gks – muellis blog

GNOME Keysign 0.9.9

tl;dr: We have a new Keysign release with support for exchanging keys via the Internet.

I am very proud to announce this version of GNOME Keysign, because it marks an important step towards a famous “1.0”. In fact, it might be just that. But given the potentially complicated new dependencies, I thought it’d be nice to make sort of an rc release.

The main feature is a transport via the Internet. In fact, the code has been lurking around since last summer thanks to Ludovico’s great work. I felt it needed some massaging and more gentle introduction to the code base before finally enabling it.

For the transport we use Magic Wormhole, an amazing package for transferring files securely. If you don’t know it yet, give it a try. It is a very convenient tool for sending files across the Internet. They have a rendezvous server so that it works in NATted environments, too. Great.

You may wonder why we need an Internet transport, given that we have local network and Bluetooth already. And the question is good, because initially I didn’t think that we’d expose ourselves to the Internet. Simply because the attack surface is just so much larger and also because I think that it’s so weird to go all the way through the Internet when all we need is to transfer a few bytes between two physically close machines. It doesn’t sound very clever to connect to the Internet when all we need is to bridge 20 centimetres.

Anyway, as it turns out, WiFi access points don’t allow clients to connect to each other 🙁 Then we have Bluetooth, but it’s still a bit awkward to use. My impression is that people are not satisfied with the quality of Bluetooth connections. Also, the Internet is comparatively easy to use, both as a programmer and a user.

Of course, we now also have the option to exchange keys when not being physically close. I do not recommend that, though, because our security assumes the visual channel to be present and, in fact, secure. In other words: Scan the barcode for a secure key signing experience. Be aware that if you transfer the “security code” manually via other means, you may be compromised.

With this change, the UX changes a bit for the non-Internet transports, too. For example, we have a final page now which indicates success or failure. We can use this as a base for accompanying the signing process further, e.g. sign the key again with a non-exportable short-term signature s.t. the user can send an email right away. Or exchange the keys again after the email has been received. Exciting times ahead.

Now, after the wall of text, you may wonder how to get hold of this release. It should show up on Flathub soon.

GNOME Keysign 0.9.8 released

It’s been a while after my last post. This time, we have many exciting news to share. For one, we have a new release of GNOME Keysign which fixes a few bugs here and there as well as introduces Bluetooth support. That is, you can transfer your key with your buddy via Bluetooth and don’t need a network connection. In fact, it becomes more and more popular for WiFis to block clients talking to each other. A design goal is (or rather: was, see down below) to not require an Internet connection, simply because it opens up a can of worms with potential failures and attacks. Now you can transfer the key even if your WiFi doesn’t let you communicate with the other machine. Of course, both of you need have to have Bluetooth hardware and have it enabled.

The other exciting news is the app being on Flathub. Now it’s easier than ever to install the app. Simply go to Flathub and install it from there. This is a big step towards getting the app into users’ hands. And the sandbox makes the app a bit more trustworthy, I hope.

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Keysign

The future brings cool changes. We have already patches lined up that bring an Internet transport with the app. Yeah, that’s contrary to what I’ve just said a few paragraphs above. And it does cause some issues in the UI, because we do not necessarily want the user to use the Internet if the local transport just works. But that “if” is unfortunately getting bigger and bigger. So I’m happy to have a mix of transports now. I’m wondering what the best way is to expose that information to the user, though. Do we add a button for the potentially privacy invading act of connecting to the Internet? If we do, then why do we not offer buttons for the other transports like Bluetooth or the local network?

Anyway, stay tuned for future updates.

Talking at PET-CON 2017.2 in Hamburg, Germany

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to talk at the 7th Privacy Enhancing Techniques Conference (PET-CON 2017.2) in Hamburg, Germany. It’s a teeny tiny academic event with a dozen or so experts in the field of privacy.

The talks were quite technical, involving things like machine learning over logs or secure multi-party computation. I talked about how I think that the best technical solution does not necessarily enable the people to be more private, simply because the people might not be able to make use of the tool properly. A concern that’s generally shared in the academic community. Yet, the methodology to create and assess the effectiveness of a design is not very elaborated. I guess we need to invest more brain power into creating models, metrics, and tools for enabling people to do safer computing.

So I’m happy to have gone and to have had the opportunity of discussing the issues I’m seeing. Likewise, I find it very interesting to see where the people are currently headed towards.

GNOME Keysign 0.9 released

Oh boy, it’s been a while that we’ve released GNOME Keysign 0.9. We changed quite a few things since last time I’ve reported but the most visible change are the new widgets which I already announced last time. Now it should be much easier to make changes with the GUI and experiment with designs.

Other changes include less visible things like the ability to run the program in a VM. We use gtksink now which not only reduces the amount of code we have to maintain but also makes it easier for us to maintain compatibility with different display servers. Similarly, we don’t use the v4l2src but rather a autovideosrc hoping that it will be more compatible with other platforms.

If you want to try to new version, the instructions in the README should get you going:

pip install --user 'git+https://github.com/GNOME-Keysign/gnome-keysign.git#egg=gnome-keysign'

Alternatively, you may try the Debian or openSuSE package. The Flatpak is still work in progress as we still need to figure out how to work with GnuPG running on the host.

The future will bring exciting changes, too. I plan for i18n support and more Python 3 compatibility.

GNOME Keysign 0.8

I’ve just release GNOME Keysign 0.8. It’s an exciting step towards a more mature codebase with less cruft and pieces of code moved to places where they should be more discoverable. To get the app, we have a tarball as usual, or an experimental flatpak (see below). Also notice that the repository has changed. The new URL should be more discoverable and cause less confusion. I will take down the old URL soon. Also note that this release will not be compatible with older releases. So you cannot find older clients on the network.
One problem that existed was when you selected a key and then pushed the “back” button, the UI would stall an unpleasantly long time. The actual problem is Python’s HTTPd implementation using select() with a relatively long interval instead of, say, doing things asynchronously. The interval is now shorter which increases the number of times the polling loop is executed but should make the UI more responsive. I wonder whether it makes sense to investigate hooking up the GLib Mainloop with Python’s SocketServer…

Another fix went into the HTTP client side which you could stall with a non reacting keyserver, i.e. when the HTTP request was simply not answered. Because the download is not done asynchronously as it should, the UI waits for the completion of the download. The current mitigation is to let the HTTP request time out.

A new thing is a popup when an uncaught exception happens. It’s copy and pasted from MyPaint and works by setting Python’s sys.excepthook.

You can also now switch the screen on which the fullscreen barcode is being shown. Once you have selected a key, you get the barcode displayed. If you click it it will cover your whole screen. If you are hooked up to a projector you might want to make sure that the barcode is shown on the bigger screen. Now you can press the left or right key to “move” the barcode. I needed to work around a bug in GTK which seems to prevent gtk_window_fullscreen_on_monitor () from working.

Finally, a new GPG abstraction consolidates all the required functionality into one module rather than having the required functionality spread around various modules. I named it “gpgmh” for “gpg made hard” which is a pun on “gpgme”, “gpg made easy”. The new module will also allow to use the real™ gpg module instead of the gpg executable wrapper provided by monkeysign. We cannot, however, switch to the library just yet, because it needs gpgme 1.8 which is too recent for current distros (well, Debian and Ubuntu). So we have to wait until we can depend on it.

If you want to try the application, you can now get the Flatpak from here. It should be possible to install the app with a command like flatpak --user install --from http://muelli.cryptobitch.de/tmp/2017-01-29-keysign.flatpakref. You can also grab the bundle if you want. Please note that the flatpak is very experimental. It would be surprising if anything but showing the UI actually worked. There are several issues we still need to work out. One is to send an email from within the sandbox and the other is re-use an existing gpg agent from the existing user session inside the sandbox. Gpg is behaving a bit weirdly there. Just having the agent’s socket available inside the sandbox does not seem to be enough to make it work. We need to investigate what’s going on there.

The future brings other exciting changes, too. We have a new UI in preparation which should be much more appealing. Here is what it will look like:

GNOME Keysign 0.7

I keep forgetting about blogging about the progress we’re making with GNOME Keysign. Since last time I reported several new cool developments happened. This 0.7 release fixes a few bugs and should increase compatibility with recent gpg versions.

The most noticeable change is probably a message when you don’t have a private key. I tried to create something clickable so that the user would be presented, say, seahorse with the relevant widgets that allows the user to quickly generate an OpenPGP key. But we currently don’t seem to be able to do that. It’s probably worth filing a bug against Seahorse.

You may also that the “Next” or “Back” button is now sensitive to the end of the notebook. That is a minor improvement in the UI.

In general, we should be more Python 3 compatible by removing python2-only code in various modules.

Another change is a hopefully more efficient bar code rendering. Instead of using mixed case characters, the newer version tries to use the alphanumeric mode which should use about 5.5 bits per character rather than 8. The barcode reading side should also save some CPU cycles by activating zbar’s cache.

GNOME Keysign 0.6

It’s been a while since I reported on GNOME Keysign. The last few releases have been exciting, because they introduced nice features which I have been waiting long for getting around to implement them.

So GNOME Keysign is an application to help you in the OpenPGP Keysigning process. That process will eventually require you to get hold of an authentic copy of the OpenPGP Key. In GNOME Keysign this is done by establishing a TCP connection between two machines and by exchanging the data via that channel. You may very well ask how we ensure that the key is authentic. The answer for now has been that we transmit the OpenPGP fingerprint via a secure channel and that we use the fingerprint to authenticate the key in question. This achieves at least the same security as when doing conventional key signing, because you get hold of the key either via a keyserver or a third party who organised the “key signing party”. Although, admittedly, in very rare cases you transfer data directly via a USB pendrive or so. Of course, this creates a whole new massive attack surface. I’m curious to see technologies like wormhole deployed for this use case.

The security of you going to the Internet to download the key is questionable, because not only do you leak that you’re intending to communicate with a certain person, but also expose yourself to attacks like someone dropping revocation certificates or UIDs of the key of your interest. While the former issue is being tackled by not going to the Internet in first place, the latter had not been dealt with. But these days are over now.

As of 0.5 GNOME Keysign also generates an HMAC of the data to be transferred and encodes that in the QR Code. The receiving end can then verify whether the data downloaded matches the expected value. I am confident that a new generation hash function serves the same purpose, but I’m not entirely sure how easy it is to get Keccak or siphash into the users’ hands. The HMAC, while being cryptographic overkill, should be fine, though. But the construction leaves a bad taste, especially because a known key is currently used to generate the HMAC. But it’s a mechanism built-in into Python. However, I expect to replace that with something more sensible.

In security, we better imagine a strong attacker who is capable of executing attacks which we think are not necessarily easy or even possible to mount. If we can defend against such a strong attacker then we may trust the system to resist weaker attacks, too. One of such a difficult attack, I think, is to inject just one frame while, at the same time, controlling the network. The attack could then make the victim scan a rogue barcode which delivers a rogue MAC which in turn validates the wrong data. Such an attack should not go unnoticed and, as of 0.5, GNOME Keysign will display the frame that contained the barcode.

This is what it looked like before:

2016-keysign-before

And now you can see the frame that got decoded. This is mainly because the GStreamer zbar element also provides the frame.

2016-keysign-after

Another interesting feature is the availability of a separate tool for producing signatures for a given key in a file. The scenario is that you may have received a key from your friend via a (trusted, haha) pendrive, a secure network connection (like wormhole), or any other means you consider sufficiently integrity preserving. In order to sign that key you can now execute something like python -m keysign.gnome-keysign-sign-key in order to run all the signing logic but without the whole key transfer stuff. This is a bit experimental though and I am not yet happy about the state that program is in, so it’s not directly exposed to users by installing it as executable.

GNOME Keysign is available in OpenSuSE, now. I don’t know the exact details of how to make it work, but rumour has it that you can just do a zypper install gnome-keysign. While getting there we identified a few issues along the way. For example, the gstreamer zbar element needs to be present. But that was a problem, because the zbar element was not built because the zbar library was not available. So that needed to get in first. Then we realised that the most modern OpenSuSE uses a very recent GnuPG which the currently used GnuPG library is not handling so nicely. That caused a few headaches. Also, the firewall seems to be an issue which needs to be dealt with. So much to code, so little time! 😉