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France is Building Its Own Encrypted Messaging Service To Ease Fears That Foreign Entities Could Spy on Private Conversations (reuters.com)
The French government is building its own encrypted messenger service to ease fears that foreign entities could spy on private conversations between top officials, the digital ministry said on Monday. From a report: None of the world's major encrypted messaging apps, including Facebook's WhatsApp and Telegram -- a favorite of President Emmanuel Macron -- are based in France, raising the risk of data breaches at servers outside the country.
About 20 officials and top civil servants are testing the new app which a state-employed developer has designed, a ministry spokeswoman said, with the aim that its use will become mandatory for the whole government by the summer. "We need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not encrypted by the United States or Russia," the spokeswoman said. "You start thinking about the potential breaches that could happen, as we saw with Facebook, so we should take the lead."
About 20 officials and top civil servants are testing the new app which a state-employed developer has designed, a ministry spokeswoman said, with the aim that its use will become mandatory for the whole government by the summer. "We need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not encrypted by the United States or Russia," the spokeswoman said. "You start thinking about the potential breaches that could happen, as we saw with Facebook, so we should take the lead."
Why not just audit https://xmpp.org/ and call it good?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Ok but....What's stopping the french government to eavesdrop on the communications used on this app? Or Are they willing to go as far as to implement strong crypto even they can't break?
Since this is France and they have 30-hour work weeks and 6 months of vacation, expect this in about 10 years.
To Ease Fears That Foreign Entities Could Spy on Private Conversations
... but enshrine the ability of the French Government to spy on private conversations.
I think it was Bruce Schneier who said "Everyone wants you to have privacy... just not from them".
Sound Illegal already. Just give it some time.
My understanding is that designing a (more or less) truly secure application is quite difficult. The encryption math can probably be handled quite easily, but there a myriad of ways to mess up the logic that goes around the math (key generation, key storage, key transport, etc).
Color me surprised. I supposed that, at least developed countries, would have specialised services for their important personnel to comunicate through.
Minitel goes secure huh...
Nullius in verba
Anybody - a government, a group, an individual - who wants secure encrypted communications they trust can get them.
If you're just careful, you can download code from trusted sources, spin it up, and run your own servers.
If you're paranoid and have more resources, you can audit the code before using it.
if you're REALLY paranoid, you can go to the theory papers and write your own code.
Governments and law enforcement agencies have to stop dreaming about systems that are secure against everyone except them - that horse left the barn in the 1990's, never to return.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Of course. The EU member states (and the UK) are part of the same ilk that rules Washington, D.C. Why do you think they always tend to collaborate on war and banking?
There is no moral high ground here. The world stage basically has four players:
1. The US - EU - UK
2. China
3. Russia
4. Everybody else (the serfs of #1-3)
then the U.S. gov will effectively have a way in. It's even possible they can modify the app if it runs on Windows or macOS. The only way to be truly sure is to only run the software on Linux systems.
Now we're starting to see them.
assez bonne intimité
Cool.
So, assuming it is designed to be utterly and completely insecure (so that the government can access it to investigate terrorism, child porn, etc) might it be a good thing to tunnel a secure protocol through?
Why are government officials using services like these for "secure" messages anyway? Seriously? Government officials who do this insane thing now are going to be trusted to use some French home brew thing instead? Surely there must be rules they are breaking now by doing this?
Yeah, I heard they speak french!
Ça, c'est une façon de passer sous le radar! ;-)
Conversations, an XMPP client, now has OMEMO encryption built in. You can also use OpenPGP with it.
And it works many different hosting providers. I recently changed the XMPP host for my domain from one provider to another. France could just make certain that they have an XMPP service provider, and bam, they are done. Don't reinvent the wheel.
As if the French security services aren't dogy as all fuck.
Anything they build, their SS will want a sneaky way into.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Instead of encrypting these services which are always being data-mined, they should saturate them with noise. Current machine-learning algorithms are easily tricked and can be led to a local minimum by spamming a few different common queries. For example, if user X wants to talk to Y about a meeting at a place Z, then all they have to do is to spam that they want to meet at Z1,...Zn , where Zi are very different types of places (amusement parks, schools, hospitals, supermarkets, etc.) , this will confuse the hell out of the algorithm. I've been trying these things already with google, I was surprised how easily it is to trick and manipulate it into messing up queries after you do this kind of "noise spam".
Telegram might be completely accessible to Putin, and the Russian government's scorn for the service may be just a ruse to attract more users.
Good move by France.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with a french "engineer" fresh out of school, employed in a big company. ...
Him: And I will develop a new crypto system for this because it must be really secure.
Me: Ah, ok, nice will you use PGP or RSA as a base or something else?
Him: No, no, it must be REALLY secure! I will develop my own algorithm! These things, RSA and so on, the algorithm and the code is known to everybody, it's not secure enough!
Me:
This has happened before.
"Fine! Keep your stupid services, America and Russia! We'll build our own encrypted messaging system. With blackjack! And hookers!"
"In fact, screw the messaging system!"
Voila, you end up with Moulin Rouge.
code found on the Internet
That sounds very vague.
Just use established, audited tech like PGP and OMEMO, and be upfront about it!