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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

#291
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I said at worst . Please read. Could you recommend a better chat app that is user friendly enough for regular people to use that is not Signal or WhatsApp and is cross platform? Quill are at least working on E2E, not introducing a cryptocurrency like Signal and don't require your phone number.

>are at least working on E2E So they're in the process of moving it from 1995 to 2004. That's great! If all you have on Signal is opt-in feature for payment, and an issue of usernames that's being worked on -- but you want to offer as a solution a product that's for now, completely insecure by design (but it's being worked on), you're in dangerous waters. This is especially condemnable because the issue with Signal h…

Calm down, I only said at worst for Quill, it seems like now I have to question your reading skills.

> If all you have on Signal is opt-in feature for payment, and an issue of usernames that's being worked on...

Opt in or not, don't think I want cryptocurrencies in my chat app. Look what happened to Keybase after that. Usernames of some kind should have been be there from day one. We don't need any more phone number leaks.

Also don't forget that Signal cannot end calls properly and the recipient is still able listen after the call has ended. Very bad. [0]

[0] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/10247#iss...

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#292
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rarity of a bug is independent from reports of it.

No, those are directly correlated.

The reports of it are correlated to the rarity, except in instances where reports are not generated, such as apps that do not collect error telemetry.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#293
post #99

The bugfix comments says: > The TL;DR is that if someone had conversation trimming on, it could create a rare situation where a database ID was re-used in a way that could result in this behavior. How is this bug even possible with E2E encryption? If picture.png exists on user A's phone and gets sent to user B, shouldn't it be client-side encrypted in such a way that user C, even if they receive it via some database…

its probably not using chat keys for the db, for the sake of being indexable

But it’s showing up on both sides of the conversation. (Both user’s devices show the same wrong unsent pic.)

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#294
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you telling me I can run my signal server and use it to communicate with others on the signal network?

I am telling you that "They also refuse to open source their server software." is false.

Signal typically delay releasing the server source code, so the latest version of the server is not open source. In one case it took them almost a year (no public commits between 20 April 2020 and 6 April 2021).

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11101#iss...

Among the official reasons given was staying ahead of spammers. In this instance it was also speculated that the payment function which they were building into the server was to remain secret.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11101#iss...

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#295
post #87

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?

> How can users be assured that this type of issue won't occur again?

Actually, this very type of issue (sending messages to wrong recipients due to stale/invalid database entries) has occured previously.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/7909

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#296

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…

Not mentioning in this comment when the issue was fixed--two weeks ago in the code and days ago in production--is extremely dishonest. I have been contacted by literally everyone I have sent this to saying something akin to "dude says it was fixed quickly but they just didn't close the issue" despite my message with the link saying (exactly) "again point out "closed today, but only fixed in production last week" (fixed in the code two weeks ago, but that doesn't matter much)... at which point they are forced to do a double take and suddenly care.

I have worked on high-impact open source software--the iOS jailbreak ecosystem, writing some of the most core software for it, such as the mechanisms which support runtime code modification and which install the userland--with a much smaller team than Signal, and when you run into serious issues you need to disclose them, and you need to be super honest about the post-mortem. You shouldn't just kind of sweep the issue under the rug in the hope you can fix it before someone notices or it affects enough people to become a PR problem.

(On what is maybe a side note of my thesis here for a moment, but for completeness on the related issue of why I am so dissatisfied with these PR-like responses: you say it is "extremely rare", but not so rare that tons of people aren't reporting the issue happening at least to people they know; this is being used here as an excuse for why it was hard to find and fix, but is then being taken by some as "oh it was also unimportant": issues have to be additionally weighted by their impact, and this bug was clearly critical.)

The equivalent of this sort of thing I have run into is "there is like a one in a hundred thousand chance that you will experience catastrophic data loss from using my software", and I took those issues very seriously, as when you have tens of millions of users that's still a non-negligible number of people in the absolute: I considered every single person who would lose something like their camera roll on their phone to be a crushing defeat that I should internalize and take super personally, as I know the feeling of loss of important information and have enough empathy to assign it to my users.

(Hell: one time I actually hired someone to spend a bunch of time going back and building a tool that would take videos recorded by Cycorder (my video recorder for the original iPhone) that had been damaged by a bug I found in one version of the app that had led to some videos being misrecorded and lost--in a way that I think was even more random than "merely" if the power ran out while recording?--and repair them, to send to the almost no people who had taken videos of their family they realized only after an event weren't playable. This is different, of course, as this was after the fact, but a demonstration of the empathy I feel developers should have for their users: if I can do it with the tiny resources I had... anyone can do it.)

When you find reports of such an issue, you carefully track every single one of them down... but you also have a small time box, past which you need to disclose the issue to everyone: you put a large message on the download link of the product or update the homepage of the app to explain your status finding the issue and asking for help with leads, as it is important that people know that if this could affect them they can mitigate... maybe they don't send photos to anyone they couldn't afford sending to someone wrong, they use a different tool, or they switch to running Signal on iOS.

This doesn't seem to have happened? Hell: if anything, this issue seems to have been sufficiently boring to you that you didn't even close it the second you fixed it or keep people abreast in the issue on GitHub of when they could expect the fix you committed to roll into production. This is both an unacceptable communication style and level of empathy for a product trying to be as important as Signal (though sadly not terribly surprising on either count... it is this same lack of empathy that springs up when Signal has database corruption issues or lacks export tooling or spends its time undermining the wrong opponents or throws in a cryptocurrency--which I should want to celebrate as I am in that space!!--built on DRM tooling and without any warning or thought as to what it means for the one open source secure messenger... sigh).

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#297
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just pointing out that "there are audits, why does it have such bugs" doesn't tell the entire story. So? Isn't that the point though? Having regular audits should have caught this issue? I thought this being 'open source' this would made this even easier. Which leads me to believe a team that has $60M~ in funding is unable to fix this issue in a matter of urgency. Remember this issue was open for half a year with u…

>So? Isn't that the point though? Having regular audits should have caught this issue? I thought this being 'open source' this would made this even easier. You have it the wrong way. Testing, audits, and open source are all best practices. They should be done. None of them are guarantees of security. Open source is not guarantee of finding all bugs, it's a necessity to allow anyone to look for bugs (and backdoors). A…

Completely irrelevant.

Nobody mentioned anything about 'guarantees', this is a matter of urgency and priorities.

I don't care if this was a 'rare' issue, Signal knew this was open for half a year and what were they doing? Testing cryptocurrency payments.

If security was really that important to Signal, where was the urgency there?

If this was any other app that did this (especially Facebook) you'd rain down on them like a ton of bricks.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh sorry, I interpreted it differently. Tho it still doesn't change anything, they prolonged investigating this issue for months and only put mayor work behind it when they "pick[ed] up a scent on it". Although they knew about it from day one (one Signal staff replied on the same day the issue was posted).

Yeah but he explained, that they could not track down the bug, without having the luxory of default user tracking and metrics. So what can you do, when you have a non reproducible bug, but limited ressources(and other problems around)? You wait for the bug to show up again and then have more data to work with.

What you do is you tell everyone about the issue so they can take the appropriate steps to protect themselves, whatever that might be (don't send sensitive photos, don't use Signal to do it, only use Signal on iOS, etc.); they did not seem to do that.

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#299
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-submitted logs to try to track it down. Without telemetry, can you actually back up the claim that this issue was extremely rare?

Some details on how this assumption was made would be nice, but I think it's pretty obvious that any developer involved in a project can make a reasonable assumption of how rare a bug is depending on the technical details on what is required for the bug to happen. For example, if we say for the sake of argument that a hypothetical bug requires you to have more than ten contacts of the exact same name and these also n…

[deleted]

Re: Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

#300
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So? Isn't that the point though? Having regular audits should have caught this issue? I thought this being 'open source' this would made this even easier. You have it the wrong way. Testing, audits, and open source are all best practices. They should be done. None of them are guarantees of security. Open source is not guarantee of finding all bugs, it's a necessity to allow anyone to look for bugs (and backdoors). A…

Completely irrelevant. Nobody mentioned anything about 'guarantees', this is a matter of urgency and priorities. I don't care if this was a 'rare' issue, Signal knew this was open for half a year and what were they doing? Testing cryptocurrency payments. If security was really that important to Signal, where was the urgency there? If this was any other app that did this (especially Facebook) you'd rain down on them l…

>If security was really that important to Signal, where was the urgency there?

If the cause is a random database key collision you can't immediately discover it obviously. You have no idea what was causing it, so you'd have to do logging.

>and what were they doing? Testing cryptocurrency payments.

Yeah I'm sure they just decided to abandon their core value because they wanted to hurry a feature they had advertised to no-one, and were thus in no rush to deploy.

If this was an actual issue I wouldn't care if it was my own app, I would pour a truck load of bricks on top of that.

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