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EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

politico.eu

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Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#261
post #123
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true. But given how much interest there is to find vulnerabilities in the Signal app, I would be very surprised if anyone would succeed in putting up a compromised Signal app on the App store and also be able to fly under the radar.

The "anyone" in this case would be Signal. No need to fake it when Signal is under US law.

Ok lawyer, explain which US law allows compelled speech considering in djb vs US it was decided code was speech, and protected by the first amendment.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#262

Our top political campaigns use Wickr (it's pushed down from on high) but I have a hard time believing it adds any more security than simply mandating 2fa security keys w/ google advanced protection. Given the problems ive experiences with the wickr app and lack of basic phone security ive seen this feels LESS secure to me. Google put out research saying they had 0 successful phishing after mandated fobs. I guess the…

Wickr is proprietary. That alone is a reason to abandon it ASAP.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#263
post #11

I'm supprised they have not developed their own or at least, bankrolled the development of one via grants. Though it would be good if there was an open source communications platform that would allow the public to engage with politicians in a formal and constructive way. Alas, so much disparity in solutions that it often irks me. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/projects Be great if the interface was bet…

France developed their own matrix protocol based network called tchap. Great idea for a nation that wants to stay independent in an increasingly american/chinese tech dependent world.

Mistakes were made along the way: https://medium.com/@fs0c131y/tchap-the-super-not-secure-app-...

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'm suspicious of Signal because of its publicity, smells like a pot of honey.

It is definitely a pot of honey now for intelligence agencies who are going to crack down on it to break it since everyone is moving to it now.

Still protected by the math?

All the three-letter agencies already knew they had these tools available, GPG, veracrypt, Signal, etc.

Now it's just impossible for governments to whole sale eavesdrop on conversations. If they want access it now has to be targetted, and most likely device specific which is harder.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#265
post #11

I'm supprised they have not developed their own or at least, bankrolled the development of one via grants. Though it would be good if there was an open source communications platform that would allow the public to engage with politicians in a formal and constructive way. Alas, so much disparity in solutions that it often irks me. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/projects Be great if the interface was bet…

While I'm _surprised_ that they didn't choose that approach, I'm glad they decided to do something sensible instead.

Developing a custom app would mean throwing tax money into a black hole, generating an inferior product that nobody would use (among other things due to the complete lack of network effect). Supporting an existing, good open-source product (and possibly spending grant money on _that_) makes a lot more sense, and is a practical solution.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is definitely a pot of honey now for intelligence agencies who are going to crack down on it to break it since everyone is moving to it now.

Still protected by the math? All the three-letter agencies already knew they had these tools available, GPG, veracrypt, Signal, etc. Now it's just impossible for governments to whole sale eavesdrop on conversations. If they want access it now has to be targetted, and most likely device specific which is harder.

Sure but the math alone won't protect it. I'm thinking more of bugs in the program such as buffer overflows etc. that can potentially be exploited. They don't even have to exist in the Signal code itself but one of the libraries they use. Everything will be scrutinized increasingly heavily now.

Moxie had better preemptively order up some new code reviews.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, besides anonymity, my requirements for a reliable communication method include not being tied to my phone.

Yes, and the huge majority of people don't have that requirement. Signal's devs have been very clear for years and years that the are optimizing for getting as many people as possible to use functioning e2e encrypted messaging rather than to focus on features that a subset of techies in the west care about.

I don't know about you, but I as a 'techie in the east-west' have a bunch of people who ask me or follow my choices wrt tech stuff.

I might recommend Signal to them if they specifically ask for something encrypted, but if they just follow what I use they'll see no Signal.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't really call DigiD secure, it doesn't seem to be open-source. Plus, rolling some own protocol/crypto instead of using PKI, that has immense effort behind it to keep secure, is not a good thing. Estonia has a similar solution, but "Smart-ID" was created after PKI was fully rolled out, it's terrible compared to that. Centralized, unverifiable, stores secrets insecurely, does some cryptographic bullshit. The t…

Can you explain why Smart-ID is bad? It is terrible compared to what, PKI, our ID card, the mobile-id system? What kind of bullshit does it do? I haven't heard any such criticism about that system before, so it would be interesting to hear. I've been using it for years, it's easy to use and there haven't been any security problems with it. The company that developed it is trying to export it to other countries as wel…

> What kind of bullshit does it do?

It doesn't utilize a hardware-backed secure secret storage on Android (~80% of marketshare in EE if I remember correctly). This means vital key material is unsafe from any compromise, just a plain file somewhere. This means that they have to go into a lot of effort to detect clones, which is also certainly not infallible. Cloning or compromising an ID-card of Mobile-ID is way way harder with it's audited security.

The technical overview describes how key is generated on the device and half of it is sent to AS SK's servers. There's no security benefit in that (they can't really verify you've deleted their half of the key from your device), except that now AS SK has half of your private key. In general their technical overview gives the feeling that like they want to pull wool over people's eyes, it's IMHO a bad sign.

It also totally lacks any privacy, every login you do is logged and counted. SK AS shouldn't mandatorily have that metadata.

It relies completely on their centralized servers, they go down, your authentication and signing goes totally down. Neither service owners or their clients can do anything about that. Identity mustn't be like that.

It's totally proprietary, thus their claims about security can't be easily verified, and it's limited to their blessed OSs (and versions). If they go bankrupt or similar, the identities of all those people are in jeopardy.

It's also expensive for server administrators and thus has a high barrier of entry. Identity and security shouldn't be behind a paywall for neither side. The web has LetsEncrypt and now a lot more sites are protected, the web is better off, SK AS has done the opposite.

In comparison, ID-card's PKI is usable for free, supported in every system (that can do TLS basically), entirely FOSS if you wish, the hardware is much more secure (EAL6+), it doesn't mandatorily leak metadata, doesn't rely on a centralized proprietary server to work.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#269

I know Signal is secure and all — and I use it myself — but I can’t help but think how can we trusted that the central servers aren’t wiretapped? It would be the ultimate proof of security if one could transparently verify that the middle man is running the actual code it claims to be running.

This is possible with remote attestation. See the "Trust but verify" paragraph in https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ and also https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ .

> Trust but verify

That phrase needs to be deprecated

It collapses to 'verify'. Just say that.

Re: EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app

#270
post #21
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does such a person exist? And if so, then just do all your communication using existing means like email and blogs.

Personally I believe that if you become an elected representative of the public you should become a public person where all your in-person meetings and all your phone calls and messages are public for the period you are elected. If you meet someone without disclosing it, it should be a criminal offence. I know this will never happen in real life but I think this is the only way to solve the problem of corrupt officia…

Also: The Circle by Dave Eggers.
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