Freedom to Tinker

Briar is a peer-to-peer encrypted messaging app that has received funding from multiple organizations, including the Open Technology Fund (OTF), which is financed by the U.S. government through the Agency for Global Media [1][2][3]. The OTF was established in 2012 as a program of Radio Free Asia, a U.S. government-funded nonprofit, and became independent in 2019 while continuing to receive congressional appropriations [3].

## Government Funding and Transparency

Briar openly discloses its funding sources on its website, listing support from the Open Technology Fund alongside other organizations like NLnet Foundation, the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, Access Now, Internews, and others [1][4]. This transparency is notable—the project does not hide its connection to U.S. government-funded initiatives. The OTF itself supports numerous widely-used internet freedom tools, with over two billion people worldwide reportedly using OTF-supported technologies daily [5].

## The Security Trade-off Question

Your skepticism about government-funded privacy tools reflects a legitimate concern that civil liberties advocates have raised [6]. However, Briar's open-source nature allows independent security audits—it was examined by Cure53 in 2017 and received positive assessments [2]. The project was developed by researchers and activists including Michael Rogers and Eleanor Saitta starting in 2011, with stated motivations around supporting freedom of expression and…

I think you get to a point, where you can't trust electronics at all. (Active network or no.)

Van Eck phreaking. Optical Time-Domain Eavesdropping [1]. Zero-Day exploits on operating systems, browsers, etc. Built-in vulnerabilities to processors. Backdoors in encryption algorithms. Acoustic Keyboard analysis [2]. Laser Audio detection [3]. Hard drive recovery. DRAM recovery. [4]

[1] http://www.rootsecure.net/content/downloads/pdf/optical_tempest_crt.pdf

[2] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/papers/Keyboard_Acoustic_Emanations_Revisited/tiss.preprint.pdf

[3] http://spie.org/x40847.xml

[4] https://citp.princeton.edu/research/memory/

If I wanted to send (very) secure email, I think I would want a Kindle-like device, with an ePaper display, no physical keyboard just a touchscreen, no bluetooth or wifi or 3G or microphone - just a single USB port. I'd install the software I want on it, and then I'd physically destroy the USB port. I'd want 4 AA batteries, no recharge port. I guess it would need a camera, as well. And it would have its own Faraday cage. And a built-in, non-electronic method that slags the RAM and storage with acid; possibly by pulling a pin out. I'd wipe the screen clean, every time I used it.

How do I get data out of it? I drop data into a QR code sending system. It would generate one full-screen QR-code like image every second or so. On another computer, I'd have a camera that I'd show the device to, and it would read the QR codes, and…

Before you dive too far into full-disk encryption, you might want to contemplate the consequences of this research:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9876060-38.html

The paper referenced is available at:

http://citp.princeton.edu/pub/coldboot.pdf

From that paper, the most salient sentence for this discussion is:

"On all of our sample DRAMs, the decay rates were low
enough that an attacker who cut power for 60 seconds
would recover 99.9% of bits correctly."

The long and short is that your password has to be in RAM at some point in order to be matched against what is typed in. RAM decays slowly after a machine has been switched off. As the research shows, one can use a widely-available can of air to make that decay happen even slower. In the process, one can pull the value out of RAM.

Note that this is a hardware problem that no software on the market has been able to address. To do so, you would have to be able to validate x against y without having the value of y ever enter RAM.

Consequently, a reasonably good tech thief can read the password out of RAM. For the not-so-good tech thief, using passwords and social engineering tricks like being nice to someone and then asking them to watch your stuff for a moment will probably do the trick. I tend to see the various implementations of full-disk encryption as more for peace of mind and mitigation of liability than real security.

since it seems it has been forgotten, remember the reason Git was created is that Larry McVoy, who ran BitMover, which had been donating proprietary software licenses for BitKeeper to core kernel devs, got increasingly shirty at people working on tools to make BK interoperate with Free tools, culminating in Tridge showing in an LCA talk that you could telnet to the BK server and it would just spew out the whole history as SCCS files.

Larry shortly told everyone he wasn't going to keep giving BK away for free, so Linus went off for a weekend and wrote a crappy "content manager" called git, on top of which perhaps he thought someone might write a proper VC system.

and here we are.

a side note was someone hacking the BitKeeper-CVS "mirror" (linear-ish approximation of the BK DAG) with probably the cleverest backdoor I'll ever see: https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoor-attempt-of-2003/

see if you can spot the small edit that made this a backdoor:

if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (current->uid = 0)) retval = -EINVAL;

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How about another incident in 2022? Attackers BGP hijacked a dependency hosting a JS file, generated a rogue TLS certificate, and stole $2 million. Keep in mind: these are incidents we know about, not including incidents that went undetected.

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2022/03/09/attackers-exploit-fundamental-flaw-in-the-webs-security-to-steal-2-million-in-cryptocurrency/

Noteworthy: "Additionally, some BGP attacks can still fool all of a CA’s vantage points. To reduce the impact of BGP attacks, we need security improvements in the routing infrastructure as well. In the short term, deployed routing technologies like the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) could significantly limit the spread of BGP attacks and make them much less likely to be successful. ... In the long run, we need a much more secure underlying routing layer for the Internet."