![]() I just wrote the following message for Twitter user I simply typed her Twitter handle into the Keybase app and it worked.īEGIN KEYBASE SALTPACK ENCRYPTED MESSAGE. You can safely use Keybase's encryption for backups and similar purposes. The process of adding a device includes a step to ensure this works. They are not backed up to iCloud or Google.Īnd yet, here's the magic: when you encrypt a file in the Keybase app, it will be available for your-or recipients'- future devices too. Your work computer, your home computer, and your phone all have their own keys, which never leave them. Each of your installs gets its own private device key. With Keybase, you simply bring 2 devices together to provision the new one. How high, we asked, must we pin the goat entrails. How do we summon the private key from one device to another? Or shall we make a new key and somehow sign it? How many bits in this new key, we wondered. ![]() “It’s a core infrastructure that can be used in millions of cases,” Krohn says, “so that in the future, people can own their own data and own their own cryptographic keys to access that data.” In that future, people could keep their secrets to themselves-and those special someones with whom they want to share them.Recall getting a new computer in the olden PGP days. They plan to extend the technology’s use to other developers, as well: for example, they are partnering with cryptocurrency company Stellar to use Keybase for instant financial transactions across international borders. So far, Krohn and colleagues have rolled out the technology in a chat app that works like an encrypted version of Slack and in a file-sharing app much like an encrypted Dropbox. The corresponding private keys used to decrypt transmitted data, meanwhile, are kept securely on recipients’ own devices.īeyond its approach to authentication, Keybase stands out for the way its advanced cryptography techniques can be applied to, and are transportable across, a range of user-friendly applications. To ensure recipients are who they say they are, Keybase links the ownership of public keys with multiple email, Twitter, Reddit, and other social-media accounts-the more accounts linked, the more confidence a sender has. Senders use recipients’ public keys to encrypt the data. Sending information on Keybase requires both sender and recipient to have their own pair of public and private keys. Keybase, which Krohn cofounded with OkCupid veteran Chris Coyne, employs what’s known as end-to-end encryption to keep user data totally secret-even from the apps through which users might share their data-so no third party can hijack it along the way. ![]() “There is a lot of great theoretical work around cryptography, and then there is the way people act day to day, and there is a pretty big gap between them.” Keybase, he says, aims to close that gap. His latest venture, Keybase, tackles that problem head-on, harnessing studies in cryptography he began at MIT to create a simple but powerful platform for securing user data. “Maybe it isn’t such a rosy future to be storing people’s deepest, darkest secrets on all of these databases and hoping all of these system administrators get it right,” he says. Krohn sold the site in 2011, however, and he began to have second thoughts about all the sensitive personal information that people were forever launching into the cloud. Unlike other dating sites that took themselves ultra-seriously and charged substantial fees, the service was witty, irreverent, and free-and full of fun quizzes to determine your dating personality or your Harry Potter alter ego. Maxwell Krohn, SM ’05, PhD ’08, helped revolutionize internet dating in the early 2000s with a site he cofounded with some college buddies: OkCupid.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |