• 11 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: November 3rd, 2021

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  • Well, there is something mentioned about latest version of omemo:

    OMEMO doesn’t attempt to provide even the vaguest rationale for its design choices, and appears to approach cryptography protocol specification with a care-free attitude.

    To put it mildly, this is the wrong way to approach cryptography

    Because there is no rationale given for this sudden square-root reduction in security against existential forgery attacks, we kind of have to fill in the gaps and assume it was because of some kind of performance or bandwidth considerations.

    But even that doesn’t really justify it, does it?

    You’re only saving 16 bytes of bandwidth by truncating the MAC. Meanwhile, the actual ciphertext blobs are being encoded with base64, which adds 33% of overhead.

    For any message larger than 48 bytes, this base64 encoding will dominate the bandwidth consumption more than using the full HMAC tag would.

    Is truncating the HMAC tag to to 128 bits still secure? According to Signal, yes, it is. And I offer no disagreement to Signal’s assessment here.

    The problem is, as I’ve said repeatedly, OMEMO’s specification makes no attempt to justify their design decisions.

    Then on one of the comments, there’s an interesting comment on something signal has mentioned it’s working on quantum resistance, that it’s no clear is something omemo will support, and even less when clients might adopt if eventually available:

    Indeed quite often someone compares the two protocols and implies OMEMO is as mature as the current state of the art Signal protocol. Allow me to throw in the emerging post-quantum support that Signal is adding or already has in libsignal.

    Somehow is implied on the comment that omemo is immature compared to libsignal…

    At any rate, dino uses libsignal-protocol-c (on Artix/Arch 2.3.3), not libomemo, and conversations uses libaxolotle-java (according to the “about” section in the settings). So somehow using signal library underneath. Although I have no idea how up to date with regards to the signal library those might be (though the axolotl dependency on conversations allows to think it’s outdated). And for conversations the author mentions:

    To be clear: These aren’t separate dependencies that Conversations pulls in to implement plugin supports. They’re first-party cryptographic implementations all within this Android app’s codebase.

    I guess by 1st party the author means like copy/paste the code (with local twists, which might be dangerous but perhaps necessary) to have a local version of the libraries. This sounds like a non version related criticism, but it’s client related rather than protocol related, however the author mentions other clients are way worse, leaving no hope…

    I don’t see on dino an option to always use omemo BTW, not sure if dino just it implies omemo by default, but it doesn’t have a way to force it. Perhaps a feature to ask dino developers…

    At any rate, according the post there’s little hope for xmpp + omemo. Which was actually something I was still hoping for, well, besides getting jami working at some point (but it has crypto issues on its own, including lack of auditing).



  • betterbird tray solution doesn’t work on wayland, given a bug on common code (affects both, Firefox, Thunderbird and derivatives). Just in case that’s one of the motivations of using betterbird. That by the way was the only feature that really made me look at betterbird, and as it didn’t work, I went back to TB. And if you’re wondering, birdtray doesn’t work on wayland, 😑.


  • Thunderbird is working on enabling exchange, and meanwhile you can combine it with TBSync plus its provider for exchange AcriveSync extensions. And given TB hadn’t care so far about tray, to at least avoid TB dying by mistake, you can also add Minimize on Close extension. Mail would still be IMap, so it’ll work as long as the outlook provider enables IMap support, but for the company I work it’s enabled. But such support is coming up on TB. Not sure if its solution would be 100% open source, but I hope it is, otherwise, I’m not sure if everyone will want to have a blob proprietary binary inside TB…



  • Not true, FF comes with few binary blobs which are removed from Librewolf. Also there are some things disabled entirely at build time, so they are removed from being an option. So it’s not just the settings, and it’s not plain re-branding. Some distros has gotten it wrong, believing that it’s just a matter of settings, but at least on the case of Librewolf and the Tor browser that’s not the case.

    That hey depend on FF continuous development to exist is true, that doesn’t mean they just rebrand.


  • kixik@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlNostalgic Distros?
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    3 months ago

    Yes SMGL is still active. You can try joining one of their channels. There are still people looking for source based distros, not sure while Gentoo is the only thing that pops up for them. I used it for some time, and it’s fantastic. Sadly having to build stuff takes too much time, particularly on old, and not performance oriented HW. They had support for binaries, and actually include a binaries grimoire, so you could install binaries that used to take too much time, like Firefox for example. Still it takes too much to keep a source based distro. And if you go all the way, then when changing parts of the building toolchain, like gcc, the recommendation was to build everything so that everything would be built with the more up to date toolchain, that was cool, since SMGL has tools for it, but those fancy stuff take as well a lot of time. There I learned 1st about ccache, hahaha.

    Sooo fun, :)












  • IT might be, but librelinux for example really removes all binary blobs, although there’s some tooling around doing that, so new cases might be missed without human inspection, but they are careful about binary blobs… So from the whole spectrum of open source stuff, if you care about binary blobs, chances are better on the libre/free SW side.


  • kixik@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    Probably Guix, and GNU endorsed distributions. Binary blobs are not allowed on free/libre distributions, or not on their official repos. That said, most gnu + linux distributions don’t care about those. Most will take care, if they get to realize it, about distribution licenses, so if something has some sort of legal issue to be distributed, that will get purged from its repos most probably…