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Comment by glogla | Hacker News Reader

There isn't a working secure messaging now.

GPG+email has UX problems meaning BFU's will never use it.

Signal is bound to Google, and Moxie's views on corporate control and calling getting applications from somewhere else than Google "going back to the old broken desktop security model" doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Telegram has broken crypto, doesn't ecrypt by default and the authors being arrogant about their broken crypto doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Whatsapp and iMessage are closed source, so they are completely unverifiable.

There isn't secure messaging tool that can be widely used as of now. I know not many people are good enough with crypto to be able to reliably write one, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying. Being able to communicate easily and securely is very very very important and should be part of basic infrastructure by now.

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In my personal opinion: if you want to communicate securely, with a very low probability of eavesdropping - use voice chat in any of modern games, on any platform. On both PS4 and X1, voice chat communication has to be encrypted(it's a compliance requirement), but at the same time there is no requirement that you have to implement a server relay - so a lot of games don't bother doing it, and it's a straight up P2P mesh implementation. You have encrypted, P2P traffic, not stored anywhere, that you can create an anonymous account to use.

http://ethanheilman.tumblr.com/post/133488739430/is-playstat...

It seems that PS4 encryption is broken.

Yep, but pretty much all games implement their own voip, in addition to system chat(Party Chat) - and while system chat can be forced to relay through MS/Sony servers, custom implementations in games do not have this requirement. They can also use different encryption to the system one.

As a game developer I can tell you that safeguards are i place to bypass this encryption.

I am also a game developer, and I have recently been working on implementing a voip system in a game. Sony/X1 requires you to use an "approved" encryption scheme, but they don't actually require you to store the key with them, or implement a server relay(which would allow them to intercept all traffic easily).

I did not implement VOIP on PS4 but I know for a fact that on 360 and XB1 the encryption for VOIP data can be entirely disabled. In case of XB1 they make you provide files to strip the voip stream from the rest of your game packets for this very reason.

There isn't one with traction.

SMSSecure is a fork of Textsecure (Signal before it changed names) that drops all internet features and focuses on SMS only. So there's no Google dependency at all, and you get all of Moxie's crypto chops with none of his wacky views (it's on GPlay and F-Droid, with no fuss). I use it as my main SMS app, and so do a few of my (non-technical) friends and family. It really does just work.

The only downside is that nobody knows it exists. So it's hard to get people to use it, and it doesn't get the eyeballs it deserves.

> Signal is bound to Google, and Moxie's views on corporate control and calling getting applications from somewhere else than Google "going back to the old broken desktop security model" doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

When you say its bound to Google, do you mean that users rely on play store to get Signal, or something else?

I think it means that push notifications are delivered via google cloud platform

And the concern is that Google has a backdoor into your phone

Easy solution: don't buy android

...and buy Apple instead? Or just go back to featurephones? I don't see any good answers in the cellphone market.

It would be nice to find Signal on F-Droid for those of us who'd rather not be a part of the Google ecosystem.

There is an F-droid repo somewhere of a fork that uses websockets.

Of course not embraced by the Signal team, but from what I gather it works most of the time. Sometimes getting messages can be a bit wonky, though.

> are closed source, so they are completely unverifiable.

They can still be verified by third parties if Whatsapp/iMessage wanted to do it.

No company can satisfy security purists, because they can't make a living out of it.

We have a secure messaging/voip app. Verified by a third party (they have the entire source code). We use the same protocol signal uses (Axolotl ratchet). You can install applications without app/play store and you can run the server on-premise on your own infrastructure. No google services are needed.

But all of that will still not be acceptable by "the community", because we are closed source and charge a license fee.

> Telegram has broken crypto, doesn't ecrypt by default and the authors being arrogant about their broken crypto doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

As a lay-person in this space, could you explain what's wrong with their crypto? Have their recent competitions not addressed Moxie's concerns? Would you be more comfortable if they published their server code (as they keep promising to do...)?

Their arrogance and will to power is rather mild in comparison to that of the people running Facebook and its properties. I'm happy not to see ads based on my private chats.

> Telegram has broken crypto, doesn't ecrypt by default and the authors being arrogant about their broken crypto doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

I find this "because it's not 100% standard crypto it's broken" mentality here questionable. Surely innovation can happen in the crypto space without having to be signed off by the usual suspects? Last time I checked Telegram's crypto was not broken.

Of course it does not end to end encrypt by default. Most people do not want that given the disadvantages this has in the user experience.

This is absolutely dangerous thinking. There are a lot of people researching crypto and making sure it's secure. If you're using non-standard crypto, you don't have that safety net.

They're using primitives that are proven to be insecure against certain types of attacks (non-checked DH, MAC-then-encrypt, etc). And their code seems to be not perfect (https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/58291636575066931...).

Signal on the other hand uses a variant of OTR (https://whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/). Which was thoroughly reviewed, and mentioned in NSA documents as not-cracked.

You can't just invent something and claim "last time I checked it's not broken". It's not broken (yet) if enough competent eyes looked at it, and the more standard building blocks you use, the easier to make those claims. That is absolutely not what Telegram does. I really wish the myth that Telegram is secure would die.

> This is absolutely dangerous thinking. There are a lot of people researching crypto and making sure it's secure. If you're using non-standard crypto, you don't have that safety net.

Absolutely dangerous thinking is to declare cryptography off limits. With that in mind eventually you just scare more people to participate in this process and eventually be left with a tiny core community.

And this discussion is very moot anyways as telegram uses standard cryptographic primitives.

> They're using primitives that are proven to be insecure against certain types of attacks (non-checked DH, MAC-then-encrypt, etc).

Except they are not using them in any insecure way and they are doing this for very good reasons. This Twitter thread is also full of misinformation collected together from an age old post that was itself misunderstanding how the protocol actually works.

> You can't just invent something and claim "last time I checked it's not broken".

Sure, that's exactly how SSL works. We invented crypto systems and we are using them until they are broken, then we phase them out for something else.

>Absolutely dangerous thinking is to declare cryptography off limits. With that in mind eventually you just scare more people to participate in this process and eventually be left with a tiny core community.

Anybody can participate, just don't claim it's secure.

> Sure, that's exactly how SSL works. We invented crypto systems and we are using them until they are broken, then we phase them out for something else.

The only difference is there's a maillist with actual cryptographers (https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tls/current/threads.ht...), that iterate over design. If you look at the history of TLS, you'll see how tricky is to get crypto right. There has been lots of attacks on the protocol, that no one person could've think of. You don't have that if you roll your own and/or have "very good reasons" when people point your mistakes out.

> If you look at the history of TLS, you'll see how tricky is to get crypto right. There has been lots of attacks on the protocol, that no one person could've think of.

You'd hope so, but contrary to popular belief, actual cryptographers relatively rarely manage to prevent errors in the standards. For instance, Phil Rogaway warned against MAC-then-Encrypt used in TLS which led to the Padding Oracle attacks many many years before they were exploited, but the suggestions were ignored by the "practitioners" designing the protocols. In fact, the TLS example was one that is relatively easy to get right if the designers wouldn't have gone crazy and listened to actual cryptographers. Telegram will someday fall into the exact same bucket.

> Absolutely dangerous thinking is to declare cryptography off limits. With that in mind eventually you just scare more people to participate in this process and eventually be left with a tiny core community.

Cryptography is not "off limits". Cryptography is just a place where Not Invented Here approach is not just stupid, and incompetent, but dangerous.

> Cryptography is not "off limits". Cryptography is just a place where Not Invented Here approach is not just stupid, and incompetent, but dangerous.

That should apply equally to all parts of software engineering and with a big exception that says: unless you know what you are doing.

There was a TOR talk where a person from China told that he recommended two systems to different people: TOR and some other one. The people he recommended the other one ended up in prison.

This kind of consequences you get when you falsely claim security. This is the main reason I want people stop saying that Telegram is somehow secure. It's just another messenger, people who need security should use something else. There must be no confusion about it.

Considering the amount of heat Telegram is receiving, I'd expect someone to demonstrate eavesdropping by now.

Aren't they using "their own" crypto just on top of standard methods?

There is a big gap between "this obviously looks bad" and "I have an exploit for it". There are many things that one should obviously not do and you can legitimately strongly advise against, but are not easy to demo an exploit for. The bar for accepting potential security issues should never be set as high as an exploit demo.

As someone who is outside of the security research community, the repeated assertion that "telegram is broken" is rather hard to accept without an example exploit. I would really appreciate if someone with the knowledge of how to break something like this took the time they would spend writing a blog post about it being broken and instead demonstrated an attack.

Having relatively low security requirements (I simply don't want to see ads based on my conversations), I'll continue using it to talk with my friends and family until someone demonstrates an exploit.

I know there's a big gap between the two. But again, given the duration, amount, and variety of the "heat", at least something tangible would be nice. What if it remains like this for another year? Ten years? Fifty years? Will it still be called "insecure, because it doesn't use what 'everyone' else uses"?

Is Signal's crypto really "well-reviewed"?

The best description of it seems to be at https://github.com/trevp/axolotl/wiki and it's not really understandable by someone who doesn't already know the protocol, so I doubt many people that don't work on Signal have reviewed it.

It looks like the authors know what they are doing though, so it's probably good, but there might be a small risk that they overlooked something.

OTR is.

As far as I know there's been one whitepaper on TextSecure itself (https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/904.pdf).

Telegram lost it credibility in how they handled criticism when they firs launched. They were arrogant ("look at all the programming world champions we have. If you don't have an exploit STFU" type of talking). The criticism people came with was valid.

After half a year a russian guy found that the server could backdoor and later decrypt any newly started secret chat. That wasn't very confidence-inspiring back then. Looking at their security documentation now is _still_ painful. What better lesson to not roll your own crypto is there than having someone show how badly you borked it? They didn't learn anything.

What do you mean Signal is bound to Google?

Also, iMessage is not "completely unverifiable". In fact, there has been much work put in to reverse engineering iMessage, and there is a program that can analyze what keys are used to encrypt. Granted, this is not easy and reverse engineering is not a preferable way to thoroughly investigate and verify an app's actions, but to call it "completely unverifiable" is just hyperbole.

What is "BFU"?

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