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On the Security of WhatsApp and Telegram

germano.dev

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Re: On the Security of WhatsApp and Telegram

#21

I’m sure that it’s just a matter of time before someone somewhere is going to target the author of this post with snide remarks on their qualifications/ignorance and hinting at them being a Telegram shill (I’m not one of those). That said, I liked this article a lot since it puts things in a manner that focuses on how to approach these comparisons and backs them up with relevant information. Elsewhere, there’s too mu…

You don't see the obvious dishonesty in how the author decided to interpret tptaceks claim about Telegram storing plaintexts of all messages?

The author claims that this is "defamation" because Telegram uses FDE or a similar solution.

With the deliberate misunderstandings apparent in this article I don't see why it would be inappropriate to call the author out for being a Telegram shill.

>Here Moxie is pretending the discussion was about having plaintext access, which obviously Telegram has for non-secret chats, instead of plaintext storage, which is what Ptacek was talking about

The whole idea of "plaintext storage" is something that the author came up with themselves, tptacek claimed that Telegram "stores the PLAINTEXT of EVERY MESSAGE". These mean entirely different things. Plaintexts are still stored even if they are encrypted on disk with keys controlled by Telegram.

Re: On the Security of WhatsApp and Telegram

#22

Was security implementation ever proven itself for Telegram? I remember reading a lot of threads on HN a few years back about how it wasn’t considered secure/kosher. I moved on and haven’t really followed the cryptography space.

These questions are next to impossible to answer. The DUAL_EC_DRBG algorithm is widely agreed to be backdoored (even the author of this article seems to agree), but nobody has actually proven that an attack exists.

Cryptography is a very complex field, Telegram has made many bizarre design decisions which make it difficult to trust them despite the fact that their encryption has not been publicly broken recently.

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