The Russian network block and letting people use Telegram again was the government squeezing their biggest source of users and income until they acquiesced.
Just as Signal, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp are deeply connected to the USA?
> People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats.
The cloud and E2EE encryption of Telegram have already been audited by independent researchers.
> They have money when Telegram is expensive to run
They literally raised money (a billion dollars) by selling bonds last year and to make Telegram self-sustainable, introduced Telegram Premium.
> not to mention they can easily threaten Durov's life
Which is why Durov (and his whole dev team) moved to the UAE in the first place!
I'm all for healthy skepticism, but there must be a limit. Unproven conspiracies aren't helping anyone, especially from people who have no issues with apps like WhatsApp. Telegram has time and again tried to fight government intervention, and yet that's not enough. The clients are open-source, everything audited by independent researchers and yet, people aren't afraid to make claims that they can't prove.
There are legitimate reasons to doubt Telegram like the lack of default end-to-end encryption but the Russian thing as a criticism of the app itself is overblown.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/1/31/5363990/how-putins-cronie...
Chances are ALWAYS against regular people.
Open sourcing it would make no difference. Signal's server is open source, yet the sources are always released late. For a whole year, Signal was running a totally different server code than the one they had made public, they even injected some crypto stuff and not a single person knew what the server was running.
This is the nature of servers. Backend is always unverifiable, even if it's got the latest code available to the public. The only thing open source backend is useful for is self-hosting, not verification.
Maybe they do something with the metadata, but so can every other messaging service.
This paranoia that everything is linked to Russia is just nuts.
Yes, and they all agree it's crap. Just look at this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6915741 (Feel free to ignore Moxie, but listen to tptacek). In addition, it doesn't even matter since (a) it's not turned on by default and (b) it can't be turned on for group chats.
That said, I agree that Durov probably is not closely collaborating with the Russian state.
MTProto 1.0 had flaws and proven vulnerabilities. Telegram ditched the algorithm after 2013.
MTProto 2.0 is much secure and has been audited multiple times already without fail. The security is solid, that's the consensus.
Also, there are 2 types of MTProto 2.0 algorithms. One is cloud encryption and the other is end to end encryption.
Cloud encryption is enabled by default on all chats but for those who need end to end encryption, they can use secret chats.
You can read more about it here: https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-does-server-client-e...
The article you link does not mention "cloud encryption". What is that? TLS?
The greatest feature that telegram offers is cloud sync. Everybody knows the limitations E2EE comes with. There's no way you could have thousands of members in a group on Signal.
Along with that, the ability to manage device sessions and to login on multiple devices with full chat sync is extremely unique to Telegram.
You're asking them to ditch that in favor of inferior UX, which they simply cannot do at this point.
But I do hear the valid complaints. I do believe they should improve MTProto 2.0 to work on multiple devices and in groups. Their implementation is fine for 1-1 chats but having something better than that is always welcome.
While in the same reality aggressively fight TOR, block VPNs, enforce passport registration, etc. etc. There's even a man jailed for running a tor node!
The Skripal affair and other fuckups highlighted that Russia can't get away with threatening even a retiree's life, let alone millionaire's with some security.
Major cloud providers have stopped making domain fronting an option (mostly because it was never supposed to happen anyway) but ISPs are never going to try to validate every single TLS certificate to see what traffic to block and what traffic to let through. The overhead would be enormous and people using custom certificate authorities (businesses and private persons) would get their communication blocked for no good reason.
It's also possible to get around SNI by using session resumption instead of doing a full handshake. 0-RTT TLS needs special attention because of replay attack risks, but it can speed up the network while at the same time avoiding SNI blocking once a session has been set up. QUIC offers a similar solution.
As far as I can tell, the tools normally used for traffic interception don't grow as fast as the tools for new communication. Support for certain protocols can take days to implement on the client side but weeks on the middlebox side, and that assumes your middleboxes get regular updates.
Worst case scenario, people just turn on a VPN to a place that doesn't block their apps and you lose all visibility of their network traffic. Implementing this stuff at scale isn't easy.
Did they already adopt a proven published alogithm for encryption, or still using a homegrown KGB-Krypt algorithm? Sorry for a trivial question, I am not a user.
Their algorithm itself is proven and published, has been audited multiple times already.
It is not as good Double Ratchet in terms of features but security wise, it's solid.