AEC - Air Gapped Encrypted Communications

General
1

Dear PlugOS team and dear community,

I have developed AEC and tested it with PlugOS and an air gapped GPD MicroPC and it works nicely so far. Under PlugOS I used GL2AEC (Google Lens to AEC) to recover the AEC QR-Codes to been send.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards
Ch1ffr3punk

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2

Hi Ch1ffr3punk,

Thanks for sharing! This is an excellent idea, and looking forward to seeing more of your innovative applications in the future.

Thanks！

3

Hi Jack,

thanks for the reply, much appreciated! I hope I come up with other things in the future.

Best regards
Ch1ffr3punk

4

I have added E2Q (Esub to QR-Code and Fetch to the repository.

Both programs can be used to send freely AEC ecrypted messages
to the Usenet Newsgroup alt.anonymous.messages, so that people
do not need an email address.

For that people can use the Nym Mixnet to Usenet Gateway at:

Hope you like!

Best regards
Ch1ffr3punk

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5

Great idea with a clean end-to-end implementation. The offline-encrypt, QR-transfer, online-deliver pipeline is well thought out.

One awkward part: the cold-start. Both parties need to pre-share public keys via the same air-gapped QR path, which means they basically have to be in the same room to bootstrap. Maybe a TOFU approach or a hybrid key directory (where only the fingerprint needs out-of-band verification) could make this much more practical.

6

Thanks. Well, regarding public key transfers. The GL2AEC program for PlugOS detects also public keys and not only AEC encrypted messages, so that Alice and Bob can do it the classic PGP way, while reading out loud the hex string via telephone, I would say. The only thing where they have to be in the same room, is when agreeing on a shared secret for the esub password, required for Usenet usage.

7

I also found out that the small thermal printer ZENWIRE TP-210 seems to work very well with AEC for postcards and letters, or possibly faxes. I’ll give it a try as soon as I get it.

8

Three projects are now supporting AEC:

Nike (formerly known as Anne Frank): https://n2n.oc2mx.net
Hermes: https://n2m.oc2mx.net
Mixfit - A YAMN Mixnet Client: https://github.com/Ch1ffr3punk/Mixfit
(Android/PlugOS, Windows, Linux)

Regards
Ch1ffr3punk

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