[tor-talk] "Confidant Mail"

[Seth David Schoen]

Mike Ingle writes:

> As far as HTTPS:
> The NSA has the ability to get into Amazon EC2 and mess with files
> too, no doubt.  And they have a variety of compromised HTTPS CA certs
> they could use to MITM.  If they wanted to do that they could, HTTPS
> or no. If they did it on a large scale, they would likely get caught,
> so they would only do such things if they were after a specific high
> value target. Hopefully you are not on their short list.

You can help mitigate each of these attacks by using HTTPS together with
HPKP to cause browsers to reject attack certs.  Anyway, you shouldn't
only think of one intelligence agency as a threat when distributing
privacy software.  Governments in any country where you may have users
might be interested in introducing malware into the versions downloaded
by some or all users in that country.  If manual signature checking is
rare -- as it probably will be -- then using HTTPS can be an important
step toward addressing that thread.  Maybe the actual attacks against
the integrity of your software distribution won't come from NSA, but
rather from some other government -- and maybe they _won't_ be able to
mount a successful attack against HTTPS certificate verification.

-- 
Seth Schoen  <schoen at eff.org>
Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
Electronic Frontier Foundation                  https://www.eff.org/join
815 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA  94109       +1 415 436 9333 x107