If you're talking about a security product -- which TrueCrypt is -- the first metric you have to concern yourself with is: does it keep you secure? The user experience and the adoption and the performance and all that other fun stuff is irrelevant if the product doesn't do the one thing that every user unequivocally requires of it.
So yes, it's not just about the crypto...when the crypto works. But when the crypto is insecure, which is what tptacek is saying, then yes, it is ONLY about the crypto.
NB: I'm plenty qualified on UX and general technical matters, but on whether crypto is secure, I defer to the experts.
My only point has been that Thomas, et. al. have been telling us we don't want something like TrueCrypt, despite the fact that we very clearly do. His suggestion of "just use PGP and FS level encryption" is absurd, but NOT from a crypto standpoint (I, like you, defer to Thomas and the other experts on the integrity of the crypto itself). It is, however, absurd from a UX/workflow standpoint.
Horseshit. Round 1 and Round 2 of the audit share technical members. The guy leading the actual crypto review work has been looking at Truecrypt for more than a year. And Matthew Green, who coordinates the whole audit project, just wrote that he and his students have been reviewing Truecrypt's crypto for months.
They did not "only get their act together today". They've thought about Truecrypt far more rigorously than you have, and for far, far longer.
You've been almost completely unable to explain in technical terms what "UX" you want from sector-level crypto that you couldn't get from filesystem crypto. When pressed, you in effect say "yeah, well, name a tool that does that".
The fact that your only options today are [insecure, easy] and [secure, difficult] does not mean that there is no [secure, easy] option possible. But militating in favor of insecure crypto goes a long way towards hiding that possibility from everyone.
This isn't a pedantic point. Ross Ulbricht just got reamed in federal court because a simple physical arrest compromised virtually every secret he had. Why? Because he was relying on sector-level all-or-nothing crypto. By encouraging people to rely on tools like Truecrypt, you are, in a very small but real way, endangering them.
Today was the day Matthew Green released an update on his blog.
I was just reading it, and that's exclusively I was referring to. I look forward to the results and am grateful of the time they're spending. I hope they find nothing.
This isn't a pedantic point. Ross Ulbricht just got reamed in federal court because a simple physical arrest compromised virtually every secret he had. Why? Because he was relying on sector-level all-or-nothing crypto.
TrueCrypt lets you create fixed sized encrypted volumes, and allows you to decrypt those volumes on any of the three major OS platforms.
There's nothing special about TrueCrypt in how it performs the encryption/decryption (or so we're told), but no tool besides TrueCrypt allows such a flexible approach.
And it's you who refuses to accept that [secure,easy] can exist, because it'd make you irrelevant. It's a completely silly stance to take, but it's yours.
But hey, at least I've wrung your opinion on TrueCrypt out of you:
> By encouraging people to rely on tools like Truecrypt, you are, in a very small but real way, endangering them.
For posterity, in case you edit it away.
Which leads me to the question: Why are you even involved in the TrueCrypt audit, if you think it's a bad idea to use such tools?
P.S. Ulbricht was caught because the FBI owned TOR, and that's about it. Maybe your indignation towards TrueCrypt should consider Snowden's use of TrueCrypt to evade the combined allied world's intelligence community.
Would you like to put money on whether my opinion about Truecrypt is identical to Matthew Green's and Kenn White's, or would you like to include them in your critique?
It's amusing that you feel you've "wrung out" of me something one of the few things I've recently blogged at length about.
