As Signal get your phone number. Can we considerate this application as private ? What’s your thoughts about it ? I’m also using SimpleX, ElementX, Threema, but not much people using it…
Cheers
Since we are on the topic of signal… im not tech saviie but i have read lots of blogs and people about how secure is the signal protocol. My question is … how can i be sure that the protocol is implemented as the open source code shows? Please correct me if im wrong but from what i read on their website the apk they provide has the capability to update itself at anytime. So what stops them to change how it works with an update? is it posible to build the apk yourself and stop the ability to update?
Just like any foss project, there some level of trust if you are going with the main distribution. In theory you are correct that not much is stopping them from releasing a malicious update, but because it is open source, soon enough people would notice that either they released new code that is malicious, or that the new version does not match the source code. That kind of scenario is known as a supply chain attack.
Since the code is open, you can literally read it for yourself to see exactly what the apk does. You can also fork it and modify it however you like, just like the creator of Molly did (Molly is a fork of the Signal client that adds some security features)
It’s a centralized, US-based service running on AWS, that’s not self-hostable, requires phone numbers, and you have no idea what code their server is running.
Whether the app is you use for it is open source entirely irrelevant for them building social network graphs, considering they have your real identity via phone numbers.
If the answer is “I just trust them”, then you’re not doing security correctly.
Right now, for the wider population, it it a heaven sent option compared to Whatsapp, FB messenger etc. Break those bonds first and keep the wheel turning.
crazy that no one’s posted the dessalines article yet https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/main/why_not_signal.md
EDIT: just to have it here in case anyone even cares, i put my thoughts on the essay later on in the thread
hi. Do you have any suggestions for an app to replace it?
Right now signal is the best. I’ve basically tried them al and at least for me, the known good confidentiality of messages is worth the lack of anonymous accounts. All the other options have issues or have not been properly verified / audited.
When simplex is ready, it will be the best by a lot. But right now you might randomly lose contacts and a few different
unfortunately not. matrix is probably a no because of this thread. i hear a lot of people saying briar is good but idk anything about it
Ok. Thanks anyway!
Briar is… Signal if you turned security up to 11. It comes with drawbacks, like if you are offline, you miss messages. You can get around it by using their mailbox, but that brings other issues (Securing a server).
do you know of any good in-depth analyses of its security? every time i decide on a new chat app someone has to point out something that totally ruins it lol
Like this?
https://www.opentech.fund/security-safety-audits/briar-security-audit/
Or more a techie in-depth review?
I can attest: Briar requires no PII to create an account, operates over the Tor network (Your device becomes an onion service, basically, for chat). And, it integrates with Ripple, an emergency wipe button app (As does signal).
I like it, because you can keep a blog, create forums, group chats, and a few other really cool features. It sucks down your battery life, though (It’s the notifs, and keeping an always-on server running).
i don’t want to make you do my googling for me but if you have anything else just on-hand i’d love to read it. i can’t trust the open tech fund because of its ties to the cia (see this paragraph by dessalines) but i’ll definitely look into briar
I would disregard, at least, that line of thinking. I mean, Tor was heavily funded by the CIA… However, it’s secure. Linux kernel is largely funded by the US government. However, it’s secure.
What dessalines is doing is called “poisoning the well”.
However, I’ll find some more, as I recently was looking into this.
With the phone number, no; and since there’s no Signal usage without a phone number, well…. Also, I think somewhere on their website (or some place) they talked about burner phones as if it’s a universal phenomena.
Signal has felt “out of place” to me. Odd. It doesn’t fit in, doesn’t make sense if I think a bit farther about it.
I hope something decentralised comes out of Signal protocol minus the need for a phone number.
SimpleX uses Signal tech AFAIK but without requiring phone number or email address.
You are talking about session. Session is a signal fork, and you don’t need phone number. But there is some concerns about its security as, in order to properly work, it removed some signal features, I’m not qualified enough to understand if it’s truly a security risk or not. But the option to use it is there.
I used it for a couple years, but came back to signal because I had so many issues with media sharing.
Imo signal protocol is mostly fairly robust, signal service itself is about the best middle ground available to get the general public off bigtech slop.
It compares favorably against whatsapp while providing comparable UX/onboarding/rendevous, which is pretty essential to get your non-tech friends/family out of meta’s evil clutches.
Just the sheer number of people signal’s helped to protect from eg. meta, you gotta give praise for that.
It is lacking in core features which would bring it to the next level of privacy, anonymity and safety. But it’s not exactly trivial to provide ALL of the above in one package while retaining accessibility to the general public.
Personally, I’d be happier if signal began to offer these additional features as options, maybe behind a consent checkbox like “yes i know what i’m doing (if someone asked you to enable this mode & you’re only doing it because they told you to, STOP NOW -> ok -> NO REALLY, STOP NOW IF YOU ARE BEING ASKED TO ENABLE THIS BY ANYONE -> ok -> alright, here ya go…)”.
Secure and private or anonymous are very different things and nearly impossible to do both at the same time and still make it user friendly. Signal is secure, not fully private or anonymous.
Blog post about Threema that changed my mind against it: https://soatok.blog/2021/11/05/threema-three-strikes-youre-out/
Why is this furry-themed?
Why not?
It’s a furry blog that happens to write about security a lot, and the author usually has very well-founded takes.
Chill out and enjoy it – you might learn something new. I usually do :D
Why not? Its nice to have fun with your website.
owo
Love it thank you for sharing. Awesome blog and so much relevant information. it’s now on RSS feed :)
Oh yeah, same. Great writeup, comprehensive and well written, have it bookmarked in case I need to talk to people about Threema.
Signal is a stop gap measure on the way to simplex
It did its job of providing privacy of content but meta data a d KYCd phones was a honeypot. Glowies got their relationship heat maps which is really all they wanted.
Once they need content, they will brick your end point with million zero day back doors caked onto everything.
Pegasus cellebrite etc is now used against normal targets.
5 years ago you would have to be a national security concern for such royal treament
This is kind of useless fear-mongering suited to no one’s threat model.
Are messages truly E2EE and they don’t share meta data? Yes? Then you’re fine. It needs a phone number for registration? OK, well buy a burner SIM card (you of course have several, right?) to register it if you’re that worried. Because if you’re already at a level where you’re THAT concerned about your phone number pinging for using a widely popular messaging app, then you have lost the game by even having a phone or sending messages to other humans who are the weakest link in the security chain anyway.
Considering that the Feds tried to make some government-compliant front end for Signal for idiot Hegseth to use to talk about national security stuff with the Vice President, I’d say that it’s probably fine for you to buy weed or whatever.
Signal has too many red flags, but the biggest one is phone numbers and SIM cards. No application that wants to be secure against nation state spying relies on these.
OK, well buy a burner SIM card
Illegal in many countries. SIM cards are attached to your real world identity.
And we shouldn’t depend on such archaic highly centralized technology like phone numbers from techinical perspective either, it is only like this because it is deeply entrenched and a very easily a suprisingly reliable form of identification and deanomization
I’ll add that if someone knowing your phone number is an actual threat to your safety, you should already know better about using something more anonymous.
Privacy ≠ anonymity
Private and anonymous are different things. While anonymity does increase privacy, it is not a strict requirement. So it this private, but not as private as possible.
The best private messenger IMO is simplex, but it not production ready yet
Many people say that SimpleX is not ready to replace the likes of Whatsapp, Telegram and Signal yet but noone specifies exactly what features are missing.
I get that public key cryptography is confusing for the average people but there is no UI fix that is getting around that obstacle if we want people to make informed choices on what platform/protocol to use for communications.
The same thing applies to decentralization - people just need to understand that the trade-off they’re making for communications’ resilience is the comfort of an online addressbook.
Although I admit that there are certain UI elements that could be made better (for example the nickname setting could be stylized a bit better so people can more easily change the names of their contacts to something more familiar), most criticism towards SimpleX comes from people being a bit lazy and not reading the manual before using the app.
TL;DR: I don’t understand what features are missing from SimpleX.
Multi-device message syncing. Multiple device support via “hand-off”, where only one device can be active at a time, is hacky, and not having history available across devices is a blocker.
The main Dev gave a talk somewhere sometime where he explained why doing multi device is a security risk. I always look for it and always lose the URL without watching it so I can’t explain more
Þat sounds like an excuse, especially since þey allow it, just not concurrently, and from þe tickets I’ve read it’s only because of technical issues, not because of some þeory of attack vectors.
I did some quick googling and found this. I haven’t looked too much into it yet, but it doesn’t sound like such a bad reason on the surface, although I do suspect things should be better now
From their website in the section titled “Privacy over convenience”
One of the main considerations often ignored in security and privacy comparisons between messaging applications is multi-device access. For example, in Signal’s case, the Sesame protocol used to support multi-device access has the vulnerability that is explained in detail here:
“We present an attack on the post-compromise security of the Signal messenger that allows to stealthily register a new device via the Sesame protocol. […] This new device can send and receive messages without raising any ‘Bad encrypted message’ errors. Our attack thus shows that the Signal messenger does not guarantee post-compromise security at all in the multi-device setting”.
Solutions are possible, and even the quoted paper proposes improvements, but they are not implemented in any existing communication solutions. Unfortunately this results in most communication systems, even those in the privacy space, having compromised security in multi-device settings due to these limitations. That’s the reason we are not rushing a full multi-device support, and currently only provide the ability to use mobile app profiles via the desktop app, while they are on the same network.
So SimpleX does support multiple devices, but wiþ limitations. If you accept “on þe same network” is sufficient for þem to ensure security, it still doesn’t explain why:
- hand-off (one device at a time) is necessary
- hand-off is so tedious
- and even if hand-off is accepted as necessary for security, none of it explains why even wiþ hand off, þere’s no history syncing between devices.
Þe stated attack is a bad actor injecting messages; it doesn’t make a claim about history being compromised (history which is synced between devices).
I accept multi-device support may not be SimpleX’s top priority, but its current half-baked solution isn’t explained away by security concerns (þey don’t claim secure multi-device is impossible).
Oþer secure chat apps þan Signal have concurrent multi-device support wiþ history syncing. Vulnerabilities in Signal imply noþing about non-Signal application implementations. Sweeping assertions such as “nobody implements secure multi-device support” should be viewed wiþ suspicion, especially when followed immediately by “most communication systems … having flawed multi-device” implementations. All, or most?
Found a better article
https://simplex.chat/faq/#why-cant-i-use-the-same-profile-on-different-devices
Which other e2ee decentralized apps have multi device without relaxing security?
Offtopic: there seems to be some issue with your comments. Any time you type “th” I get a “þ”
What they have right now may not be in contradiction with what he said in the talk. Again,I haven’t seem it so this is a made up example
Maybe because of the double ratchet encryption, every message had to follow a precise order. Of it doesn’t, everything breaks. Multi device with handoff is easy since only one can send and science messages. But if you don’t have handoff, you have to relax security rules to allow both to work at the same time
Right now when you establish a connection with someone, you exchange between 2 and 4 connections. Each person shares that receive servers out of which one of them is for, and the other is clear net. If you don’t have to running and one of the servers goes down, half of the messages no longer deliver. There is no server rotation. Even if you swap your servers ahead of the server shutting down, contacts don’t cycle and they are lost
That is currently my biggest reason not to recommend. There are also UX improvements like live messages which I think are useless and will cause people to get confused (they are messages that the other person can see in real time as you type them). They should also include some soft of recommended backup solution because people WILL get mad about losing everything
I often see convos on SimpleX that are clearly missing messages, so I’m not sure what that’s about. I mean I see people quoting messages that are not visible.
Also I really think they need to implement UnifiedPush before it’s ready. It consumes an excessive amount of battery life for this reason.
Also worth noting that the creator is an alt-right loon of the highest order.
stickers
If you are curious, here is a link for the roadmap so that you can see the things they are still planing. Some are going to bother normies (like shortening the group URLs will probably mean that they have to update them)
No, and they are supported by US gov (last check), so no good can come of that.
Do you’ve reference about it ?
Quick googling comes up with only people refuting this claim.
Sure, we had signal gate, but the way that was received should make it pretty clear that it’s not supported for official use.
Not supported for official use because it leaves no trace for the formal record. Not because Signal is insecure.
Even if it is, I don’t think we should give the government the power to tell us what to not use. Otherwise they just pick any good projects, throw money at it, leak the data, and people jump to a less secure. Trust the code and nothing more
Signal is the gold standard of secure messengers. If you’re looking for decentralized go with xmpp and/or matrix.
Hosted in the US on amazon servers, subject to national security letters.
If it was hosted outside the US and not on AWS, would you use it then?
US is the gold standard in surveillance and spying. I will not use any cloud services based in the US.
My brother, you clearly haven’t read much about the CCP’s surveillance efforts.
Also remind me which region is actively attempting to end encryption as a whole?
No because I don’t think centralized services are a good idea for communications platforms.
Depends on your threat model, as always. If you require absolute anonymity, it’s tricky, because it uses phone number during the onboarding process, so get an anonymous pre-paid number and discard it after registration. After onboarding you don’t need the number.
For the rest, it’s about as “private” as you make it. It supports group messaing, calls and video, so obviously you need to be careful while using it. Everything is e2e encrypted and stays on your local device, the source is available and has been extensively audited. The company itself is non-profit and has sensible privacy policy.
But yeah, your threat model is the key answer to your question
so get an anonymous pre-paid number
That’s not something that exists in many countries. SIM-cards have to be attached to a real world identity by law.
It exists on the internet, so it exists in every country.
you have to register with your phone number.
But you dont have to give your phone number out to friends or peopole you meet.
Some family members use Molly-Foss and have no issues.
I use signal-foss from the Twin helix repo, A fork of Signal with proprietary Google binary blobs removed…
https://www.twinhelix.com/apps/signal-foss/
Signal from the F-droid - The guardian project repo, is just signal.
I read that the issue was with signal using google firebase, and that it was easier for the fascist piglets to track your messages through notifications.
I have found that you can actually delete a contact via molly but cannot do it via signal.
With signal you can only block a contact, which for me, is a privacy issues.
If I meet a random person, say on holiday, and we swap details, I want to delete them, not block them, where they remain in my block list forever.
I swap between Signal-FOSS and Molly if I want to delete a contact.
people will still expect you to share phone numbers to talk in signal in my personal experience, I really don’t understand how they get so attached to such an archaic technology and often will refuse to use the alias system completely because remembering a random string of numbers is “simpler” somehow
hey furry toaster
Its very frustrating.
People are very odd when it comes to privacy and tech in general.
I have convinced half my friends to move from text messaging to signal and encrypted email but the other half totally refuse. Some have even changed to SimpleX chat and others to conversations.
I have explained to them how, just having my phone number in their contacts list, is hoovered up by all the other apps on their phones.
I tell them I use opencontacts because I respect their privacy, and that I do not share their phone numbers with any apps, so they should respect my privacy too. which they dont.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/opencontacts.open.com.opencontacts/
I put my foot down and say that I refuse to contact them or reply to any message they send, unless it is encrypted.
I also tell them to delete my number from their phones because I will not reply to them if they use my phone number.
they still cling on to gmail and the old text messages and dont bother messaging me at all.
very odd people.
