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Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

micahflee.com

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Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#31

Post by ryanwatkins »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #15
ComputerGuru wrote: post #10

White House communications director previously revealed (after “Signalgate”) that Signal was an approved and whitelisted app for gov’t officials to have on work phones and even discuss top-secret matters on. But I haven’t heard that TeleMessage was approved (and I’d have serious questions if it were given the foreign intelligence factor). Anyone know if there is a clear answer to whether it’s been approved?

It was incontrovertibly approved as it is only installable via MDM. A likely explanation is that the communications director (or the people informing her) wouldn’t know to distinguish between Signal the app, and a Signal compatible app that is nearly indistinguishable from Signal. A lot like Kleenex is a common term for tissue paper regardless of brand. When the leak was first revealed, there was loud speculation abo…

> It was incontrovertibly approved as it is only installable via MDM.

Only if this his standard govt issued phone. It's also been shown they are also using their own personal phones. The could easily be using unapproved phones some random DOGE'er bought gave them with an MDM setup, without any real oversight.

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#32

Post by pvg »

spenvo wrote: post #20

There is new reporting that a hacker has breached the parent company, TeleMessage, including live data being passed across servers in production. https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-use... It was marked as a DUPE of this discussion, despite being a major new development https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890034 Hopefully that decision can be reconsidered

You can just link the new development in an ongoing story that's already on the front page, just like you did. The alternative would be a second front page thread which splits the discussion and is worse all-round.

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#33

Post by baobun »

spenvo wrote: post #20

There is new reporting that a hacker has breached the parent company, TeleMessage, including live data being passed across servers in production. https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-use... It was marked as a DUPE of this discussion, despite being a major new development https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890034 Hopefully that decision can be reconsidered

There seems to be a coordinated and consistent campaign to bury submissions from 404 Media on HN. Hopefully something can be done about that, too.

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#34

Post by dashundchen »

ryanwhitney wrote: post #24

https://archive.is/2025.05.04-225615/https://www.404media.co... Why are these being instantly marked as dead?

Anything with a potentially negative impact on Musk, Trump or DOGE seems to get flagged immediately. Coordinated or not it extremely frustrating people flag rather than honestly engage.

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#36

Post by spenvo »

pvg wrote: post #32
spenvo wrote: post #20

There is new reporting that a hacker has breached the parent company, TeleMessage, including live data being passed across servers in production. https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-use... It was marked as a DUPE of this discussion, despite being a major new development https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890034 Hopefully that decision can be reconsidered

You can just link the new development in an ongoing story that's already on the front page, just like you did. The alternative would be a second front page thread which splits the discussion and is worse all-round.

That's a fair point, and it's your call - however, if the new (major) development is covered in this way then 1) users on the front page won't see mention of it at headline level and 2) the discussion of that development on HN will be affected by/limited to the time-decay of a post that is 12 hours older. I understand that there are tradeoffs at play, it really comes down to if the development at hand is big-enough to justify another post, and, again, that's your call.

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#37

Post by khaki54 »

voytec wrote: post #16

> 404 Media journalist Joseph Cox published a story pointing out that Waltz was not using the official Signal app, but rather "an obscure and unofficial version of Signal that is designed to archive messages" Wow. And that's while their entire point of using Signal is to have conversations scrapped after a week to leave no no traces of criminal activity.

Do you think they are using the message archiving version so that they can meet organizational message retention requirements? Maybe they are using signal to ensure they have e2e encrypted messaging on their devices?

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#38

Post by dang »

1oooqooq wrote: post #19
dang wrote: post #8

I appended a 'd' to the end of the title to pre-empt objections that they're not still using it. If it's known for sure that they are, we can de-'d' that bit. Edit: this subthread is obsolete now - I took a phrase from the author's update to the article to use as the title above.

honest question, but you decided to go against the "don't change titles" rule to choose one unprovable point until another just as unprovable point is proven? it could be argued both ways with the same argument.

There's no "don't change titles" rule, though it's interesting how the actual rule gets truncated to that in people's minds! Here's the actual rule:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In this case I was thinking of both the 'misleading' and 'linkbait' bits of that 'unless'. (By the way, this is common HN moderation practice—bog standard, as I often say.)

> to choose one unprovable point until another just as unprovable point is proven

You might have a, er, provable point if that were the case! but I'm taking for granted that the officials in question did actually use this client, so "used" is known while "use" (which I took to mean "are still using") isn't yet known for sure. Did I miss something?

Edit: btw, in case anyone's wondering why we left the submitted title up instead of reverting it to what the article says, one reason is that the submitted title struck me as arguably less linkbaity (and therefore ok under the rule) and the other reason is that we cut authors a bit of slack when they post their own work.

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#39

Post by an0malous »

tedunangst wrote: post #17
voytec wrote: post #16

> 404 Media journalist Joseph Cox published a story pointing out that Waltz was not using the official Signal app, but rather "an obscure and unofficial version of Signal that is designed to archive messages" Wow. And that's while their entire point of using Signal is to have conversations scrapped after a week to leave no no traces of criminal activity.

I don't think it follows that they selected the archiving messenger because they wanted disappearing messages. The whole disappearing messages thing was just internet speculation.

No it was reported by the journalist who was in the chat.

> Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-a...

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#40

Post by watusername »

spenvo wrote: post #36
pvg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just link the new development in an ongoing story that's already on the front page, just like you did. The alternative would be a second front page thread which splits the discussion and is worse all-round.

That's a fair point, and it's your call - however, if the new (major) development is covered in this way then 1) users on the front page won't see mention of it at headline level and 2) the discussion of that development on HN will be affected by/limited to the time-decay of a post that is 12 hours older. I understand that there are tradeoffs at play, it really comes down to if the development at hand is big-enough t…

I concur. An analysis of potential risks and vulnerabilities is a different beast from actual proof that the app has indeed been hacked. I call for the other discussion to be restored.

Edit: Wanted to respond to the top-level comment but you get the point.

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