Signal says it won’t compromise on encryption
theverge.com
theverge.com
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation#Signal_Mes...
(Of course employees and board members can still receive handsome compensation, but the same holds true for regular non-profits.)
Example: Suppose I bulk buy T-shirts printed with my cool logo for $15 each and I sell them to consumers for $50 each. That's a for-profit activity, if Walmart was allowed to have a "non-profit" arm which did this I'm sure they would, the tax saving would be considerable.
The other answer: They've got somewhat of a "we know best" vibe going for them which also comes in play when you see their response to feature requests - e.g. for usernames instead of phone numbers or for "edit message" functionality like Telegram has.
The good answer isn't even a good argument.
The client is open source. People have forked it and used the Signal network. Signal asked them to stop and they did, but there is nothing stopping people from ignoring Signal's request in the future.
This has nothing to do with federation. Signal could federate their network and still request everybody use the official client.
(And also extensively discussed elsewhere on HN already, if you want to dive into it some more.)
Plus yes Signal has a bit of an NIH complex.
Signal is more focused on 1:1 or small group chats. Federation there can be much simpler, more like email/xmpp than IRC.
It does still add friction and slows down youe development as upgrading is difficult.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/statement-attorney-general-wi...
Those in the top of the power tree really seem to dislike the idea that anyone not them can keep secrets from them.
Its exhausting as it never seems to be a well thought out, technically or philosophically sound argument.
Are we doomed to never have technically competent leadership?
Arguably it has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with philosophy of government. It makes some sense that people in government optimize for government's needs and wouldn't it be great (from the government's perspective) if the government could have an eye in everything so it could try to be everywhere at once?
Of course that's antithetical to a free country, but from a pragmatic rather than principled view from the top it's not as apparent that the country _should_ be free, especially once the US changed from a federation (power largely in the hands of the states with the federal government mostly focused on legitimately cross-state issues) to a nation (power largely in the hands of the federal government)
Just so we're on the same page, the "top" are the people we elect and the others are bureaucrats, technocrats, and a "community" of spies. Is that correct?
-
This pattern can be understood from different povs. A point of view rarely discussed is this: democracies and secret services are incompatible when currents of power are maintained by secrets.
Why can't we do something along the line of zero knowledge protocols in e.g. open Senate hearings?
Is it truly impossible to have both full accountability and effective intelligence services?
Was it not enough for him to be the top story in the news every day for 4 years?
There's really no other political figure with as much unrestricted aggression as he has. I certainly don't have his nerve, I have far too much respect for the founders and institutions of our government to so willfully rage against it. I guess our greatest leaders, Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and everything we've built till now humbles me.
But unlike Mr. Trump, I also was working as a paperboy at 12 years old, worked night shifts during college, and never got a break being unemployed all the way into my 40s now. There's a bigger difference between someone like me and Trump, and people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. That's why I never saw eye to eye with him. But he is pretty fascinating.
The audacity and outright disregard for our institutions is absolutely astonishing. I do hope the media spotlight remains on him for the rest of his life, I don't want that guy flying under the radar. He's a reminder of what America's worst inclinations can produce. Never worked a job (other than President of the United States of America), was born at the finish line, and a soul full of man's worst inclinations. And believe me, I agree with at least 75%+ of "his" policies. I remain an independent. If I had to describe my leanings it would be a "pre-MAGA Republican, who supports unions". These parties have to work for my vote and cannot count on my vote.. In case, you think someone saying the things I have is somehow anti-Trump. If I am, it's only because it makes sense to be so.
That said, for an example of the 25%, while I agree with low taxes, I do not agree with tax cuts when already at historical lows as President Trump enacted. Deficit spending should not be supporting any tax cuts. To share just one example outside of that 75% of agreement I have with Trump policies. I would hardly characterize that disagreement as proof that I "badly disagree" with "his" policies.
Scarequotes around him because I'm not convinced many of his administration's actions were his ideas. I would characterize him as more of a puppet that dominated the room and was willing to disregard any form of humility or tradition, but did not dominate any intellectual matters such as policy decisions. Any positive change that occurred could only accurately be ascribed to his administration. His criminal actions have nullified, or should nullify all of his support. We're long past the stage of it qualifying as a cult.
India just shot itself in the foot
Presently all large/webscale messengers in the USA (iMessage, WhatsApp, etc) all have backdoors in the e2ee that allow the FBI et al to access message content at will (often without a warrant or probable cause).
Scanning for keywords, doing content id on images, all kinds of other stuff that would not "turn over encryption keys".
I suspect other services do these things for advertising keywords, and to prevent objectionable images from being sent.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/govt-proposes-law-...
But Telecom Authority of India rules out any immediate intervention.
https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/trai-rules-out-reg...
I couldn't quote from the article here but looks like they are going to wait till clarity emerges from International jurisdiction.
Which I think Signal would fall under at least one of those services.
you can control+f your way through to see everything related to that phrase.
It defines message as:
“message” means any sign, signal, writing, image, sound, video, data stream or intelligence or information intended for telecommunication;
24.4 On the occurrence of any public emergency or in the interest of the public safety, the Central Government or a State Government or any officer specially authorized in this behalf by the Central or a State Government, may, if satisfied that it is necessary or expedient to do so, in the interest of the sovereignty, integrity or security of India, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, or preventing incitement to an offence, for reasons to be recorded in writing, by order:
(a) direct that any message or class of messages, to or from any person or class of persons, or relating to any particular subject, brought for transmission by, or transmitted or received by any telecommunication services or telecommunication network, shall not be transmitted, or shall be intercepted or detained or disclosed to the officer mentioned in such order;Service: here they are
Officer: decrypt for me
Service: Sorry, don't have the keys.
[0] https://www.outlookindia.com/business/proposal-to-curtail-tr...
The chilling effect of it is. What if they demand you give them information you do not have a way of accessing. (Eg Signal). How would you comply? Do you have to pre-empt whatever requests you MIGHT get and ensure you could back-door a user if it were required. The law also seems to imply that ASIO could demand a single employee at a company backdoors something and they wouldn't be able to tell their co-workers.
That's what Technical Capability Notices are for. You don't have to implement a backdoor until they force you to. They have worded the legislation to make it sound as though this cannot be used to implement "systemic weaknesses" but this is bullshit (their definition of a "systemic weakness" would be something like getting a backdoor into OpenSSL, while a backdoor in Facebook Messenger is not a "systemic weakness" because it only affects one application).
https://www.zdnet.com/article/kazakhstan-government-is-inter...
The EU is following this govennment friendly move:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/experts-urge-...
It would not be difficult for India as well. I see itlikely Modi and BJP will make this move as part of some anti-terrorist legislation.
The problem is that those keys can't be used passively. Just knowing these keys achieves nothing (lay people often assume you could snoop TLS, but, that's not how it works with a CA root even in archaic SSL versions) The only useful thing you can do with those keys is make certificates (the thing the CA gets to do legitimately) but presumably you'd make bogus ones.
But in most of the world's web browsers those certificates don't work unless they come with SCTs, receipts from two or more public certificate transparency logs promising they logged these certificates.
So now as well as obtaining private keys to a trusted root CA, you need to break at least two of the CT logs.
This deliberately and unavoidably creates a paper trail showing what happened. All three entities (the root CA and two logs) have their reputations destroyed and if they're for-profits presumably go bankrupt (or the business unit fails).
And what did you get for this? A forged certificate? Maybe a few dozen if you targeted carefully. Maybe you were able to pull this off for a whole week before alarm bells got too loud to ignore ?
"Cryptographer Bruce Schneier says the attack may have been "either the work of the NSA, or exploited by the NSA."[6] However, this has been disputed, with others saying the NSA had only detected a foreign intelligence service using the fake certificates.[7]"
Also, I'm convinced that if Signal were to become popular they'd probably sell it to some commercial provider, since the cost of maintaining a service used by hundreds of millions if not billions is extremely expensive.
WhatsApp is an entirely different matter. Hundreds of millions of Indians probably use it and if the company were to suspend service because the Indian government mandated a backdoor all hell would break loose!
For the same reason both Australia and the UK haven't as of yet forced WhatsApp to install a backdoor, even though legislation forcing them to do so is already in place there.
Non-E2E with black box server code like Telegram is far more concerning, in my opinion. With a system like that, it would be trivial to backdoor and leave behind no evidence after the fact.
> That would be putting their reputation
Does Facebook have any reputation left?
Most people still think of WhatsApp and Facebook as separate. For a while, WhatsApp displayed a Facebook logo for a second whenever it started (and given how Android works, opening WhatsApp does not necessarily mean starting it, most of the time it just switches to an already started process), but even that does not happen anymore, since it was replaced by a "Meta" logo (and most people do not associate "Meta" with Facebook).
I guess, by outlawing them. Think of the collateral damage. For ex, unavailability of Signal means MobileCoins in wallets of its Indian users become inaccessible (theoretically, since Signal is a non-custodial wallet) if they don't get it out in time before the ban, so there's something for Signal to think about.
If it was just being used for spam filtering and not censorship, it would make much more sense to implement the blocking client-side (on the recipient's device) and provide a user-toggleable flag to disable that functionality. This would enable those who don't want spam and trust the filter to keep the exact same functionality, while allowing those who distrust it or suspect it of censorship to voluntarily opt-out for messages they receive. This would also offload processing costs from Signal's servers to user's devices, which would decrease the operational expenditure incurred by Signal.
One reason not to take advantage of that economic incentive is that you don't want your users to have the choice, and you'd not want them to have the choice if you're trying to censor them.
Call it what it is: Signal is keeping their spam filter private. And history has shown that this is usually the right move.
I have personally witnessed political messages being censored on Signal, server-side.
I recognize that keeping that private is what makes it effective. The argument being made isn't that the filter would be more effective if it were open source, the argument is that the filter is being abused to perform censorship, and that's the reason why it's not open source.
One of many downsides of trusting centralized platforms/services like Signal.
edit to add: I guess I should clarify, the messages in Signal are properly e2ee with ephemeral keys, and there is no content hashing or the like to leak anything to the server. It's not public yet, but if you'd like, I can share some of my research into the structure of an actual Signal message, from the TCP layer down to the encrypted payload.
> if you have nothing to hide, why don’t you show it?
Is also “nice” rhetoric that laymen agree with.
I read it as smart=intellectually smart and virtuous.
In CA for example the standard highway speed limit is 65mph, but everyone drives well over 70 (this isn't a silly "everyone does it", it's a "if you're doing 65 you may well be rear ended"), this means that the CHP can basically choose whoever they want to pull over, despite everyone breaking the same laws. Essentially they've created a system where everyone is breaking a law so that they can then selectively charge.
The average person will connect the dots. Signal is an underground app for illegal stuff. I have nothing to hide so I don't need Signal to exist. People must use signal for the most illegal and disturbing thing I can think of. Signal users must be pedos. Signal must be banned.
This is how power uses media to control the masses. They don't need to make the claim they simply present facts in a narrative and allow the average person to connect the dots making them feel like they figured it all out themselves.
iPhone users are screwed until sideloading becomes a thing, but iPhones represent a tiny market share in India, AFAIK
There are several major problems with Signal:
- it is not that private after all since it requires a phone number. Yes, you can override this by using some virtual throwaway number if you are geeky enough but your account will be associated with this phone number anyways.
- as a consequence you _will_ receive spam from bots fanning out messages to phone numbers. You can’t restrict your social circle to allow only chosen people or let’s say people only from your contact list to message you.
- Signal protocol is probably great from the e2ee perspective but it is not federated and unlike XMPP you cannot spin up your own server and have full control over it.
- Since the end product is not a protocol or a framework or a platform it is a product that is run by other people who you can only trust albeit you can verify and audit source code by yourself(or by hiring someone to do it on your behalf). And I am sure you cannot run an end-to-end audit of the whole Signal platform to verify that what they actually run has been built from the source code you have audited.
- Since it is centralized, Signal is prone to censorship in those countries that decide to fight it. This leads to introducing workarounds like this https://signal.org/blog/run-a-proxy/ to help people circumvent limitations in affected regions and territories.
What costs? Element (a popular Matrix client) has recently improved their onboarding greatly!
https://element.io/blog/all-aboard-better-ftue-for-less-wtf/
It really is just as easy to onboard to Element as Signal these days, the UX has come a long way. And you'll never have the move them again, because you can choose any client you like.
Matrix is a great example where you need that one tech guy to create home server. Otherwise nobody of your friend group can use it as intended to.
Or another paid provider: https://matrix.org/hosting/
The good thing about having the federated protocol is that people can use different providers and change providers without destroying the network effects.
It's perfectly fine if most people end up using one of very few big providers as long as all providers support federation.
I think we have to make a distinction between personal communication and mass communication. The former is a question of privacy. The latter is a question of political freedoms.
Another constant stumbling block is this whole "verify session" business. No one understands what it means. I understand technically what it does but I can't explain why it is so important that it keeps popping up all the time. It creates a constant sense of "something isn't right here but I don't know what to do".
I hope this was fixed as well.
FluffyChat also has quite nice UX and a bubble layout by default, but threads are still a while off [2]. On iOS it worked flawlessly through the iOS 16 betas while Element had some show stopping bugs, a couple of my friends moved over if they were on the beta.
I haven't had any friends ask me about the verify session buttons. I don't see any prompts on latest iOS Element but it's still too prominent on Element desktop for my liking.
SchildiChat [3] is my daily driver and feels more friendly than Element on desktop (unified DMs & group chats, no verify UX, chat bubbles), but it doesn't have any update mechanism built in, so I'm wary to recommend it to non-technical friends. It was also my goto recommendation on Android before the Element redesign.
I'm confident the ecosystem is moving in the right direction though, and so thankful for the amount of choice.
[1]: https://github.com/vector-im/element-x-ios [2]: https://gitlab.com/famedly/fluffychat/-/issues/881 [3]: https://schildi.chat/
I think right there is a powerful impediment. It's not compelling to switch for most, especially when people they know are still on whatsapp.
Messages exchanged in Signal are repudiable. That said, in a recent blog post Signal indicated that arbitrary usernames is something they're working on.
> ...unlike XMPP you cannot spin up your own server and have full control over it.
Signal is a better alternative for the likes of PGP because it is centralized [0]. Spam notwithstanding, Matrix has made good of the federation model, however. So that's there too.
> And I am sure you cannot run an end-to-end audit of the whole Signal platform to verify that what they actually run...
Valid but shallow. Case in point: Public CAs, though held to accountability by browsers, are no where near as transparent as Signal is, and yet they form the backbone of almost all sensitive communication on the Interwebs.
> Signal is prone to censorship in those countries that decide to fight it.
This is the only major concern, but glad that Matrix exists, and so do other solutions. May be it isn't Signal's battle to fight. May be it is, and they'll figure something else out aside from building naive TLS proxies.
no offense but they've been saying this for years, the feature may eventually come but I'm not holding my breath
Signal never used SMS as a transport. It only provided a UI to have unencrypted SMS messages alongside Signal chats. As far as Signal messenges themselves go, phone numbers always were an arbitrary ID string.
Having a username that isn't a phone number would have only more clearly segregated the SMS feature from Signal chat; and the desire for that segregation is one of the key excuses they came up with for dropping SMS support from the Signal app.
Signal is a merge of the TextSecure and RedPhone applications; back when it was still called TextSecure, it did use SMS as a transport for encrypted messages.
SMS wasn't removed to make way for arbitrary user IDs. that would have been surprising even though i prefer IDs over SMS support. but if SMS was on the way out already it made sense to wait with implementing arbitrary user ID support until then. and now they have one less excuse not to implement it
- There is no way to back up your message history (with photos, etc). This could be done using their (annoyingly pushed to users) "PIN", but isn't.
Few people realize that if your phone dies today, your history is GONE. From what I saw, once people do realize this, it's game over for Signal. WhatsApp is just easier, "everybody is there", and it does back up your history.
EDIT: Yes, it's on iOS. Yes, I realize this might not matter to you, but it matters to a lot of people. And if Signal tries to "bring privacy to the masses", this needs to be fixed. I've seen multiple people stop using Signal after losing all their data.
And I thought people regularly backed up everything worth saving from phones to non phone archive anyway.
Every single time this comes up, someone chimes in saying they don't need it.
That does not invalidate the users who do need it. If I can't keep my messages from device to device, I'm not going to use Signal.
With far more manual effort than should be required, I can move my messages from Android device to Android device, if the old device is still functional. That's still not fully sufficient; I need a reliable automatic (encrypted) backup solution.
What you call WhatsApp history is other people being able to read your messages.
WhatsApp is violently agressive in demanding you use your phone and give access to your contacts. You can't use it without feeling violated.
Desktop Signal still keeps showing me other people who also have Signal, but whom I've never even tried to contact via Signal, only because years ago I've mistakenly let them see my contacts.
Signal contact discovery is also the most privacy preserving approach available anywhere, using only the partial hash of their phone number. You don't have to share your contacts -- but yes, your contacts may share their truncated hash list, and hence discover that your number is tied to a Signal identity, but it is on their phone that the number maps to a name, not in any network traffic or on a Signal server.
We're really not getting any better solutions until secure MPC becomes more practical.
https://www.howtogeek.com/708651/can-you-use-signal-without-...
No, that points to prioritization issues. Many other features were developed and added over the years, but backup was not. It's not an accident, it's a result of multiple decisions where backing up user data was not seen as important.
so are federated instances in reality because the vast majority of people are going to be on some popular node by virtue of how communication networks organize.
And I'd rather trust Signal than having to trust some server in a guy's basement who I can only pray has a reasonable security setup, and is going to fold ten times more quickly to a court order than a foundation with a 50 million dollar check and nice lawyers.
Yes, this. It might be "fighting for privacy" now, but they can change their mind at any point. With new management, eventual profit seeking, government coercion, etc, this could change with a simple app update. It is more likely to me that it remains private because it isn't particularly successful. I find a lot of people have it but rarely use it.
It also isn't clear to me what is in it for donors such as EM. It is much easier to trust a system with correctly designed incentive structures.
> - it is not that private after all since it requires a phone number. Yes, you can override this by using some virtual throwaway number if you are geeky enough but your account will be associated with this phone number anyways.
You still leak very little because of their sealed sender feature. If you allow arbitrary usernames, you need to bootstrap your trusted channel from no assumption instead of a weak one (if I receive a message from @barack_obama for the first time, I have no clue if it's actually someone I know, while a message from @+1235312 indicates that the sender at least had access to this number at some point to register). All solutions have tradeoffs.
> - as a consequence you _will_ receive spam from bots fanning out messages to phone numbers.
There's very little spam now on Signal (I think I've had 2 spam messages in about 4 years). At one point there was a bit, but server-side measures are now preventing that.
You can't really have no spam at all as long as you have a common id that's shared among your contacts, which is the case most of the time for usability, as any of these contacts can leak this id somehow.
> - Signal protocol is probably great from the e2ee perspective but it is not federated and unlike XMPP you cannot spin up your own server and have full control over it.
Signal's approach is that you shouldn't care about the server. Why do you?
> And I am sure you cannot run an end-to-end audit of the whole Signal platform to verify that what they actually run has been built from the source code you have audited.
You can do that on the client code, which is reproducible, and again mostly what you should care about.
> - Since it is centralized, Signal is prone to censorship in those countries that decide to fight it.
I'd say that their reliance on phone numbers is the main issue with censorship: if new users can't receive their registration text message, they cannot register.
AFAICT people in censored countries still rely on WhatsApp, Signal and similar messengers instead of more niche but more decentralized alternatives like Tox. Again, however bad their current approach might be, it's a moot point until there's something that works better in practice.
Weird take. Can you imagine the number of bots if it didn't require a phone number?
I suppose the moderators would still be at risk of hosting platforms and ISPs dropping their homeserver.
EDIT: if the person you're talking to is hosted on Google, Google has all the metadata. Even if one person is hosted on Google and is part of a room you're in, Google has all the metadata in that room.
In 2022 e2ee is the standard for messages but not metadata, and unfortunately Matrix doesn't tackle it, so no, you can't expect 100% privacy.
Would be interesting to know if Amazon could reconstruct that information without Signals knowledge
Matrix does leak more meta data though, e.g. message relationships for instance, but what does that matter?
though you will need lotsa RAM for federation if you use synapse (mine keeps bogging down now after a year of mild use (could also be a bug idk, it allocates all the RAM and then nothing goes), now im waiting for the new server software dendrite to be able to migrate from synapse... allthough i wouldnt lose much if i just nuked the synapse instance)
Yes, and I have in the past. But that does not solve the issue completely. If the police asks me some information about one of my contacts, I'll have some metadata stored in my homeserver, and I'll need to hand it over. And vice versa.
It's better that the server does not have access to this information at all in the first place.
Most important is who when with who which both leak to the server operators
https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forw...
(edit: answering to your initial message, that said that Signal operators also have access to the same metadata, but I guess my comment still answers your sentence "Most important is who when with who which both leak to the server operators" - Signal operators have showed they can't provide this information)
But Signal could store that data because they have access to that dats
Can I do this easily and still have my homeserver work correctly with Matrix?
Anyway, the law would probably require any operator to keep this data for a while since they have access to it. And I can't rely on my contact's homeservers to delete this data even if they can (technically and legally).
They have access to that data alone through the fact that they are in control of their servers and, thus, can see who sends and receives messages.
Even on a theoretical level their sealed sender technique doesn't work: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/improving-signals-...
Now, include lower level technical Details such as the IP layer.
1. Imagine you connect to a server to send a message. Now, you send a message to someone else. The server can't see who you are, right? Because the letter misses your name. Imagine someone else sends a message to you.
2. Imagine you to connect to the same server to receive messages that the server stored for delivery with your name on it. The server gives you the messages.
Do you notice something?
The information can be obtained in an automated way.
Jitsi has ZRTP encryption. Jitsi Meet uses WebRTC and its encryption isn't the same, but from the academic research papers I've read such as "Stegozoa: Enhancing WebRTC Covert Channels with Video Steganography for Internet Censorship Circumvention" from June 2022, it's convincing enough for me to have set up my own Jitsi Meet server on a Debian Linux Virtualbox machine.
From the paper:
"Given that the peer-to-peer connections carrying the video streams are encrypted end-to-end, not even a state-level adversary with unrestricted access to the network infrastructure will be able to observe the raw video content of the WebRTC streams. "
XMPP/Jabber with OMEMO encryption, it runs on federating servers.
Session is a fork of signal that doesn't require phone numbers, there's some cryptocurrency something or other in there I don't quite get, but I don't believe you need it to send messages.
There's Tox, another p2p sort of thing.
Then there's threema, wire, and a bunch of others im not all that familiar with.
This is not a fork of Signal. It was originally designed to use Signal protocol under the hood for encryption and key management but does not anymore[1]. They appear to be going a different direction now with the service using cryptocurrency nodes to route the service[2]
[1] https://getsession.org/blog/session-protocol-technical-infor...
TLDR on Session is that it's a fork of Signal (effectively same front end, key scheme, encryption scheme, etc) with a modified transport/delivery and notification system and without the phone-number-as-an-identifier caveat that signal has.
Note: Sorry for the wall of text below.
As for what that modified transport layer is, it's routing all the messaging and data hosting over Oxen (https://oxen.io/) which is a cryptocurrency that serves as a decentralised short term / small size addressable data store and an onion router for those messages/data. As much as cryptocurrency=bad in a lot of cases, here it kinda makes sense as it's just an automated digital marketplace for data hosting and bandwidth with tooling wrapped around it to support privacy and anonymity preserving tools without relying on some hopefully benevolent dictator to run it.
As for who's backing it, same group that develops the Oxen, an Australian non-profit focused on privacy tech and bearing the same name (Oxen Privacy Tech Foundation). While Oxen is pay for use (messaging and all that has an on chain cost), it looks like the foundation is covering the costs of running Session for the foreseeable future. Given the nature of the project, it should eventually be possible for users to pay their own infra costs however that doesn't seem to be implemented yet.
It's pretty easy to use.
1. Install via F-droid or download from the web.
2. Basic cryptocurrency wallet style setup where your account is based on a randomly generated "recovery seed" phrase (string of words with equal bits of randomness as the private key which can be used to rebuild the private key on a new device).
3. Then you can share your "Session ID" which is basically just your public key or you can pay for a custom username which is addressed to your public key (you can set names for contacts after adding them so the username is mostly for ease of discoverability).
4. After that it's basically just Signal but where you can make and throw away accounts at the drop of a hat.
My main complaints are
1. that it's a bit slow on delivery
2. The onion routing half of decentralised storage + routing is still being implemented for Session as the project is very much WIP at this stage.
----
My takeaway is that provided it can stick around, Session has potential to shore up where Signal falls short. Give it a year or two in the oven and I might recommend it as a daily driver for messaging.
Likewise for the OPTF and their goals in general. It looks like once Session is "fully implemented" they are looking at trying to expand the approach to a discord/slack/matrix competitor as well which could be interesting. As far as I can tell they are just a bunch of privacy nerds with a little bit of a cryptocurrency lean to them but they are doing good work.
That's rich, coming from a company that wasn't (and probably still isn't) running the code they made public.
>So if I want to fork Signal and make my own, I can just take the code and do it today?
>People do it. There are many of those. We don’t endorse them because we can’t guarantee or validate them — we don’t have the time or the resources for that. But yes, there are many out there.
Sure, but you can't use them with the same server cluster everyone else in the world is using, making it about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Is anyone aware of whether they are still obscuring spam related code?
For the downvoters:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/qlw1ag/signal_is_a...
For those that have small circles of friends they wish to chat with and minimize the number of ISP's their traffic traverses, I would suggest tinkering around with uMurmur [1] a lightweight version of Murmur. There are pre-built packages in several operating systems package managers. The configuration is dirt simple [2] and the daemon is very light weight, designed to run on home routers. Use Certbot to generate LE certs or just use self-signed. One TCP and one UDP port must be opened to the daemon or forwarded if on a different device with the default port being 64738. One can set a server-wide password to keep strangers off of it, or set passwords per-channel. It took me about 2 minutes to install and configure uMurmur on Alpine Linux and most of that time was deciding how I wanted to nest channels.
The mobile client is Mumla. Just put in the IP or hostname of the uMurmur instance. uMurmur is not E2EE but if it is running on your own router or VM and you are talking with your friends that you know and trust then maybe that is less of an issue given the server is on your hardware.
The voice quality is incredible. It uses the OPUS codec and does not require much bandwidth. The client also supports text chat, but that can be disabled in the server if one so wishes.
Reading suggestion: The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith
And nowadays, every popular IM network wants 3rd-party clients off their net at all costs. Signal is on the better side of the spectrum here. While they explicitly say they don't support non-official clients connecting to the official network, this isn't rigorously enforced. WA, on the other hand, would permaban your whole account if you even so much as try to use 3rd-party client.
Any country that value sovereignty and sees itself as an independent actor rather than a vassal state, must take the position India is taking, or else be susceptible to foreign owned apps influencing its citizenry. The only alternative would be to insist Signal hire its security agents into product / moderator roles, so that oversight can be conducted in more implicit ways.
Not great for the users, but the world where globalised technology makes everyone friends is over
Signal has 40 employees.
Are they banning all of the internet, books, movies and everything else too? Your position is that a state needs to control what the citizens can consume otherwise it's a vassal state?
My country lived under dictatorship with hard censorship before, and reading your comment that was the vibes I got.
India is a democracy, like the US, which makes similar requests for access for its domestic tech / media firms, as well demand the same for the few foreign owned ones which have had success in the country.
There is an aspect ro this we have to acknowledge: we live in a world where everybody who knows how can create encrypted communications that are impossible or at least very costly to break. You cannot stop them from doing it.
If we ban that kind of communications, the only persons making use of it will be people who really have something to hide. Criminals, drug cartels, financial fraudsters, terrorists and the likes. Which also means they are the only ones who got to get safe communication channels.
Banning a safe and private way to communicate for billions of people because of some criminals that you cannot deal with is very bad deal to strike. The way I see it criminals most of the time have to interface with the real, physical world in some places and that's were you would catch them if that was your goal: money transactions, buying selling things, shipping, production, etc. Hell if you check any police report ever this is where they catch the people.
That makes you wonder if banning encrypted communications for a whole population is not rather a thing you do for politicial (power) considerations.
They wouldn't be safe, though. Merely using encrypted communication would be enough to warrant attention. Encryption only provides plausible deniability if everyone uses it for mundane stuff.
Provided they are using the same channels as the rest of us. Which they will not do, unless they are stupid.
Publishing is a more difficult matter though. Wouldn't you say that governments should be able to demand transparency when someone distributes information to entire populations?
If someone was calling on millions of followers to kill members of some minority, would you still take the position that the distribution channel must remain off limits to governments trying to enforce encitement laws?
Where a private group becomws of the size that posting there constitutes an act of publication is a matter of discussion, but I'd argue below a certain size any group chat can still be seen as private communications.
This means Signal groups with their lower size are in less jeopardy than a one-to-many telegram group.
Horrifying take: The implications from such a stance means that the State has ultimate power over the Individual, and that when in conflict, the State's desires for control & order override the civil liberties that the Individual should have, including the right to privacy.
When it comes to privacy, it should be difficult for the State to peek into the private lives of the Individual without explicit consent from said Individual. If not, the private rights of the Individual are as ephemeral as the State's rulings on said rights (e.g. LGBTQ+ rights, abortions, rights to firearms, civil asset forfeiture, eminent domain, government bailouts/loans, etc).
The issue at stake is one of national security - we have seen that this trumps individual rights whenever the two are in conflict. Look at the creation of NSA post 9/11 - the people broadly accepted this in order to avoid another terrorist attack - and have continued to accept it even as the natsec apparatus continues to expand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA was created during World War II, renamed to its current name in 01952, and played a key role in weakening DES in the 01970s.
>> Lok Sabha passes Bill to exempt political parties from scrutiny on foreign funds, without debate
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/lok-sabha-passes-bill...
As long as they don't have a business entity there they can still keep running it, and it would be upto India to create a national firewall if they so wish to, otherwise their citizens would be able to still access Signal without any issues.
Makes me think of my encounters with US encryption export regulations. I think we're all lucky those aren't enforced.
They intentionally maintain a backdoor in the end to end crypto of iMessage:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
iMessage is encrypted, the encryption is end-to-end, there are no backdoors.
The unencrypted backup is a clear and annoying hole in the apple privacy story, but the non-e2ee iCloud backup does not include any messages (SMS, MMS, or iMessage), Contacts, Calendars, Notes, iCloud Photos, or health data.
A local backup is local, and is protected by filesystem encryption on your local storage.
So no, iMessage has no backdoors. Basic research would have showed that this claim was bogus.
99% of people have iCloud backups turned on.
The _only_ online way to maintain your iMessages is (checks settings) "Messages in the Cloud", which is e2e encrypted - if you lose all your devices there is no recovery path except for the "iCloud Key Vault", but I honestly don't know if that can get you to a point where old messages can be recovered.
Please read this article. The Messages in iCloud sync feature is e2e encrypted - but the sync key itself for the e2e is included in the (non-e2e) iCloud Backup which is done every night.
From Apple themselves:
> For Messages in iCloud, if you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your messages. This ensures you can recover your messages if you lose access to your Keychain and your trusted devices. When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn't stored by Apple.
This is actually worse. It means that Apple has the cross-device Messages in iCloud sync key in effectively unencrypted form from the backup the night before - which means that they can decrypt the iMessages as they sync between your devices in realtime. This enables realtime iMessage surveillance because of this backdoor in the end to end crypto (the effectively unencrypted iCloud Backup, which includes the e2e keys for the Messages in iCloud feature).
The technical term for this is "key escrow". When you escrow the key to the middle transit service that is supposedly end to end, you backdoor the end to end encryption.
How would/could we know? If the NSA doesn't have a backdoor (whether that's in the non-public iMessage code, the hardware RNG on iPhones, or somewhere else), what are they even doing all day?
Wait 24 hours plugged in to AC power.
Remove the SIM card and throw the iPhone into the sea. Forget the password for the Apple ID.
Buy a new iPhone, and get Apple to reset the Apple ID password using PII/SMS/whatever. Log in and restore your iCloud backup.
Your messages are still right there, and you have provided no key material. Apple has them in plaintext or plaintext-equivalent.
If the middle relay service has the keys, it's not end to end encrypted.
The non-e2ee iCloud Backup does include your photos, includes your messages (if you have Messages in iCloud disabled) or includes your message sync keys (which are equivalent to your messages) if you have Messages in iCloud enabled. Your photos, contacts, calendars, notes, etc are never end to end encrypted and don't even pretend to be.
Even if you disable iCloud Backup and do only local backups: everyone you iMessage with will have iCloud Backup still enabled, sending either the sync keys (Messages in iCloud on) or the messages themselves (Messages in iCloud off) to Apple in plaintext in the backup that is done automatically each night.
In Germany, we have a saying: "Wer glaubt wird selig." which could be translated as something like: "Blessed are they who believe."
That is factually incorrect.
Decentralized protocols are the only viable alternatives to 'normie' chat apps like Telegram & Signal.
Speek! is a new app that looks promising: https://speek.network/
However neither of those companies is terribly easy to just blackhole. You can blackhole some IPs, but you'll also be causing your own business and government endless technical headaches since those IPs also serve local ads, shared folders and documents, government outreach channels, cloud services, etc.
Following scenario:
1) X communicates with Y using Signal trying to hide from Iranian police
2) Y is getting arrested and who ever is found to have his phone number is getting in to trouble as well
3) X deletes Y from its contacts
4) Y stays in X's contacts on Signal no matter what
now what should X do? delete Signal? theoretically the police could reinstall it and see who you had in your contacts.
There have been several issues opened for this problem on GitHub for years. They all get closed by their bot after couple of weeks.
I have several ghost numbers and even ghost user names on my Signal clients. Super annoying and cluttering my list of contacts. For me Signal is just one option to avoid WhatsApp. But boy do I prefer Telegram ...
>> Signal knows nothing about who you are.
This is based on trust, not systematic proofs, Signal knows this, yet never tells its users. For example, Signal uses Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) - which is know to have multiple attacks, any of which Signal might be forced to run using national security letter. They have also had multiple data breaches, which I am guessing average user is not aware of. Moxie is still on the board, and he personally refused multiple times to remove the requirement for a phone number. Lastly, Signals three board members have all been the leader of Signal in last year and I have been unable to find their most recent 990 non-profit disclosure.
NSLs can demand information but cannot compel action. The govt cannot use an NSL to force you into military service, for example, or force you to hack someone else’s computer (which is essentially what you are suggesting).
For example, this included a room and split:
- https://wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street
My understanding is that vendors that execute national security letters offer system integration technology to be locally installed to ingest the related data.
Signal has the data, it just requires them collecting it — hence my statement that Signal’s security is based on trust, not physics, math, etc.
Also my understanding that the National Security Letters vendors can simply reissue them automatically to maintain persistent data feeds. Disclosing actions taken via All Writs Act to enable national security letters would likely be a disclosure of them similar to warrant canary.
All that said, if it was up to me, Signal would have their 990s on their site, annual publicly shared audits, etc. - which to my knowledge they do not.
Cutting through the tug-at-the-heartstrings sales pitch: Signal does not currently "depend on donations", nor will they for at least 45 more years.
It is reasonable to expect the entire truth when asked for money, instead of getting Wikipedia'd.
The last number I could find is 40 million in 2021
It is truly sad to see that an entire populace can't see the perils of a government with broad-reaching powers, when government institutions jailing the opposition, censoring the press, and supressing minorities is rather commonplace there[1][2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emergency_(India)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_Muslims_in_In...
I honestly couldn't do anything even after writing letters, talking to friends who can talk to people who make shitty decisions, just cause there is no larger sentiment against these decisions, things just go by.
And now I have to say I am not sure when will the general public understand this issue, or will they ever. Are we just too lazy to do anything about it, or too divided to put up a fight...
Truly sad to see. Taking away rights to privacy is not the way of fighting the wrongs and problematic elements, and considering how corrupt our system can be I have no hope of it not being abused wildly. :(
Or, maybe I am too optimistic about people who sold their souls for money, making a stand.
Probably only 1 out of 10 Aussies would have even heard of it. The mainstream media here are about half a dozen ideologically aligned corporations who are not the type to ask hard questions, and the average Australian is focused only on their wealth, their family or their recreation.
But as I said it's clever. It can specifically prohibit introducing new "systemic weaknesses" because they already have one that's more than good enough for their purposes. That would be silent security updates. They have given themselves the power to compel tech company (Apply/Google/Microsoft) to install a silent security update on a specific device. The "silent security update" would of course be a bug (spy intercept) of some sort. It doesn't bypass encryption because it doesn't need to - a human can only consume unencrypted data, so that's what the spy bug intercepts.
They've ensured that it will never be systemic to their own satisfaction by putting several hurdles in place, like independent judicial review of the bug and which devices will be targeted. The fundamental principle is the only acceptable reason for targeting someone is criminal activity. If those hurdles are respected (and it seems likely they would mostly be followed) it means the Chinese like surveillance society India seems to be trying to create would be very difficult in Australia, even with this law. Which I guess would make it a reasonable compromise between government privacy invasion and law and order concerns.
The flaw is it's impossible to know if they are being respected. All companies and people forced to inject these spy ware updates are automatically subject to a gag order. All that review I mentioned happens in secret, and they have specifically exempted themselves from publishing any meaningful information on who, what, why and how devices are targeted.
To finish the picture - if the Australian government was concerned about criminal behaviour happening over Signal, it's highly unlikely they would be approaching Signal as India has apparently done. (I can't for the life of me think of a reason why Signal would give a shit about what the India government thinks or wants. Ditto the Australian government.) Instead they would direct Google to inject keyboard and screen monitors into Android. Google makes a lot of money in Australia, so it's likely they would comply. Like I said - it's clever.
But not impossibly so. It only works if they can target a particular device. For a commercial products this is invariably easy - Apple, Google, Microsoft all want you to sign in with an identity so they can milk some profit out of it either by charging you or at least displaying advertising. But open source projects, like Fedora or Debian, go out of their way to not identity the users, and worse Debian creates audit trails like reproducible builds. So their users are largely immune to Australia's Assistance and Access Bill (2019). But they aren't immune to India's rubber hose approach.
There's no "different perspective" when it comes to slaughtering innocent civilians and other war crimes.
Most countries wish to be neutral on this matter, continuing to trade with both Russia and the west, i.e. similar to India's position. Look at how many countries chose to sanction Russia. Of those who voted against Russia, most who chose to sanction are western countries. Very few Asian and African countries imposed sanctions. 87% of countries chose not to impose sanctions.
Re Africa, see Why African Countries Had Different Views on the UNGA Ukraine Resolution, and Why This Matters — Center for Strategic and International Studies: https://www.csis.org/analysis/why-african-countries-had-diff...
EDIT: Just saw the company I am keeping. This is not a pro-war comment.
If we both (presumably) start from the premise of "this invasion is a bad thing", then following this up with "anyone who supports it is just a moron duped my propaganda" and/or "the Russian administration are simply crazy" isn't helpful. This did not happen in isolation, it happened against a backdrop of decades of western failures in diplomacy & deterrence.
That's worth examining if we wish to prevent future wars.
That alone could explain why not only India, but big parts of the worlds, especially the ones that suffered from the British and American imperialism, would rather see an arch-enemy of their usurper win against oppressors puppet state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93Russia_relations
When we plunder the other village, take their crop and their wives, it's to bring justice to the world. When they come to us, take our crop and our wives, they are evil aggressors.
Nothing has changed, and probably will not change anytime soon. Thousands of years of evolution are still stronger than whatever thin layer of civilization we try to put on top.
This isn't strictly true though, no? Signal knows your mobile phone number.
I appreciate that this is for facilitating usability, but its still a piece of metadata that can specifically be used to identify you - and signal knows it. You cant even use signal without verifying a mobile phone number AFAIK.
They really shouldnt be making false statements like this. It undermines their (otherwise admirable) position.
I also thought I’d read on HN recently that they were looking at making this optional in the future but don’t quote me on that !
Eh, what's the difference?
It's better to read the original article: https://www.theverge.com/23409716/signal-encryption-messagin...
Some are obviously worse (looking at you Myanmar) but most are various shades of authoritarian (Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, etc) and most have heavy censorship (yeah the same culprits again).
This shouldn't surprise anyone and yet it always seems to.
Different countries have long, deep-rooted political cultures that go back centuries. "Democracy vs authoritarianism" is the wrong lens: different systems are complex and cannot be ranked on an easy scale like we want them to.
There is nothing to refute, he's just being manipulative. Politics is "culture" + all "culture" is good and should be accepted without questioning => authoritarian governments are just as good as democratic ones and should not be judged. That's plain nonsense.
This "reputation" you referred to is nothing more than showing that there are people who have yelled "look, he sides with the enemy!" Nothing in that article you linked is a substantial refutation of his points. Everything is based on attacking his character merely for associating with countries that certain people don't like.
You may recall that "guilt by association" is certainly not a feature that free societies ought to have.
> Politics is "culture" + all "culture" is good and should be accepted without questioning
That is not the point at all. The point is that political systems cannot be easily changed because culture is enduring, meaning we shouldn't be lured by the fantasy that we can overthrow some dictators and voila we have democracy and everyone lives happily ever after. This should be super-obvious if you look at attempts to drop western-style democracy in the middle east: places are now worse off than before.
Another point is that political systems are complex, partly due to tradition and culture, and they cannot be force-fitted to be ranked on an easy, feel-good "authoritarian vs democracy" scale. This means it's a better idea to deal with those systems by talking and engaging with them, and understanding their nuances and merits, rather than taking a forceful "only my perspective is right and everyone else is wrong" approach.
This message is far more nuanced and constructive than you give him credit for. Your approach, "destroy all whom we deem authoritarian; don't listen to them in any way", has empirically resulted in countless amount of suffering in the past few decades, and has created a large amount of resentment in the global south.
It also doesn't help that many who insist on the "authoritarian vs democracy" frame are also those who align with, or at least fail to distance from, US regime change foreign policy, which is known to overthrow democracies and install dictators as long as those dictators favor US interests, while at the same time spinning such efforts as "spreading democracy and fighting for freedom". At their best, such figures often hyper-focus on "democracy", but turn a blind eye towards countries' inability to develop and inability to solve poverty due to how weak they've become after democracy was installed. All this too has generated a large amount of resentment in the global south.
the app store claims data is not shared with 3rd parties, yet they use twilio to "verify phonenumbers"
how about verifing them yourself? to expensive...? so twilio does it for free for you? what the fishy fuck is going on here?
sure they do mention verifying the numbers with a third party in their terms & privacy policy, but the rest of their communication/advertising just very misleading and fishy, claiming they dont keep any data on you.
i never liked or trusted signal, especially not with marlon"no federation for u"spike and not with auntie "i used to work for the FTC" either.
what is your point?
You don't get to say "hey our messaging service is more secure than x, y or z"
That kind of statement can only be stated by external, independent researchers, not the marketing department.
This thread alone has already pointed to a number safety/security issues that are neither obscure, unreasonable nor able to be addressed by the user.
Additionally I wouldn't even describe Signal as the safest option available in comparison to the many E2EE widely available chat programs.
Larger question here would be - Do governments and security agencies need to keep a tab on social media to check for illegal activities
If you allow for privacy you allow for illegal usage. There is no way around it.
> Larger question here would be - Do governments and security agencies need to keep a tab on social media to check for illegal activities
They can do it old fashioned way. Also every compromise on security can be used by bad actors as well, and in some cases government is that bad actor, even in 1st world countries.
Food manufacturers should also ensure that they are not contributing to feeding bad actors...
People like you being so easily manipulated by governments are extremely dangerous to democracy.
Banning encryption doesn't stop bad actors from communicating over encryption, it just adds to the number of illegal things they did.
I would not trust this product anymore, especially if you are not a hard leftist like her.
It requires a mobile number, and thus your identity is known and your device is uniquely identifiable anyway, and it's also developed in the US where three-letter agencies have infinite reach and control.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/agra/in-up-district...
https://theintercept.com/2020/12/06/kashmir-social-media-pol... this is for tweeting but twitter is a public platform, same as your "mobile number" because twitter forces 2fa that makes you put your mobile for "security" reasons.
what i am trying to say is, this is not about police needing 100% access to find pedophiles. This is about crushing dissent, about the same big brother type are what people in india are seeing unless they join the ruling party. This is out in the open now and has for some time.
This is the way of the government to force big players to comply.
lets say tomorrow signal and whatsapp BOTH remove mobile number requirement. Now, unless the ISP are made to identify their specific traffic and block them on demand, ALL the users would be independent from local indian administrative action
Use PGP and email.
Can you explain what you mean by this? In practice, I can see the argument that the only verified identity (phone number) for most users is the one protected by a flimsy SMS verification message, but I don't believe that that implies your private key is terribly vulnerable to e.g. SIM swap attacks. Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.
Put another way: if you rigidly adhere to out-of-band-verified pubkeys for contacts, you should be fairly safe. True that Signal's UI makes this hard to do, but that's a different conversation than "your keys are only protected by SMS verification".
Do you think so? The app provides a "Safety Number" and QR code with built-in scanner to verify that yup, your device and their device have nobody in the middle. It has a visible reminder that you checked this person's actual identity (if you did) and a message appears if the keys change. If you are "rigidly adhering" to protocol your response should be to arrange an in-person meet-up to reconfirm, not "New phone? Cool".
PGP and email is extremely error prone and has zero forward secrecy, and web of trust is completely broken as a practical matter.