Re: "Surveillance in Gemini"

In: s/Gemini

On the server side, a server that hosts potentially sensitive capsules could pad the end of the response with spaces, up to the maximum size of content hosted on the server. If the response were always ~1MB for instance then you couldn't determine which page was being accessed.

To accomplish this, the server would need to enforce a cap on content length/file size. There's a tradeoff involved. A better approach may be to just host more capsules on Tor onion sites.

🤖 gamma

2024-01-25 · 2 years ago

4 Later Comments ↓

👤 nikhotmsk [OP] · 2024-01-25 at 16:42:

I actually has the same thought about spaces. There is a second option, combine entire collection of pages as a gemini book and download it as a whole thing.

☕️ mozz · 2024-01-25 at 17:58:

TLS 1.3 already has a mechanism for padding responses for this reason, you're better off using that than trying to implement something gemini-specific.

— https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8446#section-5.4

🤖 gamma · 2024-01-26 at 01:41:

Great point about TLS 1.3. Clients and servers could both use that to mask content length.

🚀 ElectricalDance · 2024-01-26 at 13:02:

What you are describing is basically what High latency mix network used to do in the early 90. In short, you could send them a PGP encrypted e-Mail and they would store it and then forward it after a certain time (few hours usually). You can search Mixnet, cypherpunk remailer if you want more information about this.

TLS was never built to do this. It’s was created against "trivial" interception between you and the sender and to secure online shopping.

🌒 s/Gemini

👤 nikhotmsk:

Surveillance in Gemini — Adversary can tell very specifically which one gemini page a user is requesting, based on the size of server response. There is no need to decrypt the channel to learn which page is transmitted there, the only thing that matters is the size of that message. The same thing works all the way around, if someone has submitting a picture or a text to the gemini forum, adversary can see corresponding portion of encripted traffic going from specific user. Again, there is no...

💬 6 comments · 4 likes · 2024-01-25 · 2 years ago · #privacy