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Comment by mapt | Hacker News Reader

Apparently, Signal is already used heavily by the US military, and Telegram by the Russian & Ukrainian military.

As we create, so we destroy for tactical reasons. Telegram's founder was just arrested for "failure to moderate". PGP was regarded as "munitions export". Tor is apparently wide open to the NSA through traffic analysis.

Even as a small portion of our government wants freedom of communication, most of it is strongly opposed.

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Telegram dude was already allegedly cooperating and moderating for the Russian government. If true he loses any argument that suggests he was defending privacy or free speech.

Are you at all familiar with "Telegram Dude"? A fugitive of the Russian Government, an expat whose Facebook-like social network VKontakte was seized by the Russian Government, before he fled Russia and started an encrypted messaging app in response?

I'm no expert on his current activities, but this isn't a situation without Known Context.

there are news articles (I admit, of questionable origin) the claim he visited Russia yearly for the past decade. I do wonder if it the situation is a little more complex then he was a fugitive of the Russian Government

Further, there have been constant references, in articles from very reliable, reputable sources (see: CNN, NYT, FOX, etc.) since Russia's invasion into Ukraine about Russia's use of Telegram. I don't know that I could count the number of times I've seen phrases akin to, "based on conversations between Russian military commanders on Telegram," used as a source. The issue is that Russia's military essentially sucked at setting up their own communications channels, so they fell back to Telegram.

Even Politico and the WSJ can confirm...

https://www.politico.eu/article/telegram-ceo-arrest-pavel-du...

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-military-telegram-fo...

Thing is, Ukraine also use Telegram a lot.

It is forbidden for military to military communication, but openly used a lot for information from authorities to the public.

A reason why russia use it is because they don't have anything better.

Ukraine on the other hand had fairly advanced systems well before recent Western military aid started arriving.

>encrypted messaging app

An app that's not e2e encrypted by default, doesn't support e2e encrypted group chats, and is annoying to enable e2e encrypted messaging in.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...

Telegram can't moderate the encrypted content. Most of Telegram is not encrypted. A more apt comparison might be Facebook groups.

I've heard (and perpetuated) hearsay about Tor being compromised, but I can't find where I heard that information originally.

Could you point me to any notable incidents or events that has lead to this recurring sentiment?

> Tor is apparently wide open to the NSA through traffic analysis.

Would you be willing to clarify what you mean by that?

To start with, are you saying that Tor is wide open to traffic analysis

(1) by anyone,

(2) by powerful attackers such as the NSA, or

(3) by the NSA specifically?

The allegation is usually that the NSA owns enough of the Tor network to deanonymize people using it.

“owns” not necessarily in a financial sense, more that they have very comprehensive access to ip metadata the world over.

Semantics.

They also run a ton of nodes. So yes they own part of the network financially.

Not just that, nsa can observe enough of the whole intrnet traffic and do deep packet inspection. Afaik tor does explicitly not protect against such an observer in their threat model.

> do deep packet inspection

There is no DPI on Tor networks. Traffic analysis for de-anonymization for Tor works by knowing all the variables in the system and solving it, not by looking at any content of the packets themselves.

The last time something like that was possible at all in Tor it broke it entirely and destroyed the anonymization. The bug involved a vulnerability in the way Tor handled the traffic confirmation attack on Onion Services. This attack allowed malicious relays to embed uniquely identifiable information into Tor cells (the packets used in the Tor network).

No, you just need to observe the timings, and only of the first and last segments of the communication

Western nations will probably have access to them in most cases, at least for traffic originating and ending in one of them

That's not deep packet inspection, just FYI. Timing and traffic correlation attacks never get any access to the packet information and piggy back on existing network weaknesses (correlating IP addresses based on timing metadata)

Yeah, but there's no need of "knowing all the variables in the system" and there's no "last time something like that was possible", it's always been possible.

And you get the "packet information" out of the exit nodes...

DPI usually refers to actually poking around the contents of the packets, which in TOR are (hopefully) minimally informative. With timing attacks you just keep track of the volume.

Why is DPI still being brought up? And what was wrong in my message?

With timing you keep track of the volume and... timing, which (often) allows you to correlate the entering and exiting traffic...

(2), the Tor design is explicitly stated as being vulnerable to a "global passive adversary" (you can search that phrase online for details)

The goal of US gov is not to create, it is to control.

The US government is not one thing. It is diverse agencies, often working together, but sometimes in opposition. It is not guaranteed that all agencies have the same goal of control.

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