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Comment by c00lio | Hacker News Reader

For certain things in signal you need to trust the server hardware and suspicious technologies like SGX. SGX is a prime target for a NSA backdoor. That some upper-layer software there is open source (with lots of caveats, e.g. you cannot verify which server version is really running and signal has a history of lagging behind on publishing their "open source" version of the server code) is a distraction at best.

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Those "certain things" have nothing to do with message security. The SGX thing was an idea intended to provide a bit better protection against metadata leakage about who was talking to who. It turned out that there were other ways to get that sort of metadata. Does Signal even use the SGX stuff anymore?

Signal backup encryption works by trusting SGX. If you cannot trust SGX, you have to assume the attacker can decrypt your signal backups, of course including all media and messages.

> For certain things in signal you need to trust the server hardware and suspicious technologies like SGX. SGX is a prime target for a NSA backdoor. That some upper-layer software there is open source (with lots of caveats, e.g. you cannot verify which server version is really running and signal has a history of lagging behind on publishing their "open source" version of the server code) is a distraction at best.

Before you worry about super expensive hard to remove hardware bugs, you should worry far more about the software running on that hardware. It is much more likely that theres bugs in the software than the hardware.

Yes, of course you are right. My comment was meant more along the lines of "even if the software were ultimately trustworthy because of open source, thousand eyes, careful development and fairy dust, those hardware problems would still be a way in".

Don't forget side-channels in SGX.

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