I don’t know if I’m opening a can of worms here, and I’m still trying to backtrack a lot of history where I was tuning everything out. I keep seeing random swipes at Signal (or the representatives (?)), and I was wondering whether they are founded or just lies.Is it another situation like Lemmy where we just “take the technology and move on”? Thanks!
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This is a good comparison of messengers here:
https://eylenburg.github.io/im_comparison.htm
Btw, an imprtant aspect of privacy is how metadata are handled/leaked. Signal trues to minimize metadata leak to near zero (there are some other messengers that do that, like simplex)
Signal is an open-source privacy-focused end-to-end encrypted texting platform (so competing with SMS, WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, and similar). It’s developed by a donation-funded non-profit organization.
Signal is quite good compared to the competition, but it faces a lot of scrutiny because they make big promises about privacy and security so the people who care will really get into the details on that. Also IIRC there was a period when one of their competitors was trying to slander them more or less.
In general there’s nothing wrong with Signal and it’s quite a good option. If you really care about the privacy details you can always host your own instance (but that would require you to convince your friends to use your instance … it’s not federated).
The deal is that they run their program in a very transparent and wherever possible verifiable way.
More details here: https://lemmy.world/comment/14775870Hey signal is better than most of the mainstream bs. I use it myself and I’m confident that the messages themselves are secure. However, it had issues.
Since we cannot verify the software they run on the server is the software that is open source then we must assume it is not.
We know for a majority of cases a phone number = a real identity. Signal implements sealed sender but since signal is a centralised point they can correlate the sealed sender extraordinarily easily. We must therefore assume signal knows when and who is communicating (We can verify they don’t know what is being said) this therefore means signal could theoretically have a full social graph of real identities for every singe user.
This is of course after we remember signal received funding from BBG which is an organisation funded by the us government purely for the purpose of promoting american propaganda.
Also I believe they used to have federation but all evidence of this seems to have been wiped from the internet.
Signal can either adapt and prove themselves with more than a “trust me bro” or they can die. Just cos they are better than the alternatives does not mean we should not demand better.
great explanation!
we must assume it is not.
100% - Security is about capabilities, not intentions!
Don’t assume - verify!
Also I believe they used to have federation but all evidence of this seems to have been wiped from the internet.
They never had.
The talk about federation originated when the EU demanded interoperability from gatekeeper software i.e. Whatsapp. Signal said on day one they wouldn’t do from their end because it would mean lowering security.
There was LibreSignal once but it got shut down by Signal. It’s quite old. This was like 10 years ago.
I mean long before that with one of the 3rd party apps they used to federate their own server with signal iirc.
Well, that must be waaaaaaay back then. I’ve been using Signal for quite a while now, and I am not sure what you mean then.
Dr GPT found something on it. It was a federation between Silent Phone 2014-2015 (a secure messaging app developed by Silent Circle, a company co-founded by Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP) and TextSecure (the precursor to signal).
That really is ancient in terms of the internet! Thanks for checking.
If they encrypt meta data like they say they do (https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/), it should be very hard to use meta data the way you explained.
Whether they do can be looked up here (https://github.com/signalapp) by those who know what to look for.
As Signal uses reproducible builds (https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/), itcan be verified that the builds are made from the public source code.
They make offering a secure and trustable app a lot better (by being verifyable) than other messengers.The point is we cannot trust they run the software they claim to run. Identifying a sender despite sealed sender is trivial if u have a centralised server.
Say I am the signal server and all the clients run the known/provable secure clients that are used. I as the signal server an subject to wiretap and gag orders so I can be obligated to run software that is not the published server software and into tell anyone. As a server I by definition have everyone’s IP address. A message with signal protocol has a sealed sender and a known identity recipient. As the signal server I can see when u send a message and from what IP and to which identity and what ip that identity is. I can then simply associate IPs and identities.
I trust the app I cannot trust the server. A reproducible build does not prove anything about the server it only proves the client.
Sure. If you want full control, you need to run your own server.
Matrix crosses my mind.
But using that is a different animal than installing an app from a store.
As far as security when communicating conveniently on mobile phone goes, Signal does a pretty good job. But you’re right that it’s important to realize what’s possible and what’s not possible.I use signal for communicating with normies who just wanna download an app. Just cos signal is better than most doesn’t mean we shouldn’t demand better. Why can’t we have both? With self hosted federated signal servers and no phone number requirement we can have our cake and eat it.
If we have a federated messager that some people self host, would that actually be more secure? i dont know much about how federation works, but i imagine that an intelligence agency could make an instance that would federate to the others, listen to the metadata of the exchanges in the network and rebuild a social graph like a centralized server could. Is this a non-issue?
Different people don’t like it for different reasons. Some people don’t like it because they think it has CIA financial backing (nope), and some people don’t like it because it requires your phone number, therefore it is not private (the privacy it provides is more than sufficient for anyone not actively being persecuted by a Five Eyes state), and some people don’t like it because it feels corporate (it’s a 501c3 nonprofit, and how corporate it feels is subjective).
And some people don’t like it because it used to handle SMS on Android, and they removed that feature for security reasons.
This was such a dumb decision
That was a pretty wild decision
Handling SMS and handling secure/encrypted messages could’ve made people think they communicate securely while relying on text messages instead.
Not handling SMS fixes this source of confusion and I applaud their decision.There were ways to make it clear that it was insecure that didn’t alienate an arguable majority of their casual userbase.
If only the was some indicator for unsecure messages, such as a grey send button and an open padlock. 🙄
I think the number of people who care deeply about privacy and cannot tell the difference between an sms or signal message is minimal. There were plenty of ways signal could have highlighted DANGER UNSECURE CHANNEL if they had wanted to, or made it an off-by-default option, rather than drop SMS entirely. For myself and many other people it meant that family members dropped Signal rather than have an extra messaging app, and so I’m still stuck with WhatsApp on my phone…
The problem is that most people don’t want multiple text apps, they just want one. I had gotten a number of people using signal, and it was secure when we talked, but when signal dropped SMS, almost every one of them stopped using it, so then none of their conversations were secure.
Yeah, the never-ending weighting between convenience and security.
But are you going to tell me that those people don’t have Whatsapp, Threema, Telegram or any other IM installed and just use plain SMS instead?Yep, just the default messaging app on their phone.
I think having an unlocked symbol for standard SMS would’ve helped that…
And you seriously think most people would look at and act on such an icon instead of just ignoring it?
Or just accept that not everyone will be having a secure conservation, but more will be secured as more and more people like me convince our family members to use it and eventually we transition everyone away from SMS?
No, of course not, why would we build a critical mass of users like that?
Since they removed SMS support almost my entire family and my friends uninstalled signal, except a few who keep it to talk to me, and my half dozen friends privacy-conscious enough to care. Dozens of people, down to eight if you don’t count me, in my circles alone. Objectively, removing SMS support harmed Signal’s popularity and made everyone less secure. The argument for why they did it was at best myopic and also, in my opinion, utter bullshit.
It was very unpopular with my girlfriend, who I had just gotten into using Signal a few months prior.
This might be offtopic but:
Fun Fact, you can use an open source app like Secure Space Encryptor (SSE) (on iOS its called “Paranoia Text Encryption”) to convert any string of text into a encrypted ciphertext, and you can then copy-paste that ciphertext and send it over any medium, like SMS, without the internet. (Most encrypted messaging apps require you have to have internet AFIAK, so people without a data plan is fucked, but with SSE, you can just send ciphertext over SMS) Its not intergrated with SMS, so you’ll have to type plaintext in the app then copy paste the ciphertext it spits out.
Or you can also PGP over SMS
I remember when Signal used to intergrate with SMS, and I kinda liked that more than the Signal today where you have to use the internet and go through their servers.
Getting people to switch to Signal was difficult in the first place Imagine trying to get them to use PGP lmao
xD
there’s oversec on f-droid that can almost automate this
This got me thinking that it should also be possible to automate on iOS with Shortcuts….
Oh yea that overlay thingy, kinda glitchy last time I tried it. If someone is techy enough to manage that clunkiness, then they probably can figure out how to manually copy-paste with SSE.
Btw, these apps are for nerds, not for the average person. No one irl that I know (besides me) would be willing to use either app.
This is how TextSecure worked before it was renamed to Signal and removed SMS support.
Some people don’t like that they attached a crypto wallet to the app. I couldn’t care less and use the messenger daily!
I don’t care or use it either, but I haven’t seen a single use case for that wallet nor mobilecoins. Does people actually use it and for what?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen people say it has CIA financial backing. It did however until only a couple of years ago have strong ties to the State Department’s Open Tech Fund (from the same financial envelope that brings you RFA/RFE/VOA).
The main developer of Lemmy seems to think there’s a solid connection. I’m not jumping in that fight, I got no dog in that fight, I don’t have that kind of threat model.
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#cia-funding
However, considering he’s openly Marxist, he may be just slightly biased.
I suspect OP of this post actually saw the recent /c/Privacy thread over at lemmy.ml where Dessalines was proselytizing against Signal while not seeming to have a problem with SimpleX chat being funded by a group of Venture Capital investors, including Jack Dorsey.
Openly Marxist is just the start of it. Dude is utterly unhinged, so his theories don’t mean a lot to me unless they’re backed by evidence.
Nothing in there is incorrect.
I think he also avoid criticizing tele which is even more swiss cheese than signal
I understand why, but I get annoyed that I can’t integrate it into ferdium with my other things like discord, e-mail and calendar.
Signal is great, you should use it.
Current problems with signal
- it’s centralized
- your encryption key is stored in the cloud
- It’s not federated
Details
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Means it’s vulnerable to government pressure, it’s not wrench proof
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means you can’t really trust it for sensitive things, like if you were running the french government communication systems it would be foolish to use signal. Signal uses the power of Intel SGX enclaves to keep your private key safe, so your trusting Intel not to sign something bad, your trusting sgx to not have exploits, etc.
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Means it’s a walled garden, and not open to self hosting.
Signal is the best main stream e2e out there, but it’s not the last one we will ever see, something will replace it
Your encryption key is stored ON-DEVICE. Not in “the cloud”.
In fact, they just had a big hullabalu about the encryption key being stored in plain-text on their desktop client, which they’ve now resolved.
They now use https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/safe-storage on the desktop client.
Both on device and in the cloud.
https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
That is why when you switch phones and register again with signal using your “pin”, you can send messages to your contacts without your verification number changing.
https://github.com/signalapp/SecureValueRecovery2
The method has changed since that blog post.
So you are correct about it being stored in the cloud - they also seem to take much better care of it there, but when it’s on someone elses server, your point stands - they can SAY they do anything. There’s no way to actually test that. So thanks for the correction.
Anytime, I love it when lemmy is a collaborative space!
There is not „your encryption key“ because there is not only one.
The cloud backup (protected by the pin) includes the contact list, NOT your messages. Those are encrypted on device with a key that is on device and can not be recovered by anyone from the cloud.
There is not „your encryption key“ because there is not only one.
It’s close enough, its the master key from which all other keys can be derived.
https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
If someone loses their phone, the stretched_key, auth_key, and c1 variables can be regenerated at any time on the client as long as the user remembers their chosen passphrase.
The thing is I have yet to see any reasonable alternatives.
Threema is the closest but it’s not free-of-charge, so a non-starter for most of my friends.
The others are controlled by Russia (telegram) or Meta. What else even is viable?
Session, an Australian fork of Signal with onion routing and no phone number requirement, seems promising.
Session disables forward secrecy for no reason.
Personally, I assume it’s a honeypot.
This also disables notification text which is a good choice IMHO as those can be provided by Apple/Google to law enforcement
Didn’t know it was a Signal fork, interesting
I’m trying to move my family to Matrix with a self hosted server. It’s not easy though because of bugs in it.
It’s mostly minor shit, it’s better than the alternatives unless you self-host (which has a boatload of other issues).
How does simplex compare?
- it wants a phone number
- it’s not GETTING a phone number
- it no longer exists as an option
