Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts • Hacker News Board

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#141

Post by carstenhag » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

deanCommie wrote: post #103

johnchristopher wrote: post #7

While I suppose the protocol is not at fault and it's a UI and client bug it's still a huge problem. Just today I was thinking ”it's been weeks since they moved the GIF button to a different place but there's still the old button at the old place and when you click on it there's a pop-up "wrong, the button is somewhere else now"”. Why even keep the old button in the old place ? And it led me to thinking "what else co…

> Just today I was thinking ”it's been weeks since they moved the GIF button to a different place but there's still the old button at the old place and when you click on it there's a pop-up "wrong, the button is somewhere else now"”. That's actually a UX FEATURE. Google Maps did exactly the same thing when they reorganized and move the toggle between maps/satelite/traffic layers. The answer is pretty straightforward:…

I agree. Am an app dev myself and the weird maps relayout of gestures got me dozens of times... Can't imagine how condused my mum or some not phone-savy person is.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#142

Post by dunefox » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 7:28 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #115

dunefox wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, they invested a year into covert development of a crypto wallet inside Signal. Maybe that time could have been spent better.

From the commits I only really saw Moxie adding this and he hasn't been doing as much dev work in the last few years. So I don't feel that this took much away. It's hard to tell if it is a good move or not since Telegram and WA are both adding payments to their platforms and there is a need for feature parity. But regardless, MOB probably wasn't a good fit and we've seen no update since. My complaint is more than Sig…

> But I am saying maybe add a few more devs.

Absolutely, then such an important issue probably wouldn't stay open for this long.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#143

Post by hrjfjjfjfjd » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 7:28 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #131

hrjfjjfjfjd wrote: post #95

How can an unencrypted copy of some media end up at the wrong user? Isn't that supposed to be end-to-end encrypted, especially when stored on the signal servers?

The chat client misinterprets something and attaches a file to the message. The encryption works fine, the business logic of the app failed. E2EE won't protect you from a client accidentally encrypting and submitting files in the wrong chats.

But what exactly went wrong with signal here?

Could someone remotely instruct my signal client to share media? Previously sent or arbitrary files?

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#144

Post by dunefox » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

colesantiago wrote: post #138

dunefox wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is idiotic. It's strictly, objectively worse than Signal and not even acceptable in the worst case .

How can you be so sure if you haven't tried it? I'd rather use a chat app that takes security matters seriously and urgently and will eventually have E2E. What's more 'idiotic' is prioritising and bolting on cryptocurrencies [0] than fixing urgent security issues, leaving it for months unfixed, while also claiming to be private and secure, and also requiring your phone number. [0] https://www.wired.com/story/signal-m…

I agree that adding a crypto coin the way they did it is idiotic as well. But I wouldn't ditch an encrypted app for one that will 'eventually' be E2E encrypted. matrix.org is E2E encrypted and secure now and it's being used by France and Germany.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#145

Post by miken123 » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

greysonp wrote: post #78

Hi there, Signal-Android developer here. I updated the issue to reflect this, but this bug has been fixed. I was tracking it on a separate issue, and had forgotten to close this one. We do, in fact, take issues like this very seriously. This bug was extraordinarily rare, and because we have no metrics/remote log collection, there was an initial period where we had to spend time adding logging and collecting user-subm…

I find this quite concerning and am really wondering if there are any privacy advantages to Signal if these things happen.

Could you say something on:

1. Have any defend in depth measures been applied in the Android and other clients to make sure this issue does not happen again? E.g., an additional check when sending/encrypting a message to make sure it is absolutely meant for the person it is being send to? 2. Why did it take 8 months to fix this if some users could reproduce it consistently?

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#146

Post by gsich » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #118

andrewguenther wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This bug was extraordinarily rare, and because we have no metrics/remote log collection, there was an initial period where we had to spend time adding logging and collecting user-submitted logs to try to track it down. Without telemetry, can you actually back up the claim that this issue was extremely rare?

Even with telemetry, would you be able to back up the claim that that the issue was rare? All too often, people add telemetry to something in an attempt to try to find things like this, but they end up leaking things elsewhere and not accounting for them. Bad statistics are more dangerous than no statistics, and all that.

If this is the first instance of this bug being reported, then yes it's rare.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#147

Post by fsflover » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #122

mdoms wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on Earth are people downvoting you? This is an absolute dealbreaker for any messaging app, much less one whose raison d'etre is privacy and secure messaging.

So which app would you recommend?

Matrix.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#148

Post by reinforcedpaper » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

greysonp wrote: post #78

Hi there, Signal-Android developer here. I updated the issue to reflect this, but this bug has been fixed. I was tracking it on a separate issue, and had forgotten to close this one. We do, in fact, take issues like this very seriously. This bug was extraordinarily rare, and because we have no metrics/remote log collection, there was an initial period where we had to spend time adding logging and collecting user-subm…

From the explanation of the bug on github it seems to me like this is a client-side database issue and nothing was actually leaked. Database ids were reused so random images that were previously received were displayed in newly received messages.

Is this correct? If it is then it's probably worth mentioning.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#149

Post by pgalvin » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #84

antihero wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't even be bothered to do 2FA

Which messenger apps can be bothered to do 2FA?

Signal requires a PIN and an SMS code. WhatsApp has the option to add a password in addition to the SMS code. There are probably others.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#150

Post by hutrdvnj » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

NullPrefix wrote: post #126

hnarn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some details on how this assumption was made would be nice, but I think it's pretty obvious that any developer involved in a project can make a reasonable assumption of how rare a bug is depending on the technical details on what is required for the bug to happen. For example, if we say for the sake of argument that a hypothetical bug requires you to have more than ten contacts of the exact same name and these also n…

>for the sake of argument that a hypothetical bug requires you to have more than ten contacts of the exact same name and these also need to share the same country and area code This is only rare if you have a small social circle. My circle has multiple first name-collisions of at least 5 participants, but my circle is not very big and the area code is also quite small. Some countries do not use area codes for mobile…

Well he just wanted to make an example. One could also construct an example, where the bug only occurs for people with a rare sequence of unicode symbols (e.g. U+2600 U+2601 U+2602) in their username and have a specific date (e.g. 05.04.1920) as their birthday.