SIsillysaurus3·Aug 13, 2017
Some of you might recognize NCC Group, the company that performed the cryptographic review. They acquired Matasano, tptacek's prior company. Collectively they have some of the most talented pentesters and cryptographic analysts.
It's a safe bet that the (n+1)sec protocol has an excellent security rating on the basis that they only found one low-severity issue and two informational issues during the analysis.
https://github.com/equalitie/np1sec/raw/master/doc/NCC_Group...
Note the caveat:
NCC Group reviewed the full specification, however, only the portions of the library that lined up with the protocol were reviewed. NCC Group did not perform a line-by-line review of the entire library. Additionally, the review focused on the library and not a chat client implementing the library.
This means that the theory is sound, but the library itsel
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f wasn't actually pentested. That isn't an indication that there are problems -- just that no one has looked for them yet. As a specific example: https://github.com/equalitie/np1sec/blob/05b73b506b83be9724c... It sounds like assessing memory errors was outside the scope of the security review, so it seems unlikely that anyone was thinking about questions like "is there a way for an attacker to trick buffer.size() into becoming -1 and DoSing the system?" It was focused mostly on the mathematical soundness of the cryptosystem.
It's extraordinarily expensive to schedule a two-week pentest, but implementation errors are far more commonly exploited than attacking the properties of a cryptosystem directly. It might be good to schedule an additional pentest if possible.
That said, this is mostly incidental. Congrats on shipping!