I don't trust Signal • Hacker News Board

Re: I don't trust Signal

#271

Post by acdha » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #174

move-on-by wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moxie forbids you from distributing branded builds of the Signal app ... Having multiple branded builds to choose from would be a terrible thing and would easily allow fake apps to gain traction. > ... and if you rebrand he forbids you from using the official Open Whisper servers. This seems pretty fair to me. Not only could you abuse their resources, it would greatly hinder their ability to make changes and respon…

"Having multiple branded builds to choose from would be a terrible thing and would easily allow fake apps to gain traction" In this particular case, not likely. People who are into more secure communication do not randomly click on anything. They know what they are doing, or get it installed from people they trust. And if they don't - their fault. Not Signals. And Signal can continue to work and introduce breaking ch…

> People who are into more secure communication do not randomly click on anything

Even if that wasn't wrong, it would be a fatal limitation for a social app which relies on network effects. Even if you were actually super-humanly capable of not making mistakes you'd end up using the apps that everyone else you know is actually on.

Re: I don't trust Signal

#272

Post by carapace » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

verbify wrote: post #80

ddevault wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here, this is a fair criticism. Other alternatives (which I have not reviewed in depth) include Tox, Telegram, Wire, and Ring (not an endorsement of any of these). I'm an old curmodgen who just uses IRC+OTR and GPG, though, so I have to depend on others for recommendations. Also, Matrix enables end-to-end encryption by default on clients that support it.

According to friends in the cryptography space and from a cursory reading of wikipedia, Telegram is a shitshow compared to Signal. It's one thing not to trust Signal. It's another to recommend alternatives that are far worse.

(Totally unrelated, sorry, but about a month ago you and I had a brief exchange about the placebo effect.[1] I got distracted and missed your last reply and never responded. Sorry about that. It's too late to reply on the original thread, and I don't want to hijack this one, but while looking for an old comment I saw your reply and felt compelled to mention it to you. It was a good exchange IMO and I didn't mean to "ghost" on it.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17457085

Re: I don't trust Signal

#273

Post by toast0 » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #260

toast0 wrote: post #223

AFAIK, Signal has an open source client, and an open source server. If you want federation, you can go ahead and build it, and find users, and you can start from a reasonably well working base. Moxie isn't going to build it, because he doesn't think federation works; to convince him, you'll need to show him it works, not just tell him. Is there an example of a federated chat service which has end to end encryption th…

> Is there an example of a federated chat service which has end to end encryption that just works? Yes. SilenceIM is a fork of Signal that maintains only the SMS implementation of the Axolotl ratchet. It works perfectly. For that matter, every other chat network does too, if you use Pidgin and the pidgin-otr plugin. End to end encryption is a property of the clients, not the network, practically by definition.

SilenceIM and pidgin-otr add e2e over existing networks. That means I can attempt to send messages to people who won't be able to receive them. That is the opposite of 'just works'.

With Signal, or other services, where e2e support is a mandatory part of the client and is the only way to send messages, if someone is available on the platform, I know that I'll have a e2e message stream. (subject to MITM of key exchange, of course)

Re: I don't trust Signal

#274

Post by Arathorn » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 6:14 PM UTC

mynewtb wrote: post #189

drdaeman wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I've tried Matrix (this spring) with a group of peers, my E2E rooms were full of random "failed to decrypt" and lots of out-of-band communications "hey, are my messages working for you today?" Yes, we had one Synapse server running on a resource-constrained machine that sometimes "fell behind" the rest of the network. I believe that is what had caused such issues. Still, the fact things easily break with se…

That mirrors my experience with the matrix.org homeserver. It has not improved much over all the months.

We've been working away fixing causes of 'unable to decrypt' bugs, to the extent that (as a poweruser) I almost never see them. If you see them, please report them via bug report so we can dig into them.

Meanwhile, the performance of the matrix.org server has definitely improved massively over the last few weeks. We hit a performance ceiling from May through mid July, but since July 19th or so we've finally got CPU headroom back again thanks to stuff like https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1019957885026144257 and https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1022095383978233856.

Re: I don't trust Signal

#275

Post by vajrabum » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

mhkool wrote: post #259

dublinben wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've already made the APK available directly on their website for over a year now.[0][1] It works just fine (albeit a little heavy on battery usage) without the Google Play Store or Google Play Services. What more do you really want? [0] https://signal.org/android/apk/ [1] https://whispersystems.discoursehosting.net/t/how-to-get-sig...

The article is clear: download from the Signal site is not secure.

Checksummed but not signed.

Re: I don't trust Signal

#276

Post by mjg59 » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

jhasse wrote: post #181

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? What mechanism? Does it access the plain text from the keyboard before the app encrypts it?

It could do that.

How? (I work for Google, I don't work on Android)

Re: I don't trust Signal

#277

Post by craftyguy » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

Vinnl wrote: post #101

stratosmacker wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't even touch on the fact that Signal depends on Play Services. It has a websocket option, but the setting is actually not in the GUI

Hmm, how do you configure it? IIRC it just automatically used it because I don't have Play Services.

AFAIK it's not user configurable, and the only way to enable it is to have a device without play services installed.

Re: I don't trust Signal

#278

Post by craftyguy » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #247

kvark wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless it's Librem-5 ( https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ ), although we've yet to see what comes out of it

Still not secure. I describe the risks here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906999

Maybe not perfectly secure, but it's a big step up from the current devices. Being able to physically separate devices (e.g. baseband/modem) and toggle them off would allow you to obtain a much more secure environment.

Re: I don't trust Signal

#279

Post by xvector » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

dublinben wrote: post #257

lez wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The F-Droid argument is the strongest and most evident among all. I don't trust Google, I don't trust Play. The main point is, Moxie could take the wind out of the sails of literally all arguments in this page by publishing Signal on F-Droid but he just won't. This alone is enough for me to lose trust in Signal.

They've already made the APK available directly on their website for over a year now.[0][1] It works just fine (albeit a little heavy on battery usage) without the Google Play Store or Google Play Services. What more do you really want? [0] https://signal.org/android/apk/ [1] https://whispersystems.discoursehosting.net/t/how-to-get-sig...

Please actually read the article before saying that the accusations are invalid.

Re: I don't trust Signal

#280

Post by ddevault » Thu, Aug 09, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

lorenzhs wrote: post #266

ddevault wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The server might as well be closed source. We have no guarantees that Moxie is actually running this in production and he refuses to federate with third-party servers.

This is addressed in https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ – using Intel SGX, it's possible for the clients to verify that the server is running the code it should be running. I'm not sure whether this is already deployed, but it refutes any claim that Signal isn't serious about your concern. I don't see how federation is related to this at all . We know you're bummed about it, you don't need to inject i…

SGX is not a magic bullet, it's only part of a secure system. It's also come under some fire, check out this paper:

https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-17/thursday/us-17-Swami-SGX...

SGX alone cannot solve this problem. Even in the idealized case, you can sniff traffic on the router to find out which user IPs are talking to each other and when.