Hacker News Reader

Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

I don't get how they can make statements like this "Only Wire offers fully encrypted calls, video and group chats available on all your devices". Webrtc is encrypted by default.

View on HN

The other signal/axolotl protocol based systems currently don't support true multi device solutions. It's not a limitation of the protocol, after all Wire is based on it, too, just that Signal/WhatsApp decided not to implement it.

Wire has true multi device support (basically multiple keys per identity)

Not sure what you're definition of "true multi device" is, but Signal Desktop does not do phone routing and functions whether your mobile device has connectivity or not: https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-desktop-public/

Thanks, I thought it did phone routing, mostly because the Signal FAQ lists some odd restrictions on multi device usage (e.g. desktop can't be linked to the iOS app, cannot have iPad and iOS at the same time [1]

[1]: http://support.whispersystems.org/hc/en-us/articles/21324092...

That's a limitation of the iOS client. It doesn't support multi-device yet.

Because encryption without authentication is prone to MITM attacks. WebTRC does not have auth layer.

But they don't say anything about authentication, and authentication and encryption are two different things...

WebRTC is only the audio / video part. Chat, groupchat, etc are not using it IIRC. Chat could use the data channel, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com