A case against security nihilism (cryptographyengineering.com)

468 points by feross on July 20, 2021 | 333 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975

The "less worse scenario of internet communication privacy" is direct IPv6(coze IPv4 with custom port redirections is messy, local custom IPv6 built on ISP provided prefix is much less messy) with custom UDP(or TCP, since its usage is broader than UDP then looks more "normal") ports, E2E encryption with non-public pre-shared keys. If you are competent enough, you would have custom modifications on some standard crypto (usually session pre-shared masks, which generation code is pre-shared) with a super simplified video/audio/text protocol (probably a super lean SIP or XMPP). Ofc, no clear protocol negotiations of any kind, the traffic is immediatly encrypted. If you really want to push it, your protocol should be isochronous and have fixed size data frames ("static", with probably an exception upon tranfering really big data files, unless you are really patient). Of course, everything coded in assembly on various ISAs, optional simple code generators coded in assembly themselves without abuse of any assembler pre-processor, which means the usage of some common binary specifications).

This should give you a rather "good" protection against mass-monitoring, and against John Doh, "hacker only on Sundays".

Yeah, and we did not talk about your "corpo" hardware, your system software built with silent backdoor inject... ahem... I meant "compilers".

And in the end with all that, if the 'services' or some experienced hacking team really want to watch _you_, don't worry, they will: they don't need your password or any of your crypto keys/data.