[messaging] deniability data point

[Sam Lanning]

I'm going to go ahead and reiterate what I said last time I chimed in
on this :-P

Deniability is *not* about introducing a cool new property for a
protocol using the magic of cryptography, it's about ensuring that a
property that's always existed (before these cryptographic protocols
were a thing), remain a thing when we start to use crypto.

> I still love this Matt Green quote about deniability:
>
> “Dammit, they used a deniable key exchange protocol” said no Federal
> prosecutor ever.
>
> From
> https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/07/26/noodling-about-im-protocols/

And no federal prosecutor has ever needed to say that *because*
deniability has always implicitly been a thing. People have always
been able to claim in court that the evidence shows was forged,
sometimes that works sometimes it doesn't.

Now that we've added crypto to the mix, a lot of the time people try
to claim something was forged / doctored, and they don't realise
there's proof that that's not the case. They can no longer make the
same claim, and instead have to claim that a certain device was
hacked, they had a piece of malware that stole secret data etc... and
that's a claim that's a lot harder to make stand up in court.

Sam.

On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 4:54 PM, Tony Arcieri <bascule at gmail.com> wrote:
> I still love this Matt Green quote about deniability:
>
> “Dammit, they used a deniable key exchange protocol” said no Federal
> prosecutor ever.
>
> From
> https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/07/26/noodling-about-im-protocols/
>
> --
> Tony Arcieri
>
> _______________________________________________
> Messaging mailing list
> Messaging at moderncrypto.org
> https://moderncrypto.org/mailman/listinfo/messaging
>