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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I'll be the downer here and point out that Tox (both the specification and the c-toxcore implementation) have never undergone a security evaluation, and there are well-understood weaknesses in its security model right now[1].

If you feel inclined to use Tox at all, you should do so as a curiosity only.

[1]: https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426

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Also weirdness with funds being stolen and team splits:

https://chefkochblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/05/r-i-p-tox-mess...

it wasn't much of a team split, just the dev team's resident pakistani computer salesman (stqism) embezzled a bunch of money and ran off, as much as I think Tox is untrustworthy and stupid I can say I'm pretty sure nobody else in Tox was involved with this

Thanks for that bit of insight, it is a confusing story especially when I ran into it. I like the UI of Tox, I wish it were truly solid, but I much rather recommend Pidgin with OTR and IRC / Jabber (although Jitsi is decent in this regard too), or Wire / Signal.

right now it's absolutely awful in terms of everything it has set out to do, the internal dev team even knows of a few more security issues that they haven't publicly disclosed yet and have made little effort to resolve

t. made the linked website, used to be in dev team

I read about 20 replies of that and it does sound a bit overblown. Yes - the protocol is not perfect, but the flaw is a minor one. It could even be considered a feature request - preserve semblance of security after key compromise. If it can be done sure, by all means! But does not necessitate panic or rushing things - that would be more dangerous.

> But does not necessitate panic or rushing things

I don't think I suggested either. If anything, Tox was rushed (by a group of 4channers, no less) and many of the flaws in its design are a consequence of that. I don't think enough people are actually using it to warrant panic.

Is using 4chan known to compromise one's programming skills?

I fail to see how its developers being part of [competing tech community] has any relevance to the quality of the program.

There aren't a lot of cryptographers who would accept KCI vulnerability as a "feature".

Resistance to it would be the feature.

What do you recommend instead?

I don't know if I have any strong recommendations. In terms of what I use: Keybase and iMessage, depending on who I'm talking to.

Matrix/Riot.im is federated and has E2EE. It also has brigdes for IRC, Telegram etc. Here's a native client for macOS: https://neilalexander.eu/seaglass

Web client: https://riot.im/experimental/

Matrix is also experimental. About a year ago it kept losing my key meaning I couldn't decrypt old messages. I still use matrix, but I don't have any illusions that it's more secure than tox.

We're not aware of any bugs where Matrix clients lose your e2e keys (other than one where changing your password may cause clients to log out and remove keys for safety). If you saw it keep losing keys, i'm going to guess you configured your browser to delete local storage when you close the tab... in which case, unless you export the keys, we have nowhere else to store them.

That said, we've also just implemented the optional ability to encrypt and backup your keys on the server, but obviously comes with other tradeoffs.

In terms of security, the core crypto has been audited, as per https://matrix.org/blog/2016/11/21/matrixs-olm-end-to-end-en...

It hasn't happened in a year (I still use it) so whatever the issue was I don't see it anymore :)

I tested riot.im in a private Firefox window recently, obvious with hindsight but it didn't occur to me I should export keys and I didn't spot anything in the interface to make me aware or prompt me to action.

Great to hear you've added the option for server stored keys now.

yeah, it's a tricky one because by the time you've closed the window, it's too late to export keys.

The new online key backup stuff landed a few weeks ago on the develop branch, and will be making it onto the main release over the coming weeks :)

> I don't have any illusions that it's more secure than tox.

That conclusion doesn't follow. How does the client loosing your key cause you to consider matrix itself as less secure?

Matrix has also had a proper security evaluation

https://ricochet.im/ is a great protocol, but the UI could use work.

Yes. Each client runs a Tor .onion service, and there's end-to-end encryption. So arguably, users are mutually anonymous (except for their .onion addresses).

But it's only available for Windows, macOS and Linux. On Android, there's Briar, which is similar.[0] But Briar can also connect via Bluetooth and WiFi. That's useful when the Internet is unavailable. But it's bad because user anonymity could be blown.

0) https://briarproject.org/

I was working on a self-hostable web interface for a while. There's a public instance at https://ricochet-web.org/ but unlike the official client it hasn't been professionally (or otherwise, for that matter) security-tested and is vulnerable in various ways the official client isn't. It also has quite a few known and unknown bugs.

I used tox for a while until I realized just how sketchy the devs and community is.

Now, I recommend using xmpp(Open fire) over Tor. That allows things like

Crankylinuxuser@onion-v3-verylongkey.onion

To send messages. And my server can also send messages out via tor gateways or to other torified messaging servers.

Tl;Dr. Use secure protocols and combine with Hidden Services.

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