Signal PINs
signal.org
signal.org
There is always something absolutely odd with Signal. The obtuse insistence in creating it's own vault makes it annoying to use to share media and to make backups. Down to the built-in unusable camera app. I have almost everything duplicated in/out of signal because of this. Huge space waste. What's the threat model? Under the assumption that I can root the phone this is pointless. But if I trust the sandbox it's also pointless. Anonymizing file metadata in/out would have been more pragmatic, but pragmatism here is frowned upon.
Remote contact discovery: technically impressive. I would have gladly opted out though to remain anonymous to some contacts that have my number. Yeah, that's the real "privacy" bit which is worth 10 times this PIN debacle.
I'm still bound to use a phone number which I _don't_ really care about even just to use the desktop version (ahaha, desktop, yeah.. cough).
When I saw the PIN prompt for the first time I realized the money injection was giving its first fruits. I gave matrix a first good try. Finally I can choose from a plethora of clients, run my own server if needed.
The setup though is still not dumb-proof as signal (which is why I tolerated all the issues with signal so far), and the phone clients I've tried are not as polished.
That being said, when I mentioned PINs I managed to convert most my tech contacts to matrix within a week. The real question is whether the other ones will stay, jump over, or just go back to whatsapp (which they never removed).
1.) You only get to see the backup password ONCE. They create it for you, it's a giant bunch of numbers written in columns. They show you that the FIRST time you enable backups, which might be years away from the time you need them.
2.) After they dump the backup, they just throw it in a preset folder on Android flash. You need to find a way to get it off the device yourself (good luck if the device broke). No help with transferring to another device, no Android beam support, nothing.
3.) After you somehow manage to get the file to another device, there's no help at restoring it either. You need to put it EXACTLY in the right directory. They don't tell you which. Even after that, the app will not pick up the backup. There's no "Restore backup" button or option. You need to KNOW that you have to destroy all existing app settings by clearing data and then it'll attempt a restore.
4.) When it attempts to restore, it presents you an input field that's flat text entry and is NOT organized in original columns. You need to guess the order of columns in which you need to enter the 30+ digits. If you fail... well, try again!
5.) If you switch from iOS to Android then you're SOL because iOS people don't deserve to have their conversations preserved.
It feels like the authors of the app never had any meaningful conversations they'd like to remember in the future. It feels like the same mindset which made some security people implement nonsensical policies like "you need to change to a new 16 char password every week without duplication for a year" on Active Directory. A mind set which thinks that badgering you for PIN every week accomplishes anything but a wish to install WhatsApp. A mindset, which does significantly more harm to security than good. A mindset, which bogged proliferation of encrypted communication for years until corporations took it away. And that's sad.
You can create a new backup if you forget or lose the encryption key, and considering it creates them periodically this doesn't even serve as an extra inconvenience for me. I don't see an obviously better alternative for creating an encrypted backup. Why would a password repeatedly be shown to a user?
Also, the dialog showing the code doesn't allow copying or provide any easy way of saving it somewhere. Which makes is very unlikely that many users will successfuly store it.
Also the backup itself has no support of syncing anywhere. Your phone fell out of your pocket? Well, say goodbye of all the pictures of your nephew.
Pretty much every layer of this process is very user-hostile and provides practically no help for the user to have effective and secure backups.
What you're looking for appears to be an unencrypted backup, which has clear security implications that Signal (quite reasonably, in my opinion) chose to avoid given that it is storing a file on your local device memory. Honestly, if you don't want to keep track of an encryption key and still want to retain your message history, maybe you don't care that much about your messaging privacy (which is fine). There are plenty of apps that serve this use case.
> Also, the dialog showing the code doesn't allow copying or provide any easy way of saving it somewhere. Which makes is very unlikely that many users will successfuly store it.
Again, I think this is a conscious choice. Their design decisions appear to work well for those who don't know much about technology but still want a private messaging platform. Allowing unsafe key storage methods instead of (for example) writing it down on a piece of paper might encourage users to take that easier route and Signal wants to lean towards privacy even if that means losing message history.
> Also the backup itself has no support of syncing anywhere. Your phone fell out of your pocket? Well, say goodbye of all the pictures of your nephew.
I agree that this can make things complicated, but based on the comments here a good number of users don't want a cloud storage solution and would prefer to lose their messages. In any case, this is easy to work around because a Android allows for decent file management, so any one of the hundreds of file sync apps can work for you here.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si...
"Can I turn off these reminders?
It is important to memorize your PIN, and the reminders cannot be disabled. We cannot recover your PIN if you forget it.
You will see the reminders less frequently if you consistently enter your PIN correctly. The reminders will become more frequent if multiple attempts are necessary."Why call it a PIN and not a password to begin with? Is there a difference I'm missing?
If it’s not user friendly, the user will defer to convenience over security. Signal PINs do support alphanumeric strings FYI.
If you have a password manager, use a string. If not, a PIN works just fine.
The whole PIN thing has changed quite a bit in the past 6 months or so.
No, only supporting data: "Your profile, settings, and contacts will restore when you reinstall Signal."
For example a Yubico Security Key can use a PIN. So I could use that as second factor for my Facebook. No matter how lazy, incompetent or even malevolent Facebook is, they never see that PIN, they just get a bitflag in which the Security Key promises it confirmed my identity before authenticating. If they insisted and I allowed them to, they could verify it's a real Yubico brand product (in reality Facebook don't do that) and maybe trust the bitflag on that basis, but even then they aren't learning what PIN I set, how long it is, anything useful.
You probably don't want to store such PINs in a Password Manager, although it's unlikely to be a big security problem to do so, they are intended to be human memorable unlike a "good" modern password.
I just wish there was an option to ask less frequently.
> I just wish there was an option to ask less frequently.
It asks you when you open Signal until you lock it again, no? (At least on Android.)
I agree that an advanced option to disable PIN reminder prompts would be nice, but I understand and respect the Signal team for focusing on more important things. I can live with a 5 second prompt every 2 weeks.
Signal's challenge is to build features that other apps already have but in a way that respects their users' privacy. They make their share of mistakes but I'm deeply grateful for what they do and try not to lose sight of the important stuff.
Sure, that doesn't mean there is/was no better way to make this change. To provide more options for users, etc.
I'm simply saying that the PIN prompt worked for me over the last months (I successfully memorized it), and now with the new UI it prompted me to fill it with Keepass for Android. (And that's how I found the old PIN in Keepass.)
According to this, the prompts should settle down to once every 14 days:
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si...
I'm never going to forget my mobile number, I don't need to keep calling myself to remember it.
This has given me a good idea for a study: find people who have changed phone numbers and see how many of those people can remember them. Then plot the data by the last time they used that number.
How did they not learn from this when they tried it with the activation lock.
First off the app is incessant about asking you to enter your PIN to prove you know it; this prompt is supposed to get less frequent and I suppose it does but is still way too frequent. Some of us are competent at storing secrets in a password manager and this is like a punishment for us because it can easily take several minutes to go retrieve the strong password, copy it, paste it in.
It actually reduced the security for me; I started out with maybe a 16 or 20 digit PIN and cut it to a smaller number of digits that I could memorize. (I still haven't memorized them!)
There were also issues with Signal's implementation of the feature. I chose quite a long PIN (>20 digits) at first for security only to find out later from them that it was above the silently imposed limit. Later when I went to verify the PIN it would not work because whatever silent truncation was done when establishing the PIN was not re-performed on verification so it did not recognize the PIN.
This option should be labelled according to the reality rather than people's wishful thinking
"Don't ask me again, when I lose this I am OK with losing the account and messages"
There's probably a pithier way to express that we could get into the common lexicon as I foresee it being useful in many places. Maybe we can just label it "Yolo!" ?
... that would encapsulate the basic reality that no one can actually remember all their ~500 secure passphrases.
Secondly, outside of encryption, it should not be Signal's job to enforce whether a logged-in user of a phone can see that user's content. It is the operating system's job to enforce user-level security, and users of Signal are unlikely to keep their phones without a pin, fingerprint, or other level of authentication.
The fact that you cannot turn off the option to lose all your messages when you lose a pin that you have been forced to set is horrific for those of us that rely on conversation history as a memory aid, and is precisely the reason why I have refused to set a pin.
And if you take into account the "lending phones to kids" scenario it gets worse because that just means that when your 4yro kid gets your phone they can irrecoverably delete all your messages, simply by playing around with it.
I think one of the issues with software is that because it’s infinitely extensible, people just add more and more features, they don’t know when to stop. So they keep pushing features that satisfy 10% of their users to the detriment of the 90%. Slowly the app becomes bloated and extremely confusing to use.
If they still want to use a pen then there should be an option if it is an alphanumeric string to check a box that says this is managed by a password manager don't remind me for at least 6 months.
The experts can maybe fork Signal, or use Matrix. Then there is always PGP/GPG.
Signal should not stay as the simplest possible iteration of an encrypted chat application. If we want more people to use privacy-concious applications, those applications need to evolve.
However, this is not what they are announcing. Signal does not store any message content in the cloud. It's only your address book as well as the list of blocked accounts. So that you don't completely start from scratch when you lose your phone. This makes total sense.
If you assume that SGX is insecure and Signal can just brute force the PINs (definitely a legitimate view!), then address book equivalent data is already available to Signal in the form of who-talks-to-whom metadata. The only difference is that the metadata needs to be collected over a time span while address books only require short time compromises of the architecture. But this is a minor regression in security, for a large gain in usability.
I don't understand why it isn't just optional. They claim they want to protect my Signal data stored in the cloud. I don't want my data stored in the cloud. I want them to store nothing. I don't care about their Intel SGX whatever because I don't want to have to trust their servers in the first place.
Cloud storage is a complete non-starter for me. I started my company to get away from cloud storage [2]. The fact that they are forcing this on their users is making me seriously consider dumping Signal. I just don't know if there are any sane alternatives.
[1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9632
Yeah: particularly given how Intel SGX gets broken every year :/... prime+probe, foreshadow, load value injection, plundervolt... Moxie's fetish for Intel SGX is extremely concerning.
Which, imo, is a pretty reasonable decision.
I haven't built that stuff yet though so the current version requires that your home computer has a public IP address and that you open a port in your router. Obviously it's only usable by technical people right now, but I do eventually want this to be something my mom can install and use on her own.
>Because Signal doesn’t have access to your keys – or your data – your PIN isn’t recoverable if you forget it, so our apps help you remember your PIN with periodic reminders. Don’t worry, these reminders get less frequent over time.
Having read that, I doubt I'll get too irritated at the reminders and eventually they'll go away. You have a point that anyone who hasn't read the update blog will have no similar hope and might use something easy. I guess I'd hope the Signal user base is more security conscious than that. For instance, I know my PIN is going to be alphanumeric and immediately stored my password database.
There is a large segment of people who don't like complicated passwords and will not use a password manager, so the PIN scheme w/ advanced options and password manager integration is the way to thread that needle.
They want to add signal identifiers that aren't phone numbers. If such identifiers are to communicate with you, you need to store what's necessary.
I don't blame signal for forcing strong PINs, I don't know what's their purpose, but non phone number identifiers don't require cloud storage. The contact list (with the associated public keys) does.
What? How? You just need a key (password). If you are able to log into that "identified" then you are online with that and others can message you on that, and the network will route messages to your client.
There's nothing to store up to this point.
And if people want backups they can optionally enable that. Or the network could support multiple clients signed in for the same "identified" and allow those authenticated and authorized clients to sync/backup among themselves.
Imagine needing to configure and remember a PIN on the spot when you need to urgently read your messages.
Their handling of PINs seems quite contrary to their goal of pretty good security for the largest possible number of people.
It's VERY frustrating to have your device asking for pins every time you use it. I'm trying to protect from attackers on the internet, not someone who is going to assault me. After all if they assault me for my phone they can assault me for my pin. Single devs need to read https://xkcd.com/538/
They should explain what the pins is BEFORE they ask. What it looks like is you are going to be locked out of signal if you make a mistake. Not like the average signal user is watching the whisper systems blog.
I guess it depends on if you buy into SGX. Lots of people don't.
> Still stupid
Yeah, this isn't making anyone happy it seems. Still, they are a small organization and having configuration increases maintenance burden. As long as Signal keeps operating as non-commercial product, I will keep cutting them slack.
It's kind of a difficult thing to ask. "Do you want this app to work like every other app in the world in the ways you've come to expect?" If people were to simply reinstall Signal and find that all of their contacts were gone, all of their groups were gone, all of their block lists were gone, etc... they'd almost certainly be surprised. It's not a behavior anyone expects.
Every other consumer messaging app in the world solves this by storing all of that information in plaintext on their servers. We're trying to do something privacy preserving instead, and have done a fair amount of engineering work to try to make it as frictionless as we possibly can.
If you have ideas for how we can achieve the same ends with less friction, we're definitely interested in the feedback.
> Not like it's going to be hard to brute force a user's PIN.
Check out this blog post for more information about the technology:
I see a lame excuse.
Lets be real: Groups have never worked very well in Signal, so people use alternatives. It's been my experience that at some point it screws up and everyone has to delete the group and we start over again.
Contacts are stored by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and/or their work email provider for a large majority of the population. Only the minority using burners might care and they are likely already used to setting up lists every time they burn a device.
Put a checkbox in the app for: 'Store my blocklist and profile info in Apple/Google's backup system. This will share info with them'. Some users will want that, others won't. Quite a few people would like to have Signal's message backups included in an offline iOS backup, their complaints have fallen on deaf ears. Stop pontificating and give the option. It was a bigger compromise on your end creating a Signal Desktop app than it was to provide an option to include message exports in an encrypted backup.
Say what you will about Telegram, they made a much more reasonable compromise with their 'secure messaging'. This feature is not in their desktop apps as the attack surface of a desktop/laptop is too large. Secure chats instead focus on ephemerality and are torn down after completion. It's a more realistic threat model.
>Check out this blog post for more information about the technology:
Ah yes, the complex technology that relies on the insecure broken thing from Intel: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/hacke...
You could say:
"Hi there! Do you want to keep a backup of your conversation metadata locally, or via the cloud? The latter requires you to be badgered for a pin every day and lose all your data, even the information that the pin doesn't protect, if you lose it. The former allows you to backup to a file you can save on your computer, and store a password in your password manager!"
Asking for it once at the time of a new registration, install, or a restore/reinstall would be far more preferable to me. Treating it more like a "filevault" key or an "encryption phrase/password", would certainly encourage me to use a much longer key and just put it into a password manager (and/or write it down and put it somewhere physically safe).
Edit: Now I see. Signal wants to save data in the cloud. My Threema PIN is just for my device.
This cannot be stressed enough
Right now that's not a problem because your social graph is in the address book on your phone, and isn't managed by Signal. This is one of the primary reasons that Signal uses phone numbers for addressing: it leverages an existing user-owned and user-managed social graph. However, what we've repeatedly heard from users is that they don't want addressing to be based exclusively on phone numbers for a variety of reasons.
If we're not using that social graph, then where does the Signal-specific social graph live? For every other app in the world, the answer is that it lives in a server-side plaintext database. Snapchat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Matrix, Wire, FB Messenger, Skype, etc etc... they're all just storing your entire social graph in a plaintext database (along with a bunch of other stuff, like your groups, profiles, etc).
Given the way that technology has developed (devices are fundamentally designed for a world of clients and servers), it's probably not possible for us to build something that makes no use of servers. Instead, we've focused on building something that doesn't store or transmit any sever-side plaintext.
For instance, when you set your Signal profile name and avatar, that lives "in the cloud" so that other Signal users can retrieve and display it. But it's encrypted (https://signal.org/blog/signal-profiles-beta/), so only your contacts can see it (not us).
With Signal Private Groups (https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/), again we have to store data "in the cloud," so that there's a canonical data source for group management, but again all of the contents are encrypted so that only group members can see it (not us).
In this case, we're using Secure Value Recovery to ensure that a future addressing scheme that's not based on phone numbers is available across app reinstalls, phone switches, phone loss, etc. We could have just done what every other consumer messaging app in the world has done (store it in plaintext on the server), but we built this instead. It is the most user-friendly option that we could conceive of while still being privacy preserving, and took a lot of engineering work.
We're going to keep looking at all the feedback we've gotten, though, to try to make it the best experience we can.
Edit: it's especially stupid if you can't use a pw manager with it. I haven't tried it because I don't want to set one. Once I'm forced, I'm going to ditch signal. Fuck that.
for signal pins today, there should be an option to not be reminded of it because the user has a password manager. The option to not remind could be buried in the settings with a big scary warning that says if you do not get reminded again you will lose everything.
Signal pens can be bypassed entirely in the cases where users have multiple devices such as a linked phone or desktop.
One device sets a strong alphanumeric pin and sends it to the server. Users can share an ID unique to each signal installation on each of their devices. Each individual device has the ID for every other individual device. For each device that does not know the signal pin, it can request it from a device that does have the signal pin and or the device that made it. If a signal installation has the pin and gets a request for the pain from another device ID that it knows about, it provides it.
This device ID exchange behavior is used in syncthing to support e2ee peer-to-peer file sync, and could be used for syncing metadata in the situation where one device has its installation lost or reinstalled and needs to be repulled from the central servers.
An existing device(s) is told the Id of a new device and the new device is told about the existing device(s). None will communicate with the other without already having the user enter the device ID.
Once the two installations have handshaked, the existing device tells the new device what the seignal pin is and it can download it from the signal server.
For users who do not wish for cloud storage could have their device treat another device as the canonical source for the data post handshake and the data could be synced over lan or using stun/turn.
How about letting people back this up? There's no way to do this on iOS or in the desktop app. You're solving a problem of your own making with a solution your core audience of privacy conscious users does not want.
Why not just allow users to load their data into the cloud with a pin or password? My friends that use Signal because I pressure them into it (remember, that's why a lot of people use Signal) just want a one click upload/download. Generally these are also iPhone users, which currently doesn't allow this. Why not just give a one-click option to sync into drive or iCloud? Make it optional too (for the privacy folk who are generating your userbase). Doesn't this solve the whole problem?
Why force this "feature" on everyone? There is ZERO reason for Signal to do this. I might as well use WhatsApp if you're going to start doing this shit, but I guess that's the point.
Right now, if I re-install Signal on a new device, it will (hopefully) prompt me for a Signal-generated passphrase that I've stored very securely, and then allow me to restore everything, messages and address book, from a backup that I've diligently made and stored under an additional layer of encryption together with the rest of my data.
Will that facility remain available? Will the backup remain encrypted with the strong passphrase, or will any app with access to external storage be able to exfiltrate something that the Signal Foundation would be able to decrypt under the assumption that SGX is broken?
While I've so far been impressed with Signals' choices (prioritizing security but staying usable), I'm extremely disappointed with the new reliance on SGX, and forcing me into this scheme would likely get me to ditch Signal.
In particular, if I get a dialog forcing me to set a PIN, I'm out (at that point, Signal will be broken for me anyways - I'm using it to talk to very non-technical users that react to UX changes with a blank stare; they won't be able to use the app if a mandatory modal popup shows up, and flying over to teach them how to deal with it isn't exactly an option right now.)
I use Signal so I don't have to trust opaque stuff happening at a third party. From my understanding, Secure Value Recovery relies heavily on SGX, and becomes mostly equivalent to plain text (brute-forcing a short PIN) if you don't trust SGX.
One of the things that made me optimistic about broad adoption for Signal prior to this change is that it was basically zero-friction for Android users to use Signal over the stock messaging app, aside from the few seconds it takes to download Signal and enter your phone number. But bugging the user for a PIN all the time is a significant reason to stick to the stock messaging app (or any other one, for that matter) and makes it a lot harder for me to recommend Signal in good faith to friends and family who don't care about privacy.
In my opinion as power users we forget what regular users want and need, and are not willing to give up a little of what we like. But think of the benefits (phoneless sign ups and much much better private groups, to begin with) and tell me they don't outweigh the cons (a PIN prompt once every 2 weeks, in the marginal case).
Instead of typing in a pin few days/weeks for years, why not just have an export feature that users can select. Have users fill out an encryption key, then 1 minute later when they grab their new phone they can type it in again.
Ideally this would work from the desktop client, a tablet client, and phone clients. So if my device dies, is stolen, or sold I can restore my history from any other signal client I run.
Or maybe use the IOS approach which allows users to cloud sync to keep history (if they want), or to turn it off, which is less convenient, but more secure.
Either approach would save 10s or 100s of pin entries, and still provide a good user experience when switching phones.
This is true for today's Matrix network, but we do have peer-to-peer Matrix working now too (as previewed at https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/dip_p2p_matrix/) which stores the metadata purely on the clients. There are no servers, other than rendezvous points to seed the network. (It's still vulnerable to traffic pattern analysis, but we're working on that - and Signal suffers this even more).
It's also worth noting that because Matrix doesn't tie identity to phone numbers (or anything else), the 'social graph' which is built up is of limited use if it's built up of anonymous personae.
My partner uninstalled Signal when it failed to work from within the UAE and could not contact me. If she wouldn't have done it then, she would now with this PIN nonsense. At least we can text via Wire.
1: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/967
2: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/28598496-message-export-...
I definitely look forward to the ability to move Signal forward to a new device without losing all logs, and the ability to use Signal without tying it to a phone number.
The enclave is hardened against Spectre and LVI with this (BOLT/LLVM based), and other techniques: https://github.com/signalapp/BOLT
The last build step before signing is a verifier that checks that there are no missed mitigations, built using Intel Xed, to try to avoid potential missing mitigations due to an LLVM or BOLT bug.
To do this securely made the whole thing quite difficult, because it means we can never persist anything outside the enclave, or an attacker could unpersist into 1000 unmodified enclaves (who would never know about each other) and get 1000*N guesses.
Each partition of the keyspace lives on a 5 node cluster, running RAFT inside the enclaves to ensure the pin guess count is consistent.
If a node fails, or is failing, or we need to do maintenance, we transfer the partition from the old nodes to new ones, which transfers the serviceid as well. If you start a new enclave from scratch, it'll generate a new serviceid, and clients won't talk to it, and existing partitions will refuse to transfer to it since it already has a serviceid. In fact, it won't even be listening for incoming transfers, since it thinks it owns the entire keyspace.
We can also do a partial partition transfer that leaves the source cluster live, which we use to split up the keyspace more when we need to scale up.
There is no persistence (wouldn't be secure, attackers could do many parallel enclave resumes to get extra guesses), so the 5 nodes in the cluster live in geographically separated data centers, and we're real careful about things that could kill a node or process.
Looking at the code quickly I see that nothing is documented and it's not clear what code gets executed there. So good luck understanding what they're doing. But it seems to be using Raft, probably to bring several HSMs to consensus on what's the state of the number of attempts. And it does seem to erase stuff if you reach some threshold of attempts: https://github.com/signalapp/SecureValueRecovery/blob/00d023...
My follow up question is: what prevents someone from destroying your account's backup key by entering wrong PINs for your account?
You need a random id not the phone number, so other users can't do guesses unless they get that random id somehow. The ID is stored on the phone, and if you lose it, when you reinstall Signal, the signal server will give it to you after SMS phone # verification.
A sim-jacker could nuke your key, but that seems like a lot of work for griefing. Signal of course, has the plaintext random id, so they could nuke your backup, but there are tons of ways Signal can DoS attack their own service. Stopping paying for the servers, for one.
> PINs will also help facilitate new features like addressing that isn’t based exclusively on phone numbers
The main issue I see is with the intrusiveness of how Signal PINs are handled by the UI, this will only work to alienate users or encourage writing simple PINs that make them weak to use! It would've been much better had it been treated as a fully opt in feature and PINs treated more as passwords, without the constant bombardment of reminders to input it.
This can be placed behind a "sync" option for example and enabling it opens a dialogue explaining the need for password, from there it's up to the user to enable sync and in doing so they have to set a password like normal services.
That's just my 2 cents ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And my copy started preventing me from using it entirely yesterday with a full-screen un-dismissable popup[1] :(
[1]: https://i.redd.it/4sip5dcw9iy41.png [2]
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/giw4if/the_signal_p...
This is awesome. So important for people at risk like the human rights defenders, journalists, legal, LGBTIQ people we work with. Great to see Signal looking at this.
The blog post completely fails to explain why this feature is mandatory, and why users are now locked out of being able to view their messages until they setup a PIN. The Signal app has now essentially taken all messages hostage, and users are unable to access messages until they create a PIN.
I am a huge proponent of Signal, but this is unacceptable behavior.
I find it surprising that many users got so upset by the software asking them to set a password that they removed the app... seems a bit extreme. I guess if it was part of a "sign-up" flow, people would have been primed for it... But even then, it takes like just a minute to do it? /shrug
Plenty of apps add annoyances and nags for new features that uses don't necessarily care about. They correspondingly lose users and gain ire for doing so.
That the motivation and end feature is good is beside the point - they have simply gone about this in a very abrasive way and seem to think they 'know better'.
I have a pin for my sim-card, a pin for the phone encryption, pins for each of my 4 credit cards, a pin for the office door, a pin for my work phone, a pin for the computer smart-card login..
I'm very fine with not having a pin for Signal.
Duh. Because they explicitly disable backups.
This is going to be the reality of any data system which you want to have complete control over. I suppose it could also be a complex key you instead keep on your drive, but that has risks as well.
Normally I use 128-bit passwords (i.e., 22 mixed-case letters and digits) for any remote system. That's not really practical for something which prompts me to enter the PIN periodically (and I think Signal limits the PIN to 20 characters anyway).
I do not see any net benefit to storing my contact information on Signal's servers. If I want to rebuild my contact list, I can … ask my contacts for their Signal accounts.
If it's supposed to be an easier alternative to a passphrase, then okay, but stop showing me the freaking notification to setup a PIN...
I remember the PIN and it's also stored in BitWarden and KeePass. Now I am locked out.
Now lets assume most average (non-technical) users will simply type in/re-use their smartphone pin (most of the people i know will do this.)
Would this mean if there's a data breach in the 'Signal cloud', their Pins have now leaked onto the internet?
Doesn't seem like a great idea to store peoples Pin codes in a cloud... would probably be better if they'd just called it a 'Signal password'. People would not think about entering their smartphone PIN code that way.
So what i'm curious about is, how can this be? If you have lost your device (and thus all the keys stored in the signal app/phone), how can they store just a single pin while at the same time being able to prevent it to be recovered/brute forced (since it only has to be 4 digits)?
[Secure Value Recovery] https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
> All of this adds up to a secure enclave that limits the number of recovery attempts that are possible against a value synchronized across nodes in hardware-encrypted RAM.
Surely they'd have to do more work than iterate through a possibly as small as 4-digit key?
> As we move to support additional features the Signal community has asked for – like addressing that isn’t based on phone numbers and chatting with contacts that aren’t saved in an address book – it means that more and more of this important supporting data can also be lost.
This b.s. is starting to remind me of the systemd crap lin Linux. I am at a point where I prefere paid open source apps and services (with a free tier) so the devs have incentive to listen to users.
It worked well a year ago,now they are ruinig it. I constantly have problems with Signal where it takes hours at times to deliver the message and this translates to real world problems and misunderstandings with people for me. Just fix the bugs,make new features optional and opt-in unless you absolutley have no choice.
Meanwhile on Telegram everything just works more or less as is has always done.
If I click on settings I get a "menu" called "Passcode & Face ID". There's a button saying "Turn Passcode On", and a help text saying: "Note: if you forget the passcode, you'll need to delete and reinstall the app. All secret chats will be lost."
While I personally have big questions around the encryption in Telegram I think Telegram takes a much more effective approach towards making it available: by default it is just a very good messaging application that is a good replacement for Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and almost everything else except Signal.
On top of that it provides secret chats which are end to end encrypted (and can also be set to automatically disappear), and an option for deleting all my data if I don't log in within 1, 3, 6 or 12 months.
There's a lot of problems around Telegram from their marketing to their crypto implementation to their incentives.
But please stick to the facts.
For starters it doesn't give my raw metadata including who I talk to, when and so on to Zuckerberg, or unencrypted chat logs of both sides of a chat to servers in USA.
And the Durov brothers weren't running a massive ad and tracking network last I checked.
> There's a lot of problems around Telegram from their marketing to their crypto implementation to their incentives.
That said there are multiple ways around the monetization problem as long as you aren't trying to become a Silicon Valley unicorn:
- 1 USD pr user like WhatsApp
- Paid stickers and storage like MeWe
- Extra storage and extra features like Evernote
- Paid API access
- etc