Group Chat Vulnerability Discovered in Cryptocat, Project Fixes and Apologizes

alphadogg writes "The founder of an eavesdropping-resistant instant messaging application called Cryptocat has apologized over a now-fixed bug that made some types of messages more vulnerable to snooping. Cryptocat, which runs inside a web browser, is an open-source application intended to provide users with a high degree of security by using encryption to scramble messages. But Cryptocat warns that users should still be very cautious with communications and not to trust their life with the application. The vulnerability affected group chats and not private conversations. The encryption keys used to encode those conversations were too short, which in theory made it easier for an attacker to decrypt and read conversations." The bug report/merge request, and an analysis of the bug (although, in light of the Cryptocat's gracious response, overly acerbic and dismissive of the project).

Comments

Nothing overly dismissive there

[Anonymous Coward]

This bug and the history of it point to the cryptocat people being utterly incompetent. It's perfectly possible that they did what they did with the best of intentions and that they reacted as well as they could - that does not change one iota about them being incompetent and that you better don't trust the work of incompetent engineers. It's nice that that civil engineer did not intend to kill anyone and that she helped in rescuing people, but still her incompetence is what caused the bridge to collapse and what makes it reasonable to be suspicious of the other bridges she's responsible for.