Also, while autoupdate is on by default for the Signal client (and it includes a time bomb expiration to attempt to "force" you to upgrade regularly (removing this is one of my patches)), you are free to turn it off and remove their ability to modify the code on your own system.
The entire argument is based on the definition of an “Incoherent cryptosystem”, which is too restrictive to be useful for cases that you want eg. Tor is also developed and distributed by Tor people and it is supposed to protect you against everyone, including the Tor people.
I think the article raises interesting questions about trust, but I am also doubtful if the definition of the “incoherent cryptosystem” is useful:
The article argues that Signal is an incoherent cryptosystem, because they ship the E2E-encrypting Signal client (and could, hence, backdoor it) that should protect me, the user, against their own infrastructure snooping on me.
As I understand the definition, we would not have an incoherent cryptosystem if I used a third-party client on Signal's infrastructure. Said Non-Signal client would implement E2E encryption, and use the Signal infrastructure, so the entity running the infrastructure is different from the entity providing the client. But is this any better?
Couldn't “Non-Signal Corp.” be coerced by the government (or decide to build a backdoor for their own gain) just as easily as “Signal”?
So I don't think it matters if the entity distributing the client is the same as the one running the infrastructure. It matters if I trust the client. How to implement this (audits, OSS, version pinning, ...) is still an open question to me.
This is precisely why I have autoupdates disabled for my Signal apps. They're on by default, which basically gives Signal-the-org remote code execution on my machine (same as Chrome's built in transparent autoupdate gives Google RCE on your machine).
I don’t agree with this. While, it may be true that E2E carries risks of government surveillance.
E2E makes it less likely that your information will get hacked and reduces the risk that employees will access your information.
The reality is that these security claims are generally subject to internal audit and would need company wide collusion and the risk of a whistleblower or disgruntled former employee if they were violated provides some level of protection that a large tech company offering of e2e doesn’t mean some level of benefit from the user compared to perfect encryption security.
I feel the legal part is on point. It's also increasingly used by governments to have their cake and eat it too: "We'll completely lock down your devices and run all kinds of analysis on your data, but don't worry, it's all done on-device and all communication is encrypted, so our promise to protect your privacy is kept!"
Kind of a weird concern to be reading on HN, where the sentiment is overwhelmingly that these kinds of systems should be exempt from warrants and discovery.
this is one of the problems content addressed stores like nix and ipfs can prevent. every version of the code is immutable and impossible to delete. if the devs update the "latest pointer" to a backdoored release users can just stay on the old version or move to a fork. and in the happy case (honest developer) you get all the benefits of auto update.
for this to work in practice it needs to be paired with reproducible builds, open source and either p2p or server choice (use signal.mydomain.net instead of signal.org). but these are all things that already exist and none of them is really hard to set up. the harder problem is distributing community block lists of bad package versions but that can be done with atproto or simple ublock style filter files.
i think the real bottleneck for adoption is that the only browser with built in ipfs support is brave, the one thats full of crypto ads and affiliate link fraud. i dont know if firefox would ever take it up or we need to build a brand new browser. or find a way to do it one layer down with a system service.
Signal clients have a built in time bomb in each version to "force" you to upgrade after a period of time. It can, of course, be patched out (and I patch it out, along with other fuckery such as disappearing messages/expiring messages/remote delete) but to say that "reproducible builds + content-addressing distribution" solves this problem is basically false in practice.
Also, on iOS, almost everyone has app autoupdates turned on because that's the default.
Many comments suggest that the definition and criteria proposed are infeasible and useless. They are not wrong.
But still it points out something the layperson misses (or even many tech-savvy people): An E2EE service from A does not provably protect your data against A.
There are a lot of other implementations of this idea that don't necessarily rely on trust-on-first-use. The securedrop team explicitly includes malicious JS served by the primary-domain in the threat-model and made WEBCAT[0] as an outcome of that research. Their article on webcrypto is much better than this one.
The solution obviously is to go out-of-band:
> When a user visits a website that has enrolled in WEBCAT, before the site can load the content is checked against a signed manifest to ensure that it has not been tampered with (more on enrollment later). If everything checks out, the page loads normally. If, however, any content does not match what’s expected, the page load is aborted and a warning is displayed, protecting the user from potentially malicious content before it can execute.
This entire article is... Nonsense? It categorically dismisses e2ee, without any supporting evidence whatsoever, other than the notion that a provider might push a update that doesn't encrypt messages anymore.
It's on the level of "you can't trust your OS unless you wrote it yourself"
-righteous sounding but utterly stupid in practice
As a developer, when some company says that some platform is end-to-end encrypted, you know that it means "the default client provides encryption, by default" but you know very well that they could selectively turn it off for anyone, at any time and it may be impossible to know that they did this this unless the target was tech savvy and actively monitoring their network packets during the brief period that encryption was turned off... Especially on the web, they could just serve a different JavaScript library with a backdoor to a specific IP address only and the target would have no idea.
Articles like this remind me that non-devs think "end-to-end encrypted" means it's always the case and they can't turn it off at will. This is not the case.
If web-based encryption is snake oil, then science-based medicine is also snake oil, because you trust your doctor not to secretly give you sugar pills instead of the real thing. In fact, this argument applies even more strongly to medication, because I can't really determine what a pill does, but I can determine what an app or website does and what it sends to the server.
Two problems I see with the authors argument. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can chip in to correct me if I'm wrong:
1. Aren't E2EE systems designed to prevent decryption of content already created in the past sitting on the vendor's servers? Yes, the vendor could go rogue, but, assuming they currently have implemented E2EE right, it means any change to the client can only compromise content created in the future from that point onward, no? So why is the article implying Apple could have provided a back-doored iOS to bypass the encryption for existing content?
2. I also don't find the argument that E2EE is only a legal trick fully convincing. There are several other incentives for a vendor to implement it apart from avoiding legal issues: preventing insider abuse, reducing liability, improving customer trust, and resisting mass surveillance
These are real engineering motivations. The threat model is not: "Protect you if <vendor> becomes actively malicious tomorrow." Its more like "Protect messages stored on <Vendor>'s servers from attackers, employees, hackers, routine legal requests, and passive surveillance."
Alright, I'm ready. These are engineering motivations, as you said. So, which one of these isn't a cost center? Because an insurance policy would handle the first two, but probably cheaper. Customers have repeatedly proven they will buy the product lacking the trust. Resisting mass surveillance? They are the mass surveillance. Which is now a legal compliance based cost center.
Isn't non-web-based cryptography affected (as per this take) in the same way but with extra steps?
A sophisticated actor might as well also control the application that ends up on my device.
It does not have to be the same delivery mechanism as long as I did not write it myself.
So all cryptography is snake oil?
___
I mean I kinda sorta get the point and there would be some merit to discuss there, but the weird framing makes that very hard to do.
Of course it's easier to break web e2ee if you are for example cloudflare compared with someone also having to compromise the Debian repos.
> Isn't non-web-based cryptography affected (as per this take) in the same way but with extra steps?
Yes, but it's a whole lot of extra steps spread across multiple independent parties, each of them adds large delays to the actions and increasing the chance that it is discovered long before it ends up on the users machine.
When you hack GPG it will take years before it trickles down into every Linux distribution, especially LTS releases. And ideally, you want an encryption protocol, not one app, thus you have some people running GPG, some running Sequoia PGP and some running OpenPGP.js. If somebody fiddles with the encryption, different clients won't be able to decode the messages anymore and it will be clear pretty quickly that something is wrong.
Meanwhile on the Web or smartphones, you remove or backdoor the encryption, everybody gets auto updated to the latest version and nobody will know that something went wrong.
How about GPG distributed with a Linux distribution like Debian as a counterexample? It would be fairly difficult to backdoor GPG in that case without getting caught. Everything happens in the open both at the GPG level and the Linux distribution level. The binaries are signed by the distribution and are distributed by a bunch of mirrors. An evil Debian maintainer would have to make a change that was well enough disguised as something else to evade scrutiny.
Hm not necessarily. You "just" need to get code onto the system that is somehow being loaded into the gpg process or has the ability to load code into a gpg process.
Of course, still orders of magnitude harder than just modifying the js bundle, but not a counter-example.
Snake oil is just a fundamentally wrong label for the issues OP is seeing, even though those issues are of course real and relevant.
If, say, Signal was completely controlled by the CIA[1] and was thus evil, then having incoherent cryptography as described in the article would be a feature, not a bug. Being able to reject law enforcement requests would produce a false sense of security for the people the CIA was interested in surveilling. Responding effectively to law enforcement requests would reduce the value to the CIA of the ability to secretly backdoor Signal.
This effect was seen in the Apple vs FBI incident described in the article. The public perception of Apple as a brave defender of user privacy was greatly increased due to that dispute. For all we know, the FBI was in on the conspiracy. In return they might receive the fruits of such surveillance with the only limitation that they would have to disguise the source with parallel construction[2].
I'm confused, is the argument that it doesn't work because Google is fueled by surveillance capitalism? If so what about Apple which is only partly so? What about Firefox and in particular its de-branded ones without Google search as default?
I think what makes the Web special is precisely that there are different browsers beyond Chromium. If the Web was Chrome I would tend to agree but even though popular I do not think it is fair to conflate it to be the Web.
I could not find anything about google or other browser vendors in the article.
My take is that you should trust provider (developer, hoster) of said encryption app to send you actual implementation, not something that looks like the real deal, but does not encrypt anything. From a regular user's point of view: you can not inspect what you run (due to technical reasons, that on the web anything can be downloaded and executed at any moment, swapping implementation on the fly. And due to skills needed to actually read and understand executed scripts), so you can only believe and trust. At which point usual TLS is surely enough.
Like I said I'm confused, genuinely trying to figure the article out.
"A cryptosystem is incoherent if its implementation is distributed by the same entity which it purports to secure against."
What is the cryptosystem then on the Web? Who is the entity? It's not the server or the Website so I don't see what's left except the browser and browser vendor.
Before reading this article, I used to believe that IT companies deeply respected users’ human rights, spending millions of dollars to build end‑to‑end encryption. But thanks to this very article, I learned that they were actually saving tens of millions in administrative litigation costs – costs they would otherwise have had to pay every month to respond to wiretap warrants.
Some might call this a “cryptographic innovation.” I call it “the technical outsourcing of legal disclaimers.” Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have a Harvard Law School legal team on my side.
End-to-end encryption is about protecting data at rest on the vendor's servers. TLS only secures data in transit.
The article's argument is a bit like saying TLS protects plain-text passwords in transit, so there is no need to store them in hashed form in the database.
Sure, the article makes good arguments about the trust that is still implicit in E2EE, but it goes too far in its dismissal of it.
I never believed that the messages were truly E2E encrypted and I know for sure when WhatsApp retroactively censored a message I sent to a friend a while back, I found that super sus.
Reminder: iMessage claims to be e2ee, but the on-by-default iCloud Backup on iOS backs up material that is sufficient to defeat this (either the endpoint keys, in the case of "Messages in iCloud" disabled, or the messages themselves, in the case of "Messages in iCloud" enabled).
This means that, in practice, iMessage is not e2ee.
Before you say "But what about Advanced Data Protection that enables e2ee for iCloud Backup?" - virtually nobody has this on, Apple prohibits you from turning it on in the UK, and even if you enable it - the people you iMessage with don't, so your conversations are in their backups. This means that if either endpoint of the iMessage conversation is in the UK, and both parties have iCloud Backup enabled (the default), then your iMessages are not e2ee as a non-endpoint has an escrowed copy of the plaintext or keys.
If you’re not running PGP commands yourself to encrypt and read your messages, it’s not secure.
Also no OS integrated system that does this for you automatically / conveniently has ever existed that was widely adopted because that application would have the ability to read all of your private communication, and impossible to install on an uncracked phone.
Still it would take literally minutes to vibe code an app that sits in front of a WhatsApp client and automatically handles these things. Maybe the future is just to write it yourself (not the security) so you can trust it and it’s convenient.
Something I don't understand about this argument, which has been made before, is you can tie JavaScript to a specific hash with SRI. So you release the cryptographic code in public where it can be audited and then what runs in the browser verifies that was what loaded.
The host could inject malicious JavaScript from the host or change libraries but I feel like this is an avoidable problem because it can be audited much more easily than expecting users to audit JavaScript every time. People could even build known, trusted, web frontends. So I think there are mitigations if not ways to assure the browser is running trusted code.
> A cryptosystem is incoherent if its implementation is distributed by the same entity which it purports to secure against.
This is both true, and also useless: pretty much any E2E system is falling under this definition.
By definition you can't protect yourself from the entity that provides you the software you use, because you have now way to guarantee that they aren't going to backdoor you.
That doesn't mean it's snake oil though, as the entity you want protection against is generally not the software provider but a third party. Using e2e from a US-based entity means you are prone to spying from the US government, but at least you know you're reasonably secure against the IRGC, the Chinese intelligence service, the FSB, and so on.
It also means you are safe from data leaks, which are by far the most common threat today.
No system can be secure unconditionally, it's always secure under a particular threat model. And in practice “the attacker is able to deploy arbitrary code on your behalf for an extended period of time without being detected ” is a much narrower attack surface than “the attacker is able to obtain read-only access to your DB or your backups for at least a few minutes”. In the former case, the encryption being broken is also the least of your concern, as you've basically given remote access to all of your user's devices at this point…
> By definition you can't protect yourself from the entity that provides you the software you use, because you have now way to guarantee that they aren't going to backdoor you.
But with repro builds and system transparency, hiding backdoors is impractical.
Not really, time and time again people have abused their position/influence to build backdoors almost into everything for good or bad reasons. The whole idea of third party audits was to ensure that there are checks and balances. Then again the auditors are lowest paid to get stuff done and they take word of the company for most part.
On other hand its quite natural, security is not really getting you direct revenue so business is least motivated in investing it or say continuously investing in it. The ones that do are doing partial lip service for most part.
One thing you can do is have your adversary put their money where their mouth is and use the very same products, sourced independently, that they use to protect their own sensitive information.
There are limits to this of course. You can’t buy a TACLANE[1], but you can buy many of the other products[2] USG uses to protect its own classified information.
[1] https://gdmissionsystems.com/encryption/taclane-network-encr...
[2] https://www.nsa.gov/resources/Commercial-Solutions-for-Class...
The obvious counterexample is NOBUS[0] vulnerabilities, and intentional backdoors like the Clipper Chip[1] or Dual_EC_DRBG[2]: if you genuinely believe you are the only one who could possibly exploit it, there's no reason to avoid using it.
A more modern example is probably the NSA aggressively pushing[3] for replacing classical encryption with post-quantum encryption, rather than taking the more conservative and probably-more-secure approach of layering the two - while at the same time mandating the use of two layers of those same algorithms for their own use[4]!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
[3]: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html
[4]: https://defense-solutions.curtisswright.com/capabilities/tec...
It's not useless, I don't think.
If the software is open source and you only install new versions after their source code has been audited, you should be ok.
> Using e2e from a US-based entity means you are prone to spying from the US government, but at least you know you're reasonably secure against the IRGC, the Chinese intelligence service, the FSB, and so on.
You don't need E2E for that, using https/TLS for transport and servers hosted in the US would be enough.
It will be enough until the server is pwnd and the data is leaked to the world.
Data breaches happen literally every day.
a website can serve you a keylogger client and no one will ever know most likely, harder to do with binaries/sources
> By definition you can't protect yourself from the entity that provides you the software you use, because you have now way to guarantee that they aren't going to backdoor you.
That's not completely true. If I can control when (and if!) the software updates and if there is some kind of vetting process to verify that the version I'm currently running does not contain a backdoor, I can treat it like a third party with respect to the server.
I agree with you though that most current software that are made to auto-update at any time without any oversight do not fall under this umbrella. Web apps definitely don't fall under it.
> if there is some kind of vetting process to verify that the version I'm currently running does not contain a backdoor
This would be extremely difficult, I would say impossible from a practical standpoint.
> the entity you want protection against is generally not the software provider but a third party.
This. The author is dismissing the whole web-based cryptography, or any end-to-end cryptography for that matter, on the basis of a one-dimension analysis.
But claiming that your system is end to end encrypted means that you are claiming protection from you and your system. This is mainly a truth in advertising issue.
The article is nothing but a rant.
>...pretty much any E2E system is falling under this definition.
The definition is quite clear. It does not apply when the implementation is not distributed by the same entity that creates it for example. There are other related issues but the message here is that web based cryptography has a particular weakness when it comes to things like end to end encrypted messaging which makes it so bad as to be worthless.
> The definition is quite clear. It does not apply when the implementation is not distributed by the same entity that creates it for example.
How can you be sure that the entity distributing the software didn't backdoor it?
> the message here is that web based cryptography has a particular weakness when it comes to things like end to end encrypted messaging
There's literally no substance about that claim in TFA.
> This is both true, and also useless: pretty much any E2E system is falling under this definition.
This is not true. I can build Signal from source from GitHub, and use Signal-the-service with the client (which did not come from Signal, but GitHub/my compiler).
Many cryptosystems are like this. In any case, if you are getting something from the App Store, you can get it once and disable autoupdates, which prevents the service provider (presuming they are the same as the people who published the app) from backdooring you at some point in the future. Alternately, even with updates, unless Apple is colluding with them to serve only you* a specific backdoored app, you can at least be reasonably confident that it's not specifically backdooring only you* in an undetectable fashion.
> This is not true. I can build Signal from source from GitHub
Sure, but can you find an NSA-designed backdoor in the source code?
> you can get it once and disable autoupdates
Try doing that with Signal, and you'll be unable to connect to the main network in just a few days because you get out of sync. Also, what do you do if there's a high severity CVE on the program? You still don't update or you re-audit all the new code?
What you describe may be possible for an intelligence agency, but completely out of reach for an individual.
> unless Apple is colluding with them
Given the most likely adversary is the US intelligence with a warrant, it's absolutely not far fetched to assume that in your threat model.
> you can at least be reasonably confident that it's not specifically backdooring only you
That's not really reassuring…
The author is basically saying if you participate in any part of the encryption process, you're deceiving users in saying things are e2e encrypted.
Isn't this conflating encryption with trust? Of course whoever claims to encrypt your data needs to be trustworthy, and whether they actually are is another matter, but If my app allows you to generate a client side key, export it and use it to encrypt data client side and we only get the encrypted data, that is verifiably valid encryption.
I could be malicious and also send a copy of your actual plaintext to the server as well, but that is trivial to check (unless I'm being targeted and I am the only user that gets the malicious code, still, I can check). It's a risky proposition for an organization with vested interest in being seen as pro privacy.
But I get it, different conversation if the government coerces you, and the outcome depends on your bank account and ability to handle pressure.
> Isn't this conflating encryption with trust?
Absolutely, and the claim is somewhere between nonsense and pedantry bordering on nonsense.
The exact same thing is true for, say, Signal. The provider delivers the client, and they aggressively block non-official clients from participating. So the “ends” in end-to-end are ultimately controlled by Signal. But as long as you trust the Signal company not to insert a backdoor into your client, it’s still true that the company can’t read your texts.
Signal does not aggressively block non-official clients. I constantly use a modified version of Signal Desktop containing a small set of my own patches, and it always works fine. Also, while autoupdate is on by default for the Signal client (and it includes a time bomb expiration to attempt to "force" you to upgrade regularly (removing this is one of my patches)), you are free to turn it off and remove their ability to modify the code on your own system.
The entire argument is based on the definition of an “Incoherent cryptosystem”, which is too restrictive to be useful for cases that you want eg. Tor is also developed and distributed by Tor people and it is supposed to protect you against everyone, including the Tor people.
I think the article raises interesting questions about trust, but I am also doubtful if the definition of the “incoherent cryptosystem” is useful:
The article argues that Signal is an incoherent cryptosystem, because they ship the E2E-encrypting Signal client (and could, hence, backdoor it) that should protect me, the user, against their own infrastructure snooping on me.
As I understand the definition, we would not have an incoherent cryptosystem if I used a third-party client on Signal's infrastructure. Said Non-Signal client would implement E2E encryption, and use the Signal infrastructure, so the entity running the infrastructure is different from the entity providing the client. But is this any better?
Couldn't “Non-Signal Corp.” be coerced by the government (or decide to build a backdoor for their own gain) just as easily as “Signal”?
So I don't think it matters if the entity distributing the client is the same as the one running the infrastructure. It matters if I trust the client. How to implement this (audits, OSS, version pinning, ...) is still an open question to me.
Perhaps Molly[1] could serve as an alternative client for you?
[1] https://molly.im/
This is precisely why I have autoupdates disabled for my Signal apps. They're on by default, which basically gives Signal-the-org remote code execution on my machine (same as Chrome's built in transparent autoupdate gives Google RCE on your machine).
technically you could audit your local copy of tor source code, build it, and then never upgrade it.
still this wouldn't guarantee that all the other nodes are not compromised
I don’t agree with this. While, it may be true that E2E carries risks of government surveillance.
E2E makes it less likely that your information will get hacked and reduces the risk that employees will access your information.
The reality is that these security claims are generally subject to internal audit and would need company wide collusion and the risk of a whistleblower or disgruntled former employee if they were violated provides some level of protection that a large tech company offering of e2e doesn’t mean some level of benefit from the user compared to perfect encryption security.
I feel the legal part is on point. It's also increasingly used by governments to have their cake and eat it too: "We'll completely lock down your devices and run all kinds of analysis on your data, but don't worry, it's all done on-device and all communication is encrypted, so our promise to protect your privacy is kept!"
Kind of a weird concern to be reading on HN, where the sentiment is overwhelmingly that these kinds of systems should be exempt from warrants and discovery.
this is one of the problems content addressed stores like nix and ipfs can prevent. every version of the code is immutable and impossible to delete. if the devs update the "latest pointer" to a backdoored release users can just stay on the old version or move to a fork. and in the happy case (honest developer) you get all the benefits of auto update.
for this to work in practice it needs to be paired with reproducible builds, open source and either p2p or server choice (use signal.mydomain.net instead of signal.org). but these are all things that already exist and none of them is really hard to set up. the harder problem is distributing community block lists of bad package versions but that can be done with atproto or simple ublock style filter files.
i think the real bottleneck for adoption is that the only browser with built in ipfs support is brave, the one thats full of crypto ads and affiliate link fraud. i dont know if firefox would ever take it up or we need to build a brand new browser. or find a way to do it one layer down with a system service.
Signal clients have a built in time bomb in each version to "force" you to upgrade after a period of time. It can, of course, be patched out (and I patch it out, along with other fuckery such as disappearing messages/expiring messages/remote delete) but to say that "reproducible builds + content-addressing distribution" solves this problem is basically false in practice.
Also, on iOS, almost everyone has app autoupdates turned on because that's the default.
Many comments suggest that the definition and criteria proposed are infeasible and useless. They are not wrong. But still it points out something the layperson misses (or even many tech-savvy people): An E2EE service from A does not provably protect your data against A.
> The purpose of cryptography theatre is not to deliver actual security from a cryptographic perspective but act as a kind of magic spell
This reminds me Telegram, which promises to be secure, but requires giving it my phone number, which is the most insecure thing one can do.
The discussion on the proposed solution is interesting
https://github.com/w3c/ServiceWorker/issues/1680
There are a lot of other implementations of this idea that don't necessarily rely on trust-on-first-use. The securedrop team explicitly includes malicious JS served by the primary-domain in the threat-model and made WEBCAT[0] as an outcome of that research. Their article on webcrypto is much better than this one.
The solution obviously is to go out-of-band:
> When a user visits a website that has enrolled in WEBCAT, before the site can load the content is checked against a signed manifest to ensure that it has not been tampered with (more on enrollment later). If everything checks out, the page loads normally. If, however, any content does not match what’s expected, the page load is aborted and a warning is displayed, protecting the user from potentially malicious content before it can execute.
[0]: https://securedrop.org/news/introducing-webcat-web-based-cod...
[1]: https://securedrop.org/news/browser-based-cryptography/
This entire article is... Nonsense? It categorically dismisses e2ee, without any supporting evidence whatsoever, other than the notion that a provider might push a update that doesn't encrypt messages anymore.
It's on the level of "you can't trust your OS unless you wrote it yourself" -righteous sounding but utterly stupid in practice
As a developer, when some company says that some platform is end-to-end encrypted, you know that it means "the default client provides encryption, by default" but you know very well that they could selectively turn it off for anyone, at any time and it may be impossible to know that they did this this unless the target was tech savvy and actively monitoring their network packets during the brief period that encryption was turned off... Especially on the web, they could just serve a different JavaScript library with a backdoor to a specific IP address only and the target would have no idea.
Articles like this remind me that non-devs think "end-to-end encrypted" means it's always the case and they can't turn it off at will. This is not the case.
Yeah, this argument is nonsensical as presented.
If web-based encryption is snake oil, then science-based medicine is also snake oil, because you trust your doctor not to secretly give you sugar pills instead of the real thing. In fact, this argument applies even more strongly to medication, because I can't really determine what a pill does, but I can determine what an app or website does and what it sends to the server.
Two problems I see with the authors argument. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can chip in to correct me if I'm wrong:
1. Aren't E2EE systems designed to prevent decryption of content already created in the past sitting on the vendor's servers? Yes, the vendor could go rogue, but, assuming they currently have implemented E2EE right, it means any change to the client can only compromise content created in the future from that point onward, no? So why is the article implying Apple could have provided a back-doored iOS to bypass the encryption for existing content?
2. I also don't find the argument that E2EE is only a legal trick fully convincing. There are several other incentives for a vendor to implement it apart from avoiding legal issues: preventing insider abuse, reducing liability, improving customer trust, and resisting mass surveillance
These are real engineering motivations. The threat model is not: "Protect you if <vendor> becomes actively malicious tomorrow." Its more like "Protect messages stored on <Vendor>'s servers from attackers, employees, hackers, routine legal requests, and passive surveillance."
Alright, I'm ready. These are engineering motivations, as you said. So, which one of these isn't a cost center? Because an insurance policy would handle the first two, but probably cheaper. Customers have repeatedly proven they will buy the product lacking the trust. Resisting mass surveillance? They are the mass surveillance. Which is now a legal compliance based cost center.
* preventing insider abuse * reducing liability * improving customer trust * resisting mass surveillance
I’d rather make up my own mind, read the docs/code. All I read was unsubstantiated claims, with zero real world evidence.
Isn't non-web-based cryptography affected (as per this take) in the same way but with extra steps?
A sophisticated actor might as well also control the application that ends up on my device. It does not have to be the same delivery mechanism as long as I did not write it myself.
So all cryptography is snake oil?
___
I mean I kinda sorta get the point and there would be some merit to discuss there, but the weird framing makes that very hard to do.
Of course it's easier to break web e2ee if you are for example cloudflare compared with someone also having to compromise the Debian repos.
But that's not what snake oil means.
> Isn't non-web-based cryptography affected (as per this take) in the same way but with extra steps?
Yes, but it's a whole lot of extra steps spread across multiple independent parties, each of them adds large delays to the actions and increasing the chance that it is discovered long before it ends up on the users machine.
When you hack GPG it will take years before it trickles down into every Linux distribution, especially LTS releases. And ideally, you want an encryption protocol, not one app, thus you have some people running GPG, some running Sequoia PGP and some running OpenPGP.js. If somebody fiddles with the encryption, different clients won't be able to decode the messages anymore and it will be clear pretty quickly that something is wrong.
Meanwhile on the Web or smartphones, you remove or backdoor the encryption, everybody gets auto updated to the latest version and nobody will know that something went wrong.
How about GPG distributed with a Linux distribution like Debian as a counterexample? It would be fairly difficult to backdoor GPG in that case without getting caught. Everything happens in the open both at the GPG level and the Linux distribution level. The binaries are signed by the distribution and are distributed by a bunch of mirrors. An evil Debian maintainer would have to make a change that was well enough disguised as something else to evade scrutiny.
Hm not necessarily. You "just" need to get code onto the system that is somehow being loaded into the gpg process or has the ability to load code into a gpg process.
Of course, still orders of magnitude harder than just modifying the js bundle, but not a counter-example.
Snake oil is just a fundamentally wrong label for the issues OP is seeing, even though those issues are of course real and relevant.
If, say, Signal was completely controlled by the CIA[1] and was thus evil, then having incoherent cryptography as described in the article would be a feature, not a bug. Being able to reject law enforcement requests would produce a false sense of security for the people the CIA was interested in surveilling. Responding effectively to law enforcement requests would reduce the value to the CIA of the ability to secretly backdoor Signal.
This effect was seen in the Apple vs FBI incident described in the article. The public perception of Apple as a brave defender of user privacy was greatly increased due to that dispute. For all we know, the FBI was in on the conspiracy. In return they might receive the fruits of such surveillance with the only limitation that they would have to disguise the source with parallel construction[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
The word "if" is doing a whole lot of work in that first paragraph. Holding the entire world on its shoulders, so to speak.
I'm confused, is the argument that it doesn't work because Google is fueled by surveillance capitalism? If so what about Apple which is only partly so? What about Firefox and in particular its de-branded ones without Google search as default?
I think what makes the Web special is precisely that there are different browsers beyond Chromium. If the Web was Chrome I would tend to agree but even though popular I do not think it is fair to conflate it to be the Web.
I could not find anything about google or other browser vendors in the article.
My take is that you should trust provider (developer, hoster) of said encryption app to send you actual implementation, not something that looks like the real deal, but does not encrypt anything. From a regular user's point of view: you can not inspect what you run (due to technical reasons, that on the web anything can be downloaded and executed at any moment, swapping implementation on the fly. And due to skills needed to actually read and understand executed scripts), so you can only believe and trust. At which point usual TLS is surely enough.
Like I said I'm confused, genuinely trying to figure the article out.
"A cryptosystem is incoherent if its implementation is distributed by the same entity which it purports to secure against."
What is the cryptosystem then on the Web? Who is the entity? It's not the server or the Website so I don't see what's left except the browser and browser vendor.
But we are talking about protecting data at rest on the vendor's servers. Unless the vendor stores no user data at, how does TLS protect that data?
Your argument is a bit like saying TLS protects plain-text passwords in transit, so there is no need to store them in hashed form in the database.
Before reading this article, I used to believe that IT companies deeply respected users’ human rights, spending millions of dollars to build end‑to‑end encryption. But thanks to this very article, I learned that they were actually saving tens of millions in administrative litigation costs – costs they would otherwise have had to pay every month to respond to wiretap warrants.
Some might call this a “cryptographic innovation.” I call it “the technical outsourcing of legal disclaimers.” Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have a Harvard Law School legal team on my side.
End-to-end encryption is about protecting data at rest on the vendor's servers. TLS only secures data in transit.
The article's argument is a bit like saying TLS protects plain-text passwords in transit, so there is no need to store them in hashed form in the database.
Sure, the article makes good arguments about the trust that is still implicit in E2EE, but it goes too far in its dismissal of it.
having E2E encryption is a marketing feature, you need it if you want to be competitive in the market, so this is another incentive to add it
I never believed that the messages were truly E2E encrypted and I know for sure when WhatsApp retroactively censored a message I sent to a friend a while back, I found that super sus.
Reminder: iMessage claims to be e2ee, but the on-by-default iCloud Backup on iOS backs up material that is sufficient to defeat this (either the endpoint keys, in the case of "Messages in iCloud" disabled, or the messages themselves, in the case of "Messages in iCloud" enabled).
This means that, in practice, iMessage is not e2ee.
Before you say "But what about Advanced Data Protection that enables e2ee for iCloud Backup?" - virtually nobody has this on, Apple prohibits you from turning it on in the UK, and even if you enable it - the people you iMessage with don't, so your conversations are in their backups. This means that if either endpoint of the iMessage conversation is in the UK, and both parties have iCloud Backup enabled (the default), then your iMessages are not e2ee as a non-endpoint has an escrowed copy of the plaintext or keys.
If you’re not running PGP commands yourself to encrypt and read your messages, it’s not secure.
Also no OS integrated system that does this for you automatically / conveniently has ever existed that was widely adopted because that application would have the ability to read all of your private communication, and impossible to install on an uncracked phone.
Still it would take literally minutes to vibe code an app that sits in front of a WhatsApp client and automatically handles these things. Maybe the future is just to write it yourself (not the security) so you can trust it and it’s convenient.