zedred

> If negotiating TLS 1.2, TLS 1.3 servers MUST set the last eight bytes of their Random value to the bytes: 44 4F 57 4E 47 52 44 01

If it is possible to do this safely, does that mean the TLS 1.2 Random value was always eight bytes too long? Or that it was unnecessary?

Can you give us some examples?

I haven't directly explored the source for either in little while, so I should take a new look. I might be a little out of date, but the things that I have seen second hand recently confirmed my earlier conclusions.

Like I recently saw an announcement from Wire that calls are now secure, but they had been advertising them as secure all along! I had even spent time looking through the code but didn't know that calls weren't authenticated. Now are they really secure? I don't know, they said that before too, and the source is so hard to follow. Then I saw a post that showed they weren't even doing cert pinning, which is so basic.

I wanted to like it, but the more I looked the more I felt like "security" was just sprinkled on as an after thought.

I was hopeful at first. A large VC funded company with a big full time team should run circles around a small open source effort, but their security is still way behind Signal. I was also quickly put off by their "less than honest" marketing.

Probably worth mentioning this is a paid report for one library they use, not the Wire app.

I think this study is exploring "persistent" ED, which is less known. ED is a documented side effect, but this shows that some men continue to experience ED even after they stop taking the drug.

That's sort of too bad, because it looks like Signal was one of the only implementations they audited that had no issues.

I hope these authors will eventually look at the new thing too.

> As the article says, Bernstein's stuff won out because his work is at the intersection of solid crypto, clean and performant code, and sane API design.

As a casual observer, my impression has been pretty different. Here's an excerpt from the README of curve25519-donna, which it seemed like everyone was using for a while:

curve25519 is an elliptic curve, developed by Dan Bernstein, for fast Diffie-Hellman key agreement. DJB's original implementation was written in a language of his own devising called qhasm. The original qhasm source isn't available, only the x86 32-bit assembly output.

Since many x86 systems are now 64-bit, and portability is important, this project provides alternative implementations for other platforms.

My impression has always been that what we get from DJB is some wacky implementation written in a language of his own devising, or just the 32bit assembler output of that, or some partial code fragment that has to be disentangled from his benchmarking library, and the only thing that makes this usable are people who are motivated to do the work of making it digestible by mortals.

> It isn't because GnuPG doesn't work well or because it is too hard to use that people don't use it. They don't use it because other people don't use it.

Sure, GnuPG works "well," for engineers. This post is written by an engineer, but engineers are no longer the majority of computer users. If you want to develop mass market products today, coming to terms with that is pretty important.

To even try to draw a comparison between WhatsApp and XMPP+OTR is absurd. For an engineer, maybe the latter is passable, but the billions of people around the world who want to chat on their mobile device, don't understand what a key exchange is, don't understand why they can't immediately see everyone in their address book they can chat with, and don't want to run their own server, it definitely isn't passable.

> Why do people use Facebook instead of Diaspora? It's not because Facebook is better, works well, or is easier to use... It's because other people use Facebook.

> Why do people use Skype instead of XMPP? It's not because Skype is better, works well, or is easier to use... It's because other people use Skype.

> Why do people use WhatsApp instead of GnuPG or OTR? It's not because WhatsApp is better, works well, or is easier to use... It's because other people use WhatsApp.

I'm sorry but this is just not true. Network effects are important, but there's a reason that people are using these networks to begin with. They work really well.

Something like WhatsApp may seem simple, but every little interaction within the app is perfectly polished in a way that GnuPG, OTR, or any XMPP client is definitely not.

> And the reason people initially used Facebook, Skype, and WhatsApp is not that they were easier to use or better. It's advertising. Notice how all of these are proprietary software made by companies with the means to advertise their software? You can bet people would use GnuPG, Diaspora, and XMPP if they had been advertised by companies like Facebook and Microsoft.

As far as I can tell, WhatsApp never spent a single dollar on advertising. Their entire growth strategy seems to have been word of mouth.

These companies have hundreds or thousands of engineers who work on these products full time every day, driving the products forward, making them better and better. That is not something an open source client is ever going to be able to compete with. It just isn't.

I recently switched from Android to iPhone and was pretty surprised by how much lower quality the Signal app is for iPhone than Android.

Signal for Android was really amazing, and the switch made me think this could be one reason why so many people seem to speak both highly and poorly of Signal. The iPhone app just unfortunately seems to be way behind the Android app.

Not sure why they have prioritized development in that way.