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Comment by dngray | Hacker News Reader

> Routing data between servers and networks you literally control

This isn't always the case, not every user is a server admin. Also for group chats other server admins will certainly know what data your requesting.

TLDR is that XMPP is not a private protocol, and that was never its intention. It was actually very centralized in it's original usage and the designers clearly envisaged similar usage to email ie $companyA.com employees talking to $companyB.com not some sort of "private messenger" competitor to Matrix or Signal which were meant to be used by the wider general population.

> Leaking metadata to a centralized service is simply inevitable by pure physics

Not necessarily true https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

Signal has a lot less metadata than XMPP.

View on HN

https://simplex.chat/ has lesser metadata than Signal[1][2], Matrix and XMPP. SimpleX Chat is going to move to Groups V2[3] very soon to make the experience much better.

[1]: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/improving-signals-...

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09799

[3]: https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat/issues/4620#iss...

SimpleX looks really interesting. Will have to read on it. Seems somewhat like "magic", is there any gotcha?

See "We plan to add:"

https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat?tab=readme-ov-f...

but the first 2 points were already implemented as shown in their Roadmap[1], so they are going to probably remove them

[1]: https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat?tab=readme-ov-f...

XMPP largest deployments are in enterprises. I do not disagree with this. To go from there to "it is not designed to be a private protocol" is a stretch. And does that invalidate any of my points?

> Not necessarily true https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

Yeah, no. Timing alone is enough to clearly distinguish a sender, and any attempts like these is pure astronaut engineering to obfuscate something that is trivial to recover by a million side channels.

There is just No. Way. to eliminate the problem of metadata leaks to a centralized server, other than making it practically distributed/P2P. The more time it takes for people to realize this, the worse society becomes.

> And does that invalidate any of my point

Yes it does, because the threat model there is not the server itself. You trust that as it's your employer's server and you're using it for work related purposes.

> Timing alone is enough to clearly distinguish a sender

It's a lot harder to pull off than doing an MiTM attack with STARTTLS and then just observing the person's roster being sent to them when they connect lol.

> You trust that as it's your employer's server and you're using it for work related purposes.

Yes, that is the point. Or it is my home server sitting at my router serving my family. I have been arguing that if I can trust the server then the discussion about E2EE becomes less relevant.

> It's a lot harder to pull off than doing an MiTM attack with STARTTLS and then just observing the person's roster being sent to them when they connect lol.

And here you make the dangerous mistake that I most hate. It's not only trivially easy for the server operator to leak metadata, it's actually HARD to avoid it.

> Or it is my home server sitting at my router serving my family.

That works in your situation, but not for most people who don't want to have to maintain a moving part. Also hosting in general on a residential connection can depend on the provider and even availability of good internet.

For a lot of people it wouldn't even be possible if they wanted to and that's not getting into the technical investment they would have to make in knowing how to do such a thing in the first place.

> And here you make the dangerous mistake that I most hate. It's not only trivially easy for the server operator to leak metadata, it's actually HARD to avoid it.

It's a lot easier than simply not having that data server side in the first place like Signal for example.

> That works in your situation, but not for most people who don't want to have to maintain a moving part. Also hosting in general on a residential connection can depend on the provider and even availability of good internet.

Frankly, that works for the majority of XMPP users -- let's not forget about that. But yes, this is a problem today for many consumers. However, I see this as a much better direction for the Internet as a whole to take -- see efforts such as ownCloud and the like -- , rather than just conceding defeat and accepting a centralized Internet, or worse: the extremely dangerous idea that centralization increases security. Which should only be seen as the non-sense it is.

> It's a lot easier than simply not having that data server side in the first place like Signal for example.

You still do not get the point here at all. This is not about storage. This is not about the server implementation. As long as there is a communication at all between me and the server and then my contacts and the server, it is irrelevant if you are storing the roster or not. ANYONE (*anyone with access to that server) can easily pick it up. In fact, it is HARD not to leak it up, even by accident. Barring a P2P Freenet-like thing, this is _unavoidable_. (and even with P2P/Freenet/Onion/whatever it's not trivial) And due to the nature of IMs, metadata is practically as big an issue than protecting the payload itself.

> conceding defeat and accepting a centralized Internet

I think you can still have decentralization without having to be a sysop. That may be server operators that run small servers etc.

Decentralization doesn't inherently mean privacy though and it's important to remember that.

> You still do not get the point here at all. This is not about storage

Pretty sure signal servers can't intercept messages or decrypt them. In regard to the client you cannot send unencrypted messages. We do know that lawful interception warrants sent to Signal are not particularly effective only registration time and last connection time is available. https://signal.org/bigbrother/

> Pretty sure signal servers can't intercept messages or decrypt them. In regard to the client you cannot send unencrypted messages. We do know that lawful interception warrants sent to Signal are not particularly effective only registration time and last connection time is available. https://signal.org/bigbrother/

Please, I'm really trying to put the emphasis on metadata, and definitely Signal servers can intercept that at will. Even here on HN there was recently an article of how "lawful interception warrants" were targeting Apple's and Google's _push notification servers_ (those _by design_ really only have access to metadata -- that should speak about how important metadata is for law enforcement). The Signal server has access to significantly more metadata about you and your communications than your typical push server. Again, there's just no contest here: simply avoiding the issue of using their server in the first place is much better than anything they claim* to do (or even better than anything they could _physically_ do).

* I absolutely detest these type of "our privacy is great, believe us!" pages. Time and time again it shown that they are absolutely useless. Where did Apple report that their push notification servers were tapped? The fact that a server collects enough data about you that it is a tempting target for authorities should be cause for concern, not relief.

> Apple's and Google's _push notification servers_

This never effected signal as no data that is sensitive was ever sent via that. Again though warrants against Signal are not new, and for years law enforcement has been getting the same answers to their subpoenas. If it was "possible" as you say and that "they do", pretty sure the ACLU would not be making submissions to a court that "this is all that is available <registration date> & <connection date>" especially as the source code is open, it would be easy to verify if that was in fact true.

> I absolutely detest these type of "our privacy is great, believe us!" pages

The page literally has the legal request and reply, these would be able to be checked against court records. Remember being in contempt of a court order is actually punishable, so if there was more I'm sure Signal would have been fined by now lol.

> This never effected signal as no data that is sensitive was ever sent via that.

How are you still missing the point that this is _about metadata_? No one is sending "sensitive data" through a push notification in the first place. You have to go out of your way to do that. My point was to show you that the authorities _are_ after metadata.

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