Day one
In the first day of the workshop, we learned about Qubes OS and how it works from Joanna Rutkowska. In the second talk, Kenny Paterson presented some disturbing facts about the NSA's capabilities from Snowden's revelations such as a rumoured "real-time breakage of RC4" and "ability to break certain unnamed VPN products". Also, he gave some solutions for the new problems of surveillance such as building cryptographic implementations that are "strong, fast and developer-friendly." Next, Phil Zimmermann gave a speech and answered questions. In the last talk of the first day, Jon A. Solworth presented the Ethos Operating System and how his group built the OS. He explained some important features of the OS such as how its networking is "encrypted, cryptographically authenticated, and authorized."Day two
On the second day, Christopher Soghoian spoke about the revelations of the NSA and how the FBI uses this information, i.e. how law enforcement is the "little brother" that does the actions. Claudia Diaz presented some results about website fingerprinting on Tor, i.e. how to collect information from a client that is using Tor. Website fingerprinting consists of recognizing the traffic patterns of specific web pages without other information. Ian Goldberg presented DP5. DP5 allows clients to register and interact with friends without leaking metadata.
"DP5 is the Dagstuhl Privacy-Preserving Presence Protocol P — the extra P is for extra privacy" #PSC pic.twitter.com/eAgyLpxkB1
— GF(¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
(@hdevalence) December 10, 2015
Next, Christian Grothoff talked about the development of GNUnet and how it is built. One little part of the work, i.e. the complexity of the development of any library he presented a dependency graph of GNUnet. Then, in the last part of the workshop, Jacob Appelbaum presented a "modest post-Snowden proposal." In fact, the correct term is post-Snowden revelations, since Snowden is still alive. In this talk, he presented a different view of the situation, that is, we did not need to hide the information. In the last talk of the day, Nathan Freitas presented an overview of the Guardian Project and his experience with development of secure apps for Android. He showed that the Guardian Project has SDKs for encryption in mobile applications such as SQLCipher to encrypt databases.The event presented an ethical view of cryptography and which path cryptography is following. The moment for this discussion could be reached in better time, after the essay from Phillip Rogaway called "The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work," cryptographers need to pay more attention in their work. In simple words, this means that we should care about what we are doing and how this will impact society. We need to ask ourselves what kind of legacy we want to leave behind or what benefits we want to bring to the world in general.
Slides for some speakers' talks are available on the Post-Snowden Cryptography Workshop website.
No backdoors at #PSC pic.twitter.com/IbOTAMrgBx
—GF(¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
(@hdevalence) December 9, 2015
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