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Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

telegram.org

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Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#71

Post by JimDabell »

m_mueller wrote: post #44
techquery wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Messages in secret chats are stored on server until downloaded by recipient. So there is no such problem like in Skype. Push notifications also work fine there, except on iOS they don't contain any message data, just "You have a new message", probably because server doesn't know what's inside encrypted message. Although havent tried their android client.

Great info, thanks. I didn't expect the message to be visible in Push notifications, it's obvious to me that this couldn't work - especially with client side encryption. Whether 'Secret Chats' are truly client side encrypted is another question (see the discussion with one of your siblings).

> Whether 'Secret Chats' are truly client side encrypted is another question

I don't think anybody has suggested that they aren't client side encrypted, only that the way in which the encryption is used renders it ineffective.

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#72

Post by infinity0 »

money is cheap, show me the code.

even if people are being unfair with these criticisms, what telegram should focus on is to make their designs more secure, and ignore all this publicity. if they truly believe in the "importance of keeping the [system] open", then they should understand that all this publicity (good or bad) is insignificant - especially as they say they have rich guys backing them, so they're not relying on public opinion influencing investors.

it's very easy to make statements like "Together we can make Telegram unbreakable"; harder to turn this into a reality. the current round of attention is a red herring, both for Telegram and for us commenters. let's give them a year and see what it's like after that.

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#73

Post by pgeorgi »

m_mueller wrote: post #54
ceejayoz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with encrypted Jabber?

On OSX I'm happy with Adium, but last time I've used Pidgin it was a lot of work to configure it the way I want. That would still work for me, but to roll it out for an organization it would meet quite some resistance. So the problem with XMPP for me is the client situation.

> So the problem with XMPP for me is the client situation

... which is fixed by a better client. That requires skills, but different ones from designing a new crypto protocol.

Given the PR efforts of the telegram people, they might actually be better XMPP+OTR+TextSecure+... client implementers than crypto designers (and maybe even better client implementers than most of the people who build clients right now since the situation _is_ bad).

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#74

Post by josephlord »

This is still in the FAQ:

Q: How secure is Telegram?

Very secure. We are based on the MTProto protocol (see description and advanced FAQ), built by our own specialists, employing time-tested algorithms, to make security compatible with high speed delivery and reliability. At this moment, the biggest security threat to your Telegram messages is your mother reading over your shoulder. We took care of the rest.

While Telegram may be on the way to a secure future it is not there yet and the FAQ needs to be less certain before I can applaud them.

Edit: Actually I think the FAQ been toned down a bit but I think some acknowledgement of how new the protocol is and the risks associated with that should be mentioned.

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#75

Post by pfraze »

sudhirj wrote: post #70
reginaldjcooper wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> precisely because they show how willing they are to improve their service. Multiple people that know what they are doing have remarked that the system Telegram has created is a bad idea and it would be much better to use any established protocol. They have also pointed out multiple places where Telegram is committing obvious cryptographic blunders in their protocol. Telegram decided to pay out $100k under contest r…

> They have also pointed out multiple places where Telegram is committing obvious cryptographic blunders in their protocol. They have pointed out multiple places where Telegram MAY BE committing blunders, namely their internal server - server communication MIGHT be susceptible to MITM attacks. It's not the same thing.

It is, though. If the protocol relies on servers to be good actors, then servers are a weak point. People aren't willing to let that by because, besides just good security standards, servers are being targetted by government spying.

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#76

Post by m_mueller »

makomk wrote: post #51
m_mueller wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does. Show me another non-profit Open Source (mostly) IM service that invests this heavily in seamless encryption and I'll change my opinion. The weakness that they found could have easily been brushed off as non-exploitable, yet they didn't, instead encouraging more security experts to become involved by paying out immediately.

To name just one alternative, the OTR developers have done far more to make seamless, open source encryption of IMs possible than Telegram - regardless of how much cash Telegram are willing to throw around. Even if the secret chat feature worked perfectly as intended, it'd still be both less usable and less secure than OTR. It requires users to manually validate key hashes in order to stay secure, a requirement the O…

OTR sounds great, I just wish I'd find an easy-to-setup-and-use, good looking Windows client, such that I could convince non technical decision makers to adopt it. Adium does that for me on OSX, but I don't think Pidgin is a good match, except if something big has changed since 2-3 years ago when I last gave it a try.

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#77

Post by girvo »

paveldurov wrote: post #39
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applaud their effort at putting out a secure chat app that everyone can use. They aren't making a reasonable effort to put out a secure chat app. If they were, then they would use some of that $200k to hire a company like Matasano to fly out and audit their architecture for flaws. Matasano probably would've caught this bug, because it was a pretty basic mistake.

Not sure hiring a US security firm is a safer approach than crowdsourcing using the power of the global community. After all, Matasano's tptacek obviously did spend some of his time inspecting and criticizing Telegram this week. However, he overlooked the 100K vulnerability that was later discovered by a Russian guy who considers himself a newbie in cryptography. The other reason that makes me somewhat reluctant to s…

Wow, you really are as arrogant as you seemed. I'm sorry I'm normally not rude, but attack tptaeck like that? That's just pathetic mate.

Oh, and the vuln was outside your contest. You gave him 100k, instead of the 200k because of that. No one knew that you'd pay out if they found something outside your competition. So saying that people here looked at it but missed that vuln because they didn't claim the reward is disingenuous -- it was outside the contest.

Nice ad hominem though. smh.

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#78

Post by m_mueller »

makomk wrote: post #48
m_mueller wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, I didn't interpret the news this way. I haven't seen secret chat functionality mentioned anywhere yet - I was assuming that secret chat shouldn't be affected by these nonce messages since the secret key shouldn't touch their servers according to their documentation. Do you have any source on this?

The linked blogpost actually says that the attack is against secure chat and explains what it does, it just underplays how serious it is. Basically, when setting up a secret chat the two parties use something called a Diffie-Hellman key exchange to agree on a secret encryption key without eavesdroppers being able to tell what the key is. However, the parties can't tell whether they've securely agreed on a key with th…

Seems like I had potatoes on my eyes. Your explanation made the whole thing quite a bit clearer to me than the original post, thanks for that. I think it's good that this weakness is now in the open - this will create some pressure on Telegram to solve it since, as I understand, it compromises one of the main features of their service. Their way of handling the fix will decide whether they should be taken seriously I think.

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#79

Post by DanBC »

paveldurov wrote: post #39
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applaud their effort at putting out a secure chat app that everyone can use. They aren't making a reasonable effort to put out a secure chat app. If they were, then they would use some of that $200k to hire a company like Matasano to fly out and audit their architecture for flaws. Matasano probably would've caught this bug, because it was a pretty basic mistake.

Not sure hiring a US security firm is a safer approach than crowdsourcing using the power of the global community. After all, Matasano's tptacek obviously did spend some of his time inspecting and criticizing Telegram this week. However, he overlooked the 100K vulnerability that was later discovered by a Russian guy who considers himself a newbie in cryptography. The other reason that makes me somewhat reluctant to s…

> However, he overlooked the 100K vulnerability that was later discovered by a Russian guy who considers himself a newbie in cryptography.

In the software that you said was secure?

Re: Crowdsourcing a More Secure Future

#80

Post by m_mueller »

pgeorgi wrote: post #73
m_mueller wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On OSX I'm happy with Adium, but last time I've used Pidgin it was a lot of work to configure it the way I want. That would still work for me, but to roll it out for an organization it would meet quite some resistance. So the problem with XMPP for me is the client situation.

> So the problem with XMPP for me is the client situation ... which is fixed by a better client. That requires skills, but different ones from designing a new crypto protocol. Given the PR efforts of the telegram people, they might actually be better XMPP+OTR+TextSecure+... client implementers than crypto designers (and maybe even better client implementers than most of the people who build clients right now since th…

I agree with that. Why they didn't go with this route is something I'd like to know as well - Telegram's FAQ is quite vague on this issue. But still, I prefer a reasonably secure service with great clients on all platforms, over a perfectly secure service with ugly clients that I can never 'sell' to decision makers.
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