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Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

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Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#251

Post by maqp »

h_anna_h wrote: post #245
Santosh83 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email has weaker EtoE encryption than these IM solutions. Even with GPG. Too much metadata is leaked. However the decentralised nature of email is one crucial advantage it has over these apps.

"Weaker E2EE" as in "PFS is not commonly used with email". As for the metadata, no metadata is leaked that signal does not also leak.

>As for the metadata, no metadata is leaked that signal does not also leak.

Signal does not leak to third party servers with whom I talk to. There's encrypted comms to the server, and that's it. I try to talk to someone who has gmail account, Google now has access to 100% of my metadata with that contact. I trust Signal more than I trust Google with my metadata.

Also, there's precedent from TWO court cases Signal doesn't collect your metadata. Show me one email vendor that has such real-life proof about not collecting metadata about their users.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#252

Post by h_anna_h »

maqp wrote: post #205
colesantiago wrote: post #18

Signal is becoming a joke that we should reconsider using, and now has dangerous bugs that is at the edge of compromising people's privacy. Has this app/service really been audited properly? We now need to consider serious alternatives that we should get behind like Element [0] or Session [1] but I am open to user friendly alternatives other than Signal (at worst even Quill [2] or Delta Chat [3]). [0] https://element…

>serious alternatives How is Quill Chat that's proprietary and not E2EE a serious alternative? Element's UX is behind Signal but at least the encryption is E2EE by default. Session is a Signal fork with bad metadata protection: There's 60 entities owning Loki nodes, and top three players own 80% of nodes. Delta chat leaks metadata to email providers, and PGP has no forward secrecy or deniability. Element is the only…

> Delta chat leaks metadata to email providers, and PGP has no forward secrecy or deniability.

Signal leaks metadata to the signal server. Deniability is useless. Forward secrecy is cool as long as you are not using more than one device.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#253

Post by johnisgood »

gsich wrote: post #146
saagarjha wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The rarity of a bug is independent from reports of it.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#254

Post by hellcow »

maqp wrote: post #208
colesantiago wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which this bug was left open for months while users were experiencing this privacy issue. How can I recommend a chat app that does this and claim they are a privacy based app? and also does not respond to urgent bugs in this manner?

So what ingenious method should they have deployed to prevent all programming errors beforehand, and how should they have handled it? Advice users to fall-back to non E2EE SMS? The team deployed logging as fast as they could, successfully detected the issue as soon as it happened again, and deployed fix as fast as possible. What should they have done? If you only recommend chat apps with perfect track record, you're…

I don't think anyone takes issue with the fact that the mistake was made or that it was really hard to track down. Shit happens.

How you handle it is everything. No communication on it and issuing no warning to their users for a critical bug that risked user privacy in a substantial way for 7 months is unacceptable for an app that calls itself secure, full stop.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#255

Post by maqp »

hkt wrote: post #212
maqp wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, my contacts can keep using their gmail account and leak all communication metadata to Google without me having any say on that if I want to talk to them. Where can I sign up?

Maybe gently encourage your contacts to use another provider?

Nah, easier to get them to Signal when a large portion of their peers is already there. Plus Signal's more secure than Delta-Chat that's not even forward secret, that isn't audited, and that's using 30 year old PGP.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#256

Post by maqp »

johnchristopher wrote: post #89
bakoo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first issue was fixed and just closed, and seems like it was very difficult to track down.

It's fixed in 5.17 and this is the release number I see on the Google playstore. Unfortunately for my ubuntu 18.04 LTS and this is in no way Signal's fault (but maybe the desktop version doesn't have that bug ?): $ apt-cache policy signal-desktop signal-desktop: Installé : 5.10.0 Candidat : 5.10.0 Table de version : *** 5.10.0 500 500 https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt xenial/main amd64 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg…

Would rolling into the beta help here? https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318471-Si...

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#257

Post by barsonme »

johnisgood wrote: post #253
gsich wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The rarity of a bug is independent from reports of it.

That also depends on the severity of the bug. :)

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#258

Post by herpderperator »

A lot of people are talking about the bug but not the fix.

Is anyone else incredibly surprised that the fix was just adding auto_increment to the primary key column for two tables[0][1]? Not having these as auto_increment seems like incredible oversight to me. In what common scenario would you want a setup like that?

[0] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/83086a5a2...

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/b9657208f...

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#259

Post by ViViDboarder »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #20
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…

This underscores why it’s important to allow third party clients to connect. When only the first-party client is allowed, the failings of its UI drag down the core, too — it doesn’t matter how good the core is if it’s permanently mated to a half-baked UI.

With this party clients, you don’t avoid this. The failings of a third party client will still reflect on the whole of the core product as well. Articles would still talk about a bug like this breathing a Signal issue, even if limited to a third party app.

Additionally, I find it quite a stretch to call the app “half-baked”. I think it’s pretty great.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#260

Post by NavinF »

rasengan wrote: post #192
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…

You should have shut down the servers while this was happening - especially because you couldn't track it down. Shame on you for not caring about your users or their privacy when they were specifically using Signal for privacy. Edit: Anyone downvoting this also simply doesn't understand how serious this privacy leak really is. Shame on you too.

It's pretty much impossible to distinguish rare bugs from user error if you don't have logging/telemetry.
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