Has there been any weakness found in Telegram's encryption?
While there's only one vuln that have been discussed publicly at HN. The only issue is they are in russian as well.
At least one more was exposed[0] by the same person shortly after, i mean days after the initial. Over here[1] the same researcher wonders whether any other flaws exist.
And here's[2] how the self-proclaimed `part time-troll` Pavel Durov (the Telegram CEO) reacts to [1]. To me it's obvious he is being haugty towards HN community with `venerable HN cryptographers`.
To add to his general slandering approach towards competition while handling own product flaws without any transparency and publicity mind his company is now under investigation by SEC[3].
[0] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
[2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=ru&tl=en&u=htt...
[3] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/let-slip-dogs-war-sec-v...
And for the paltry $200k they are offering for breaking it I'd bet you could find a magnitude more with little effort on the grey markets.
But no, absolutely no proof the underlying crypto has been broken. It doesn't need to be when government requests for data stored on their servers does more than enough.
So far, Roskomnadzor has "no urgent request" to include Viber and WhatsApp messengers in the register of organizers and distributors of information. According to Interfax, this was stated by the head of the Department, Alexander Zharov. He was asked when these companies will be included in the register. "We had a stormy substantive dialogue with the telegram messenger," the official recalled. "We are consulting with all other companies on this topic until there is an urgent request to include them in the register."
Maybe gn. Zharov uses whatsapp for chatting with his family and they didn’t like the appearance of mail.ru’s tamtam.chat.
* Group chats can only use the default encryption, not end to end encryption.
* The end to end encrypted chats are tied to a single device, and there's no sync across devices (in contrast, all chats on Wire are end to end encrypted and sync across devices within a limited time period).
The default use cases of almost all users has the chat messages stored in plain text on the Telegram servers. This is one of the reasons search (done on the server side) is quite fast on Telegram.
P.S.: Despite these limitations, I prefer Telegram for its superior UX and for not having metadata shared with Facebook. My wish is that someday Telegram makes E2E the default everywhere.
E: Well, I took a look at the desktop client with wireshark. It appears to just do MTProto on port 443, not TLS. When I use iptables to drop traffic on port 443, it falls back to MTProto over HTTP(!).
They list some alternate transports on their website, but it looks like you need to host them yourself. https://core.telegram.org/mtproto/transports
I reminisce that when Durov was questioned about the abscence of secure connection to the servers, he told it's a too much of overhead and may impact QoS badly.
Some time they rolled out an `always use https` option and buried it deep in the user preferences. Meaning most of non-tech savvy audience kept using the service unaware they are not secure.
The obvious pattern here is they tend to use plain http as a default transport unerminig established security practices.
[0] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
Could you expand on their usage of TLS and HTTP? Surely they don't send anything in plain-text over HTTP?
I thought they used TLS wrapping in some markets for censorship resistance, but apparently that is not the case unless you set up your own proxy.
You of all should know better than to conflate the general concept of encryption with the very nice special case that is end-to-end encryption!
> and 1:1 E2E is disabled by default.
It is not disabled in any way. It just isn't default.
There are really enough real reasons to criticize Telegram, absolutely no reason to 1. redefine words to have narrower definitions 2. Write outright misinformation.
I respect you a whole lot but your somewhat sloppy handling of facts detract a whole lot from the overall image.
When this design flaw came to be known, Telegram released a newer version where the user has more control on who can know that they're on Telegram. With that change, even if you had someone's number in your contacts list, you wouldn't know if/when they join/are available on Telegram unless they choose to make themselves visible.