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Telegram - secure, free messaging

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Re: Telegram - secure, free messaging

#33

Post by sillysaurus2 »

yurylifshits wrote: post #25
na85 wrote: post #7

From their FAQ: > Q: How secure is Telegram? > Very secure. We are based on a new protocol, MTProto, built by our own specialists from scratch, with security in mind. At this moment, the biggest security threat to your Telegram messages is your mother reading over your shoulder. We took care of the rest. Oh good, a bunch of randoms have rolled their own crypto. I stopped reading at this point.

MTProto's author is Nikolai Durov: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov He is one of most legendary math/programming champions of all time.

He's done nothing in crypto, and he's rolled his own protocol. That's historically been recipe for disaster regardless of how many honors you hold.

Colin Percival is similarly decorated, along with being a cryptographer (he's the FreeBSD security officer): http://www.daemonology.net/papers/

... yet even his crypto app Tarsnap was broken for over a year before he noticed, due to a typo during an innocent-looking refactoring change. http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-18-tarsnap-critical-...

And the only reason the critical bug was found is because it was open source. This, as far as I can see, isn't.

So we have a perfect storm of problems here: An author who has rolled his own crypto, isn't a cryptographer, and whose product is closed source. Trust Telegram at your peril.

It's worth noting that there's an app which already does what Telegram claims to do. It's called TextSecure, and it was written by Moxie Marlinspoke and several other big-name cryptographers: https://whispersystems.org/

... and it's open source: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/

... and they don't try to roll their own crypto: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/wiki/ProtocolV2

These aren't coincidences. It's basic necessity.

EDIT: Telegram is open source, so I was wrong about that and it'd be unfair of me not to mention it. But the other observations still apply. Until Telegram is verified to be secure, I don't think it's a good idea to trust it, especially when secure alternatives like TextSecure exist.

Re: Telegram - secure, free messaging

#34

Post by macalicious »

subb wrote: post #32

How can this be free? They're not Wikipedia. I'm not sure how they can pay for multiple servers...

http://telegram.org/faq#q-how-are-you-going-to-make-money-ou...

The brothers do have some money, I suppose, from their company. However, I'm not sure if they are using the data gathered from this service, thus resulting in revenue somehow (maybe in their social network).

Re: Telegram - secure, free messaging

#35

Post by jessedhillon »

yurylifshits wrote: post #25
na85 wrote: post #7

From their FAQ: > Q: How secure is Telegram? > Very secure. We are based on a new protocol, MTProto, built by our own specialists from scratch, with security in mind. At this moment, the biggest security threat to your Telegram messages is your mother reading over your shoulder. We took care of the rest. Oh good, a bunch of randoms have rolled their own crypto. I stopped reading at this point.

MTProto's author is Nikolai Durov: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov He is one of most legendary math/programming champions of all time.

I don't care if it was written by Eric A. Young -- I think history has shown that crypto takes a long time and many iterations to get to a point where it's secure and trustworthy. No single person is going to come down from the mountaintop with a working, secure and correct protocol from scratch. That just doesn't seem to be how it works.

Re: Telegram - secure, free messaging

#39

Post by davidw »

na85 wrote: post #7

From their FAQ: > Q: How secure is Telegram? > Very secure. We are based on a new protocol, MTProto, built by our own specialists from scratch, with security in mind. At this moment, the biggest security threat to your Telegram messages is your mother reading over your shoulder. We took care of the rest. Oh good, a bunch of randoms have rolled their own crypto. I stopped reading at this point.

Could you find a way to say that without sounding like the Simpsons' Comic Book Guy? Maybe like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6913705

For further reference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852560

Re: Telegram - secure, free messaging

#40

Post by onedev »

jeswin wrote: post #23

Looks like they kept the interface exactly the same as What's App to attract users. The smiley selection has the entire list of What's App smileys in exactly the same order. What's App is going to be upset, but it might help users.

The authors are also the founders of the social network VK which is pretty much a Facebook clone design-wise[1].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_(social_network)

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