technology Wanna be a beta tester for an anti-NSA program?

[Stormbringer 347]

Here we go! This project is called "Snowed In". I, your favorite mlpforums member, am the loyal moderator of our very own pony thread. Go here! http://w11.zetaboards.com/Snowed_In/topic/9780708/1/#new

[Doc. Volt 2,561]

uhm... i am gonna think about this.. could be a nice report for my university

[Stormbringer 347]

How so? It'd be greatly appreciated if you supported us on the forums.

[Mlpfan185 1,763]

Something was here. Something was here. Something was here. 

Edited October 10, 2018 by NONAME

[Stormbringer 347]

@, 

 

In the words of the creator of Snowed In:

 

To address all of these points:

1. TrueCrypt does all of this, in a much simpler fashion, and even provides ghost OS features.
I'm not going for simplicity. The idea here is to *sorta* make my own OS. I plan to make it an all-in-one deal, complete with internal editing programs for basic file types and a file and program system comparable in some ways to an actual OS. It'll be a sort of shell for my future software projects.
2. You are talking about storing external keys over a network, what you may already realise is, the big stink with the NSA is all about its backdoor access to major hosting companies and tier 1 line spying.
I could be misunderstanding what you're saying here, but there will be no keys stored in any manner. If you want to distribute the encrypted files with a key, be my guest, but this will not be designed with such. Simple: remember the key, or record it some other way, and use it for encryption and decryption. The keys directly describe how information should be encoded, so this really has more in common with scrambling than with encryption in terms of how data is processed.
3. Many encryption keys, if the government wants them, can be obtained through extortion and prison time.
This point is invalid because that is true of ANYTHING. I don't care how secure your system is or tries to be, if you give someone the key, it will become accessible to them. No software will change that.
4. Translation from binary into a subset of numbers is already available, and with encryption at that. As an example, take a base(64) injection virus.
I recognize this, and I have in fact written software in the past for converting from binary to text, just as a personal test for myself for reading and writing bytes using Mark Overmars' GML (GameMaker Language). This is just an example of me wanting to include more than just encryption and decryption into Snowed In. If you wanted to directly email an encoded file, you could directly export it as simple text rather than exporting to binary and using a separate program to convert that to text.
5. To insure proper compatibility, unless you are REALLY talented, you would need a team of people helping. As the project grew, so would the complaints, this would require hiring help. One of the ways the NSA obtains the ability to crack encryption software, is through traditional spy maneuvers. You end up hiring a tag they send out. That person adds vulnerabilities. TrueCrypt was victim of this (they have patched since then).
While I may have big dreams for this project, I will not be outsourcing to anyone more than a small team composed of people I've known personally. This was something I worried about quite a bit, especially when I decided to make the source code available as soon as a usable product was completed. But when it comes down to it, I could give away all the information in the world, but without the keys used to encrypt the files, it wouldn't do jack. Files are directly encrypted/scrambled using the key itself, and thus would require the key during encryption, no matter how much a cracker knows about the inner-workings of the program.
I plan on porting everything over to Linux and Mac myself, and might into an Android port. All of my work is being done with potential cross-compatibility in the future in mind. Any sufh port would be a while, but that's okay, since this is more of a hobby for me as it stands.

I've taken a look at TrueCrypt before, and I can't say I complete trust it. Probably just being paranoid, but I don't. If I make it myself, then I can trust it, at least for my own personal use.