With “guarantees” I meant things like whether you want to have perfect forward secrecy, or whether you want to provide some degree of deniability, and so on, not so much what kinds of guarantees you’re relying on although they’re definitely also good to keep in mind.
“As secure as possible” is a very all-encompassing goal which doesn’t really say much – what I was trying to get at with my point about the guarantees you want to make is that you’ll want to have a clear idea of what you actually mean with “as secure as possible” so you’ll know what sort of eg. architectural decisions to make before you do a lot of work and paint yourself into a corner.
It’s a very ambitious project, but I can guarantee it’ll probably be very interesting to work on and you’ll learn a lot regardless of the outcome, and I’m definitely rooting for you.
I have a background in distributed systems and some background in security (I’m by no means a cryptography expert but I do know more about the subject than average developers), and I’d say that at this stage you shouldn’t worry too much about meeting all parts of some guideline or another; they’re often geared more towards bigger teams and slightly more established projects. What I think could benefit you would be first of all to have a clear idea of what exactly you want to accomplish (from a security standpoint, not necessarily so much from a functionality standpoint) if you don’t already have have one, ie. what sort of guarantees do you want to be able to make. Doesn’t have to even be a public document at first, just some notes and sketches for yourself. Then you’d want to find other projects with similar guarantees and aims and see how they did things, find research papers on the subjects and so on. Security guidelines can be useful, but generally it’s more useful to understand why something is in a guideline in the first place. For a project such as yourst I would personally really emphasize design documents and research over code at an early stage, because you need to have a clear goal in mind before you start cranking out code which might turn out to be worthless (at least to some degree) after you run into problems with your approach. Not saying that the documentation has to be public, just that you / the team know exactly what the goal is.
“Encrypted P2P chat” can mean vastly different kinds of projects, with very different aims. For example, do you want perfect forward secrecy? If so, you’d want to find out the challenges associated with it, especially in relation to interactivity since you’re building a P2P architecture, etc. etc. Same with anonymity / user “traceability” like I mentioned earlier; you need to have a clear picture of what kinds of guarantees do you want the users to have to be even able to say what kinds of best practices you’d have to follow.
Sorry, that turned into a bit of a ramble and might be completely obvious to you already, since I have no idea about your background and the level of research you’ve already done.
Yeah, was the C++ dev just “pre-empting” the PHP devs by ordering all their beers for them so they don’t do it one by one and sing the rest of the song?
Right that makes sense.
But yeah, after glancing through the links you provided, I’d agree that you’ll definitely need to pay someone for an audit / review, there are so many pitfalls and gotchas when it comes to encryption alone, and depending on the guarantees you want to be able to make you’ll find even more pitfalls and gotchas – especially if you want to make even relatively light guarantees about anonymity. The classic problem is that even with encrypted payloads the metadata / protocol itself leaks information, which might or might not be a problem depending on what your guarantees are.
I’d suggest writing at least some level of documentation for the protocol. I’d assume a lot of the more security-minded folks – who your app seems to be targeting – won’t be too enthusiastic about using a chat service that promises security but doesn’t tell you how it plans on achieving it.
I, uh… I don’t get it. Somebody help an idiot out? I haven’t had my morning cuppa yet so it might just be a lack of caffeine.
Is there a description of the protocol somewhere?
Or a FAT meme you’re too young to understand? I honestly can’t remember if NTFS needs defragging or not, I haven’t used Windows since Win7
Programming is also for nerds.
Therefore, tests are for programmers.
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Management said that writing tests takes too much time and eats into the time that could be used to write features for the app, so they decided that we’re not writing tests. They were always green anyhow
Probably the majority
With the candidate in question being Ian Gribbin. Of course he “apologized” for this, which translated from conservative means “I’m sorry I got caught.” He’s also said that women are the “sponging gender” and should be “deprived of health care” in case there was any doubt about what sort of a person he is.
Naturally other Reform cockwombles have defended him
The big problem is rather that a lot of innovation has been absorbed by the big companies via buyouts
Which ultimately does seem to lead to innovation slowing down. The big players buy out any potential smaller competitors, and very often just outright kill the products / services they inherited in the acquisition.
It feels like actual innovation in all sectors has slowed to a crawl, and corporations – especially the ones run by MBA parasites – are concentrating more and more on just squeezing money out of people with various bullshit tactics, while at the same time thinning their workforce (naturally the MBAs are never under threat, though)
Microsoft security practices haven’t changed much over the decades
But why can a theme make web requests?!
Because we live in a broken world and nothing matters.
On a more serious note, it’s a pretty horrifying misfeature. What’s even more worrying is that by all appearances Microsoft doesn’t give a shit, if they apparently didn’t even bother removing the malicious extensions that were reported. Not that I’m surprised, but still.
It’s almost like the rules don’t apply to the moneyed class
Considering that C-suite executives are usually fantastically expensive, they’d be a logical position to automate (assuming AI worked like suits think it does). For some veeeery strange reason no board of directors has suggested replacing themselves with AIs
Literally not what I did. I said it’s probably not whatshername, but I’m not in the habit of trusting The Sun either and it’s as likely that they got it wrong as it is that Twatter got whatshername wrong. There’s probably a reason why eg. The Guardian removed Victoria’s name from their article – and no, it’s not that they think the press secretary did it
Not all that cute though