Can the URL be changed to the Signal blog post at https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender ?
Yes, I don’t understand why TechCrunch blogspam is exempt from the normal original source rules. They don’t add any value and reduce the amount of information.
Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signal
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Re: Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signal
#22How to fight spam if sender identity is not known? Currently I get at least a few marketing calls a week and don't know how to make them stop other than blocking the numbers.
From the Signal blog post: > To prevent abuse, clients derive a 96-bit delivery token from their profile key and register it with the service. The service requires clients to prove knowledge of the delivery token for a user in order to transmit “sealed sender” messages to that user.
They add:
> Additionally, blocking a user who has access to a profile key will trigger a profile key rotation.
People who don't know you can't use the new sender privacy beta feature, but if you are willing to risk spam then you can allow everyone to use it:
> users who want to live on the edge can enable an optional setting that allows them to receive incoming “sealed sender” messages from non-contacts and people with whom they haven’t shared their profile or delivery token. This comes at the increased risk of abuse, but allows for every incoming message to be sent with “sealed sender,” without requiring any normal message traffic to first discover a profile key.
Re: Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signal
#23Two observations:
1. You should look into what other messengers do with sender/receiver pairs information. One very popular competing messenger logs pairs permanently, serverside, in order to make UI features work.
2. One of the least popular attributes of Signal (on Hacker News, at least) is its lack of federation and ability to interoperate with third-party clients. This feature is a pretty crystalline example of the kind of protocol change you can make when you control all the mainstream clients, and that would be an absolute nightmare for a protocol where you didn't.
Re: Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signal
#24Here's an idea, Signal, how about removing the requirement that everything be tied to phone numbers? BBM back in the day worked great with their unique "PINs", that could be shared by QR code, and I could reject an "add" request.
This is the "Go y u no generics" of secure messaging.
The answer is always the same:
Phone numbers bootstrap a workable social network for ordinary users. Signal's goal is to transform all ordinary messaging into secure messaging. Not elite secure messaging. All messaging. The most popular messaging application in the world uses phone numbers for identifiers (as, obviously, does SMS). That's the goal they've set for themselves.
The simple answer for a lot of questions about Signal is that they aren't trying to solve every problem, or even many of HN's problems.
If phone numbers are super-problematic for you, use Wire. Consider carefully the privacy tradeoff you'll be making, though.
Re: Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signal
#25This is an unexpected move, perhaps Briar, Matrix and other distributed platforms are putting more pressure on Signal to show forward progress on the serious metadata issue with Signal and most other centralized platforms? Its been a rallying cry/common complaint by those who are technically inclined and privacy conscious for years now, surprised OWS would choose to give credit to the problem.
No mainstream messenger has ever done a better job with metadata than Signal. It took Signal several years after launch just to get user profiles with names and stuff, purely because of privacy concerns. Read the blog post they wrote about GIF sharing to get a sense of how seriously they take this, then compare how their features work to other mainstream messengers.
There is one privacy issue people put pressure on Signal about, and that's the use of phone numbers. Apart from that, Signal has always led the field on privacy issues.
Re: Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signal
#26I'm not sure I understand the feature. It protects the sender's identity from their servers , or from the recipient ? What's the use case / threat model? I think it prevents their servers from correlating my identity and my IP address etc., but since I want replies and I'm asking the server about replies, doesn't that operation tell the server what my identity is anyway? (There are some comments here talking about an…
It prevents their servers from easily tracking (and, importantly, logging) who sent which messages to whom.
Re: Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signal
#27Here's an idea, Signal, how about removing the requirement that everything be tied to phone numbers? BBM back in the day worked great with their unique "PINs", that could be shared by QR code, and I could reject an "add" request.
This is the "Go y u no generics" of secure messaging. The answer is always the same: Phone numbers bootstrap a workable social network for ordinary users. Signal's goal is to transform all ordinary messaging into secure messaging. Not elite secure messaging. All messaging . The most popular messaging application in the world uses phone numbers for identifiers (as, obviously, does SMS). That's the goal they've set for…
No, it's not. By requiring a phone number, Signal does not defend privacy. This is a binary question, there's not a grey area here. It doesn't matter that they're building a social network, or anything else. What matters is that it's not private so long as they require a phone number.
Re: Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signal
#28Here's an idea, Signal, how about removing the requirement that everything be tied to phone numbers? BBM back in the day worked great with their unique "PINs", that could be shared by QR code, and I could reject an "add" request.
This is the "Go y u no generics" of secure messaging. The answer is always the same: Phone numbers bootstrap a workable social network for ordinary users. Signal's goal is to transform all ordinary messaging into secure messaging. Not elite secure messaging. All messaging . The most popular messaging application in the world uses phone numbers for identifiers (as, obviously, does SMS). That's the goal they've set for…
But... Wire has both! With generics, you introduce complexity into the language that everyone has to understand, but that's obviously not true when it comes to having accounts that aren't tied to phone numbers!
Re: Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signal
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the "Go y u no generics" of secure messaging. The answer is always the same: Phone numbers bootstrap a workable social network for ordinary users. Signal's goal is to transform all ordinary messaging into secure messaging. Not elite secure messaging. All messaging . The most popular messaging application in the world uses phone numbers for identifiers (as, obviously, does SMS). That's the goal they've set for…
No, it's not. By requiring a phone number, Signal does not defend privacy. This is a binary question, there's not a grey area here. It doesn't matter that they're building a social network, or anything else. What matters is that it's not private so long as they require a phone number.
I'm not sure what was unclear about my summary of what Signal is doing. Here, let me put it differently for you:
Signal's goal is to make all the messaging in the world that currently uses phone numbers as identifiers --- which, by a long ways, is most messaging in the world --- cryptographically secure.
Hope that helps. You are welcome to have and to advocate for different goals. Please don't pretend your goals are Signal's, though.
Re: Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signal
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the "Go y u no generics" of secure messaging. The answer is always the same: Phone numbers bootstrap a workable social network for ordinary users. Signal's goal is to transform all ordinary messaging into secure messaging. Not elite secure messaging. All messaging . The most popular messaging application in the world uses phone numbers for identifiers (as, obviously, does SMS). That's the goal they've set for…
But... Wire has both! With generics, you introduce complexity into the language that everyone has to understand, but that's obviously not true when it comes to having accounts that aren't tied to phone numbers!
Wire is a perfectly legitimate option. I'd only ask that you keep in mind that there are other privacy tradeoffs involved in using it.