BitTorrent Unveils Secure Chat To Counter 'NSA Dragnet Surveillance' 111
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Jacob Kastrenakes reports on The Verge that as part a response to the NSA's wide-reaching surveillance programs, BitTorrent is unveiling a secure messaging service that will use public key encryption, forward secrecy, and a distributed hash table so that chats will be individually encrypted and won't be stored on some company's server. 'It's become increasingly clear that we need to devote hackathons, hours and resources to developing a messaging app that protects user privacy,' says Christian Averill, BitTorrent's director of communications. Because most current chat services rely on central servers to facilitate the exchange of messages, 'they're vulnerable: to hackers, to NSA dragnet surveillance sweeps.' BitTorrent chat aims to avoid those vulnerabilities through its encryption methods and decentralized infrastructure. Rather than checking in with one specific server, users of BitTorrent chat will collectively help each other figure out where to route messages to. In order to get started chatting, you'll just need to give someone else your public key — effectively your identifier. Exchanging public keys doesn't sound like the simplest way to begin a chat, but Averill says that BitTorrent hopes to make it easy enough for anyone interested. 'What we're going to do is to make sure there are options for how this is set up,' says Averill. 'This way it will appeal to the more privacy conscious consumer as well as the less technically inclined.' For now, it remains in a private testing phase that interested users can apply for access to. There's no word on when it'll be open to everyone, but with all of the recent surveillance revelations, it's easy to imagine that some people will be eager to get started."
OTR (Score:2, Insightful)
How is this different from OTR?
Re:OTR (Score:5, Informative)
How is this different from OTR?
OTR rides on top of underlying IM protocols (e.g. AIM, ICQ, XMPP, Yahoo Messenger, etc.) and encrypts the contents of communications. IM service providers can still shut down individual accounts, monitor who is accessing them, etc., even if they cannot read the contents of messages.
With BitTorrent Chat, the service takes advantage of the DHT (similar to "trackerless torrents" that don't have any single point of failure) to provide a decentralized, fault-tolerant means of exchanging data. There's no dependence on a single service -- all users would participate in the DHT, making it an extremely robust system.
If I read the description properly, it's similar to "OTR-over-DHT" but there's likely substantial differences in the details.
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DHT doesn't seem to be robust or fault-tolerant to me.
I also don't see how it would provide any anonymity as seems to be claimed.
OTR over TOR might make more sense.
Re:OTR (Score:5, Informative)
DHT is very reliable. Once a node has been connected a while and established links with many other nodes, traffic is quick and you have the redundancy of many 100s of connections.
Encrypting the data prior to transport and using DHT would be no worse off from TOR.
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Oh noes port forwarding and uPnP r so hard!!! :-(
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It's not that it's hard to do - it's that it requires manual intervention. I can do it, my grandma can't.
Also, in CGNs (Carrier Grade NATs) the ISP controls the NAT, not the home user.
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That's what UPnP is for.
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Once a node has been connected a while
Unfortunately, having a radio on for "a while" is going to put quite a lot of strain on a mobile battery. Still, it's good to see them working on this. Perhaps we could set up relays through a home server that has a power source.
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DHT doesn't seem to be robust or fault-tolerant to me.
How so? The mainline DHT used for torrents has been operating without outages for years, with tens of millions of nodes taking part (with a churn of about 10 million a day). The DHT is self-healing in that if there's a small cluster of nodes that are interconnected with each other but disconnected from the main DHT, a single connection to the main DHT will result in that cluster completely rejoining the main DHT.
I also don't see how it would provide any anonymity as seems to be claimed.
Indeed. The system appears to provide decentralized, encrypted communications. That's a very imp
Can't do anonymous + decentralized + enc-envelope (Score:3)
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An I2P messaging system 'I2PBote' was developed several years ago, and is based on DHT. It has the benefit of decentralization, plus the privacy/anonymity of onion routing.
Everyone is offering an encryption mode for their apps these days. But they don't address two important factors in privacy: Revealing the who/when/where info (the metadata the NSA is so interested in, for instance), and inconsistency of use. Using a network like I2P for all/most of your communications (including email, chat, bittorrent, e
closed source (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't trust a closed source "security" app.
Re:closed source (Score:5, Insightful)
And should also become quite obvious that you need to start vetting coders who are infiltrating projects on behalf of the government. That good old warped 80's tinfoil hat paranoia is the only thing that will save you anymore because it seems it was never wrong.
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Re:closed source (Score:4, Interesting)
If the protocol is open, you could build your own app implementing it.
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You can't trust a closed source "security" app.
How many different BitTorrent clients are there? How did that happen...?
PATENTS and veiled threats at Open Source (Score:3)
How many different BitTorrent clients are there? How did that happen...?
It would appear that Bittorrent the company considers the healthy bittorrent/client ecosystem to be a mistake not to be repeated. Like this chat protocol, they have also announced a P2P Streaming protcol - their implimentation will be closed source encumbered with patents that they have threated to use against anyone wishing to start an alternative open client. So even when they openly publish the protocol, it is still of no use the open source community. Don't believe me, take this quote from the horses m [torrentfreak.com]
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There's precedent for the FLOSS community not giving a fuck about software patents. They're not enforceable globally and the internet is still mostly borderless, at least in the "free" world. How many open source media players are out there that technically violate the patents on MP3, Windows and Apple codecs, et al? There's no trouble distributing those.
Cryptocat? (Score:2, Funny)
Hey, guys, I got this wheel, and I don't like it. Somebody help make a new one with more corners please!
Re:Cryptocat? (Score:5, Informative)
This means that in practice, CryptoCat is no more secure than Yahoo chat,
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This attitude needs to go away. Now. I have EVERYTHING to hide.
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when I'm using something that supposed to be secured, I'm still taking extra precautions.
At the very least, every single connection that I'm making I scramble my MAC address.
And btw, the other day there was a news about someone got apprehended despite hiding behind a TOR - you just never know when they will come at you, and when they want to get you, they can.
If you're doing things that make them specifically target you then they'll probably get you anyway (and that's as it should be).
This new is to stop mass spying/recording of every conversation (which is what they're doing now).
It's been attempted before.... (Score:3)
Started a shit-storm at AOL..... It was called WASTE...
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Problem with WASTE is its hilarious overhead. We had a case where around min 2000s uni network's DC hub was shut down and users moved to WASTE. Suddenly all those intranet 100mbps-1gbps links that you never saw coming close to 10% usage were getting saturated as WASTE bounced every file transfer several times between nodes to obfuscate sender/receiver.
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Never said it was efficient or effective, just that it was a "prior attempt" and indicated the shit storm that ensued. Had WASTE continued proper development they may have worked those issues out the same way ID Software did with the original release of DOOM (seriously, BROADCAST networking? ouch!)
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Try Retroshare. Same idea, much better implementation.
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Vulnerable to Social Engineering (Score:5, Interesting)
If the public/private key pair is created at account creation, then people accustomed to everything being in the cloud will frequently forget to backup their private key (which isn't stored on any central server). A common occurrence will be "Hey Alice, it's Bob. I lost my private key so this is my new account now." Potentially, Bob is in jail and a fed is masquerading as him.
Also from my experience with DHT, it doesn't work unless you already know an IP running the protocol -- who you usually find through, yes, a centralized server. If that server were TOR-based it might work, but then that raises the question of what functionality is added by this protocol that a messaging program running thru TOR doesn't offer. Having Mixmaster-style message queueing in addition to onion routing would offer improved resistance to topology attacks as well. I'm referring to TOR's hidden services protocol, by the way, rather than the standard web proxy where an unencrypted message would be sent to a messaging server after several encrypted hops.
Re:Vulnerable to Social Engineering (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Vulnerable to Social Engineering (Score:4, Interesting)
yes but they could not do it to everyone, only people who they had good grounds to obtain a warrant, even without the need for a warrant they would still have not acquired the full message history from everyone all the time as this would have been too much work. All this does it put this situation back how it was.
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I hate to break the news to you , but "old-fashioned police work" also involved wire tapping and intercepting post. Its whats known as gaining evidence. Now in a perfect world it wouldn't be necessary , but unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world and a lot of people don't play by the rules and oddly enough they usually say "no" if someone asks if they've commited a crime. Therefor the authorities have to get information on their activities, a lot of which comes from correspondence in whatever form it takes.
Hope that clears things up for you since you're clearly new to this reality.
Whoosh!
target individuals they suspect rather than mass collect everything
Nothing was said about no longer doing wire tapping etc. Merely that the mere act of existence should no longer make you a suspect on equal footing with the senior counsel of Al-Qaeda.
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What we have now is mass surveillance, mass wiretaps, and no judicial oversight. That's what we're trying to halt.
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Yeah. They'll go for lower hanging fruit instead, and let the legislative bodies suffer from crimes that they "could have" solved had they enough "for a warrant" and all that stuff.
Remember, there are three pillars - you have the executive, the legislative, and the judicial (law enforcement). If t
Re:Vulnerable to Social Engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
This is to stop mass spying/trawling.
If your contacts are all in jail then you have bigger problems.
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If the public/private key pair is created at account creation, then people accustomed to everything being in the cloud will frequently forget to backup their private key (which isn't stored on any central server). A common occurrence will be "Hey Alice, it's Bob. I lost my private key so this is my new account now." Potentially, Bob is in jail and a fed is masquerading as him.
If I'm emailing you on average at least once every day or every other day to recall the passphrase, losing a private key should not be any more "common" for people than their hard drive crashing, which isn't THAT common. As far as data loss, I've got no sympathy for those morons who never back up when autosync cloud storage software is being pimped for free all over the damn place.
As far as masquerading, I've also have no sympathy for the idiot who loses their wallet and chooses not to inform their bank of
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What? No.
Once DHT is started by 2 separate peers and grows, it can be maintained 100% without a parent server unless the entire internet dies for any length of time and the IP records scrambled. That is the only way to take down a full DHT implementation and not just a half-assed one.
That is unlikely to happen any time soon. (having to put soon in there saddens me)
And if you have enough peers that are active enough, or have static IPs, it becomes even more stable.
The problem with Tor is that anyone can
If exchanging a keypair is too hard (Score:2, Interesting)
Then maybe you shouldn't be using the Internet. Just because a child can reach the steering wheel of a car doesn't mean that they should drive.
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A $1000 plane ticket just to exchange some key pair is a bit expensive.
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How about a 50 cent postage stamp? (or whatever it costs where you live)
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It is interesting though that develop two different clients and do not advertise uTorrent on their main site.
Sounds a lot like WASTE to me. (Score:1)
WASTE was a decentralized peer2peer chat tool which sounds very similar to what bittorrent wants to build.
You can still download and use WASTE and have this capability now.
Way to go bittorrent - someone needs to do this en masse.
WASTE was traditionally hard to establish large networks with - lets hope bittorrent succeeds in this regard.
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WASTE has been largely replaced by Retroshare. Same intent, but it's much less buggy and more capable.
I'm just thinking out loud here.. (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re:I'm just thinking out loud here.. (Score:4, Informative)
The thing about PUBLIC key cryptography is that the encryption keys are PUBLIC, it doesn't matter who knows them.
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Re:I'm just thinking out loud here.. (Score:5, Informative)
This explains it very simply [wimp.com].
You can exchange a piece of information without exposing the full picture to a 3rd party.
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As it was already said, an asymmetric cryptography key pair lets you get around the problem of someone knowing your key being able to decrypt the message.
Establishing that the public key you initially get really belongs to your friend, and not to a NSA datacenter is much harder through.
There are basically two ways: either trust a central authority whose key you previously know (ie, how web certificates work now) or build a network of computers who would vouch for the trustworthiness of the opposite side (th
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Will it stop collection of metadata? (Score:1)
How will this hinder collection of meta data? The participants still talks to each others directly (its p2p not peer-thru-peer)? And people have usernames (public key) instead of email addresses?
user acceptance? (Score:3)
The primary issue will be the same as for PGP (anyone use that? wait, let me rephrase that: anyone know of any non-geek people who use it?): User acceptance.
Unless it's as easy not only to use but also to add contacts as FB chat, AIM, ICQ, Skype, Google+, etc. etc. it won't get the critical mass it needs.
What good is a secure chat if you don't have anyone you can chat to?
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If it behaves anything like Retroshare, it would have the users exchange keys, and not let them connect until each has the other's keys and allows the connection. Nintendo online players have been doing something similar for a while with friend codes, so I don't see why this needs to be so difficult.
Stop reinventing the wheel. (Score:2)
We already have this program.
It's called Retroshare.
bedroom spy camera (Score:1)
This of course does not stop the NSA / MI5 etc. breaking into your house and putting a few bugs in.
Re:bedroom spy camera (Score:4, Insightful)
Breaking into houses takes time and resources. Much more so then if the NSA can simply watch all your chat, archive it in a huge data center in utah, and then do a search through your histories.
So when spy agencies have to work the old fashioned way, even if they disrespect the need for warrants they still can't spy on everybody. If they can just do a search through your data, they are effectively watching everyone
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What we have now, and what we need to stop, is having the government or any other organization know almost everything about everyone on a routine basis. That's the path towards dictatorship.
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I agree. Someone once told me I should not go out at night, walk naked (except for a hundred dollar bill pasted to each of my nipples) to the highest-crime district in my city, and start yelling "Some of my best friends are you people!" They said I would be safer if I behaved differently, stayed home instead, and STFU-ed up with my crazy rants.
I explained that even if I behaved differently, that doesn't stop the Russians from launching a nuclear ICBM strike, killing us all, including me. Safe is safe, uns
These types of things get a bad rep (Score:2)
Everyone should have their communications privacy by default, not having to hunt downs means to keep their privacy. Services like these end up being used mostly by paranoids and people with malicious intent. So in some respects the government officials have a point in wanting to shut down initiatives like these. On the other hand initiatives like these only exist because the government wants to control everything.
Re:These types of things get a bad rep (Score:5, Funny)
I use these services because I have nothing to hide and like our caring government.
Since I have nothing to hide, my caring government would be wasting resources trying to monitor and read my communication.
By making it impossible for them to do so, I'm saving them effort, time and money.
Retroshare (Score:1)
anybody interested in this sort of thing shoulc check out retroshare. Can also use the DHT to find peers.
Encrypts everything with pgp keys. And only connects with trusted peers.
I would trust an open source project like retroshare more than aa commercial company like bittorrent for this sort of thing.
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Yes yes yes! Finally someone else who sees how important Retroshare could be, if only more were aware of it.
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If you want to protect your information (even from hackers not paid by the government) in any way you will get into their monitoring list. Is not if, is when (and that moment could be in the past already), you will be monitored. And even if you think you have nothing to hide, they could have another [go.com] opinion [wsj.com].
Don't play boiling frog or by the time you decide that something must be done will be already too late.
Bitmessage? (Score:2)
How does this compare with https://bitmessage.org/ [bitmessage.org] ?
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I just thought the same thing. Encrypted communication, hides metadata/senders/recipients, PLUS it's open-source.
The big problem is the initial exchange of keys. (Score:2)
Unless you're meeting in person to exchange physical media, there's not really a secure way to do so.
E-Mail? Hah!
File lockers? Hah!
BitTorrent? Hah!
Encrypted file transfer through another IM client? Hah!
Basically, setup becomes this tiny set of flaming hoops that you're somehow expected to jump through simultaneously.
Another proprietary mess - a pity. (Score:3)
Much like MEGA, the other projects of BitTorrent labs (most notably - Snyc), and a whole host of pseudo-security minded programs and services popping up recently, this is sadly proprietary bullshit. Much like BitTorrent Inc absorbing uTorrent as the main client etc... they've repeatedly demonstrated that they view their greatest success - the Bit Torrent protocol itself, as a mistake to be avoided. Why did BitTorrent itself grow to be so prevalent? Exactly the thing they seem to hate - its openness. BitTorrent protocol and most of its extensions (ie DHT, uTP, PEX and more) are all free and open source, to be implemented in a variety of clients. This is its greatest strength, from the slashdot-reading hacktivist running Deluge/Transmission/rTorrent, to World of Warcraft's client updater/patcher, BitTorrent is not just a great protocol for both tracker-based and trackerless sharing, but its implementations are as wide as can be and interoperable.
I am not sure why BitTorrent Inc has decided to treat this as a weakness, and develop yet another proprietary software-as-a-service, centrally managed debacle. While there seems to be some casual lip service paid to FOSS and promises of openness, I haven't seen any examples that they're actually interested in such things. For instance, the javascript Torque API which is supposed to bring BitTorrent to the web browser, doesn't seem to be compatible with any clients aside from the official BitTorrent/uTorrent clients themselves! Other "labs" projects like Live, Surf, and Sync are similar in this regard, being designed only for approved first-party clients.
So long as this ideal reigns, I won't be using these projects. Especially when it comes to privacy and security it is simply too important than to trust a proprietary, unverifiable item of this sort. There are already a variety of projects that offer better privacy and more secure messaging - RetroShare for instance. If you're interested in some of the best, check out www.prism-break.org for a directory of privacy and security respecting, mostly FOSS, programs for many uses. Until those like BitTorrent Inc wake up and realize that openness is one of their greatest strengths, I don't see any reason to consider what they provide.
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I2P has a DHT based messaging system available. The whole stack is fully open, and the underlying protocol is actually like a marriage between bittorrent and Tor-- users are expected to relay traffic thus contributing greater bandwith and anonymity to the network.
I2P also has anonymized bittorrent built-in, so I'm not sure what this new bt chat brings to the table. It seems like too little too late to me.
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I don't know of another one. FWIW, they are developing on Android primarily so they are forced to keep the code as efficient and lean as possible. The effect on resource usage has been very positive.
As for taking off, I2P nodes and traffic have already been on a big upward climb over the past few years. I wouldn't be surprised if it surpasses Tor soon in the number of relays and amount of traffic.
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Hope they were smart enough to use PGP keys (Score:2)
Hopefully they weren't stupid enough to roll their own key format, and instead, they use standard OpenPGP keys. That way, people can have MitM-proof verified-identity conversations if they want that (and can tune the degree of MitM-proofing that is needed) but also have MitM-vulnerable pseudonymous conversations if they don't (for cases where you'd prefer to be anonymous).
When you're talking to your wife, it's ok for her to know who you are, and you to know you're talking to her, so you'd use the keys that
isn't that the NSA 'secure chat' system? (Score:2)
Seriously, how do you know you can trust this thing?
Ah OH! (Score:1)
Signing up requires java script to be enabled. Are they tracking you? Email address is also required, but you could give them mixnym.net address to obscure that.
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And then there is this:
We need to confirm your email address.
To complete the subscription process, please click the link in the email we just sent you.
Boy, are they interested in privacy NOT!
bottorrent == realplayer (Score:2)
in it's level of respect for the user and their computer. i installed the BT client on my mac, and it went into the preferences of firefox, safari, and chrome and changed my default search engine to yahoo, then set it so the yahoo home page loads every time i start the browser.
disgusting. i'll never install another product from these guys.
It gets better.. (Score:1)