Dienstag, 27. August 2013

A quick overview of simple encryption for end-users


Recent revelations regarding PRISM and other US (as well as UK and EU) government agencies systematically collecting and processessing private information has sparked many conversations about encryption across socialnetworks. So, here is a quick overview of a few free, (mostly) open source programs that enable everyone to use high quality encryption. The encryption schemes used by the programs listed below are considered uncrackable and require, using the currently available computing power, billions of years to crack.


To encrypt your hard drive and/or private data files, I highly recommend to use TrueCrypt. It can encrypt your entire hard drive, including your operating system. Or, it can create a virtual disk that when you enable and look at it in your explorer will look and function just like a USB drive -- only, everthing you put onto the disk will be still on your harddrive, but now stored in an encypted file. Option #1, The Encrypt Everything Solution requires you to provide a password when you boot up your computer. The TrueCrypt manual provides more information on how to set up encrypted devices or fine tune some of the parameters available.
It is also possible to use truecrypt on android phones with EDS, and if the phone is rooted, it is possible to share encrypted files via Dropbox between smartphones and other devices.


To encrypt emails, as well as single files, public key cryptography is the go-to choice. This works by having every users generate two keys, a public one that anyone can know, and a private one that must stay secret. The public key can be used to create encrypted messages for the owner of the key (think of this like putting a lock onto the message) -- it can only be decrypted using the private key (the key to the lock that you put on the message). The private key can be used to create signatures of documents. This enables third parties to reliably check whether a text was authored, and is unmodified, by the owner of the private key.

Popular software that integrates this form of encryption into your email program in the openPGP standard are


These programs come with an extensive, 190 page manual, although using the program is really simple and easy due to the plugins for Thunderbird and Apple's mail program.



To encrypt chat sessions, I highly recommend using OTR. It is a plugin for pidgin (windows, linux) and adium (mac), an opensource chat client that supports a wide range of chat protocols, e.g. google talk, msn, facebook, xmpp, icq, and many more. It is also available in gibberbot for Android. Using the skype4pidgin plugin in pidgin or adium, it is possible to encrypt the text chat of skype, too. Unfortunately, it does not help to secure voice communication. There are some guides, including video tutorials for set up.

(Another interesting feature: the plugin not only offers encryption, but also enables plausibly deniablity. If used correctly, by just looking at the encrypted stream of exchanged messages, it is not possible to attribute authorship to the messages.)


For push notification based instant messaging on smartphones, I recommend Threema. The system I described above (OTR) requires users to be online to send messages - but whatsapp and others do not require both parties to be online at the same time. Threema avoids this issue by using a scheme similar to the public key encryption in emails.

Unfortunately, it costs a couple of bucks (~1.8 €), but has no further charges. It basically is an encrypted version of whatsapp. The only drawback is, of course, no intercommunication with other messengers. It is also closed source, meaning it is hard to check what the app actually does, but the cryptography is provided by an open source library NaCl.

Surfing anonymously is a bit harder, and there is a choice of VPN providers. They all are centralized, i.e. there is one party that knows everything you do. There are a few peer to peer solutions, and the best and probably most famous on is the TOR project.
The Tor project offers a a lot and is actually used in China, Egypt and other Arabic countries to enable and protect members of the opposition. There is an amazing talk "How governments have tried to block Tor" by one of the creators, describing the arms race with China and other countries on en-/disabling access to the TOR network - once a user is in, it is almost impossible to track his activities.

Keine Kommentare: