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Comment by botto | Hacker News Reader

Telegram is scary and questionable. Inventing your own encryption is never the answer and reeks of horrible understanding of security, at this stage there is no reason they should not adopt a standard of communication like Signal protocol.

Signal app itself is ok, it's a little....annoying as it requires a phone number and the UX needs some love.

Keybase is great, It has ways of verifying you across multiple services and has end-to-end encryption using PGP. Also offers file storage.

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Signal/RedPhone did invent its own crypto (the ratchet), didn't they?

> Signal/RedPhone did invent its own crypto (the ratchet), didn't they?

IIRC, they didn't invent any crypto primitives (e.g. cyphers).

Sure, but the primitives are pretty boring, anyway. Few people try to invent those.

Many more try to invent new constructions on top of the primitives. That's where things go wrong, in practice.

(I fully trust in OWS here, but "don't invent crypto" is an unsuitable argument in a Signal-vs-Telegram discussion)

> Many more try to invent new constructions on top of the primitives. That's where things go wrong, in practice.

Things go wronger when non-cryptographers try to invent their own primitives, and that's what the saying "don't invent your own crypto" was invented to warn against.

We still haven't seen any examples of Telegram being compromised.

That's the same as saying that a car model is safe because there have not been any crashes yet with this make and model. No cars are safe because there are industry standards that a manufacturer is tested to ensure they are following.

Closed source (both in code and implementation) has no place in the security world and anything security related should always be open for anyone to scrutinize.

Feel free to scrutinize Telegram's crypto and E2E implementation for secret chats. It's open source and you can find it here: https://github.com/tdlib/td

Yep, did it, not going to use Telegram now.

Love the unsecure TLRPC objects deserialization that actually makes the native client crash and to not verify what other clients have sent: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DrKLO/Telegram/e397bd9afdf...

and the tons of magic and undocumented numbers in the code: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/master/TMessagesProj/...

Crashing in the face of invalid and likely malicious input is a secure approach (fail fast).

Depends on whether the crash is intentional :/

RSA encryption is potentially exploitable by quantum computing. Still people are using it everywhere.

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