[liberationtech] Peer-review required: SwaTwt and TweedleDH

[Brandon Wiley]

I seem to have missed your original about SwaTwt and TweedleDH as my mail
server was down for a few days. So this is the first I've heard of them. I
just wanted to say, very cool!

Also I noticed that you're using Python, so I wanted to let you know about
the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Helman (ECDH) library for Python, specifically
Curve25519: http://github.com/warner/curve25519-donna

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Uncle "The Dod" Zzzen
<unclezzzen at gmail.com>wrote:

> Sorry for late response. I was mostly offline for a few days. eDivide in
> action :)
>
> On Wed, 2010-09-29 at 12:04 -0700, Daniel Colascione wrote:
>
> > As you mentioned a few days ago, Javascript-callable cryptography
> > primitives can only be performance optimizations: they cannot change the
> > fundamental trust model between a client and server. As such, they just
> > encourage what we know to be a bad idea. If a client can trust a server,
> > a client can trust a server to do the cryptographic work server-side.
>
> I totally agree, and if I ever try to have another go at "secure social
> networking", it would be a desktop twitter front end like you've
> suggested in a previous email.
>
> Speaking of trust models, I'd like to explain why I chose an RC4-based
> algorithm (despite the history it has with WEP). Given that there *is* a
> way to implement RC4 in a way that avoids pitfalls (and I'm not saying
> that my implementation was "it"), RC4 has one advantage over other other
> algorithms (at least AFAIK): It's simple enough to visually inspect for
> trapdoors.
>
> Now the implementation of SwaTwt had a problem *inherent* to
> server-provided JS (jscrypt too): You *can* inspect the code, but - as
> Steve said - you'll fallback to trusting the site eventually (still
> better than *having* to trust your remote diaspora node ;) - but not by
> much).
>
> My question is: since trapdoors are not only a known problem, but
> there's even talk about enforcing them by law
> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/government-seeks
> doesn't the fact that the code is feasible-to-inspect make it safer?
> (assume it's a client-side python script)
>
> Maybe RC4 is not the only simple-to-inspect code, maybe I can make sure
> the python version won't have the problems you've found in SwaTwt, or
> maybe I should simply go for a standard python crypto library and hope
> they're never forced to install trapdoors by law :)
>
> What do you think?
>
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