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Comment by gloosx | Hacker News Reader

That's a popular lie, Telegram uses the MTProto 2.0 Cloud algorithm for non-secret chats, which is audited and verified by multiple independent parties. For example WhatsApp claims it uses EE2E encrypted chats, how ever these claims are unverified and not audited. Also their chief executives are not in jail, coincidentally.

You can consult these links if you want to read more about it:

https://core.telegram.org/mtproto/AJiEAwIYFoAsBGJBjZwYoQIwFM...

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.03141

https://github.com/miculan/telegram-mtproto2-verification

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https://t.me/s/UkraineNow

This is a Ukraine channel. You can preview it in a web browser. If Telegram can enable that functionality, then it means they have the complete capability to serve the content of the channel. Same story if they can scroll back an existing channel to new users.

Channels were meant to be public. No-one ever claimed encryption for channels since it is nonsense.

You claim that only secret chats are encrypted in telegram, which is straight not true. You can pull up a link to public channel and everyone can preview the posts, that's obvious. You cannot do the same trick with group chats because they are private and encrypted using MTProto

MTProto is pretty much transport layer encryption. After the MTProto decryption occurs, Telegram servers still ultimately receive your unencrypted message encoded as a https://core.telegram.org/method/messages.sendMessage to send it to the recipient and to store it. How do you think it is possible that you can sign in on a new device and get all of your old messages? There's a reason Signal can't do that.

MTProto is not pretty much transport layer encryption, Telegram servers receive messages encrypted with an auth_key which is created during registration directly on the device and never exchanged via network. When you sign in on a new device, you have to communicate the keys with your other devices, and there is also a second-factor user defined recovery password in place, which is not stored or known to the telegram servers. If you loose your permament session you may be locked out of your account and data forever. Everything is documented at the links, audited and verified, and everything is possible - you can just read how it works.

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