keysign – Page 2 – muellis blog

Talking at mrmcds 2016 in Darmstadt, Germany

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the mrmcds in Darmstadt, Germany. Just like I did the last years. Like the years before, the conference was nicely themed. This year, the theme was all things medical. So speakers were given doctors’ coats, conference staff were running around like surgeons, alcohol could be had intravenously …

mrmcd 2016 logo

The talk on medical device nightmares (video) showed some medical devices like which show and record vital signs such as the pulse or blood pressure. But also more fancy devices such as an MRI. Of course, he did not only show the devices themselves, but rather how they tested them on their external interfaces, i.e. the networking port. Speaking of the MRI: It exposed a few hundred open ports. The services listening on these ports crashed when nmap scanned the host… But at least apparently they recovered automatically. He also presented an anaesthetic monitoring device, which is supposed to show how much alive a patient still is. The device seems to have a telnet interface which you can log on to with default credentials. The telnet interface has, not surprisingly, a command injection vulnerability, which allowed them to take ownership of the device. The next step was then to hijack the framebuffer and to render whatever they wanted on it. For example nice looking vital data; as if the patient was still alive. Or, probably the more obvious thing to do: Show Rick Astley.

It’s been an entertaining talk which makes you realise how complicated the whole area of pharmaceutical or medical appliances is. They need to go through a long and troublesome certification process, not unlike other businesses (say, car manufacturers). Patching the underlying Windows is simply not possible without losing the certification. You may well ask whether a certificate or an up-to-date OS is better for your health. And while I make it look a bit ridiculous now, I do appreciate that it’s a tough subject.

My own talk on GNOME (video) was well visited. I explained why I think GNOME is a good candidate for shipping security software to the masses. I said that GNOME cares about its users and goes the extra mile to support as many users as possible. That includes making certain decisions to provide a secure by default system. I gave two examples of how I think GNOME pushes the envelope when it comes to making security usable. One was the problem of OpenPGP Keysigning. I mentioned that it’s a very geeky thing which mortals do not understand. Neither do many security people, to be honest. And you can’t even blame them because it’s a messy thing to do. Doing it properly™ involves a metric ton of OpSec to protect the integrity of the key to be signed. I think that we can make the process much more usable than it is right now while even maintaining security. This year, I had Andrei working with me to make this happen.

The other example I gave was the problem of USB security. Do you know when you use your USB? And do you know when you don’t? And do you know when other people use your USB? I talked about the possibility to lock down your USB ports while you’re not in front of your computer. The argument goes that you can’t possibly insert anything if you’re away. Of course, there are certain cases to keep in mind, like not forbidding a keyboard to be plugged in, in case the old one breaks. But there is little reason to allow your USB camera to work unless you are actively using your machine. I presented how this could look like by showing off the work the George did last summer.

My friend Jens talked about Reverse Engineering of applications. He started to explain why you would do that in first place. Analysing your freshly received malware or weaknesses (think backdoors or bypasses) in your software are motivations, he said. But you might as well tinker with old software which has no developer anymore or try to find APIs of other software for interoperational purposes, he said. Let me note that with Free Software, you wouldn’t have to reverse engineer the binary 😉 But he also mentioned that industrial espionage is a reason for people to reverse engineer a compiled programme. The tool he uses the most is the “file” tool. He went on to explain the various executable formats for various machine flavours (think: x86, ELF, PE, JVM). To go practical, he showed a .NET application which only writes “hello, world!”, because malware, he said, is written in .NET nowadays. In order to decompile the binary he recommended “iLspy” as a one-stop suite for reverse engineering .NET applications. Next up were Android applications. He showed how to pull the APK off the device and how to decompose it to JAR classes. Then he recommended CFR for decompiling those into Java code. His clients, mostly banks, he said, try to hide secret keys in their apps, so the first thing he does when having a new job is to grep for “secret”. In 80% of the cases, he said, it is successful. To make it harder for someone to reverse engineer the binary, obfuscators exist for Java, but also for C. He also mentioned some anti debugging techniques such as to check for the presence of certain DLLs or to throw certain interrupts to determine whether the application runs under a debugger. It was a very practical talk which certainly made it clear that the presented things are relevant today. Due to the limited time and the many examples, he could only scratch the surface, though.

It’s been a nice conference with 400ish attendees. I really like how they care about the details, also when it comes to make the speakers feel good. It’s too sad that it’s only one weekend. I’m looking forward to attending next year’s edition 🙂

The Hackocratic Oath

I swear by Eris, Goddess of Chaos, Discordia, and all other Gods above, making them my witnesses, that, according to my ability and judgement, I will keep this Oath and this contract:
To hold those who taught me this art equally dear to me as my friends, to share the Net with them, and to fulfill all their needs for data when required; to look upon their offspring as equals to my own friends, and to teach them this art, if they shall wish to learn it, without fee or contract.
By the set rules, lectures, cat content, and every other mode of instruction, I will impart a knowledge of the art to my own offspring, and those of my friends, and to students bound by this contract and having sworn this Oath to the Hacker Ethic, but to no others.
I will use those data regimens which will benefit my users according to my greatest ability and judgement, and I will do no harm or injustice to them. I will not give a lethal maleware to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a comuter a rootkit.
In purity and according to divine law will I carry out my life and my art.
I will not develop crypto algorithms, but I will leave this to those who are trained in this craft.
Into whatever networks I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the users, avoiding any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including hurtful comments towards users or hackers, whether they are online or offline.
Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients, whether in connection with my professional practice or by way of leaks, which ought to be private,
I will keep faithfully secret.
So long as I maintain this Oath faithfully and without corruption, may it be granted to me to partake of life fully and the practice of my art, gaining the respect of all for all time. However, should I transgress this Oath and violate it, may the opposite be my fate.
www.mrmcd.net

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! 😉

mrmcd 2015

I attended this year’s mrmcd, a cozy conference in Darmstadt, Germany. As in the previous years, it’s a 350 people event with a relaxed atmosphere. I really enjoy going to these mid-size events with a decent selection of talks and attentive guests.

The conference was opened by Paolo Ferri’s Keynote. He is from the ESA and gave a very entertaining talk about the Rosetta mission. He mentioned the challenges involved in launching a missile for a mission to be executed ten years later. It was very interesting to see what they have achieved over a few hundred kilometers distance. Now I want to become a space pilot, too 😉

The next talk was on those tracking devices for your fitness. Turns out, that these tracking devices may actually track you and that they hence pose a risk for your privacy. Apparently fraud is another issue for insurance companies in the US, because some allow you to get better rates when you upload your fitness status. That makes those fitness trackers an interesting target for both people wanting to manipulate their walking statistics to get a better premium for health care and attackers who want to harm someone by changing their statistics.

Concretely, he presented, these devices run with Bluetooth 4 (Smart) which allows anyone to see the device. In addition, service discovery is also turned on which allows anyone to query the device. Usually, he said, no pin is needed anymore to connect to the device. He actually tested several devices with regard to several aspects, such as authentication, what data is stored, what is sent to the Internet and what security mechanisms the apps (for a phone) have been deployed. Among the tested devices were the XiaomMi Miband, the Fitbit, or the Huawei TalkBand B1. The MiBand was setting a good example by disabling discovery once someone has connected to the device. It also saves the MAC address of the phone and ignores others. In order to investigate the data sent between a phone and a band, they disassembled the Android applications.

Muzy was telling a fairytale about a big data lake gone bad.
He said that data lakes are a storage for not necessarily structured data which allow extraction of certain features in an on-demand fashion and that the processed data will then eventually end up in a data warehouse in a much more structured fashion. According to him, data scientists then have unlimited access to that data. That poses a problem and in order to secure the data, he proposed to introduce another layer of authorization to determine whether data scientists are allowed to access certain records. That is a bit different from what exists today: Encrypt data at rest and encrypt in motion. He claimed that current approaches do not solve actual problems, because of, e.g. key management questions. However, user rights management and user authorization are currently emerging, he said.

Later, he referred on Apache Spark. With big data, he said, you need to adapt to a new programming paradigm away from a single worker to multiple nodes, split up work, handling errors and slow tasks. Map reduce, he said, is one programming model. A popular framework for writing in a such a paradigm is Apache’s Hadoop, but there are more. He presented Apache Spark. But it only begins to make sense if you want to analyse more data than you can fit in your RAM, he said. Spark distributes data for you and executes operations on it in a parallel manner, so you don’t need to care about all of that. However, not all applications are a nice fit for Spark, he mentioned. He gave high performance weather computations as such as example. In general, Spark fits well if IPC not required.

The conference then continued with two very interesting talks on Bahn APIs. derf presented on public transport APIs like EFA, HAFAS, and IRIS. These APIs can do things like routing from A to B or answer questions such as which trains are running from a given station. However, these APIs are hardly documented. The IRIS-system is the internal Bahn-API which is probably not supposed to be publicly available, but there is a Web page which exposes (bits) of the API. Others have used that to build similar, even more fancy things. Anyway, he used these APIs to query for trains running late. The results were insightful and entertaining, but have not been released to the general public. However, the speakers presented a way to query all trains in Germany. Long story short: They use the Zugradar which also contains the geo coordinates. They acquired 160 millions datasets over the last year which is represented in 80GB of JSON. They have made their database available as ElasticSearch and Kibana interface. The code it at Github. That is really really good stuff. I’m already in the process of building an ElasticSearch and Spark cluster to munch on that data.

Yours truly also had a talk. I was speaking on GNOME Keysign. Because the CCC people know how to run a great conference, we already have recordings (torrent). You get the slides here. Those of you who know me don’t find the content surprising. To all others: GNOME Keysign is a tool for signing OpenPGP Keys. New features include the capability to sign keys offline, that is, you present a file with a key and you have it signed following best practices.

Another talk I had, this time with a colleague of mine, was on Searchable Encryption. Again, the Video already exists. The slides are probably less funny than they were during the presentation, but hopefully still informative enough to make some sense out of them. Together we mentioned various existing cryptographic schemes which allow you to have a third party execute search operations on your encrypted data on your behalf. The most interesting schemes we showed were Song, Wagner, Perrig and Cash et al..

Thanks again to the organisers for this nice event! I’m looking forward to coming back next year.

DFN Workshop 2015

As in the last few years, the DFN Workshop happened in Hamburg, Germany.

The conference was keynoted by Steven Le Blond who talked about targeted attacks, e.g. against dissidents. He mentioned that he already presented the content at the USENIX security conference which some people think is very excellent. He first showed how he used Skype to look up IP addresses of his boss and how similarly targeted attacks were executed in the past. Think Stuxnet. His main focus were attacks on NGOs though. He focussed on an attacker sending malicious emails to the victim.

In order to find out what attack vectors were used, they contacted over 100 NGOs to ask whether they were attacked. Two NGOs, which are affiliated with the Chinese WUC, which represents the Uyghur minority, received 1500 malicious emails, out of which 1100 were carrying malware. He showed examples of those emails and some of them were indeed very targeted. They contained a personalised message with enough context to look genuine. However, the mail also had a malicious DOC file attached. Interestingly enough though, the infrastructure used by the attacker for the targeted attacks was re-used for several victims. You could have expected the attacker to have their infrastructure separated for the various victims, especially when carrying out targeted attacks.

They also investigated how quickly the attacker exploited publicly known vulnerabilities. They measured the time of the malicious email sent minus the release date of the vulnerability. They found that some of the attacks were launched on day 0, meaning that as soon as a vulnerability was publicly disclosed, an NGO was attacked with a relevant exploit. Maybe interestingly, they did not find any 0-day exploits launched. They also measured how the security precautions taken by Adobe for their Acrobat Reader and Microsoft for their Office product (think sandboxing) affected the frequency of attacks. It turned out that it does help to make your software more secure!

To defend against targeted attacks based on spoofed emails he proposed to detect whether the writing style of an email corresponds to that of previously seen emails of the presumed contact. In fact, their research shows that they are able to tell whether the writing style matches that of previous emails with very high probability.

The following talk assessed end-to-end email solutions. It was interesting, because they created a taxonomy for 36 existing projects and assessed qualities such as their compatibility, the trust-model used, or the platform it runs on.
The 36 solutions they identified were (don’t hold your breath, wall of links coming): Neomailbox, Countermail, salusafe, Tutanota, Shazzlemail, Safe-Mail, Enlocked, Lockbin, virtru, APG, gpg4o, gpg4win, Enigmail, Jumble Mail, opaqueMail, Scramble.io, whiteout.io, Mailpile, Bitmail, Mailvelope, pEp, openKeychain, Shwyz, Lavaboom, ProtonMail, StartMail, PrivateSky, Lavabit, FreedomBox, Parley, Mega, Dark Mail, opencom, okTurtles, End-to-End, kinko.me, and LEAP (Bitmask).

Many of them could be discarded right away, because they were not production ready. The list could be further reduced by discarding solutions which do not use open standards such as OpenPGP, but rather proprietary message formats. After applying more filters, such as that the private key must not leave the realm of the user, the list could be condensed to seven projects. Those were: APG, Enigmail, gpg4o, Mailvelope, pEp, Scramble.io, and whiteout.io.

Interestingly, the latter two were not compatible with the rest. The speakers attributed that to the use of GPG/MIME vs. GPG/Inline and they favoured the latter. I don’t think it’s a good idea though. The authors attest pEp a lot of potential and they seem to have indeed interesting ideas. For example, they offer to sign another person’s key by reading “safe words” over a secure channel. While this is not a silver bullet to the keysigning problem, it appears to be much easier to use.

As we are on keysigning. I have placed an article in the conference proceedings. It’s about GNOME Keysign. The paper’s title is “Welcome to the 2000s: Enabling casual two-party key signing” which I think reflects in what era the current OpenPGP infrastructure is stuck. The mindsets of the people involved are still a bit left in the old days where dealing with computation machines was a thing for those with long and white beards. The target group of users for secure communication protocols has inevitably grown much larger than it used to be. While this sounds trivial, the interface to GnuPG has not significantly changed since. It also still makes it hard for others to build higher level tools by making bad default decisions, demanding to be in control of “trust” decisions, and by requiring certain environmental conditions (i.e. the filesystem to be used). GnuPG is not a mere library. It seems it understands itself as a complete crypto suite. Anyway, in the paper, I explained how I think contemporary keysigning protocols work, why it’s not a good thing, and how to make it better.

I propose to further decentralise OpenPGP by enabling people to have very small keysigning “parties”. Currently, the setup cost of a keysigning party is very high. This is, amongst other things, due to the fact that an organiser is required to collect all the keys, to compile a list of participant, and to make the keys available for download. Then, depending on the size of the event, the participants queue up for several hours. And to then tick checkboxes on pieces of paper. A gigantic secops fail. The smarter people sign every box they tick so that an attacker cannot “inject” a maliciously ticked box onto the paper sheet. That’s not fun. The not so smart people don’t even bring their sheets of paper or have them printed by a random person who happens to also be at the conference and, surprise, has access to a printer. What a gigantic attack surface. I think this is bad. Let’s try to reduce that surface by reducing the size of the events.

In order to enable people to have very small events, i.e. two people keysigning, I propose to make most of the actions of a keysigning protocol automatic. So instead of requiring the user to manually compare the fingerprint, I propose that we securely transfer the key to be signed. You might rightfully ask, how to do that. My answer is that we’ve passed the 2000s and that we bring devices which are capable of opening a TCP connection on a link local network, e.g. WiFi. I know, this is not necessarily a given, but let’s just assume for the sake of simplicity that one of our device we carry along can actually do WiFi (and that the network does not block connections between machines). This also prevents certain attacks that users of current Best Practises are still vulnerable against, namely using short key ids or leaking who you are communicating with.

Another step that needs to be automated is signing the key. It sounds easy, right? But it’s not just a mere gpg --sign-key. The first problem is, that you don’t want the key to be signed to pollute your keyring. That can be fixed by using --homedir or the GNUPGHOME environment variable. But then you also want to sign each UID on the key separately. And this is were things get a bit more interesting. Anyway, to make a long story short: We’re not able to do that with plain GnuPG (as of now) in a sane manner. And I think it’s a shame.

Lastly, sending the key needs to be as “zero-click” as possible, too. I propose to simply reuse the current MUA of the user. That sounds easy, but unfortunately, it’s only 2015 and we cannot interact with, say, Evolution and Thunderbird in a standardised manner. There is xdg-email, but it has annoying bugs and doesn’t seem to be maintained. I’m waiting for a sane Email-API. I mean, Email has been around for some time now, let’s now try to actually use it. I hope to be able to make another more formal announcement on GNOME Keysign, soon.

the userbase for strong cryptography declines by half with every additional keystroke or mouseclick required to make it work

— attributed to Ellison.

Anyway, the event was good, I am happy to have attended. I hope to be able to make it there next year again.

FOSDEM 2015

It’s winter again and it was clear that FOSDEM was coming. However, preparation fell through the cracks, at least for me, mainly because my personal life is fast-paced at the moment. We had a table again, and our EventsBox, which is filled with goodness to demo GNOME, made its way from Gothenburg, where I actually carried it to a couple of months ago.

Unfortunately though, we didn’t have t-shirts to sell. We do have boxes of t-shirts left, but they didn’t make it to FOSDEM :-\ So this FOSDEM didn’t generate nearly as much revenue as the last years. It’s a pity that this year’s preparation was suboptimal. I hope we can improve next year. Were able to get rid of other people’s things, though 😉 Like last year, the SuSE people brought beer, but it was different this time. Better, even 😉

The fact that there wasn’t as much action at our booth as last years, I could actually attend talks. I was able to see Sri and Pam talking on the Groupon incident that shook us up a couple of months ago. It was really nice to see her, because I wanted to shake hands and say thanks. She did an amazing job. Interestingly enough, she praised us, the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors, for working very professionally. Much better than any client she has worked with. I am surprised, because I didn’t really have the feeling we were acting as promptly as we could. You know, we’re volunteers, after all. Also, we didn’t really prepare as much as we could have which led to some things being done rather spontaneously. Anyway, I take that as a compliment and I guess that our work can’t be all too bad. The talk itself showed our side of things and, if you ask me, was painting things in a too bright light. Sure, we were successful, but I attribute much of that success to network effects and a bit of luck. I don’t think we could replicate that success easily.

GNOME’s presence at FOSDEM was not too bad though, despite the lack of shirts. We had a packed beer event and more talks by GNOMEy people. The list includes Karen‘s keynote, Benzo‘s talk on SDAPDS, and Sri‘s talk on GNOME’s impact on the Free Software ecosystem. You can find more here.

A talk that I did see was on improving the keysigning situation. I really mean to write about this some more. For now, let me just say that I am pleased to see people working on solutions. Solutions to a problem I’m not sure many people see and that I want to devote some time for explaining it, i.e. in s separate post. The gist is, that contemporary “keysigning parties” come with non-negligible costs for both, the organiser and the participant. KeySigningPartyTools were presented which intend to improve they way things are currently done. That’s already quite good as it’ll reduce the number of errors people typically make when attending such a party.

However, I think that we need to rethink keysigning. Mostly, because the state of the art is a massive SecOps fail. There is about a gazillion traps to be avoided and many things don’t actually make so much sense. For example, I am unable to comprehend why we are muttering a base16 encoded version of your 160 bit fingerprint to ourselves. Or why we must queue outside in the cold without being able to jump the queue if a single person is a bit slow, because then everybody will be terribly confused and the whole thing taking even longer. Or why we need to do everything on paper (well, I know the arguments: Your computer can be hacked, be social, yadda yadda). I did actually give a talk on rethinking the keysigning problem (slides). It’s about a project that I have only briefly mentioned here and which I should really write about in the near future. GNOME Keysign intends to be less of a SecOps fail by letting the scan a barcode and click “next”. The rest will be operations known to the user such as sending an email. No more manually comparing fingerprints. No more leaking data to the Internet about who you want to contact. No more MITM attacks against your OpenPGP installation. No more short key ids that you accidentally use or because you mistyped a letter of the fingerprint. No more editing raw Perl in order to configure your keysigning tool. The talk went surprisingly well. I actually expected the people in the security devroom to be mad when someone like me is taking their perl and their command line away. I received good questions and interesting feedback. I’ll follow up here with another post once real-life lets me get to it.

Brussels itself is a very nice city. We were lucky, I guess, because we had some sunshine when we were walking around the city. I love the plethora of restaurants. And I like that Brussels is very open and cultural. Unfortunately, the makerspace was deserted when we arrived, but it is was somewhat expected as it was daytime… I hope to return again and check it out during the night 😉

GNOME at FSCONS14 in Gothenburg, Sweden

I was glad to be invited to FSONCS 2014 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Remember that this is also the place for next year’s GUADEC! This year’s FSCONS was attended by around 150 people or so. I guess it was a bit less. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s a very cool event with many interesting people and talks.

We, GNOME, had a presence at the event due to me bringing the EventsBox and T-Shirts to Gothenburg. It was quite a trip, especially with those heavy boxes…

The first keynote of the conference was given by Karl Fogel. He declared the end of copyright in 1993. He imagined copyright as a tree whose bottom has been chopped off, but the, the top hasn’t noticed that just yet. He put copyright on a timeline and drew a strong relation to the printing press. He claimed that in the United Kingdom, a monopoly used to control who prints and distributes books and it then transferred to a differently shaped monopoly which involved the actual authors. These could then transfer their rights to printers. He went on with ranting about the fact that nowadays you cannot tip the author for their (free) work. He appealed to the authors of f-droid or the firefox mobile app market to integrate such a functionality. Overall it was an interesting talk with many aspects. He is a talented speaker.

The second keynote was given by Leigh Honeywell. She talked about communities and community building. She said that she got most of the ideas presented in her talk from Sumana Harihareswara‘s “Models we use to change the world”. During her talk she referred to her experiences when founded the HackLabTO Hackerspace after having attended the CCCamp 2007. She basically shared models of understanding the community and their behaviour. The Q&A session was inspiring and informative. Many questions about managing a community were asked and answered.

Another interesting talk was given by Guilhem Moulin who went on to talk about Fripost. It is a democratic email service provider from Sweden. He gave a bit of an insight regarding the current Email usage on today’s Internet. He claimed that we have 2.7 billion internet users and that the top three email service providers accumulate roughly a third of this population. His numbers were 425 million for GMail, 420 million for Hotmail, and 280 million for Yahoo. All these companies are part of PRISM, he said, which worried him enough to engage with Fripost. In fact, he became a board member after having been a user and a sysadmin. As someone who operates a mail server for oneself and others with similar needs, I was quite interested in seeing concentrated efforts like this. Fripost’s governance seems to be interesting. It’s a democratic body and I wonder how to thwart malicious subversion. Anyway, the talk was about technical details as to how to create your own fripost.org. So I can only encourage to run your own infrastructure and found structures that care about running ecosystem. A memorable quote he provided to underpin this appeal is attributed to Schneier: “We were safer when our email was at 10,000 ISPs than it was at 10“.

My talk went sufficiently well. I guess I preached to the choir regarding Free Software. I don’t think I needed to convince the people that Free Software is a good thing. As for convincing the audience that GNOME is a good thing, I think I faced a big challenge. Some of the attendees didn’t seem to be very enthusiastic about their desktop which is great. But some others were more in the, what I would call, old school category using lynx, xautoscreenlock, and all that stuff from the 90s. Anyway, we had a great session with many questions from the audience such that I couldn’t even go through my slides.

I had a lightning talk about signing OpenPGP keys using GNOME Keysign. I probably need to write up a separate blog post for that. In short, I mentioned that short key IDs are evil, but that long key IDs are also problematic. Actually, using keyservers is inherently problematic and should be avoided. To do so, I showed how I transfer a key securely and sign it following best practices (thanks to Andrei for an initial version!). Bastian was nice enough to do the demo with me. We needed to cheat a little though, as currently, they key is transferred using the WiFi network you are on. The WiFi, however, didn’t allow us to create a TCP connection to each other. We thus opened a WiFi hotspot and used that. I think this would be a useful feature.

The last talk of the conference was given by Hans Lysglimt from Norway. He is, among other things, a politician, an activist, and an entrepreneur who founded an email service. His runbox has around 1000000 accounts and 30000 paid subscriptions, so it’s fairly big, compared to Fripost at least. Again, running email services myself, I found it interesting to listen to the stories he had to tell. His story was that he received a gag order for running his commercial email service provider. It remained unclear whether it was send because of his interview with Julian Assange or not.

Interestingly, he didn’t seem to have received many correct subpoenas in the sense that they were Norwegian court orders. However, in one case the American authorities went through the Norwegian legal system which he found funny in itself because the two legal system were not very similar. He eventually mentioned that every email service provider has at least one gag order, either an implicit or and explicit one. Ultimately, he concluded that you cannot trust a corporation.

FSCONS is an interesting event. Their manifesto is certainly impressive. I am glad to have visited and I am looking forward to visiting again. It is very atmospheric, very relaxed, and friendly. A very nice place to be.