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Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

sandervenema.ch

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Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#81

Post by zigzigzag »

sandervenema wrote: post #71
zabuni wrote: post #42

"Also, there’s the issue of integrity. Google is still cooperating with the NSA and other intelligence agencies. PRISM is also still a thing. I’m pretty sure that Google could serve a specially modified update or version of Signal to specific targets for surveillance, and they would be none the wiser that they installed malware on their phones." Isn't part of the reason that Moxie went with the Google Store is that h…

Hi, author here. Yes, my point with that sentence was that the average (non-technical) user (to which Signal is marketed btw), is not going to check signatures. Google has root on the phone, the user is using their app store to install the Signal app that comes up in the store, and basically Google has full control over this, and the user would be none the wiser. Of course, us more technical inclined people could the…

Does it, actually?

I was under the impression that the Play Store doesn't run as root and the package manager API (controlled by the phone manufacturer) is what checks signatures. Can the Play Store override the signature checks on upgrade and if so, what codepaths is it using?

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#82

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

heavenlyhash wrote: post #22

EDIT: this isn't a response to most of the article, but specifically to the "Moving Forward" section, asking about alternative tools. Come to the matrix! https://matrix.org/ It's free -- all FOSS, including the entirety of the server -- and yes, all of it: proof by existence: several of my friends run their own. It federates. I regularly join channels hosted on several different servers, and exchange messages without…

I heard from another thread that Matrix is bad a realtime messaging, and quite slow at it. Is this true?

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#83

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

raverbashing wrote: post #15

- Lack of federation Use a federated secure protocol. Oh wait, there are none. Because if a problem appears you just can't fix it without breaking all federated clients. And then they will whine. - Dependency on Google Cloud Messaging Fair enough - Your contact list is not private Fair enough - The RedPhone server is not open-source While it would be nice that it was Open sourced I can understand them not releasing i…

Umm... Tox?

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#84

Post by joecool1029 »

venomsnake wrote: post #78
tptacek wrote: post #41

The author of this post believes that by making a stand over Signal policies he doesn't like (the superficial GCM dep, the OWS-only server policy, the contact list discovery system), something more like LibreSignal will grow to take Signal's place. The author is wrong. LibreSignal won't replace Signal. Something like Telegram will: an "open source" messaging system with inferior cryptography, "opt-in" end-to-end mess…

Just a question - is Telegram secret chat after you verify keys still with inferior cryptography? And why?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10713064

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#85

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

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.

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#86

Post by Canada »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #79
Canada wrote: post #70

Nothing is stopping anyone from running their own servers, changing the username scheme, and implementing the voice signaling. Moxie doesn't complain about such usage. But that's more work than simply complaining and telling OWS what they should do. As far as usernames go, that would require the signaling key to be remembered by the user. That doesn't work well in practice. As far as contact sync goes, has anyone sub…

> Regarding federation, let's see some code. It's ridiculous to demand the small team that is OWS solve every single problem. Moxie has explicitly rejected federation. Anyone writing such code is wasting their time it won't get accepted.

Yep. You can run your own federation though. And maybe if it's really awesome he'll change his mind.

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#87

Post by snvzz »

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.

> For nontechnical users, that's a massive downside.

I disagree entirely. It's an upside. They get to benefit from PKI without even understanding anything. A person's address gets them the actual person.

ToxMe requires trusting the ToxMe identity provider, and is an obvious point of attack. And we'd no doubt see fake addresses that resemble other peoples, and other such nonsense.

There's minimising the inconvenience (with ideas like the QR code feature they have), and there's plain giving up security for minimal gained convenience, which we should just avoid.

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#88

Post by sandervenema »

zigzigzag wrote: post #81
sandervenema wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, author here. Yes, my point with that sentence was that the average (non-technical) user (to which Signal is marketed btw), is not going to check signatures. Google has root on the phone, the user is using their app store to install the Signal app that comes up in the store, and basically Google has full control over this, and the user would be none the wiser. Of course, us more technical inclined people could the…

Does it, actually? I was under the impression that the Play Store doesn't run as root and the package manager API (controlled by the phone manufacturer) is what checks signatures. Can the Play Store override the signature checks on upgrade and if so, what codepaths is it using?

Just a quick look, but this is the PackageManager.java file:

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...

for the Android base framework. It has the checkSignatures() abstract definition and some other stuff that seems to be the API you talk about. Now this is all abstract, so some other party (maybe phone manufacturer, possibly others) must implement these methods to conform to the API. Could Google (or some other party) not just override the abstract implementation?

I find it hard to believe this is something only the phone manufacturer would have access to, not Google itself, given that Google has created the entire operating system basically, and is pulling more and more stuff from the AOSP into their proprietary apps (like Play services).

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#89

Post by kuschku »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #59
kuschku wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just a JAR (no native components) I’ve reversed it, and rebuilt an alternative The jar you include actually opens just an IPC channel to the Google Play Services framework, which runs with system permissions, and handles the actual stuff. You can’t implement your own FCM without having root access on EVERY Android phone out there.

Maybe not. Although there's this guy: https://eladnava.com/pushy-a-new-alternative-to-google-cloud... , it seems like his library doesn't work very well after Nougat.

From Android 6 on, Doze just terminates apps running in background after a while. The only network access that is allowed is GCM.

Which causes the entire issue.

I wrote a complaint to the EU privacy official responsible for them and the EU antitrust committee.

Re: Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

#90

Post by heavenlyhash »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #82
heavenlyhash wrote: post #22

EDIT: this isn't a response to most of the article, but specifically to the "Moving Forward" section, asking about alternative tools. Come to the matrix! https://matrix.org/ It's free -- all FOSS, including the entirety of the server -- and yes, all of it: proof by existence: several of my friends run their own. It federates. I regularly join channels hosted on several different servers, and exchange messages without…

I heard from another thread that Matrix is bad a realtime messaging, and quite slow at it. Is this true?

Not even remotely.

It's quite good at realtime, and especially reliable realtime. Compared with protocols like XMPP, Matrix scores way higher on reliability because it has message IDs and message ordering baked into the protocol, so it can actually converge on a correct state after network flakes. (I consider this a pretty big deal because silent message drops were a pretty regular issue for me in XMPP, and we all know about netsplits in IRC. I've simply never had silent message loss in Matrix because the protocol is simply better.)

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