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Comment by just-ok | Hacker News Reader

This could be the case for literally any E2EE service that controls key distribution (including WhatsApp, Signal, etc.), especially when there's no way to verify key fingerprints (here Signal differs because it does have a way, and it's open source so you can be more confident that it's not BSing you).

It's shocking to me how often this is glossed over when discussing E2EE services: you still must trust the platform.

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E2EE and open source: the two things people assume automatically makes things super-crazy-secure.

The implementation of E2EE must be robust and there must be somebody who is actually checking the source code (plus verifiable builds)

Don't forget the human element: users still have actually do the verifying (e.g. checking public key fingerprints of recipients) that the source code enables!

It doesn’t automatically make everything secure, but it’s still a prerequisite for a trusted secure thing.

If you go down that road, you can make this argument infinitely. Even if you verify your builds, you cannot know if the software you are using to check the build isn't compromised. Or if you check the software you use to check the build, you have to check the software doing that check and so on.

Nothing makes software automatically super-crazy-secure. Absolute security doesn't exist.

You'd get close by doing all you mentioned, but also compiling and hosting the code and infrastructure yourself. Not often this is feasible.

You'd be still trusting the compiler. However many layers of checks you do, there's always something you need to trust.

and safe OS, computer, room...

"E2EE" is kinda antonymous with "key distribution" (unless, maybe, if you mean authentication keys)

Well the crux of E2EE is authenticity, so yes. Key distribution is a fundamental problem of public-key cryptography: you can’t get my public, authentic identity key without trusting someone to not tamper with it along the way. We implicitly trust [Zoom|iMessage|Telegram|...] to do this.

You can check the finger print on WhatsApp

You absolutely can, but this leads directly to vonquant’s point (and antris’ follow-up)[1]: without the source, how far do you trust Facebook to not just pull a UI trick? It’s paranoia all the way down ;)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23554909

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