UPDATE/SPOILER: Zcash eventually got rid of the trusted setup! ๐
Also see our followup: How To Compromise Zcash And Take Over The World
As part of our work, we will sometimes put a new system under scrutiny in order to provide constructive feedback, and/or clear up a widespread misunderstanding that could lead to problems down the road (for example, see our series on Certificate Transparency). Continue reading
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 Yearโs Letter:
Some turtles got together this weekend to hack on a thonโerr, for a Group Income hackathon! Continue reading
On Monday, the Internet received another reminder about its sad state of security. It was discovered that Dell decided to compromise their usersโ Internet security in a way thatโs difficult to top.
As elaborated further in this post, Dell, in tandem with Google, made it possible for anyone on earth, you or me, to break every single type of HTTPS connection that Dell users were making (including HPKP connections)โshiny lock icons be damned. Their reason? Continue reading
Translations: ไธญๆ
Update: We made a huge mistake in forgetting to review Riot โ the only Slack alternative based on an open protocol, and the only Slack alternative to support end-to-end encrypted group chats.
Slack is a popular team communications application for organizations that offers group chat and direct messaging for mobile, web, and desktop platforms. While Slack offers many benefits to customers, there are also downsides to using the platform, including high subscription fees and the risk of a massive leak of private data if Slackโs servers are ever breached (again).Today there are a growing number of open-source Slack alternatives available for people who want to avoid the trap of walled gardens and have more control over the security of their data. As part of our own search for a self-hosted Slack alternative, we reviewed the options out there.
Here are five of our favorites: Continue reading
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 rely on thin client techniques to reduce the trust placed in such proxies.
Continue readingAfter publishing our Certificate transparency on blockchains we learned of a recently updated IETF draft proposal that updates how Certificate Transparency (CT)1 gossip protocols work. Continue reading
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, weโll use the acronym CT to refer to Googleโs implementation of the general concept of certificate transparency, and weโll explore other technologies that also provide it. Continue reading
DNSChain 0.5 brings about many new features.
Itโs important to remember, however, that this project is not really about new bells and whistles. Itโs about what kind of a world we want to live in, and for us the answer is clear: we want to live in a free world, and that means addressing these problems:
Update October 28, 2014: John Light, welcome aboard! Continue reading