WhatsApp Will Never Be Secure | Hacker News Reader

WhatsApp Will Never Be Secure

telegra.ph

65 pointseitland14 comments

I really want to like Telegram (it's certainly a handy gateway to my attempts at getting people off Facebook Messenger) but this article seems pretty misleading & reads like a marketing grab

_Disclaimer: This thread is mostly based off of a sporadic interest in this space, not necessarily up-to-date research of counterpoints_

A few observations in no particular order:

- Telegram use their own proprietary encryption algorithm which has had some questions raised in the crypto community

- Telegram appear to do a fair bit of hand-waving re. distinguishing their end-to-end "secure" messaging vs. the default (and more convenient) group and non-secret messages - which are encrypted differently, and cloud-archived similarly to what the article describes WhatsApp doing.

  - Not that there's necessarily a satisfactory alternative, but a privacy-first solution would ideally be more overt

- Article never mentions Signal (either the protocol, or the competing application) which have undergone significant peer review, but does refer to Telegram as distinguishing itself through open source and open process.

- One can't help but question the motive of a crypto-first app which doesn't follow crypto best practice, or at least speak candidly about their attempts to iteratively improve this.

- Telegram seem to be making moves towards an increasingly "social media messenger" space - does this run at odds with privacy-first? (my guess would be it does)

---

Some links:

- [Is Telegram Secure? (security stack exchange)](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegr...)

- [white paper analysis of Telegram's crypto](https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf)

- [Signal's Moxie Marlinspike on Telegram's founder](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/18/signal-moxie-marlinspike-t...)

EDIT: formatting

I use Telegram and so does my friends despite I (primarily) know about the questionable security.

And the reasons are very simple: Because it's packed with features and it's user interface is so extremely well done it simply outclasses any other option in those regards.

Second, our normal level of communication simply does not require perfect security. Being on Telegram or as a group on a bus being overheard by everyone would make no difference. No one of us cares because it doesn't matter.

I talk to my family and spouse over "normal" Telegram, and it's the same thing there. When we need to talk about intimate things we do so eye-to-eye, and even if it would become public I believe audience would find TV soap operas more exciting.

What I am saying our choices are dictated by convenience and enjoyment. Signal, Riot and Wire provides none of those compared to Telegram.

Don't forget about the native (i.e., not electron based), fast, cross-platform, desktop app.

Unlike other platforms, you don't need to have your phone on and connected all the time to use it.

Absolutely - I also use it, for very similar reasons. It's the closest I can recommend to people when trying to help ween them off of Facebook Messenger

My commentary is more around the seemingly bait-and-switch approach of riding in on the "we respect privacy" wave, but ultimately having that as secondary to bells and whistles

Telegram at least keeps your conversations out of the hands of Facebook, Google, and the like, which is most of concern these days.

There's a bit of misunderstanding. Pavel is talking about backups to Google Drive / iCloud that you do in order to preserve the messages and move them to the other phone. While it's true they aren't encrypted, it makes a lot of sense for such a mainstream product — I wouldn't imagine the app asking people to save a private key for it.

All communication itself is E2E-encrypted with WhatsApp. Telegram doesn't have that by default but in return the app is available on multiple platforms and these instances work independently with great cloud sync.

End to end encryption means nothing if the app uses your text to lookup for ads and other data mining.

There's no confirmation WhatsApp does that.

The best approximation of security in this space should be an open-implementation of an open-source protocol that can be easily audited.

As far as I know, the only app that fits this requirement with a minimum viable community such that it can be used day to day is Signal.

Real questions, which will sound like a conspiracy theory:

- Is being open source, and some eager and independent security researchers having done an audit enough to convince you (or some other well-informed part on the thread) that no clever flaws are intentionally in the source?

- Do the funding or institutions which support the development of a piece of tech change the answer to the above question? E.g. I've been encouraged to avoid Signal b/c it was created partly with US State Dept funding (via the Open Technology Fund). The main point made during that conversation was that the US supports projects like Signal and Tor as a means of supporting dissidents in other countries. But a side implication was that it may be naive to rely on tools (indirectly) provided by the state to avoid surveillance by the state.

The way I view this, funding can definitely raise suspicion. But The open sourcing of the protocols should help to remove those suspicions.

Exactly.

Another positive is Signal have been very intentionally slow and transparent about security considerations when it comes to adding new features (gif search, link previews)

Telegram appear to be more focused on feature parity with competitors than "crushing the core" of secure messaging

Still Telegram is good enough. It is feature rich, offers good security if you want and most importantly has no ties to FB or Google.

First lesson taught at IBM for mainframe programmers: "There is no such thing as computer security, only the appearance of security."

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