He writes: "When a PR person retained by a new hot security startup pitches you, consider approaching an independent security researcher or two for their thoughts. While this post is a response to Soghoian's critique, it's not really directed at him - it's meant for the portion of the security community his blast was emblematic of.įirst, you'd have no indication from Soghoian's critique that Quinn Norton is anything other than an overworked, technically illiterate blogger filling a quota by writing up press releases hyping the next big thing. It's good journalism, even if a very clubby and very vocal part of the security community blasts it. Obviously dinet is still (at best) beta quality software, so do not use it for anything that requries serious security.Cryptocat is a very interesting addition to the suite of security tools available to the world, and is a refreshing breakthrough - thanks to its focus on user experience, something that is abysmally lacking in security tools like Tor and OTR.Ĭelebrating that and explaining the motivation of its creator, while being clear about its technical limitations, isn't hype. Also, my Javascript skills aren't great (yet) so the client is pretty rough. There is a basic dinet client up now, but there is only one node running, which isn't much of a network at all. As the network was designed for short text messages (unlike Tor or I2P), this was an important consideration.īy building a network instead of an application I hope that people with clever ideas can use this as an effective tool for creating messaging programs. The fixed message size was chosen to limit plaintext length attacks (see Kelsey or Tezcan-Vaudenay). The two ways a packet is invalid are if its SHA-256 checksum does not match and if the packet is of an incorrect length. There are essentially no message parsing, decoding, or endianness issues to consider. It's a lot simpler than other protocols and designed to be easy to implement 2. Typedef struct _attribute_ (( packed )) dpacket Router links are not automatically bidirectional each router must specify who it is subscribing to and where other routers can listen for updates. It is a simple idea, really: each router will deliver every message it hasn't seen recently to every router that's listening. This is just one of many possible applications which can be built on top of the Diluvian Network, also known as dinet. Then, before communicating, interested parties would share their prefix, so that we'd all be communicating on the same channel. Why don't we limit the amount of data deliver to each user? Let's put an ID on each message, and take only messages starting with a particular prefix. Your encryption will need to be top-notch, though, as it would be trivial to get all encrypted messages. However, you now cannot tell who is communicating with who easily 1. As they are all encrypted, the conversations are still private. Imagine a new version of Cryptocat where all the messages on the network are sent to every member who is online. How could I build a system that was more secure and more anonymous? By solving a different problem. While I'm interested in cryptography and have taken several university level classes in it, I am by no means an expert in cryptography. That's not important for many people, but if you want to "topple an oppressive government" as Dr. There was also a big gap in Cryptocat from my perspective: a lack of anonymity. Matthew Green did some analysis on Cryptocat, which wasn't very positive from a security perspective. That's not really very secure for anything worth hiding. Bruce Schneier commented on Cryptocat that it was similar to Hushmail in its security. However, it was not, at the time, very secure. Someone actually making cryptography available for the masses in an intuitive way without needing complicated key exchanges or a web of trust! Finally. Last year, sometime around June, I heard of Cryptocat and thought it was a pretty cool idea. The Origins of the Diluvian Network Mon 22 April 2013 in: programming Sean cassidy : The Origins of the Diluvian Network sean cassidy :
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