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Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

micahflee.com

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Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#301

Post by lrvick »

You have to archive messages in some sectors by law, fine. But taking an E2E encrypted app and decrypting and storing the messages in plain text is a brain dead solution.

You get a group of people, say 5, and you generate a Shamirs Secret Split key requiring a minimum of 3 shares to recover, call it the archive key, with each share encrypted to one of those people. You have the modified apps encrypt chat logs every day to a new one time use key, and encrypt that to the Archive key, and upload the encrypted logs somewhere all can access.

Now 3 people in that set of 5 people get a subpoena to disclose logs in a given time period. Each one can consent to using their archive key in an ephemeral secure enclave server to decrypt the daily log keys in the requested date ranged, and decrypt the requested logs.

This way everything is end to end encrypted unless M-of-N people agree to decrypt specific archived logs to comply with a court order.

This shit is not that hard and with the budget of the White House there are 0 excuses for not running a private server and end to end encrypted chat apps with reproducible builds using archive tactics along the lines I just described.

But, I am also not mad at them making public fools of themselves either.

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#302

Post by mmooss »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #299
mmooss wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Disappearing messages has never been a security guarantee of Signal. What makes you say that? Has Signal posted something about it? Retention settings are widely used for messaging security. Also, I just used retention as an example. There could be many other holes in the unofficial client, including how it communicates with the Signal network. Maybe my messages aren't E2EE when communicating with that client. Mayb…

> What makes you say that? Has Signal posted something about it? I mean, if you want Signal's blog post where they introduced it, it's here: https://signal.org/blog/disappearing-messages/ But also, of course Signal hasn't promised that if they're remotely competent, because that's impossible. You can't stop people from retaining messages if they want to. Now perhaps they're not remotely competent, but in reality they…

> Your recipient could get out a camera and take a photograph if that's what it comes to.

You are making the perfect the enemy of the good. As I said, two comments up: "I suppose I must trust other users - they could always screenshot a conversation. But while I trust them not to intentionally cheat me, I shouldn't have to trust them to accurately evaluate the security implementation of a software application - something most people can't do, Mike Waltz being the most famous example."

IT security professionals do use retention settings for security; it's not perfect, as you say, but it's very helpful. For example, many businesses auto-delete messages after a certain period except messages that the user intentionally preserves.

And as I said, there are other security functions in Signal that users must trust their apps to handle correctly.

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#303

Post by goupillon »

mmooss wrote: post #293
dboreham wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way for Signal to prevent any piece of code that can make a TCP connection and speak its protocol from using the service.

Why not require keys signed with Signal's private key?

If the keys are generated on the device, they can't be trusted by Signal since any clone could generate them too. If the keys are generated by Signal and sent to the device, they can be intercepted and used in any clone

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#304

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

gopher_space wrote: post #258
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's anti-intellectual about religious pro-lifers?

Their take on scripture is deliberately anachronistic. We didn’t have the medicine or sanitation 2000 years ago to place their kind of value on a fetus.

The medicine in question comes from the very scientific establishment that grew out of scholasticism, which is why I find the accusation of anti-intellectualism rather strange.

My point is that you have to distinguish between arguing against the output of the intellectual activity and arguing against the intellectual activity taking place.

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#305

Post by mycatisblack »

matsemann wrote: post #256
dang wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890179 for discussion of whether that article should count as a follow-up or SNI. Normally I wouldn't link to meta discussion but this was such a weird borderline case that I spent over an hour trying to figure it out. Maybe that makes it interesting. Edit: in case anyone's confused about the sequence here, micahflee posted the current thread 2 days ago. The timestamp a…

FWIW, I never clicked into this when I originally saw it because I'm not that interested in a "technical analysis", but gained interest when the other title said that the app was hacked. To me, that's worth discussing, but here that lede is a bit buried. And I now only know about it because a friend sent me the link. I do feel there's a pattern of me reading some interesting tech news, then thinking "wait, why didn't…

As a non-native English understander, I find it funny that discussions related to politics are “flagged”. I.e. carrying a flag.

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#306

Post by SequoiaHope »

abhisek wrote: post #72

Still trying to grasp the idea of archiving messages from E2E encrypted communication system into a storage that entirely breaks the purpose of using something like Signal. It’s like encashing on the trust of Signal protocol, app while breaking its security model so that someone else can search through all messages. What am I missing here?

My wild speculation is that someone wants to use AI to monitor everyone’s communication.

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#307

Post by blitzar »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #306
abhisek wrote: post #72

Still trying to grasp the idea of archiving messages from E2E encrypted communication system into a storage that entirely breaks the purpose of using something like Signal. It’s like encashing on the trust of Signal protocol, app while breaking its security model so that someone else can search through all messages. What am I missing here?

My wild speculation is that someone wants to use AI to monitor everyone’s communication.

What they should have done is write a bot that you invite to every conversation for "archival purposes". No new app.

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#309

Post by teratron27 »

namdnay wrote: post #136
_djo_ wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can distribute custom managed apps through Apple's MDM programme. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep575bfed8...

Sorry yes I meant for personal devices. These are designed to be deployed under MDM on corporate devices edit: found their install doc! https://smarsh.my.salesforce.com/sfc/p/#30000001FgxH/a/Pb000...

These are all high profile, high net worth individuals. Their 'personal' devices will all be managed by MDM as well.

Re: Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials

#310

Post by fredoliveira »

randomcarbloke wrote: post #308

enjoyed this but not sure how technical it is if you can't actually look at or disassemble the app in question.

You can. The author made the source code of the app itself available: https://micahflee.com/heres-the-source-code-for-the-unoffici...
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