Crypto.cat
Faucon, Daniel
Secure messaging for everyone Cryptocat is free software that aims to provide an open, accessible Instant Messaging environment with a transparent layer of encryption that works right in your browser. Cryptocat is developed by privacy advocates, for privacy advocates. Big Data providers such as Google and Facebook continue to amass gigantic amounts of personal information without providing any guarantee of privacy, while encryption remains largely inaccessible. This means that a lot of what you do online is not within your control, but rather susceptible to governmental or corporate interception. Cryptocat aims to bridge the gap for those who need encrypted communications that are easily accessible.
 Hello, thank you for being here. I'm Kulfi, also known as Daniel Focon, and I'm presenting CryptoCats. So CryptoCats is a project created by Nadim Kobayisi, also known as Kaepora on Twitter. And CryptoCats is, of course, open source software, and it does chatroom encryption in the browser, and is focused on usability by non-experienced users, I mean normal people, and it looks like this. So the question you might ask yourself is why CryptoCats, why do we need something new in the security community? We don't like new things very much because we like using proven stuff, stuff that has been proven to work and is known for years. Every time someone comes with a new project, new idea, which we always must ask ourselves, do we need something new, or can we do it with the existing stuff? Can we avoid making new things that will have new mistakes and fall into pitfalls and make everything look bad? So why do we need CryptoCats? Because right now we have OTR. OTR is great, it works perfectly. So why do we need something other than OTR? So first, OTR doesn't do chatrooms. That means that OTR can only do one-on-one conversations. You can only have a secure communication with one other person. And it looks like a very tiny problem, something important, but in fact, the use cases we are seeing nowadays is that communities need to have secure communications, not only a pair of individuals, but communities. And we cannot ask for everyone to have 15 windows open to talk with 15 other people and try to have a working organization like that. It doesn't work. It's not realistic. So we need something that works in a chatroom. We need to bring encryption to communities, not only to individuals, but to communities. And the other big problem there is right now is that we have great tools. We have very good cryptography, but people still use Google, G-talk, people still use Skype, people still use Facebook chat. And people get spied on because of that. They get arrested. Some people get killed because they use those solutions. We have some answers to those problems, but they are not used. And cryptography cannot work if it's not used. So CryptoCAD is trying to fix both problems. So how will it do it? First, CryptoCAD works in a browser. It's a browser plugin, but it works in a browser that takes care of a few problems. The first one being a multi-platform. Another one is that everyone who wants to have secure conversations already has most of the software in this computer because nowadays everyone has a browser. You only need to fetch the plugin, but most of the browser you have it already. Another thing is I don't know if any of you have already tried to convince this loved one and relatives to stop using Facebook chat and start using Pg and Gtc or anything that can use OTR only for you and always with you and don't use anything else with you. It doesn't work. You will lose a lot of friends. So at least with a browser plugin, we don't need people to change all their habits because they will not do it if it's too hard. Another thing is that it's a browser plugin approach. At first, CryptoCAD used JavaScript served by the server in a web page. It turns out it was a terrible idea. Basically, it completely breaks the threat model of CryptoCAD and you cannot expect to have security with that approach. Nadim would say that currently, a browser and not ready for JavaScript encryption, but that's another debate. And of course, just because it's proven to be broken and just because it doesn't work doesn't mean a big company software will try to implement it and claim it is secure. Sorry. Next, it's Icandy. That's a very big issue. We need it to be Icandy because people should not feel the powerful tools we give to them. People will not use PGN or anything that has complicated fingerprints on search when people to understand what they use and to feel confident what they use. They do not have to crawl them with features and buttons. They need to get right to the features and has to be beautiful to be used. It turns out a regular XMPP, so nothing new there. Nothing complicated. It works, so we use it. And it has multi-party encryption protocol. That is what CryptoCAD brings to the table. It's Lusibase on OTR, but it's not OTR. So do not expect to have possible deniability. We don't have it yet. We may have it in the future, but right now it's not there. But yeah, because OTR is such a great protocol, we try to use a specification as a model and to make it look like OTR because it's a good basis. And of course, when you want in a chat room to have a private conversation with one person, we use a regular OTR because it works and there is no need to reinvent the wheel and there is no reason not to. So what does the project need right now? So of course, we're testing. My people will not cryptography, JavaScript, anything that the project uses for these reasons. And for less obvious reasons, we need testers that have no idea what encryption is, what JavaScript is, what the browser is, the most uneducated. They are the best. That's simply because the people we are targeting are those people. Not the power users, not me, not probably you, because we already have, we know how to use cryptographic tools. We need other people to use them. And for that, we need cryptocad to fit their needs. And when regular testers like us give feedback, we do not see that things are not obvious. We do not see what other people might miss, what they might need. We are not objective. So we need real people. We really don't know about that. We are not used to secure conversations to use that and to give us feedback to tell us, I didn't know what the fingerprint was. It wasn't clear enough. I didn't find the fingerprints. It didn't pop up good enough. That is missing. This command, I didn't know it existed. We need to fix that because it's their needs. We need to address not ours. It's their needs. We also need a lot of research on the multi-party structure encryption because it's something that's relatively new. It's a new field and there isn't nearly enough research on it. They may and there will be none of these implications on doing multi-party encryption. It adds a lot of complexity to what we can expect, to how we encryption, authentication and such. We really need academic research to be done on that field to know what are the limitations of what we are doing and what you can expect, what you cannot expect and if it's at all possible to do in a secure manner. We need peer review, of course. That's another debate because to me peer review in the cryptography community is basically broken. There are a few projects to unbreak it from a cryptologist. Check it out. We need it. We need to bring peer review because it doesn't happen on itself. Currently, CryptoCAD and other projects do not have nearly enough peer review even if they look popular. Even if a lot of people use it. Experts and such do not review it as they should as we want them to do it. We need people to come in and read the specific notification, read the code because there is a lot of things we are missing, we may miss and we will miss. We need peer review and it doesn't happen just because of popularity. The peer review also helps with finding flows and improvements to make and to implement those improvements. We need coding hands. When people who know JavaScript were used to browser plugins, were used to encryption because there are a lot of things we already identified but haven't fixed yet because of lack of coding hands. We need more testing because there will never be enough testing. There will always be a bug that we missed and we need a lot of testers. So, public service announcement. More rapidly. Please, please, please, please, please. I cannot stress this enough. Don't let the GUI mislead you. It's beautiful right now because Nadim likes 8-bit stuff. It's very good at making things look good. But it may look like a finished product but it is not. It's still a very young protocol. It's still in early stages. It cannot be considered ready for life and the situations. It may look like a very slick project that's already working, that's already does everything right. But, excuse me, it's not the case. Right now we cannot consider it safe for life and the scenario. So, if something goes wrong and all the encryption breaks and nothing gets encrypted, if in that case you are in danger, please don't use CryptoCats. The good news is it's not that bad actually. It's ready for everyday privacy. So, with your friends, with communities, lesbian and gay communities. But just don't use it when your adversary may kill you, may imprison you or forced for very serious situations. Just use it. We need people to use it. So, please use it. Don't use it from your users. But if it's a very dangerous situation, please use something else or go back to OTR or things that are very finished and reviewed and proven because CryptoCats is not yet that product. But nevertheless, it's a very cool project. It has a lot of potential. And maybe with your help, we can achieve that level of security of being proven. And maybe one day it may be a very useful tool for life and the situation. Maybe one day it will be ready for that. And then maybe one day it will change something in the field. But we need people and we need help to achieve that goal. And the more people come, the earlier we are ready for those situations. So, please come join us. Here is the website, the specification, the threat model, the RSI channel, the GitHub. Please open issues, be it for bugs, improvements, proposals, everything that's useful. We need your help. And even just opening a debate, opening a conversation, if do you think that's good, that's bad, just opening a debate. It's really a great help. Because other people will join in and the conversation will go on. And very useful stuff usually comes out of those debates. Yes, please come join us. If you want to to chat with me, I will be outside either in the corridor or in the corridor. And please come join me, be it for criticism, be it constructive or not, joining suggestions, comments, and there. And if you have a question, we have three minutes for a small QA session. Really? Ouch. Would someone have a question? Okay. You have a mic? You're running fast. Small questions. I really like crypto cats, even if I'm coming from the crypto part and so on. But are you working on specifically on the cover channel part? Because I think a lot of the cover channel. The cover channel. So are you working on this? Okay. The thing is, right now we have to do those choices. We need to discuss whether we want, for example, a public list of channels and password to enter channels or not. I'm talking about hiding the protocol inside another protocol. So for example, the thing is a lot of those protocols are detected by, if you, for example, use this protocol in Iran or Israel, whatever, you get intercepted and you get detected because the protocol has a specific pattern. You can, for example, use crypto cat over Tor. Tor is blocked in some countries. Yeah, but there is the OBFS proxy system that obfuscates the Tor protocol. So there is a lot of work in Tor to make it pass through every sensor chip, every filtering. So my advice would be to use crypto cat over Tor. Anything you want to be covered by a protocol, you store it. So you will use a different protocol for doing the covering of your protocol? Yeah, crypto cat, it's not in crypto cat threat model to take care of that problem. It should be, Tor does it well and I don't think crypto cat would be, should really obfuscate itself right now. Okay, thank you. Keep it simple. Another question? Just as an example of a covert channel that might be interesting to attack, you're trying to, obviously you're trying to hide what people are talking about. But if you look at the traffic and see that they always talk, they're always active on days following certain events, then you can make a guess about what they're talking about. So then you might want to be able to cover things like that. Yeah, of course, and by, for that you can use Tor every day and each day you browse random pages or use Tor for everything. But then do you need this at all if you use Tor? That's an interesting question. But yeah, you could implement chatroom encryption with Tor hidden services. Some people have tried that, but yeah, it's another approach. It may work. It may not. The cool thing about crypto cat is it utilizes, it utilizes on XMPP. So you don't need to set up Tor hidden services and search to make it work. It just, yeah, prefer moment to keep it simple, stupid. And if there is a real need to complete the challenge, the crypto cat protocol, why not? But right now, until there is a reason to, a good reason to make it more complicated, we keep it simple. There was a question right there, I think. Sir? He raised his hand twice, but I think he had a question. No? Indeed. Is he ignoring me? Hello? You had a question? You, yeah, you. Do you have a question or not? You're killing me. Will you allow futures like using passwords to join a chatroom? Yeah, that's what I thought was the first question. That's a good question. We are thinking about it. But the thing is, we don't know yet if we should use the name of the conversation as a password, like some Pacebin does, if there should be a password in there to enter the chat. How do we set it up? Who manages this password? So there are several ways to achieve that and we're not focused on the one right now. I have an idea, but we have to discuss it before we implement stuff. We need to discuss it because people should give feedback and maybe our ideas are very stupid and people should tell us it's stupid. So right now, we haven't decided of our way to do it yet, but it's something we need to do. The thing is, the name of the chatroom is one thing, but you can basically just look at every name and sort of define something. Right now, you cannot list the exact, you cannot make a list of all the chatrooms, so that's that. But yeah, we need to improve that and we need to find a system. And if you have inputs or ideas, please come and open a shoot ticket. I think there is one open for that. If not open it and open the debate. We need it.
 Hello, thank you for being here. I'm Kulfi, also known as Daniel Focon, and I'm presenting  CryptoCats. So CryptoCats is a project created by Nadim Kobayisi, also known as Kaepora on  Twitter. And CryptoCats is, of course, open source software, and it does chatroom encryption  in the browser, and is focused on usability by non-experienced users, I mean normal people,  and it looks like this. So the question you might ask yourself is why CryptoCats, why  do we need something new in the security community? We don't like new things very much because  we like using proven stuff, stuff that has been proven to work and is known for years.  Every time someone comes with a new project, new idea, which we always must ask ourselves,  do we need something new, or can we do it with the existing stuff? Can we avoid making  new things that will have new mistakes and fall into pitfalls and make everything look  bad? So why do we need CryptoCats? Because right now we have OTR. OTR is great, it works  perfectly. So why do we need something other than OTR? So first, OTR doesn't do chatrooms.  That means that OTR can only do one-on-one conversations. You can only have a secure communication  with one other person. And it looks like a very tiny problem, something important, but  in fact, the use cases we are seeing nowadays is that communities need to have secure communications,  not only a pair of individuals, but communities. And we cannot ask for everyone to have 15  windows open to talk with 15 other people and try to have a working organization like  that. It doesn't work. It's not realistic. So we need something that works in a chatroom.  We need to bring encryption to communities, not only to individuals, but to communities.  And the other big problem there is right now is that we have great tools. We have very  good cryptography, but people still use Google, G-talk, people still use Skype, people still  use Facebook chat. And people get spied on because of that. They get arrested. Some people  get killed because they use those solutions. We have some answers to those problems, but  they are not used. And cryptography cannot work if it's not used. So CryptoCAD is trying  to fix both problems. So how will it do it? First, CryptoCAD works in a browser. It's  a browser plugin, but it works in a browser that takes care of a few problems. The first  one being a multi-platform. Another one is that everyone who wants to have secure conversations  already has most of the software in this computer because nowadays everyone has a browser. You  only need to fetch the plugin, but most of the browser you have it already. Another thing  is I don't know if any of you have already tried to convince this loved one and relatives  to stop using Facebook chat and start using Pg and Gtc or anything that can use OTR only  for you and always with you and don't use anything else with you. It doesn't work. You  will lose a lot of friends. So at least with a browser plugin, we don't need people to  change all their habits because they will not do it if it's too hard. Another thing  is that it's a browser plugin approach. At first, CryptoCAD used JavaScript served by  the server in a web page. It turns out it was a terrible idea. Basically, it completely  breaks the threat model of CryptoCAD and you cannot expect to have security with that approach.  Nadim would say that currently, a browser and not ready for JavaScript encryption, but  that's another debate. And of course, just because it's proven to be broken and just  because it doesn't work doesn't mean a big company software will try to implement it  and claim it is secure. Sorry. Next, it's Icandy. That's a very big issue. We need it to be  Icandy because people should not feel the powerful tools we give to them. People will  not use PGN or anything that has complicated fingerprints on search when people to understand  what they use and to feel confident what they use. They do not have to crawl them with  features and buttons. They need to get right to the features and has to be beautiful to  be used. It turns out a regular XMPP, so nothing new there. Nothing complicated. It works,  so we use it. And it has multi-party encryption protocol. That is what CryptoCAD brings to  the table. It's Lusibase on OTR, but it's not OTR. So do not expect to have possible  deniability. We don't have it yet. We may have it in the future, but right now it's  not there. But yeah, because OTR is such a great protocol, we try to use a specification  as a model and to make it look like OTR because it's a good basis. And of course, when you  want in a chat room to have a private conversation with one person, we use a regular OTR because  it works and there is no need to reinvent the wheel and there is no reason not to.  So what does the project need right now? So of course, we're testing. My people will  not cryptography, JavaScript, anything that the project uses for these reasons. And for  less obvious reasons, we need testers that have no idea what encryption is, what JavaScript  is, what the browser is, the most uneducated. They are the best. That's simply because the  people we are targeting are those people. Not the power users, not me, not probably you,  because we already have, we know how to use cryptographic tools. We need other people  to use them. And for that, we need cryptocad to fit their needs. And when regular testers  like us give feedback, we do not see that things are not obvious. We do not see what  other people might miss, what they might need. We are not objective. So we need real people.  We really don't know about that. We are not used to secure conversations to use that and  to give us feedback to tell us, I didn't know what the fingerprint was. It wasn't clear  enough. I didn't find the fingerprints. It didn't pop up good enough. That is missing.  This command, I didn't know it existed. We need to fix that because it's their needs.  We need to address not ours. It's their needs. We also need a lot of research on the multi-party  structure encryption because it's something that's relatively new. It's a new field and  there isn't nearly enough research on it. They may and there will be none of these implications  on doing multi-party encryption. It adds a lot of complexity to what we can expect,  to how we encryption, authentication and such. We really need academic research to be done  on that field to know what are the limitations of what we are doing and what you can expect,  what you cannot expect and if it's at all possible to do in a secure manner.  We need peer review, of course. That's another debate because to me peer review in the cryptography  community is basically broken. There are a few projects to unbreak it from a cryptologist.  Check it out. We need it. We need to bring peer review because it doesn't happen on itself.  Currently, CryptoCAD and other projects do not have nearly enough peer review even if  they look popular. Even if a lot of people use it. Experts and such do not review it  as they should as we want them to do it. We need people to come in and read the specific  notification, read the code because there is a lot of things we are missing, we may miss  and we will miss. We need peer review and it doesn't happen just because of popularity.  The peer review also helps with finding flows and improvements to make and to implement  those improvements. We need coding hands. When people who know JavaScript were used to  browser plugins, were used to encryption because there are a lot of things we already identified  but haven't fixed yet because of lack of coding hands. We need more testing because there  will never be enough testing. There will always be a bug that we missed and we need a lot  of testers. So, public service announcement. More  rapidly. Please, please, please, please, please. I cannot stress this enough. Don't let the  GUI mislead you. It's beautiful right now because Nadim likes 8-bit stuff. It's very good at  making things look good. But it may look like a finished product but it is not. It's still  a very young protocol. It's still in early stages. It cannot be considered ready for  life and the situations. It may look like a very slick project that's already working,  that's already does everything right. But, excuse me, it's not the case. Right now we cannot  consider it safe for life and the scenario. So, if something goes wrong and all the encryption  breaks and nothing gets encrypted, if in that case you are in danger, please don't use CryptoCats.  The good news is it's not that bad actually. It's ready for everyday privacy. So, with your  friends, with communities, lesbian and gay communities. But just don't use it when your  adversary may kill you, may imprison you or forced for very serious situations. Just use  it. We need people to use it. So, please use it. Don't use it from your users. But if it's a very  dangerous situation, please use something else or go back to OTR or things that are very finished  and reviewed and proven because CryptoCats is not yet that product. But nevertheless,  it's a very cool project. It has a lot of potential. And maybe with your help, we can  achieve that level of security of being proven. And maybe one day it may be a very useful tool  for life and the situation. Maybe one day it will be ready for that. And then maybe one day it will  change something in the field. But we need people and we need help to achieve that goal. And the  more people come, the earlier we are ready for those situations. So, please come join us. Here is  the website, the specification, the threat model, the RSI channel, the GitHub. Please open issues,  be it for bugs, improvements, proposals, everything that's useful. We need your help. And even just  opening a debate, opening a conversation, if do you think that's good, that's bad, just opening a  debate. It's really a great help. Because other people will join in and the conversation will go on. And  very useful stuff usually comes out of those debates. Yes, please come join us. If you want to  to chat with me, I will be outside either in the corridor or in the corridor. And please come  join me, be it for criticism, be it constructive or not, joining suggestions, comments, and there.  And if you have a question, we have three minutes for a small QA session.  Really? Ouch. Would someone have a question? Okay.  You have a mic? You're running fast. Small questions. I really like crypto cats, even if I'm coming  from the crypto part and so on. But are you working on specifically on the cover channel part?  Because I think a lot of the cover channel. The cover channel. So are you working on this?  Okay. The thing is, right now we have to do those choices. We need to discuss whether we want, for  example, a public list of channels and password to enter channels or not.  I'm talking about hiding the protocol inside another protocol. So for example, the thing is a lot of  those protocols are detected by, if you, for example, use this protocol in Iran or Israel,  whatever, you get intercepted and you get detected because the protocol has a specific  pattern. You can, for example, use crypto cat over Tor. Tor is blocked in some countries.  Yeah, but there is the OBFS proxy system that obfuscates the Tor protocol. So there is a lot of  work in Tor to make it pass through every sensor chip, every filtering. So my advice would be to use  crypto cat over Tor. Anything you want to be covered by a protocol, you store it.  So you will use a different protocol for doing the covering of your protocol?  Yeah, crypto cat, it's not in crypto cat threat model to take care of that problem. It should be, Tor does it well  and I don't think crypto cat would be, should really obfuscate itself right now.  Okay, thank you.  Keep it simple.  Another question?  Just as an example of a covert channel that might be interesting to attack, you're trying to, obviously  you're trying to hide what people are talking about. But if you look at the traffic and see that  they always talk, they're always active on days following certain events, then you can make a guess  about what they're talking about. So then you might want to be able to cover things like that.  Yeah, of course, and by, for that you can use Tor every day and each day you browse random pages or use Tor for everything.  But then do you need this at all if you use Tor?  That's an interesting question. But yeah, you could implement chatroom encryption with Tor hidden services.  Some people have tried that, but yeah, it's another approach. It may work. It may not.  The cool thing about crypto cat is it utilizes, it utilizes on XMPP. So you don't need to set up Tor hidden services and search to make it work.  It just, yeah, prefer moment to keep it simple, stupid. And if there is a real need to complete the challenge, the crypto cat protocol, why not?  But right now, until there is a reason to, a good reason to make it more complicated, we keep it simple.  There was a question right there, I think. Sir?  He raised his hand twice, but I think he had a question. No?  Indeed. Is he ignoring me?  Hello? You had a question? You, yeah, you.  Do you have a question or not? You're killing me.  Will you allow futures like using passwords to join a chatroom?  Yeah, that's what I thought was the first question. That's a good question. We are thinking about it.  But the thing is, we don't know yet if we should use the name of the conversation as a password, like some Pacebin does, if there should be a password in there to enter the chat.  How do we set it up? Who manages this password? So there are several ways to achieve that and we're not focused on the one right now.  I have an idea, but we have to discuss it before we implement stuff. We need to discuss it because people should give feedback and maybe our ideas are very stupid and people should tell us it's stupid.  So right now, we haven't decided of our way to do it yet, but it's something we need to do.  The thing is, the name of the chatroom is one thing, but you can basically just look at every name and sort of define something.  Right now, you cannot list the exact, you cannot make a list of all the chatrooms, so that's that.  But yeah, we need to improve that and we need to find a system. And if you have inputs or ideas, please come and open a shoot ticket.  I think there is one open for that. If not open it and open the debate. We need it.
Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_0_107.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_108_167.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_168_215.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_216_1139.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_1140_1859.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_1860_6443.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_6444_6515.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_6516_19175.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_19176_19223.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_19224_19271.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_19272_19319.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_19320_19811.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_19812_19859.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_19860_19907.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_19908_19955.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_19956_22319.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_22320_22367.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_22368_23003.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_23004_23051.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_23052_23099.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_23100_25775.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_25776_26747.png Crypto_cat_MpwqUUoLvcs_2_26748_27052.png
Hello, thank you for being here. I'm Kulfi, also known as Daniel Focon, and I'm presenting CryptoCats. So CryptoCats is a project created by Nadim Kobayisi, also known as Kaepora on Twitter. And CryptoCats is, of course, open source software, and it does chatroom encryption in the browser, and is focused on usability by non-experienced users, I mean normal people, and it looks like this. So the question you might ask yourself is why CryptoCats, why do we need something new in the security community? We don't like new things very much because we like using proven stuff, stuff that has been proven to work and is known for years. Every time someone comes with a new project, new idea, which we always must ask ourselves, do we need something new, or can we do it with the existing stuff? Can we avoid making new things that will have new mistakes and fall into pitfalls and make everything look bad? So why do we need CryptoCats? Because right now we have OTR. OTR is great, it works perfectly. So why do we need something other than OTR? So first, OTR doesn't do chatrooms. That means that OTR can only do one-on-one conversations. You can only have a secure communication with one other person. And it looks like a very tiny problem, something important, but in fact, the use cases we are seeing nowadays is that communities need to have secure communications, not only a pair of individuals, but communities. And we cannot ask for everyone to have 15 windows open to talk with 15 other people and try to have a working organization like that. It doesn't work. It's not realistic. So we need something that works in a chatroom. We need to bring encryption to communities, not only to individuals, but to communities. And the other big problem there is right now is that we have great tools. We have very good cryptography, but people still use Google, G-talk, people still use Skype, people still use Facebook chat. And people get spied on because of that. They get arrested. Some people get killed because they use those solutions. We have some answers to those problems, but they are not used. And cryptography cannot work if it's not used. So CryptoCAD is trying to fix both problems. So how will it do it? First, CryptoCAD works in a browser. It's a browser plugin, but it works in a browser that takes care of a few problems. The first one being a multi-platform. Another one is that everyone who wants to have secure conversations already has most of the software in this computer because nowadays everyone has a browser. You only need to fetch the plugin, but most of the browser you have it already. Another thing is I don't know if any of you have already tried to convince this loved one and relatives to stop using Facebook chat and start using Pg and Gtc or anything that can use OTR only for you and always with you and don't use anything else with you. It doesn't work. You will lose a lot of friends. So at least with a browser plugin, we don't need people to change all their habits because they will not do it if it's too hard. Another thing is that it's a browser plugin approach. At first, CryptoCAD used JavaScript served by the server in a web page. It turns out it was a terrible idea. Basically, it completely breaks the threat model of CryptoCAD and you cannot expect to have security with that approach. Nadim would say that currently, a browser and not ready for JavaScript encryption, but that's another debate. And of course, just because it's proven to be broken and just because it doesn't work doesn't mean a big company software will try to implement it and claim it is secure. Sorry. Next, it's Icandy. That's a very big issue. We need it to be Icandy because people should not feel the powerful tools we give to them. People will not use PGN or anything that has complicated fingerprints on search when people to understand what they use and to feel confident what they use. They do not have to crawl them with features and buttons. They need to get right to the features and has to be beautiful to be used. It turns out a regular XMPP, so nothing new there. Nothing complicated. It works, so we use it. And it has multi-party encryption protocol. That is what CryptoCAD brings to the table. It's Lusibase on OTR, but it's not OTR. So do not expect to have possible deniability. We don't have it yet. We may have it in the future, but right now it's not there. But yeah, because OTR is such a great protocol, we try to use a specification as a model and to make it look like OTR because it's a good basis. And of course, when you want in a chat room to have a private conversation with one person, we use a regular OTR because it works and there is no need to reinvent the wheel and there is no reason not to. So what does the project need right now? So of course, we're testing. My people will not cryptography, JavaScript, anything that the project uses for these reasons. And for less obvious reasons, we need testers that have no idea what encryption is, what JavaScript is, what the browser is, the most uneducated. They are the best. That's simply because the people we are targeting are those people. Not the power users, not me, not probably you, because we already have, we know how to use cryptographic tools. We need other people to use them. And for that, we need cryptocad to fit their needs. And when regular testers like us give feedback, we do not see that things are not obvious. We do not see what other people might miss, what they might need. We are not objective. So we need real people. We really don't know about that. We are not used to secure conversations to use that and to give us feedback to tell us, I didn't know what the fingerprint was. It wasn't clear enough. I didn't find the fingerprints. It didn't pop up good enough. That is missing. This command, I didn't know it existed. We need to fix that because it's their needs. We need to address not ours. It's their needs. We also need a lot of research on the multi-party structure encryption because it's something that's relatively new. It's a new field and there isn't nearly enough research on it. They may and there will be none of these implications on doing multi-party encryption. It adds a lot of complexity to what we can expect, to how we encryption, authentication and such. We really need academic research to be done on that field to know what are the limitations of what we are doing and what you can expect, what you cannot expect and if it's at all possible to do in a secure manner. We need peer review, of course. That's another debate because to me peer review in the cryptography community is basically broken. There are a few projects to unbreak it from a cryptologist. Check it out. We need it. We need to bring peer review because it doesn't happen on itself. Currently, CryptoCAD and other projects do not have nearly enough peer review even if they look popular. Even if a lot of people use it. Experts and such do not review it as they should as we want them to do it. We need people to come in and read the specific notification, read the code because there is a lot of things we are missing, we may miss and we will miss. We need peer review and it doesn't happen just because of popularity. The peer review also helps with finding flows and improvements to make and to implement those improvements. We need coding hands. When people who know JavaScript were used to browser plugins, were used to encryption because there are a lot of things we already identified but haven't fixed yet because of lack of coding hands. We need more testing because there will never be enough testing. There will always be a bug that we missed and we need a lot of testers. So, public service announcement. More rapidly. Please, please, please, please, please. I cannot stress this enough. Don't let the GUI mislead you. It's beautiful right now because Nadim likes 8-bit stuff. It's very good at making things look good. But it may look like a finished product but it is not. It's still a very young protocol. It's still in early stages. It cannot be considered ready for life and the situations. It may look like a very slick project that's already working, that's already does everything right. But, excuse me, it's not the case. Right now we cannot consider it safe for life and the scenario. So, if something goes wrong and all the encryption breaks and nothing gets encrypted, if in that case you are in danger, please don't use CryptoCats. The good news is it's not that bad actually. It's ready for everyday privacy. So, with your friends, with communities, lesbian and gay communities. But just don't use it when your adversary may kill you, may imprison you or forced for very serious situations. Just use it. We need people to use it. So, please use it. Don't use it from your users. But if it's a very dangerous situation, please use something else or go back to OTR or things that are very finished and reviewed and proven because CryptoCats is not yet that product. But nevertheless, it's a very cool project. It has a lot of potential. And maybe with your help, we can achieve that level of security of being proven. And maybe one day it may be a very useful tool for life and the situation. Maybe one day it will be ready for that. And then maybe one day it will change something in the field. But we need people and we need help to achieve that goal. And the more people come, the earlier we are ready for those situations. So, please come join us. Here is the website, the specification, the threat model, the RSI channel, the GitHub. Please open issues, be it for bugs, improvements, proposals, everything that's useful. We need your help. And even just opening a debate, opening a conversation, if do you think that's good, that's bad, just opening a debate. It's really a great help. Because other people will join in and the conversation will go on. And very useful stuff usually comes out of those debates. Yes, please come join us. If you want to to chat with me, I will be outside either in the corridor or in the corridor. And please come join me, be it for criticism, be it constructive or not, joining suggestions, comments, and there. And if you have a question, we have three minutes for a small QA session. Really? Ouch. Would someone have a question? Okay. You have a mic? You're running fast. Small questions. I really like crypto cats, even if I'm coming from the crypto part and so on. But are you working on specifically on the cover channel part? Because I think a lot of the cover channel. The cover channel. So are you working on this? Okay. The thing is, right now we have to do those choices. We need to discuss whether we want, for example, a public list of channels and password to enter channels or not. I'm talking about hiding the protocol inside another protocol. So for example, the thing is a lot of those protocols are detected by, if you, for example, use this protocol in Iran or Israel, whatever, you get intercepted and you get detected because the protocol has a specific pattern. You can, for example, use crypto cat over Tor. Tor is blocked in some countries. Yeah, but there is the OBFS proxy system that obfuscates the Tor protocol. So there is a lot of work in Tor to make it pass through every sensor chip, every filtering. So my advice would be to use crypto cat over Tor. Anything you want to be covered by a protocol, you store it. So you will use a different protocol for doing the covering of your protocol? Yeah, crypto cat, it's not in crypto cat threat model to take care of that problem. It should be, Tor does it well and I don't think crypto cat would be, should really obfuscate itself right now. Okay, thank you. Keep it simple. Another question? Just as an example of a covert channel that might be interesting to attack, you're trying to, obviously you're trying to hide what people are talking about. But if you look at the traffic and see that they always talk, they're always active on days following certain events, then you can make a guess about what they're talking about. So then you might want to be able to cover things like that. Yeah, of course, and by, for that you can use Tor every day and each day you browse random pages or use Tor for everything. But then do you need this at all if you use Tor? That's an interesting question. But yeah, you could implement chatroom encryption with Tor hidden services. Some people have tried that, but yeah, it's another approach. It may work. It may not. The cool thing about crypto cat is it utilizes, it utilizes on XMPP. So you don't need to set up Tor hidden services and search to make it work. It just, yeah, prefer moment to keep it simple, stupid. And if there is a real need to complete the challenge, the crypto cat protocol, why not? But right now, until there is a reason to, a good reason to make it more complicated, we keep it simple. There was a question right there, I think. Sir? He raised his hand twice, but I think he had a question. No? Indeed. Is he ignoring me? Hello? You had a question? You, yeah, you. Do you have a question or not? You're killing me. Will you allow futures like using passwords to join a chatroom? Yeah, that's what I thought was the first question. That's a good question. We are thinking about it. But the thing is, we don't know yet if we should use the name of the conversation as a password, like some Pacebin does, if there should be a password in there to enter the chat. How do we set it up? Who manages this password? So there are several ways to achieve that and we're not focused on the one right now. I have an idea, but we have to discuss it before we implement stuff. We need to discuss it because people should give feedback and maybe our ideas are very stupid and people should tell us it's stupid. So right now, we haven't decided of our way to do it yet, but it's something we need to do. The thing is, the name of the chatroom is one thing, but you can basically just look at every name and sort of define something. Right now, you cannot list the exact, you cannot make a list of all the chatrooms, so that's that. But yeah, we need to improve that and we need to find a system. And if you have inputs or ideas, please come and open a shoot ticket. I think there is one open for that. If not open it and open the debate. We need it.
software, and it does chatroom encryption in the browser, and is focused on usability by do chatrooms. That means that OTR can only do secure communications, not only a pair of for everyone to have 15 windows open to talk with realistic. So we need something that works in a Another one is that everyone who wants to have are the limitations of what we are doing and what you can expect, what you cannot expect and if it. Experts and such do not review it as they go back to OTR or things that are very finished for example, the thing is a lot of those protocol for doing the covering of your protocol? focused on the one right now. I have an idea, but