281–289 of 289 posts
In previous discussion here on HN, Wire was claimed to be more secure than Signal (something related to initial key sharing?) I don't understand why there's so much publicity behind Signal, and Wire is never mentioned. I've been using Wire for years, and it doesn't require a phone number to setup.
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Signal uses Intel SGX to give you some assurances about this, at least for parts of their serving stack. You can run the remote attestation tools and get a report back from Intel that says, in effect, "you connected to a genuine CPU and it's running software with this hash". Then you reproduce the build of the open source code and check the hashes match. I'd be surprised if anyone has ever actually done this. It's a…
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I had one idea of extreme transparency. What if the Signal server used a per-user-thread model where each thread was isolated in a sandbox, which only the user has access to. The user can log in with read only access via ssh and certify that nothing is logged, nothing is tampered with etc. A kind of extreme transparency.
Consider: how do you know the SSH server isn't tampered with? It could be feeding you an entirely fake session.
You might say, the sandbox. How do you know the sandbox isn't tampered with?
How do you know the hard disk or the RAM isn't tampered with? The third party owns the machine itself.
SGX is based on the insight that it's very, very difficult to tamper with a physical circuit as small as a CPU. The CPU is the root of trust in any machine. If a CPU can produce a report that says the moral equivalent of "I'm running an OpenSSH server version X" and the CPU itself is preventing the server owner from tampering with the software, then you have the ability to reason about what the server is doing with your data.
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The phone number deregister flow is such a dark pattern it's incredible. Not something a chat app should ever do to be reputable.
How so?
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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.
Sure. But the fact that the huge majority of messaging users use their phones is not exactly controversial. Heck, whatsapp has gotten several orders of magnitude more people to use encrypted messaging than any other software, and techies hate it.
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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.
How is something that's tied to your phone number "secure"? The communications are encrypted, but my identity is public.
This is about official communications in an organization with public lists of work phone numbers, not our underground cypherpunk community where we have no names maan we are nameless. There's no requirement to be anonymous in this context. Metadata can be reduced via tech but it's not the top-priority -- quick fix to confidentiality problems OTOH is.