[messaging] plausible deniability and transcript editors

[Guy K. Kloss]

Hi,

last night in a discussion (in meat space) the issue of plausible
deniability came up again. As far as it stands, I guess most people are
of the opinion that even if a protocol features the capability for
plausible deniability, it probably won't hold up in court.

We've been thinking what could be done to "better" the chances that
something like this might actually hold up. That one could believably
argue that one for example has been framed through a
doctored/manufactured transcript.

One thought was, that it's too difficult to make anybody believe that
somebody has actually tampered with a transcript. So, an idea came up
that one actually might just need to provide a tool that's reasonably
easy to use for an average Joe to read a recorded transcript, edit it,
and save the modified version again.

I could imagine this to work reasonably easy, if one can actually use an
existing session transcript as a "seed", which includes the initial
session key negotiation, and in the following only authenticates
messages through session secrets, rather than using the long term static
secrets (like private OTR key, or any other personal authentication
mechanism).

Any thoughts on this?

I think this might in scope actually make a nice student project for
some final year comp sci students.

Guy

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/attachments/20140627/9e1108fd/attachment.sig>