The New Yorker's new Strongbox feature claims to be an online safebox for whistleblowers to submit documents safely and anonymously. The system, based on open source DeadDrop software developed by the late Aaron Swartz, has invited comparisons to Wikileaks.

Can Strongbox really deliver on its promises? Can it be as successful and secure as Wikileaks' system was?

"I think Wikileaks is the gold standard for reasons that most other leaking systems hardly understand," said Jacob Appelbaum, a famous hacker who has been working with Julian Assange for years.

Wikileaks' submission system has been offline since late 2010, when the mysterious hacker who developed it — known as "The Architect" — left Wikileaks and took the system with him, as explained in Andy Greenberg's This Machine Kills Secrets.

Strongbox, just like Wikileaks' old submission system, tries to achieve two goals: First, give sources with incendiary information a way to deliver it to journalists without without revealing their identity. Second, strike a balance between security and usability by giving sources and reporters a system they don't need to be computer geniuses to understand.

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Security experts are generally impressed by Strongbox's seemingly paranoid approach to security, but are more skeptical about its practicality.

"For me, it's unusable," said Fabio Pietrosanti, an Italian security engineer, who's working on his own Wikileaks-style software called GlobalLeaks.

Pietrosanti was specifically referring to the way journalists must jump through five or six hoops to manage and read documents after files are uploaded to the server. For him, this is "overkill" and a nightmare for journalists without the technical skills or time to take such precautions.

Tim May, one of the leaders of the Cypherpunk movement in the 1990s, agrees with Pietrosanti. May was also the mind behind BlackNet, the very first concept of an anonymous submission system powered by cryptography.

"It seems The New Yorker system is way more complicated than most people are likely to deal with," he wrote in a lengthy comment on a Forbes story on Strongbox.

"That's a best practice, not an obligation," said Kevin Poulsen, an editor at Wired magazine and the Strongbox coordinator, regarding the cautionary steps journalists have to take to download, decrypt and review the leaked materials. The process involves using a Virtual Private Network (VPN), a laptop with neither an Internet connection nor hard drive, and two different USB thumb drives.

Since DeadDrop is open source, any publication can personalize it for its own needs, perhaps making it less complicated. Poulsen, however, argues they might want to think twice about sacrificing any of its security features.

"If there are any major news organizations who think that process is overkill from a security point of view, we just have to wait until they're hacked by China a couple more times and I expect they'll change their tune," he said.

For sources, the system is relatively straight-forward. A would-be leaker only needs to use Tor, an onion-layer software tool that anonymizes and encrypts users' web traffic, and then upload the documents, which are encrypted and transmitted to a special server.

"I think Strongbox does strike the right balance between usability and security. The part that users see seems fairly simple to use," said M.C. McGrath, a Boston University student and researcher at MIT Media Labs who has studied leaking and whistleblowing, in an email to Mashable.

Despite that, both May and Jacob Harris, Senior Software Architect at the New York Times, suggested that a source who really wants to be anonymous might be better off sending the documents via snail mail. Harris wrote in an email to Knight-Mozilla's Source news that that approach is "not helpful for the reporters, and decidedly old-fashioned with a low chance of success, but no other option is as low-risk."

When asked about that possibility, Poulsen noted that such and old-school system "puts the source's protection entirely on him," and that sending regular mail anonymously isn't as easy as it sounds. Tricks snail mail-using sources should adopt include leaving trackable cellphones at home, ensuring fingerprints aren't put on envelopes, and avoiding surveillance cameras. All that leaving out the most obvious flaw: the leaker is sending the documents through "an unencrypted channel literally owned and operated by the U.S. government," said Pousen.

Regardless of its security, perhaps the biggest question is whether the New Yorker's Strongbox or DeadDrop, implemented by another news organization, will ever deliver the massive scoops (Bradley Manning's leak, for example) that Wikileaks delivered thanks to its secure submission system.

"The big question hanging over any secure dropbox is, will you get any useful tips? Are anonymous leakers out there and common, or was Bradley Manning a black swan?" Harris wrote.

Others have already tried replicating Wikileaks. OpenLeaks, a Wikileaks spin-off founded by Assange's old ally Daniel Domscheit-Berg despite a lot of fanfare, has never fully taken off. Al Jazeera's own secure dropbox — called Trasparency Unit — has yet to score a big scoop. And the Wall Street Journal's SafeHouse was widely criticized as insecure.

At the end of the day, though, Poulsen argues that this is not the point of the project at all.

"It's a mistake to think of this as a slot machine that might pay a big news jackpot. Its about addressing an architectural deficiency, like not having a wheelchair ramp at the entryway to a retail store," Poulsen said. "The New Yorker now has a doorway for at-risk sources, designed from the ground up to protect them."

Image via iStockphoto, lumpynoodles