Haven: Building the Most Secure Baby Monitor Ever?
Posted on December 22, 2017
| n8fr8
About eight months ago, friends at the Freedom of the Press Foundation reached out to us, to see if we were interested in prototyping an idea they had been batting around. They knew that from projects like CameraV and ProofMode, that we knew how to tap into the sensors on smartphones to do interesting things. They also knew we could connect devices together using encrypted messaging and onion routing, through our work on ChatSecure and Tor (Orbot!
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Building the most private app store
Posted on June 2, 2016
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
App stores can work well without any tracking at all
Attackers are increasingly seeing app stores as a prime attack vector, whether it is aimed at the masses like XCodeGhost or very targeted like in FBI vs Apple. When we install software from an app store, we are placing a lot of trust in a lot of different parties involved in getting the source code from the original developer delivered to our device in a useful form.
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Copperhead, Guardian Project and F-Droid Partner to Build Open, Verifiably Secure Mobile Ecosystem
Posted on March 28, 2016
| n8fr8
Three open-source projects haved joined together to announce a new partnership to create an open, verifiably secure mobile ecosystem of software, services and hardware. Led by the work of the Toronto-based CopperheadOS team on securing the core Android OS, Guardian Project and F-Droid have joined in to partner on envisioning and developing a full mobile ecosystem. The goal is to create a solution that can be verifiably trusted from the operating system, through the network and network services, all the way up to the app stores and apps themselves.
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How to Migrate Your Android App’s Signing Key
Posted on December 29, 2015
| Abel Luck
It is time to update to a stronger signing key for your Android app! The old default RSA 1024-bit key is weak and officially deprecated.
What? The Android OS requires that every application installed be signed by a digital key. The purpose behind this signature is to identify the author of the application, allow this author and this author alone to make updates to the app, as well as provide a mechanism to establish inter-application trust.
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First working test of IOCipher for Obj-C
Posted on January 26, 2015
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
Every so often, we revisit our core libraries in the process of improving our existing apps, and creating new ones. IOCipher has become a standard part of our apps since it provides a really easy way to include encrypted file storage in Android apps. And we are now working on spreading it to iOS as well, headed up by Chris Ballinger, with the first preliminary tests of IOCipher for Obj-C. Testing and contributions are most welcome!
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Reducing metadata leakage from software updates
Posted on October 16, 2014
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
Update: now you can do this with Tor Onion Services
Many software update systems use code signing to ensure that only the correct software is downloaded and installed, and to prevent the code from being altered. This is an effective way to prevent the code from being modified, and because of that, software update systems often use plain, unencrypted HTTP connections for downloading code updates. That means that the metadata of what packages a machine has installed is available in plain text for any network observer, from someone sitting on the same public WiFi as you, to state actors with full network observation capabilities.
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CipherKit updates: IOCipher and CacheWord
Posted on September 26, 2014
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
We’ve been on a big kick recently, updating the newest members of our CipherKit family of frameworks: IOCipher and CacheWord. There also are is a little news about the original CipherKit framework: SQLCipher-for-Android.
IOCipher v0.2 IOCipher is a library for storing files in an encrypted virtual disk. It’s API is the exact same as java.io for working with files, and it does not need root access. That makes it the sibling of SQLCipher-for-Android, both are native Android APIs that wrap the SQLCipher database.
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Security in a thumb drive: the promise and pain of hardware security modules, take one!
Posted on March 28, 2014
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
Hardware Security Modules (aka Smartcards, chipcards, etc) provide a secure way to store and use cryptographic keys, while actually making the whole process a bit easier. In theory, one USB thumb drive like thing could manage all of the crypto keys you use in a way that makes them much harder to steal. That is the promise. The reality is that the world of Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) is a massive, scary minefield of endless technical gotchas, byzantine standards (PKCS#11!
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Tweaking HTTPS for Better Security
Posted on February 12, 2014
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
The HTTPS protocol is based on TLS and SSL, which are standard ways to negotiate encrypted connections. There is a lot of complexity in the protocols and lots of config options, but luckily most of the config options can be ignored since the defaults are fine. But there are some things worth tweaking to ensure that as many connections as possible are using reliable encryption ciphers while providing forward secrecy. A connection with forward secrecy provides protection to past transactions even if the server’s HTTPS private key/certificate is stolen or compromised.
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Integrating Crypto Identities with Android
Posted on December 28, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
ver the past couple of years, Android has included a central database for managing information about people, it is known as the ContactsContract (that’s a mouthful). Android then provides the People app and reusable interface chunks to choose contacts that work with all the information in the ContactsContract database. Any time that you are adding an account in the Settings app, you are setting up this integration. You can see it with Google services, Skype, Facebook, and many more.
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Keys, signatures, certificates, verifications, etc. What are all these for?
Posted on December 12, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
For the past two years, we have been thinking about how to make it easier for anyone to achieve private communications. One particular focus has been on the “security tokens” that are required to make private communications systems work. This research area is called internally Portable Shared Security Tokens aka PSST. All of the privacy tools that we are working on require “keys” and “signatures”, to use the language of cryptography, and these are the core of what “security tokens” are.
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Getting keys into your keyring with Gnu Privacy Guard for Android
Posted on December 6, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
Now that you can have a full GnuPG on your Android device with Gnu Privacy Guard for Android, the next step is getting keys you need onto your device and included in Gnu Privacy Guard. We have tried to make it as easy as possible without compromising privacy, and have implemented a few approaches, while working on others. There are a few ways to get this done right now.
Gnu Privacy Guard registered itself with Android as a handler of all the standard OpenPGP MIME types (application/pgp-keys, application/pgp-encrypted, application/pgp-signature), as well as all of the OpenPGP and GnuPG file extensions (.
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Your own private dropbox with free software
Posted on November 12, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
There are lots of file storage and sharing software packages out there that make it easy for a group of people to share files. Dropbox is perhaps the most well known of the group, it provides an easy way for a group of people to share files. The downside of Dropbox is that it is not a private service, just like any cloud-based service. Dropbox has total access to your files that you store there.
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Issues when distributing software
Posted on October 31, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
There is currently a discussion underway on the Debian-security list about adding TLS and Tor functionality to the official repositories (repos) of Debian packages that is highlighting how we need to update how we think about the risks when distributing software. Mostly, we are used to thinking about making sure that the software that the user is installing is the same exact software that has been posted for distribution. This is generally handled by signing the software package, then verifying that signature on the user’s machine.
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Keeping data private means it must be truly deletable!
Posted on August 23, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
There are lots of apps these days that promise to keep your data secure, and even some that promise to wipe away private information mere seconds or minutes after it has been received. It is one thing to keep data out of view from people you don’t want seeing it, it is also important to be able to truly delete information. Unfortunately computers make it very difficult to make data truly disappear.
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Modernizing Expectations for the Nouveau Secure Mobile Messaging Movement
Posted on July 16, 2013
| n8fr8
The tl;dr of this lengthy (tho entertaining and immensely important!) post is this: Stopping with “We support OTR” or “We support PGP” is not enough anymore. There are at least seven, if not more, very important security features that any app claiming to provide secure messaging must implement as soon as possible, to truly safeguard a user’s communication content, metadata and identity.
Note: The names “Gibberbot” and “ChatSecure” are used interchangeabley below, as we are in the midst of an app rebrand.
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GnuPG for Android progress: we have an command line app!
Posted on May 9, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
This alpha release of our command-line developer tool brings GnuPG to Android for the first time!
GNU Privacy Guard Command-Line (gpgcli) gives you command line access to the entire GnuPG suite of encryption software. GPG is GNU’s tool for end-to-end secure communication and encrypted data storage. This trusted protocol is the free software alternative to PGP. GnuPG 2.1 is the new modularized version of GnuPG that now supports OpenPGP and S/MIME.
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IOCipher beta: easy encrypted file storage for your Android app
Posted on February 7, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
At long last, we are proud to announce the first beta release of IOCipher, an easy framework for providing virtual encrypted disks for Android apps.
does not require root or any special permissions at all the API is a drop-in replacement for the standard java.io.File API, so if you have ever worked with files in Java, you already know how to use IOCipher works easiest in an app that stores all files in IOCipher, but using standard java.
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report on IOCipher beta dev sprint
Posted on January 31, 2013
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
We are just wrapping up an intensive dev sprint on IOCipher in order to get the first real beta release out, and it has been a wonderfully productive session on many levels! Before we started this, we had a proof-of-concept project that was crashy and ridiculously slow. We’re talking crashes every 100 or so transactions and 9 minutes to write 2 megs. Abel and I were plodding thru the bugs, trying to find the motivation to dive into the hard problems in the guts of some of the more arcane parts of the code.
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Sometimes the best solution is a library, not an app
Posted on August 27, 2012
| Hans-Christoph Steiner
Our general approach to software development starts with surveying existing solutions that are available and in use, to see if there is already enough of an ecosystem or whether we need to seed that. When there is already an adundance of tools and apps out there, we work to find the good ones, provide feedback and auditing, and then build apps and tools to fill in any gaps. For example, this was our approach in the Open Secure Telephony Network.
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