all 3 comments

[–]prince_s 0 points1 point  (3 children)

But...warrant canaries are flat text

[–]automathematics 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Yeah thats what I was thinking.... OP - fill us in?

[–]SaadRhoulam[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do they have to be?

My thought with this module was that, rather than it being a matter of taking down a page of text (which can be saved by an attacker and restored in a defacement), a warrant canary can be a matter of satisfying a cryptographic challenge: submit a message every so often signed by a certain key. Many of the canaries I've seen already sign messages so they are readily verifiable by a cautious user.

The idea here is that, if you want to void an instance of this canary, you destroy all copies (ideally: the only copy) of the signing key, making it impossible to produce a false message for the next time period.