[guardian-dev] Silent Text for Android - interesting feature

[Daniel McCarney]

I'd advocate being very careful in how the functionality is described. I'm
always nervous when talk of burner messages comes up. It's sufficiently simple
that average users think they understand the security properties, but impossible
to guarantee much from an implementation perspective. The devil is in the
details :-)

Even on an entirely trusted platform with no security flaws (I wish!) you could
always take a picture of the screen before the message destructs (the "analog
hole").

- Dan

On 26/07, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> 
> 
> On 07/26/2013 11:46 AM, Nathan of Guardian wrote:
> > On 07/26/2013 11:38 AM, Matej Kovacic wrote:
> >> this is proprietary software (I think it is not opensourced yet), but
> >> has one interesting feature - burning notices (deleting messages after
> >> the other party received it).
> > 
> > I do understand why a "this message will self destruct" feature is
> > desirable, but I just can't bring myself to try and implement one.
> > 
> > In short, do you want a remote mobile phone to be able to send a message
> > to your mobile phone that it should delete an entry in your secure and
> > encrypted local database?
> > 
> > I suppose if you have a verified OTR connection, it does mean you trust
> > the person you are communicating with, but otherwise, this sounds like
> > DRM and/or a backdoor to me.
> 
> It as long as the delete function its strictly limited to the single message,
> I think that the functionality could outweigh the little bit of loss of control.
> 
> .hc
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