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  • The Smartphones

    From fault tolerant systems@21:1/5 to All on Sat Apr 15 08:56:33 2023
    There were concerns about smartphones and their use in government
    institutions and NGOs in the climate of overall surveillance, when friends do not trust friends, and allies spy on allies.

    In a flash, I saw how the problem is in apps, drivers and hardware that
    are not open-sourced. We virtually do not know what is coded in those
    apps, nor can we afford to monitor all of their traffic.

    There should be a "people's smartphone" with all open sourced hardware,
    drivers and apps.

    I think that would quiet some legitimate concerns and postpone an
    Apocalyptic scenario of a post-Orwellian civilisation.

    In particular there were concerns with the chips that are believed
    to have backdoors by the governments. This should be remedied by
    an open sourced chip with reliable public encryptions and
    random number generators. Many authors explained concerns about
    the hardware random number generators being reduced to a small
    space of keys to test on high volume clusters and hardware
    (in future possibly also quantum computers), and in conditions
    of the offline breaking of previously stored Internet traffic by
    the major players.

    itL
    A

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  • From fault tolerant systems@21:1/5 to All on Thu Apr 20 00:20:13 2023
    Of course, generating secrets from a limited space of values in a hardware
    chip seems like a good idea. Who would give unbreakable encryption to a
    device that a terrorist or an opposition member would use?

    However, there is a gotcha here:

    1. There is no insight into what a "trusted" hardware chip does
    2. The motivated adversary can guess the limited space in which keys
    were generated, making the encryption as good as written on a postcard.
    But even to your friends who use the "trusted" chip

    The idea of using hardware encryption is a great one, as long as you can trust the
    hardware and its manufacturer.

    Whom can we trust any longer?

    The open source algorithms based on mathematically proven encryption algorithms are our best bet, as we do not have open-sourced encryption hardware ATM.

    in the Lord
    Amen

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