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Comment by twr | Hacker News Reader

Signal doesn't entrust security to carriers. Messages are sent E2E encrypted to the registered device over the internet. If someone MitMs a device, the safety numbers would not match on either end.

Signal, and the Signal server operators, malicious or not, do not know the phone numbers of people you are communicating with (presuming the secure enclave on the server isn't cracked). Signal does know your phone number, so someone could figure out if you use Signal. If you're worried about that, or personal sharing of your number, you could falsify information to create an anonymous phone number, or you can just use Matrix or Wire.

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My experience of Signal is that people don't reliably follow up on safety number changes, yet keep using it in a MITM-vulnerable way. Including myself, honestly, because people change or reset phones frequently. Is your experience different?

At least with GPG I can factory reset all of my computers and phones and not have to re-establish trust if I take the right steps to preserve the secret key information.

Even if I don't preserve that correctly, people change computers less often than phones.

On the other hand, I'll admit that my GPG key is newer than my Signal number (which I've owned for 15 years), due to upgrading crypto algorithms.

It isn't. I rarely send sensitive messages, however, so I feel that some surveillance potential is acceptable, to save time and effort. The few times where I did, I first verified both ends.

I perform the safety number verifications in exchange for forward and backward secrecy. GPG isn't enough to establish a truly confidential communication channel, I think. (Unless you erase keys after every sent message, maybe.)

I'm not happy with Signal's dependence on a phone. Ideally I'd like to use a pocket-sized SBC for secure messaging. Come to think of it, that sounds rather like a phone. Just, uh, without the cellular hardware, and with a user-installed OS.

It entrusts the identity to carriers. What use of having perfect peer-to-peer security if you can't be sure who you are talking to? So you will send the data to Eve in a perfectly secure way, while thinking you're talking to Bob - and that's better than Eve breaking the encryption? I say it's much less work for Eve - instead of employing vast resources to exploit a tiny vulnerability in encryption, she would just need to take over a phone number. And if she works for the government, it's not even a hard thing to do.

Again, you can be sure, by comparing the safety numbers. It's the same as comparing SSH or GPG key fingerprints. If someone else masquerades as Bob, the numbers won't match. See section III-D3, key fingerprint verification: https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2015/papers-archived/6949...

That would be true if people routinely verified fingerprints of their contacts. I don't think it happens more often than any other commonly ignored security precautions. Also, what happens if the phone is lost/damaged/replaced with a newer model? I assume new key and thus new fingerprint?

Signal, WhatsApp, Matrix et al. show notifications when the participant’s device keys change. You’re right that most users don’t verify. The opportunity for detection or prevention of common forms of surveillance is better than none at all.

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