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Your last paragraph is quite insulting to the work we do, suggesting intention to trap people ? Did I read this right ?

I'm not really sure i want to continue the conversation unless you retract this. Our team is working hard on many fronts and does not deserve to be treated like that.

If you believe it's critical that the "link situation" be resolved, where is the pull request, or even the specification of the necessary change ?

Ludovic




I think the work you've done with cryptpad, while impressive on many levels and, I'm assuming, motivated by a desire to make secure document collaboration more accessible, is actually putting people at increased risk due to how bad this issue with the share URLs is.

I attempted to disclose the issue responsibly (in other words, not as a github issue), and urged you to make passwords mandatory for documents, or at least default with a prominent warning displayed for users foregoing the password. The response I received indicated that Cryptpad didn't consider this to be a vulnerability, but that you'd welcome changes to improve documentation.

You asked where my PR was: I gladly would submit one if I didn't expect it to be closed based on the response I had received prior, but I don't think documentation changes would cut it.

I wasn't intending to make this personal and I definitely wasn't saying that you (or your team's) motivations were unambiguously malicious or deceptive. My last paragraph was perhaps overly dramatic, but my impression is that Cryptpad positions itself as a general-purpose e2ee document collaboration suite, and one of the use cases I associate with that positioning, one of the less strict ones if I'm honest, would be something like:

> empower laypeople to collaborate on documents with reasonable confidence that nation-state actors won't be able to passively surveil those documents.

which is a much softer use case to satisfy than, say, providing halfway-decent protection from active, targeted surveillance (the space I believe Signal to be in, and also the space I'd love Cryptpad to be in)

So if those aren't among the kinds of things y'all think about when designing Cryptpad, then I'd appreciate if you made your overall project goals and use cases more explicit. Of course there are other valid reasons to desire document security, they're just not ones I tend to spend as much time thinking about.


Disclaimer: I'm the CEO of the company doing CryptPad.

The problem I have, is that you say the word "vulnerability" for CryptPad when we never promised to protect you from a badly configured computer.

If there is a vulnerability, it's unsecured browser syncing which would be exposing your browsing history to Google. Google Docs has anonymous links which are in that history too.

BTW I could not find any info about browser companies exposing the synced browser history. As far as I know It's encrypted on Chrome and Firefox. But maybe I'm wrong as I believe if people want to be sure why would they use browser sync ?

Note that in addition to passwords there are also Access configs where the server can block access to documents to specific users. This is an additional security which mitigates the issue of links that would be opened on a bad browser. Sharing links through CryptPad as also the recommended way to never have URLs opened by your browser.

When I mentioned PR, you could also fork and run your server with higher security settings.

If a team does not respond to your vision, you can indeed bitch about that team, or you can come and give more proof of your vision. Documentation also help ? Why not document that browser syncing would be risky for activists ?

So take this as a call to be constructive. Make a github issue and propose something that helps. Maybe indeed add a message and a link to more documentation about good and bad ways to use shared links.

About "> empower laypeople to collaborate on documents with reasonable confidence that nation-state actors won't be able to passively surveil those documents", did you read our white paper ?

Ludovic


Seems like Microsoft and Google employees have joined the room.

They might as well complain that cryptopad isn't secure because it is connected to electricity all the time. They'll never be satisfied, fortunately they are also relatively easy to spot.




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