doc-golix

'm not [1] the only [2] person (and, since I'm effectively 100% unknown, I'm far, FAR from the most prominent, who is arguably Bruce Schneier [3]) to criticize PGP, but at the core of it, even ignoring substantial usability issues, have you ever tried to forward a PGP message? It's sort-of possible, if you re-encrypt and re-sign everything, but it's certainly not practical and definitely not scalable. Sharing and re-sharing is the cornerstone of much of the social internet, and PGP renders it effectively impossible. Keybase has a really, really cool body of work surrounding "connect this PGP key to this physical identity", but unfortunately PGP keys are only one in a small subset of cryptographic identities, which is itself an even smaller subset of digital identities in general. I get why they've done it this way; the alternative is to write your own cryptographic protocol that nobody is using, which is a much riskier thing (speaking from experience [4]). But at the end of the day, all of Keybase hinges around using PGP (or a PGP-like approach), and I'm very skeptical that's a viable solution to the social problems we have today. [1] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-ma... [2] https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/ [3] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/11/testing_the_u... [4] https://github.com/Muterra/doc-golix

ely impossible to buy "dumb". Every analysis and meta-analysis of IoT that I've seen has been incredibly bullish on it, and I think that's an indication of how much economic incentive there is for it. Given that, I'd say automobile ECIs are the proof in the pudding for the assertion that IoT will be unavoidably ubiquitous. As an experiment, try to find a new car that you can personally can actually buy, that doesn't have a computer in it. As the median Western consumer, that's not possible. So I'm pretty convinced that for IoT, non-participation will not remain an option. So then the question is, what do we do about those 5 issues? I tend to look at stuff like this from an economic perspective; clearly device producers haven't seen enough market pressure to give a shit about any of them. Right now, the only pressure device creators are demonstrating is a profound push to get something, anything, to market. It really is an internet of shit. That being said, even the bare minimum is really hard here. You're talking about a system architecture that our existing infrastructure simply isn't cut out to handle. Think about the challenges involved in deploying a reliable authentication system to a web-scale application, and now imagine doing it in a way that can't necessarily rely upon a central server. It's far easier to just "punt" on the second half of that, assume the traditional web paradigm (trusted third party server), and call it a day. And make no mistake, for a commercial device, authentication is absolutely required, even for home WiFi network: not everyone wants every person in their house to control, for example, their locks. Or, alternatively, imagine an AirBNB host being forced to give their guests unfettered access to their IoT vibrator (yes, they exist). These edge cases are everywhere, and they make authentication of some sort or another an absolute requirement. My hope is that someone (and by someone, in all honesty I'm talking about my own project [1]) can come along and say to device producers: 1. I understand how hard it is for you to make any IoT device. 2. I'm going to make it substantially cheaper for you to do that, but... 3. The privacy and security I've baked into my system is inseparable from your economic benefit as a device producer. The idea is to evolve that into: 4. You cannot be competitive in the IoT marketplace without privacy and security. At this point, with how completely and totally horrendous the industry has been in these areas so far, I think that's the only viable way we can achieve those goals without a tremendous amount of growing pains. [1] The project is called Hypergolix, and at this point it's basically "Dropbox for Python objects, geared towards IoT, with an emphasis on social, and secured via end-to-end encryption". We're in the process of getting a private alpha shippable, to be followed soon by a public alpha. It all works, and it's all open source, but there's some necessary stuff we need to iron out in the coming weeks. Our outdated landing page is https://hypergolix.com, but a better preview of the developer experience is on our very incomplete docs page: http://pyhgx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html . The whole project is backed by a crypto protocol known as Golix: https://github.com/Muterra/doc-golix