We saw it with the Green Revolution in Iran. We've seen it several times since.
So long as messages are not encrypted, messaging apps are much more naturally suited as tools of oppression than tools of revolution.
This isn't good advice for trying to show someone their messages aren't being sent in clear text. It could be encrypted using a weak cipher or have other implementation bugs that make it trivial for a nation state to decrypt it. You need to be able to look at the application's source code to tell what encryption it's using and if it's secure enough.
Sure they can encrypt E2E but they don't. Most chats on Telegram are unencrypted. Huge channels like the one mentioned above are full of agents and nothing prevents them from taking screenshots.
Don't spread false security.
Maybe I'm stupid for not realizing or looking it up before chosing Telegram. Luckily there are a lot of other apps out there in the same space that do this better. Have switched to Signal now and really like it! Privacy should never be an opt-in feature like in Telegram!
So that would include world famous professional cryptographers like Bruce Schneier and Matt Green. Meanwhile the people recommending Telegram are random usernames on internet forums. It sounds like you're the only one who doesn't know what they're talking about.
"Anyone can start a private chat encrypted end-to-end"
This is such a shill talking point. Telegram doesn't even support E2EE for groups. Every dissident groups leaks 100% of its chats to server with no possibility to opt-out.
1. arrest person.
2. torture until you get the chat app unlocked. (which is readily verifiable and very practical to get with torture).
3. arrest everyone else based on the chats after cross-referencing telegram accounts and phone company records.
~~By default~~ Telegram's group chats used to organize protests aren't E2EE. If Belarusian government hacks Telegram server, they can read every dissident group's chat history trivially.
People who join later only see messages from a while before they joined though so that helps a bit but only a bit.
This is customizable and can be disabled, so that new members do not see any messages from before they joined.
> You're protesting with people. Cops pick them up, but not you. You can delete their messages and it is likely that you are able to do so before the police can clone your phone or copy the messages (screenshot, whatever).
I got a few strange responses back:
- Deleting messages doesn't mean they can't be saved (yeah... this is probabilistic privacy, not guaranteed)
- My device, my data (okay?)
- Some people run custom apps that save everything (how does that apply here? Funny enough, a sibling comment said something similar)
- Just own up to your typos (-_____-)
- Don't use Signal for communication then because you can't be guaranteed privacy (great, I'll use smoke signals with my friends to organize)
To be fair to Signal, the devs did not get into the forums. To also be fair, Signal is taking the same position and is going to only allow deletion an hour after a message was sent. As much as I love Signal, it is my preferred messaging app, I think they are not in touch with the needs of people. We should look at why people are turning to Telegram when protesting. What can we do to better preserve the privacy of people protesting in HK, Belarus, America, etc? Everything is probabilistic security and privacy when it comes down to it. But what tools would help these people the most? I would argue that bidirectional deletion to reduce the chance of self incrimination is one of them. The other is group messaging, channels, and anonymous messages (so your phone number isn't visible in channels). Emojis are nice and fun for day to day use, but it is getting more and more important to push these other features (yes, I know they are extremely difficult to do and actually preserve privacy to the standard Signal currently does. I think many would be fine if it was an incremental increase in privacy with these newer features).
Sadly, this has been true of Signal for a long time. Signal marches only to its own beat, and is quite slow to address real needs of most people.
- the UI should hide e2e/“reallyprivate” conversations by default - as in "not visible anywhere" (edit: unless the app is in the foreground and you are chatting of course)
Unless you:
- do the “add a new user/conversation" - then instead of adding mail/GUID/phone you add a whatevercanberemembered number/emoji/sentence that unlocks the private conversation you initiated long before
There should be no trace in the UI that private conversations are going on.
What does HN think ? Why hasn't it been done before ?
Edit: there could even be notifications disguised as another app (news subscriptions, medical reminders, battery low, etc.)
Security by obscurity is never a win.
Rather I'd change the GP's solution to having a secret vault in an already encrypted chat system (so you can do the above), essentially making it two layers. Just the second layer isn't a button that says "look at me, I'm where all the real secret shit is."
I agree that security through obscurity isn't a winning solution, but it is part of the toolkit. It would just be dumb to rely on your security solely being obscurity. Encrypted steganography is still a powerful tool, hackers obscure code, and real spies use obscurity all the time. It just isn't the dominant factor.
Hmmm. What about from the get-go saying that the app allocates 100Mbytes of space and fills it randomly at regular time until some encrypted content is generated. That'd put a 100Mbytes log/message limit to conversations but that'd be by design and nobody could be sure those bytes are random or genuine messages.
> If the phone is jailbroken and the key for the message logs is leaked, it doesn't help at all.
Why would the key get leaked if it's never stored ?
Every single person I know who uses Telegram does it for either porn or piracy or both. So using what you already have for protests if they occur makes sense. Trying to get ppl to install a different app is much more complicated at this point. Sometimes may even be prevented by the regime.
What it also is here is male. I haven't met a single woman in Germany who'd have the app.
In telegram it is understood that 'secret chats' constitutes confidentiality. As such, both parties, I believe, ought to be able to delete everything.
I kind of see you point about non-secret chats.
But then we are back with a opt-in model for privacy.
Personally: what I tell you at the coffee machine, in confidence or not, is ephemeral. I would probably not talk to you at all if you where taperecording all conversations, as you want to do with messages... so I think both.parties.should be able to delete text conversations. And privacy should be on by default.
> I would probably not talk to you at all if you where taperecording all conversations
You hit the nail on the head with this one. To me deletion is a nice compromise and why the coffee shop analogy isn't a good comparator. Similarly we don't record video calls (and Moxie himself doesn't like this). So why should every text be recorded and parties do not have control over that data? I do feel that each person in the conversation has a right to control that data (if anything the sender more so) and when policy fails it should fail in the direction that has more privacy (which is the message not existing within Signal's log^). But currently people aren't given this choice and there is no consideration of failure modes.
^ Careful wording because if I don't make this added comment people think I'm unaware that screenshots exist.
I don't really make that distinction, I think it's harmful to have E2E as optional, and only use platforms than have either mandatory E2E encryption (Signal, WhatsApp), or no E2E encryption (SMS, email).
If you have an in-person conversation with me in confidence, that doesn't grant you any additional powers to make me forget details of the conversation.
> Personally: what I tell you at the coffee machine, in confidence or not, is ephemeral. I would probably not talk to you at all if you where taperecording all conversations, as you want to do with messages...
What if I have a very good memory, and follow conversations by writing up their details in personal memos that you can't delete? (e.g. Comey's contemporary memos of conversations he had with Trump.)
> so I think both.parties.should be able to delete text conversations. And privacy should be on by default.
The problem for you is that I'm not going to agree to that - if you won't use Signal, I'm going to force a downgrade to SMS or email, and then you get even worse security and privacy.
If you want to have a conversation that can't be recorded in an automated way, you basically need to meet in a sauna.
Or we will set up e2e encrypted telegram. Or not talk.
> What if I have a very good memory, and follow conversations by writing up their details
You saying that you remember I said something, even took a screenshot vs you can prove I said something, is a big difference.
If I am doing a snowden, I might go to a sauna. If I am planning to overthrow my boss, I think e2e telegram is okay. Because I can delete the conversation it might even be preferable to signal.
Use cases and threat models...
>> Sure, maybe this doesn't help you in a channel, but one on one? Or small groups? Most people don't run custom apps
The bidirectional part is helpful in the non-public channel context.
How does this help? Why does this matter? Well you can keep a public face and a private face. Private channels, group chats with friends, or one on one messages you can be more open and use this tool. But this is normal. Everyone shows a different face in public than what they show to friends (offline!).
> If your friends are picked up by a nefarious actor, you would have to know that they were
Sure. But they're your friends. I don't know how you interact with your friends, but usually when I'm out with them I'm physically near them and know what they are doing. Chances are pretty high I'd know within a few hours if they got arrested/abducted.
> you'd have to ensure that Telegram isn't keeping some sort of deletion log.
This is a different issue and FWIW that's why I don't personally use Telegram. There's no verification so no trust. But that doesn't mean that the deletion tool can be useful in certain contexts if the implementation is correct. No reason to throw the baby out with the bath water. It is about the probability of reducing self incrimination, not guaranteeing.
There's a reason big companies/government employers want root access to your phone and will wipe data if it is lost or stolen. Because it reduces the chance that company/state secrets. No one thinks it is a guarantee. But if given the choice of "revealing a secret" vs "rolling a dice to see if I reveal a secret or not" I'm going with the latter no matter the odds.
'Congressional investigators determined that "targeting of US political figures would not occur by accident, but was designed into the system from the start."'
So yeah that might still be going on. Signal etc. make it harder but it's not like the NSA isn't hacking endpoints so hard to say if it's actually secure. We can only hope the next Snowden will let us know if NSA's spying on the opposing political party.
My kids tested sending https://kamalaharris.info and https://joebiden.info to each other on Instagram, in private messages. The sender would see that the message was successfully sent, but it would never arrive.
Another case is that the person who ran the primary campaign for Kamala Harris now works at Twitter, where he blocked an opponent's campaign account.
There's Secret Chats feature which they claim to be end-to-end encrypted, meaning that it's no more secure than Facebook's Messenger (also end-to-end encrypted in Secret Conversations). Even less so considering that they roll their own encryption (MTProto), while Facebook's Messenger uses Signal's protocol.
Further info (which will also lead you to problems with their MTProto protocol, if you're interested): https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegr...
Facebook is planning to merge Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, which makes it even more awful of a choice.
Facebook can't read your WhatsApp messages (of course they can add an update any time to do that), but Telegram has access to all your messages right now.
¹ Yes, you can select the end-to-end encrypted sessions, but they're very crippled from a usability perspective. I don't remember the last time anyone used it with me, yet all my chats on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted without anyone doing anything.
Are we sure it can't? Because WhatsApp is closed-source, its GDrive backups are unencrypted and Facebook's whole profit model is based around snooping. Unless they make the app open-source, I'm not trusting them even with a grocery list. People act like E2E is the be-all and end-all but trusting an incredibly shady company on its word is not something I'm comfortable with.
GDrive backups are not readable by Facebook, they're readable by Google. End-to-end, if properly implemented is the be-all and end-all. Except for metadata, which is a problem, but a different one, and Facebook definitely abuses that. But they don't/can't read the contents of chat messages (for now).
It's not merely trusting that shady company, but also realizing that the news of FB not having E2E-encrypted messages would definitely make the news, you'd be aware of it.
Right.. consider what your adversary would be giving up by revealing such a secret, even if it was true. That alone provides a not-insubstantial amount of security.
> Are we sure it can't?
Google can remotely uninstall, and install a trojaned version of any app regardless of app signature on an official Android distribution.
No, there's a 1..2% chance of backdoor.
The real question is, why is Telegram more secure? There's a 100% chance it can read your group messages, because it says so on their documentation that describes the cloud encryption. There is no E2EE at all for groups. There is no E2EE at all for desktop. Together these mean E2EE are completely neutered and useless. I'm a privacy researcher and I don't use them at all. Why would an average joe?
Open source means anyone can audit and verify nothing was done after audit.
Moxie more or less audited WhatsApp's Signal protocol implementation, and people are right to be concerned about whether changes have been made since FB bought the app.
Facebook does get your WhatsApp communication metadata, and has been for years now. As the three letter agencies showed, metadata is actually quite valuable in many respects without needing to trawl through massive amounts of content.
The fact Telegram's E2EE has not been available
1. by default
2. on desktop apps
3. for group messages
for seven years tells you exactly how secure it is.
"the only other criticism comes from a direct competitor"
Fuck this attitude. Everyone has the right to criticize. If Telegram can't own their mistakes it's their fault, not that of the people who are beating them. Also, impartial professional cryptographers like Bruce Schneier and Matthew Green have told people not to use Telegram. Why is that if not because it's so horribly insecure. Why isn't there a single recommendation for Telegram from ANY cryptographer on the entire planet?
"they recommend WhatsApp despite the fact that it's closed-source and nobody can verify if its encryption truly works."
Because they've helped implement the encryption? Also if proprietary tools doing encryption are not secure, then why do Telegram users think it's ok for Telegram to use closed-source server that's doing the "distributed datacenter encryption" for group messages' at-rest protection. There's not even documentation available for this let alone source code.
Really? I haven't seen a single credible audit, nor a clear reason for rolling their own
> Some of its channels helped unconnected, scattered rallies mature into well-coordinated action.
This line alone makes their encryption rather meaningless for this use case, since Secret Chats only work between two people.
This has nothing to do with secure chats and everything to do with Telegram's Channels feature. But a ton of people that have never used Telegram nor read the article don't know that.
A multitude of proxies, shadow optic cables over the border and a bit of whitelisting from the government to allow payment processing made Telegram invincible.
But secret chats are only for 1-to-1 chats, not for groups as far as I know (or has that changed?)
There are also options for invite only channels ( I manage several TG channels, public and private) in which nobody can join without having been given the invite link, or added to the channel if their settings permit other users adding them to channels.
This is demonstrably false. Telegram's apps are open sourced (except Telegram X for some reason), same as Signal's (no exceptions). None of the two offer you their server's code.
> And who "rolled" the Signal protocol, Moxie Marlinspike? Did he not design that himself?
It passed the scrutiny of the best cryptographers out there. This comment provides more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24237791
And again, this is completely irrelevant because even if Telegram's end-to-end encryption was absolutely the best there is, a) it doesn't work on group chats, and b) it's not enabled by default, only in Secret Chats. The vast majority of Telegram's usage is not end-to-end encrypted at all.
Signal server source code:
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
"The vast majority of Telegram's usage is not end-to-end encrypted at all."
This. This is the backdoor right here. It was never going to be shady flaw in the implementation. It's SO much easier to put it out there in the open, spread misinformation about Telegram being at the forefront of privacy battle and silence all criticism (my links were shadowbanned on their subreddit), and to attack straw men like people posting example's of Telegram's bad track record. tl;dr: damage control.
The open source Telegram client tells us
1. That E2EE is not enabled by default
2. That E2EE is not available at all for group chats
3. That E2EE is not available at all for desktop clients.
So just. No.
"Are you a cryptographer?"
Here's the world's most famous cryptographer, Bruce Schneier saying don't use Telegram: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/06/comparing_mes...
Here's the world's second most famous cryptographer, Matthew Green saying don't use Telegram https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/72642891296898252...
Now show me the cryptographer who recommends Telegram. You can't. Because there isn't _any_.
"And who "rolled" the Signal protocol, Moxie Marlinspike? Did he not design that himself?"
No, it was co-authored with Trevor Perrin[1] who is a cryptographer.
[1] https://twitter.com/trevp__
Telegram's encryption OTOH was designed by Nikolai Durov who is not a cryptographer, but a geometrician. That's like asking a gynecologist to perform brain surgery, lol.
Telegram's protocol... is not that.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/06/comparing_mes...
[2] https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/72642891296898252...
But yes, not having encryption on by default speaks poorly of them. OTOH it’s not concrete proof that the encryption still sucks as of now.
Also, Signal has no upper group size limit but E2EE would make group with 100,000s a bit sluggish. But that's a problem that reduces with Moore's law.
The world's best audit of Telegram would make the following obvious findings:
1. It's not E2EE by default therefore it's not private and secure by default.
2. It's not E2EE at all for groups therefore it's not safe for use of dissident groups
3. It's not E2EE at all for desktop clients therefore it's not practical in daily messaging.
Any audit of the E2EE part is meaningless when E2EE is so impractical it's not used by users at all.
Don't depend on asking someone else's device to delete the data as that data being gone.
> All compatible Android devices newly launching with Android Q are required to encrypt user data, with no exceptions.
Unless the OS+HW provide API for some sort of TPM, it's not possible to provide strong protection for app databases without asking for strong password every time the app is opened. Android has had some sort of sandboxing for a while but it's not comparable to secure enclaves etc. AFAIK.
But as far as I know Telegram has no equivalent feature.
Why can't they look at the TCP headers of incoming packets to determine source-IP? Also, why can't they look at session identifier or signal ID like phone number to determine who the sender is?
Ammendment to my above statement: This does not apply to Signal.
In Turkey, they arrested people who had the ByLock app installed. It didn't matter how people had used it. Having installed it was enough.
If you fear such a reprisal then in being afraid you have only your life to save. If you try and make it succeed then you have everything to gain.
It is total gamble, but there seems to be little choice now for the Belorussian people: a chance at freedom or worse reprisals.
If Russia so overtly threw money at organising American riots it would be front page news. There's been a year of mass unrest and yellow vest riots in France yet Marcons junta still reigns supreme.
Also, the article is not about people exchanging messages, it's about telegram channels read by many.
Telegram group messages are not end-to-end encrypted.
Telegram desktop messages are not end-to-end encrypted.
Telegram's messages are never end-to-end encrypted by default.
Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
What you've counterpointed doesn't exactly negate what I said. There are no Belarus state controlled or regionally located Telegram servers. I fully understand and take that risk that server side code is manipulable, and I also fully know they are able to edit open conversations from the server and this has been done. Still a better alternative to choose a foreign state adversarial network these days and to choose E2E and do as best you can to use a throwaway number than to choose something that's been gamed by your own state, for fun and for profit to eavesdrop all conversations out of the gate, or use backdoored WhatsApp. Choose all throwaway, blend in, and don't talk too much.