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Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

#301
post #93

that gives a better explanation on why telegram is safer in real world settings than whastapp or other popular messengers: https://x.com/Pinboard/status/1474096410383421452

Seems to hang on some loading screen overlay. If it fits in a toot, care to just copy it here and save people a click?

Re: Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. WhatsApp only keep them temporarily (and E2EE!) until they're delivered to each device. Signal too. Telegram keeps everything for all time. Which is kinda handy too I have to say. Of course you can send your backup to Google for WhatsApp and signal but that's optional. You can keep it locally too. And it's encrypted too. With WhatsApp you can even choose to keep the key locally only.

WhatsApp? The closed source app that AFAIK has never been externally audited, owned by one of the most privacy-disrespecting corporations in the world? You say I can trust it wholeheartedly as long as I don't upload backups to the cloud?

The founder departing Meta on very bad terms is quite a signal to me:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive...

Re: Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

#303
post #46

Fascinating. I might have missed it, but I don't think the author mentioned the possibility of steganography. Just code the encrypted text such that it resembles a normal conversation.

Steganography is pointless given that encrypted and metadata protected communication is ubiquitously available to those who need it. Steganography is a niche you read about in your first year of studying the world of privacy and what you completely forget because nobody has time for spycraft when there's life to be lived. The novelty wears out faster than you can imagine.

Re: Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

#304

The author claims that everyone refers to Telegram as an encrypted messenger, but he only provides a single example to support that. I quickly checked Google News and couldn't find any media on the first page that did the same. It feels like a manipulation. UPDATE: anyone who downvote, I invite to check for themselves. Just a few known media: 1. https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/8/25/telegram-messag... 2. https…

Lol

https://www.google.com/search?q=Telegram+"encrypted+messagin...

Re: Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

#305

Something that might be interesting in this topic - forked version [0] of telegram client made during protests in Belarus in 2020 (and appears to be actively maintained to this day). Can't vouch for it, but found it interesting. [0] https://github.com/wrwrabbit/Partisan-Telegram-Android

That GitHub account is… interesting.

Re: Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

#306
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a misrepresentation. Telegram could at-will feed the cloud-2FA password to password hashing function like Argon2 to derive a client-side encryption key. Everything could be backed up to the cloud in encrypted state only you can access. Do they do that? No. So it's not as much as trade-off, as it is half-assed security design.

Telegram currently has very intuitive and snappy search, even in very active groups with years of content. That's because the heavy lifting is done by the server. Think that'd still be possible if there was no way for the server to process the data?

Yeah, try searching anything older than a year, the amazing snappy search grinds to halt. Meanwhile I'm storing years worth of stuff on Signal with no issues, and it searches ridiculously fast offline with no seconds long pause for buffering.

Re: Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

#307
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a misrepresentation. Telegram could at-will feed the cloud-2FA password to password hashing function like Argon2 to derive a client-side encryption key. Everything could be backed up to the cloud in encrypted state only you can access. Do they do that? No. So it's not as much as trade-off, as it is half-assed security design.

Telegram currently has very intuitive and snappy search, even in very active groups with years of content. That's because the heavy lifting is done by the server. Think that'd still be possible if there was no way for the server to process the data?

PCs and phones been fast enough to have snappy search on text data for years now.

Is "grep" not snappy enough for you?

Re: Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

#308
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> you can install a reproducible build of Telegram and be sure it's end-to-end encrypting things. This is incorrect. The construction for group chats in Telegram is not e2e at all. The construction for dm’s is considered dubious by many cryptographers. It does not matter if you can reproduce a non-e2e encrypted message scheme, you must still trust the servers which you have no visibility on. Trustworthy e2e is table…

It's interesting how all these years later and cryptographers can still only be dubious; nobody has actually cracked the implementation (or if they have, they haven't publicized it for whatever reason).

Re: Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

#309
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this true for Signal too? I thought it wasn’t. It is, because you cannot use Signal without giving them your mobile phone number, and from that point onward they (and anyone they might be sharing data with) know the who/what/when, and more. My gut feeling, notwithstanding any apologist and their weak arguments, is that the design choice is exactly about the who/what/when because it's mandatory despite being enti…

How does it follow that Signal knowing a phone number means they know who the identity that phone number represents is communicating with?

Every Signal account is represented by the phone number the user provided in order to receive their SMS activation code, and messages are not sent directly between users' clients/apps but relayed through Signal's systems.

Re: Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?

#310

>One of the biggest privacy problems in messaging is the availability of loads of meta-data — essentially data about who uses the service, who they talk to, and when they do that talking. >I am not specifically calling out Telegram for this, since the same problem exists with virtually every other social media network and private messenger. In fact, https://simplex.chat/ is the only messenger with the least amount of…

This snake oil is spreading like [Herpes] Simplex .

Again, the company lies about queues (a programming technique) being a privacy feature.

The application can not get rid of the metadata of server knowing which IPs are conversing, unless the clients explicitly connect to the service via Tor. The server must always know from which connection to which connection it routes packets. It's not a network hub, it's a switch, after all.

https://cwtch.im/ and https://briarproject.org/ route everything through Tor always, and they don't have server in the middle, which means there is no centralized authority to collect metadata. It's light years ahead of what Simplex pretends to offer.

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