
This can quickly lead to a false sense of security. Like any cryptography implementation, there are a number of scenarios that could result in mitigating the benefits you had in mind to gain from such an effort.
#CRYPTOCAT SCARCITY INDEX PLUG IN HOW TO#
These include both how to deploy it and being wary of messing up such a deployment. It's worth noting that there have been a few posts about Forward Secrecy lately. By using certain cipher suites (such as DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA), the session keys themselves are protected even if the private key for the SSL certificate handling the communications is compromised and a packet capture of a transmission is taken.įrustratingly enough, this topic is addressed in the previously noted blogpost from the CryptoCat team stating, "We should also note that our SSL setup has implemented forward secrecy since the past couple of weeks." This, unfortunately, means that the worst-case scenario of an attacker getting both a packet capture of SSL communications and the private key could indeed decrypt the communications (with varying levels of ease) for nearly two years of conversations. Luckily, there is a way for SSL to function so that even with the private key, previously recorded communications are unable to be decrypted without the SSL session key for that transmission. What that also means, though, is that if the SSL private key was compromised the data actually may not be secure. The reality here is that, without the SSL private key that was used to transmit the data, the encrypted packet captures would be useless.

This means that if an attacker was eavesdropping on communications, they wouldn’t have been able to do any more than record the SSL-encrypted transmissions and store them. A somewhat bright light in this story is that the actual encrypted communications were being sent over SSL. The most important thing to note is that the risks exist due to crucial issues in the utilization of cryptography standards-standards that should have effectively guaranteed privacy of communications.
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The risk to communicating parties could range from low risk to serious trouble, depending on which version of CryptoCat they were using. Last week it was shown that CryptoCat's implementation of cryptography has been flawed for the past two years.

Industry news July 9th, 2013 Mark Stanislav CryptoCat & The Practical Case for Implementing Forward Secrecy
