Anything else is uninformed navel-gazing about the risk without understanding the subject.
I've explained in another comment but, it effectively hides who's actually communicating with who.
You still have connect to them and deliver this to the signal servers. They'll have your IP and will know approximately where you are physically.
There is no way to make this kind of thing secure without some kind of remailer system and without many peer-to-peer connections.
Almost all proper anonymous remailers have been shut down. What remains, Tor for example, are insecure parodies of an anonymous remailer, and this is justified to the users as being for the sake of speed, but makes the system useless for anonymity. Even Mixminion is insecure if you can observe the full network, since you can count the packets received by the clients and there aren't dummy packets.
I did, in fact, check it when writing TFA.
> You still have connect to them and deliver this to the signal servers. They'll have your IP and will know approximately where you are physically.
Okay, let's actually think this through.
You have millions of people using Signal. When you send a message, the message is encrypted such that only the recipient can decrypt the envelope to verify if you're even permitted to send to them. The only thing the server gets is an encrypted envelope and some 96-bit random string that tells the server where to send the envelope.
This 96-bit random string is derived from your profile key (which is also encrypted and, at minimum, rotates every time you block someone).
Let's assume Signal's server has been maximally pwned by the NSA to slurp as much data and metadata as possible in the most malicious manner logically possible. In this thought experiment, they will now log things that the server currently does not because of a government-mandated implant.
In this scenario, the NSA will learn: someone from an IP address send an encrypted envelope to an unknown recipient.
Later, they will learn that another user (and their IP address) accessed the same envelope when downloading it from the Signal server.
You might be sitting there, rubbing your hands, thinking, "Wow, we sure got them." Except that there are millions of Signal users, many whom share IP addresses over time, and you can't even be reliably sure if a given Delivery Token maps to a targeted recipient.
Furthermore, you can't reliably distinguish between 1:1 messages and group messages, due to how groups are implemented (see: zkgroup).
> There is no way to make this kind of thing secure without some kind of remailer system and without many peer-to-peer connections.
When you say "make this kind of thing secure", are you talking about hiding IP addresses and phone numbers from Signal's servers? Or are you suggesting what Signal is already doing is not possible in the first place?
Cryptography isn't magic. It is comprehensible to mortals.
We used a law in the EU requiring ISPs to keep track of this. It was determined to be illegal, so many ISPs probably don't store this information anymore, but I am sure that many do, and there can be other people-- maybe someone from another country that comes to your country gets jobs at ISPs to modify their software and make it do things he wants.
I don't know about this Salt Typhoon, but as I interpret it, there was an excellent secure system, and then people built some kind of front end on top of it so they could enter their orders into it, and then somebody compromised that front end and basically started getting all the data that the government could order to be gathered. I'm thinking that's going to include who has what IP.
I agree though, the complexity is maybe okay. It doesn't sound like a super terrible protocol or that involved. I suppose the description I saw of it felt more convoluted. At the same, I felt that the complexity of the presentation was hiding something, which I think might well be true-- it might even have been this simple fact that the central server still has every opportunity to determine who sends things to whom.
Public WiFi.
> I don't know about this Salt Typhoon, but as I interpret it, there was an excellent secure system
Hahahaha no. There was never an excellent secure system. Look at the past decade or so of SS7 attacks.
This taken together means there's no security with regard to contacts if the server or the network is compromised.
There are excellent solutions to this: dummy messages and remailing. Without those no system can ensure that contact information is kept secret.
> so they've basically got everbody's real names.
Based on the above as well as on the fact that having phone number does not by itself == real name PII / identity - claiming "so they've basically got everbody's real names" is not just overly dramatic but also patently false and disingenuous. :( I'm sure you did not mean to dissuade people, but c'mon. Generalising in such a way and then adding hyperbole does not help, imho.
Such an adversary can ask the phone company whose phone number a certain phone number is, and they will tell him.
No, not necessarily. In fact I'd claim that we should all use Signal so that usage of Signal would not imply any kind of user profile (would not rconstitute any kind of meaningful signal where one could infer what kind of user they are).
I do believe that there's a spectrum of users with a corresponding spectrum of appropriate threat models.
If my own threat model (that I felt I had to adopt) was particularly gnarly, I would (1) use Signal sandboxed / in a VM, tunnelling all traffic through Tor (e.g. Tor listens on socket exposed to VM so that there's no easy way to work around tunnel), and/or (2) if particularly gnarly - would set up pre-shared one time pads with counterparties where possible, and use them to authenticate further, perhaps encrypt further (maybe just encrypting a session key, to save most of OTP) - essentially definitely not deem Signal enough by itself.
Signal correctly focuses on privacy, not on anonymity. The wider your set of claims as to what kinds of properties (from the set of: privacy, anonymity, censorship-circumvention, etc.) you provide, the higher the probability you're going to screw up with one of these, I'd say. Better to combine several tools where possible if your needs require it.