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TrueCrypt Author Claims That Forking Is Impossible
An anonymous reader writes On a request from Matthew Green to fork the TrueCrypt code, the author answers that this is impossible. He says that this might be no good idea, because the code needs a rewrite, but he allows to use the existing code as a reference. "I am sorry, but I think what you're asking for here is impossible. I don't feel that forking TrueCrypt would be a good idea, a complete rewrite was something we wanted to do for a while. I believe that starting from scratch wouldn't require much more work than actually learning and understanding all of truecrypts current codebase. I have no problem with the source code being used as reference."
It would appear that the intended meaning is 'impractical'. The code is available, and the original project declared itself dead, so forking is totally possible; but the author believes that it would probably be a better use of time to use the existing project as a reference for building a new one, rather than get sufficiently familiar with the old one that you can (safely) start modifying it.
I don't know if it's true or not; but it's a much less radical assertion.
So far as I can tell he claims that it would be impossible to re-license it under an OSS license and allow Matthew Green to use the trademark. This may be "impossible" because he doesn't control the IP or he may just be using it as a figure of speech to say that he won't comply with the request. The article title somewhat misleadingly takes the quote out of context. Of course it's just an anonymously posted email on Pastbin, I wouldn't put too much stock by it unless there's some independent confirmation of its validity.
The article source is from pastebin. Are we really supposed to give this any merit? It's pretty obvious that the authors won't sanction anything related to the project (or did we forget the final cripple commit?)
Easy to be brave when there's not a TLA breathing down your neck.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Reading between the lines here, it seems fairly probable that Truecrypt has either
a) Very serious security bugs, or
b) Had backdoors introduced by the NSA.(Does Truecrypt use elliptic curve cryptography?)
In either event the code is basically tainted and shouldn't be used for any future projects.
The vague and sometimes bizzare nature of the statements from the Truecrypt dev team, including this one, lead me to believe that they have been placed under a standard NSA gagging order and have decided to burn Truecrypt rather than see it be turned against its users. Comments like "Forking is Impossibe" appear to be an open code for communicating that they are essentially unable to communicate, but that Truecrypt is no longer a trustworthy piece of software.
Reading though the Lavabit case, it's clear that those placed under NSA gagging orders have very, very little room for legal/media maneuver, but nevertheless still retain the freedom to walk away from their projects and tell others not to use them. Such actions appear to be the last defense of cryptographers in the US, and I think that is what we're seeing with Truecrypt.
May the Maths Be with you!
Seriously, people, save yourself the time. You'll just also get a letter from the NSA and either have to include their backdoor or drop the project.
And I sure as hell don't want to be the one who did the right thing only to see it going to waste because someone else didn't.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is a pissing war. Both sides may be sincere and well intentioned, but it's still a pissing war. Here's a manager type summary. I'll use TC to represent the TC developer who responder and Forkers for the person representing the people who want to fork it.
Forkers: We'd like your permission to fork your code and get the rights to it. We could just fork it without your permission and others no doubt will if you refuse to comply. We want your trademarks and your OK to put the forked code into a different license then you used. We've started looking at your code and while we do agree that there are problems there that desperately need to be fixed, we feel strongly that fixing your broken code is a million times easier than writing this from scratch. So will you play ball with us?
TC: Our code is so broken that you need to start from scratch. That's why we abandoned it - didn't think it was possible to fix without doing a complete re-write. So no, we're not going to "play ball".
As far as we know so far, Truecrypt hasn't been compromised. So ending use of it might be a victory for the NSA and their kind. And all they had to do was sow some seeds of doubt.
I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude that some vague, yet menacing government agency has compromised the code and the developers are unwilling to see what they worked for burned to the ground. I mean, 15 years ago, this would have sounded like the rantings of a paranoid schizophrenic, but with all that's come out about the U.S. government recently, I think it's perfectly rational. Given the level of security TrueCrypt has the potential to provide, and the level of oversight the U.S. Government wants over both foreigners and citizens alike, I would honestly be surprised if TrueCrypt wasn't compromised long ago.
Maybe the goals of this vague, yet menacing government agency are pure and wholesome. After all, TrueCrypt would absolutely benefit those organizations trying to keep their activities secret from authority. But we'll never know because of the veil of secrecy behind it.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
It's more likely that the author is the victim of a National Security Letter, and is obliged to say things like this to discourage people from using TrueCrypt or forking it. Which ever agency got to him must have known that this was likely to happen, and he is probably in it knee deep after putting lots of not-so-subtle hints on the revised homepage.
The 7.1a source code is being audited. There may be issues with the code base, but at least we will soon know with reasonable confidence if it is secure or not. Starting a new project would require a complete audit from scratch to get that level of confidence, and it is likely that at least one of the replacement projects is an NSA shill with backdoors installed from day one. The very fact that they went after TrueCrypt gives us some confidence that it is resilient to their attacks.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Lavabit, NSLs, etc are FBI, not NSA. The NSA may have found vulnerabilities, may have even hacked his computer and modified the source code, but they don't dick around with NSLs or gag orders.
Source: I'm a spook.
He says:
"I am sorry, but I think what you're asking for here is impossible."
As a developer, he uses the term "impossible". Nobody says
"impossible" in a development framework. You could
say "difficult" or "expensive" but not "impossible".
He says "impossible" because he is telling us in
specific terms:
It is "impossible" to use the current code base because
it has been compromised. He can't talk about it. He is
under court order or some fucking thing.
Since he cant tell us where the compromise is
he says fuck it all and start from scratch.
He is very specific.
Look, if the developer of an encryption product
says the product is not secure and it is impossible
to fix, I take that as:
"Stay the fuck away from this thing".
To be forewarned...
With few exceptions, rewrites are a bad idea. They only make sense when you need to fundamentally change the architecture, and even then it's often better to refactor heavily. Almost without exception, whenever someone says "Oh, it'll be easier to start from scratch", they're wrong. I understand that the TrueCrypt codebase is something of a mess, but I'm still skeptical that a rewrite is actually a better choice.
My opinion is the exact opposite: rewrites are often better when reaching a certain codebase size. The main reason is that existing functionality can often be put into a better shape by taking the big picture and adjusting everything according from the experience of the existing code.
The idea that rewrites are bad (that is often taught in programming classes) is mostly economical: it is less economical to do a rewrite rather than patch another level of indirection somewhere in the code tree. It requires more effort, a thorough understanding of the existing codebase (which often doesn't exist at all when code reaches some size, depending on _what_ the code does) and it requires a time gap between the releases.
But all these problems are fundamentally economical. But doing a rewrite can often be more economical, it's just that doing a patch is easier to quantify in money than a rewrite that will simplify patching/upgrades in the future and avoid fragile bug promoting messes.
Refactoring is essentially a "running rewrite" where parts of the code is changed while keeping most/all other parts intact or slightly changed. It decreases the time gap problem but in most cases require more effort than a rewrite while making many types of improvements hard or impossible.
A paranoid man is difficult to surprise.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
You missed an explanation - the TrueCrypt devs determined that the community code audit of TrueCrypt would eventually turn up backdoors, or spotty code in places so bizarre it would have to be intentional - and, possibly combined with a National Security Letter, the debs decided to just burn the house to the ground instead of allowing the government to repeatedly burgle it.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
I do not read that much into it.
I have many code bases out there. However, I would not recommend people build on them. The team that knows how it works no longer exists. In many cases even if you could get them back together they have not seen the code in years.
Sometimes it is better to throw it out and start over. Using the existing code as your test for features and build yourself a design you understand as you are the one who will be working on it.
Now you could also refactor. That in many cases takes as much work as rewriting it. As that is exactly what you are doing.
I have seen both ways done many times. Both work. But if the orig author says 'i wouldnt bother' it is usually worth at least listening to his advice.
How would you know it was genuine without consulting a legal professional? I can download the NSA logo from Google Images, find their address from Wikipedia, and write "You should stop doing this thing or we'll invite you to stay at Guantanamo Bay Care Home for the Politically Undesirable. Oh, and where I said 'invite you to stay at' replace it with 'put you in a 4' x 2' x 2' hold-all and ship you freight to'."
Someone should start sending fakes to random US addresses, just to see what happens.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
A security letter could ask for a lot of things but it would be a bit strange for it to demand that the source code license not be modified. To make that of any value the security letter would also have to demand that the group of developers enforce their copyright. That is easily tested. Fork the code, create NewTrueCrypt and put it up on a website. If a cease and desist letter appears then you are, perhaps, correct. If not, you are likely incorrect.
One thing about Truecrypt that always impressed me was how well it worked with Windows -- containers with drive letters, whole disk encryption, etc.
If you were to recreate it, what would be the hardest part -- doing the encryption or doing the OS integration bits? I assume doing encryption securely (ie, not leaving keys or passphrases hanging around in memory or written to swap files) is non-trivial, but I also assume that integrating well with Windows is, too.
The situation is probably what it was stated to be, that the developers do not understand the code and its more trouble to try to unravel a poorly written software project than to do it over again. THis is a common problem with open source. Software code is NOT self documenting, but open source people think it is. To really understand a big project in reasonable amount of time you really, really need good documentation and an overview of the system
Looking at the TrueCrypt License it sucks pretty bad, and it seems to be the major problem preventing a fork.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Its not even remotely crazy at this point. TLAs are strongly suspected of having backdoored Windows 2000, OpenBSD's IPSec stack, and the PRNG used by RSA. There are some slides floating around on the internet indicating that there is already a backdoor in Bitlocker.
At this point you would have to be crazy NOT to expect a TLA to have an "answer" to Truecrypt-- thats exactly why theres a code audit being done.
I'm seeing a Streisand effect. There is so much suspicion about TC's abrupt ending, especially after the code reviews found that it is a clean product, that more people seem to be using because they feel that it was killed by some powerful party.
TC is the only cross platform product out there that gives plausible deniability, is open source, and has been through an audit. The only thing against it are rumors about backdoors, none found.
They could have said something like "No Such Action should be taken with regard to our code and you Can't Implement Anything based on it. You might Feel Better If you rewrite everything from scratch."
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
As someone from the Southern United States I assure you that the English language has forked.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
When it comes to security, one must always error on the side of caution. There are very strong signs and signals that there is a problem with Truecrypt. Those that don't heed that warning are placing themselves at risk.
The default position of everything is: insecure until proven otherwise. If there's a good chance something is insecure, then we assume it is. We don't want to error in the other direction because the implications are too great if we are wrong. This is where we are with Truecrypt. Those throwing caution to the wind - at this point - are doing themselves a disservice.
--- Redefining "OS integration" to include "OS and boot integration", the short answer is: the boot process, hands down. You can model a new app based on TC's approach for OS-level (container/partition/disk) encryption, and you can do the same for MBR boot/system disk encryption, but now that everything is moving to TCG-TCM/UEFI/GPT/etc. it's a lot more complicated. -- Some history: IIRC from the TC forum, the TC's developer had issues finding a public API/method in the MS docs that could be used to pass keys and boot control from the MBR/bootloader to the OS and tc driver shim. There were third party apps out there doing it, but there didn't seem to be a documented way to do it, and the tc devs wanted to avoid fragile hacks to get it done. -- Microsoft actually responded to the TC devs by either publicizing a private API or by creating an official one. Again, this was back in the MBR days. -- With UEFI/GPT, trusted boot, etc., this part has become a lot more complex. I'm not sure what Microsoft's responsiveness would be on pursuing an official UEFI/GPT API, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's something along the lines of "Just use Bitlocker, it does this already."
This.
Try blowing the whistle on something. Revel in satisfying your moral obligation and the feeling of righteousnous. It will last until the first threatening letter from a lawyer arrives. Then you'll see what you're made of. Chances are good that it's not steel. Until you've experienced it, you won't know.
Just about any government organization or better than medium-sized private entity has the resources to crush an individual with very little threat of recourse. You really can't imagine the kinds of crap they can lob. If you are thinking of blowing a whistle, be very careful. Read up on the subject (Google for "how to whistleblower"). Absolutely DO NOT try to use internal channels. There are organizations that try to support whistle blowers, contact one (anonymously) and see what reading material they can give you. Make sure your nose is absolutely clean. Try to find cases of similar acts of whistle-blowing in your legal jurisdiction. How did they turn out for the whistle-blower? Probably not very good. Do everything right. Make sure you have enough evidence for an iron-clad case (without actually stealing anything). And wait until you have some distance. If you can keep the perpetrator(s) from figuring out your identity, absolutely do so. You will save yourself a lot of grief. This means you have to keep your mouth shut and trust nobody. (Note that I'm posting anonymously.) You won't be able to vent to anyone, especially co-workers. This is much harder than you might think. If you like to talk, you'd best just forget what you've seen. If you can time your actions so they hit while the perpetrator is under pressure for other problems, so much the better. Before you pull the trigger, think long and hard about the affect this will have on your loved ones. Consider supporting an anti-corruption organization to satisfy your need to do good rather than risking yourself.
Yes, it's really that bad. The sort of folk that deserve to be found out are more entrenched than you suspect. They are willing to go to extreme lengths to protect themselves. The problem almost definitely is more widespread than you think. The way it often works is that there is a web of wrong-doing, where one fellow's previous mistakes are used as leverage for silence/support by someone else. It makes for a kind of club. Many members of the club will have had one or more whistles blown on them before and have strategies for dodging and attacking the whistle-blower.
And that's just if you are whistle-blowing on a run of the mill organization. Going up against the likes of the NSA, the DOD, or the CIA... The TrueCrypt authors have all of my respect for shutting the project down. It was an act of bravery.
The Guardian reported on a hidden Latin message: TrueCrypt probably didn't leave a Latin message alerting users to NSA spying. I'm not so sure about their in-headline conclusion, though.
They quote this comment on Wikipedia by 'Bardon':
The Guardian article rebuffs this with: "In fact, "uti nsa im cu si" is meaningless in Latin - except to Google translate, (mis)translates it to the message Badon discovered."
But isn't that enough? It's a hidden message; it doesn't need to be correct Latin as long as the point gets across. If you put into Google Translate right now, you get "If I wish to use the NSA". Unusual that it's been changed slightly, but still expresses the same message: The NSA has compromised TrueCrypt.
I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but this entire TrueCrypt saga has been bizarre. Obviously something happened beyond "the task of maintaining a widely used cryptography program just became too much work" or else why not just say that?
As far as we know so far, Truecrypt hasn't been compromised.
No, you're wrong.
From the TrueCrypt website:
WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues
WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure
It may not use the explicit word 'compromised', but that says it clearly right there. TrueCrypt is compromised, whether a TLA did it or not.
It very well could be "code speak" (pardon pun) for; "yes our code is compromised, no we are not allowed to talk about it, end communication".
Then again it could me less complicated than that, and taken at face value they could be saying; "Our code is a mess. Fixing it would take more effort than we are willing to expend for this project so we ended it. You are welcome to try, but we would recommend you just start from scratch as it contains many fundamental problems."
It is too bad, I've always considered it the defacto standard in encryption. I am not a huge fan of the idea of MS being my provider of encryption with bitlocker, though I have heard some good things about it. Then again it isn't exactly free either.
The Slashdot tinfoil hat part of me wants to believe the NSA story, however common sense tells me it is just another open project that was led by a dedicated few with little resources that became too much to maintain over time. That said, they were rather elusive about it in the end, so who knows. Then again that could be a professional record thing, liability, or legal... plausible deniability limiting personal liability sort of thing.
Yeah, sounds fun. Why don't you try it and let us know how it goes?...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
strongly suspected
Is there evidence to support any of these assertions? Just because it's less "unlikely" doesn't mean it's "true."
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
I'd really like to know just what kind of punishment can the NSA hand out, anyway. Is the guy under legitimate threat of being renditioned to some black hole never to be seen again?
The CIA rendition plane was waiitng for Snowden. When Joseph Nacchio (Qwest CEO) refused to play ball with NSA, they set the SEC on him with some bogus charges and then refused to allow him to defend himself in court by classifying the evidence.
When the government starts actually locking people up for dissent, it's game over, isn't it?
Only if people do nothing to stop them. So far, Americans seem as willing to fight as the 30's Germans.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How could he stop people forking it? If he were to sue them is identity would be revealed.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Code review did not find it to be a clean product. They simply found that the Windows binary that was distributed could be produced from the source code. IE there were no extras in that bin. Whether the code itself has crap in it is still at question and is being audited.
Silence is a state of mime.
This is a common problem with software.
The first statement is a tautology and the second is unconfirmed and could just be FUD-mongering to discourage us from using a product the TLAs haven't cracked. If you give up a privacy tool every time someone merely claims to have subverted it, soon you will have no tools left. By the way, your home is not secure; I've subverted it. Good luck.
Code review did not find it to be a clean product. They simply found that the Windows binary that was distributed could be produced from the source code. IE there were no extras in that bin. Whether the code itself has crap in it is still at question and is being audited.
Binary Reproducibility wasn't a goal (or even attempted) by the audit project - that was done by somebody else.
The audit project didn't go through the entire TC codebase, but covered a lot of important areas. They found some issues here and there, but nothing they highlighted was especially serious - i.e., no cold-attack vectors, which is the important thing to guard against (anybody with physical access to your machine would be able to dump keys from memory, Game Over).
The license doesn't really matter. They can't sue if they want to remain anonymous.
Because noone wants to start a gratis OSS project with the spectre of a lawsuit hanging over their head?
"As far as we know so far, Truecrypt hasn't been compromised"
The message from the originator may be covert side-channel communication that this is not the case.
You absolutely have the right to consult with an attorney before you are investigated or accused of a crime. A big part of an attorney's job is showing people how to accomplish something without breaking the law. Your notion that the government can prohibit me from consulting with an attorney about a lease I am about to sign because I haven't been accused of a crime has no basis in reality. You are simply making up your "fact: that "you may not consult with an attorney about an NSL". NSL's have been the subject of multiple court cases and in each of those court cases attorneys have been involved.
recall the '"WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues""
"TrueCrypt probably didn't leave a Latin message alerting users to NSA spying"
http://www.theguardian.com/tec... (17 June 2014)
"Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues"
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"Librarians' NSL Challenge" (May 26, 2006)
https://www.aclu.org/national-...
https://www.aclu.org/blog/cont...
The US legal system has faced the unconstitutional NSL issue.
Once in light the press and in open court the gov just "withdrew its demand".
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"