Turtle Status Letter #2 — Group Income + DPKI + More!

This is our second yearly status letter. It covers all news-worthy updates since our previous letter. Inside This Year's Letter: Group Income Voting systems research research education Victor Morrow Joins Group Income! development Group Income Shorts! education San Francisco Basic Income Create-A-Thon education development New York Meetup! education DPKI: Decentralized Public-key Infrastructure ID2020 - Rebooting […]

CONIKS vs Key Transparency vs Certificate Transparency vs Blockchains

Previously, we reviewed Google's Certificate Transparency efforts, and observed that while it does not prevent MITM attacks, it might detect at least some of them. We compared it to blockchains, and described what a Decentralized Public-key Infrastructure (DPKI), which uses blockchains, might look like. Today we compare […]

Our First Status Letter: Browser Extension, DNSChain, DPKI, & More!

Thanks to insightful feedback from John Light, I realized it would be good to do a regular Turtle Status Letter in order to keep our followers and supporters abreast of our activities and decision-making process. We now plan to do one every year. Inside This Year's Letter: How […]

Proof of Transition: New Thin Client Technique for Blockchains

Blockchains are difficult to run on most end-user devices. Although MITM-proof proxies are a great way to address this problem, they are unlikely to scale well to all Internet users (not everyone will be able to run their own full node). Therefore, most people will need to […]

Certificate transparency on blockchains

This week Google learned of another batch of fraudulently issued certificates for several of their domains. At the end of the post they made a renewed call for Certificate Transparency. In this post, we'll use the acronym CT to refer to Google's implementation of the general […]

DNSChain 0.5 Released: HTTPS + Openname Resolver API + More!

DNSChain 0.5 brings about many new features. It's important to remember, however, that this project is not really about new bells and whistles. It's about what kind of a world we want to live in, and for us the answer is clear: we want to live in […]

[Job] Fundraising Genius (Update: Filled!)

Update October 28, 2014: John Light, welcome aboard! Being a non-profit means we have a constant need to fund raise, so: The okTurtles Foundation is looking to hire a genius fundraiser, part time or full time. About okTurtles: The protocol "securing" most internet traffic today (SSL/TLS) has a 20+ year […]

The Trouble with Certificate Transparency

Update: March 25, 2015, see also: Certificate transparency on blockchains Ben Laurie, project lead for Google's Certificate Transparency (CT), recently published an article wherein he compared CT against various efforts to secure Internet communication world-wide from Man-In-The-Middle Attacks (MITM), including DNSChain. In it, he made several claims about […]

okTurtles Demo at SOUPS 2014 (EFF CUP Crypto Usability Prize)

Oh boy! Lots of news to share about okTurtles and DNSChain in the upcoming days: These projects are now officially under the stewardship of a new non-profit organization called the okTurtles Foundation (more on this coming soon). We're going to be moving the site from okturtles.com ➜ okturtles.org We […]

Introducing the dotDNS metaTLD

We've taken several important steps on the road to making "MITM-proof communication" on your favorite websites possible. We released the first version of DNSChain, the blockchain-based DNS resolver (fully compatible with canonical DNS). We launched the first public DNSChain server. Its 600 lines of […]