[Anastasis] GNU Anastasis v0.3.0 released

[Christian Grothoff]

Dear all,

I'm happy to announce the release of GNU Anastasis v0.3.0.

GNU Anastasis is a privacy-preserving distributed key backup and
recovery solution. You can use it to distribute key material across
multiple providers and recover your keys by authenticating with each
provider to obtain the key shares. The providers learn nothing about you
in this process, except during recovery when they learn the minimum
amount of information required to authenticate you depending on the
chosen authentication method.

Users can freely choose authentication methods, Anastasis providers and
which combination(s) of providers and authentication methods will be
sufficient to recover the key material.

GNU Anastasis will initially ask you for country-specific highly
personal information. This information will not leave your computer! It
is used as the input into a cryptographic hash function and generates a
unique value that is used to encrypt your recovery policy before it is
uploaded to the Anastasis providers.

This release fixes a large number of UI/UX issues and cleans up some of
the internal logic. We now have three Anastasis providers operational
offering four different authentication methods (two more are implemented
but not yet in production).

We encourage you to try out GNU Anastasis, but please be aware of the
following limitations:

- Currently, the three public providers are experimental.
  They are free-of-charge, but equally free-of-warranty.
  We do encourage you to use them, so that we can gain
  more experience with operating them. Do let us know if
  there are any problems!
- SEPA wire transfer authentication is offline as we still
  wait for the necessary steps with a bank to complete.
- Postal mail is offline due to the associated cost until GNU Taler
  payments are operational. SMS may be taken offline if it becomes
  expensive ;-).

Also, we can still use some help to put GNU Anastasis into production:

- The lists of country-specific questions we ask about individuals
  should be reviewed. Are there other answers users could give that
  a) they cannot forget (so asking this does not harm availability),
  b) have high entropy (so they add much security),
  c) are ideally private information only few people have access to, and
  d) are not used in one of the authentication processes?
  Also, the list of countries supported right now is still quite short,
  so help with adding more would be very welcome!
- We're looking for additional trustworthy organizations that are
  willing to run reliable Anastasis providers to enable users to
  distribute their secrets across more countries and continents.


You can download GNU Anastasis from:

* All GNU FTP mirrors         ftp://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnu/anastasis/
* Our Git repository is at                    https://git.taler.net/

Debian and Ubuntu packages are also available, please follow the
GNU Taler handbook [1] to add our Debian repository and then
# apt install anastasis-gtk

Please report bugs to our bugtracker at   https://bugs.anastasis.lu/

An introduction can be found at      http://www.gnu.org/s/anastasis/
Additional documentation  is at           https://docs.anastasis.lu/
Our corporate Web site is at                   https://anastasis.lu/
The mailinglist is https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/anastasis/

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation programme within the framework of the LEDGER
Project funded under grant agreement No 825268.


Happy hacking!

Christian
[1] 
https://docs.taler.net/taler-exchange-manual.html#installing-the-gnu-taler-binary-packages-on-debian