Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

People keep writing posts and comments like this that seem premised on the thought that nobody at Signal considered the downsides to centralization, and that they just rejected federation out of spite.

If you're reading HN, Signal's design goals are almost certainly not your design goals. Signal was designed to replace SMS and WhatsApp, the most widely-used messaging systems on the planet, with something end-to-end secure. Signal is not Telegram, Slack, Wire, or Matrix. They make decisions that are certain to upset orangey-types like us (phone numbers, no federation, tethering to phones, and so on) because HN people aren't their core user base.

If you want to understand why Signal went this way, look at Matrix. Matrix was designed for federation from the beginning; that's part of the point. Federation delayed the rollout of default E2EE on Matrix by over a year. It will probably delay the resolution of the Nebuchadnezzar vulnerabilities --- which are very bad --- by some material amount of time as well. You can't have Signal's use cases and accept those downsides, but you can with Matrix's use cases.

By all means: use Matrix. But the constant psychologizing and theorizing about Signal's federation decision is tiresome. "The Ecosystem Is Moving" post, where Moxie Marlinspike laid out his case, was received approximately as well at Steve Jobs open letter on Adobe Flash. And, like the Flash letter, it has been pretty conclusively vindicated. That doesn't mean everything, or even most things, should be centralized. But it does make clear why Signal needed to be.

But then who is Signal for? Yes, it has E2EE encryption, but who cares about that other than us orangey types?

And Signal makes plenty of user hostile moves: making backups is not supported. If your Android phone dies, you can kiss your previous conversations goodbye. That's working as intended according to the team.

If I receive a large number of photos via Signal, i have to long tap each of them and save them individually (several taps to do that).

So really, who is Signal for then? It's not for anonymity fans. It's not for people who care about long term discussions.

All media, select all, save by the way. You don't need to tap the individual photos.

> But then who is Signal for? Yes, it has E2EE encryption, but who cares about that other than us orangey types?

Although I think people like us (?) were some of the original proponents of Signal, and it could never have spread without us, I believe Signal's intention is more about capturing the wider market while simultaneously changing that market to be more privacy-aware. I think that they believe they can make private, encrypted messaging to be a household idea, and I hope they're right.

> Yes, it has E2EE encryption, but who cares about that other than us orangey types?

Signal is vulnerable to MITM attack. Our government has no problems with reading of my messages in Signal. I forced either to accept new certificate and be OK with wiretaping, or to lost communication channel with a friend.

Which MITM attack has a government used to read your Signal messages? I've heard people allude to government breaks of Signal for years, but always without evidence. Surely some Signal messages have been recovered from devices in the government's possession, but that's not a protocol problem. Are you saying a government has successfully spoofed safety number change messages from your contacts?

I believe they're saying that if the government (or another party) can read your received SMS messages, then your Signal account isn't secure. It could be taken over by anyone who can receive the SMS verification code. Your contacts would be notified that you'd changed your keys, and your own device would be locked out. So it's not the most quiet attack. But people replace their phones and forget account details so it may pass unnoticed by some of your contacts, particularly if you have no other channel to reach your contacts.

The number of countries where the government would do that to your SMS but won't also just arrest you arbitrarily and seize your device and/or beat/threaten you, seems small. But I imagine there are some people in some places, who feel physically and/or legally secure from arbitrary government action against their devices proper, but not with their cellular service.

> So it's not the most quiet attack. But people replace their phones and forget account details so it may pass unnoticed by some of your contacts, particularly if you have no other channel to reach your contacts.

So in other words, such attacks aren't viable for dragnet surveillance and must be targeted. But if you have reason to believe that you'll be targeted by the government for surveillance, you'd be on the lookout for signs like "your safety number has changed"?

You can also make it so that your PIN is required to register your number on a new device.

So it's not vulnerable. You choose to accept the new certificate.

I have two options: 1) accept new certificate and be OK with MITM, 2) use another messenger.

>But then who is Signal for? Yes, it has E2EE encryption, but who cares about that other than us orangey types?

Me.

> If I receive a large number of photos via Signal, i have to long tap each of them and save them individually (several taps to do that).

No, you don't. You can select them all and export to Photos app (at least on Android, I have not tried on my iPhone).

> So really, who is Signal for then? It's not for anonymity fans. It's not for people who care about long term discussions.

My SO and I foster. New case, new numbers for everything. When I'm at the pediatrician and I can't remember an insurance number or a birth date, my SO can text it to me and after I say I have it, they can delete the message.

Signal is great. I love it. Warts and all.

I use Signal to be able to communicate with those members of my family who don't have iPhones. It's a compromise between my privacy expectations and their usability expectations.

For me and my converted familie. It is the same as WA but not FB. Well, except for that everybody just leaves that message for a PIN code verification open all the time and never do anything with it.

> "The Ecosystem Is Moving" post, where Moxie Marlinspike laid out his case, was received approximately as well at Steve Jobs open letter on Adobe Flash. And, like the Flash letter, it has been pretty conclusively vindicated.

The Flash letter was vindicated, but I do not see how the Moxie blog post was vindicated.

Unless you claim that federated E2EE is impossible, I believe you cannot claim that it has been vindicated. But I could be wrong.

Federated E2EE is possible but won't achieve widespread adoption.

Signal's choices optimize usability of E2EE messaging for the masses.

Federated E2EE can work. Matrix did it. But it took lots of extra time, a time cost imposed structurally on the project by being open to third parties who had to coordinate to get things deployed. It's especially painful when you run up against protocol vulnerabilities, doubly so when the fixes for those vulnerabilities involve policy decisions that are their own coordination problems, which is a jam I think Matrix is in right now. All of this is stuff Moxie Marlinspike more or less predicted in his post.

Again: you can get past this stuff, and Matrix will. But Matrix is going to get through this because their use cases (more or less: replace IRC and Slack) are forgiving. Signal's aren't.

My gripe isn't that HN users refuse to tough out Signal's rough edges; I certainly don't ask my own family to use Signal to talk to me (I use Signal for things that matter, and little else). My gripe is that HN people who should know better don't seem to respect, or at least understand, the painful decisions that Signal made to support its use cases, and instead write weird little essays about how Moxie Marlinspike, the "brilliant cryptographer", built Signal this way because it was fun. It doesn't look super fun to me.

>Federated E2EE can work. Matrix did it

Kind of hard to claim they've done it given their current level of adoption.

Quite easy actually when you look at the number of governments who rely on Matrix - https://element.io/case-studies/tchap, https://element.io/case-studies/bundeswehr and many more (US, UK, Sweden, Ukraine, Luxembourg, Finland…). But if your friends aren’t on it, i guess that means nothing.

> But if your friends aren’t on it, i guess that means nothing.

Well... yes, actually. Governments use a lot of things that don't have widespread adoption outside of governmental use cases.

If your goal is to build for that market -- for environments with very specific needs -- then you're doing a great job. But governmental use isn't the ringing endorsement that you seem to think, because it has no bearing on actual widespread adoption.

Back in the day, I used to use BBSes via local dial-up. Everyone did, so you could expect BBSes were on the rise from so much usage. Meanwhilr, governments were stuck on ArpaNet and futzing around with some newfangled "TCP/IP" protocol. What good does government support even provide???

His entire point is that Matrix went for and is in the process of getting the larger goal right for the sake of long-term adoption at the cost of development time -- whereas Signal opted for worst-is-better limited-scope pragmatism for the sake of near-term adoption.

Whatever lesson you want to derive from this technical trade-off is up to you, but yeah the psychobabble about Moxie is absolutely tiresome.

Claiming that Matrix did it is even a stretch. Only a few core features are covered and just about every new feature ships without E2EE. Room topics aren't encrypted, sticker packs aren't encrypted, reactions aren't encrypted...

The devs will tell you that requiring every feature to be E2EE will slow down adoption too much, that can always be added later as another MSC (Matrix Spec Change).

This is not true :| We do everything to encrypt new features - eg voice messages, polls, location share etc are all encrypted. It’s the old features which predate e2ee (state events like topics or sticker packs and aggregations like reactions) which need to be brought in line, and MSC3414 is addressing that.

> The devs will tell you that requiring every feature to be E2EE will slow down adoption too much, that can always be added later as another MSC (Matrix Spec Change).

No?

I'll give you a pass for state events but sticker packs are still going through MSC and it seems that people on the team are happy to add E2EE later?

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/254...

Or is that out of date and there is a new proposal with encryption?

I assume you’re talking about https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/254.... There is nobody from the spec core team or for that matter the matrix core team on that thread; Sorunome, deepbluev7 and Cadair are community contributors. You can spot the folks who actually are project members (ie core team) by the “member” label next to their names in Github. It is unlikely that the MSC will pass review (when we finally get to it) unless it’s e2ee… unless MSC3414 automatically handles it.

Well that's good to hear. Maybe it would be good to drop an "official" note on the RFC to make it clear that it is unlikely to be accepted without E2EE since I seem to be the only voice mentioning that and was quickly dismissed.

I understand that the core team is busy but if big problems like this could be pointed out early it could save a lot of time all around.

Do you mean that they send it unencrypted or that it isn't end-to-end encrypted?

Please be precise.

This is probably the most annoying thing about HN lately, the insistence on pretending that only end to end encryption matters.

Meanwhile we see end-to-end encrypted solutions like WhatsApp being cheered forward but ultimately failing badly because all incentives are aligned against security.

I don't understand why you use Signal only for things that matter. If you use Whatsapp, all your metadata is available to Facebook, which can learn a lot about you and your personal networks and use that information for personal advertising.

Indeed, the jury is still out on Moxie’s post. https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom is the counterpoint.

Yes, that is a blog post that I've read and really like.

I hope you prove Moxie wrong, and once my business is off the ground, I'd like to contribute financially to that end.

Your constant dismissiveness of criticism wrt Signal remains pretty darkly amusing.

>They make decisions that are certain to upset orangey-types like us (phone numbers, no federation, tethering to phones, and so on) because HN people aren't their core user base.

These decisions upset other people beyond your elitist dismissive "orangey-types", but upsetting "orangey-types" has its own cost. Nobody in my family, friends, or client organizations use Signal, because I advised them all against it. Sure that's <200 people but for network effect stuff it adds up.

>And, like the Flash letter, it has been pretty conclusively vindicated

Huh? It's successfully replaced SMS completely? It's replaced email? It's beaten out iMessage and Whatsapp etc worldwide? Oh. I mean sure, tens of millions of users worldwide is nothing to sniff at. But that's not a story of domination and "we won so all of you are wrong and also stupid".

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