2 posts tagged with "identity"

Bitchat Plugin Support on SPR​

I've released a proof of concept for Bitchat running on Linux, along with a plugin configuration for SPR!

Background​

Since we last wrote about Bitchat, the security response for Bitchat been pretty much perfect. Jack quickly added prominent warnings that Bitchat was in development, and very quickly (as in within a week or so), the protocol moved to use Noise Encryption, providing strong security guarantees. Not long after Bitchat made it to the App Store. And even more impressively a little while later support for Nostr made it in. Recently I got a patch in for a small security fix for handling plaintext DMs.

The Intersection of Vibe Coding and Security​

Many of us have seen glimpses of what agentic generative coding does for security. We see the missteps, and sometimes wonder about the shallow bugs that pile on. Config managers that are almost always arbitrary file upload endpoints. Glue layers that become bash command launch as a service. And most frustratingly, code generation that's excellent at pretending forward progress has been made when no meaningful change has occurred. One of the most impressive parts of agentic coding is exactly that: how convincing it is by appearance and how easily we're tricked about the depth of substance in the code gen. In some ways we extend our trust of people to the stochastic code parrots, assuming that generative coding produced the actual work a human would have probably performed.

Vibe Identity: An Obvious Flaw​

I'm no stranger to e2e breaks, and have been following along over the past decade. Some of my favorite breaks I have found personally include Vaudenay oracles against Kakao, LINE, and bypassable OTR signature verification in iCloud Keychain compromising the password sync.

So this morning when bitchat came up I took some time to look through the code and write up some demos. My first thought was we really don't want or need another protocol, many aspects of Noise would fit in for finer points around true forward secrecy.

But bitchat's most glaring issue is identity. There's essentially no trust/auth built in today. So I would not really think about this as a secure messenger. The protocol has an identity key system, but it's only decorative as implemented and has misleading security claims. The 32-byte public key gets shuffled around with ephemeral key pairs as an opaque blob. The user verification is unfortunately disconnected from any trust and authentication. These are the hallmarks of vibe code (in)security.