

Practicing privacy: Encryption - digitalnalogika
http://matt.might.net/articles/practicing-privacy-encryption/

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dllthomas
_" Encryption makes privacy a right that can be claimed rather than granted."_

Not really, or at least not alone. There will always be points at which
information must be encrypted. Encryption just pushes the need for the right
to be granted to those points. This is not at all a bad idea, of course; just
that government recognition of a right to privacy is still important.

~~~
geal
Encryption provides a good way to keep secrets. This has nothing to do with
privacy. Privacy is minding my own business without anyone watching me or
judging me.

If you need to rely on encryption to protect your privacy, then you have very
little privacy, because everything that is not encrypted can be snooped on:
where you are, who you talk to and about what (because GPG doesn't protect the
username and subject), who are your friends (because you can't trust them to
encrypt properly).

If you want to escape surveillance, encryption is just one tool. What you
really need is good opsec habits. See for examples
[http://fr.slideshare.net/grugq/opsec-for-
hackers](http://fr.slideshare.net/grugq/opsec-for-hackers)

~~~
dllthomas
Excellent resource, thank you for sharing it. I think we're agreed, though,
that we shouldn't be needing to practice opsec to have some basic privacy.

------
dmix
For cloud services I'd recommend Lastpass (works with Yubikey 2 factor) for
password management and Tarsnap for backups.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Worth pointing out that if you use LastPass and the US government wants a list
of all of the accounts you use, a history of when you logged in to them, the
IPs you were using when you logged in, and your usernames and passwords, they
can get it.

All they need is a court order to compell LastPass to target your account with
some modified backdoored JS. They have done this before to force Hushmail to
send backdoored java applets to targetted users.

I used LastPass for a very short time. I now use a PGP encrypted text file.

~~~
pampa
PGP encrypted text file is not very convenient. Give keepass a try
[http://keepass.info/](http://keepass.info/). Its open source, cross platform
and has a nice random password generator. Can't live without it.

I never understood why people would want to use a cloud-based password
manager. I find the whole idea of giving your passwords to a 3rd party
ridiculous, and doesn't matter if they are encrypted or not. Wasn't there a
security breach with one of these services a few months ago?

~~~
newman314
Yes, LastPass which is why I use 1Password + DropBox. As soon as a non-Dropbox
cloud (eg. aerofs) share becomes available that works for 1Password, I'm
switching to that.

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chacham15
> By long, I mean greater than 16 characters, and perhaps longer than 20.

Talk about going overboard... furthermore this in combination with "Don't use
words or "clever" variations on words" make it all but likely that you're
going to forget your own password and write it down.

~~~
rotnewson
If you can't remember 1 password over 20 characters that you will use a lot
with a password manager you probably need to change what kind of passwords you
make.

Instead of "E=E<4oc^(z&kj6Snm9uy" do something like "The Brown cow jumps over
the m00n!".

Set the password manager to make you enter the password if you haven't used it
for 30 seconds (for a few days so you remember your password).

You're using a password manager with a good password that is easy to remember
but the you do use the password manager to generate hard to remember passwords
like the one above.

~~~
dllthomas
Do not give password advice without looking at the entropy.

Estimates of the entropy of English text place it below 1.5 bits per
character. "The brown cow jumps over the moon." would, generously, have about
34 * 1.5 = 51 bits of entropy, plus a few more for the simplistic
substitutions - say 70 bits total? This is assuming the sentence was, in fact,
chosen uniformly across English sentences, which is obviously not going to be
the case (this one being a modification of a line from a nursery rhyme), so in
actuality it'll be even worse.

A fully random password of length 20, from characters on a typical keyboard
(say 94, it seems to be on mine) would have 20 * lg(94) > 20 * 6.5 = 130 bits.
But impossible to remember and a pain to type correctly.

Picking from my /usr/share/dict/words with no restrictions (99171 entries), it
would take 70 / lg(99171) = 5 words to be stronger than the sentence and 130 /
lg(99171) = 8 words to be stronger than the gibberish, with no substitutions
or tweaks, however not all of those passwords could be typed on my keyboard.

Restricting /usr/share/dict/words to those which match (with LANG=C)
'^[a-zA-Z]\\{1,10\\}$' yields 61078 words at about 7.3 bits of entropy per
word, so you would get security comparable to the above with 5 (again -
aliasing) and 9 words respectively.

Some nine-word passwords generated this way:

    
    
        embryo distressed Ramadan chocks broaching official outstript explicit formulas
        tokens bruskly realizing rubric earmarks aphorism sweeps hallelujah Bardeen
        respects jocularity crummier leave spinsters Rodriquez hatch assurance torture
        patinas Elba dairymaids blabbing kissing handyman Ind tobogganed directed
        mossy Flora concepts medalist kidding heinously deafened evaluation nodes
        Steinmetz lizard Janette scatted cunning geckos belched demurring grandest
        faints nicest unleashes navel Monroe frostbites Pl loon careening
        overtake tasselled quahog utters Upjohn incloses punchy Jericho reveille
        sicked sinning premiere Satanism loiters accrual Caspar infatuate renewable
        dinning hereabouts Lithuanian formalism voiceless demoted bundle teed fluent
    

The above were generated with LANG=C grep "^[a-zA-Z]\\{1,10\\}$"
/usr/share/dict/words | rl --reselect -c 10 | xargs

This is, obviously, reliant on an assumption that rl produces cryptographic
level randomness, which is probably not the case but should certainly be near
enough the case for examples (and in any case will be much, much closer to
true than any method involving humans - we are very poor sources of
cryptographic entropy).

~~~
rotnewson
Thanks for taking 1 tiny part of my point and trying to destroy it.

I chose the passphrase "The Brown cow jumps over the m00n!" as an example not
"The brown cow jumps over the moon." which is a significantly worse
passphrase, especially considering every word is available in a dictionary.

The OP had trouble memorizing more than 16 characters for a passphrase so I
suggested something easier yet still solid yet you seemed to think I suggested
just a plain english sentence of words.

~~~
thirsteh
If you think "m00n" vs. "moon" or "The" vs. "the" matters, you're not paying
attention. A memorizable, but randomly composed string of words all in lower-
case ASCII is significantly stronger than anything "complex" (for you, hardly
for the cracker--common substitutions are basically worthless: they provide no
entropy) you can concoct _and_ remember.

