freedomofpress / securedrop-protocol

Research and proof of concept to develop the next SecureDrop with end to end encryption.
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Better terminology to describe server posture #44

Open rocodes opened 4 months ago

rocodes commented 4 months ago

From mastodon:

I'm somewhat perplexed by the new SecureDrop protocol - https://securedrop.org/news/introducing-securedrop-protocol/

Specifically: "The server is “untrusted” in the sense [it] learn[s] nothing about users & messages besides what is inherently observable from its pattern of requests, and it should not have access to sensitive metadata, or sender or receiver information"

Seems like a very weak definition of "untrusted", especially when two comparison techniques explicitly attempt to restrict knowledge derived from access patterns.

This is a valid critique - our intention is to find terminology for "a server that has little-enough information about its users that it could conceivably be deployed in an adversarial environment, eg where disk/RAM snapshots could occur," but maybe we need to work on how we define that, since the server is still a privileged asset and has access to more information than a generic internet user.