But there's something more subtle here. Juicebox means that your key material is remotely stored in encrypted form. In an ideal setup, it's split between multiple different realms operated by different people, and the key material is stored in HSMs. There's a complicated dance where you prove knowledge of the PIN without actually revealing the PIN, and then the remote realms hand over the key material and you reassemble it into your key by decrypting it with a key also derived from your PIN.
If Twitter is running their own Juicebox realms then you're having to trust them. Even if the realms are implemented as HSMs, they're in a position to see the encrypted key material as it exits the HSM. And if they're not in HSMs, then the encrypted key material is just sitting there where they can see it. This doesn't intrinsically give them the key, since it still needs the PIN to decrypt it - but the key derivation function from the PIN is just 32 rounds of argon2id with 16MB of memory use, and given the PIN is limited to 4 digits, that's going to take about a second of GPU aided brute forcing to drop out the actual key.
As noted in the help doc, this isn't forward secure, so the moment they have the key they can decrypt everything. This is so far from being a meaningful e2ee platform it's ridiculous.
Since we're on the topic of having to trust X, is there any reason to believe X wouldn't insert some code into the client JS (behind some per-account flag) to exfiltrate your key or PIN, if they were ordered to do so?
I wouldn't rely on a website as a secure communication client, that seems like a job for an open-source native application. But I'm no expert.
[0]: http://xchat.org
If this hasn't been done already, I have a new weekend project!
It’s not the same XChat
Thank you for at least explaining that I missed a joke, it’s a lot more helpful than downvotes. (I’m not complaining, I don’t really care about internet points, I was just confused about what I did wrong) :)
That doesn't mean that we know for sure that the team doesn't have cryptography experts, but ... I have my doubts. Surely we'd have heard details by now if that was the case.
(I mean "Bitcoin style"! The most important part of encrypted chat is confidentiality, and no part of Bitcoin's architecture even ATTEMPTS to ensure confidentiality! Everything's permanently stored in plaintext on the public ledger FFS!!!!)
Bitcoin’s creator demonstrated an impressive mastery of cryptography—- it was made to be extremely resilient (including to quantum computing) and no one has ever broken it despite billions of dollars being on the line. Maybe Musk meant to say that he thinks his product will be similarly resilient.
He might also mean that the secp256k1 elliptic curve (which Bitcoin uses) is also used by their product in some way, such as for a key exchange.
You can read anything with the assumption that the writer is an absolute idiot, but I’d give the world’s richest man more credit than that.
Before the pandemic, I would've said similar, even despite some of his errors of judgement.
Since then, and the trend started earlier, it has become difficult to ignore that (1) he responds poorly to experts contradicting him, and (2) outside his actual domains of expertise (rockets and sales/motivational pitches*) he's just as much of a noob as everyone other opinionated loudmouth on the internet.
* the latter of which is, IMO, one of the two big reasons Tesla share price is 10x to 30x what it should be, and that in turn is why he's the richest man on the planet.
The other is that surviving the stock shorters probably burned people off shorting that stock, so the market is mostly now mostly just the exhuberent optimists unbalanced by doubters.
That would be a step ahead of most of the ultra wealthy, in my humble experience. Family money seems to do nothing positive for critical thinking skills or practical experience.
Paying someone to level your character is officially against Blizzard's rules in all of their games, but their lack of enforcement reveals that they don't care as long as the monthly payments clear. World of Warcraft is overrun with people selling gold and boosts-- given that they're openly advertising this in Stormwind, it wouldn't be a stretch to call it de-facto legal (or at least decriminalized). Heck, Blizzard is selling gold and level boosts on its own website! [1]
[1] https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/family/world-of-warcraft
Using crypto as a phrase makes it more interesting for journalists, gives them something to pad their articles with.
You say musk has no idea, but he has too talent working for him and they will explain stuff.
He will then think of the PR and Sales angle and adjust the product/press releases accordingly.
He then invested in OpenAI, is still trying to make FSD a thing, wants humans and AI to merge via Neuralink, made humanoid robots, and made grok because he parted ways with OpenAI.
If he knows what he's talking about in general, this combination makes him a demonolater.
Given how often (and for how long) he keeps saying FSD is just around the corner — and how poorly recieved have been TBC's tunnels, Neuralink's research, grok, Twitter's changes under Musk, Optimus, Cybertruck, his comments when sharing a video of him attempting to play high-leveled characters in some video games — I have every reason to think he doesn't know much outside of rockets and sales/motivational speeches.
I don't even need to reference the salutes, supporting AfD, DOGE etc. as examples here.
This is just the latest example.
Correct
Doing so, is a business tactic. We know he is full of shit, but it gives him some kind of status in front of other business people.
On the other hand, he promised that Grok 3 would be massively better than ChatGPT, and it turned out to be comparable at best.
I assume this means that the "encryption" is about as strong as base64.
I mean its just for notification to my app so its not something critical
If your threat model is such that you'd rather not have the server know what's sent to and from the client, it's not enough to just encrypt the data in flight, which is what HTTPS does. With encrypted chat, we typically want what we refer to as end-to-end encryption, where the server can't see the content of messages sent between users.
I want to prevent vector attack such MiTM if TLS is somehow hacked
There are things you can do to make it more difficult to hack your TLS connection though, for example you could use key pinning to make sure that your app will only accept a server with the certificate you expect. This would protect against an IT admin installing root certs on their users' devices, or against certificate authorities issuing fake certificates for your domain.
but for things like IoT running websocket connection for long time maybe I need that
When your server facilitates a communication between two clients and just acts as the infrastructure E2EE can become relevant. If the clients want to be able to exchange information withouth the server being able to snoop in on what is being sent, then you'd want to use E2EE. With that the server won't be able to read what is being sent.
- then notification service is probably something I want to E2EE then, but Idk about performance hit cost would be
If so, then you really don't need any extra encryption.
If not, then it depends on who's using your chat, how they use it, and for what purpose. Are the users of the chat room a small group with occasional users joining or leaving, or are many users expected to join and leave at any given moment?
That being said, encrypting the notifications won't bring any real benefits. A bad actor would simply focus on trying to compromise your server.
If you do decide that full e2ee would benefit your users, then look for someone who can help you implement it.
Implementing real e2ee for a 2 party chat is hard for someone without experience.
Implementing e2ee for a group chat is hard even for someone with experience.
(Though I still think that "how can I protect against TLS being broken?" is the wrong question and you should instead ask "how can I ensure that TLS doesn't break?".)
I do wish that the Paypal statement would be a bit more nuanced though. Yes, Musk made a lot of money on the dot-com hype by way of Paypal. And he seems to have built strong friendships from that, weirdly with the same people that fired him. But his involvement in Paypal was that he let it buy the startup he was in and demanded to be CEO. He then only showed interest in throwing out the FreeBSD it was built on and replace it with NT (which was the hottest fad at the time) and to rename the company to "X". Neither happened, and he was quickly let go before the company risked bankruptcy. It's rather far fetched to go from that to "changing the Internet". Paypal won and X didn't.
Yeah he made the electric car popular, but it can be argued that in order to make his company economically viable he basically lied to his investors and customers about self driving cars for almost a decade, when he had nothing real in his hands. Thanks to those promises he got the money to keep the company afloat until it had the manufacturing capability to actually deliver the cars they sold; and someone may argue he would have failed if he had been honest from the beginning, and that maybe people wouldn't have invested the money they did if he hadn't set unachievable goals to begin with
And this is a pattern you can see in all of his companies; he promises the world Mars, gets a lot of funding and then instead of delivering on the "dream" target, he uses the money to deliver a valid but definitely less "romantic" product he can actually sell. One time is ok, but it's basically a modus operandi now. And this gives me a strong suspicion that the product was the real goal all along, and he knew he had to lie about the "dream" in order to get the capital at all
Elon sells a 2-3 phase project, and then delivers phase 1. Thats the entire man.
Tesla: Was meant to revolutionise car making and green the planet. He delivered a pretty ok set of electric cars and got completely outflanked by traditional car makers. He also used it to rescue his brothers failing business.
Starlink: Its billed as an uninterruptible censorship ignoring super internet in space where government cant get it. But what he delivered is just landline fiber extended by 1 - 2 satellite hops. Its great for rural areas but the business complies with all legal censorship requirements where it operates. My back of the napkin math tells me its ultimate goals are completely unachievable, and MEO internet providers IMHO are catching up.
SpaceX: SpaceX is really good, they have brought in everyone from JPL and other places and absolutely nailed low cost orbital payload. In fact I read speculation they will take boeings contracts for Artemis prep. However what he sold is the relocation of humanity to mars which is no closer to being achieved, and as far as I can tell, he has literally no one but concept artists working on.
Hyperloop etc: Basically kickstarted the boring company which IIRC is one of his better long term prospects. He wont be creating super fast mass transit systems but he can shave months off of boring projects.
Xitter: Billed as an uncensored town square, the place has just engaged in the other teams censorship and is generally a cess pit.
Neuralink: Apparently almost as good as stuff displayed on Beyond 2000 25+ years ago.
tl;dr guy is a salesman. The fact that he can sell you a dream and then pretend like he delivered it without delivering it is a testament to his business strengths. But dont drink the koolaid.
I'm not being cynical or funny, I legitimately think, after having worked with some hype-driven leadership people, that this is quite common and results in a lot of flawed slop products, which are hyped up by leaders who don't know what they're talking about.
Admitting that this sort of product doesn't do what they think it does would mean admitting that they are wholly incompetent and got tricked by the hype; and that's not acceptable. So it get sunk-cost-fallacied into being a real product even more.
What does this mean?