For the amount of haters telegram had when they launched for their purported security failures, it's funny that people are looking to block it instead of silently explore its flaws
> purported security failures > people are looking to block it instead of silently explore its flaws This is not a good heuristic for determining if security failures are "purported." In point of fact, Telegram is widely lampooned by every self-respecting professional cryptographer who has written about it. There's nothing "purported" about Telegram's security failures - they are empirically demonstrable, and have be…
Russia threatens to block Telegram
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Re: Russia threatens to block Telegram
#52Unfortunately looks like P2P messengers are not available/not existent nowadays. Especially on mobile. All we have phone tied centralized apps.
Re: Russia threatens to block Telegram
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Homebrew crypto written by 4chan. No offline messages. Drains a gigabyte of data and battery overnight thanks to P2P.
> Homebrew crypto written by 4chan. Where did you get that from? Tox uses libsodium. [0] [0] https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/blob/master/docs/updat...
Re: Russia threatens to block Telegram
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the State actors that would be capable of making that kind of exploit would keep that to themselves.
No one else is?
Re: Russia threatens to block Telegram
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Homebrew crypto written by 4chan. Where did you get that from? Tox uses libsodium. [0] [0] https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/blob/master/docs/updat...
There is more to building a secure end-to-end messaging protocol than dropping in libsodium and calling it a day. See issues like https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426 .
Though, even the issue you've linked show the thought that the tox team have been putting into their protocol. (A stolen private key is game over, as in most situations. KCI is hard, let's rework.)
Re: Russia threatens to block Telegram
#56Unfortunately looks like P2P messengers are not available/not existent nowadays. Especially on mobile. All we have phone tied centralized apps.
This seems like an apropos place to shill my own p2p instant messaging protocol implemented in Rust: https://github.com/zacstewart/comm The readme doesn't do it justice. It's actually very functional if I bothered to document how to use it, and I have a working GTK-based frontend that works well too. tl;dr: Its network architecture is loosely based on the BitTorrent DHT. Each node forwards a message as closely as it…
Nothing against you, but good documentation is necessary for acknowledgement and adoption.
Re: Russia threatens to block Telegram
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone needs to publish an exploit, how come I have never seen a single one yet
Go, right now, and download an exploit for the most recent revision of Firefox. Can't do it? That must mean there are no exploits for Firefox.
There are qualified security research teams that develop targeted exploit implementations for exotic and very impactful vulnerabilities. They do not need (or want) to publish the exploits because a) that's a valuable product and intellectual property and b) turnkey weaponization reduces the half life of the vulnerabilities (and therefore income potential).
The people who publish exploit implementations generally do so because they have no interest in seeing the vulnerability flourish and because they would rather have industry fame than a short term payday. If you want to improve your credibility in the security industry, identifying high-impact security vulnerabilities (i.e. CVE worthy) is enough. If you want to earn money by dealing in vulnerabilities, you generally want to develop exploits for them (or give them away for relative pennies on the dollar).
This is a roundabout way of saying that the absence of easily available exploits does not mean that software is secure. On the contrary, it could be an extremely high value target. There are different incentives at play - on one hand, merely releasing details of a vulnerability is enough for recognition, while the most lucrative payments go to weaponized vulnerabilities.
If I were to, say, identify a series of two or three vulnerabilities that can be theoretically chained to achieve remote code execution on an iOS device, I could do one of two things with that. I could report it to Apple and receive up to $200k, per their recently developed disclosure program. I could also sell this for 2 - 5 times that much with a complete exploit. The first option is a great payday and comes with (effectively) never needing to interview again. The second option results in a much better payday (life-changing, perhaps) with essentially no recognition.
If you can consistently churn those out, the second option is probably better if you're optimizing for wealth. But realistically speaking neither party is exceptionally incentivized to publish an exploit that you could just find and download.
Re: Russia threatens to block Telegram
#58So, I'm guessing Telegram is going to circumvent it in the next release. It's too popular in Russia to simply leave it at that. Signal showed how to do it.
Re: Russia threatens to block Telegram
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one else is?
If someone had an exploit like that, there's money to be had by exploiting it in secret and/or selling it to people who do that. Why would they post it online for you for free?
Re: Russia threatens to block Telegram
#60Can I ask how can a service be blocked in a country? Is it because it has centralized servers? What if it was open source and could be hosted on any website? Then they would have to detect signatures of the protocol and block that, right? At what level, the national level? But the server would be local. So what does it mean when they say they block Tor for instance? How can you block something that is run on many dom…
2. They collect all IPs and domains and ban them on provider level. There is a law which forces internet providers to sync the list of banned resources and prohibit access to them.
Basically they ban hundreds of thousands resources already.
Adding few thousands of nodes may take some time, but:
1. It is possible to do for sure within months
2. When you ban 20-30% of decentralized system it looses 20-30% of users which makes it not that attractive compared to allowed alternatives which are controlled by the government (like vk.com)