encryption – WIRED

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Caption: Original illustration: Getty

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Caption: A screenshot from an early demo of miniLock.

Encryption is hard. When NSA leaker Edward Snowden wanted to communicate with journalist Glenn Greenwald via encrypted email, Greenwald couldnt figure out the venerable crypto program PGP even after Snowden made a 12-minute tutorial video.

Nadim Kobeissi wants to bulldoze that steep learning curve. At theHOPE hacker conference in New York later this month hell release a beta version of an all-purpose file encryption program called miniLock, a free and open-source browser plugin designed to let even Luddites encrypt and decrypt files with practically uncrackable cryptographic protection in seconds.

The tagline is that this is file encryption that does more with less, says Kobeissi, a 23-year old coder, activist and security consultant. Its super simple, approachable, and its almost impossible to be confused using it.

Kobeissis creation, which he says is in an experimental phase and shouldnt yet be used for high security files, may in fact be the easiest encryption software of its kind. In an early version of the Google Chrome plugin tested by WIRED, we were able to drag and drop a file into the program in seconds, scrambling the data such that no one but the intended recipientin theory not even law enforcement or intelligence agenciescould unscramble and read it. MiniLock can be used to encrypt anything from video email attachments to photos stored on a USB drive, or to encrypt files for secure storage on Dropbox or Google Drive.

Like the older PGP, miniLock offers so-called public key encryption. In public key encryption systems, users have two cryptographic keys, a public key and a private one. They share the public key with anyone who wants to securely send them files; anything encrypted with that public key can only be decrypted with their private key, which the user guards closely.

Kobeissis version of public key encryption hides nearly all of that complexity. Theres no need to even register or log inevery time miniLock launches, the user enters only a passphrase, though miniLock requires a strong one with as many as 30 characters or a lot of symbols and numbers. From that passphrase, the program derives a public key, which it calls a miniLock ID, and a private key, which the user never sees and is erased when the program closes. Both are the same every time the user enters the passphrase. That trick of generating the same keys again in every session means anyone can use the program on any computer without worrying about safely storing or moving a sensitive private key.

No logins, and no private keys to manage. Both are eliminated. Thats whats special, says Kobeissi. Users can have their identity for sending and receiving files on any computer that has miniLock installed, without needing to have an account like a web service does, and without needing to manage key files like PGP.

In fact, miniLock uses a flavor of encryption that had barely been developed when PGP became popular in the 1990s: elliptic curve cryptography. Kobeissi says that crypto toolset allows for tricks that havent been possible before; PGPs public keys, which users have to share with anyone who wants to send them encrypted files, often fill close to a page with random text. MiniLock IDs are only 44 characters, small enough that they can fit in a tweet with room to spare. And elliptic curve crypto makes possible miniLocks feature of deriving the users keys from his or her passphrase every time its entered rather than storing them. Kobeissi says hes saving the full technical explanation of miniLocks elliptic curve feats for his HOPE conference talk.

Despite all those clever features, miniLock may not get a warm welcome from the crypto community. Kobeissis best-known previous creation is Cryptocat, a secure chat program that, like miniLock, made encryption so easy that a five-year-old could use it. But it also suffered from several serious security flaws that led many in the security community to dismiss it as useless or worse, a trap offering vulnerable users an illusion of privacy.

But the flaws that made Cryptocat into the security communitys whipping boy have been fixed, Kobeissi points out. Today the program been downloaded close to 750,000 times, and in a security ranking of chat programs by the German security firm PSW Group last month it tied for first place.

Despite Cryptocats early flaws, miniLock shouldnt be dismissed, says Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University who highlighted previous bugs in Cryptocat and has now also reviewed Kobeissis design spec for miniLock. Nadim gets a lot of crap, Green says. But slighting him over things he did years ago is getting to be pretty unfair.

Green is cautiously optimistic about miniLocks security. I wouldnt go out and encrypt NSA documents with it right now, he says. But it has a nice and simple cryptographic design, with not a lot of places for it to go wrongThis is one that I actually think will take some review, but could be pretty secure.

Kobeissi says hes also learned lessons from Cryptocats failures: miniLock wont initially be released in the Chrome Web Store. Instead, hes making its code available on GitHub for review, and has taken special pains to document how it works in detail for any auditors. This isnt my first rodeo, he says. [MiniLocks] openness is designed to show sound programming practice, studied cryptographic design decisions, and to make it easy to evaluate miniLock for potential bugs.

If miniLock becomes the first truly idiot-proof public key encryption program, it could bring sophisticated encryption to a broad new audience. PGP sucks, Johns Hopkins Green says. The ability for regular people to encrypt files is actually a valuable thing[Kobeissi] has stripped away the complexity and made this thing that does what we need it to do.

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encryption - WIRED