[messaging] Messaging Digest, Vol 576, Issue 1

Mike Power mike.power.casual at theguardian.com
Mon Jun 15 03:31:12 PDT 2020 

hey peter,

i must confess i don't quite follow your message? Could you tell me a bit
mor? Unless it's a joke, then *please* don't explain it (nothing more awful
than an dissected joke and punchline).


Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 12:11:46 +0000
> From: Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>
> To: "messaging at moderncrypto.org" <messaging at moderncrypto.org>
> Subject: Re: [messaging] [FORGED] Crypto standards in modern-day
>         consumer        apps
> Message-ID: <1591704707218.93122 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> Mike Power <mike.power.casual at theguardian.com> writes:
> >Anyway, I'm researching a piece on Encro phones and crypto standards in
> >commercial phone software for a book i'm pitching, and also for a series
> of
> >planned articles.
> "Drown me! Roast me! Hang me! Do whatever you please," said Brer Cop. "Only
> please, Brer Criminal, please don't throw me into^H^H^H^Huse that specific
> brand of encrypted phone that I definitely can't break".
> Peter.



On Tue, 9 Jun 2020 at 20:00, <messaging-request at moderncrypto.org> wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Re: Crypto standards in modern-day consumer apps (Mike Hearn)
>    2. Re: Crypto standards in modern-day consumer apps (Thom Wiggers)
>    3. Re: Crypto standards in modern-day consumer apps (Daniel Lublin)
>    4. Re: [FORGED] Crypto standards in modern-day consumer      apps
>       (Peter Gutmann)
>    5. Re: Crypto standards in modern-day consumer apps (Jasper Spaans)
>    6. Re: Crypto standards in modern-day consumer apps (Mike Hearn)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 02:18:47 -0700
> From: Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net>
> To: Mike Power <mike.power.casual at theguardian.com>
> Cc: messaging at moderncrypto.org
> Subject: Re: [messaging] Crypto standards in modern-day consumer apps
> Message-ID:
>         <CANEZrP2=Urg3YcaUWGYhPai5tY+gdp6uc_Bh=
> sACmDxb-yErOw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Interesting question.
>
> Unfortunately their website offers little more information than the
> Liverpool Echo article you link to. It appears to simply be a customised
> Android phone, with a few features that are especially useful for
> criminals. Without a doubt 95% of the tech in them is the same as you can
> get on a regular Android phone, but the remaining 5% of the integration and
> feature work is sufficiently valuable to justify the eyewatering cost.
>
> >From looking over the advertised feature set, my guess is the value comes
> from a very small number of features. The majority of advertised features
> are industry standard and nothing special, e.g. disk encryption, secure
> boot, tamper proofing, the message cryptography they discuss etc. They
> advertise them because they're security related, but they're not actually a
> competitive advantage.
>
> I'd dig in to this mysterious "notary" verification process, which is
> presumably some method of verifying public keys. They say:
>
> "All clients directly negotiate keys automatically with each other’s
> devices. Our servers, located offshore in our datacenter, never create,
> store, or decrypt keys, message conversations or user data."
>
>
> To me this implies some sort of Bluetooth based key transfer or key
> agreement, probably combined with the ability to send keys between users.
> Sort of like the PGP web of trust but integrated with the phone itself.
>
> The point of this would be to ensure police can't force EncroPhone to
> intercept messages by changing public keys, which is an issue for every
> centralised messenger otherwise.
>
> Users who buy this phone have demonstrated a huge willingness to make
> effort up front, as apparently to get one you have to know someone who can
> supply you. You can't buy them from shops. So, they can probably impose
> rules like "you may only communicate with someone you interacted with
> physically before, or someone they vouched for", whereas for normal
> consumer-oriented software it's all about maximum convenience so the
> messengers all use centralised public key directories linked to phone
> numbers.
>
> The other obvious eye-catching feature is the duress/capture stuff, like
> being able to request all your contact phones delete all your messages
> triggered by a panic PIN. There's even mention of a countdown which I
> suppose can be useful if you suspect you're walking into a trap - you could
> set up a timer, be grabbed immediately, your phone taken from you without
> even a chance to touch it at all, and all the evidence is still destroyed.
> Finally the ability to hide that you're using this phone via dual boot is
> quite clever.
>
> I'll now say something that may be a bit controversial for this list
> (though it's a point I've made before).
>
> It's worth observing that these sorts of features are in many ways a
> meaningless shell game. EncroPhone are a Dutch company with (presumably)
> known owners who can be found. All the fancy stuff they advertise is
> controlled by software. That makes it meaningless because EncroPhone can
> push a "security update" to their users that disables all of it, or adds
> arbitrary message interception facilities, without any visible change and
> at any time. For example, how do the users know the message deletions are
> really working? The only trustable evidence is complaints from the police.
>
> Even though stock Android will notify users that an update is available and
> ask them to apply it, users can't tell the difference between a real
> security update that makes their phone harder to hack by the police, and
> one that makes it easier. No matter what option they take (apply/ignore)
> there's a risk it's the wrong one.
>
> This is a fundamental problem with all end-to-end encrypted messaging
> services. Despite all the progress made in this space, it all still boils
> down to the trustworthiness of a brand because the service owners always
> have the option of just switching it off - and in ways users cannot
> actually detect except via some sort of hypothetical continuous reverse
> engineering effort, which nobody anywhere has ever mounted.
>
> Whilst pitched for privacy advocates, if that were true they'd presumably
> make it easier to buy them via their website and charge less. The fact that
> it's so expensive and that they're only leasable implies something odd is
> going on there. It won't surprise me if at some point EncroPhone gets
> silently taken over by the Dutch police and used in a sting operation, in
> the same way that Tor markets sometimes were. For them to be legally safe
> they'd have to avoid anything that could be used to prove a criminal
> conspiracy, which from your description of how they operate and the news
> articles sounds unlikely.
>
> W.R.T. your last question. All consumer messaging systems on smartphones
> route all messages via central datacenters. That's not unique to WhatsApp
> and is the entire motivation for the end-to-end encryption features to
> start with. The only "peer to peer" messaging system that works is SMS, and
> obviously it's peer to peer only in some pedantic technical sense that the
> telcos themselves communicate directly with each other (so e.g. messages
> stay in country). All app-based messengers route messages either via
> Google/Apple datacenters, or their own, or more typically a mix. Moreover
> most modern messengers use the same cryptography. Certainly Signal,
> WhatsApp and probably this EncroPhone thing (which sounds like it uses a
> modified version of Signal) all use the same underlying tech developed by
> the sort of people who are on this mailing list. Telegram I don't know,
> someone else can tell you about that, last I heard they were different and
> used their own thing.
>
> >From a pure cryptographic perspective none of them are really hiding the
> message metadata people care about and indeed cannot, as the Liverpool Echo
> story points out (police can still track EncroPhone users via cell sites
> and messengers must still route messages to the right devices).
>
> So with respect to what you can use that your contacts will trust, sorry
> but I have no idea.
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 12:08:14 +0200
> From: Thom Wiggers <thom at thomwiggers.nl>
> To: Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net>
> Cc: Mike Power <mike.power.casual at theguardian.com>,
>         messaging at moderncrypto.org
> Subject: Re: [messaging] Crypto standards in modern-day consumer apps
> Message-ID:
>         <
> CABzBS7mC-5TBA_+niPMZoJk-Jm5YBP6PcWjFUwurzePHxH5XXw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Hi,
>
> You wrote:
>
> Op di 9 jun. 2020 om 11:19 schreef Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net>:
>
> >
> > Whilst pitched for privacy advocates, if that were true they'd presumably
> > make it easier to buy them via their website and charge less. The fact
> that
> > it's so expensive and that they're only leasable implies something odd is
> > going on there. It won't surprise me if at some point EncroPhone gets
> > silently taken over by the Dutch police and used in a sting operation, in
> > the same way that Tor markets sometimes were. For them to be legally safe
> > they'd have to avoid anything that could be used to prove a criminal
> > conspiracy, which from your description of how they operate and the news
> > articles sounds unlikely.
> >
>
> It's maybe worth to note that Dutch police have done so in the past, see
> e.g. the Ennetcom case (
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/22/dutch-police-ennetcom-shut-down-owner-arrested
> )
> and IronChat (
>
> https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/11/09/258000-encrypted-ironchat-phone-messages-cracked-by-police/
> ).
>
> Cheers,
>
> Thom Wiggers
>
>
> >
>
> > _______________________________________________
> > Messaging mailing list
> > Messaging at moderncrypto.org
> > https://moderncrypto.org/mailman/listinfo/messaging
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 12:26:22 +0200
> From: Daniel Lublin <daniel at lublin.se>
> To: messaging at moderncrypto.org
> Cc: mike at plan99.net, Mike Power <mike.power.casual at theguardian.com>
> Subject: Re: [messaging] Crypto standards in modern-day consumer apps
> Message-ID: <20200609102622.GB34825 at ot.lublin.se>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> > All app-based messengers route messages either via Google/Apple
> > datacenters, or their own, or more typically a mix. Moreover most modern
> > messengers use the same cryptography.
>
> Perhaps you still mean app-based *consumer* messengers here (and the
> subject
> still does). Briar is arguably not among those, but it is indeed an
> interesting example of a peer-to-peer messenger that tries to avoid leaking
> of metadata. It has been presented on the list before.
>
>   https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/
>
> --
> Daniel
> lublin.se
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 12:11:46 +0000
> From: Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>
> To: "messaging at moderncrypto.org" <messaging at moderncrypto.org>
> Subject: Re: [messaging] [FORGED] Crypto standards in modern-day
>         consumer        apps
> Message-ID: <1591704707218.93122 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Mike Power <mike.power.casual at theguardian.com> writes:
>
> >Anyway, I'm researching a piece on Encro phones and crypto standards in
> >commercial phone software for a book i'm pitching, and also for a series
> of
> >planned articles.
>
> "Drown me! Roast me! Hang me! Do whatever you please," said Brer Cop. "Only
> please, Brer Criminal, please don't throw me into^H^H^H^Huse that specific
> brand of encrypted phone that I definitely can't break".
>
> Peter.
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 14:33:31 +0200
> From: Jasper Spaans <jasper at startmail.com>
> To: Mike Power <mike.power.casual at theguardian.com>
> Cc: messaging at moderncrypto.org
> Subject: Re: [messaging] Crypto standards in modern-day consumer apps
> Message-ID: <676E5E86-D49E-49B7-B7ED-307EE59913EC at startmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset=us-ascii
>
> Hi,
>
> > On 8 Jun 2020, at 19:45, Mike Power <mike.power.casual at theguardian.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Almost every murder case or major drug bust in Liverpool involves these
> devices.
> > https://encrophone.com/en/
>
> Completely off-topic and I have no knowledge of this product, but "encro"
> sounds like a poor play on the words "encryption" and "Mocro" - the latter
> being slang for Morocco/Moroccan, popularised some time ago in Dutch by
> rappers of Moroccan descent, and currently by the book and TV-series
> "Mocro-maffia".
>
> Can't believe that would truly be the origin of this name...
>
>
> Cheers,
> Jasper
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 06:23:05 -0700
> From: Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net>
> To: Daniel Lublin <daniel at lublin.se>
> Cc: Mike Power <mike.power.casual at theguardian.com>,
>         messaging at moderncrypto.org
> Subject: Re: [messaging] Crypto standards in modern-day consumer apps
> Message-ID:
>         <CANEZrP3PHf=agE=
> uWw1LV7DpxWmEnVknasZee4L_7wFOHj+bxw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Thanks! I didn't know about Briar. Sounds interesting. I used the Orchid
> library for integrating Tor into Java apps before, it's quite easy to do,
> surprising we don't see more of it. At least on Android.
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> End of Messaging Digest, Vol 576, Issue 1
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