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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

#351

Post by twobitshifter »

cycomanic wrote: post #249

The bigger story is the follow up that shows someone already hacked telemessage because the app seems to be vulnerable to several exploits (and transmits data in the clear apparently). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43896138

I can’t read that full article, but are you saying the chats go e2e encrypted into signal and then come out non e2e when transmitting to the archive? That seems like an unlikely design for even an amateur. Why wouldn’t you just add something like an archive bot that sits in signal chats and sees everything e2e?

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

#353

Post by selenography »

dragontamer wrote: post #346
mycatisblack wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-native English understander, I find it funny that discussions related to politics are “flagged”. I.e. carrying a flag.

Someone carrying a flag is flagging. Someone who had a flag applied to them was flagged. Noun to verb conjugations are unofficial English. But we love verbing our words. Google has been verbed into Googling. And when someone is the target of Google we call that getting Googled. It's again, unofficial and unwritten and unstudied American English. So don't sweat it. It's how our slang evolves. Apologies for the lack of…

> It's again, unofficial and unwritten and unstudied American English.

Hm? Where'd you get that impression?

It's certainly unofficial -- English has no official governing body, so essentially _all_ English is unofficial. However, zero-derived denominal verbs are quite common in even formal written English [0], are well studied [1], and aren't at all limited to American English [2].

----

[0] As seen in this very thread.

[1] It took me almost no time to find a random academic paper [1a] and two Wikipedia articles [1b][1c].

[1a] https://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~hharley/PDFs/HarleyDenominalV...

[1b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denominal_verb

[1c] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(word_formation)

[2] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/the-pedant-noun...

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

#354

Post by jetbalsa »

XorNot wrote: post #240
jetbalsa wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interesting to dump the app binaries so people can take a look at how its put together, I suspect its a minefield of sloppy injection functions into how signal works.

Signal is open source for the client, no one is doing work they don't have to cracking a binary you can just compile.

I was looking for the modified client to look into, not the main line signal binary

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

#355

Post by batch12 »

mycatisblack wrote: post #305
matsemann wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I never clicked into this when I originally saw it because I'm not that interested in a "technical analysis", but gained interest when the other title said that the app was hacked. To me, that's worth discussing, but here that lede is a bit buried. And I now only know about it because a friend sent me the link. I do feel there's a pattern of me reading some interesting tech news, then thinking "wait, why didn't…

As a non-native English understander, I find it funny that discussions related to politics are “flagged”. I.e. carrying a flag.

I also read it as carrying a flag (applied by others) to highlight that it needs to be reviewed or hidden.

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

#356

Post by dang »

osrec wrote: post #330
dang wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890179 for discussion of whether that article should count as a follow-up or SNI. Normally I wouldn't link to meta discussion but this was such a weird borderline case that I spent over an hour trying to figure it out. Maybe that makes it interesting. Edit: in case anyone's confused about the sequence here, micahflee posted the current thread 2 days ago. The timestamp a…

SNI means?

Sorry! norome is correct. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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

#357

Post by nitwit005 »

nozzlegear wrote: post #342
aucisson_masque wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israël have different interest than the usa. Today they may collide in most instances, who's to say tomorrow it will still be the case. For instance when Iran gets the nuclear bomb and threaten Israel with it ? An encrypted messaging system, used by the American government, is in my opinion even worst than the supposed Huawei 5g antenna data collection. Huawei wouldn't have had access to secret talk between top gover…

>For instance when Iran gets the nuclear bomb and threaten Israel with it ? I don't know if this was your intention, but it's exceedingly likely that the US would side with Israel in all circumstances if Iran threatened Israel with a nuclear weapon, no matter who is president. In fact, the threat of Iran attacking Israel was one of the key reasons† Biden refused to unilaterally stop all arms shipments to Israel. † So…

Given that Trump's foreign policy is quite alien compared to his predecessors, I don't know how valuable looking to the past is for this sort of thing. A new president, of any political bent, may follow the example and make further breaks with the past.

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

#358

Post by taejo »

twobitshifter wrote: post #351
cycomanic wrote: post #249

The bigger story is the follow up that shows someone already hacked telemessage because the app seems to be vulnerable to several exploits (and transmits data in the clear apparently). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43896138

I can’t read that full article, but are you saying the chats go e2e encrypted into signal and then come out non e2e when transmitting to the archive? That seems like an unlikely design for even an amateur. Why wouldn’t you just add something like an archive bot that sits in signal chats and sees everything e2e?

It seems TM SGNL also works when you're messaging with somebody using the genuine Signal app. They aren't gonna make a group chat with your archive bot to message you, and they might not be pleased when you add them to such a group chat.

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

#359

Post by dang »

crazydoggers wrote: post #345
dang wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890179 for discussion of whether that article should count as a follow-up or SNI. Normally I wouldn't link to meta discussion but this was such a weird borderline case that I spent over an hour trying to figure it out. Maybe that makes it interesting. Edit: in case anyone's confused about the sequence here, micahflee posted the current thread 2 days ago. The timestamp a…

This article doesn’t include information on the Hack. The 404 media article linked in this article is an earlier article. The 404 media article with the hack was posted last night at 6pm. So that needs a seperate post, and should not be marked duped.

I think I addressed all these points in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43896978 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43901823, but if you read those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I can take a crack at it.

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

#360

Post by quantadev »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #350
quantadev wrote: post #245

To me the shocking thing about the USA Gov't is that they manage to lose trillions in the defense dept that they can't account for, but somehow are unable to develop their own communications apps? What? Signing messages with a crypto key takes like 4 lines of code. It's not rocket science. Yet they use some corporate app? My only theory is that they're pretending to have only 'Signal' so that when they want to they c…

You are severely overestimating the intelligence levels of the people currently occupying the halls of power in America.

I don't think the current administration came up with the idea of using Signal. However whatever team did was pretty "security illiterate" (to use a polite phrase), unless the NSA is secretly operating Signal from the inside. It's hard to know which is the case.
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