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Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

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Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#401

Post by Krasnol »

throwitaway1235 wrote: post #351
Krasnol wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not in the US and this is popular to me because I'm happy to be able to help people out who are suppressed by their government. Not everything is a US conspiracy in geopolitics...

That nation states do things to advance their interests globally is not a conspiracy. Foreign policy 101. Who is to say that the Western technocratic system of government replacing the current Iranian regime would not also be oppressive? I personally believe it would be vastly more oppressive.

> That nation states do things to advance their interests globally is not a conspiracy. Foreign policy 101.

This level of argumentation is so beyond sense and reason that I'm not even sure which nation you're talking about. Iran is not advancing anything and Signal is not part of the US government.

> Who is to say that the Western technocratic system of government replacing the current Iranian regime would not also be oppressive? I personally believe it would be vastly more oppressive.

Nobody is saying that because you can't but you don't have to if you want to help people out who are opressed under a dictatorship.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#402

Post by Krasnol »

doublestandard2 wrote: post #365
Krasnol wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet, in the US these companies help the mainstream narrative to enforce censorship by banning Why THESE companies? Where did Signal do this? Or are all US companies the same entity to you?

I describe my sentiment more precisely. By "these companies" I refer to entities or even individuals who take a very simplistic view toward this issue (Blocking of Signal by Iranian government). In this simplistic viewpoint, issues in 3rd world countries (even this naming is condescending) are assumed to be evident. In this case an evil government versus oppressed people who can not even communicate with each other f…

> This is in contrast to a much more nuanced view of the issues in the west. End-to-end encryption is a debated issue in the US and EU and legislators have proposed laws to ban it or enforcing other mechanisms to circumvent by law enforcement such as backdoors.

It looks to me like you try to cloud your false argument in whataboutisms based upon a profound lack of knowledge:

> I mentioned the US as an example, because of Signal is operating under US jurisdiction.

The reason Signal is a good way to go is because this doesn't matter. Signal doesn't save any conversations they can hand over to the US (or other) government.

> This is in contrast to Iran which is in a chaotic region and surrounded by the US military bases.

Yeah, yeah I get it. We all do. US = bad but how does it change anything for the oppressed people in Iran we can help here? If those would have been people in the US, we'd be doing the same thing for them here in the EU.

> What I am expecting is a more nuanced and sophisticated perspective toward the issue.

A whataboutism and derailment of the issue is neither nuanced nor sophisticated. It's quite shady and ignorant.

Here is something you can do to help people out but instead of doing that, you try to build some weird case which actually helps the Iranian government.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#403

Post by snthd »

shervin01 wrote: post #134

Hi, from Iran with love! First of all, thank you moxie and signal team for this proxy. Until 2018, many Iranians used telegram but Iran's regime after Russia blocked this messenger. telegram released mtproxy and this proxy was helpful. Russia lifted the ban on telegram but this app is still blocked on my country. but with VPNs, many iranians still use this app. after 2018, second most popular messaging app in iran wa…

>I have a suggestion for signal team: please put tor in the signal, tor is better than any proxys or vpns.

You can get a tor proxy for Android at

https://guardianproject.info/apps/org.torproject.android/

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#404

Post by throwitaway1235 »

Krasnol wrote: post #401
throwitaway1235 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That nation states do things to advance their interests globally is not a conspiracy. Foreign policy 101. Who is to say that the Western technocratic system of government replacing the current Iranian regime would not also be oppressive? I personally believe it would be vastly more oppressive.

> That nation states do things to advance their interests globally is not a conspiracy. Foreign policy 101. This level of argumentation is so beyond sense and reason that I'm not even sure which nation you're talking about. Iran is not advancing anything and Signal is not part of the US government. > Who is to say that the Western technocratic system of government replacing the current Iranian regime would not also b…

Signal is an American company with it's headquarters in California. My point is that the global interests of nation states and their alliances are not only pursued through government channels but also through their influence on domestic private companies.

I agree that my second point was too personal and unproductive.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#405

Post by Krasnol »

throwitaway1235 wrote: post #404
Krasnol wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That nation states do things to advance their interests globally is not a conspiracy. Foreign policy 101. This level of argumentation is so beyond sense and reason that I'm not even sure which nation you're talking about. Iran is not advancing anything and Signal is not part of the US government. > Who is to say that the Western technocratic system of government replacing the current Iranian regime would not also b…

Signal is an American company with it's headquarters in California. My point is that the global interests of nation states and their alliances are not only pursued through government channels but also through their influence on domestic private companies. I agree that my second point was too personal and unproductive.

> Signal is an American company with it's headquarters in California. My point is that the global interests of nation states and their alliances are not only pursued through government channels but also through their influence on domestic private companies.

Please outline those channels which connect Signal to the US government. Otherwise please stop insulting me with this story. Selling basic human rights as some evil US government agenda is ridiculous.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#406

Post by kdunglas »

cryo wrote: post #369
kdunglas wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (partially) fixed this issue, and I'm not affiliated in any way with Signal. It's public ( https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-TLS-Proxy/pull/2 ), and it looks like they welcome contributions, because they merged mine.

Wouldn't it be saner to also verify the downloaded archive hash? It looks like the domain resolving of nginx.org is trusted without doubt.

Sure! I also opened another PR to check the archive signature: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-TLS-Proxy/pull/10

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#407

Post by junon »

lucb1e wrote: post #256
realducksoft wrote: post #163

This proxy failed to be probing resistant. The PoC code is released by studentmain: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-TLS-Proxy/issues/3#issue...

That's the sort of PoC that should be PGP encrypted to the Signal authors instead of publicly posted. Iran will have a field day with it being posted like this. Except, of course, that posting public keys is too 1990s for him https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html (which contains some good arguments but offers no solutions, so whatcha gonna do, post a phone number and trust the signal servers to give you the ri…

They've since deleted the issue, FWIW. Perhaps it was important enough this time ;)

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#408

Post by thealig »

2cb wrote: post #310
olah_1 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only annoyance with the crypto currency is that it doesn’t have a good UX yet. They have stated before though that Session will always remain free for everyone. I think compensating node operators in some capacity makes sense but if it’s not implemented well, node operators feel a bit screwed over. Regarding your footnote #2 about PFS, it said this (among other things). > In some theoretical scenarios, these prope…

I haven't played with their crypto wallet honestly so I can't provide any kind of informed opinion on it. It's a fork of Monero, but Monero is more widely accepted. Although Monero's wallet has a terrible UX too so if they've forked their wallet too, that'll be why. Session has a pretty nice UX though, better than Wickr which has been around longer, although not as refined as Wire. It's pretty much a more barebones S…

Interesting tidbits I'm reading about different chat apps targeted for privacy and security. On a related question, how do you rank the various prominent apps like Signal, Telegram and Whatsapp on their cryptographic security measures?

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#409

Post by cyphar »

franga2000 wrote: post #371
mmc4444 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so only some go through Tor (see the Silk Road case for why), but that also equally applies to VPNs. Can you explain this?

I looked into the Silk Road story again and it looks like I was misremembering how they caught DPR, but splitting your "personally identifiable" and other browsing is still a good idea. Let's say you use the Tor browser to browse some regular (non-Tor) site that is illegal in your country for whatever reason. But let's say you then remember you still haven't paid your taxes so you open a new tab and quickly go do tha…

> Let's say you use the Tor browser to browse some regular (non-Tor) site that is illegal in your country for whatever reason. But let's say you then remember you still haven't paid your taxes so you open a new tab and quickly go do that. But you're still in the Tor browser, so your e-banking traffic is going out the same exit node as your "illegal" traffic.

That isn't how Tor works. Tor creates a new circuit for each new host you connect to, and they also create new circuits for the same host fairly regularly (every 15 minutes I think) -- both of which are done specifically to avoid this precise attack.

I also don't have experience dealing with an authoritarian regime, and there are many more aspects to OPSEC than just using Tor (after all, Tor doesn't look like normal internet traffic unless you use obfuscators -- so an authoritarian regime can just target all Tor users, which is why having Tor be used by more people is important for improving anonymity). But Tor has already dealt with obvious attacks like the one you outlined.

Re: Help users in Iran reconnect to Signal

#410

Post by nirui »

realducksoft wrote: post #32

Damn, I've read the code. This won't work against an active probe. Censors just use signal domains and non-signal domains to test your proxy. If signal domains get passed and non-signal domains got denied, you are fucked. Besides, TLS in TLS is highly identifiable by simple packet length dpi. I'd hope there's better plan.

And based the log on my hand, probing is really "mainstream" now days. I have a Shadowsocks proxy instance started since Oct 20 last year, and it's been attacked

    $ docker logs shadowsocks 2>&1| grep "AEAD: repeat salt detected" | wc -l
    16468
times total. The last 6 happened less than 10 minutes ago. My expectation is, TLS will be probed even more, because the handshake parameters (the order of CipherSuite for example) itself could leak a lots of info about the client&server.

It's not easy to build a protocol that is cryptographically safe all while keep the traffic characterless/innocent. Could be a "World Changing Event" if somebody discovered a way through.

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