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Table of Contents
End To End Encryption Workshop
Here are the slides:
What is end to end Encryption
Usually, this is how you interact with someone: each time you make a request to the internet (a Google search, sending a mail, sending a Signal message, going to Facebook, everything), you do not talk directly to the person you want to talk to (in case you want to share something with someone). There is always a middle man, called a server:
Every information that passes through the server can be seen by the server, which is administrated by some entity, which will at least cooperate with the police or other government agencies if needed.
This is something that can be prevented by using End to End encrypted services. With such services, you encrypt your message on your own laptop, then send it to the server that will only pass it to someone, who will decrypt it on their own computer: the server only has access to encrypted data.
What common tools are end to end encrypted
Messaging apps such as Signal, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are end to end encrypted. However, Signal is widely considered the safest tool for messaging, as it makes a lot of effort to reduce the metadata it collects compared to the other two. If you do not have a smartphone, or if you wish to use a burner for your signal account, please follow those instructions to install signal without a smartphone. Telegram is NOT end to end encrypted
Cryptpad is an end to end encrypted, open source and possible to self host service for doing collaborative work on Office documents, or collaborative cloud.
Nextcloud is an open source, self hostable software that acts as a cloud, a collaborative tool for office documents and group calls. It is NOT end to end encrypted by default, but an App can be added to activate end to end encryption. Then the service should only use the client, not the browser. Note that this feature is only True for files, not for all the extra collaborative things that Nextcloud offers.
LUFI is an open source, self hostable, End To End Encrypted software used to share files, in a similar way than the popular WeTransfer (which is neither open source, nor self hostable, nor end to end encrypted).
Magic wormhole is an open source software used for the same purpose than LUFI, but which the built in possibility of using the TOR network for sharing the file, adding anonymity. It requires that the sender and receiver execute a command at the same time though.
Mails are NOT end to end encrypted. No, not even if you use Riseup. You can set up PGP with any standard mail provider to have End to End encryption, but this system is nowadays recognized as very complicated, error prone and not very safe. As an example of big limitations, it does not encrypt the subject line, which is quite an important piece of information. If you are interested, you can read several of the critical pieces written those past years against PGP by clever people. If you use ProtonMail you have PGP end to End encrypted mails only if you communicate to another Protonmail account. If you use Tuta you have end to end encrypted mails (with something more robust than PGP it seems) only if you communicate with another tuta user. This is why it is usually recommended to consider Signal as a safer alternative than mails altogether. This is also because of those problems that modern companies set up a secure messaging tool in their website instead of a plain mail. If you still want to try out PGP (which has other features that are more useful than end to end encrypted mails, such as verifying downloads, and is still interesting for pedagogic reasons) you can check my workshop here.
It goes without saying, but SMS and regular phone calls are not only not end to end encrypted, but also not encrypted at all, in any ways. Please avoid them.
Regarding chat softwares, Discord is not End to End encrypted either. Mattermost is open source, self hosted but also not end to end encrypted. RocketChat is also open source, self hosted and not end to end encrypted by default, although it is possible for the administrator to configure it to be end to end encrypted. Matrix is open source, self hosted, federated and end to end encrypted.