
You have a moral obligation to use crypto - peteforde
http://blog.easydns.org/2014/02/11/you-have-a-moral-obligation-to-use-crypto/
======
robertfw
Reposting my comment on the blog:

I can't comment on which encryption schemes are still strong, but one
advantage to using protection for general use is providing strength in
numbers. Right now, using Tor or strong encryption is a bright beacon saying
"this person has something to hide!" and the NSA et al hone in by default.

If, however, using Tor and strong encryption was the norm, it is easier for
those who need it - whistle blowers, dissidents, etc - to hide underneath the
regular noise.

edit: keep getting flagged for spam! Perhaps I have the wrong keywords?

~~~
anovikov
That won't work because Tor is too slow. I'd use only if i was a terrorist -
it's too slow even for pedophiles. If we want people to use crypto en masse,
we have to give them something faster.

But the general idea is correct.

~~~
dispense
Perhaps it's been a while since you've last used Tor, but at least in my
experience, the speed really isn't that bad, especially for tasks that aren't
time critical. Speeds of hundred or several hundred KB/s are not uncommon. The
latency is a couple of seconds at most, in most cases. You won't be streaming
in HD over Tor, sure, but fetching your email over Tor is not significantly
more tiresome than over a direct connection. There is usually no noticeable
lag for instant messaging either. YouTube video streams in the Tor browser
also works with no delays most of the time.

------
Zigurd
The Internet services who are complaining should start coding, instead, or in
addition to complaining. Secure key exchange, secure real time communication,
secure storage, and secure email payload would blind the surveillance state.
All surveillance states.

Even if you think your own surveillance state is less than harmful, there are
dozens of others which are patently evil or thoroughly corrupt. And yet, while
we do business all over the planet, even business cloud services are almost
all unencrypted.

Meeting this moral obligation is something Yahoo, Google, and others could
make much easier. At some point, we have to ask why not?

~~~
tptacek
Google has done more to securely encrypt Internet traffic than any other
company in the world. Among other things, they are the pioneering standard-
bearer for ECC forward secrecy and for certificate pinning, the two most
important Internet encryption advances in the last 10 years.

~~~
Zigurd
That's nice. But putting our email, IM, and VoIP out of reach of snooping
would actually change things.

Actually, you can stop being obtuse here rather than farther down the thread.

~~~
tptacek
You wrote "secure key exchange, secure real time communication, secure
storage, and secure email payload would blind the surveillance state". Now I'm
not sure we're working from the same definitions of those terms.

~~~
Zigurd
If you think Google, or any other consumer Internet service, has already
secured those things, evidently not. What I have in mind is end-to-end
encryption with no provisions for surveillance of cleartext, with or without a
warrant. As I wrote earlier in this thread, even if you think our law
enforcement can be trusted, there are plenty of jurisdictions where that is
not the case at all.

~~~
tptacek
I think I understand. Any acknowledgement that Google has done more to secure
Internet traffic for normal users than any other company would require you to
concede something, and thus feel bad.

~~~
Zigurd
"Normal users" don't need their stuff hidden from government surveillance?
Nope, not going to concede that.

Stop being obtuse and address the point of the article: Unless encryption is
routine, it isn't effective against dragnet surveillance.

~~~
schoen
I think the difference between you and tptacek here is basically about this:

[http://benlog.com/2014/01/03/there-are-3-kinds-of-
crypto/](http://benlog.com/2014/01/03/there-are-3-kinds-of-crypto/)

Google has done an enormous amount to improve and deploy what Ben Adida called
"b2c crypto" \-- typically turning it on months to years ahead of its main
competitors, and actively supporting work on making it stronger. But they've
done almost nothing to encourage the use of "p2p crypto" in Adida's sense, at
least not as a product feature.

I support the widespread routine use of p2p crypto, but I think Google
deserves credit for what it has done. That includes making b2c crypto
"routine" for most products, which does have direct effects on dragnet
surveillance.

~~~
Zigurd
Of course Google deserves praise for that and 97 other things. But it is
completely unapropos to what the article posted here is about. It does not
really have an effect on dragnet surveillance because Google can be ordered to
simply allow the government to let it happen.

There is _some_ value in that foreign governments with their own NSA wannabes
could get thwarted.

~~~
sgift
The problem is that Google would probably closed down if they implemented
security which cannot be circumvented, even with a warrant, because they would
break the law.

There are many laws and long standing rulings which force companies/people/..
to cooperate with law agencies. So, as it has been stated many times before,
the solution for these things is political, not technical. Law always trumps
programming and law is influenced by politics.

~~~
Zigurd
What law would that break?

------
rwg
Safari can't verify the identity of the website "blog.easydns.org".

The certificate for this website is invalid. You might be connecting to a
website that is pretending to be "blog.easydns.org", which could put your
confidential information at risk. Would you like to connect to the website
anyway?

~~~
Karunamon
As usual, misconfiguration causing scary warnings, useless to the end user,
but the connection is still encrypted.

I really wish we'd divorce the identity assurance part of PKI from the
encryption part. I have no idea how it would be done, but.

~~~
GauntletWizard
HTTPS Encryption is virtually useless without the identify verification part.
Anyone can run a valid HTTPS server with a self-generated public key. Anyone
could then place a MITM, and without the identity bit, you're just as
compromised.

If we had dropped the identity bit, every ISP would be running a MITM proxy,
because they want control. Already, plenty of businesses enable poor hygiene
by including transparent squid proxies that strip SSL.

~~~
boronine
Does SSL not use a key exchange algorithm that ensures that a MITM proxy be
useless?

~~~
GauntletWizard
Even without the CA system, SSL (and TLS) is secure against _passive_ MITM
attacks; That is, if the attacker cannot alter the data-stream. This is still
reasonable for many simple links, but for internet, it is not.

If you've got no verification of the opposite party, literally any computer
could be on the other end. The key exchange mechanism is secure, certainly,
but any computer can execute it. The attacker can even show you the real
website just proxied through, but that's plenty enough to get your password or
any other access that the attacker wants.

~~~
mnw21cam
A "passive MITM" attack isn't MITM any more - it's just interception. MITM
means that the man in the middle is able to control the data stream that both
ends see.

------
ronaldx
OK. I'm prepared to agree with the headline in principle.

However, here's the deal/problem:

I am willing to encrypt outgoing mail only in cases where I can identify that
the recipient are capable of decrypting it (with 0 friction at any stage).

It's (still) more important to me that my e-mail is read by the recipient,
than that it's not read by any other party.

~~~
jimmaswell
Do email sites not already use HTTPS?

~~~
jedbrown
Transfer between servers is over SMTP, which is not encrypted by default and
almost always subject to degradation attacks (the MITM can claim not to
support STARTTLS). In any case, the user cannot verify or demand that STARTTLS
be used and many hosts don't support it at all. Meanwhile, PGP does not
require any trust of intermediate entities, but relatively few people you
might want to email have PGP keys and even those with keys might not have them
on the device from which they intend to read your email. S/MIME is in a
similar position to PGP, with a CAs trust model instead of Web of Trust.

~~~
andrewaylett
Note that this is indeed _almost_ always, rather than _actually_ always. My
mail server is configured to refuse to send to Google (and a few other hand-
picked sites) unless protected by SSL. The converse is, unfortunately, not yet
true.

DANE[0] should allow me to put DNSSEC secured records in place to tell Google
(et al) that they should always use SSL to talk to me too, but I don't have
DNSSEC support for my domains yet and my version of Postfix isn't new enough
to be able to use it for outgoing mail either.

More frustratingly, many popular email providers (for example, BT) don't
support SSL at all. That lowers the bar for eavesdropping from active MITM to
passive listening.

0:
[http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/dane/](http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/dane/)

------
Canada
> But the idea that we are somehow "out of reach of the NSA" is definitely not
> one of them. Sure, we're not actively collaborating with them, as many US
> businesses are, but as we've said before: we just assume the pipes going
> into and out of our major network exchange points are being vacuumed en
> masse.

Maybe easydns isn't, but the Telcos are definitely collaborating. We've had
intercept equipment directly under the control of CSIS installed in major
datacenters since the early 2000s. (I really do mean CSIS, not CSEC.)

I've seen it myself and I have multiple sources with direct, first hand
knowledge of it.

None of them are interested in coming forward though, and I have no proof to
offer myself.

What would necessitate cooperation of easydns anyway? They can't possibly get
transit or peer with anyone of significance in Canada that doesn't have the
surveillance equipment installed, so I don't see why any of the spooks would
bother contacting them.

~~~
jmnicolas
For people wondering :

CSEC means Communications Security Establishment Canada

CSIS means Canadian Security Intelligence Service

------
peterwwillis
If encrypting our communications were a moral imperative, wouldn't someone
have suggested our telephone calls or postal mail be encrypted some time in
the past 40 years? We've had the capability to do so as private citizens for
years, but who the hell cares? And it's not like your bank is going to start
sending your bank statements in the mail with a one-time pad.

If we didn't have to think about crypto, everyone would be using it. It is
just not easy to ensure the secrecy and integrity of all your data. And Joe
Blow does not really care so much about his security or integrity to go out of
his way to use more crypto.

~~~
Joeboy
> If encrypting our communications were a moral imperative,

> wouldn't someone have suggested our telephone calls or

> postal mail be encrypted some time in the past 40 years?

 _Mass_ surveillance of those things wasn't really a threat, in most places
anyway.

------
dfc
The title certainly makes an emotional appeal to me. However I could not find
justification/explanation of any moral obligation in the text.

I could understand a moral obligation to fight unjust surveillance, but that
is not what was presented. Why am I morally obligated to increase the cost of
surveillance? If society accepts the unjust surveillance the only consequences
of increasing surveillance costs are economic waste and most likely
justifications for new encroachments on personal liberty.

~~~
funinobu
It will become, if it is not already, a practical obligation. Why should
anyone in the rest of the world trust American products that enable
"justified" surveillance?

~~~
dfc
I am not really sure what any of your comment means and/or why you directed it
to me? Is the practical obligation the same thing as financial incentive? And
what does "enable 'justified' surveillance" mean? Existing in the world
enables surveillance. I have no problem with just and legal surveillance, my
problem is with unjust surveillance.

------
danbmil99
You have a moral obligation to make end-to-end encryption, authentication, key
exchange and validation and so on so easy to use a fucking moron could manage
it, or my Mother.

------
Pxtl
Then everybody implements crypto, and then we get another 20 articles on
Hacker News about how "your crypto is wrong and broken and you're a terrible
person!".

I'd be interested in joining the fight to hide information from the NSA if it
didn't seem _functionally impossible_ for folks who haven't made it into a
career.

~~~
jmnicolas
This.

I have a web-app project for which encryption would be ideal.

However I have already a hard time finding an encryption capable database.

PostgreSQL has a pg-crypto but it looks like an after fought module.

Right now the best solution I can find is each user gets an encrypted SQLite
database on my server. But what happens when 2 or more users need to share
data that are in their respective databases ?

------
shurcooL
I don't know how to best phrase this, but...

I still don't understand why I should worry about preventing non-recipients of
my messages from being able to read them.

------
Fasebook
You have a moral obligation to ignore "moral obligations" from dubious
sources.

------
saraid216
Never going to get tired of self-identified libertarians making statements
about moral obligations.

~~~
baddox
I would probably self-identify as a libertarian (although I would be eager to
qualify that), and I am very tired of statements about moral obligations.

~~~
dfc
Empty and unjustified statements about moral obligations.

~~~
baddox
The thing about moral obligations is you can't really "justify" them to
someone who doesn't share your fundamental beliefs about morality itself.

~~~
maxerickson
Do you think most people are constructing their morality on top of some
fundamental beliefs?

(I tend to think we work backwards trying to come up with compact descriptions
of what we are comfortable with...)

~~~
dfc
Yes. I can not imagine any other conception of moral obligation. How would you
come up with an obligation to do X or not do Y without an underlying belief
structure?

~~~
maxerickson
I was asking about the second half of the sentence.

(But to answer your question in terms of what I am getting at, you would work
backwards from what you were comfortable with and then tell yourself that it
was your underlying belief structure, whether that were meaningfully true or
not)

~~~
dfc
I see. I guess I took it for granted that everyone understood moral obligation
to mean a commandment to act a certain way due to moral principles. Depending
on how you define "comfortable with" we might be using different language to
talk about the same thing. I am uncomfortable with immoral behavior? I do not
think you are advancing moral relativism/nihilism?

I do not think most people use moral reasoning to guide (even semi-
consitently) their actions. However I assumed that anyone who says "You have a
moral obligation to do X" was speaking in a philosophical context and not
using it as a euphemism or "Crypto is /<oo1."

~~~
maxerickson
Well, someone could be discussing in good faith, articulate a principle that
they believe represents their morality, reason out a consequence of that
principle and then observably act in a contradictory manner.

(now that I have written that, I guess part of what I am getting at is that
the more often that actually happens, the more you have to discount the
articulation of moral principles rather than discounting the people or the
good faith. Personally, I'm pretty optimistic about people and pretty cynical
about the things they say...)

------
dguaraglia
'crypto', because typing 'cryptography' is too hard. This and 'cyber' grind my
gears. Specially when politicians/opinion makers throw the terms around
without really understanding what they mean.

~~~
pjscott
Do "memo" and "pub" irritate you as well?

