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Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

telegram.org

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Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#191

Post by amq »

adamheins wrote: post #175
pixl97 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I always see these services talking about "crystal clear quality", but never latency, which is a shame. Maybe there is simply nothing they can do about it. I've noticed latency get worse and worse on the Internet since I started using it in the 90s and nobody seems to talk about it. Well, the first problem at home is likely your wireless. Live in an apartment and you can pick up 30 other routers in your wifi search.…

I don't know much about the different router brands and models. Which would you consider to be some of the good ones?

A starting point for me: LEDE support

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#192

Post by RubyPinch »

_jomo wrote: post #71
Derbasti wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Client and protocol are open source. What more do you need?

They have stopped publishing the source code for their clients.

They have?

https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop seems fairly up to date?

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#193

Post by fenwick67 »

moe wrote: post #150
samat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those codecs have tons of parameters to tweak (source: private conversation with Pavel Durov)

But what sort of parameters are adjusted? This is HN. A link to an example would be appreciated. Edit: To clarify, I work with audio codecs too, and can't really think of parameters (other than the compression level?) that would make much sense to adjust on the fly. If "AI" is used for more than just a buzzword here, then I imagine the answer must be quite interesting.

They probably adjust the incoming / outgoing buffer sizes (and therefore the audio delay, since it's live) to account for packet loss.

They might also prioritize traffic depending on how full your buffers are.

I can only assume Youtube and Netflix do similar parameter tweaks to optimize their video delivery based on the connection (totally filling the buffer to a max size all the time would waste bandwidth, but if the client has lots of packet loss they need a larger safety net).

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#194

Post by fenwick67 »

jaflo wrote: post #188
unicornporn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're sitting on troves of data. Extremely few use the E2E encrypted "secure chat" feature (mainly because it isn't default, but also because it doesn't sync between devices) and all the chat logs and data are stored on their servers (and are readable by Telegram). They also store your address book on their servers. I'm sure they will find ways monetize this. Data is the "new gold", as they say[1]... [1] https://ww…

Their FAQ[1] states: Q: Will you have ads? Or sell my data? Or steal my beloved and enslave my children? No. So I don't think they will make money by selling data. [1] https://telegram.org/faq#q-will-you-have-ads-or-sell-my-data...

An FAQ isn't binding. What does their TOS say?

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#195

Post by lucb1e »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #183
lucb1e wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still curious to hear Moxie/OWS' take on the Wire issue, where they supposedly demanded $2.5mln for implementing the Signal Protocol (which is open source) and using source code where the documentation lacked (which is open source).

I'm afraid you're talking to the wrong person.

The HN audience? I'm not trying to ask the person I'm responding to.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#196

Post by jdfreefly »

torrent-of-ions wrote: post #121

I will definitely try this because I have trouble with all other voice chat services including Skype, WhatsApp and Hangouts. Often one of those three will work but not always. But the most annoying problem with any internet voice chat is not so much the quality but the latency. Landline phones have noticeably lower voice quality but one can still enjoy a conversation perfectly well. High latency, on the other hand, a…

Have you tried Amazon Chime? We are ridiculously aware of the latency issue in high quality voip. We do not at the moment support user generated keys the way Telegram does but we do use TLS/DTLS encryption end to end for our VOIP streams.

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#197

Post by walterbell »

JshWright wrote: post #132
drakenot wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa, I had never thought of monitoring VBR as an attack vector for recovering audio. Do you have a link discussing this?

Sure, here are a couple papers on the topic: https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/voip-vbr.pdf It's fundamentally very similar to the sorts of issues you end up with if you compress then encrypt. If the attacker can make some educated guesses about the plaintext prior to the compression, the compression ratio can be a very powerful tool in their arsenal.

Wire implemented CBR for their encrypted calls, upstreamed it to WebRTC and submitted a patch to Signal, https://medium.com/wire-news/call-security-constant-bit-rate...

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#198

Post by lucb1e »

cflee wrote: post #73

Does anyone have an opinion on the new "three-message modification of the standard DH key exchange" they introduced for calls? From their API doc: https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-ver... > Party A will generate a shared key with B — or whoever pretends to be B — without having a second chance to change its exponent a depending on the value g_b received from the other side; and the impostor wil…

I like it. I tried to explain it in slightly simpler terms to some friends in a group chat like this:

> reading about the emoticon generation thingy, it's actually worth a read

> they use a DH KEX[1], but wrapped with something which is interesting. Client A generates a, client B generates b, and g seems to be an already-exchanged finite group generator. That's all standard.

[1] diffie-hellman key exchange

> now before A sends g^a to B, it will send hash(g^a) to B. B responds as normal (with g^b) to which A will respond with what it normally would send first: g^a.

> after receiving g^a, B can check whether the initially received hash(g^a) matches. This means that A can't brute force a specific value of a, so it doesn't matter that it's only 33 bits of entropy in that emoticon thingy. Any brute forcing will change the hash (unless you collide, iirc, sha256) and B will go "dude wtf" and kill the connection

> I tried to summarize in more understandable terms, but if it's too shortened or something, the original thing is here: https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/voice-calls#key-ver...

Re: Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered

#199

Post by rz2k »

jonotime wrote: post #179

My problem with Telegram is I want to use it but they wont let me. I use a budget phone service (freedompop) which apparently is technically voip, but I did not know until I tried to register for Telegram with it. They refuse to send me text verification. Wont work with my google voice number either. WhatsApp does not have this problem. And what if I want to use Telegram on desktop only? Why do I need to verify a pho…

It worked with my Google Voice number just now. Could they have changed the policy? I did sign up with my iPad (with cell service) first then iPhone, so it was probably more open to not using the device's phone number.
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