Web-based cryptography is always snake oil

Web-based cryptography is always snake oil
Nowadays, there is an epidemic of web applications purporting to offer
“end-to-end” encryption. Examples might range from a file upload service,
which allows you to upload and share files of arbitrary size and promises
“end-to-end encryption”; or a web-based password safe service which claims that
it can't see your passwords because they're encrypted; or a web-based
cryptocurrency wallet.
The cryptographic claims made by these services are invariably nonsense. Indeed
they necessarily must be, because the web as a platform does not possess the
necessary functionality which would allow otherwise.
Fundamentally, all web-based cryptosystems are incoherent because they suffer
from an incoherent threat model.
Let me start by coining a law, which is both obvious and yet, to my knowledge,
novel and overdue:
A cryptosystem is incoherent if its implementation is distributed
by the same entity which it purports to secure against.
It is inherent to the model of the web platform that the code which implements
a client-side web application is distributed by the given website. Thus the
client-side code is always distributed by the operator of the web server.
In other words, web-based “E2E” applications claim to secure against malice on
the part of the server operator using encryption implemented in client-side
JavaScript, but this is obviously not true, since if the server operator was
malicious, they could just push different client-side JavaScript. (Conversely,
entities other than the server operator are secured against via use of TLS, so
there is no additional benefit to “E2E” if you trust the server operator.)
The web platform does not contain any functionality which could be used to
separate this relationship (e.g., to distrust server operators for the purposes
of what client-side code can execute for an origin), so this problem is
intrinsic to any attempt to implement “E2E” encryption in a web application.
There are no exceptions.
It is worth noting that this law also applies to non-web applications where the
service provider supposedly being secured against is also the client software
distributor; thus, the “end-to-end encryption” offered by Whatsapp and Signal,
amongst other proprietary services, is equally bogus. (Both Whatsapp and Signal
ban use of third party clients, and enforce this policy.)
By any normal definition of the term, a cryptosystem is backdoored if the
vendor of a cryptosystem retains the ability to bypass it after its deployment.
In this regard all web-based “E2E” cryptography can be regarded as backdoored,
as can Whatsapp, Signal, etc.
Cryptography theatre: Snake oil cryptography as a legal technology
This, of course, raises the question: why is this snake oil crypto so popular?
Why have companies like Meta spent substantial amounts of money equipping
messenger systems like Whatsapp with snake oil crypto? The actions of these
companies can't be understood from the perspective of offering actual security,
because their actions aren't congruent with this objective and their threat
model is incoherent.
The real motive for the popularity of “E2E” amongst tech companies actually
turns out to be fairly obvious: the purpose of adopting snake oil “E2E” is not
to deliver actual security, but to act as a kind of cunning legal maneuver
to exempt themselves from the usual legal obligation to honour warrants,
subpoenas and other court orders. By nominally adopting “end to end encryption”,
these companies can theatrically throw up their hands when the government comes
to them with a warrant: “Well, we'd love to help you, but there's nothing we
After all, warrant processing is simply an annoying cost centre and liability
for these companies. By simply casting the spell of applying snake-oil
cryptography to their product, a company can magically exempt itself from this
entire category of legal obligation, reducing both their costs and their
potential legal liabilities.
The problem is, of course, that “there's nothing we can do” isn't true. The
service provider could develop and ship a backdoored version of the client
software. The actual gambit the service provider is counting on here is a
particular legal theory: “we could change the software so as to be able to
process this warrant, but you can't make us do so”.
You could perhaps call this cryptography theatre. The purpose of cryptography
theatre is not to deliver actual security from a cryptographic perspective but
act as a kind of magic spell which (the user believes) gives them a magic opt
out from the obligations conferred by warrants and subpoenas. Thus,
cryptography theatre must fundamentally be understood not as a cryptographic
technology but as a legal one.
There are several problems with this legal “magic spell”. In particular, this
legal theory (“you can't make us compromise our system”) seems to be relatively
specific to US case law and the typical company offering snake-oil cryptography
is based in the US. There are some points of constitutional law which seem to
act in favour of this argument, like the fact that the First Amendment is
supposed to preclude compelled speech just as much as the prohibition of
speech, and there is case law that code is a form of speech. These sorts of
protections are unlikely to be effective in other countries.
Moreover, the US government clearly does not agree with this interpretation, as
it has repeatedly argued that it can in fact force an entity to compromise a
cryptosystem it distributes. There are at least two such cases:
The Lavabit incident: When Edward Snowden leaked the Snowden documents,
he used a Lavabit email address. Lavabit was an email service boasting
web-based (and therefore snake-oil) encryption functionality. The FBI
attempted to coerce the owner of Lavabit to compromise the client-side code
to allow decryption of Edward Snowden's messages. The owner, rather
honourably, chose to shut down the entire service rather than comply (which
is to say that they had the ability to comply).
I don't know what legal options the owner of Lavabit explored. It is possible
they took legal advice and concluded they had an obligation to comply, but
also possible they simply decided they didn't have the budget or appetite for
complex and extended litigation against the US government. I suspect the
The FBI—Apple case: In
which the FBI tried to use US law to coerce Apple to make a version of the
iOS firmware which was compromised so as to enable them to decrypt a
suspect's iPhone. The FBI eventually withdrew before a decision was made,
after gaining access to the iPhone in question another way. It is fairly
clear they don't intend to let this matter settle, however.
(It is worth noting that Apple's defence fundamentally was of the argument
that we don't want to and you can't make us, not that they did not have
the ability to. Since the security controls the FBI was complaining about in
this case are ultimately enforced by Apple-signed proprietary firmware, Apple
could create firmware defeating these controls if it wanted to, which the FBI
was seeking to force it to do. In this regard, iOS also can be regarded as
backdoored, as the vendor retains the ability to compromise the system.)
In short, the problem with relying on this sort of thing is that it can be
unmade by a new legal ruling at any time, which is a much weaker standard than
we are generally seeking to obtain when adopting cryptography. Again,
cryptography theatre must fundamentally be understood as a legal technology,
not a cryptographic one.
The final reason why relying on this legal “magic spell” is not safe is because
the assumption that governments are meaningfully bound by law is demonstrably
overwhelmingly false. Governments routinely coerce companies into helping with
their surveillance initiatives in ways that subsequently turn out to be
illegal. In fact this is not even speculative in light of past programs like
PRISM, which targeted companies such as Facebook (now Meta); thus it's
basically a given that these companies remain compromised and retain a working
relationship with governmental intelligence services.
Reiterating the above, as a dialogue
Could web-based cryptography be fixed?
This is an interesting question. One idea I have sometimes considered is if
subresource integrity (SRI) hashes could be applied to web service workers:
Service workers are a feature added to the web platform which allows
a piece of persistent client-side JavaScript to potentially intercept
and handle all requests to an origin.
Subresource integrity (SRI) allows a resource incorporated on a web page
to have a cryptographic hash specified for it, such that it will only
load if that hash matches.
Since service workers are persistent, the idea is that if you can pin a service
worker script file as having a certain hash, it essentially becomes a root of
trust for an origin. Unfortunately, service workers currently don't support
SRI; I've proposed this feature
What this gains you in theory is the ability to permanently bind your website
to a root of trust which could potentially be entirely different, and for
example in a different jurisdiction, to that of the web server operator.
However, there are still a lot of issues with this approach:
This is a TOFU (trust on first use) security model, since it only takes
effect once a user has visited a website for the first time. Thus this
model can still be compromised if the website is already compromised
at a user's first visit — or if they clear their cache, etc.
It is not obvious to a user how to verify the cryptographic root of trust.
They would have to verify the SRI hash of the registered service worker
and compare it to some known good value. This is rather awkward.
It relies on the assumption that all requests to an origin pass through
a service worker without exception. This seems doubtful, though I haven't
looked into it in detail.
In order to work properly, it necessarily also gives the website operator
the power to accidentally brick their website in perpetuity. Thus this
suffers from the same issues as HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKE), which
was supported by browsers but a time but eventually removed after it was
found impractical.
The core of the issue here is that the web is fundamentally designed around the
premise of client-side code being distributed by the communications service it
relates to; that these two things are coupled together. This model is at once
extremely powerful in terms of ease of deployment and portability, and has
enabled incredible things; yet at the same time makes the implementation of
meaningful client-side cryptosystems on the web platform impossible. Because
this model is so deeply ingrained in the nature of the web, it seems like
something that can't be easily fixed. It would require a substantial paradigm
shift regarding the web's idea of coupling these two things, because a secure
cryptosystem inherently requires that these two things not be coupled.