The "feds" do not have access to Signal, except by CNE attacks against individual phones. Signal's security does not rely on you trusting the Signal organization.
That's going quite far. Even with all the details of it documented and open, there's a relatively small number of people who can actually verify that both the implementation is correct and the design is safe. Even though I can understand how it works, I wouldn't claim I can verify it in any meaningful way.
Alternatively: it's trivial for people sufficiently experienced with cryptography. And that's a tiny pool of people overall.
Or go back to Dual_EC_DRBG.
Unless DJB has blessed it, I'll pass.
Avoiding this is obviously a huge effort.
How much effort would it be for the US government to force Google to ship a different APK from everyone else to a single individual?
VS
"You must backdoor the operating system used on billions of devices. Nobody can know about it but we somehow made it a law that you must obey."
Come on, that's not the same amount of efforts at all.
Anything you can buy retail will for sure fuck you the user over.
Hence the security afforded by Signal is very weak in-practice and questionable at best.
Perfect security isn't possible. See "reflections on trusting trust".
> ANOM was a trap
Yes, ANOM was intended to be a trap.
> and most closed encryption schemes are hideously buggy
Yes they are. Hence some of us use open encryption schemes on our closed-market devices.
> You're actually better off with Android and signal.
I am better off with closed-market devices than I am with any retail device.
> If we had open baseband it would be better
And the ability to audit what is loaded on the handset, and the ability to reflash, etc. In the real-world all we have so far is punting this problem over to another compute board.
> Perfect security isn't possible.
Perhaps, but I was not after "perfect security", I was just after "security" and no retail device will ever give me that, but a closed-market device already has.
> See "reflections on trusting trust".
Already saw it. You're welcome to see:
- https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2020/reproducible-computations-with-guix/
- https://reproducible-builds.org
- https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/discuss an exceedingly clear assassination plot against the President exclusively over signal with yourself between a phone that's traceable back to you, and a burner that isn't. if the secret service pays you a visit, and that's the only way they could have come by it, then you have you answer.
You want to use this, by all means.
Lessons Learned
We believe that all of the vulnerabilities we discovered have been mitigated by Threema's recent patches. This means that, at this time, the security issues we found no longer pose any threat to Threema customers, including OnPrem instances that have been kept up-to-date. On the other hand, some of the vulnerabilities we discovered may have been present in Threema for a long time.