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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

#271

Post by doctor_eval »

varispeed wrote: post #189
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…

Why would anyone think that re-use of ID was a good idea?

Perhaps that’s why it was a bug?

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#272

Post by hackinthebochs »

tomudding wrote: post #124
TekMol wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide a link to the commit that fixes it? Shouldn't there have been an announcement to inform users what has been leaked and under which circumstances? How can user A send an image to user B that neither of them took? Isn't everything end-2-end encrypted? Then how can unencrypted data from user C end up on the device of user B?

> Can you provide a link to the commit that fixes it? If I understand the issue [0] correctly, these two commits should be the fix: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/e90fa05d6... https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/b9657208f... The former updates how recipients (or really threads, I suppose) are merged (the issue occurred when trimming threads) and the latter changes the way how thread…

Using incrementing ids as your source of ownership is just asking for trouble. This just means a programming error can have a high probability of ids lining up and leaking resources. Guids make this practically impossible.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#273

Post by GekkePrutser »

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…

One thing I wonder is: how could this happen at all? Considering the E2E Encryption in place, I would expect the incorrect recipient simply wouldn't be able to decode the image considering they never have exchanged keys with the sender?

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#274

Post by eternalban »

I'm not up on my signal protocol but using PGP, sending encrypted messages to the wrong person would result in them getting an encrypted message they can not decipher. If a bug in signal allows a third party to decrypt a message intended for another person, does that means that signal servers see plaintext messages?

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#275

Post by proactivesvcs »

63 wrote: post #37

Several years ago I had this same issue occur in Facebook Messenger. I was using a pretty slow outdated device even for the time. I went to take a picture to send with the in-app camera. I actually pressed send before the picture rendered on my screen and somehow what was sent was not the picture I took, but a picture of some man's forehead who neither of us had ever seen before. It seemed like a pretty huge bug that…

It also happened to Skype around 2011ish. IIRC it was so frequent that I simply stopped using the software until a fix was released.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#276

Post by lwhi »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #207
lwhi wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. If that really is the choice, they should drop the secure moniker without further debate. -- If you produce a product that claims to be secure, the onus is on you to back up those claims. Off the top my my head there are many ways to implement measures that can help to encourage security going forward. One of the benefits of coding in the open, and ascribing to opens standards and protocols is transparenc…

> One of the benefits of coding in the open, and ascribing to opens standards and protocols is transparency and the ability for all to interrogate the code. They already do all of those things. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android

You need to reread my post.

The situation is far more complicated than your link to the GitHub repo would indicate.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#277

Post by runarberg »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #273
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…

One thing I wonder is: how could this happen at all? Considering the E2E Encryption in place, I would expect the incorrect recipient simply wouldn't be able to decode the image considering they never have exchanged keys with the sender?

Not a signal developer, but I would imagine it would be fairly simple that the same bug also encrypted the message with the eventual receiver’s key (as opposed to the intended receiver’s key). Resulting in a message which the eventual receiver could decrypt but not the intended receiver.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#279

Post by lwhi »

sneak wrote: post #250
ghoward wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moxie Marlinspike is famously belligerent against Signal forks, so no, the license does not really help here.

It does. You are allowed to fork or reimplement the Signal client, and even distribute it, with the official Signal servers configured, so long as you do not infringe the Signal trademark. They don't like forks using their servers, but it's the users who connect to their servers, not the fork publisher. Those users are permitted to connect via the TOS, which is independent from the GPL.

They also refuse to open source their server software.

This is the problem in my mind. Open source in words, but not spirit.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#280

Post by tylermenezes »

hutzlibu wrote: post #229
tylermenezes wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not at all selective. This should have been "all they worked on" from the moment they got several confirmations, not from the moment people beat them over the head with data. If they couldn't fix it they should have pulled the app. This is a company that aggressively markets itself to people needing privacy, and mistakes can ruin lives. And before you say it, they have tens of millions of dollars in funding.

Well yes, maybe they should have put more people on it, from day one. But even though they have solid funding, doesn't mean they can throw it out the window. And non reproducible bugs can be hard, even when you throw money at them. But your quote was almost a textbook example of selective quoting, because you said, that they said they did a quick fix, when it really took over 6 months. But they did not say this - the…

"But even though they have solid funding, doesn't mean they can throw it out the window."

This is a product which is advertised as private, marketed extensively toward people requiring privacy. Knowing they're accidentally sending images to the wrong people is a HUGE, priority 1 problem.

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