[liberationtech] BlackBerry and CALEA-II

[Jacob Appelbaum]

> Why is there this rhetoric as if all of the bugs in JS crypto are unique to
> JS crypto? These breaks happen in other platforms too, but simply occur in
> different forms. However, overwhelmingly, the frequency and severity do
> compare.

There are specific bugs in the JS crypto library and as a result, the
rest of the software breaks, badly.

> 
> I think that there is a lot of optimism to be had if we look at the recent
> Pwn2Own results — Chrome's sandboxing prove exceptionally difficult to
> break, while Chrome OS was actually unbroken. These are web technologies
> and they are performing very impressively on the security front.
> 

Actually, I was at Pwn2Own with Ralf and he owned it. Though there was
small timing dispute about the contest though, so he polished it up and
gave it to them after pwn2own:

 http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.de/2013/04/stable-channel-update-for-chrome-os.html

That he sat on the bug for a while does not really suggest good things
about the security of the platform. Though I like ChromeOS and Chrome -
still, it was not unbroken by any means.

> Nothing is perfect, but there's also a selection and confirmation bias
> where we pretend that just because a class of security considerations is
> new, that it must therefore be more present in severity and frequency than
> other flaws. However it's largely, if of course never entirely, a matter of
> perception.
> 

Javascript web crypto has all of the problems of traditional crypto
without a solid basis on which to build. As a result, the application on
top has some set of unknown issues and the underlying library code does
as well. This is especially true with homebaked crypto protocols and
those issues are realistically compounded by say, a broken library that
does some standard thing but does it badly.

It is often said that "Nothing is perfect" as if this excuses known to
be dangerous constructions. So rather than repeat that until I'm blue in
the face, I'll offer a corollary point to move past the rhetoric: Many
projects are exponentially worse through compounding failures that are
almost completely avoidable in production software. The concern is not
perfection, it is about repeating the mistakes of the past and
compounding them with the arrogance of the future.

All the best,
Jacob