[Cryptography] Boing Boing pushing an RSA Conference boycott

[Smári McCarthy]

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On 01/13/2014 08:26 PM, Kent Borg wrote:
> We have a proud example in Lavabit, and I would hope that if we saw
> a resume with Lavabit on it we would be impressed.

Disagree. Lavabit is a good example only in that they did the right
thing in the face of legal pressure. That is politically very
important and I'm thankful that they did it, but they are a terrible
example every other way. They had an insecure system ("let us store
your keymatter, your ciphertext, and receive your passphrase - but we
can't decrypt it, honest!"). It was possible to put that system under
legal pressure. That should not have been possible.

If we were to see Lavabit resume (as they tried to do with vague
promises of releasing their currently existing source code in exchange
for large sums of money - see
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ladar/lavabits-dark-mail-initiative ),
I would hope that this community would hold them to a very high
standard. Moxie has attempted to do so with good results:
http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/lavabit-critique/

I do not mean to say that these people cannot produce secure systems,
merely that they have misled people in the past in ways where they
certainly should have known better.

  - Smári



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