I cannot take seriously any claims made by the company or its employees / owners. None of it can be used as evidence of their goodwill or what they do with my data. They have an interest in deceiving me.
I cannot take seriously any claims made by the company or its employees / owners. None of it can be used as evidence of their goodwill or what they do with my data. They have an interest in deceiving me.
And why has this been "in the works" for years? It's certainly not that hard to implement. Many less capable and mature messengers work without a phone number.
It's hard to implement it in a privacy-preserving way. Many other messengers of similar scale implement it by storing your social graph unencrypted on their servers.
My use case for Signal is friends and family, and it was easy to get everyone onboard because we all have each other's phone numbers already and didn't need to build a new list of contacts. It's a drop-in Android-compatible replacement for iMessage.
My phone number identifies my country, my address and my real name - even if I restrict the listing, it's tied to my credit card. It's tied to a sim card with separate geolocation data to the GPS tracking Google does; even if I active signal from eg a pine phone, the number is tied to a 4g base station.
Ed: and its tied to my current place of employment, too.
None of this is needed/wanted for my signal identity (for me or signal).
I could go out of my way to acquire a pseudonymous phone number, but I guess I'd have to be able to use it somehow - which seems pretty hard to keep anonymous. At the very least I'd probably have to pay for it.
Signal should be able to do better than PGP and five mix master hops of 90s-era anonymous email...
Or you get the old problem of those needing actual secure communication using terrorist@phreak.suspicious.net.ru and using signal just for "other" stuff..
Ed: note that this mostly about connecting with people on signal that otherwise might not have my number, than about (almost) random people that have my phone number discovering that I'm on signal.
You have to give up your anonymity to get one in many places.
"Just give your phone number to us, and don't worry, we won't share it with anyone!".
That exactly what Signal does.
Until they allow user-created ID's with no link to any identity - the above concern stays.
You don't need to use a GSM number, and you don't need to use the country code in which you live. The fact is, mostly anonymous phone numbers are available on the internet for use with Signal, and Signal (correctly) does not discriminate on country code or "type" of number. Any number that can receive phone calls or texts will do.
There are indeed countries that want to tie phone numbers to strong identity, but you can simply get a second number from a country that's not so hellbent on restricting access.
The number you're logged in to in Signal on a phone does not need to be the same number of the SIM card inside that phone. You can use any number you wish.
Signal does not, and that's guaranteed by the client code (i.e. no need to trust anything on the server for that).
This is not true. This is not guaranteed even by the "sealed sender" feature that signal has.
The whole plan to finally have usernames comes down to their use of Intel SGX.
They were forced to store (encrypted) information on servers anyway, since client-side contact matching didn't end up scaling, which is why stuff like this and usernames are now being developed.
Their new security strategy now relies on decryption being done by client-attested code on SGX enclaves, so that the server still doesn't have access to the plain-text contact graph.
All of this took a huge amount of time to come up with, and you can see the progress if you read their blogs or forums.
Are you suggesting that there isn't a contact graph on their servers? How exactly do they route from one user to another? It's certainly not P2P.
If you are suggesting that we should trust them just because it could work without them storing who I've contacted, you are mistaken. The whole point of private messaging is to obviate the need for trust. The code should be auditable/open source, and everything on the server should be either transparent, or assumed to be compromised. They certainly do send your contact graph to their servers, and whether they say they discard it or not is irrelevant. In the context of privacy, you must assume your data is persisted once it is behind a curtain you have no visibility into.
They can theoretically rebuild a contact graph by finding everyone you’re talking to, but that’s a small subset of the contact graph created by contact matching.
The code is open source and SGX literally means that the client attests that the code on the server matches what it’s expecting.
Signal might be the most audited stuff out there.
Also, aren't most mobile processors not Intel? How would SGX be used?
How do we know the closed source version of signal on the app stores is using the same MRENCLAVE as the one from the open source server?
Also, my understanding as to why a contact graph is needed at all is because signal wants to increase their virality. Couldn't we forgo this unnecessary feature? Signal could generate a long enough key locally, and if you want to add another signal user, the client could send it automatically to a contact through SMS. The client on the other side could automatically read the key through SMS and add the contact. Or the user could manually send the key through any mechanism they wanted.
A third note, trusting SGX assumes that 1. it has no bugs, and 2. it has no backdoors, 3. Signal server code has no bugs, 4. Signal server code has no backdoors. The first two of these are not strong guarantees, especially considering that it's not open source, intel doesn't have a great track record, and nation state actors have been involved in weakening these sorts of features in the past. At least with the Signal server code you can audit it.
The version on app stores is not a closed source version. However it is a binary, and there might be questions on build reproducibility. I do not know the answer to this nor the answer to your MRENCLAVE question.
Virality is because of their philosophy - their first goal is to end mass surveillance, not provide custom software for preventing individual surveillance. The quicker everyone in the world is using E2E, not only is there less mass surveillance, contact discovery leaks zero additional information at that point.
Concerns with SGX are real - but it remains the state-of-the-art - your criticism assumes that the competitors do any better, at this point they do not. They have traditional backends or are as flawed. Signal is doing the hard work on researching solutions at this point, the others are not as close.
> Signal could generate a long enough key locally, and if you want to add another signal user, the client could send it automatically to a contact through SMS. The client on the other side could automatically read the key through SMS and add the contact. Or the user could manually send the key through any mechanism they wanted.
This is what happens when contacts verify each other through QR codes on Signal. But this mechanism does not solve your problem nor are you solving the problem Signal wanted to solve - minimizing data on servers. Even with keys, servers still has to route messages, and with your solution they'll have to maintain a user database.