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DARPA Wants To Make a Better, More Secure Version of WhatsApp (trustedreviews.com)
The Defense and Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) appears to be in the process of developing its own ultra secure communication platform. The program is called "Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone," or RACE, and it will be similar to WhatsApp in that it will be for everyone to use. Trusted Reviews reports: The objectives of the program are to create a distributed messaging system that can do three things: Exist completely within a network; Provide confidentiality, integrity and availability of messaging; and Preserve privacy to any participant in the system.
DARPA seem to be putting security front and center, and the description of the project claims that "compromised system data and associated networked communications should not be helpful for comprising any additional parts of the system," meaning that DARPA are keen that one breach shouldn't also give them a leg up on access to other parts of the system. So, will we soon be using a U.S government branded DARPA? Probably not, but the chances are that RACE will go some way to creating a messaging app that's resilient to attacks, with the protocol and security they find no doubt dripping through to consumer tech and features in the coming years.
DARPA seem to be putting security front and center, and the description of the project claims that "compromised system data and associated networked communications should not be helpful for comprising any additional parts of the system," meaning that DARPA are keen that one breach shouldn't also give them a leg up on access to other parts of the system. So, will we soon be using a U.S government branded DARPA? Probably not, but the chances are that RACE will go some way to creating a messaging app that's resilient to attacks, with the protocol and security they find no doubt dripping through to consumer tech and features in the coming years.
Are you seriously suggesting I should trust a communications app made by the government?
FBI tells us that encryption is for terrorists, DARPA tells us that encryption is for everyone. Are we all terrorists now?
You mean Signal?
Will users be referred to as "racists"?
is this not just obvious. what use case would a spy organization have for software that:
Untraceable unreadable distributed long distance communication ubiquitously.
Isn't that basically the holy grail of military encryption.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
your social credit score will go down.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if the US Government, after much detailed study, concluded that private communications would actually be GOOD for the country?
OR is there a chance that valid court order will be a valid decryption key for this new Whatsapp - like Clipper, anyone remember Clipper?
Signal.
Sig ?
I think we've all been burned before!
What?
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I am not sure I could ever trust a government-endorsed and/or supplied communication system as being actually "private" for the public. To me, private means that NOBODY can ever intercept, decrypt, or obtain the information contained in the messages except for those intended by the end users.
Perhaps if the entire design was open, all the code was open source and openly reviewed, and all the management of it were distributed and open. Otherwise, there is far, far, far too much incentive for the government's "three letter" agencies to plant in back doors, weaknesses, logging, tap points, malware, whatever. And if they can't get what they want, I believe it will be stopped, prevented, or corrupted; so I wouldn't hold my breath.
If they want it for the general public, it will fail.
And if they want it for covert missions, it will blow plausible deniability if they are caught. Fucking genius, eh?
The most intelligent thing is to use a popular open source project that already has enough market share, such as Signal.
It is insanely secure, and if your operatives are caught, you have the plausible deniability that the user is simply a privacy nutjob.
WhatsApp uses Signal's encryption too, thanks to Signal's makers caring more about making the world better than partisanship.
But it's silly and pointless, given that it's used to let closed-source code communicate with Facebook servers.
World wide, Government hypocricy is stunning. Will they roll this out to the "Five Eyes" countries? Oh yeah, not Australia of course because our fuckwit Government has just legislated to ban encryption.
You misunderstood.
This is for state terrorists, when they share your secrets and privacy. So you, "the terrorists", err "Russians", err "China", can't tell how much they know about you.
In fascist Murica, government has privacy from YOU! ;)
(Ok, I frankly thinj, if they abuse American values and American people that much, they by definition are not Americans. But traitors. Enemy combatants. For whatever we shall call their state.)
Yeah sure... the kind that encrypts everything end to end.. nobody can decrypt it except the sender/receiver. For a bonus... the government will be able to decrypt anybody's msg with a single click/command.
Gee, government wanting to dig its fingers into chat?
It's a trap, that's what.
From Program Information:
The Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE) program will research technologies for a distributed messaging system that can: a) exist completely within a given network, b) provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability of messaging, and c) preserve privacy to any participant in the system. Compromised system data and associated networked communications should not be helpful for compromising any additional parts of the system. RACE advances will be based on rigorous security arguments, such as those found in the academic cryptography community or statistical arguments based on realistic simulations. RACE will seek to create advances in communication protocol encapsulation methods as well as efficient, oblivious, distributed system tasking to build a system that is resistant to attack, even with limited participant compromises and largescale, real-time deep packet inspection. The program will further seek to explore approaches to preserving privacy, such as secure multiparty computation and obfuscated communication protocols.
The goal of the RACE program is to create a system capable of avoiding large-scale compromise. As such, RACE research efforts will explore: 1) preventing compromised information from being useful for identifying any of the system nodes because all such information is encrypted on the nodes at all times, even during computation; and 2) preventing communications compromise by virtue of obfuscating communication protocols.
‘The Defense and Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) appears to be in the process of developing its own ultra secure communication platform. The program is called "Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone," or RACE, and it will be similar to WhatsApp in that it will be for everyone to use. Trusted Reviews reports’
An identical app on everyone's computer, trusted to be remotely updated at any time by the DoD, doesn't seem very secure to me.
Why isn't DARPA looking at Signal? I thought they were the benchmark by which all other secure communications are compared. Most other services actually use their protocol behind the scenes, including WhatsApp.
AFAIK the problems with WhatsApp are mismanagement of the backend, not the protocol, and I'm not aware of Signal having these problems.
I run a remailer. There is a system that uses the remailer system whereby people can communicate anonymous and securely. It is called Hsub.
France went with a Matrix/Riot.im public fork/derivative as their government encrypted messenger app. Why reinvent the wheel, when this is something that works at scale?
https://github.com/dinsic-pim
Check out this communication app called Clariti https://clariti.app/