Hacking group plans system to encrypt social media and other apps

picnic@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 69 points –
washingtonpost.com

The hacktivist group Cult of the Dead Cow will release details about the system at Def Con next week.

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This is the best summary I could come up with:


SAN FRANCISCO — Once known for distributing hacking tools and shaming software companies into improving their security, a famed group of technology activists is now working to develop a system that will allow the creation of messaging and social networking apps that won’t keep hold of users’ personal data.

The latest effort, to be detailed at the massive annual Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas next week, seeks to provide a foundation for messaging, file sharing and even social networking apps without harvesting any data, all secured by the kind of end-to-end encryption that makes interception hard even for governments.

The team behind Veilid has not yet released documentation explaining its design choices, and collaborative work on an initial messaging app, intended to function without requiring a phone number, has yet to produce a test version.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment, but law enforcement agencies often complain that end-to-end encryption makes it hard to scan messages for criminal plots and for police to recover evidence after the fact.

That pair includes Peiter Zatko, widely known as Mudge, who was a program manager at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the head of security for the online payments facilitator Stripe.


I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This sounds very useful, I wonder to what extent federated platforms like ours can make use of it? It sounds as if apps will need to specially deisgned around it, given it presents challenges to traditional moderation of things like DMs between users.