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Comment by upofadown | Hacker News Reader

It appears to tick all the boxes other than verifiable client binaries...

So ahead of things like iMessage. About the same as stuff like Whatsapp. Behind things like Signal, Telegram, PGP and the like.

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PGP can be considered "worse" than some of the other systems because it lacks perfect forward secrecy. If you steal the key, you can decrypt past messages, which is not the case in Signal or others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ratchet_Algorithm

OK, but that has nothing to do with how end to end the encryption is. PGP pretty much set the standard for the concept.

BTW, in practice few people get any benefit out of forward secrecy when used for E2EE messaging as they tend to keep their old messages. Forward secrecy protects against the disclosure of the private key used in such systems. If the attacker can get at your private key then they pretty much for sure get your saved messages.

I talked about this in a series of PGP advocacy articles I recently did:

* https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:forward_secrecy

It’s like saying that LUKS is bad because it doesn’t offer forward secrecy, or it’s more “cumbersome”; signal protocol is better.

There are different applications with different solutions.

Does Telegram have E2EE for group discussions yet or is it still only for 1:1 ?

Honest question, I haven't checked recently.

Unfortunately still only 1:1 And on mobile only. E2EE is not available in group chats or on the desktop client.

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