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Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

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Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#201

Post by godelski »

geofft wrote: post #157
nerbert wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘Many forms of secure messaging systems have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that Signal is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that Signal is the worst messaging except for all those other forms that have been developed from time to time…’ Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947

Sure, but there's a small theoretical difference with democracy. You have to live under some system of government. You don't have to use a secure messenger. You can choose to have sensitive conversations in person or not have them at all. I agree that in practice, a lot of people are going to use their phones for relatively sensitive conversations, and in practice, Signal remains the best choice for doing so. But the…

> You can choose to have sensitive conversations in person or not have them at all.

I don't think this is fair. Most of the solution to this is "not having them at all." That's not a good solution and still doesn't solve your problem since you can still be listened to.

> There's iMessage/FaceTime, for instance.

Which also has gotten in trouble recently with Pegasus as there was a 0-click exploit in iMessage. Honestly, that is a far more serious issue than the one here. That being said, I still trust iMessage and that the devs are doing the best that they can. I just recognize that security is difficult and will always be a cat and mouse game. There is no such thing as perfect security.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#202

Post by NullPrefix »

hnarn wrote: post #183
NullPrefix wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And for the sake of the same argument I made a counter argument, stating that some initially believed to be rare circumstances are actually not that rare.

"For the sake of argument" does not mean "I invite you to debate this", it means the exact opposite: "let's assume this is correct/we agree/etc. for a while and debate what comes after". So in this case you are doing the exact opposite of what the phrase "for the sake of argument" is requesting. https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/for+the+sake+of+argumen... > I know you want to go to Stanford, but just for the sake…

OKay, M[rs] English-as-a-first-language.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#203

Post by hnarn »

NullPrefix wrote: post #202
hnarn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For the sake of argument" does not mean "I invite you to debate this", it means the exact opposite: "let's assume this is correct/we agree/etc. for a while and debate what comes after". So in this case you are doing the exact opposite of what the phrase "for the sake of argument" is requesting. https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/for+the+sake+of+argumen... > I know you want to go to Stanford, but just for the sake…

OKay, M[rs] English-as-a-first-language.

English is my second language.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#204

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

lwhi wrote: post #87
greysonp wrote: post #78

Hi there, Signal-Android developer here. I updated the issue to reflect this, but this bug has been fixed. I was tracking it on a separate issue, and had forgotten to close this one. We do, in fact, take issues like this very seriously. This bug was extraordinarily rare, and because we have no metrics/remote log collection, there was an initial period where we had to spend time adding logging and collecting user-subm…

I appreciate that this was a difficult and rare bug, but for an app that sells itself as 'secure', it feels like this isn't acceptable. How can users be assured that this type of issue won't occur again?

What does it mean for it to "not be acceptable?" Accepting or not accepting the bug is not an option on the table. It happened. The options you have open to you are to use or not use the freely provided software, or donate or not donate to the foundation providing it. Users cannot be assured that future bugs will not occur. That is an assurance that is not available with most consumer software, and certainly not with software delivered for free by a not-for-profit.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#205

Post by maqp »

colesantiago wrote: post #18

Signal is becoming a joke that we should reconsider using, and now has dangerous bugs that is at the edge of compromising people's privacy. Has this app/service really been audited properly? We now need to consider serious alternatives that we should get behind like Element [0] or Session [1] but I am open to user friendly alternatives other than Signal (at worst even Quill [2] or Delta Chat [3]). [0] https://element…

>serious alternatives

How is Quill Chat that's proprietary and not E2EE a serious alternative?

Element's UX is behind Signal but at least the encryption is E2EE by default.

Session is a Signal fork with bad metadata protection: There's 60 entities owning Loki nodes, and top three players own 80% of nodes.

Delta chat leaks metadata to email providers, and PGP has no forward secrecy or deniability.

Element is the only one that's even remotely fixing the issue.

The issue here was client side, and no architectural design, not even hardware system can prevent the "wrong contact receives plaintext message" vulnerability categorically.

The fix is now in place, and I'll eat my shorts if they don't have a unit test in place to detect reintroduction of this issue.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#206

Post by ChrisKnott »

NullPrefix wrote: post #182
hutrdvnj wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument depends on an alternate universe in which signal supports it, everything else being equal, because why not.

Does that alternate universe support phone numbers with unicode characters too?

You are arguing against a hypothetical situation of your opponent's creation. This is like when Ross tried to beat Chandler at Cups

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#207

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

lwhi wrote: post #188
tablespoon wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can users be assured that this type of issue won't occur again? By not using software. And I mean software in general, not this software in particular. You're basically asking for assurance that they won't have any more bugs, but no one can actually provide such an assurance in the real world.

I disagree. If that really is the choice, they should drop the secure moniker without further debate. -- If you produce a product that claims to be secure, the onus is on you to back up those claims. Off the top my my head there are many ways to implement measures that can help to encourage security going forward. One of the benefits of coding in the open, and ascribing to opens standards and protocols is transparenc…

> One of the benefits of coding in the open, and ascribing to opens standards and protocols is transparency and the ability for all to interrogate the code.

They already do all of those things. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#208

Post by maqp »

colesantiago wrote: post #71
detaro wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the main audits are clearly described as auditing internal components, so it's not surprising app-level errors aren't covered by them.

Which this bug was left open for months while users were experiencing this privacy issue. How can I recommend a chat app that does this and claim they are a privacy based app? and also does not respond to urgent bugs in this manner?

So what ingenious method should they have deployed to prevent all programming errors beforehand, and how should they have handled it? Advice users to fall-back to non E2EE SMS?

The team deployed logging as fast as they could, successfully detected the issue as soon as it happened again, and deployed fix as fast as possible. What should they have done?

If you only recommend chat apps with perfect track record, you're basically recommending chat apps with internal policy of not disclosing vulnerabilities, and ones that downplay any revealed vulnerabilities.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#209

Post by hutrdvnj »

ChrisKnott wrote: post #206
NullPrefix wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that alternate universe support phone numbers with unicode characters too?

You are arguing against a hypothetical situation of your opponent's creation. This is like when Ross tried to beat Chandler at Cups

I go to bed now and dream of a universe in which NullPrefix is Ross and continues to argue endlessly.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#210

Post by qu4z-2 »

hnarn wrote: post #183
NullPrefix wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And for the sake of the same argument I made a counter argument, stating that some initially believed to be rare circumstances are actually not that rare.

"For the sake of argument" does not mean "I invite you to debate this", it means the exact opposite: "let's assume this is correct/we agree/etc. for a while and debate what comes after". So in this case you are doing the exact opposite of what the phrase "for the sake of argument" is requesting. https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/for+the+sake+of+argumen... > I know you want to go to Stanford, but just for the sake…

It sounds to me like NullPrefix accepted the hypothetical bug, for the sake of the argument, and then addressed the rarity assumptions made about that bug. "For the sake of argument" doesn't mean "No debating" it means "Let's assume some thing x is taken as a given and go from there."
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