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Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

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

#191

Post by cesarb »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #164
jFriedensreich wrote: post #156

Here is the thing about e2e encrypted messengers: They lock you and your data in and do not allow you control of your life. There is a right to data portability (at least in the eu) that they violate and there is no one fighting for it. Whenever i engage in conversation about this i get empty faces, hostility and vague references to features that are crippled or just don't work at all. There are people and institutio…

There's a difference between data transport and data hosting. Modern expectations of messengers seem to blur this line and it's better if it's not blurred. Incidentally: The reason why they blur it is because of 2 network asymmetries prevalent since the 1990's that enforced a disempowering "all-clients-must-go-through-a-central-server model" of communications. Those 2 asymmetries are A) clients have lower bandwidth t…

> Those 2 asymmetries are A) clients have lower bandwidth than servers and B) IPv4 address exhaustion and the need/insistence on NAT.

There's a third asymmetry: C) power-constrained clients which are asleep most of the time. And this applies not only to battery-powered phones/tablets and laptops, but also to modern desktops which are configured by default to suspend on inactivity.

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

#192

Post by Analemma_ »

woodruffw wrote: post #160
jFriedensreich wrote: post #156

Here is the thing about e2e encrypted messengers: They lock you and your data in and do not allow you control of your life. There is a right to data portability (at least in the eu) that they violate and there is no one fighting for it. Whenever i engage in conversation about this i get empty faces, hostility and vague references to features that are crippled or just don't work at all. There are people and institutio…

I don't understand this: there's nothing intrinsic to e2e that makes interoperability particularly hard. There are multiple open-source e2e protocols that demonstrate this tidily, and my understanding is that there are governments in the EU that are adopting e.g. Matrix for this reason. > show a sign similar to ssl warnings in browsers to the other side that this user is using an archival api service. There is no sou…

If you have interoperability, then you need cipher negotiation between clients with different capabilities (and they will always have different capabilities), and that's a huge, juicy attack surface. Multiple critical SSL/TLS CVEs-- including some we know for a fact the NSA relied on-- came from cipher negotiation.

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

#194

Post by Zak »

croemer wrote: post #120
be_erik wrote: post #64

There’s chatter on bsky. But tl;dr anything said on those phones is assumed to be compromised until proven otherwise by time or a whole lot of very interesting security verifications. So far the evidence that this is a very large leak looks probable based on the evidence presented.

Why do you say "everything said on those phones" - did you mean "on this app"? If the backend of an app was compromised, that wouldn't mean the phone itself was rooted?

It is reasonable to assume that the intelligence services of unfriendly countries are actively devoting significant resources to compromising both issued and personal phones of top-level officials in the US government. They would be negligent not to. It's also a good guess that those efforts would be increased after the first time it became public knowledge the officials were likely using those phones for secret official business.

It is also reasonable to guess that such services have access to malware similar to the infamous Pegasus and a nonzero success rate at deploying it. In short, it's careless to assume none of the phones aren't rooted by a hostile actor.

That's one of several reasons the government has rules requiring that classified conversations take place on specific approved devices which aren't used for anything else.

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

#195

Post by like_any_other »

woodruffw wrote: post #161
mdhb wrote: post #3

The big part of this story which nobody is talking about is the fact that the app is literally controlled by a bunch of “former” Israeli intelligence officers. Who now have what is arguably the worlds most valuable access out of anyone.

I don't think it's that big: USG procures defense and intelligence tech more or less constantly from Israel. It's unlikely that Israel would threaten that relationship (and the value they extract from it in terms of favorable relations) in exchange for military intelligence that's already shared with them. (I feel like I have to say this in every thread that insinuates something sinister about being a "former Israeli…

> I don't think it's that big: USG procures defense and intelligence tech more or less constantly from Israel. It's unlikely that Israel would threaten that relationship (and the value they extract from it in terms of favorable relations) in exchange for military intelligence that's already shared with them.

Correct - they would not use that intelligence to threaten that relationship, but to maintain it. Knowing the political leanings of politicians and government officials (for example, identifying any that think that relationship is more of a cost than a benefit) is extremely valuable to that end.

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

#196

Post by Zak »

namdnay wrote: post #131
LordShredda wrote: post #2

The decision to use a signal knockoff was a planned and managed one, not just on a whim. Who's responsible for managing the phones?

It's not really a knockoff, it's a deliberately cracked version of a B2C app to adapt it to a corporate setting

The Signal client app is open source; it's probably not reasonable to describe a modified version as "cracked". Signal does discourage the use of modified clients for security reasons, but does not actively block most of them.

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

#197

Post by woodruffw »

Analemma_ wrote: post #192
woodruffw wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this: there's nothing intrinsic to e2e that makes interoperability particularly hard. There are multiple open-source e2e protocols that demonstrate this tidily, and my understanding is that there are governments in the EU that are adopting e.g. Matrix for this reason. > show a sign similar to ssl warnings in browsers to the other side that this user is using an archival api service. There is no sou…

If you have interoperability, then you need cipher negotiation between clients with different capabilities (and they will always have different capabilities), and that's a huge, juicy attack surface. Multiple critical SSL/TLS CVEs-- including some we know for a fact the NSA relied on-- came from cipher negotiation.

> If you have interoperability, then you need cipher negotiation between clients with different capabilities (and they will always have different capabilities), and that's a huge, juicy attack surface.

Not really. The degree of malleability in cipher negotiation is widely considered to have been a Bad Move in SSL/TLS's early design, and modern (well-designed) cryptographic protocols don't enable the kinds of parametric malleability that made SSL/TLS so exploitable at the time.

Signal's protocol, for example, is perfectly interoperable; the lack of interoperability comes from a (not unreasonable) constraint at the application layer, not the protocol itself. Another example would be MLS[1], which supports fixed suites rather than parametric malleability and uses the technique from RFC 8701[2] to prevent clients from getting clever and trying to add their own extensions that undermine the fixed suites.

[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9420/

[2]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8701.html

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

#198

Post by dgellow »

thenewwazoo wrote: post #193

[edit: apparently I responded to the wrong post. uh, oops. that's embarrassing.]

I would say, you maintain a blog where you demonstrate your skill and knowledge. As a side effect, I’m pretty lots of people here would be interested to read your debugging, design process, etc :)

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

#199

Post by seattle_spring »

_djo_ wrote: post #137
timschmidt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's not a counter-argument. You're introducing a hypothetical with no substantiating evidence, trying to create a parallel to a situation where we have unambiguous evidence of non-classified devices and software being used to discuss classified material. The onus is on you to prove the claim, not on others to prove a negative. It has been eight years since Obama's presidency, had there been any use of this hardene…

Person you're replying to is using an "absence of evidence" fallacy as their argument, also known as an "appeal to ignorance" [0]. They're inferring that the absence of evidence that Obama didn't use his BlackBerry "for Secret, Top Secret, or other classified communications" is potentially evidence that he did in fact do so.

(I would have replied to him directly, but the comments have since been [appropriately] flagged)

In reality, no argument could ever be made if you had to prove the negative of every argument. Some other common applications of this fallacy off the top of my head:

"Well we don't have proof that children weren't trafficked in Comet Pizza, so it's proof that it did actually happen."

"We don't have proof that no kids used litterboxes at school, so it's proof that they did use litterboxes."

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

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

#200

Post by Etheryte »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #182
namdnay wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What am I missing here? OK, say you're a bank. The SEC states you need to keep archives of every discussion your traders have with anyone at any time (I'm simplifying things but you get the point). You keep getting massive fines because traders were whatsapping about deals So now you've got several options - you can use MS Teams, which of course offers archival, compliance monitoring etc. But that means trusting MS…

> say you're a bank. The SEC states you need to keep archives of every discussion your traders have with anyone at any time These records are encrypted in storage.

That is more than overly optimistic given how slow the pace of any technical innovation in finance is. The recent and not so recent issues with Citi are a good example of that.
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