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Comment by dunefox | Hacker News Reader

I've been looking for secure messengers during the last few weeks. I use WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. Telegram isn't very secure, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook and even Signal - while very secure - requires a cell phone number... Briar seems great in this regard but isn't available on iPhone and has no support for images, calls, voice messages, etc. Apparently they're going to support images and a desktop client, though.

In short, I just don't know what to use.

Edit: Session looks great but is not fully released yet: https://getsession.org/ This might be what I'm looking for in the future.

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FWIW, I think you can just get a Google Voice or other short-term burner number to sign up for Signal, and then never worry about it again. Signal's an order of magnitude more trustworthy than the other messaging players and have built out a good base of features at this point. (telegram specifically is a joke... proprietary closed-source encryption is a recipe for disaster.)

I would strongly advise against picking a tiny new-comer without some serious research beforehand... They're not battle-hardened, so will typically be less reliable than any of the existing larger players.

I don't think never worry about it again is quit correct

  What if someone registers with my old number? 
  If someone were to register with your old number on a new phone, then they will have an empty message history. Your contacts will also be made aware of a safety number change if they start messaging with the old number.

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007062012-Ne...

I had no luck getting people to use signal. Family thinks that I'm a freak because I try to make them understand that in socialist Denmark your communication is not secure from the government.

The app is easy to use, but people are not using it. They use sms and FB etc. to message friends.

Have you tried Jabber with Conversations or Pix-Art android app? It has end to end encryption (OMEMO), support for sharing media, voice and video calling, multitude of desktop clients, (a less secure) web client etc.

Most importantly, you can host the server yourself without cutting off from the network.

Signal is working on getting rid of the cell # requirement, but it'll take a while.

It can't happen soon enough. I installed Signal a few years ago, and the first thing it did was notify a bunch of people I had in my contacts, that I was now using Signal...

...Including the unstable frenemy-guy who was only in my contacts so I'd recognize the number if he called and I'd know not to answer...

....who immediately PM'd me on Signal to push his latest delusion and make sure I didn't disagree.

Great, just great. For a privacy-focused product, that's a pretty colossal fuckup.

I understand your frustration, but Signal didn't notify your contacts because you installed it. It notified the other person, because he had your phone number.

Your local Signal installation regularly checks if any of your contacts (with the phone numbers you have of them) are registered at the Signal servers - and then lets you know it, such that you can text this contact securely.

doesn't make a difference. it shouldn't do that without user confirmation

The technical details do not really matter.

Many people might have my phone number, possibly from a long ago. But the number itself is pretty safe -- there is no way to tell if this phone is in use or not.

Signal breaks that assumption -- it immediately tells every other user that this number is alive, valid, and can be contacted right now.

This is a terrible idea to do by default, especially if one cannot disable it.

Although it lacks a notification in WhatsApp it's just as easy to check a phone number for 'aliveness'. When you select 'new conversation' you get a list of your contacts with a name (from your address book) and a picture and tagline.

This is all based on your address-book so it doesn't matter if the other party knows your number or not.

But in this case they do matter. When you give someone your phone number, you give them the possibility to contact you. And then it should be securely, if it's possible.

A check for "aliveness" of a number can be done without Signal. Just call and see if it is ringing. You get the same information. Your Signal profile name and picture, however, will only be shared when you accept it.

I agree. I found that behaviour disgusting, and that's why I avoid Signal.

Anyone who says Signal has good privacy is just wrong. When Signal say they have good privacy, that's false advertising.

Of course, Telegram does the same thing. I have Telegram installed, and I use it, but it wasn't really a choice. I needed to access a forum which is only on Telegram :/ Unfortunately that meant I had no choice but to have people who know me notified that I installed it. Someone messaged me about 30 seconds after I installed it to say hi. I'm not comfortable about this, but as I say, I didn't really have a choice.

Then there's WhatsApp. I was surprised to read an article which recommended that, of the three, WhatsApp is probably the most privacy-respecting of the apps. I have WhatsApp installed after a long period of avoiding it, because of all people recruiters started expecting it. Hmph. I still refuse to grant it access to my contact list, because I'm not handing that over to Facebook. Which means every message is associated with a raw phone number only, and I have to guess who it is from the content :-)

You can tell WhatsApp doesn't reveal so much, by the people who have sent WhatsApp messages without being told that the recipient doesn't have WhatsApp installed and won't see the message. I've known a few people this happened to. One installed WhatsApp and found they'd been sent a message a year earlier, from someone they thought wasn't talking to them. They were talking, but the sender assumed of course the recipient would have WhatsApp.

You might want to read Whatsapp terms of service, in particular the part where they claim copyright and even the right to make derivative works on anything you transmit over their platform.

Oh don't get me wrong. I don't want to use WhatsApp. I'm only on it at all because I need to speak with people who are using it without antagonising them. I still haven't granted it access to my contacts DB.

All three of Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp make me a bit off about using them for various reasons. None of them are what you'd call "user's privacy first".

As it is, I'm currently having occasional confidential chats (at someone else's request) on Telegram secret chats, and at least that probably is what it says it is.

I don't think any of these three apps are awful.

They are pretty slick, and useful.

I don't feel too bad actually using them, any more then using say MSN, Yahoo or Freenode.

They just don't meet the advertised bar of respecting individual privacy first. And I find that really misleading in the case of Signal and Telegram in particular, which emphasise the privacy angle, and then without letting you know, sprays everyone you ever interacted with outside Signal with a notification, including professional contacts, customer service agents, people you don't like, spammers, etc.

Signal can't fix social problems. Sounds like you probably ought to cut the toxic person out of your life. Or if that's too confrontational, there's always the old, "Sorry, I just got this number, don't know who you're talking about."

That's because most privacy design is done by nerds who think "CIA/NSA/GCHQ/Mossad/FSB etc. might secretly whisk me away to Gitmo for my thoughtcrimes" is a far more pressing problem in people's lives than "my partner is a coercive, controlling domestic abuser", or "my employer might fire me for trying to set up a union"...

It still leaks all the connections metadata. It's very easy to correlate TCP connections to and from the server.

How exactly does Element leak metadata?

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Jami https://jami.net/

Self hosted matrix? It has e2e encryption.

Even better, I'm pinning my hopes on peer-to-peer matrix via dendrite.

It still leaks all the connections metadata. It's very easy to correlate TCP connections to and from the server.

also, very soon signal won't require a phone numbet as the PIN feature (what is present now for storage encryption) will be extended to serve as account ID

Have you looked at 'threema'? I recently installed it and I'm actually pleasantly surprised.

However, all of these bloody messengers mean that my contacts list is spread across a multitude of programs: we need the iOS/Android equivalent of pidgin.

Pidgin is exactly what we need.. and each messenger needs to be a pluggable module. Then we dont need to hound friends and family to switch messenger apps they just use pidgin.

But why would something like Facebook open up their walled garden? Does it even count as a walled garden when you have 2 billion people on the platform?

the walls i think refer to transparency ?

so is regardless of user count

Obviously yes. Does any wall count if there are more entities on one side of it than the other?

Threema is closed source which is something I don't really like when it comes to security as there are no independent audits.

Edit: Generally, Threema seems interesting feature-wise, but I think the price (4€) will prevent my contacts from using it...

Interesting thought experiment though; if you’re not paying for the development and hosting- who is?

threema claims no having no identificable information yet the account IDs are just the unsalted hashes of your telephone number.

What did Riot, the Matrix client, get renamed to?

"Element". had to look it up, forgotten it already. :/

It is a really forgettable name, to be fair.

> Telegram isn't very secure

Can someone elaborate?

There are different aspects to this. The first and the easily verifiable one is that they default to client-server-client connections, not end-to-end encryption. If you want to have an end-to-end encrypted channel, you have to explicitly open a "secret chat". However, this removes the convenience of cross device syncing.

The second one is more difficult to evaluate. If you use the above mentioned "secret chat" feature, Telegram employs their own closed-source encryption scheme. That's usually an indicator to be cautious from the get-go. Since it's closed source, it can't really be trusted.

See [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)#Security) for a timeline in regards to the security.

Telegram clients are open source. I downloaded and built MacOS version recently - it was very straightforward.

https://telegram.org/apps#source-code

Encryption for secret chats doesn't involve server, so technically it can be analyzed.

It's a pity Telegram decided to roll their own encryption scheme. I use Telegram a lot for daily business because it's superior desktop messenger product. I would gladly participate if somebody started a crowd-funding for Telegram's security and encryption audit.

> Encryption for secret chats doesn't involve server, so technically it can be analyzed.

Except if you are on desktop, you have no secret chats at all. And "desktop" includes GNU/Linux phones.

To add to my sibling's comment: Contact lists also get synced with the servers (in contrast to e.g. how Signal handles this).

The project is no longer maintained but Oversec had a cool concept of hiding your own encrypted text as non-printing chars in Android text fields in any other app, like e.g. WhatsApp.

https://github.com/oversecio/oversec

I'm a big fan of Keybase https://keybase.io/. The team was acquired by Zoom, but there's a new website and development is still going on.

"Wire" is the only one, AFAIK, that ticks all those boxes.

care to elaborate on how telegram is unsecure? Their fat bug bounty program yielded no security issues for years and I'm unaware of any issues with MTProto

Their server backend code is closed source and they're running custom crypto. Also groups and desktop clients don't support end-to-end encryption.

iMessage? Natively on your phone/macOS and peer to peer encrypted. Never really saw a need for yet another messaging service. I think I'd trust Apple to do the right thing over any of these.

Great unless you or someone you want to communicate with doesn't use an apple device. Which covers the majority of the population.

I've also had terrible reliability issue with imessage in the past, messages not delivering, not showing up, errors sending, showing up on one device but not another, etc. Was a mess that caused a lot of confusion.

Guess it depends on your circles. For my group, everyone has an iPhone or a Mac. For the outliers, everyone has cell phones, and iMessage supports SMS.

>iMessage supports SMS.

Which isn't end to end encrypted which defeats the whole point in terms of this conversation.

Thank you for identifying that.

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