5 ms·

Essentially this guy is saying, Signal is secure, it's mostly easy to use (with the exception of multiple phone numbers), and the only alternative he mentioned

Essentially this guy is saying, Signal is secure, it's mostly easy to use (with the exception of multiple phone numbers), and the only alternative he mentioned is a half broken clone. Is he seriously going to stop recommending it to people whose lives depend on secure communications because of some abstruse ideological point? In any case, Moxie's position is a reasonable one even though there are some arguments for federation. While my current phone doesn't support Signal, once I get a new one I will continue to use it. You might opine that allowing Signal clones would allow me to use the app, but they would almost certainly be maintained by people who aren't really crypto experts, and so it's better to operate as though I am broadcasting in cleartext than to pretend that I'm not and get burned.

kuschku 10y ago
The biggest argument is that there is little of a difference between Signal and Telegram or Signal and WhatsApp for the user if they are forced to use the official servers, and those servers get to store their entire social graph.
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  Here's what Moxie said about this issue: https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/
  - wtbob 10y ago
    And here's my write-up of how a private set-intersection protocol could be used to enable users to securely swap contacts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11289223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11289223 It's a solved problem, but Signal doesn't implement it.
    - bascule 10y ago
      The protocol you describe is a synchronous online protocol where Alice and Bob have to be online at the same time (and if they're doing this at Charlie's behest, so does Charlie). Signal is designed for asynchronous communication where both participants don't have to be online to discover each other or send each other message. Also, how does this protocol even help? What's the use case? It allows participants to discover mutual contacts, but what then? Do we use Bob as a web-of-trust style introducer? What if Alice doesn't even want to talk to Charlie? Do we do this for all the friends Alice has in common with Bob? Do we do this for all the friends Alice has in common with everyone? Does Charlie initiate the process, only to have it only work if all three of them are online at the same time? Who kicks it off and why, and what would the user experience be? You end your last post with "So, problem solved" but I'm not sure this protocol even solves any practical problems for the Signal use case, and seems like a mere first step of solving a much more complicated problem of actually trying to turn this into a useful feature with good UX.
      - wtbob 10y ago
        > The protocol you describe is a synchronous online protocol where Alice and Bob have to be online at the same time (and if they're doing this at Charlie's behest, so does Charlie). They don't actually have to be online at the same time (and they don't care about whether Charlie is online or not: it's a pairwise protocol): they just to be able to send and receive one another messages, and to store state. Fortunately the former is some Signal's quite good at, and storing state is something that phone hard drives are quite good at. > Also, how does this protocol even help? What's the use case? It allows participants to discover mutual contacts, but what then? Do we use Bob as a web-of-trust style introducer? What if Alice doesn't even want to talk to Charlie? Do we do this for all the friends Alice has in common with Bob? Do we do this for all the friends Alice has in common with everyone? It's the exact same use case as Signal's existing contact-discovery code, only private: it enables Alice & Bob to share information about a mutual acquaintance, e.g. Charlie. This might be used to share Charlie's key ID, in a trust on first use style. Note that this is no less secure than everyone everywhere trusting Open Whisper Systems on first use. The idea is that when one starts using Signal, one exchanges keys in some out-of-band mechanism (NFC is a likely candidate) with an acquaintance, and then from that person get keys of mutual acquaintances, and from then others, and so on and so forth. Whenever you add a new acquaintance, one can reiterate the same protocol with all previous acquaintances (it's amenable to batching, too, which is nice) in order to propagate that information. It may have some interesting uses in a certificate transparency sense, but I don't know about that. > You end your last post with "So, problem solved" but I'm not sure this protocol even solves any practical problems for the Signal use case It solves the exact same problems the Signal contact-discovery protocol solves, without actually revealing all one's contacts to OWS. That's all. If it did nothing more than that, it would be a good thing.
- throwaway101416 10y ago
  That's a terrible argument. What about all the other end-to-end encryption services that have more users and don't require you to give up anonymity?
lucb1e 10y ago
> and the only alternative he mentioned is a half broken clone. Sorry but you've got that backwards. He doesn't propose using that, he mentions OpenWhisperSystems banned them from using the service. It's criticism towards Signal, not a product recommendation. > my current phone doesn't support Signal I think it's Signal not supporting your phone, not the other way around. The manufacturer probably didn't make a conscious choice to not support Signal, but depending on what the issue is exactly, Signal probably did.
- haffenloher 10y ago
  > OpenWhisperSystems banned them from using the service Nobody has been banned from anything. People have been politely asked not to distribute 3rd-party builds of Signal using their name and their servers, and that's it.
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    I think the name is plenty different, nobody will mistake LibreSignal as being the same as Signal. That's as if Microsoft goes LibreOffice and OpenOffice are trademark infringements of Office (insofar as you can trademark the word "office" anyway). As for the politely asking, yeah that is still banning. If you banish someone from a country, they can still physically walk into the country. They're just not allowed to.
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  I think you are mistaking my choice of words for a lack of understanding, but I do understand. The author makes no recommendation _outside_ of Signal related products.

kuschku 10y ago

The biggest argument is that there is little of a difference between Signal and Telegram or Signal and WhatsApp for the user if they are forced to use the official servers, and those servers get to store their entire social graph.

SapphireSun 10y ago
Here's what Moxie said about this issue: https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/
- wtbob 10y ago
  And here's my write-up of how a private set-intersection protocol could be used to enable users to securely swap contacts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11289223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11289223 It's a solved problem, but Signal doesn't implement it.
  - bascule 10y ago
    The protocol you describe is a synchronous online protocol where Alice and Bob have to be online at the same time (and if they're doing this at Charlie's behest, so does Charlie). Signal is designed for asynchronous communication where both participants don't have to be online to discover each other or send each other message. Also, how does this protocol even help? What's the use case? It allows participants to discover mutual contacts, but what then? Do we use Bob as a web-of-trust style introducer? What if Alice doesn't even want to talk to Charlie? Do we do this for all the friends Alice has in common with Bob? Do we do this for all the friends Alice has in common with everyone? Does Charlie initiate the process, only to have it only work if all three of them are online at the same time? Who kicks it off and why, and what would the user experience be? You end your last post with "So, problem solved" but I'm not sure this protocol even solves any practical problems for the Signal use case, and seems like a mere first step of solving a much more complicated problem of actually trying to turn this into a useful feature with good UX.
    - wtbob 10y ago
      > The protocol you describe is a synchronous online protocol where Alice and Bob have to be online at the same time (and if they're doing this at Charlie's behest, so does Charlie). They don't actually have to be online at the same time (and they don't care about whether Charlie is online or not: it's a pairwise protocol): they just to be able to send and receive one another messages, and to store state. Fortunately the former is some Signal's quite good at, and storing state is something that phone hard drives are quite good at. > Also, how does this protocol even help? What's the use case? It allows participants to discover mutual contacts, but what then? Do we use Bob as a web-of-trust style introducer? What if Alice doesn't even want to talk to Charlie? Do we do this for all the friends Alice has in common with Bob? Do we do this for all the friends Alice has in common with everyone? It's the exact same use case as Signal's existing contact-discovery code, only private: it enables Alice & Bob to share information about a mutual acquaintance, e.g. Charlie. This might be used to share Charlie's key ID, in a trust on first use style. Note that this is no less secure than everyone everywhere trusting Open Whisper Systems on first use. The idea is that when one starts using Signal, one exchanges keys in some out-of-band mechanism (NFC is a likely candidate) with an acquaintance, and then from that person get keys of mutual acquaintances, and from then others, and so on and so forth. Whenever you add a new acquaintance, one can reiterate the same protocol with all previous acquaintances (it's amenable to batching, too, which is nice) in order to propagate that information. It may have some interesting uses in a certificate transparency sense, but I don't know about that. > You end your last post with "So, problem solved" but I'm not sure this protocol even solves any practical problems for the Signal use case It solves the exact same problems the Signal contact-discovery protocol solves, without actually revealing all one's contacts to OWS. That's all. If it did nothing more than that, it would be a good thing.
throwaway101416 10y ago
That's a terrible argument. What about all the other end-to-end encryption services that have more users and don't require you to give up anonymity?

lucb1e 10y ago

> and the only alternative he mentioned is a half broken clone. Sorry but you've got that backwards. He doesn't propose using that, he mentions OpenWhisperSystems banned them from using the service. It's criticism towards Signal, not a product recommendation. > my current phone doesn't support Signal I think it's Signal not supporting your phone, not the other way around. The manufacturer probably didn't make a conscious choice to not support Signal, but depending on what the issue is exactly, Signal probably did.

haffenloher 10y ago
> OpenWhisperSystems banned them from using the service Nobody has been banned from anything. People have been politely asked not to distribute 3rd-party builds of Signal using their name and their servers, and that's it.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  I think the name is plenty different, nobody will mistake LibreSignal as being the same as Signal. That's as if Microsoft goes LibreOffice and OpenOffice are trademark infringements of Office (insofar as you can trademark the word "office" anyway). As for the politely asking, yeah that is still banning. If you banish someone from a country, they can still physically walk into the country. They're just not allowed to.
SapphireSun 10y ago
I think you are mistaking my choice of words for a lack of understanding, but I do understand. The author makes no recommendation _outside_ of Signal related products.