Telegram Desktop vulnerability allowed any user's file to be stolen
beaksec.github.io
beaksec.github.io
“Any sufficiently complex input format is indistinguishable from bytecode; the code receiving it is indistinguishable from a vir- tual machine.”
This aspect is also not highlighted much in the article, which weirdly mostly focuses on the account takeover.
To me it seems something remarkable enough to warrant reposting the link with a different title.
Somewhat astonishingly, the core of the vulnerability comes from an internal url scheme added to Telegram to... help them publish their releases on their channel.
The Telegram developers saw no better way to do that than adding an internal tool which uploads any file it's told to.
Everyone else publishing their app on Telegram is able to do that with a script, but they had to do it that way.
It's true that it was exploitable only in a somewhat convoluted way, but still, it's an obviously dangerous feature.
Anyhow, yes, clicking on a link in Telegram Desktop was enough to have any user's file exfiltrated and to access or take over their account.
a) access all your files, and
b) roam the internet at will.
I don't want my computer to always be as closed and restrictive as an iPhone. That's good sometimes and perfect for some users, but not for everyone or all the time.
If the OS vendors are motivated to harvest peoples data, why on Earth would they be motivated to make sure nobody can harvest peoples data?
/sys is powered by sysfs, which is actually a database as file and folders. OpenBSD doesn’t have it (and /proc too), so if you need to interact with kernel objects, you need to use C and the system library. But on Linux, you can do a lot with basic read and write on files.
As far as network control... We have open-source blacklists for various malicious websites. Perhaps we should also have "known-good" site whitelists and have OS-level blocking for that by default. Like, OSes running DNS-sinkholing of StevenBlack malware lists, and the option to enable "known-good" whitelists as well. Having a hosts file of 450,000 entries to sinkhole can bog down an interface coming up reliably... that process needs optimized.
There's a lot of money in the enterprise world doing similar things.
So maybe I misunderstood you and there is no disagreement at all. Of course, I think file permissions and protected memory can make sense.
At the same time it sounds like you may have skipped over OP's "by default" phrasing.
Half the problem is that too many people rely on commercial software that will crap itself if it doesn't have access to what it wants whenever it wants. If, say, Adobe CC stops working after a new macOS release because macOS won't allow it to litter the filesystem any more, the one taking the heat won't be Adobe (which shouldn't have been doing that in the first place) but rather Apple.
Also, some people use an iPad Pro connected to a USB hub connected to a monitor, keyboard, etc, as their daily driver.
Also, doesn't MacOS sandbox most apps?
This app needs access to all your files to function.
No it wasn't.
It's kind of hard to hash out what you're saying here
TIL I'm not a legit good hearted person.
Guess I'll remove myself from the organ donation registry.
I prefer to keep the contents of my message secure from the panopticon.
Telegram is connected to Eastern European and the Middle Eastern countries and not in a good way, and the server-side components are closed source. There is no E2EE by default.
Especially because they have their own crypto coin right there in the app so why not allow payments with that?
It's not end to end encrypted but for big group channels that anyone can join that doesn't really matter.
Here it's all WhatsApp and Telegram. iMessage isn't really a thing at all except for expats. Because most locals use smarties. I don't accept sms or rcs either.
Yes
Some of us aren't paranoid and don't care, and instead just enjoy a messenger that works and doesn't throw bullshit limitations at you.
If you want to vomit your entire digital social life to some random company in Dubai and to every party who hacks their servers, you do you.
Telegram also allows to delete any chat in one click. Telegram has support for HTTP, SOCKS, MTPROTO and WEB proxies to evade censorship, Western messengers do not. Telegram is written in C++. Although it is a piece of proprietary garbage and might be connected to the government, at least it is well made piece.
Also it became difficult to register in Telegram, it often asks for 1 euro when trying to register with a fake number. And with a real number the OTP code simply doesn't get delivered to Russia.
Well, most of those apps try to inject themselves in between you and the rest of the world, by "helpfully" offering to be your SMS handler and phone call replacement.
No thanks.
And no, Signal is not inferior. If you are really concerned about the phone number issue, use a burner eSIM or purchase a Signal account. Last time I checked though, payment was tied to Apple/Google, inexplicably.
The web experience is actually better, as eg there I can do web searches when right clicking sth with my default search engine without slack highjacking the options to force me onto google.
> - We never see or store your admin password. The dialog box you see is a native OS X API (i.e. made by Apple).
Not to mention that Dropbox has never been E2E protected and had that Lenovo credential free access bug on web not too long ago.
Dropbox should be considered untrustworthy at this point, especially since iCloud Drive offers E2E encryption and so do other competitors.
It gets buttoned up fast and is always getting better, but its absolutely not a silver bullet.
Except when you want actual end-to-end encryption, in which case web versions fundamentally cannot guarantee it today (and there are no plans to get there).
People using Telegram don't care so much about end-to-end encryption, so there maybe it makes sense to use the web version indeed.
If you download an install a program on your OS, you can e.g. check the hash of that downloaded archive and compare it to others, ideally making sure that you are running an audited version of the program. You don't have that guarantee when loading code in a browser: the server could totally serve you a modified version of the code, and you don't have a practical way to check that. Not that the laws of physics prevent it; it's just not how a browser works.
Say you have a device that projects the screen on a skyscraper in Manhattan, visible by tens of thousands of people in real time. You can do all the cryptography you want, I would argue that you fundamentally cannot achieve "privacy" on that device, because "thousands of random people seeing it" means it is not private, by definition. Sure, you can run Signal on that device, and it does actually run sound E2EE maths. But it is not an "end-to-end encrypted deployment", it is a public deployment that happens to be running E2EE cryptography.
What I say is that running E2EE in a browser has that kind of nuance (as far as the comparison goes, obviously). In that the browser is indeed running E2EE cryptography, but it is not an "end-to-end encrypted deployment", because the user has to trust the server.
> This is not a coherent segmentation for whether E2EE is possible and engaged.
I would argue that it is. Just like E2EE is not "possible and engaged" on the skyscraped in Manhattan, I argue that it cannot be in a browser. The browser is running sound cryptographic code, but what the user gets is not an end-to-end encrypted experience.
That "trusting the code that runs in your browser when you load the website of a messaging webapp to actually facilitate E2EE" is out of scope for the question "is E2EE in a browser possible".
> I would argue that it is.
This is what I very directly disagree with. In both your Manhattan example, your browser example, or in my very own shoulder surfing example, it's not that E2EE isn't in place, it's that it is rendered useless by the circumstances. That is a distinct matter. The same applies to your heavily audited, reproducibly built, hash and signature checked, native, installed application. Worth jack if your phone itself, or the virtual keyboard you're typing on, etc, is compromised.
If this is how you segment things, E2EE cannot exist, hence why this is an incoherent segmentation; it selects for nothing that can actually exist, the label never truly applies. It's a category mistake.
Agree to disagree, I guess.
But I feel like you are just nitpicking on the wording. When I say "you cannot have E2EE in the browser", I mean "you don't get what you expect if you expect that you don't have to trust the server". And the reason I say it is that many products advertise themselves as "E2EE", and many users believe that what they get from it is that they don't have to trust the server.
So I feel like the message I am trying to convey is "be careful people, you get less security than you think".
Similarly, I feel like the message you are trying to convey is "your wording is subpar". Sure, I'm not good with words, and I'm usually not taken seriously because of that. I am sorry about it. Story of my life, I'm used to it :-). I just wish eloquent people used their skill to help me convey my point (if they agree with me, obviously) rather than to make it sound like my point is worthless.
For example:
- you may wish to protect the trust in / reputation of E2EE, and so you might gonna have an axe to grind with in-browser implementations, and thus you may feel compelled to segment this subject accordingly
- I kind of have an axe to grind with E2EE exactly because of how little it can actually guarantee to begin with, so rather than protecting the trust and reputation of E2EE, I feel drawn to correct the popular record, and spread the word about the very serious limitations of this thing, making me segment accordingly (although I do think that even beyond this, I am right to bikeshed this)
I'm speculating on your part obviously, though not on mine. I think of E2EE as a bare minimum, not something to be particularly proud of and market, and the more I learn about how we secure our devices over the years and decades, the more distraught I feel about these technological measures. It's a lot more smoke than fire.
At the same time, I could also apologize for the bikeshedding, but then I'd hope it's clear that it's not like I did it to annoy you or anything, I just have a different perspective, and find different things salient. What's a perfectly acceptable and even a justified high level categorization to you, is a bending-of-reality category error for me, and vice versa. Happens when people from arbitrarily different walks of lives from arbitrarily different points in their life cross paths. No way around it as far I'm aware, and it's not like I don't see your point either. Like yes, loading up a random website is obviously way more of a gamble than pulling up an app you may very well even manually update biweekly, no doubt about it. It's just a difference in the overarching narrative suggested that I'm hung up on.
Well then I think this is just wrong. If you do E2EE right, then you have the guarantee that no one in the middle (including the server) can read the data. It does have value, and saying "anyway cryptography is worthless because everything can be hacked" is not a productive argument IMO. Some people do rely on it, and it is important that those people understand when they can and when they cannot.
I don't really care so much about nomenclature and categorisation. I care about the fact that people who need it must understand when they can rely on it. And nitpicking on the wording is not making it clearer for them.
I'll keep that trick, it sounds like a nice way to be always right :-).
What you can’t do is make sure the server giving you the code that does the encryption doesn’t change it out with code that also sends your secret messages to Siberia. Unless you control the server giving you the web page. And you trust DNS.
At that point your trust model is simpler with an auditable local application. It could even be an Electron app - so almost exactly doing E2EE in the ‘browser’.
If your thought is just "disable automatic updates", there's no reason you couldn't do the same by declining new versions of a web app. Unless you built it yourself (as a web app or native app), you need to include the servers and DNS in your trust model.
To me, it seems entirely isomorphic. The only material difference I see is whether automatic updates are on by default (an OS/browser vendor issue, not anything inherent to the tech).
Mostly. But the alternative shouldn't be a native app that updates itself, but rather a native app that is updated by a package manager. The big difference is traceability and auditability: With a trusted package manager (and even in good app stores) the company can only decide to push an update to everyone or to no-one. There is no way to push an update just to the pesky journalist or whistle blower. A covert attack is really hard to accomplish this way.
* The cryptography must be sound. That's the obvious one, if it's not encrypted then it's not "end-to-end" encrypted.
* There must be a practical way for the user to "verify" (with some definition of verifying) the client they are running.
A web browser doesn't provide that at all. It does not mean that everything else provides it: there are many ways to provide a Desktop app that break E2EE, but that is a different discussion. My point is that fundamentally, the web browser does not provide that. It's not that the laws of physics prevent it, it's just that the web browser never chose to provide that.
Yes, this exactly. If we wanted ‘verifiable’ app distribution via browser, then we’d need browsers to implement some way to cross check the code downloaded vs a publicly published list somewhere - similar to certificate transparency or what WhatsApp is trying to do with an extension [1]. Without that, web apps are left working with a weaker threat model.
[1] https://engineering.fb.com/2022/03/10/security/code-verify
> or what WhatsApp is trying to do with an extension
I remember looking into it, and while it is interesting, I think what it allows to verify is that the intermediary (Cloudflare, I believe) didn't tamper with the code being served. Which in the end allows the user to verify that the code they run comes... from the server they trust.
And even that is not super practical, I find.
I am not trying to say "browsers should not exist, everything should be a desktop app". I guess I am more defending "some use-cases work better in a browser, others work better as desktop apps". And I have the strong feeling that over the last years (decades?) there has been a very strong push by web people to say "everything should run in the browser".
A browser allows you to run an app on any device (to a degree), so it definetely seems useful to me.
I'm actually not a fan of web apps, JavaScript and anything that came after XHTML, but it sure is/would be convenient to be able to run the same software on every device, without even having to recompile it.
The single reason I dislike browser "apps" is what we've been discussing here, that you can't check what you're running (well, also that it's hard to control their internet access).
Same here, I personally like to load "websites" in my browser, and to download "apps"... like as "desktop apps".
> but it sure is/would be convenient to be able to run the same software on every device
Oh yeah that's for sure. I can't help but to think that with a fraction of the resources that went into supporting webapps in browsers, it could have improved native systems a lot.
But even then, Kotlin MultiPlatform (KMP) is making me optimistic. With Compose MultiPlatform (CMP) I am hoping that it will make its way to desktop apps, too.
> without even having to recompile it.
If recompiling is the price to pay to have diversity, I'm fine with it. If 100% of the computers ran the exact same OS, it would simplify many things, but that one OS would certainly not be what I want to run.
> The single reason I dislike browser "apps" is what we've been discussing here, that you can't check what you're running (well, also that it's hard to control their internet access).
I dislike the fact that they force me to have a modern browser at all. I like having control over my OS, it's not for being forced to run everything in Google Chrome.
Yeah that's true
> But even then, Kotlin MultiPlatform (KMP) is making me optimistic. With Compose MultiPlatform (CMP) I am hoping that it will make its way to desktop apps, too
I personally hate Kotlin, but yeah it's one more option ;)
I wouldn't mind if it was Rust, but the KMP story seems a lot more mature in that regard, IMO. And Compose is my favourite way of doing UI.
App updates can be cryptographically signed with a key that’s kept offline and only held by a few people. Your trust in the app can be equal to your trust in those people, multiplied by your trust in the technology that keeps those offline keys safe from compromise.
Your trust in a web app will be equal to your trust in the people running the server multiplied by your trust that the server isn’t compromised. Since the server is necessarily always online, that trust will be much lower.
It's not, I don't think so. For instance, if you install Signal on your Android, the apk was signed by Signal, sent to Google and distributed by Google. Google cannot modify it, because Signal has to sign it. So in order to make you install a "malevolent" version of Signal, Google has to collude with Signal.
Of course you can download and install the apk from Signal's website, in which case Signal may give you personally a malevolent version. But you can easily compare that file to someone else's. On Android there are verifier apps that allow you to check that.
Finally if E2EE does matter a lot to you, you can compile Signal yourself from the sources, and even go as far as auditing those sources yourself.
You don't get to do any of that on the web. When you load ProtonMail in your browser, you don't have any practical way to verify that the code your browser is running is the same as everybody else who is running it around that time. You have to trust Proton that they give you code that prevents them from reading your emails. It is better than nothing or course, but it still means that you have to trust Proton.
I'd stress that for specifically Signal this seems to indeed still be true, but almost apps on Google Play are now signed by Google (with keys either generated by them or provided to them), and even customized by Google for your specific system.
Google requires it for all apps created after August 2021. *
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> On Android there are verifier apps that allow you to check that.
If you mean Accrescent, it only checks the app's signature, not the hash of the individual versions.
I only know APK redistributors such as apkmirror that might let you check the individual app version, but they don't have API access and only host some apps.
And again, now almost apps on Google Play are signed by Google and customized on the fly for your device, so you typically can't really confront them.
---
* Except that apparently, since a couple months ago Google allows you to use their HSMs?
Even this magnanimous concession though is “strictly for enterprise organizations with mandatory compliance, regulatory, or policy requirements to retain key custody in an external Google Cloud KMS instance” (https://developers.google.com/android-publisher/api-ref/rest...).
There's some chance that they can't access these keys; but the app needs to be compiled on their servers, so yeah, plenty of ways for them to meddle with it, and probably even to issue signing requests.
This seems to have been introduced in July, it's the first time I hear of it
Yes! Google's goddamn "bundles" seem to be enforced to everybody. I guess part of Google "not being evil" and all. Another reason why initiatives like EU's Digital Markets Act are needed, I guess.
And yet another reason to use GrapheneOS, of course.
> If you mean Accrescent, it only checks the app's signature, not the hash of the individual versions.
No, there is an app called "AppVerifier" actually. That's the one I meant.
https://github.com/soupslurpr/AppVerifier , right? It only checks the signature (the certificate)
> And yet another reason to use GrapheneOS, of course.
Which always recommended to use the Play Store, though
But supports alternative stores nicely.
Most of my apps I can get through the Play Store. It's not like I need end-to-end encryption on my banking app.
Inconvenient truth, but it is so to a degree. I am disturbed by the lack of attention to that by many security gurus.
One difference is that with web apps you're practically updating them every single time you launch them.
It is possible to make E2EE that the user can rely on with apps, is my point. It is not in a browser.
Many E2EE apps meet my bar.
> Furthermore, there's nothing stopping anyone from using tools to verify a web build too.
Feels like you haven't really thought that through. It's one thing to say it, it's another to actually try. It's not that the laws of the universe make it theoretically impossible for a browser to allow that. It's just that browsers do not allow anything remotely practical in that sense, because they are just not made for that.
> There's nothing fundamentally better about native apps for this purpose.
What's fundamentally better about apps is that it is actually practical. It is possible right now, and I do it.
> Without those auditing the security of anything distributed by an app store is hopeless.
It's not. People have to realise that security is a gradient. Not everyone's enemy is the NSA. Some examples:
* With apps, you can verify that you are running the same build as random people on the Internet. In the browser you can't.
* With apps, you can verify that you are running a build signed by the same entity as random people on the Internet. In the browser you can't, and WhatsApp even has a browser extension just to allow you to check that Cloudflare didn't tamper with the code served by Meta (because obviously you trust Meta but not Cloudflare :-) ).
* You can compile an app from sources. You cannot do that in the browser.
* You can get an open source app that was compiled by someone you trust. You cannot do that in the browser.
Not on iOS. You can't verify an iOS app at all. You technically could on Android but only by using developer tools and a separate PC.
> With apps, you can verify that you are running a build signed by the same entity as random people on the Internet
On the web every resource is signed with the certificate of the publisher. For all iOS apps and most Android apps you are required to trust the app store in addition to the publisher, which would be analogous to Cloudflare on the web, with the major difference being Cloudflare is optional and app stores are not!
> * You can compile an app from sources. You cannot do that in the browser.
Bullshit. You can absolutely have a reproducible web build that allows auditing that the assets you receive have not been tampered with.
> You can get an open source app that was compiled by someone you trust
Not on iOS, you have to trust Apple didn't modify it. On the web you can verify the certificate of someone you trust and know that what you're downloading is signed by them.
> E2EE is not limited to messaging apps.
So you concede that Signal, and only on Android, is the only messaging app that meets the bar of being auditable. Both web and native are auditable in theory. In reality the "E2EE" native apps people actually use are not any more auditable than browser apps.
Of course it's not black or white, security is a gradient. But if you want to check today that you are running the legit client of ProtonMail in your browser, you do not have a practical way to do it. It is theoretically feasible, I guess (?), but far from practical. But I can walk you through the steps needed to do it today with Signal, for instance.
I think I put my limit there: it's not enough to run cryptography. Verifying the client has to be practical for the user. The way ProtonMail works in the browser is a nice way for Proton to minimise the data they collect, but it's not E2EE, because even as an advanced user I cannot practically verify the client they serve me. In other words, E2EE means (to me) that there can be some kind of guarantee if you put a reasonable amount of effort into verifying it. The browser doesn't provide that at all.
Interestingly, shipping a webapp in ElectronJS (which is terrible in terms of software, IMO) is different: you can have E2EE in an ElectronJS app.
And I'm assuming that's why Signal has a Desktop app (which I believe is ElectronJS) and not a web (as in, "loads in the browser") version.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it is on purpose, and not a good purpose. The trust model of the web is fundamentally broken.
IMHO, the web should be to load websites (obviously) and small webapps that don't require E2EE or any kind of auditing. As soon as those are desirable, it shouldn't be a webapp anymore.
I find it nice to be able to load websites in my browser, instead of installing one program per website.
But sometimes I want a program.
one long time Firefox contributor have been for a couple years now removing every part of the --noremote option. even botching (Ooops!) the console notice that the flag was no-op some time ago.
What's this now? I'm using that to handle multiple profiles and haven't noticed anything breaking
try it, start with --noremote. you will get the vulnerable rpc/dbus listener. start another "firefox --noremote https://example.com" and it will open on the previous process. ha!
yeah, and you never got a warning about that option going way uh? that's why I'm 80% sure it was malicious. too many convenient mistakes.
Telegram wanting to be single instance means that it has to use some serialization, and it not escaping semicolons enables a part of the attack.
And if you open a Telegram link it will open in the existing instance.
Windows uri handlers actually always create a new process, though; so if you want this single instance behavior, you have to do some check at the start of the process and communicate the uri to the previously running process (as explained in the article).
so why answer?
this is the pattern that was abuses in the telegram hack. and this is what security conscious people implemented --notemote in firefox to close this vector. which is gone.
If you only want to make a software single-instance, you typically simply use a named mutex on Windows.
In general it only requires *a way* of communicating *some* information, not to "fully control" the other process or to have a port open.
What was abused in the Telegram hack is a hidden feature that shouldn't have existed, and it was even only vulnerable because of a lack of escaping.
Not sure how that partitions the files on disk though, would probably need some code changes to work with some kind of firejail setup.
This is seamless on Qubes OS: You just click a link and a new empty VM with Firefox opens. You close the browser, and the VM is destroyed. Can't recommend it enough.
[0] https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/qsb-116-multiple-xen-issues-xsa...
You could also use a VM on FreeBSD too, but I would argue that it's very inefficient to boot up a VM for each application instance. A container/jail is virtually the same as a VM, except a VM uses your host's kernel. And kernels are probably the least of worries in terms of security for apps.
> but I would argue that it's very inefficient to boot up a VM for each application instance
https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/introduction/faq.html#doe...
> A container/jail is virtually the same as a VM
No, it's not, https://hn.algolia.com/?q=container+escape
Also Qubes doesn't just use VMs but enforces virtualization with hardware (VT-d).
I used to use Cookie Auto Delete for years. But when I last checked it seemed unmaintained. I log out of all somewhat important services anyway every time I am done.
For important stuff like banking I use Firefox containers.
Yeah, all of them could have their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. I just hope no attacker hits exactly the stack I use...
By the way, they don't have just one web apps. They have A, they have K, and apparently a Z – subdomain is webz, or maybe that's actaully A. Not sure.
Seems like many people do this when it comes to russian tech. Im American and I certainly trust my data in the hands of a foriegn government/entity (which is not even the case for telegram), than my own. Even if it was a russian op (its not the Ukrainian military literally used telegram for years), the russian government cant touch me.
Lots of people follow channels for on the ground news reporting, especially since it's not censored or "advertiser friendly" like social media companies are incentivised to be.
My Bible study class has grown enough that standard SMS/MMS group texts are hitting up against Verizon's carrier limit (I think we have only two people who use Verizon), and RCS isn't an option. Telegram wasn't my first choice, but it was a lot easier for everyone, and it supports tablets out-of-the-box.
1. You must join a group to see its contents. This puts a stupid "{user} joined the room" message in the room for everyone to see. Channel membership is anonymous.
2. Channels generate a public feed that doesn't require any special software to read from (see Durov: https://t.me/s/durov). Matrix requires a client of some kind, all clients are clunky at best and none have a public view.
3. Channels support millions of readers. Matrix rooms literally cannot do this, and rooms frequently get out of sync due to federation.
It also has way more security features too, such as the ability for any session to de-auth any other session, while on Signal, only one mobile device is your "primary", so you're screwed if you lose that. Also tons of detailed permissions for who is allowed to see what information of yours and add you to groups. The only thing Signal actually does better is E2EE for groups. I think it's simplistic and short-sighted that many tech people seem to think that "security" means E2EE and absolutely nothing else.
Except when you enable E2EE, you lose a lot of the features like stickers.
Also, enabling E2EE manually leaks additional metadata about intent to hide content from the service provider. That's insanely valuable even if you can't see the content.
Telegram treats E2EE like a door wreath hung from a nail. Practically all private messengers like Signal treat it like the foundations of the building.
>much better behavior for large groups
Telegram leaks a group as large as the size of 3 members, to the server, always, with ZERO way to opt-out. That's not better behavior. Whatever seasoning you apply on top of a turd, won't change what you're eating.
>far more sophisticated and granular permissions system for admins in groups
Yeah when you remove the "server has no ability to control the group" security feature you can do all sorts of things really easily.
>It also has way more security features too, such as the ability for any session to de-auth any other session
Way more in this case is clearly one. And this is a trade-off. Any of your devices gets stolen and the attacker can lock you out.
>so you're screwed if you lose that.
No you can keep backups in the cloud these days to recover your account. Unlike Telegram, the backups are actually encrypted so that the service provider can't read them.
>Also tons of detailed permissions for who is allowed to see what information of yours and add you to groups.
You mean, it allows you to control to whom the service provider yields the data. But the main privacy issue with Facebook, Telegram and any other surveillance capitalistic platform is the service provider. And Telegram isn't fixing Telegram learning everything about you.
>The only thing Signal actually does better is E2EE for groups.
Signal does EVERY thing better because every feature is private by design. Even if there's UX stuff to fix. You wouldn't claim some Trojan horse malware is really good because the game crack works and you can play a 30 dollar game while it steals your entire digital life or demands random or whatever.
>I think it's simplistic and short-sighted that many tech people seem to think that "security" means E2EE and absolutely nothing else.
In private messaging apps security begins with E2EE. Then you add tons of other features, like forward secrecy (Signal does it better than Telegram), future secrecy (Signal does it better than Telegram), Post-quantum security (Signal has it and Telegram doesn't), cross-platform messages usage (Telegram has no cross-platform E2EE), default security (Telegram has none), and that's just content. There's much more private tools for metadata protection, and on top of that you have advanced issues like endpoint security to deal with. E2EE is the bare minimum for e.g. PrivacyGuides app recommendations, and Telegram can't even cross that bar.
> Telegram has no cross-platform E2EE
If you mean between an Android and an Apple device, that is supported, to my knowledge.
Telegram's E2EE is acceptable only for limited use cases, though, it's crippled beyond belief.
When you can't continue the secret chat on your desktop device, you'll eventually get tired of having to dig your phone from your phone, unlock it, open telegram, navigate to chat, reply, lock phone, put it back to pocket continue work; the alternative of ditching security and just alt-tabbing to insecure chat on desktop client wins.
This is what a modern backdoor would look like. Vendor can't be blamed about introducing a backdoor, when using the backdoor feature is your own fault.
And this is just DMs where E2EE is possible in the first place.
The only purpose of the private chats feature at this point is to be able to claim that Telegram can do E2EE
>In private messaging apps security begins with E2EE.
This may be clearer from a product point of view. Your apparent viewpoint, and that of Signal etc, seems to be that protection from the server (and admittedly whoever can coerce whoever owns the server) is the only thing that matters, no matter what other features you have to throw out to get it.
What I am calling out is that this is a fundamentally ideological point of view. You can believe that and act according to it if you want, but general readers should be aware of what they are losing in order to enact this ideology with benefits that seem to be a bit dubious in the real world.
It is well known that Meta is happy to hand over to any legitimate law enforcement agency any content they have. To the best of my knowledge, Telegram never has, and neither has Signal. The fact that Telegram potentially could someday seems more theoretical to me. Again, to the best of my knowledge, all actual leaks of messaging group content have been by various authorities compromising individual devices and/or their owners, which works equally well against Telegram and Signal.
Meanwhile, Telegram gives you a lot more practical security regarding what information to share with other users, and how to manage what other users can do in large chat groups, which seems like a much more real-world concern regarding actual dangers to users than what the company that owns it might potentially do at some future date.
I think for real security, it's better to pay attention to the business model of the company that runs it. Meta's business model is indeed to basically sell your data to advertisers. Telegram does not do this, and shows no signs of wanting to. Instead, you can pay for premium, and they allow advertising as messages in public channels, and they're doing some semi-dubious stuff with cryptocurrency. Signal seems a little weird, they are apparently funded by some sort of donations from unknown parties. It seems to work okay for now, I guess, but is their financial future any more secure?
>>so you're screwed if you lose that.
>No you can keep backups in the cloud these days to recover your account. Unlike Telegram, the backups are actually encrypted so that the service provider can't read them.
I wasn't talking about that, but about the ability to de-auth your mobile device (the one probably most likely to someday get lost) from another device, since no one device is the "primary". Yes, an attacker could potentially lock you out if they get into your Telegram on the compromised device before you get on one of your other devices. But on Signal, you're screwed if it's your mobile, and fine if it's any other device.
Though since you mentioned backups, I think Telegram's way is arguably more secure. Individual user backups, even encrypted, means all your communication security is at the mercy of whoever in your group has the weakest encryption keys and backup storage location. With a centralized system like Telegram, it's never anywhere but their servers.
That's just it, it's not a false dichotomy. Proper privacy engineering can achieve tons of private actually good features. And it's also fine for Telegram to not provide it, but then you can't really market yourself as more private than WhatsApp, "heavily encrypted" etc. There's loads of people who do not know how poor Telegram's security is. Informed consent is what matters much more than dialing every security feature to 11.
>What I am calling out is that this is a fundamentally ideological point of view.
Privacy is a human right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy Just because some people sell it for pennies and convenience doesn't erode that fact.
> but general readers should be aware of what they are losing in order to enact this ideology with benefits that seem to be a bit dubious in the real world.
Sounds like you're trying real hard to get people to give up their human right. Why? Do you gain something personally from people using Telegram? Why would you defend such a shit product marketed with lies?
>It is well known that Meta is happy to hand over to any legitimate law enforcement agency any content they have.
Oh so privacy does matter to you when it's Mark Zuckerberg having access to your data but not when its Mark Zuckerberg of Russia having access to your data. The fact is, Telegram looks like an FSB op, or the very least, it doesn't give hard time for nation states to access messages of billion users. Hack the server and you're done.
>To the best of my knowledge, Telegram never has, and neither has Signal.
It shows a bit poor taste to equate these two. Signal doesn't have your data because it end-to-end encrypts all messages. Telegram does the opposite.
>The fact that Telegram potentially could someday seems more theoretical to me.
Their product is now 13 years old. If they cared about user privacy they'd have already hired competent cryptographers to design a protocol that provides the security and the features.
>Again, to the best of my knowledge, all actual leaks of messaging group content have been by various authorities compromising individual devices and/or their owners, which works equally well against Telegram and Signal.
Yeah except Telegram that clearly lacks proper security team wouldn't tell if their servers were compromised. There's nothing they could do to retain user trust at that point. They don't have to care about NSA or FSB or whatever hacking their servers because those agencies aren't boasting. And yeah user endpoint exploitation is obviously out of scope for secure messaging apps as networked TCBs can't be made hardened by some app vendor. I might know something about this topic as I'm the only person who has created messaging system that gets around that issue.
>Meanwhile, Telegram gives you a lot more practical security regarding what information to share with other users, and how to manage what other users can do in large chat groups, which seems like a much more real-world concern regarding actual dangers to users than what the company that owns it might potentially do at some future date.
Telegram IS the threat, not my friends in my closed group where I never need group management. Open groups that require granular permission controls do not require end-to-end encryption. The difference is, Telegram doesn't give you choice for small private groups with friends.
>I think for real security, it's better to pay attention to the business model of the company that runs it
It's SO CUTE that you're trying to control the narrative :D No Telegram has nothing to do with real security.
If Telegram is an FSB op, there is no business model. And if not, nothing prevents selling Telegram and its users and decades worth of data once it becomes unusable. Telegram is surveillance capitalistic, but the sale hasn't happened yet. You don't slaughter the piglet until it's grown. How many times do people need to repeat the same mistake of getting f'd by companies that betray them when it's time. You'd probably actually want to look into Signal's direction as it's a 501c3 non-profit, meaning it can't be sold.
>But on Signal, you're screwed if it's your mobile, and fine if it's any other device.
No you can just install Signal on new phone if old is stolen https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007062452-Wh... Then you just re-link your other devices to the new phone. It's the phone access controls' job to protect from accessing the messages.
>Though since you mentioned backups, I think Telegram's way is arguably more secure. Individual user backups, even encrypted, means all your communication security is at the mercy of whoever in your group has the weakest encryption keys and backup storage location. With a centralized system like Telegram, it's never anywhere but their servers.
Signal's backup storage location is at Signal's servers. The app generates a 256-bit encryption key for you. If you choose to use manual backups and upload them to some random ass company, then that's poor judgement on behalf of that person. The only thing worse, would be if Telegram would make that decision for EVERY group member, every time, with no chance to opt out :)
Your mental gymnastics are so insane if you aren't getting paid to shill Telegram, you definitely need to apply https://telegram.org/jobs
> I might know something about this topic as I'm the only person who has created messaging system that gets around that issue.
And there it is. The only person in this thread "shilling" and "trying to control the narrative" for their own personal benefit is you. I'll refrain from being condescending about it the way you have though.
You're also going into straight conspiracy theory territory here. Telegram is allegedly a FSB op, or maybe NSA or whoever, even though the current Russian government doesn't seem to like Telegram or Durov, their CEO, much. Definitely don't worry at all about Signal's leadership and funding though!
No we just have different idea of what quality means.
>The only person in this thread "shilling" and "trying to control the narrative" for their own personal benefit is you.
Yes a person advocating for other people to have human right to privacy is benefitting from a better society! How selfish of me! It's really cute that you're gaslighting the hell out of your audience.
>You're also going into straight conspiracy theory territory here.
No, I'm stating that I have no proof of it, but that it's Durov's job to disprove that claim with the ubiquitous E2EE. What would you call someone who writes a non-private messenger and markets it as private?
>Telegram is allegedly a FSB op, or maybe NSA or whoever, even though the current Russian government doesn't seem to like Telegram or Durov, their CEO, much.
Yes because everyone would trust Telegram if it was the official recommendation of Russian government and FSB. You not understanding first level of misdirection is the absurd part here.
>Definitely don't worry at all about Signal's leadership and funding though!
For someone who doesn't care at all you sure have every single shill argument nailed. I've had these debates since roughly 2015 and you're no different from every other Telegram shill :)
Anyhow, people don't write off Telegram because it's Russian, but for many legitimate reasons.
There are indications that it could be much closer to the Russian government than they pretend, but that matters not because Russians are bad people, but because the current government of Russia is an aggressive dictatorship.
The Ukrainian military literally used Telegram for years and now literally banned it.
Maybe in part for this Ukrainian article: https://texty.org.ua/articles/112347/eight-signsof-danger-te...
Even assuming they are fully legitimate today, if this ever changes and somebody gets access to their infrastructure, they immediately get a treasure trove of historical messages.
> There are indications that it could be much closer to the Russian government than they pretend
Can you give more details, please? I'm using telegram a lot and want to know if there is something...
https://kyivindependent.com/kremlingram-investigation-durov/
despite endless claims he's in exile
So I'm just gonna assume you work for Internet Research Agency and tell you to maybe bugger off.
That's fine. I write it off because it by default leaks all of your content and metadata to the server, and then I ask why, and who is learning all that information and I do not like the answer.
>Seems like many people do this when it comes to russian tech
Yeah as a Finn it's not very hard to distrust Russia.
> Even if it was a russian op (its not the Ukrainian military literally used telegram for years)
You didn't prove anything with this, if anything, the fact that Ukraine banned using Telegram on the state officials devices, speaks the exact opposite: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78dwepw95do
>the russian government cant touch me
If it's a Russian op, they're collecting your entire life, your political opinions, your relationship issues, everything, in search of kompromat that they'd use to coerce you during recruiting.
Not all user processes upload those files somewhere surreptitiously.
Of course operating systems should support that isolation (hopefully in some better way than the hell that smartphones are), but it's not like Telegram can blame the OS for this vulnerability.
Only if you have access to full source code, can audit it (including each update) and somehow can prove that it has no vulnerabilities. Otherwise one should assume that any application is potentially-harmful and/or vulnerable.
Uhm, OpenBSD would like a word, buddy.
[1]: https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap#usage
[2]: https://man.archlinux.org/man/bwrap.1
[3]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap#Usage_examples
[4]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap/Examples#p7zip
No, it's definitely a Telegram specific vulnerability. It might be worse because of poor defense in depth, but without Telegram itself being vulnerable it wouldn't matter.
So how will you spam all the group chats you're on with meme gifs downloaded from facebook then? :)
The file-manger application managed above is a single point of failure, of course. So, it should be allowed to use only one provided by OS vendor.
There is a lot of middle ground, like having a shared folder for access. "Downloads" might be a good default, if clearly communicated, that anything in there, is accessible by any app.
Does Telegram do that, or do they consider themselves beyond bugs, just like they consider themselves too clever and untouchable by anyone to need end-to-end encryption?
not true on macos.
You wouldn't ignore a zero-day announcement either because the formatting is ugly.
I did skim over the important bits though.
Reported 25 June
Fixed 16 September
I wonder why it took them so long?
Like any number of articles like this: https://hackernoon.com/7-reason-why-telegram-is-insecure-by-...
A file exfiltration vulnerability is still noteworthy.
The Most Backdoor-Looking Bug I’ve Ever Seen - https://words.filippo.io/telegram-ecdh/
And yes, I know that by default chats are not E2E, that phone number has way too many effects on accounts etc. Still, UX and agencies interested in important people are more welcome than data selling, ad-based companies.
Yeah same can be said for Facebook and WhatsApp that Durov vehemently claims should not be trusted with user's data. Maybe it's a ploy for the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia to get the data of people.
Also, Telegram doesn't have to sell it's users if it's an FSB honeypot.
And what UX problems exactly is Telegram solving that its many competitors aren’t? I hear this all the time, but I use both Telegram and WhatsApp and I haven’t found anything lacking in the latter, UX wise.
I'm sorry if I'll sound condescending, but you probably don't use either frequently enough. With telegram it's the little (and sometimes not so little) things, e.g.:
- voice message transcription
- you can select part of the message via long-press and use it as a quote when responding
- massively more complex formatting possible
- bots as the first class citizens not gated behind some bullshit 'Business' KYC/subscription
- is not crippled by prohibiting system-level phonebook access like whatsapp
- extreme flexibility in managing large groups, mostly due to the bot point above
- and many more
Bot access is definitely better in Telegram; that’s what I sometimes use it for.
WhatsApp has voice message transcription now, but fortunately I don’t receive many. (I consider it pretty rude to put the effort of messaging on the recipient because the sender can’t be bothered to type or transcribe on their side.)
Everything else you mentioned is a minor inconvenience to me. Knowing the provider can’t mine my message data more than makes up for that.
It mainly competes against facebook and other social media plattforms. The privacy is clearly wrong and only believed by non technical people (which can be amusing, when on TG someone posts a link to FB, or a WhatsApp group and people chime in and lecturing others that they should not use that as it is insecure and owned by a big company who will sell them out).
(I'm a contributor to the repository)
As a Telegram user, my current impression of the platform is that they are a tiny elite team, they focus very heavily on creating a polished product, and are somewhat arrogant about all of that.
The most common criticism that I see and understand is the lack of E2EE by default. But I'm not aware of a messenger that provides a good UX for that. For most people, losing access to the account is a much greater risk. (The trade-off has changed somewhat now that everyone is getting hacked by AI and thus Telegram's whole dataset leaking becomes a concern.)
The criticism that I agree the most with is phone numbers being used for authentication. Even if Telegram still wants to know everyone's phone numbers for growth reasons, as far as I'm aware for authn phone numbers are strictly worse than emails.
On the positive side, they still have a proper API, open source their clients and allow third-party clients. All of which seem non-optional for any messenger that claims to prioritize security.
> open source
I'd just stress that at least for the Android client it's open source with some degree of quoting: the real git history is not shared (each release typically consists of a single huge commit), and the source is often published weeks after a release of the official client.
The server is also not open source, but that's not very relevant for security.
One thing I don't know is whether these delayed source releases are enough to validate releases published to app stores. If they are, this means Telegram is building up reputation and would have to burn it to publish a release with a backdoor not present in the source.
The other thing this allows is for a third party to maintain a fork without having too much trouble keeping up with new features.
WhatsApp is the largest messaging app in the world (3B MAU) and does E2EE by default across private chats and groups.
[1] https://github.com/marcovelon/tdesktop/blob/NoSecretChats/RE...
So in the hindsight it was a right thing for me to put it into a sandbox without any SSH keys and tokens. Also, I didn't bother registering tg:// scheme in the OS which also turned out to be good - clicking such a link in the browser does nothing for me, and as a side effect, websites cannot detect presence of Telegram or send command to it though registered scheme handler.
Also, I was surprised that Telegram uses passcode (an on-device password that is required to access the app) to encrypt user data. I thought they just keep the hash of a passcode and check it.
Also I assume Telegram can block this attack on the server, as groups are not E2EE and the server can find and delete files needed for successful exploitation. And links too. If someone has a spare account they can check if posting such type of files or links works.
Last I checked, that's exactly how Telegram works by default. It's laughable to consider a service tied to a phone number secure.
That still means you have to check it every 7 days.
Afterwards I just deleted the account outright myself. anything that desktop-hostile isn't worth my time.
The obvious question is "why not just have a backup logged in phone session to solve this" and the obvious answer is because I don't fucking want it on a phone. And I'm not paying ~50 a year for a burner phone just for telegram.
Wow what a brazen scam opportunity. Message rando phone numbers and/or email addresses of strangers, politely explaining your complex technical dilemma that necessitates the recipient start forwarding MFA codes to you (especially the ones that say "never share this with anyone")
You could easily parlay this into financial fraud and SIM-hijacking, among other mischief.
It's so crazy, it should definitely work!
technically, this is one agency burning the feature of another agency.
yeah fsb et al have access to what you post, but they also had access to any file you Don't post. Which was the feature they closed now.
With Telegram it is very easy: NOTHING is end-to-end encrypted by defaults, and group / desktop chats can't be end-to-end encrypted. So operating a honeypot server that gets access to billion users' data, is the most obvious honeypot out there.
Open source is not panacea, but it's a requirement for verifiable security.
So how about you show us that either the play store APK doesn't match, or, that the source has the backdoor you claim it has.
Signal having an "obvious" backdoor is really a thing for the tinfoilers, crackpots, and the misinformed.
Wait till they find out about web browsers. /s
(Yes, I know they're technically Dubai based now)