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Comment by conroy | Hacker News Reader

    The important thing to remember is that all Telegram messages
    are always securely encrypted. The difference between messages
    in Secret Chats and ordinary Telegram messages is in the 
    encryption type: client-client in case of Secret Chats, 
    client-server/server-client for ordinary chats.

Where "securely encrypted" means that the Telegram server has full access to message contents for ordinary chats. All chats should be "Secret Chats", not the other way around.

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Came here to say this. I also don't understand why "secret chats" can't be kept in the cloud. Why can't they store encrypted messages and give them to me to decrypt when I want to?

My guess is that it's a security thing. Even if they don't know the security key, I would prefer if they kept no record of the message.

The real issue is that they could just make a lever that would still store "secret chats," unless if they're being delievered p2p.

Begs the question why there's a difference really.

I guess, that the problem is in encryption key exchange. Cloud chats are easy to synchronize between devices. Secret chats require unique encryption key for each chat.

Look into this:

https://whispersystems.org/blog/advanced-ratcheting/

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