Dating Site on Eccentric Authentication

walkthrough datingsite

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This blog gives a simple walk through “The world’s mode secure dating site”.

It’s full of technobabble talk of how the security system
operates. Feel free to ignore that at first reading.

We assume that you’ve installed the ecca-proxy as described.
If not, you’ll see some Don’t panic messages. We describe those later.

Home page

This is the url for the dating site.

http://dating.wtmnd.nl/

If you enter this into your browser you’ll see this page.

It’s a bit boring, just some plain text, no images. However, the proxy
has done a lot of work already.

It uses DNSSEC to resolve the hostname (dating.wtmnd.nl) into the
IP-address 94.142.241.226.

It also uses a DANE, an extension protocol to lookup the
TLS-certificate of the server. Every connection from the ecca-proxy to
the site uses https under the hood. We have to deserve the claim
‘most secure’ somehow.

Now click on the button ‘The aliens”.

The aliens

Here is the list of aliens. This page is visible without logging in
yet. Click one of the aliens and you see the detail page. It doen’t
have much details, as we want to showcase the technology behind
eccntric authentication. The most important thing is the “Compose a
Poem” button.

If you have an account you can send encrypted messages to other
participants. And you can receive messages too. To create an account,
press the ‘Your profile’ button at the top.

signing up

Here it turns ugly. Although only the page layout. What we get is a
page generated by the Ecca-proxy user agent. It is your computer that
asks you what to do. The dating site just waits until we return with a
valid account. It tells us with the 401 - Eccentric Authentication
required that it wants an anonymous client certificate, signed by
it’s own CA. See Anonymous Logins.

There are three options on the page.

The first option the proxy offers me (the user) to log in with my
existing account (guidow). Pressing that button tells the proxyt that
we want all subsequent connection to the dating site with that
account. Behind that account, the proxy logs in with the client
certificate.

The second option allows me to sign up for a new account. I come up
with a nickname and press the ‘Register’ button. The proxy (running on
my own computer) will create a new private key, and registers the
public key at the site’s own Certificate Authority. It checks if the
nickname is unique and signs it. Our proxy receives the certificate
and uses that to log in at the site.

Notice there are two components: The site itself and the Local Certificate Authority.

Finally, there is a third option to register anonymously. My proxy
will come up with a unique name ‘anon-’ and registers an
account with that name at the Local CA.

We take that third - anonymous - option.

signed up - manage profile

With a second or two, we are back at the dating site. And the proxy has logged me in.

The top part of the browser window is the part of the Ecca proxy. It shows that I’m logged in at the dating site, with the account it has created for me. There is also a log out button and a link to the proxy’s management page where we can see all accounts we have for all sites where we have accounts.

The blue part of the page is the dating site. It shows the typical questions to create a profile. Select some at will and press Engage. That sets the profile at the dating site. Now we are ready to comminicate.

sending messages

Click on the ‘Aliens’ button, select one of them to whom you want to
write a Vogon Poem. Click on the name to get to the details
page. There, click ‘Compose a Poem’.

Here we are at another simple looking but interesting screen. It’s just a textbox and a Deliver-button. All the interesting things happen - invisible - inside the ecca-proxy.

It’s the ecca-proxy that receives the message and two hidden parameters that the dating site put there. (The site and the proxy work together on this.)

<form method="POST">
  <input type="hidden" name="encrypt" value="required">
  <input type="hidden" name="certificate_url" 
     value="https://register-dating.wtmnd.nl:10444/get-certificate? ...
       ...  nickname=guidow%40%40dating.wtmnd.nl">
  <br>
  <textarea name="cleartext" rows="8" cols="80">
     I love the size of your ... ehm ... spaceship. Wanna dance?
  </textarea><br>
  <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Deliver">
</form>

This tells the proxy to encrypt the data in the form with the public
key it can find in the in the certificate at the given URL. The proxy
fetches the certificate, encrypts the data with it and submits it to
the dating site.

The dating site receives the encrypted text! It cannot read the
contents of the message. Only the recipient can. Now we wait for the
recipient to read our message and reply….

… and wait …

Oh, wait, as I control both accounts, both the anonymous and the guidow-account,
I’ve effectively sent a message to myself. We have to switch the
account.

manage accounts

First press the logout-button in the top part. You get to the Eccentric Authentication Handler.

As you can see, I have seven accounts at three sites.

receiving encrypted message

Click on the dating.wtmnd.nl link. You get back to the home page. Now
press the ‘Read messages’ button.

The site will want to know as whom we want to log in. The proxy offers
our two accounts for this site, not the accounts we have at the
other two sites.

Now we click ‘guidow’, to log in with that identity. The site receives
our certificate with the name, looks up the messages and presents what
it has for us. It looks like this:

That gibberish is what the dating site received from the ecca-proxy of
the sender. It looks like a Vogon Poem indeed.

Below it is the link to decode. Press it and it will tell the
ecca-proxy to decode the message with the private key is has for my
guidow-account. Then the proxy shows me what it has decoded.

Just what we expected.

conclusion

At no point has the dating site asked for an email address, real names
or identities. When it would be paid service, it can do so for listing
the account name in the list of aliens. Or it could require payment
for the alien-to-alien communication.

The user stays completely anonymous.

Here we’ve shown a way to create client certificates to log in to a
web site. All the hard work is done by the Ecca-proxy. The user specifies the actions and the accounts to use.

How could it be more user friendly?

run it yourself

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Safe, secure and as anonymous as you want.

It was already possible to test drive the Eccentric Authentication
Proxy. But it required you to compile software. Now we’ve flattend that
hurdle (a bit).

As of today we can offer the first download of our client software for
Debian GNU/Linux. It might even work at other linux-distributions.

The software is a local proxy service. It sits on your computer,
receiving requests from your brower. It does all cryptographic
operations that browsers are bad at.

Here is a walkthrough of what you can expect when you run it: walkthrough.

download

You can download the ecca-proxy software here: ecca-proxy.tgz

Notice that this is a 64-bit executable. (linux only).

run it

To run it, perform these steps:

apt get install libunbound2 libsqlite3 openssl
tar xzvf ecca-proxy.tgz

./ecca-proxy

configure your browser

You need to configure your brower to send all requests to the ecca-proxy. Here is how to do that:

start your browser (iceweasel/firefox)
click on Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings

You should see this:

Click ‘Manual…’ and fill in 127.0.0.1 and port 8000 at the HTTP Proxy setting and press Ok -> Close

Now you’re ready to play with it. We have two websites that offer Eccentric Authentication:

1. The worlds’ most secure dating site

It looks a bit like a dating site. You can get a list of aliens (as we
call humans that use this service). You can create your own
profile. And you can send encrypted messages. The proxy is handling
encryption and decryption. The dating site only sees the unreadable
bits (ciphertext).

To see the messaging in action, get a friend to sign up too and send
encrypted messages to each other. It’s free!

http://dating.wtmnd.nl/

2. The cryptoblog

It’s a rudimentary blogging site. You can create a blog or comment on
other peoples’ blogs. The demo showcases how one can exchange keys
with strangers - correctly - without any dificult prodedures. Instead,
just click.

http://cryptoblog.wtmnd.nl/

Free software

This is all Free Software with open source code. The source code of the ecca-proxy is at:
github.com/gwitmond/ecca-proxy.
The dating site is based at github.com/gwitmond/ecca-datingsite.

the worlds most private dating site

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The worlds most private dating site

With Eccentric Authentication we can design the worlds most private
dating site. Ecca gives us benefits that other authentication
mechanisms cannot provide. Namely: Completely anonymous and fully
secure.

Similarities

Like any other dating site, ours allows you to create a profile and
search for other peoples’ profiles. When you’ve found a
Profile-of-Interest, you can write messages to the person behind the
profile.

The similarities end here. See what we do diffently.

Sign up

We require our users to sign up with an Ecca account. As with every
ecca-account you choose your nickname. It’s how you wish to be known on the
site. Names can be anything, say “Beer Belly” or “Biker Babe”.

When you’ve chosen your username, your browser creates the account for
you:

it creates a private and public key;
it offers the username and public key to the site for signing;
it receives the certificate;
it keeps the private key secure.

The certificate allows you to log in and create your profile.

After you’ve paid the membership fee, our site lists your profile.
Now you can browse profiles and other members can view yours.

Private messaging

Say you have registerd under the name Beer Belly. You find the profile
of Biker Babe interesting to start a private conversation with
her. Would you use a conventional dating site, you only have their promise
that they won’t read your message. Or at least that they have the ‘decency’ not to
tell you that they do read your messages.

With Ecca, you don’t have that worry. No one except Biker Babe can
read your message. Here’s how that works.

You press the ‘private-message’ button on your browser. It fetches the
certificate of Biker Babe. In the certificate is her public key.

You type your message, your browser encrypts it with Biker Babes’
public key. That makes the message only readable to her. Now you sign
it with your private key. Then you hand it over to our dating site for
delivery.

When Biker Babe logs in, your message will be delivered. She fetches
your certificate from the site. That allows her to: 1. verify that you
are a member of the site; 2. send messages back to you.

Going further

When the two of you like your conversation so much you can take it up a
notch and do a voice chat.

Each of you feeds the certificate of the other into your (privacy
preserving) voice chat application and the systems will set up a
encrypted voice channel, ready to talk ~~dirty~~.

This chat application is not connected to the dating site. It doesn’t
need to be. All that it needs is the the certificate of the other
party and your private key. Technically, it also needs a common ground
where the two programs can find each other before they validate the
certificates and set up the audio channel but that’s out of the scope
of this blog post.

Abuse handling

Suppose one of the BB’s is too liberal with the private channels and
behaves too inappropriate to the other BB’s opinion. Let’s say that
BB1 finds the message of BB2 inappropriate.

BB1 has now several options:

Block all messages signed by BB2;
Report the messages to the dating site staff; If they agree that
BB2 went out of line, they close the account. BB1 cannot falsely
accuse BB2. The messages are signed with BB2’s private key, so
there’s the proof.

In both cases BB2 now needs create a new account and pay the
membership fee again to be able to contact BB1 ever again.

Closing an account

Our dating site doesn’t have to do much to close the account. It just
blacklists your public key from login in and refuse to accept your
messages to other members.

There is no need for a CRL or other crypto revocation
protocols. We keep it simple but effective. Eventually the certificate
expires and we can clean up our blacklist.

Wipe your trail

When your subscription to our dating site expires, it
would be in your best interest to delete your private key.

Would you ever use that private key to sign a message and you somehow
you would need to public with your real world identity, it allows your
dating partner to match these messages and publish your love letters,
fully attributed to you. Although embarassing at best, it could be
worse if you where the one so rude that the site closed your account.

The Ecca protocol almost makes that problem a non-issue because it
generates a new private key for every account you create and your
browser handles all the crypto-bits.

Trust considerations

When you decided to sign up for our dating service and pay the fee,
you made a trust decision. Your decision is most likely based upon
recommendations from people that you trust.

You wouldn’t make that decision because some global CA has signed a
server certificate that made the address bar green.

It’s the other way around. By trusting our site enough to sign up, you trust
us to have our cryptography in order so you can communicate
privately with the other members of the site.

If we don’t have our crypto in order, or we turn out to be
crooks, you’ve only lost some money. You never gave us your real
world identity. (And you did pay in bitcoin, didn’t you?)

Deployment

The bad news: To deploy this we need to improve our web browsers. The
good news, we can start with just three – not too complicated –
browser plug ins to get things going. That’s for another blog.