Technology Preview: Signal Private Group System

Post by commoner » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 7:10 AM UTC

stilisstuk wrote: post #60

tptacek wrote: post #2

Again, in the theme of "features every group messaging system had already, but Signal didn't, because they hadn't figured out a way to implement it without turning Signal's central servers into a database of who's talking to who about what". Signal didn't even have user profiles until recently, for the same reason. Here, they've slightly expanded the state of the art in MAC-based anonymous credentials to accomplish t…

Been using signal since textsecure I think (I even think there was another name before that). In all that time, one thing keeps me thinking about backing out: phone numbers. When a contact decides to uninstall signal, I lose contact. Signal still thinks that the recipient has a signal account, and hence won't deliver messages via SMS.

Post by Arathorn » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 7:43 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #14

pepijndevos wrote: post #10

I really want Signal to succeed. Or rather, I want anything that has decent cryto and is not FAANG to succeed. The problem is not which messaging app I want to use, it's which messaging app my friends are using. That said, if I had to choose, I think Matrix has a slight edge in my books because it's a protocol rather than a silo. Even though Signal is private and open source, they are hostile towards people running t…

Matrix and Signal aren't comparable from a security perspective. Because Matrix is a protocol rather than a silo, many (most?) of its implementations don't even support E2E, and because Matrix has its roots in an ecosystem where E2E was a nonstandard add-on, Matrix will never be as safe as Wire or Signal.

Post by stilisstuk » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 8:16 AM UTC

commoner wrote: post #111

stilisstuk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been using signal since textsecure I think (I even think there was another name before that). In all that time, one thing keeps me thinking about backing out: phone numbers. When a contact decides to uninstall signal, I lose contact. Signal still thinks that the recipient has a signal account, and hence won't deliver messages via SMS.

Former Signal users can unregister their phone numbers from Signal on this page: https://signal.org/signal/unregister

Post by AmericanChopper » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 8:29 AM UTC

ajvs wrote: post #114

AmericanChopper wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there something I'm missing that makes this a hard problem? Yes. Pretty much the entire security model of Signal underpinned by this UX compromise. The way signal works at the moment, you sign up for an account with your phone number, your device generates a secret, and that secret is used to secure all your communication. You can pass that secret around devices (as long as you have a device that has it - or jus…

How does Matrix/Riot accomplish this successfully then?

Post by Krasnol » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 8:52 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #19

tptacek wrote: post #2

Again, in the theme of "features every group messaging system had already, but Signal didn't, because they hadn't figured out a way to implement it without turning Signal's central servers into a database of who's talking to who about what". Signal didn't even have user profiles until recently, for the same reason. Here, they've slightly expanded the state of the art in MAC-based anonymous credentials to accomplish t…

Honestly, the one and only feature I'm missing in Signal that would let me use it and recommend it to everyone without reservations (rather than exclusively for ephemeral-only communication) is the ability to keep identity and full message history when moving to a new device. Today, on iOS, you can't move your Signal history to a new device, and on Android you can only do so by manually making an encrypted backup fil…