[liberationtech] Signal ignores proxy censorship vulnerability, bans researchers

Thu Feb 25 09:26:38 CET 2021

> Yup totally agreed Collin. There is a real world consequence here in an
increasingly impoverished region where marginalized groups are at real
risk.

And the general alternative for the marginalized is Telegram (or, God help
us all, WhatsApp).  Anyone care to compare and contrast?

This is a real world consequence of a lack of funding, respect, and
outreach for circumvention tools, these days.  In 2006, Tor went from broke
to $3M+ in funding in one year, and the difference was outreach to
non-technical funders who cared about the marginalized and deceived -- and
came to understand, how these ultra-geeky and previously opaque and
shadowy tools could help good people on the ground.

The aughties are calling and asking the folks today to explain to these
increasingly impoverished regions, in plain language and not in elite
technical discussions, what their alternatives are and how they impact all
of our futures.  There's a lot more trust and perspective to be built in a
lot more contexts.

yrs,

Shava Nerad
shava23 at gmail.com
https://patreon.com/shava23

On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 9:38 PM Adam Fisk <afisk at getlantern.org> wrote:

> Yup totally agreed Collin. There is a real world consequence here in an
> increasingly impoverished region where marginalized groups are at real risk.
>
> On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 11:01 PM Collin Anderson <
> collin at averysmallbird.com> wrote:
>
>> All this debate over whether Signal could use a better bridge protocol is
>> fine, but distracts from the core problem — Signal Proxy is of little
>> consequence and is a slight of hand trick to avoid taking on further
>> burdens to address 80 million vulnerable people (a community Signal was
>> long funded to support) being cut off.
>>
>> Signal could invest that time into providing another cloud service for
>> meek-style circumvention. It did not. Instead it told users, who generally
>> have no connection to Iran to run bridge and post solicitations on blocked
>> social media. How is that a serious idea to pitch to people?
>>
>> The aughts called and it wants its internet freedom agenda back.
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 11:41 PM Adam Fisk <afisk at getlantern.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 8:19 PM Harry Halpin <hhalpin at ibiblio.org>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Again, if Sergey - who seems to be a perfectly nice Ph.D. student -
>>>> wants to fix TLS, that's fine. I would support fixes to TLS as would any
>>>> sensible person, including Moxie.
>>>>
>>>
>>> So just so we're on the same page, Sergey is a perfectly nice Ph.D.
>>> student whose code was deployed on more phones globally than Moxie's up
>>> until a few months ago. It's deployed almost exclusively in censored
>>> regions, in contrast to Signal which is deployed almost exclusively in
>>> uncensored regions.
>>>
>>> Making TLS more censorship resistant at the IETF level is great. I'm not
>>> sure what vulnerabilities you specifically have in mind, but to me the most
>>> promising is Encrypted Client Hellos (
>>> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-esni-09) that especially
>>> Nick Sullivan at Cloudflare has been pushing with great success.
>>>
>>> While I agree we should vigorously pursue approaches like that, it won't
>>> help people in the most censored regions today. Sergey's code is actually a
>>> core piece of bypassing real world censorship now.
>>>
>>>
>>>> But that's not Signal's problem - TLS bugs are a lower-level network
>>>> level protocol whose bugs Signal inherits when it tries to use TLS. Sergey
>>>> should approach the TLS 1.3 Working Group at the IETF, no try to garner
>>>> attention for himself via media releases over his github comments. This
>>>> reminds me of the Israeli "security" firm that claimed they had "hacked"
>>>> Signal by simply accessing the keys in the phone, which can be done to
>>>> *any* app on phone that has a rootkit that doesn't use
>>>> some-yet-not-really-working secure enclave.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Right. Signal's problem is that they were blocked in Iran. Their
>>> solution to that problem attempts to use TLS in a way that doesn't work.
>>> You're basically thinking of TLS in the way that Signal is thinking of TLS,
>>> which is limited and the heart of the problem.
>>>
>>> Sergey hardly tried to garner attention for himself -- heck his last
>>> name was never even mentioned anywhere I saw. I happened to realize it must
>>> be him just based on his first name and the nature of the analysis.
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> There are literally *no* server that is not susceptible to active
>>>> probes and machine-learning based traffic analysis attacks. If Sergey had a
>>>> kind of solution that actually did what Adam claimed it did
>>>> "anti-censorship tools that actually work at scale in censored regions are
>>>> not susceptible to active probes" then all of China would be using it. As
>>>> it doesn't exist, people aren't using them.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I never mentioned anything about machine-learning based traffic
>>> analysis, which is a different problem, but the most disturbing reality is
>>> that there are "anti-censorship tools that actually work at scale in
>>> censored regions are not susceptible to active probes", but it turns out
>>> that a very small minority of Chinese actually have much interest in the
>>> censored internet. Could the tools that work in China capture more of them?
>>> Sure, but there are all sorts of other issues in China too, such as
>>> distribution. It's also very dangerous for people in China to work on those
>>> tools.
>>>
>>> One that's been growing recently is v2ray. There's a reason it has over
>>> 30K stars on GitHub: https://github.com/v2ray/v2ray-core
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Censorship is a very hard problem, which is why Shava is basically
>>>> right. Cutting-edge usable tech here is still I believe obfs4proxy, and
>>>> it's well-known defeatable by nation-state level adversaries.
>>>>
>>>
>>> This is actually the fundamental issue -- there is a huge asymmetry of
>>> information between the more conventional security community and the people
>>> who work on bypassing censorship, largely because the techniques that work
>>> are largely kept secret. The "cutting-edge" usable tech at one time was
>>> obfs4proxy, but it's been probably 7 years or so since that was the case.
>>> The people who know what the cutting edge usable tech is are those who
>>> deploy it at scale, but you're not likely to read about it anywhere.
>>>
>>>
>>>> I do support the usage of Tor, and Tor also is susceptible to the
>>>> precise same kinds of attacks Signal is and thus doesn't work in China,
>>>> Iran, and many other places. Furthermore, it's not resistant to NSA-style
>>>> traffic analysis. But it is by better than most shady VPNs and proxies, and
>>>> I hope people use it where their nation-state hasn't starting censoring it
>>>> yet. Same with Signal. Most VPNs that work in these countries work insofar
>>>> as they are easily susceptible to attacks (i.e. see Moxie's older work on
>>>> bugs in PPTP or the myriad of authentication issues facing OpenVPN,
>>>> fingerprinting of Wireguard...). Again, more work is needed but aim work in
>>>> productive way, not cheap media hit pieces on Signal or Tor.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Yeah so that's where the asymmetry of information kicks in. The VPNs
>>> that work in the most censoring countries that are easily susceptible to
>>> attacks stopped working long ago. China in particular has stepped up its
>>> game in crazy ways in the last couple of years.
>>>
>>> Tor is incredible, and I support Tor's work all day long, but as you say
>>> it is not used widely in the most censoring countries. Other tools are.
>>>
>>> -Adam
>>>
>>> --
>>> --
>>> President
>>> Brave New Software Project, Inc.
>>> https://lantern.io <https://www.getlantern.org>
>>> A998 2B6E EF1C 373E 723F A813 045D A255 901A FD89
>>> --
>>> Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable from any major
>>> commercial search engine. Violations of list guidelines will get you
>>> moderated: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/lt. Unsubscribe,
>>> change to digest mode, or change password by emailing
>>> lt-owner at lists.liberationtech.org.
>>>
>> --
>> *Collin David Anderson*
>> averysmallbird.com | @cda | Washington, D.C.
>>
> --
> --
> President
> Brave New Software Project, Inc.
> https://lantern.io <https://www.getlantern.org>
> A998 2B6E EF1C 373E 723F A813 045D A255 901A FD89
> --
> Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable from any major
> commercial search engine. Violations of list guidelines will get you
> moderated: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/lt. Unsubscribe,
> change to digest mode, or change password by emailing
> lt-owner at lists.liberationtech.org.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ghserv.net/pipermail/lt/attachments/20210225/1de39db2/attachment.htm>