[inor0gu]

You will always have to root your trust in something, assuming you cannot control the entire pipeline from the sand that becomes the CPU silicone, through the OS and all the way to how packets are forwarded from you to the person on the other end.

This makes that entire goal moot; eliminating trust thus seems impossible, you're just shifting around the things you're willing to trust, or hide them behind an abstraction.

I think what will become more important is to have enough mechanisms to be able to categorically prove if an entity you trust to a certain extent is acting maliciously, and hold them accountable. If economic incentives are not enough to trust a "big guy", what remains is to give all the "little guys" a good enough loudspeaker to point distrust.

A few examples: - certificate transparency logs so your traffic is not MitM'ed - reproducible builds so the binary you get matches the public open source code you expect it does (regardless of its quality) - key transparency, so when you chat with someone on WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage you actually get the public keys you expect and not the NSA's

[parhamn]

> This makes that entire goal moot

I agree. Perhaps it's why I find the discussions like nonce-lengths and randomness sources almost insane (in the sense of willfully missing the forrest from the trees). Intelligence agencies have managed to penetrate the most secretive and powerful organizations known to man. Why would one think Signal's supply chain is impervious? I'd assume the opposite.

[inor0gu]

I don't think they are insane, they are quite useful when designing security mechanisms, while at the same time being utter noise for the end-user benefiting from that system.

> If you're building a chip to generate prime numbers I do surely hope you know how to select randomness or make constant time & branch free algorithms, just like an engineer designing elevators better know what should be the tensile strength of the cable it'll use. In either cases, it's mumbo jumbo for me, and I just need to get on with my day.

Part of what muddies the water is our collective inability to separate the two contexts, or empower tech communicators to do it. If we keep making new tech akin to esoteric magic, no one will board the elevator.

[542354234235]

But depending on your threat model, it can still be useful. If a state actor has a backdoor into something, would they burn that capability to get you? If you are a dissident in a totalitarian government, you would expect them to throw everything at you and not tell anyone how/why. If you are terrorizing and could be tried in a “classified” setting, you would expect them to throw everything at you. If you are Jane Average passing nudes and talking about doing a little Molly last weekend and would have a lawyer go through discovery, you are probably safe.