Why I won't recommend Signal anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#341

Post by mirimir » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 3:38 AM UTC

exo762 wrote: post #274

mirimir wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the clarifications. > First, on Android 6+ you can just disable the contacts permission and everything works (although you obviously won't see your contact names). This is very good. > However, we also spend a lot of time thinking about this class of problems, as well as metadata in general. Right now things are playing out alright for one specific class of attack: [federal subpoena] Good, so Open Whisper…

> Good, so Open Whisper Systems has no metadata. Do any third parties retain metadata about Signal messages? I'll try to answer to the best of my knowledge (I'm not associated with project, I'm just a happy customer). Does your ISP know that you are communicating with Signal servers? Yes, IP addresses. Does it know to whom you are sending messages? No. Does Google know you are using Signal? Yes. Does it know whom of…

Thanks :)

I get that Signal is probably the best option for smartphones. And that maybe its vulnerabilities are only relevant for "TAO targets". But the problem is that "TAO targets" is in rapid flux, given developments in automation and AI. So arguably, more and more journalists and dissidents are becoming vulnerable.

And there's the fundamental insecurity of devices with cellular-radio connectivity, and operating systems that users can't control and lock down. Signal can do nothing about that. Even something as simple as reliably obscuring identity in connections to Signal servers is nontrivial.

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#342

Post by zetok » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 12:06 PM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #76

snvzz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use and love Tox as it got some key fundamentals right. First, they have full forward secrecy. This is notably unlike Ring, which does not. Secondly, all communications are end to end encrypted and endpoint-verified, as there's no "legacy SIP support" (eg: SIP) or such nonsense and the DHT addresses your contacts gave you are actual ec25519 public keys.

>the DHT addresses your contacts gave you are actual ec25519 public keys. For nontechnical users, that's a massive downside. The first tox client to integrate ToxMe into itself will get very popular, very fast, provided it's got the right marketing.

>The first tox client to integrate ToxMe into itself will get very popular, very fast, provided it's got the right marketing.

Ouch. qTox had it for quite some time already, and given that I didn't observe massive increase in its popularity (there was increase, but ~normal), it's got to be the marketing (or lack of thereof)...

Sadly, I don't know about marketing, and while there were some people who could into marketing, hiring them would require money, which Tox ecosystem doesn't have at all, and if it had, it would be spent on hiring devs part or full time. :|

With that being said, it's quite likely that the UI for the integration in qTox is not the best one, and could use some improvements. If you have any suggestions / ideas how it could be made better, please don't hesitate to make an issue on qTox repo with them: https://github.com/qTox/qTox . Or any other part of qTox.

Anyways, aside from qTox also Antox should have ToxMe integration. I don't know about other clients.

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#343

Post by joesmo » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 6:29 PM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #85

joesmo wrote: post #69

"Otherwise, we’ll be in danger of ending up in an neo-90s Internet, with walled gardens and pay walls all over the place. You already see this trend happening in journalism." The internet will never be less walled, more free, and more federated than it was in the 90's. With such a poor understanding of the internet and its history, even if he did make a compelling argument (he doesn't), it'd be hard to take seriously…

You're forgetting about AOL and Compuserve. The Internet itself was federated. Networking really wasn't.

I forgot them on purpose because he's talking about the Internet, not networking, not BBSs (which AOL and Compuserve were just big versions of). AOL and Compuserve eventually made themselves just another part of the Internet, but before that, they were really irrelevant in relation to the Internet's federation. In fact, other than AOL being an ISP and a gateway to the Internet for many, the actual AOL service was completely irrelevant once Internet connections came along.

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#344

Post by bitmapbrother » Mon, Nov 07, 2016, 10:51 PM UTC

Drdrdrq wrote: post #273

bitmapbrother wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unfortunately, Google has made it (almost) impossible to wake up the phone via some external event without using its proprietary GCM No, fortunately Google has made it impossible for apps to abuse waking up the phone.

No. Apps can abuse waking up the phone all they want (and as much as user lets them), as long as they do it via Google's servers. What they can't do is bypass GCM/FCM. Nothing to do with UX.

Any apps that try to abuse it will quickly be flagged by Google for analysis.

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#345

Post by jospoortvliet » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 11:24 AM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #300

exo762 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is not positioned as a tool for possible TAO targets. Never was, and never will be. Don't use it and please stop spreading the FUD.

> Signal is not positioned as a tool for possible TAO targets. Never was, and never will be. Eh, that’s exactly what it is currently advertised as. A tool, supported by Snowden, to be used by journalists who are at risk of being under active surveillance by state actors. That is the very definition of a TAO target.

You shouldn't use a smartphone if you expect to be TAO. Even the hardware could be compromised. Use a laptop with Linux for anything anyone might want to track...

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#346

Post by angry_octet » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 2:53 AM UTC

md_ wrote: post #272

angry_octet wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although the masking effect may be useful, my immediate thought was how much extra code and buffer overflows had been added to the client. Android doesn't have any sandbox mechanism like pnacl to contain such code.

In addition to Moxie's comment about using Java, you're more broadly confused, I think. Pnacl provides sandboxing, but it doesn't seem to provide any protection against buffer overflows. Android apps are also sandboxed, so I'm not sure what your point was. Android (at least recent versions) has both NX pages and ASLR, both of which are specifically designed for these kinds of attacks. Sandboxing isn't, really, especi…

Perhaps I did not isolate my concerns in sufficiently deliberate language.

You may be aware that of late there have been numerous buffer overflows (or other parsing problems) in standard image parsing libraries. Where these are implemented in Java that may be less of a concern, but this type of task is often handled by native code. And while more Java exploits are via breaking the verification in clever ways, via reflection or priviledged calls or pickling, that does not rule out that processing external data can lead to an inconsistent state. It might not be a problem with gifs, if they are small, but animated gifs can be large. Or maybe java See this discussion on Android image processing: https://code.facebook.com/posts/366199913563917/introducing-...

The point of PNaCL is that you can use it to sandbox components within the same process/permission set, you don't have to rely on the OS. It has a much smaller attack surface than Java.

You talk about NX and ASLR being useful in the same post as you say buffer overflows can't happen. In any case, while they may be designed to restrict attackers, they are by no means sufficient. There are Java ROP gadget chain builders! JVMs use JIT, which inherently means they are creating new code. Eg. see jit spraying.

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#347

Post by heavenlyhash » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 9:42 AM UTC

joecool1029 wrote: post #55

SamWhited wrote: post #5

I highly recommend Conversations (disclaimer: I've worked on it in the past, although I'm not a project "member" per say): https://conversations.im/ It's open source, uses a federated, open protocol, and can do multiple types of encryption including OTR and OMEMO (an XMPP wire format that uses the Axolotl ratched devised for signal). It does not do VoIP, so it would just be for chat (although there is a large bounty…

Conversations is great, but there's nothing comparable on iOS except Chatsecure which isn't yet beta quality. Then you need to pair it with a server that actually has all the recent XEP's installed (for push is XEP357, usually missing), see: https://gultsch.de/compliance_ranked.html My current 'solution' is to use ZNC connected to Bitlbee (supporting OTR). On Bitlbee I use the jabber.fr service. ZNC has a push script…

That compliance table is the thing really killing XMPP for practical modern usage.

I tried to write an XMPP client about a year ago and found out about that compatibility table the hard way. It's rough -- I had no idea what I was getting into.

Turns out that XMPP, before expansions, has no standard definition of what message IDs are. Which means "good luck, have fun!" is pretty much the best anyone can hope for on synchronizing messages when you have multiple devices or when the network flakes on you. Which in turn means XMPP is basically unusable on multiple devices. If you're lucky, everything supports all the same extensions, and it'll probably work most of the time; but if any piece of software you use is missing one extension, your day is toast. (And even then, frankly, the "carbons" API is wrong-headed and not very capable of recovering from network failures. In no uncertain terms: It's time to move on.)

I wrote about this more previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772968

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#348

Post by kuschku » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 3:01 PM UTC

jospoortvliet wrote: post #345

kuschku wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Signal is not positioned as a tool for possible TAO targets. Never was, and never will be. Eh, that’s exactly what it is currently advertised as. A tool, supported by Snowden, to be used by journalists who are at risk of being under active surveillance by state actors. That is the very definition of a TAO target.

You shouldn't use a smartphone if you expect to be TAO. Even the hardware could be compromised. Use a laptop with Linux for anything anyone might want to track...

Then why is Moxie advertising with Snowden the Signal app as communication for TAO targets?

And for non-TAO targets, WhatsApp is just as good as Signal – the users won’t read the source code anyway, and in both cases President Trump gets your social graph.

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#349

Post by kikoreis » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 12:32 PM UTC

throwaway101416 wrote: post #244

tptacek wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, this is madness. I shouldn't have to care what global power my messaging service is aligned with. With Signal, I don't.

With Signal, you clearly do as they send a lot of your information to Google explicitly (like contacts) and Google has root on your phone.

Is that completely accurate? As Moxie explained elsewhere they do sync contacts, but that's optional. I'm not sure there's any other dependency beyond the GCM push, which I don't know is very concerning.

Google definitely has root on your phone, but is that automatically an implication that Signal is compromised?

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#350

Post by exo762 » Sun, Nov 20, 2016, 7:12 PM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #341

exo762 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good, so Open Whisper Systems has no metadata. Do any third parties retain metadata about Signal messages? I'll try to answer to the best of my knowledge (I'm not associated with project, I'm just a happy customer). Does your ISP know that you are communicating with Signal servers? Yes, IP addresses. Does it know to whom you are sending messages? No. Does Google know you are using Signal? Yes. Does it know whom of…

Thanks :) I get that Signal is probably the best option for smartphones. And that maybe its vulnerabilities are only relevant for "TAO targets". But the problem is that "TAO targets" is in rapid flux, given developments in automation and AI. So arguably, more and more journalists and dissidents are becoming vulnerable. And there's the fundamental insecurity of devices with cellular-radio connectivity, and operating s…

> But the problem is that "TAO targets" is in rapid flux, given developments in automation and AI.

You are implying that cost of TAO consists mostly of labor costs. Which is false. NSA and friends are not really limited by money. They are limited by amount of unpatched software vulnerabilities. Every use of vulnerability in the wild is a chance of revealing it to world and losing it. Snowden docs reveal the existence of automated software which evaluates chance of vulnerability being revealed by attack. XKeyScore or one of related pieces, AFAIR.