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Comment by daft_pink | Hacker News Reader

I sort of assumed that a messaging app based in Russia should probably not be used unless you were okay with Russia reading your messages, which is currently considered an enemy state in most western countries. It totally shocks me that so many pro Ukrainian influencers use Telegram.

I feel that this is a pretty good summary of what's going on: https://youtu.be/39rBzRd4M0k and explains how the encryption works etc.

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Telegram is not based in Russia.

To be fair it's not really based anywhere. The legal headquarters are in the Virgin Islands and the ops HQ is now in Dubai.

Saying telegram is based in Russia is like saying the pirate bay is based in Sweden. Used to be true, but not so much anymore.

Regardless, I think it's totally reasonable to be concerned about having shared symmetric cryptography keys stored on servers in Russia while claiming your app is 'secure'/end to end encrypted (not sure if they're claiming the latter anymore or if that was even official claims to begin with vs internet BS), and is especially relevant for Ukranians or Russians politically opposed to Putin.

Don't use non-secure chats for your communication, then. Telegram is not just a chat app, it's also used somewhat like Facebook. Are you concerned that Facebook can see posts and comments? Facebook can also see your chats, there is no option to E2E encrypt them, unlike Telegram.

Meta added end-to-end encryption to Messenger some time ago. [0]

[0] https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1084673321594605

"Tribunal Judiciaire de Paris", the court, has published the charges: https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files.... It's a two-pager primary source. Maybe check that before the video.

> I feel that this is a pretty good summary of what's going on: https://youtu.be/39rBzRd4M0k and explains how the encryption works etc.

What makes you feel that? Never seen that channel before, and the self-description of "High-intensity code tutorials and tech news to help you ship your app faster" doesn't really inspire much confidence when it comes to talking about more nuanced topics.

For example, Telegram isn't based in Russia, and I don't think it ever was. So if that's one of the takeaways from that video, it seems pretty misinformed even about the basics.

If I were a pro-Ukraninian influencer, I'd want Russia to be reading a bunch of my messages. Probably not my private ones, but using the enemy's platform to distribute propaganda is a veritable goldmine.

Not that it’s a whole lot better than Russia, but I’m pretty sure it’s based in Dubai.

And what would be better? France?

This is a good instinct. Even if you're using a good E2EE messaging app like Signal, you still trust them not to mitm unless you check the other person's public key out-of-band. I suspect most people don't do that.

Also, there are issues with Telegram's E2EE mode, besides it being disabled by default. More than enough reason not to use it.

i suspect this particular security hole in the signal protocol is the single reason why whatsapp hasn't been banned yet.

They can eavedrop by simply adding a device to a conversation and nobody will notice. Your device will gladly send them decryption keys and provide them with a copy of the message nicely.

I'm not sure if they can add a participant to an existing conversation, and if they did, your client would at least know. Also don't remember if the client will send message history, but I think Signal doesn't.

The simple bad scenario I have in mind is when you're initiating a new chat and the mitm it from the start. Or they could do it halfway through, which would notify you that the other end's key changed, but that message is non-threatening enough and happens enough for random other reasons that most people would probably ignore it.

not a participant. Whatsapp is multi device ( a single user can have multiple devices, such as a web client, an iphone and a mac app). They can simply register another device as belonging to one of the participant, and everything should be forwarded to them, invisibly.

Multi-device mode is new enough that I might be wrong about this, but afaik the web client still needs to get the priv key from your phone, so they can't authorize a new client unilaterally. Or it'd be a really silly hole if they could.

Edit: Meant to say, the web client needs to somehow be authorized by the phone, not that it takes the privkey exactly. Probably gets a new key that the phone stores, so the phone is still the "master" device. I wouldn't expect the phone client to happily send the chat history to a new device it didn't authorize locally.

Maybe the phone transfers a secret to the webclient, and that secret is then used by the other participant to certify it is indeed an "authorized" device, but i was under the impression that you had to rely on the server to correctly give you a list of correct devices for a given participant.

i'm happy to know more about that topic if you've got some documentation.

Someone else here probably knows more than me. I don't want to speculate too much about what it actually does, I just know that the original device takes part in authorizing a new one, so it seems like they can't do it on their own.

i guess it depends if the authorization process reaches the other participants in some way or another ( such as a key derivation mechanism that can be verified by everyone) or if it's just a security feature to strengthen the login process.

Maybe it's similar to adding a new chat participant, except your client says "btw this is also me." I used that way when designing a toy e2ee app a while back. Or maybe there is a central repo of each user's per-device pub keys, and your client signs its updates to it using the original pub key so it's tamper-evident.

Maybe there's some key derivation mechanism so the new pubkey is self-evidently owned by the first one, never heard of one though.

Separate from our other convo, I just found this spicy note in Telegram's manual: "Multi-device End-to-end encrypted chats are a mess[...] Most of our competitors (notably, Whatsapp and iMessage) solve these problems in ways that make their end-to-end encryption useless (this is a big topic, so requires a separate manual)." And links to a TODO page. Can't just say that and leave us hanging!

https://tsf.telegram.org/manuals/e2ee-simple

My own distrust for Telegram aside, I like how these pages seem to be written by an engineer and not a PR person.

Well, if you're communicating with someone on Signal and they indeed receive your messages, you're safe to assume they are the public key holder. The critical part is the secret key management. In other words, are they _the only_ ones who hold the secret key?

No, your client asks Signal's server for the other end's public key. There's fundamentally no way for Signal's server to prove to your client that the pubkey you're encrypting for is indeed the one owned by the phone number you keyed in.

It offers a fingerprint you're supposed to validate over sneakernet but people are lazy

and Google Play offers the possibility to distribute an update only to specific e-mail addresses, so if there is a need to compromise users with a malicious update that shows another fingerprint it's really doable (or just copy the messages, like Skype was doing with TOM-Skype).

To clarify, there's no way for any software to do that. You need to somehow validate the keys' ownership out of band.

No, that someone would also be able to indeed receive your messages if there is an attacker in the middle who gave you his public key and is then forwarding the message using a channel established with the true recipient's public key.

Message secrecy does rely on being able to authenticate the recipient's public key.

> It totally shocks me that so many pro Ukrainian influencers use Telegram.

They are using Telegram for PR, same as Twitter or Instagram. It doesn't matter if the posts get decrypted by Russia – they are anyways meant to be public.

> unless you were okay with Russia reading your messages

This is not an empty accusation, there's been several stories which could not be explained by anything else than FSB having access to Telegram. That said, however, it's only FSB. There hasn't been a single suspicious act like that on behalf of Russian police, so we can assume that this access is only used in exceptional cases. So, unless you believe that Russian intelligence is targeting you personally, you're safe.

> there's been several stories which could not be explained by anything else than FSB having access to Telegram

Could you share which "100% confirmed" stories this is about? Haven't really come across that before

>there's been several stories which could not be explained by anything else than FSB having access to Telegram

If your device is compromised, all bets are off.

Example: FSB once leaked Navalny's emails. He used gmail. And no one suspects Google of conspiring with FSB.

Telegram is not a Russian controlled app. Durov had to flee from Russia after the Crimea invasion because he refused to mass spy on dissidens. If anything he has a good track of not cooperating with Putin.

He's almost certainly better off getting arrested in France than he would have been getting arrested in Russia.

That's a nice cover story, but Telegram had operated for years from the same Singer House in Saint Petersburg where VK headquarters are situated. Russian Direct Investment Fund had invested in Telegram. Nikolai Durov works at Russian Academy of Sciences.

As of 2024, Russia-the-state has no problems with either Pavel Durov or Telegram. That's suspicious to say the least.

> As of 2024, Russia-the-state has no problems with either Pavel Durov or Telegram

They only tried to ban it in 2018 and gave up in 2020 after failing to do so without cutting off access to other Internet services. The last time they blocked access to it was quite recently, on 21 August, after the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk oblast.

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-...

> from the same Singer House in Saint Petersburg where VK headquarters are situated.

And so? Durov happens to be the founder of VK...

Telegram was using Singer House office long after VK had been sold. He definitely didn't "flee Russia". Durov family and close-to-the-oligarchs-and/or-siloviki parts of the Russian elites had parted ways on good terms.

Wow, hold on there, cold warrior.

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