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I don't trust Signal

drewdevault.com

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Re: I don't trust Signal

#211

Post by staticautomatic »

tekromancr wrote: post #136
lowry wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree with you if only Signal would not ask for so many permissions on my phone.

Can you elaborate? I just set it up on a new phone yesterday and all it asked for on mine was; contacts (makes sense) files (to send pictures, files, etc) receive and send texts (if you want it as your default texting app/validating phone number via sms) Access to camera and microphone (for calls and in app photography) These all seem like reasonable permissions for the features available.

Is sharing your contacts mandatory in Signal? I don't use WhatsApp because I can't without sharing them.

Re: I don't trust Signal

#212

Post by ddevault »

lorenzhs wrote: post #182
lmm wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An open-source server is certainly a step up from Signal, but since Wire doesn't support federation (either in their ToS or in practice) I'd favour Matrix.

> An open-source server is certainly a step up from Signal https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server . You are spreading a lot of incorrect or misleading information about Signal in this thread. That makes it difficult to assume that you're arguing in good faith here.

The server might as well be closed source. We have no guarantees that Moxie is actually running this in production and he refuses to federate with third-party servers.

Re: I don't trust Signal

#213

Post by move-on-by »

hutzlibu wrote: post #174
move-on-by wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moxie forbids you from distributing branded builds of the Signal app ... Having multiple branded builds to choose from would be a terrible thing and would easily allow fake apps to gain traction. > ... and if you rebrand he forbids you from using the official Open Whisper servers. This seems pretty fair to me. Not only could you abuse their resources, it would greatly hinder their ability to make changes and respon…

"Having multiple branded builds to choose from would be a terrible thing and would easily allow fake apps to gain traction" In this particular case, not likely. People who are into more secure communication do not randomly click on anything. They know what they are doing, or get it installed from people they trust. And if they don't - their fault. Not Signals. And Signal can continue to work and introduce breaking ch…

> People who are into more secure communication do not randomly click on anything

I think you overestimate people. I told my wife to install Signal because she needed a password for something and it was way to complicated for her to remember. I know what the signal app is and could likely avoid fakes - she would not. I think it is often the case that only one party of the conversation is security minded, while the others just trust that person.

> And the ressouce-abuse. Can this really be a thing?

You know NTP, the protocol for sharing what time it is? That gets abused badly [1]. If you have an open service, there are ways it can be abused. This would without a doubt lead to DDoS-like resource abuse where lazy clients don't cache things properly and just hog server resources. There are ways to limit things like that- but they aren't always simple. Also, like I said before, Signal isn't in the API business.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTP_server_misuse_and_abuse

Re: I don't trust Signal

#214

Post by JasonFruit »

KingMob wrote: post #128
sdenton4 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My new secure chat app encrypts your message then send it to /dev/null.

I guess that's acceptable if you trust the NSA not to replace /dev/null with an email forwarder. My new secure chat app, on the other hand, encrypts your message in memory, then zeros out the bytes.

In "memory". Sheeple!

Re: I don't trust Signal

#215

Post by jlund »

dleslie wrote: post #161
lowry wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree with you if only Signal would not ask for so many permissions on my phone.

Last time I had it installed it scanned my contacts a half dozen times while I slept. I removed it in the AM.

The Contacts permission is completely optional, and contact information is never stored: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

Re: I don't trust Signal

#217

Post by StavrosK »

zmanian wrote: post #41
lmm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Open Whisper Systems had received a national security letter requiring them to collect more information and keep it secret that they were doing so, how would you expect them to have responded to that subpoena?

NSL can't require to collect new business records. They can only compel you to disclose business records that you already have. This is beyond the legal authority of an NSL.

Does the NSL have any legal authority? Is it actually bound by laws? From what I understand, an NSL is "do what we tell you, because we're the NSA".

Re: I don't trust Signal

#218

Post by huhtenberg »

ryanlol wrote: post #206
huhtenberg wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you stop posting this in every Telegram thread? I personally explained to you why this is a complete nonsense as far as conspiracy theories go [1] as did several others. Give it a rest already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17195956

You call this complete nonsense, but you never explain the existence of this backdoor. If you actually stop for a minute to consider what's happening here, it's pretty difficult to dismiss telegrams choices as mere incompetence. Do you feel personally insulted by comments criticizing telegram?

> you never explain the existence of this backdoor.

I certainly do.

Re: I don't trust Signal

#219

Post by Bartweiss »

distantsounds wrote: post #22

"The APK direct download doesn’t even accomplish the stated goal of “harm reduction”. The user has to manually verify the checksum, and figure out how to do it on a phone, no less. A checksum isn’t a signature, by the way - if your government- or workplace- or abusive-spouse-installed certificate authority gets in the way they can replace the APK and its checksum with whatever they want." This is true for just about…

A lot of the complaints here appear to actually be "if you download software, or run that software on Android, or on any third party hardware at all, it could be compromised", but with Signal singled out.

For a given user, I don't understand how signing is better than a checksum under this threat model. Going online to download an app is not part of an established connection with that app, so an attacker could simply serve you a page of their choosing with a signature they issued. Verifying identity for an initial connection is definitionally what signatures can't solve.

I think, maybe, the idea is that a signed app could reject communications from unsigned/mis-signed installations? So if someone has entirely hijacked your session and served you a fake app, you won't be able to communicate with the rest of the network. It sounds like a coherent model at least: you can protect single targets by verifying their software when they try to communicate.

(If so, I don't understand how that meshes with the call to federate Signal, which would require it to accept signatures from outside parties. Is the idea something like a CA web-of-trust where only people approved by accepted signers can federate their apps?)

Re: I don't trust Signal

#220

Post by lmm »

okatsu wrote: post #177
lmm wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The article isn't about bad encryption though. It's not about a flaw in the signal protocol or something like that. It's stuff like Moxie doesn't like F-Droid. Which is not an invalid criticism but I'm not gonna stop recommending Signal over Facebook Messenger because of that. You have to look at the whole system, not just one algorithm that it uses - if any part of the system is secure then the whole is insecure.…

Isn't the whole point of Signal that it's e2e encrypted and therefore can't really read and share your messages? Whereas Facebook's system is centralized? So yeah you're safe from outside attacks but not internal ones? I mean if you're asking me if I know for certain that Signal is better than Facebook, there's no way for me to know for sure. But at some point there is a level of trust required and I trust a company…

> Isn't the whole point of Signal that it's e2e encrypted and therefore can't really read and share your messages?

Maybe. They have an awkward, compromised design, because fundamentally you can only the key exchange stuff that's necessary for forward secrecy if you're both online at the same time, but of course they want to support offline messaging, so they have a protocol that's mostly-e2e but the server also participates in it in some cases. In theory maybe it's all fine, but it's complex and has a lot of surface area. Combine that with Signal keeping the server not-quite-open and being weirdly insistent on not having federation, and I'm suspicious.

> But at some point there is a level of trust required and I trust a company like OWS more than I trust a company like FB. Call it blind faith, I dunno, but I also have to trust my operating system otherwise I wouldn't get anything done.

Agreed, which is really what the article is about. I have very little trust in OWS and Marlinspike in particular because of his attacks on the most important/effective working cryptosystems we have (OpenPGP), and his willingness to compromise security properties that seem very important to me (open-source auditability, federation, stronger anonymity than a phone number has) for the sake of features that I think are less significant (forward secrecy), and his refusal to even acknowledge that a tradeoff is being made.

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