Greetings!
A friend of mine wants to be more secure and private in light of recent events in the USA.
They originally told me they were going to use telegram, in which I explained how Telegram is considered compromised, and Signal is far more secure to use.
But they want more detailed explanations then what I provided verbally. Please help me explain things better to them! ✨
I am going to forward this thread to them, so they can see all your responses! And if you can, please cite!
Thank you! ✨
I can’t speak about telegram, but signal is absolutely not secure to use. Its a US-based service (that must adhere to NSLs), and requires phone numbers (meaning your real identity in the US).
Matrix, XMPP, or SimpleX are all decentralized, and don’t require US hosting.
So if I understand it Signal has your phone number but only logs sign up date and last activity date. So yes they can say this person has Signal and last used it on date X. Other than that no information.
Matrix doesn’t require a phone number but has no standard on logging activity so it’s up to the server admin what they log, and they could retain ip address, what users are talking in what, rooms, etc. and E2EE is not required.
I think both have different approaches. I’m just trying to understand. On one hand you have centralized system that has a standard to minimize logs or decentralized system that must be configured to use E2EE and to remove logs.
This entire article is guessing at hypothetical backdoors. Its like saying that AES is backdoored because the US government chose it as the standard defacto symmetrical encryption.
There is no proof that Signal has done anything nefarious at all.
As an outsider, I mean isn’t that the same for news coverage for chinese/russian backdoors, but everyone believes it without any proof.
Why is US company being a US honeypot a big surprise, and its government recommending it not a big red flag? but it is when China recommends wechat? Can’t we be critical and suspicious of both authoritarian countries?
Do you have access to Signal servers to verify your claims by any chance? Afaik their servers are running modified codebase, and third party apps cannot use them. So how do you claim anything that goes behind closed doors at all? Genuinel curious.
That’s not how it works. The signal protocol is designed in a way that the server can’t have access to your message contents if the client encrypts them properly. You’re supposed to assume the server might be compromised at any time. The parts you actually need to verify for safe communication are:
Being critical is good, and we should always hold them accountable for our security. We can look to third party audits for help with that.
https://community.signalusers.org/t/overview-of-third-party-security-audits/13243
This gets shared a lot as a major concern for all services requiring a phone number. It is definitely true that by definition, a phone number is linked to a person’s identity, but in the case of signal, no other information can be derived from it. When the US government requests data for that phone number from Signal, like they occasionally do, the only information Signal provides them with is whether they do have a signal account and when they registered it last and when they last signed in. How is that truly problematic? For all other services which require a phone number, you would have much more information which is where it is truly problematic, say social graph, text messages, media, locations, devices etc. But none of that is accessible by Signal. So literally the only thing signal can say is whether the person has an account, that’s about it. What’s the big deal about it? Clearly the US government already has your phone number because they need it to make the request for Signal, but they gain absolutely no other information.
Your data is routed through Signal servers to establish connections. Signal absolutely can does provide social graphs, message frequency, message times, message size. There’s also nothing stopping them from pushing a snooping build to one user when that user is targeted by the NSA. The specific user would need to check all updates against verified hashes. And if they’re on iOS then that’s not even an option, since the official iOS build hash already doesn’t match the repo.
Do you have anything to back this up?
They have to. They can’t route your messages otherwise.
They have to know who the message needs to go to, granted. But they don’t have to know who the message comes from, hence why the sealed sender technique works. The recipient verifies the message via the keys that are exchanged if they have been communicating with that correspondent before or else it is a new message request.
So I don’t see how they can build social graphs if they don’t know who the sender if all messages are, they can only plot recipients which is not enough.
Anyone who’s worked with centralized databases can tell you that even if they did add something like that, with message timestamps, it’d be trivial to find the real sender of a message. You have no proof that they even use that, because the server is centralized, and closed source. Again, if their response is “just trust us”, then its not secure.
From what I understand, sealed sender is implemented on the client side. And that’s what’s in the github repo.
How does that work? I wasn’t able to find this. Can you find documentation or code that explains how the client can obscure where it came from?