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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Is there any reason to believe that Signal’s encryption has been compromised or that metadata harvesting is going on?

No. The clients are open source, and (at least on Android) you are able to verify that the source on Github is the same that was used to compile the client on Google Play with reproducible builds [1].

And even if the servers turn out to be malicious, the clients are designed to expose as little metadata as possible with things like private contact discovery[2], sealed sender[3] and private groups[4]. It's not perfect, but the data a malicious server could collect is limited.

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/master/repr...

[2] https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

[3] https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

[4] https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/

But you cannot verify the source code and binary of the server or set up your own independent one, so reproducible builds don't help here.

That's true, and in that sense it doesn't really matter if they publish the server source or not (although they really should continue to do so). What does matter is that the client was designed with a possible malicious server in mind so you don't have to trust the code the server is running.

They control the only allowed client binaries and don't let others compile and distribute them.

Those binaries have complete control of your keys.

If they wanted to (or were forced to) release an update that bulk decrypted all messages or those of specific people and sent them to a random server somewhere... They totally could, and likely not get caught until well after every target was exposed, if at all. Huge SPOF.

End to end encryption where only one party controls the software that controls both ends with no accountability is more marketing than security.

What you are really saying is you dont know how to market an alternate approach. So hopefully grandma or someone else shows up and does the work right?

I am fine with Signal. They arent Facebook. And they arent Russians. Anyone who has an alternative go spend some cash and energy on marketing cause thats the hard problem not the technical details.

> And they arent Russians.

Any other ethnicities you don't allow?

It's not the ethnicity:

- If a company is based in the US, they will be under pressure from the US government.

- If a company is based in Russia, they will be under pressure from the Russian government.

- If a company is based in China, they will be under pressure from the Chinese government.

I assume that op03 is referring to Telegram, which I believe is founded by Russians. However, the company is head quartered in London and Dubai according to Wikipedia.

It is, by Russians living in exile.

No. If they wanted to harvest metadata, they could do it while still making their repo look up to date and totally clean. Wouldn't be hard either.

They could harvest whatever they want and just not push it to the repo, not limited to metadata.

This would require updating the apps but you can't decompile GP versions to source code...

But you can verify that the source they publish on Github is the same that was used to built the Google Play version with reproducible builds[1]. Also, Android apps are fairly easy to decompile. They are very likely to get caught if they publish an update with a backdoor.

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/master/repr...

Wow. That's awesome, I could have sworn they opposed to reproducible builds for some reason.

Probably because of this: https://forum.f-droid.org/t/signal-wickr-on-f-droid-2021/122....

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