Tinfoilchat inspired ideas
Just repeating one of the diagram
Tinfoil-chat(pdf) is cool. Here is one of the diagrams.
Did not put much work into thinking about these below, doing this largely “for fun” and they’re not necessarily totally original;
Computers that just receive or just send.
But i thought, well now you need three computers.. What if you wanted a single device that did something like this?
So the idea is that each computer still just receives or sends. The receiving one is connected to a display and keyboard(input) where it draws the message to be created.
The second computer just looks at all the keyboard inputs, and in parallel figures out what the messages are.
In receiving, you might know H(Pubkey)
, and the message repeats Pubkey
,
so knowing someone indeed has H(Pubkey)
is enough. However, in sending,
the sender computer knows nothing, never receives anything other than
what is typed in. You have to re-type the entire receiving Pubkey
in order for it to be able to.
Attacks
Point of these schemes is that they mitigate the effect of being hacked. So lets consider being the screen(receiving) computer being hacked, for instance because one of the contacts was malicious, or on some side-channel of the crypto.
Even if the screen computer does the attackers bidding, you cannot send anything any other way than the arrows; you can only send to the display. So you can only programmatically depend that on data in the screen computer.(unless you know about it separately)
You could simply disable the device, or try feign subtil frustrating malfunctions. More active is to try get the user to think they should type something, that the send-computer will then send. For instance the private key of the screen computer. With that, you can eavesdrop on all traffic towards the device.
Note
In some ways it is really quite similar to TFC. I mean, you could easily imagine this device being hooked up, ‘network’ being pidgin, like TFC suggest. Main difference is the idea of parallel construction of the message in the sender and screen computer, and that here, the screen computer does know about what messages are being sent.
Reading the state of an installation by hardware
Instead of the OS making checksums, a separate piece of hardware does. This can also put messages to the network.
Then, when other devices exist with a similar setup, they can see if the software checksums are what they should be. So if the one computer is compromised and the others ‘watching’ it are not, those others are warned, and can warn the owner.