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‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

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Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#171

Post by akvadrako »

BelleOfTheBall wrote: post #165
akvadrako wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Telegram's encrypted chats have not had nearly enough analysis to be trusted. They used to use some bad home-grown techniques, now it's just "probably secure enough". Their client code also isn't really open source, even though they claim it is. While Signal has reproducible builds.

Huh? Their client code isn't just fully open-source, it also has reproducible builds both on Android and iOS, has been for a while. Doesn't Signal only have them on Android? It's a great app either way but if RBs matter, that's a little knock against it.

Where did you get that idea from?

Their client code is not usable because they don't provide working instructions for compiling it. If you can't compile it, they can't have reproducible builds.

For example, see this issue from 2019 which the developers still haven't replied to:

https://github.com/TelegramMessenger/Telegram-iOS/issues/97

There are a lot more issues about people not being able to use the code, none of which get any replies from the owners.

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#172

Post by wkat4242 »

timschmidt wrote: post #114
kyledrake wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moxie Marlinspike is a lot of things but I'm pretty confident the queen bee of a honeypot is not one of them.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/127

Yeah moxie is diametrically opposed to me. This is why I don't promote signal and only use it through matrix for those two people who don't use anything else. Which is also in contravention to his highness' wishes because he hates third party clients.

Moxie believes in security above everything even if it takes choices away from the user and forces you to trust a third party (in this case him, but also the mobile vendor and Google because he doesn't trust custom firmware either). Basically what he calls the mobile security model. And the reason I hate mobile devices with their closed model and attestation crap to make sure I play by the vendor's rules.

I believe a user should always have the final say in everything. If the user makes it insecure that's their business. Basically the desktop security model. And the reason I don't like working on mobile devices if I can avoid it.

I'm as principalled as he (and other people like him) is so I wouldn't even enter an argument, there's no point.

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#173

Post by caskstrength »

entropyneur wrote: post #127
VincentEvans wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no need to “hack” anything in Belarus. They simply resort to torture. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/12/23/critics-slam-16-ye...

They do both. Source: am Belarusian, both things happened to my friends (specifically with respect to Telegram account access).

Did you friends that were hacked had the PIN set for their Telegram accounts? I'm curious whether there is actually a Telegram "hack" or yet another SMS hijacking (via ss7 or by just directly co-opting the telco).

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#175

Post by wkat4242 »

lostmsu wrote: post #95
acc_297 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you and your group chat friends can meet up in person once to input an agreed upon a ~1Gb one-time-pad then you can exchange uncrackable text messages for years on any insecure channel I’ve long felt that this is the ideal solution for anything super super secret

That actually makes a lot of sense. Matrix should add it as a feature.

There's too many practical drawbacks. For example you have to send the OTP without getting it intercepted. How do you do that? It also has to be truly random. You can't pick a page from a book or anything, that undermines the whole model and makes cryptanalysis possible.

It's useful but only in very specific cases. Mostly it's just a paradigm in cryptography.

Note that for all its fame as unbreakable it does lack perfect forward secrecy so anyone getting a hold of it from any of the participants can read their intercepts from all the way back.

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#176

Post by anonymoose33282 »

super256 wrote: post #84
entropyneur wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse. 2FA is optional and SMS code is the first (and default) auth method.

> It's worse. 2FA is optional and SMS code is the first (and default) auth method. This will be changed on Saturday. Got the following message about API changes last week: https://telegra.ph/Telegram-API-Changes-02-16

But given the choice, isn't SMS a stronger first authentication factor? It's temporary and randomized, whereas users don't change passwords that frequently. So a password is much more susceptible to keyloggers/malware/brute-force than an SMS code.

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#177

Post by entropyneur »

caskstrength wrote: post #173
entropyneur wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do both. Source: am Belarusian, both things happened to my friends (specifically with respect to Telegram account access).

Did you friends that were hacked had the PIN set for their Telegram accounts? I'm curious whether there is actually a Telegram "hack" or yet another SMS hijacking (via ss7 or by just directly co-opting the telco).

Both hacking victims I personally know didn't have the 2FA password set and were hacked via SMS hijacking. I'm following this pretty closely and so far haven't heard of successful attacks of any other type. One semi-exception is [1], but here the victim's device was captured and most likely used to receive the password reset email.

[1] https://habr.com/ru/post/598939/

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#178

Post by BelleOfTheBall »

akvadrako wrote: post #171
BelleOfTheBall wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Their client code isn't just fully open-source, it also has reproducible builds both on Android and iOS, has been for a while. Doesn't Signal only have them on Android? It's a great app either way but if RBs matter, that's a little knock against it.

Where did you get that idea from? Their client code is not usable because they don't provide working instructions for compiling it. If you can't compile it, they can't have reproducible builds. For example, see this issue from 2019 which the developers still haven't replied to: https://github.com/TelegramMessenger/Telegram-iOS/issues/97 There are a lot more issues about people not being able to use the code, none of…

From their official announcement of reproducible builds. And this seems to be the instructions: https://core.telegram.org/reproducible-builds

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#179

Post by kragen »

jancsika wrote: post #143
kragen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also how do you ensure the messages haven't been corrupted in transit

1. For each letter of the plaintext, concatenate "dontcorruptmebro" 2. Grab 17 letters from the pad (I'm assuming pad means the randomly chosen letters that make up the 1 gigabyte of shared secret among the participants) 3. Convert the first letter of the pad to a number (let's say 1-26) 4. Right-shift the message by that amount and let the letters wrap around: e.g., if the plaintext letter is g and we're shifting by…

not sure; i think this just means the attacker has to guess one letter of the pad in addition to the crib, so (with your example alphabet) they need 26× as many tries to get a corrupted message through

Re: ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’

#180

Post by anonym29 »

WolfeReader wrote: post #168
anonym29 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it locks you into using their servers, does not distribute on F-Droid (only Google Play OR an APK with an insecure update mechanism), and has a completely closed-source "abusive message filter" module server side, that could functionally be used for censorship, storing messages for future decryption, or any other number of nefarious purposes - we have no idea since it's not open source ( https://github.…

Signal uses Curve25519, AES-256, and HMAC-SHA256 for its e2e encryption. So unless you believe those algorithms are insecure, there's no reason to think that their server setup is a compromise on your messages' security. Fear of "future decryption" applies equally to all forms of encrypted communication, regardless of which servers the messages go through. And since AES-256 is known to resist quantum computing decryp…

You don't need to break encryption to engage in censorship based on unencrypted metadata.

OWS is based in San Francisco. The US federal government has compelled providers to introduce backdoors or start logging information that was not being logged before for certain IP addresses or user identifiers - phone numbers in this case, and done so under gag orders that prevent companies from disclosing it. Judges can rule that use of a warrant canary as intended can violate these gag orders as well.

Just because Signal can share 1 or 2 instances of cases where information was requested and they did not comply does not mean they never have, weren't able to in the past, or aren't able to in the future.

As others have stated, using Signal is putting a lot of trust into the OWS legal entity, and proper cryptosystems should not rely on trust.

I hadn't heard of Molly and am checking it out now, thank you for sharing.

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