The Crypto Pi

This year has had some devastating news about the state of the internet infrastructure in store and came with some disillusion about the vulnerability of tools we use day by day. And BTW it had turned out, that Johnny still can't encrypt.

To change that, I've put some effort into developing the crypto pi.

While running on a minimalist Linux OS with only the necessary tools installed, the crypto pi is different both from internet servers and insecure endpoints, and helps Johnny to establish secure communication that is always encrypted, without burdening him with complex tasks that would only make him avoid using secure communication.

The crypto pi is in its early stages of its infant life and although it's working and looking great, it has not got the most important ingredient for a happy life (yet), peer-review.

So I'd like to ask all of you, who think a well-designed, isolated crypto box under the sole control of its user, capable of doing message encryption reliably, may improve the situation we're facing today, to give a hand and scrutinize the design and implementation of the crypto pi. Let's make the crypto pi a success in 2015, together.

The concept of secure communication using the crypto pi relies on several assumptions, not everyone will agree to:

  1. Johnny will be able to communicate securely with people he knows, if he had been able to exchange an initial secret information (on a piece of paper, via telephone, or some other way)

  2. Johnny's endpoint device is not trustworthy, as it runs all kinds of complex programs that are prone to attack the secrets on his device without notice in unforeseeable ways.

  3. Apart from feeding the crypto pi with the initial secret and an email address of the recipient (by filling out a form) Johnny has nothing to do with key management, but will be able to verify that message encryption has been performed.

  4. All secrets are stored on the crypto pi and messages leave the crypto pi AES-encrypted with a strong randomly generated key. The crypto pi does not use public key cryptography, there is no PKI nor CAs involved.

  5. Johnny uses one single secret that he alone knows to establish an encrypted tunnel to the crypto pi over which he interacts with the web server on the crypto pi to read and write messages.

  6. The local network in which the crypto pi works is not trustworthy, so all information that originates from the crypto pi is encrypted and only encrypted information that enters the crypto pi will be processed inside.

  7. Although desirable, ensuring anonymity is not a pre-requisite of the crypto pi's design (at the moment).

  8. All source code is licensed under GPL.

Fortunately, the crypto pi has a home (crypto-pi.com) where you can get more detailed information about its fundamental concepts and implementation. Make sure, your criticism and constructive suggestions will be used to improve this project.

Best wishes for 2015

Ralf Senderek