16 ms·

A Formal Security Analysis of the Signal Messaging Protocol

253 points by galadran 10y ago

moyta 10y ago
Its great that the underlying Signal protocol is secure, my major worry is how do we get more people to use it, and how do we make it more reliable? As it stands right now, Signal is used exclusively by the moderately technically inclined, with a little over 1 million users. In a perfect world, it would be bigger than Whatsapp, which uses libsignal but has many metadata related issues, and also misses many older demographics in the US. Additionally, server reliability has been something like 710hrs out of 720hrs usually every month, with an outage just this last Saturday from 19:51 to 22:08 PST for everything but ZRTP calls. I know Moxie will likely never allow interoperability with his servers after the cluster that was CyanogenMod WhisperPush interop, but we need something to allow for self hosting or alternative hosting, Signal's servers are not bulletproof and a local server in remote areas can be invaluble, essentially XMPP with Conversations is all we have in this arena right now.
- widforss 10y ago
  I find it's really easy to get people to use it. I tell them to install it and then use it as my primary communication channel with them. As I do this with more and more of my contacts some of them will have each others numbers and will automatically be able to talk to each other via Signal.
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    Yeah, same here. Except then messages arrive out of order, duplicate, for another session, "bad encrypted message", or simply take minutes to deliver. I don't understand why duplicates are even possible. So while I'm able to get people to try it out or use it for "sensitive" stuff, these issues really hurt usage and I'll just end up reverting to SMS once a day at least. Edit: I don't want to sound to be complaining too much. I love Signal and try to convert people. Just hard when basics mess up. And it's also frustrating because on the surface some of this stuff doesn't make sense.
    - moyta 10y ago
      I experienced this with TextSecure over a year ago, but since then it has been smooth sailing outside of minor outages (10hrs a month), since the outages are less than the regional outages we've been experiencing on AT&T and T-Mobile for SMS as of late (20 to 30hrs a month). Calling has also improved quite a bit, for Signal enabled contacts I've been using it exclusively for the past 9 months, I can be driving for an hour without call quality issues and maintain a stable call reliably.
      - JshWright 10y ago
        Is the codec choice any better? The last time I tried to use it the audio quality was awful.
        lorenzhs 10y ago
        I use it for calling when abroad, and so far the audio quality has been quite good. I don't know if it was worse in the past, but maybe just give it another try?
        haffenloher 10y ago
        Audio quality has been good enough for me, but there's definitely room for improvement as they're still using Speex (if I'm not mistaken).
        moyta 10y ago
        If they'd use Opus I'd really appreciate it, hell, if I could even get interop, I have hacked together an app to pass the ZRTP codeword to my deskphone when Freeswitch terminates it and reencodes it as SRTP/TLS for it, since no deskphone vendor supports ZRTP. Would make those that insist on ZRTP in my life a lot more convenient to have extended convos with.
      - newman314 10y ago
        My major problem is when a contact stops using Signal for some reason (new phone etc.). My messages go into the ether without any indication that they are not being received.
  - hambofus 10y ago
    I have no problem to get people to use it, the problem is to get people to keep using it. For example some time ago when Signal was still called TextSecure, we converted all our group chats for a friend group of technically minded people to TextSecure. We all agreed that encryption is important and worth some minor discomforts. We switched back to Facebook (which we all dislike) within a month because TextSecure didn't have consistent message ordering in group chats, making some conversations impossible to understand for those unfortunate enough to receive messages in a bad order.
    - moyta 10y ago
      This is mostly fixed as of a few months ago, the desktop client also makes it as convenient as Facebook.
      - m-p-3 10y ago
        The problem is that they chose to make it a Chrome Apps, which will eventually be dropped from all plateforms but ChromeOS.
        moyta 10y ago
        True, I assume they'll just ride that till the bitter end and then unhappily move to using nwjs instead of Chrome, and distribute it from their website instead (even though they seem highly opposed to that).
        m-p-3 10y ago
        I wouldn't mind if they decided to make an Electron app instead.
        striking 10y ago
        I would, I really dislike Electron. Even Chrome Apps are a pain. I would be much happier with a native implementation.
  - mtgx 10y ago
    In other words, the Chrome evangelist strategy (or Firefox evangelist strategy prior to that): Let me install this app for you - trust me, it's much better!"
  - kombucha2 10y ago
    way easier than others...wickr etc
- HurrdurrHodor 10y ago
  Note that while they do not retain or analyze it Signal offers no metadata protection either.
  - moyta 10y ago
    Exactly why I like XMPP, it allows me to protect my metadata from leakage, if I could get normies to use it for more than a few weeks.
    - haffenloher 10y ago
      > Exactly why I like XMPP, it allows me to protect my metadata from leakage I read this frequently, but I'm still not sure how this is supposed to work - would you care to explain?
      - moyta 10y ago
        Say I run the server under my control, and I talk to other people on and off my server via XMPP. What is occuring is my laptop, phone & tablet are connecting back to my XMPP server, which then connects to those clients, thus not leaking my IP address, OS, etc. Additionally, I can tunnel this all over CJDNS or OpenVPN and nooone will be the wiser that I am even using XMPP. Comparatively, as it stands now Google is getting a bunch of metadata on Signal users, such as when messages are sent and received and from which device, IP addresses, OS info, etc.
        moxie 10y ago
        > Say I run the server under my control, and I talk to other people on and off my server via XMPP. What is occuring is my laptop, phone & tablet are connecting back to my XMPP server, which then connects to those clients, thus not leaking my IP address, OS, etc. Here it seems that you're defining "metadata" as your IP address (and OS?). That's kind of a non-standard definition of "metadata" in this space -- most people approach the topic more concerned about who is communicating with who. Email is federated, and I run my own mail server, but almost every single email I send or receive has GMail at the other end of it -- so running my own server does not provide me with any meaningful metadata protection, even though it is a federated protocol. The idea that everyone in the world is going to run their own mail server (or messaging server, or whatever) has not born out in practice, even in environments that natively support federation. I think serious metadata protection is going to require new protocols and new techniques, so we're much more likely to see major progress in centralized rather than distributed environments (in the same way that Signal Protocol is now on over two billion devices, but we're unlikely to ever see even basic large scale email end to end encryption). If all you want to do is hide your IP address, it sounds like you should just use Tor or a VPN. > Comparatively, as it stands now Google is getting a bunch of metadata on Signal users, such as when messages are sent and received and from which device, IP addresses, OS info, etc. This is not true. You're referring to GCM? The only thing GCM does is wake up a device to connect to the Signal server when the app is running in the background, nothing is actually transmitted over GCM.
- vog 10y ago
  > essentially XMPP with Conversations is all we have in this arena right now. Maybe this isn't too bad. How does modern XMPP compare with Signal's protocol? Since Signal refuses to learn from XMPP (especially the federated part), maybe the solution is to make XMPP learn from Signal. Then, Signal's failure to become federated would have been an important step to make XMPP finally useful for secure messaging.
  - moyta 10y ago
    Its not too bad, XMPP is very easy with a good client like Conversations. That being said it is not for normies, over the course of a year Signal will be used and appreciated by normies, normies using Conversations meanwhile will go perma offline after a few weeks from what I've seen. Conversations is essentially Signal but for XMPP, the problem is it doesn't blend in normal SMS and additional value adds to sweeten the pot for normies and keep them using it.
- Y-bar 10y ago
  One hurdle for me (at least) is the lack of export/import/backup. I got a new phone recently and discovered that there was no way to restore message conversations onto the new phone. This might not be a deal-breaker for some, maybe even a very nice feature for some, but for me it made me go back to other services. Github issue: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/issues/967 https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/issues/967
  - rosshays 10y ago
    The lack of some good history mechanism is what has always kept me away from this kind of software. But I don't know how we could possibly get the kind of messenger I would dream of (secure/encrypted, history backup to cloud, and web app for messaging).
  - h4waii 10y ago
    Just to clarify, this is iOS only. On Android, the client can export plaintext messages to storage, or you can use something like Titanium Backup, which wraps up the app installer AND data directories in a tarball and can restore it across other many different versions of Android.
  - moyta 10y ago
    At one point Signal had working backup & restore on Android, whereby you could keep your private keys and seamlessly move between phones, but they did away with that since a few users encountered bugs. I really wish they hadn't axed it, it was a lot easier to use it than do an adb backup of the app & data. Looking at that GitHub issue, Moxie appears to have popped in for half a second out of annoyance, then the main repo maintainer michaelkirk went and locked & limited the issue to just contributors.
    - lorenzhs 10y ago
      The problem with backup & restore in Android was that it didn't work reliably. I know first-hand. If the feature isn't there, people won't rely on it, as they may do when it's there but doesn't work. The thing with locking issues is that Signal issues get so much noise that the content will drown in it. I dislike not being able to add on-topic comments, too, but I understand how they got where they are.
- padraic7a 10y ago
  I can't see that allowing for self-hosting / federation will do anything to drive adoption. If that was the case then Conversations would be bigger than Signal, but it just isn't Improving server reliability is a separate thing.
  - moyta 10y ago
    It could be like email, except with libsignal as its base. Federation definitely drove email to be as big as it is today, and it has made server reliability a non-issue (your server holds the message until the other server is online). XMPP itself is huge, GCM is essentially just a frontend for it. Conversations is smaller than Signal in part due to Signal being around since 2011, and Conversations being created in 2014, and also Signal gaining many high profile endorsements, from Snowden to Hillary. Still, Signal is microscopic compared to Whatsapp.
- moxie 10y ago
  Hmm, I'm not sure where you got these numbers, but none of them are correct. Ten hours of downtime a month? We measure this pretty obsessively, and haven't had that much downtime in a three year period. I appreciate the sentiment for what you're saying, but our direct user growth has surprised even us (again, not sure where you're getting your numbers), and Signal Protocol is now on over two billion devices. If your major concerns are reliability and user growth, I think federated protocols are likely to exacerbate rather than improve those conditions -- as we've seen with XMPP historically. However, I would love it if you proved me wrong. Signal can be deployed in a federated environment today, let me know if you need any help setting it up.
  - webmaven 10y ago
    How many direct users does Signal-the-app have? If you can further narrow that to active users per $TIMEPERIOD (for example, MAU), that would be great.
  - moyta 10y ago
    This is what I've observed on T-Mobile, Centurylink and Comcast over the past month across two phones, it does allow me to backdate messages and send them later at least, so not a total loss. In regards to federation for Signal, what are you looking for in terms of technical competence and skills? I'm already intimately familiar with running servers, VOIP, SMS delivery, etc so I've got a good grip on things, and I'd like to tie in our existing PBXes with Signal whereby ZRTP calls go straight to endpoints, perhaps we can force the issue with Grandstream and get them to add ZRTP support on device for their GXP2140 & GXP2170 phones.
- Adverblessly 10y ago
  > how do we get more people to use it? For me the missing link is a good, native Linux client. Signal would have "got" me the last time I was shopping around for a communication app if it had that. Then again, I probably represent maybe 0.01% of the audience you are trying to reach...
- Veratyr 10y ago
  > essentially XMPP with Conversations is all we have in this arena right now There's also Matrix (matrix.org). Took me about half an hour to set up a homeserver, has federation and TLS for now but full end to end encryption is already in beta (since I'm using my own homeserver I'm fine with just TLS) and Riot, the biggest client, is easy to set up and use. My wife is rather opposed to new things and isn't amazing with technology but she's happy enough with it. Conversations on the other hand was a pain to set up self hosted (more Prosody/eJabberd's fault though) and had silent message send/receive failures.
eveningcoffee 10y ago
I think that this is relevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880520 I would recommend to read the article first and then follow the protectionism in the comments later. The main claim of the article is that we need federation, as we do with the email (but imo we are loosing it). In addition, Signal shares a problem with email - information about your communication circle is not secure.
- throwanem 10y ago
  This is a classic example of making the perfect the enemy of the good.
  - eveningcoffee 10y ago
    I disagree. These are valid points and dismissing them based on ignorance would be wrong. Instead we should discuss why these are not implemented and how could be proceed to implement them.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      That's not what the article you cite is saying. It's saying "don't use Signal because Signal is less than perfect". Calling the counterarguments in that thread "protectionism" suggests you feel likewise. If you want to discuss how a follow-on from Signal could and maybe should address some or all of those points, great! That's a conversation worth having. But it doesn't sound from your toplevel comment as though it is the conversation you're trying to start.
      - bahjoite 10y ago
        > It's saying "don't use Signal because Signal is less than perfect". This is mis-categorisation. The article says "I won't recommend the use of Signal" and gives reasons and desired improvements.
      - eveningcoffee 10y ago
tptacek 10y ago
Ugh. The paper isn't from "the International Association for Cryptologic Research". IACR is simply a site that hosts academic crypto papers. The paper is fine, but probably disregard the article.
- 24gttghh 10y ago
  And what article would that be? The link goes directly to the PDF...
  - tptacek 10y ago
    The submission has been updated. It originally pointed to an article on The Register.
    - 24gttghh 10y ago
      Ah I was not aware of that, thank you!
claudius 10y ago
Rather pointless to have a "trusted" application on an operating system you cannot trust – and not even the possibility to run the application on an even remotely trusted and private system, in particular without giving unaccountable root access to Google.
- tptacek 10y ago
  This is more or less a way of saying it's "rather pointless to have secure messengers on iOS". I understand why open source advocates say that, because they've been saying it for 20 years now, but I'm not sure we need to litigate the point or pretend it's some great insight.
  - jrcii 10y ago
    Surely the age of a problem doesn't necessarily diminish its significance?
  - claudius 10y ago
    Let me put it like this – if OpenWhisperSystems had an explicit toggle in their protocol which, after flipping it, would allow them to access all future communications and where the user was unable to tell whether it had or had not been flipped, nobody would call the protocol "secure" or write a "Trust It" headline about it. However, if OWS only supports systems on which such a toggle exists via a third-party provider, that somehow makes them secure? I find this hard to understand. Yes, of course an app which encrypts data against some adversaries is nice, but it should definitely be called "secure-against-some-people", not "secure", and people shouldn’t write "Trust It" but rather "Trust It if you also trust X and Y and Z".
    - tptacek 10y ago
      Again: this is a point that can be made to sound interesting with lots of extra words, but all you're saying is that people run applications on operating systems you don't like. They're not going to switch.
teekert 10y ago
Currently I'm on telegram primarily. Loving it, using the bots, using the gifs built in, using the stickers and the cloud storage. I don't love the encryption. But my next switch will be to a self hosted/federated solution such as https://riot.im/ https://riot.im/, at least for me and my wife. I will not be able to make friends use and trust my server (they shouldn't for their private messages) and they won't run their own. Signal looks nice but man the Telegram desktop client on Linux is also very very convenient, plus the fact that you don't need your phone to be on.
- moyta 10y ago
  Is it still insecure? http://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-stop-using-telegram-right-now-1782557415 http://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-stop-using-telegram-right-...
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    That article is complete bullshit. I sent them a big email pointing out mistake after mistake and of course never got any response nor did they publish anything to correct their "journalism". There are legitimate concerns with Telegram that I share with all other technically inclined people, but this article is like saying "use a firewalled Windows 95 instead" because something is wrong with Vista. You really should disregard everything they say because the true parts are too interwoven with fabrications.
    - moyta 10y ago
      Sure, I didn't look for an amazing article, just remember hearing about their homebrew "crypto" years ago and going eww. This might be slightly better: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/130559/is-telegram-e2e-still-insecure http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/130559/is-telegr...
    - gr3yh47 10y ago
      You should provide some specific counterpoints and sources to back said points up - because rolling their own encryption is by itself reason enough not to use them. defaulting encryption to off is just icing on the cake
jonathanstrange 10y ago
Maybe I'm too grumpy today, but the gist of the summary of the review to me is not 'trust it' but rather 'the protocol is new and overly complex and the security goals have not been stated clearly' with the addition that no major error was found.
- moyta 10y ago
  Yeah, pretty much. Its good enough that Whatsapp, Allo and many others paid chump change to license it ($1 mil each I heard) since its cheaper and better vetted than anything they'd develop internally.
VLM 10y ago
Serious question, if both the endpoints are completely powned by corporations and governments, what do I gain by having the traffic on the wire be secure? Who is the only Opfor I'm defending against, Sprint? They can barely provide working service and correct billing. Its a given that secret juicy electronic stuff always ends up on wikileaks, so anything important I discuss live in person and never electronically. So if, in a massive delusion of self importance, everything I do thats juicy can't show up on wikileaks because its not electronic, regardless of any app I use or don't use, and the only thing I use electronics for is the security equivalent of "don't forget to buy a quart of milk at the store on the way home" then how does encrypting my quart of milk purchase help me? Is there any reason to not take it as a given that any juicy electronic stuff ends up on wikileaks regardless of this app? Realize that if I wanted to keep my visit to the supermarket a secret using this app, I can't. Facebook and google sell my GPS data. Tomorrow google rewards will send me a survey asking what I thought of my visit to the store. The store sniffs the wifi MACs and bluetooth data and camera data to track my every move, that free internet for customers isn't entirely free. Not to mention I'm on probably 50 camera recordings. And the phone company knows where I am, every step of the way, for supposed 911 purposes. And my credit card is rubbed up against my receipt purchase data to data mine the hell out of my milk purchase. But I'm supposed to feel perfectly private and secure because Sprint can't read the contents of my wife's shopping list, uh huh. If you keep things super nebulous and don't think too hard, it seems I'd be protecting myself against someone, and protecting is always good and there's always a someone to fear so obviously it must be awesome. But analysis shows there's not a problem and I'm not defended against any important forces only against a single weak and unimportant force and wide open to absolutely everyone else.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  You may be abnormal, but most people text sexually explicit comments they'd prefer neither be in corporate or government databases. (And a ton of other highly private, perfectly inocuous material.) There's no reason people should be confined to only discussing those topics with people in physical proximity, and encrypted IM apps perfectly fit that use case. There's also a legal and technical distinction between the NSA (or phone company) reading plaintext on the wire and actively compromising a device. Your comment faceteously ignores that. Ed: I think of it like locking my front door. My deadbolt won't stop the government getting in, but it establishes (for legal reasons) that I had taken steps to ensure privacy and it raises the chance they leave signs of entry, rather than being covert. It's not that Im trying to hide things from the government -- they could just ask me anything they wanted to know. I just want them to have to ask, not just covertly take whatever they want.
campuscodi 10y ago
What... no flaws.... impossibro!!!
sametmax 10y ago
I can't help but feel like the word "normies" is somewhat insulting. Although I never read it before, but it sounds very condescending.
- throwanem 10y ago
  It has origin in 4chan, like a lot of memes, and is at least as insulting to its user as to its object - being in essence an insult directed at functional adults by caricatures of NEETs, the humor coming from the fact that the latter really aren't in a position to look down on the former. Of course, as with any hot meme, it gets a semantic makeover in the course of widening adoption, but if you're looking for an answer to the question of whether someone who uses "normie" unironically, especially in a context outside Reddit or a *chan, merits taking seriously...well, at the very least, I think it's reasonable to interpret that at least as a strong clue that the user isn't in the habit of thoroughly considering his utterances before emitting them.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    Ah ok. In the context of 4chan or memes, it's not a problem. You usually like them because of the politically incorrectness. It just seems out of place on HN, where people tends to be overly analytic, and rarely call people names.
    - mst 10y ago
      In a conversation like this I read it as a short-hand for "average non-techical user" that's less directly insulting than "lusers". I'd probably just say "normal user" or "average user" myself, but I don't find it name-calling in context.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      It is out of place on HN.
- moyta 10y ago
  It is moderately condescending, but it is very handy to describe average technical competence and what to expect from said humans. Things need to be straightforward & familiar for normies (eg. Pokemon Go vs Ingress) and you can't expect to hold a high level conversation with a good chunk of them, whether that be about mathematics, policy (so much circular logic), reality (citations & sources are not a thing many normies are willing to use), etc. That being said, its not all bad, just set expectations accordingly, just like you would going on HN. I do not expect the average HN reader to understand much about traffic dynamics and the minimal efficiency gains that may come with self driving cars, or the sheer volume of people a moderate sized light rail network can move in a timely manner, so I set my expectations very low. Its like talking to a Microsoftie about rail or self driving cars, there is a lack of knowledge (the fact that Amtrak runs trains from Vancouver to Seattle to Portland and is paying BNSF to make the route more reliable) and a conceptual barrier that I do not expect them to rapidly grasp (bullet trains need dead straight rights of way, no exceptions). Edit: Apparently I can't reply to you, nevertheless I picked up normie as a term in meatspace, and while it might not meet your sensibilities, I do not see a more accurate term, and I'm not here to intimately know & defend your sensibilities. Same goes for asking me or telling me your pronoun, great for you, I give not a single shit, use what you want and cut to the chase.
redwood 10y ago
When I first looked at this, it boggled my mind that they require a phone number to sign up. Maybe that's no longer the case? But assuming it is, it just struck me as the epitome of breaking away from the concept of secure anonymity.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  I thought the system was supposed to provide encryption to known communication, not anonymity? If that's the case, choosing to use an existing identity management system most people are part of is an excellent bootstrapping decision. Identity management is hard, and it's a fair problem to punt on if it's not your focus. Encryption != anonymity. (In fact, it usually does the opposite, because encrypted messages stand out.)
- kbart 10y ago
  Hm, Signal was never about anonymity, it's just an end-to-end encrypted chat and marketed as such.
- Amir6 10y ago
  You are absolutely right! Plus, getting a copy of all your contacts is and invasion of privacy for an app that is advocating for privacy and security. You cant even use a online voip phone number for this app. Its just such a turn off and I'm extremely disappointed with endorsements from people like Snowden ignoring such fundamental flaws.
  - MrMullen 10y ago
    > Plus, getting a copy of all your contacts is and invasion of privacy for an app that is advocating for privacy and security. You really need to do research into this before making this claim. The phone numbers are hashed (Or something like it) before being sent to the Signal servers.
    - haffenloher 10y ago
      Unfortunately, hashing provides no meaningful protection here. The preimage space (i.e. the set of all possible phone numbers) is just too small. See https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/
lhlmgr 10y ago
Since I'm very happy with the usability of the WIRE messenger I would appreciate if someone would do a formal security analysis on their (modified) axolotl protocol.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sjfiekzjndn 10y ago
Signal contains usage telemetry, unverifiable proprietary components, automatic software updates without user consent, and forces you to send messages over Google servers, allowing them to collect metadata about your social network graph. It doesn't matter if the transport layer has flawless encryption if the app itself is doing things wrong. Moxie Marlinespike's cease and desist[0] orders against open source projects trying to fix these issues has me thoroughly convinced that Signal is a honeypot. Using XMPP with OTR encryption would be a much safer choice if you're discussing something sensitive, in my opinion. [0] https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217218091 https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
- corv 10y ago
  As if working with Facebook wasn't enough of a red flag.
- CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
  > automatic software updates without user consent Do not include that in your list of complaints. That is a security feature, not a privacy deficit, but only if done right. https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/10/guide-automatic-security-updates-for-php-developers https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/10/guide-automatic-security-... TL;DR you want automatic updates
  - sjfiekzjndn 10y ago
    There are other update mechanisms available that don't let bad actors ship out malicious updates to compromise specific users.
    - CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
      Did you even read the article I linked?
      - sjfiekzjndn 10y ago
        Yes, and can you understand the concept of a silent malicious update being sent to specific individuals signed by the proper key?
iamnothere 10y ago
The protocol may be in good shape, but Signal's permission model is flawed for an application that handles sensitive data. A few examples of excessive permissions: * Disable your screen lock * Location permissions * Set wallpaper ("kitchen sink" feature here) * External storage (why not use internal "app only" storage?) * System log data Android's sandbox will do its best to protect the user from compromised applications, but it can't do anything to protect you if the application already has full permissions. Based on recent events, I would assume that Signal users are at risk of targeting as a block -- their desire for privacy makes them interesting targets from an intelligence and LEO perspective. Many successful applications follow a plugin model, where intrusive permissions are split off into separate, optional applications. Signal should do the same.
- AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
  On Marshmallow or newer, can't these be blocked? I was alarmed at the Location permissions at first too, but I believe it's only used so that you can send someone your GPS location. If you simply deny the request, that feature will be disabled, but I don't think it prevents the app from working.
  - iamnothere 10y ago
    Only some can be blocked. Unfortunately Android still groups permissions together, and all related permissions must be enabled or disabled as a block. (For instance, storage read and write permissions are technically separate, but they are placed together in a single "storage" group.) Most (all?) permissions in the catch-all "other" group cannot be disabled at all.
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      One of the interesting irrevocable permissions in that "Other" group is full network access, so any app can portscan your network or try to hack your IoT devices. Bluetooth pairing is also in Other. The Android permission model is terrible. What ever happened to Intents? Shouldn't photo sharing be a simple Intent rather than requiring a new UI and storage permissions for every single app?
potatosoup 10y ago
Installed Signal, wanted to use it. First step is to connect with my phone number and there is no other way to create an account. This is an unfortunate privacy-blind choice for what otherwise could be a great platform.
- HurrdurrHodor 10y ago
  It's probably somebody from the "Usernames are bad UX and if we have bad UX nobody will use the messanger and then we don't actually get a secure messenger because we don't get a messenger that anybody uses at all"-camp".
- haffenloher 10y ago
  You can still register with some landline or VoIP number if you want.
uselpa 10y ago
I don't understand all this recent Signal bashing here on HN. I have been using Signal for some time now on a daily basis and I haven't had real usability issues. We cannot hold OWS responsible for the insecurity of our operating systems, the nature of today's cloud or hardware infrastructure, the choices we make for comfort reasons, and what not. What they do is provide us with, and I think most of us would actually agree, a secure messenger that is both free of charge and best of breed, or close to. And as with every open source project, it's their project, but you're free to fork it and provide us with something better if you don't agree with their choices. So if you need a secure messenger now, because you need or want privacy, Signal is an excellent option, free of charge, open source. What are we actually complaining about? I don't know moxie but it seems that he's actually open to suggestions and offers if you're willing to provide some manpower as well. Then he has his convictions but still offers to discuss them constructively. Again, what is there to complain about? As for myself, I contact support if I have a question or issue, and they have been very helpful. I donated to the project, also because they are supported by http://freedom.press http://freedom.press, and I value a free press. And even though I am absolutely not interested into the giphy thing (I'm on iOS so I haven't really seen it yet), I'll open an issue on github if I want Signal to change. And I invite everybody to support the project in this way, and make sure that the projects that are actually supporting our interests don't get abandoned in favour of comfortable-to-use data-hogs like Facebook, WhatsApp or Telegram.
- subliminalpanda 10y ago
  Personally speaking I would have much rather have a feature in Signal that allows me to send documents or attachments from my various cloud providers rather than a gif search.
- iamnothere 10y ago
  This may not be true of everyone, but my own criticisms of Signal are meant as a constructive critique, and not as "bashing." Signal occupies a valuable spot in a new market, and we all win if it continues to improve. Think about what is at stake. Many people working in politics, law, human rights, and other areas absolutely need a way to communicate securely, especially when their causes don't align with the interests of those in power. If you're wondering why people are so passionate about having a more secure platform, that's why. In this case, it's important to be forgiving if people seem hostile or overly critical.
throw2016 10y ago
I don't understand how a company based in the US and one that requires a phone number can make any kind of claims about security or privacy, without being looked on as a honeypot untill it redeems itself with evidence to the contrary. Why would a privacy centric protocol choose to use a phone number which directly connects a user to their identity. How can this make sense? There is enough evidence most US based companies are in bed with the nsa, compromised or can be easily compromised. Companies or open source projects can be bullied and threatened by government officals, legally forced to give up their users, gagged and forced to betray users, co-opted, infiltrated or compromised. Lavabit has already happened. Why do we need encryption, security or privacy? If it is exclusively against state actors then we know its a serious challenge against extremely powerful, well resourced, and legally empowered actors and illusions of privacy, hand flailing 'something is better than nothing' and half baked measures won't do. It's reasonable then to expect any solution claiming security or privacy in this context to explicitly spell out how they address or plan to address these threat models. The alternative is acting in bad faith and making users vulnerable.

253 points by galadran 10y ago

moyta 10y ago

Its great that the underlying Signal protocol is secure, my major worry is how do we get more people to use it, and how do we make it more reliable? As it stands right now, Signal is used exclusively by the moderately technically inclined, with a little over 1 million users. In a perfect world, it would be bigger than Whatsapp, which uses libsignal but has many metadata related issues, and also misses many older demographics in the US. Additionally, server reliability has been something like 710hrs out of 720hrs usually every month, with an outage just this last Saturday from 19:51 to 22:08 PST for everything but ZRTP calls. I know Moxie will likely never allow interoperability with his servers after the cluster that was CyanogenMod WhisperPush interop, but we need something to allow for self hosting or alternative hosting, Signal's servers are not bulletproof and a local server in remote areas can be invaluble, essentially XMPP with Conversations is all we have in this arena right now.

widforss 10y ago
I find it's really easy to get people to use it. I tell them to install it and then use it as my primary communication channel with them. As I do this with more and more of my contacts some of them will have each others numbers and will automatically be able to talk to each other via Signal.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Yeah, same here. Except then messages arrive out of order, duplicate, for another session, "bad encrypted message", or simply take minutes to deliver. I don't understand why duplicates are even possible. So while I'm able to get people to try it out or use it for "sensitive" stuff, these issues really hurt usage and I'll just end up reverting to SMS once a day at least. Edit: I don't want to sound to be complaining too much. I love Signal and try to convert people. Just hard when basics mess up. And it's also frustrating because on the surface some of this stuff doesn't make sense.
  - moyta 10y ago
    I experienced this with TextSecure over a year ago, but since then it has been smooth sailing outside of minor outages (10hrs a month), since the outages are less than the regional outages we've been experiencing on AT&T and T-Mobile for SMS as of late (20 to 30hrs a month). Calling has also improved quite a bit, for Signal enabled contacts I've been using it exclusively for the past 9 months, I can be driving for an hour without call quality issues and maintain a stable call reliably.
    - JshWright 10y ago
      Is the codec choice any better? The last time I tried to use it the audio quality was awful.
      - lorenzhs 10y ago
        I use it for calling when abroad, and so far the audio quality has been quite good. I don't know if it was worse in the past, but maybe just give it another try?
      - haffenloher 10y ago
        Audio quality has been good enough for me, but there's definitely room for improvement as they're still using Speex (if I'm not mistaken).
        moyta 10y ago
        If they'd use Opus I'd really appreciate it, hell, if I could even get interop, I have hacked together an app to pass the ZRTP codeword to my deskphone when Freeswitch terminates it and reencodes it as SRTP/TLS for it, since no deskphone vendor supports ZRTP. Would make those that insist on ZRTP in my life a lot more convenient to have extended convos with.
    - newman314 10y ago
      My major problem is when a contact stops using Signal for some reason (new phone etc.). My messages go into the ether without any indication that they are not being received.
- hambofus 10y ago
  I have no problem to get people to use it, the problem is to get people to keep using it. For example some time ago when Signal was still called TextSecure, we converted all our group chats for a friend group of technically minded people to TextSecure. We all agreed that encryption is important and worth some minor discomforts. We switched back to Facebook (which we all dislike) within a month because TextSecure didn't have consistent message ordering in group chats, making some conversations impossible to understand for those unfortunate enough to receive messages in a bad order.
  - moyta 10y ago
    This is mostly fixed as of a few months ago, the desktop client also makes it as convenient as Facebook.
    - m-p-3 10y ago
      The problem is that they chose to make it a Chrome Apps, which will eventually be dropped from all plateforms but ChromeOS.
      - moyta 10y ago
        True, I assume they'll just ride that till the bitter end and then unhappily move to using nwjs instead of Chrome, and distribute it from their website instead (even though they seem highly opposed to that).
        m-p-3 10y ago
        I wouldn't mind if they decided to make an Electron app instead.
        striking 10y ago
        I would, I really dislike Electron. Even Chrome Apps are a pain. I would be much happier with a native implementation.
- mtgx 10y ago
  In other words, the Chrome evangelist strategy (or Firefox evangelist strategy prior to that): Let me install this app for you - trust me, it's much better!"
- kombucha2 10y ago
  way easier than others...wickr etc
HurrdurrHodor 10y ago
Note that while they do not retain or analyze it Signal offers no metadata protection either.
- moyta 10y ago
  Exactly why I like XMPP, it allows me to protect my metadata from leakage, if I could get normies to use it for more than a few weeks.
  - haffenloher 10y ago
    > Exactly why I like XMPP, it allows me to protect my metadata from leakage I read this frequently, but I'm still not sure how this is supposed to work - would you care to explain?
    - moyta 10y ago
      Say I run the server under my control, and I talk to other people on and off my server via XMPP. What is occuring is my laptop, phone & tablet are connecting back to my XMPP server, which then connects to those clients, thus not leaking my IP address, OS, etc. Additionally, I can tunnel this all over CJDNS or OpenVPN and nooone will be the wiser that I am even using XMPP. Comparatively, as it stands now Google is getting a bunch of metadata on Signal users, such as when messages are sent and received and from which device, IP addresses, OS info, etc.
      - moxie 10y ago
        > Say I run the server under my control, and I talk to other people on and off my server via XMPP. What is occuring is my laptop, phone & tablet are connecting back to my XMPP server, which then connects to those clients, thus not leaking my IP address, OS, etc. Here it seems that you're defining "metadata" as your IP address (and OS?). That's kind of a non-standard definition of "metadata" in this space -- most people approach the topic more concerned about who is communicating with who. Email is federated, and I run my own mail server, but almost every single email I send or receive has GMail at the other end of it -- so running my own server does not provide me with any meaningful metadata protection, even though it is a federated protocol. The idea that everyone in the world is going to run their own mail server (or messaging server, or whatever) has not born out in practice, even in environments that natively support federation. I think serious metadata protection is going to require new protocols and new techniques, so we're much more likely to see major progress in centralized rather than distributed environments (in the same way that Signal Protocol is now on over two billion devices, but we're unlikely to ever see even basic large scale email end to end encryption). If all you want to do is hide your IP address, it sounds like you should just use Tor or a VPN. > Comparatively, as it stands now Google is getting a bunch of metadata on Signal users, such as when messages are sent and received and from which device, IP addresses, OS info, etc. This is not true. You're referring to GCM? The only thing GCM does is wake up a device to connect to the Signal server when the app is running in the background, nothing is actually transmitted over GCM.
vog 10y ago
> essentially XMPP with Conversations is all we have in this arena right now. Maybe this isn't too bad. How does modern XMPP compare with Signal's protocol? Since Signal refuses to learn from XMPP (especially the federated part), maybe the solution is to make XMPP learn from Signal. Then, Signal's failure to become federated would have been an important step to make XMPP finally useful for secure messaging.
- moyta 10y ago
  Its not too bad, XMPP is very easy with a good client like Conversations. That being said it is not for normies, over the course of a year Signal will be used and appreciated by normies, normies using Conversations meanwhile will go perma offline after a few weeks from what I've seen. Conversations is essentially Signal but for XMPP, the problem is it doesn't blend in normal SMS and additional value adds to sweeten the pot for normies and keep them using it.
Y-bar 10y ago
One hurdle for me (at least) is the lack of export/import/backup. I got a new phone recently and discovered that there was no way to restore message conversations onto the new phone. This might not be a deal-breaker for some, maybe even a very nice feature for some, but for me it made me go back to other services. Github issue: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/issues/967 https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/issues/967
- rosshays 10y ago
  The lack of some good history mechanism is what has always kept me away from this kind of software. But I don't know how we could possibly get the kind of messenger I would dream of (secure/encrypted, history backup to cloud, and web app for messaging).
- h4waii 10y ago
  Just to clarify, this is iOS only. On Android, the client can export plaintext messages to storage, or you can use something like Titanium Backup, which wraps up the app installer AND data directories in a tarball and can restore it across other many different versions of Android.
- moyta 10y ago
  At one point Signal had working backup & restore on Android, whereby you could keep your private keys and seamlessly move between phones, but they did away with that since a few users encountered bugs. I really wish they hadn't axed it, it was a lot easier to use it than do an adb backup of the app & data. Looking at that GitHub issue, Moxie appears to have popped in for half a second out of annoyance, then the main repo maintainer michaelkirk went and locked & limited the issue to just contributors.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    The problem with backup & restore in Android was that it didn't work reliably. I know first-hand. If the feature isn't there, people won't rely on it, as they may do when it's there but doesn't work. The thing with locking issues is that Signal issues get so much noise that the content will drown in it. I dislike not being able to add on-topic comments, too, but I understand how they got where they are.
padraic7a 10y ago
I can't see that allowing for self-hosting / federation will do anything to drive adoption. If that was the case then Conversations would be bigger than Signal, but it just isn't Improving server reliability is a separate thing.
- moyta 10y ago
  It could be like email, except with libsignal as its base. Federation definitely drove email to be as big as it is today, and it has made server reliability a non-issue (your server holds the message until the other server is online). XMPP itself is huge, GCM is essentially just a frontend for it. Conversations is smaller than Signal in part due to Signal being around since 2011, and Conversations being created in 2014, and also Signal gaining many high profile endorsements, from Snowden to Hillary. Still, Signal is microscopic compared to Whatsapp.
moxie 10y ago
Hmm, I'm not sure where you got these numbers, but none of them are correct. Ten hours of downtime a month? We measure this pretty obsessively, and haven't had that much downtime in a three year period. I appreciate the sentiment for what you're saying, but our direct user growth has surprised even us (again, not sure where you're getting your numbers), and Signal Protocol is now on over two billion devices. If your major concerns are reliability and user growth, I think federated protocols are likely to exacerbate rather than improve those conditions -- as we've seen with XMPP historically. However, I would love it if you proved me wrong. Signal can be deployed in a federated environment today, let me know if you need any help setting it up.
- webmaven 10y ago
  How many direct users does Signal-the-app have? If you can further narrow that to active users per $TIMEPERIOD (for example, MAU), that would be great.
- moyta 10y ago
  This is what I've observed on T-Mobile, Centurylink and Comcast over the past month across two phones, it does allow me to backdate messages and send them later at least, so not a total loss. In regards to federation for Signal, what are you looking for in terms of technical competence and skills? I'm already intimately familiar with running servers, VOIP, SMS delivery, etc so I've got a good grip on things, and I'd like to tie in our existing PBXes with Signal whereby ZRTP calls go straight to endpoints, perhaps we can force the issue with Grandstream and get them to add ZRTP support on device for their GXP2140 & GXP2170 phones.
Adverblessly 10y ago
> how do we get more people to use it? For me the missing link is a good, native Linux client. Signal would have "got" me the last time I was shopping around for a communication app if it had that. Then again, I probably represent maybe 0.01% of the audience you are trying to reach...
Veratyr 10y ago
> essentially XMPP with Conversations is all we have in this arena right now There's also Matrix (matrix.org). Took me about half an hour to set up a homeserver, has federation and TLS for now but full end to end encryption is already in beta (since I'm using my own homeserver I'm fine with just TLS) and Riot, the biggest client, is easy to set up and use. My wife is rather opposed to new things and isn't amazing with technology but she's happy enough with it. Conversations on the other hand was a pain to set up self hosted (more Prosody/eJabberd's fault though) and had silent message send/receive failures.

eveningcoffee 10y ago

I think that this is relevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880520 I would recommend to read the article first and then follow the protectionism in the comments later. The main claim of the article is that we need federation, as we do with the email (but imo we are loosing it). In addition, Signal shares a problem with email - information about your communication circle is not secure.

throwanem 10y ago
This is a classic example of making the perfect the enemy of the good.
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  I disagree. These are valid points and dismissing them based on ignorance would be wrong. Instead we should discuss why these are not implemented and how could be proceed to implement them.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    That's not what the article you cite is saying. It's saying "don't use Signal because Signal is less than perfect". Calling the counterarguments in that thread "protectionism" suggests you feel likewise. If you want to discuss how a follow-on from Signal could and maybe should address some or all of those points, great! That's a conversation worth having. But it doesn't sound from your toplevel comment as though it is the conversation you're trying to start.
    - bahjoite 10y ago
      > It's saying "don't use Signal because Signal is less than perfect". This is mis-categorisation. The article says "I won't recommend the use of Signal" and gives reasons and desired improvements.
    - eveningcoffee 10y ago

tptacek 10y ago

Ugh. The paper isn't from "the International Association for Cryptologic Research". IACR is simply a site that hosts academic crypto papers. The paper is fine, but probably disregard the article.

24gttghh 10y ago
And what article would that be? The link goes directly to the PDF...
- tptacek 10y ago
  The submission has been updated. It originally pointed to an article on The Register.
  - 24gttghh 10y ago
    Ah I was not aware of that, thank you!

claudius 10y ago

Rather pointless to have a "trusted" application on an operating system you cannot trust – and not even the possibility to run the application on an even remotely trusted and private system, in particular without giving unaccountable root access to Google.

tptacek 10y ago
This is more or less a way of saying it's "rather pointless to have secure messengers on iOS". I understand why open source advocates say that, because they've been saying it for 20 years now, but I'm not sure we need to litigate the point or pretend it's some great insight.
- jrcii 10y ago
  Surely the age of a problem doesn't necessarily diminish its significance?
- claudius 10y ago
  Let me put it like this – if OpenWhisperSystems had an explicit toggle in their protocol which, after flipping it, would allow them to access all future communications and where the user was unable to tell whether it had or had not been flipped, nobody would call the protocol "secure" or write a "Trust It" headline about it. However, if OWS only supports systems on which such a toggle exists via a third-party provider, that somehow makes them secure? I find this hard to understand. Yes, of course an app which encrypts data against some adversaries is nice, but it should definitely be called "secure-against-some-people", not "secure", and people shouldn’t write "Trust It" but rather "Trust It if you also trust X and Y and Z".
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Again: this is a point that can be made to sound interesting with lots of extra words, but all you're saying is that people run applications on operating systems you don't like. They're not going to switch.

teekert 10y ago

Currently I'm on telegram primarily. Loving it, using the bots, using the gifs built in, using the stickers and the cloud storage. I don't love the encryption. But my next switch will be to a self hosted/federated solution such as https://riot.im/ https://riot.im/, at least for me and my wife. I will not be able to make friends use and trust my server (they shouldn't for their private messages) and they won't run their own. Signal looks nice but man the Telegram desktop client on Linux is also very very convenient, plus the fact that you don't need your phone to be on.

moyta 10y ago
Is it still insecure? http://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-stop-using-telegram-right-now-1782557415 http://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-stop-using-telegram-right-...
- lucb1e 10y ago
  That article is complete bullshit. I sent them a big email pointing out mistake after mistake and of course never got any response nor did they publish anything to correct their "journalism". There are legitimate concerns with Telegram that I share with all other technically inclined people, but this article is like saying "use a firewalled Windows 95 instead" because something is wrong with Vista. You really should disregard everything they say because the true parts are too interwoven with fabrications.
  - moyta 10y ago
    Sure, I didn't look for an amazing article, just remember hearing about their homebrew "crypto" years ago and going eww. This might be slightly better: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/130559/is-telegram-e2e-still-insecure http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/130559/is-telegr...
  - gr3yh47 10y ago
    You should provide some specific counterpoints and sources to back said points up - because rolling their own encryption is by itself reason enough not to use them. defaulting encryption to off is just icing on the cake

jonathanstrange 10y ago

Maybe I'm too grumpy today, but the gist of the summary of the review to me is not 'trust it' but rather 'the protocol is new and overly complex and the security goals have not been stated clearly' with the addition that no major error was found.

moyta 10y ago
Yeah, pretty much. Its good enough that Whatsapp, Allo and many others paid chump change to license it ($1 mil each I heard) since its cheaper and better vetted than anything they'd develop internally.

VLM 10y ago

Serious question, if both the endpoints are completely powned by corporations and governments, what do I gain by having the traffic on the wire be secure? Who is the only Opfor I'm defending against, Sprint? They can barely provide working service and correct billing. Its a given that secret juicy electronic stuff always ends up on wikileaks, so anything important I discuss live in person and never electronically. So if, in a massive delusion of self importance, everything I do thats juicy can't show up on wikileaks because its not electronic, regardless of any app I use or don't use, and the only thing I use electronics for is the security equivalent of "don't forget to buy a quart of milk at the store on the way home" then how does encrypting my quart of milk purchase help me? Is there any reason to not take it as a given that any juicy electronic stuff ends up on wikileaks regardless of this app? Realize that if I wanted to keep my visit to the supermarket a secret using this app, I can't. Facebook and google sell my GPS data. Tomorrow google rewards will send me a survey asking what I thought of my visit to the store. The store sniffs the wifi MACs and bluetooth data and camera data to track my every move, that free internet for customers isn't entirely free. Not to mention I'm on probably 50 camera recordings. And the phone company knows where I am, every step of the way, for supposed 911 purposes. And my credit card is rubbed up against my receipt purchase data to data mine the hell out of my milk purchase. But I'm supposed to feel perfectly private and secure because Sprint can't read the contents of my wife's shopping list, uh huh. If you keep things super nebulous and don't think too hard, it seems I'd be protecting myself against someone, and protecting is always good and there's always a someone to fear so obviously it must be awesome. But analysis shows there's not a problem and I'm not defended against any important forces only against a single weak and unimportant force and wide open to absolutely everyone else.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
You may be abnormal, but most people text sexually explicit comments they'd prefer neither be in corporate or government databases. (And a ton of other highly private, perfectly inocuous material.) There's no reason people should be confined to only discussing those topics with people in physical proximity, and encrypted IM apps perfectly fit that use case. There's also a legal and technical distinction between the NSA (or phone company) reading plaintext on the wire and actively compromising a device. Your comment faceteously ignores that. Ed: I think of it like locking my front door. My deadbolt won't stop the government getting in, but it establishes (for legal reasons) that I had taken steps to ensure privacy and it raises the chance they leave signs of entry, rather than being covert. It's not that Im trying to hide things from the government -- they could just ask me anything they wanted to know. I just want them to have to ask, not just covertly take whatever they want.

campuscodi 10y ago

What... no flaws.... impossibro!!!

sametmax 10y ago

I can't help but feel like the word "normies" is somewhat insulting. Although I never read it before, but it sounds very condescending.

throwanem 10y ago
It has origin in 4chan, like a lot of memes, and is at least as insulting to its user as to its object - being in essence an insult directed at functional adults by caricatures of NEETs, the humor coming from the fact that the latter really aren't in a position to look down on the former. Of course, as with any hot meme, it gets a semantic makeover in the course of widening adoption, but if you're looking for an answer to the question of whether someone who uses "normie" unironically, especially in a context outside Reddit or a *chan, merits taking seriously...well, at the very least, I think it's reasonable to interpret that at least as a strong clue that the user isn't in the habit of thoroughly considering his utterances before emitting them.
- sametmax 10y ago
  Ah ok. In the context of 4chan or memes, it's not a problem. You usually like them because of the politically incorrectness. It just seems out of place on HN, where people tends to be overly analytic, and rarely call people names.
  - mst 10y ago
    In a conversation like this I read it as a short-hand for "average non-techical user" that's less directly insulting than "lusers". I'd probably just say "normal user" or "average user" myself, but I don't find it name-calling in context.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    It is out of place on HN.
moyta 10y ago
It is moderately condescending, but it is very handy to describe average technical competence and what to expect from said humans. Things need to be straightforward & familiar for normies (eg. Pokemon Go vs Ingress) and you can't expect to hold a high level conversation with a good chunk of them, whether that be about mathematics, policy (so much circular logic), reality (citations & sources are not a thing many normies are willing to use), etc. That being said, its not all bad, just set expectations accordingly, just like you would going on HN. I do not expect the average HN reader to understand much about traffic dynamics and the minimal efficiency gains that may come with self driving cars, or the sheer volume of people a moderate sized light rail network can move in a timely manner, so I set my expectations very low. Its like talking to a Microsoftie about rail or self driving cars, there is a lack of knowledge (the fact that Amtrak runs trains from Vancouver to Seattle to Portland and is paying BNSF to make the route more reliable) and a conceptual barrier that I do not expect them to rapidly grasp (bullet trains need dead straight rights of way, no exceptions). Edit: Apparently I can't reply to you, nevertheless I picked up normie as a term in meatspace, and while it might not meet your sensibilities, I do not see a more accurate term, and I'm not here to intimately know & defend your sensibilities. Same goes for asking me or telling me your pronoun, great for you, I give not a single shit, use what you want and cut to the chase.

redwood 10y ago

When I first looked at this, it boggled my mind that they require a phone number to sign up. Maybe that's no longer the case? But assuming it is, it just struck me as the epitome of breaking away from the concept of secure anonymity.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
I thought the system was supposed to provide encryption to known communication, not anonymity? If that's the case, choosing to use an existing identity management system most people are part of is an excellent bootstrapping decision. Identity management is hard, and it's a fair problem to punt on if it's not your focus. Encryption != anonymity. (In fact, it usually does the opposite, because encrypted messages stand out.)
kbart 10y ago
Hm, Signal was never about anonymity, it's just an end-to-end encrypted chat and marketed as such.
Amir6 10y ago
You are absolutely right! Plus, getting a copy of all your contacts is and invasion of privacy for an app that is advocating for privacy and security. You cant even use a online voip phone number for this app. Its just such a turn off and I'm extremely disappointed with endorsements from people like Snowden ignoring such fundamental flaws.
- MrMullen 10y ago
  > Plus, getting a copy of all your contacts is and invasion of privacy for an app that is advocating for privacy and security. You really need to do research into this before making this claim. The phone numbers are hashed (Or something like it) before being sent to the Signal servers.
  - haffenloher 10y ago
    Unfortunately, hashing provides no meaningful protection here. The preimage space (i.e. the set of all possible phone numbers) is just too small. See https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/

lhlmgr 10y ago

Since I'm very happy with the usability of the WIRE messenger I would appreciate if someone would do a formal security analysis on their (modified) axolotl protocol.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

sjfiekzjndn 10y ago

Signal contains usage telemetry, unverifiable proprietary components, automatic software updates without user consent, and forces you to send messages over Google servers, allowing them to collect metadata about your social network graph. It doesn't matter if the transport layer has flawless encryption if the app itself is doing things wrong. Moxie Marlinespike's cease and desist[0] orders against open source projects trying to fix these issues has me thoroughly convinced that Signal is a honeypot. Using XMPP with OTR encryption would be a much safer choice if you're discussing something sensitive, in my opinion. [0] https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217218091 https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

corv 10y ago
As if working with Facebook wasn't enough of a red flag.
CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
> automatic software updates without user consent Do not include that in your list of complaints. That is a security feature, not a privacy deficit, but only if done right. https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/10/guide-automatic-security-updates-for-php-developers https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/10/guide-automatic-security-... TL;DR you want automatic updates
- sjfiekzjndn 10y ago
  There are other update mechanisms available that don't let bad actors ship out malicious updates to compromise specific users.
  - CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
    Did you even read the article I linked?
    - sjfiekzjndn 10y ago
      Yes, and can you understand the concept of a silent malicious update being sent to specific individuals signed by the proper key?

iamnothere 10y ago

The protocol may be in good shape, but Signal's permission model is flawed for an application that handles sensitive data. A few examples of excessive permissions: * Disable your screen lock * Location permissions * Set wallpaper ("kitchen sink" feature here) * External storage (why not use internal "app only" storage?) * System log data Android's sandbox will do its best to protect the user from compromised applications, but it can't do anything to protect you if the application already has full permissions. Based on recent events, I would assume that Signal users are at risk of targeting as a block -- their desire for privacy makes them interesting targets from an intelligence and LEO perspective. Many successful applications follow a plugin model, where intrusive permissions are split off into separate, optional applications. Signal should do the same.

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
On Marshmallow or newer, can't these be blocked? I was alarmed at the Location permissions at first too, but I believe it's only used so that you can send someone your GPS location. If you simply deny the request, that feature will be disabled, but I don't think it prevents the app from working.
- iamnothere 10y ago
  Only some can be blocked. Unfortunately Android still groups permissions together, and all related permissions must be enabled or disabled as a block. (For instance, storage read and write permissions are technically separate, but they are placed together in a single "storage" group.) Most (all?) permissions in the catch-all "other" group cannot be disabled at all.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    One of the interesting irrevocable permissions in that "Other" group is full network access, so any app can portscan your network or try to hack your IoT devices. Bluetooth pairing is also in Other. The Android permission model is terrible. What ever happened to Intents? Shouldn't photo sharing be a simple Intent rather than requiring a new UI and storage permissions for every single app?

potatosoup 10y ago

Installed Signal, wanted to use it. First step is to connect with my phone number and there is no other way to create an account. This is an unfortunate privacy-blind choice for what otherwise could be a great platform.

HurrdurrHodor 10y ago
It's probably somebody from the "Usernames are bad UX and if we have bad UX nobody will use the messanger and then we don't actually get a secure messenger because we don't get a messenger that anybody uses at all"-camp".
haffenloher 10y ago
You can still register with some landline or VoIP number if you want.

uselpa 10y ago

I don't understand all this recent Signal bashing here on HN. I have been using Signal for some time now on a daily basis and I haven't had real usability issues. We cannot hold OWS responsible for the insecurity of our operating systems, the nature of today's cloud or hardware infrastructure, the choices we make for comfort reasons, and what not. What they do is provide us with, and I think most of us would actually agree, a secure messenger that is both free of charge and best of breed, or close to. And as with every open source project, it's their project, but you're free to fork it and provide us with something better if you don't agree with their choices. So if you need a secure messenger now, because you need or want privacy, Signal is an excellent option, free of charge, open source. What are we actually complaining about? I don't know moxie but it seems that he's actually open to suggestions and offers if you're willing to provide some manpower as well. Then he has his convictions but still offers to discuss them constructively. Again, what is there to complain about? As for myself, I contact support if I have a question or issue, and they have been very helpful. I donated to the project, also because they are supported by http://freedom.press http://freedom.press, and I value a free press. And even though I am absolutely not interested into the giphy thing (I'm on iOS so I haven't really seen it yet), I'll open an issue on github if I want Signal to change. And I invite everybody to support the project in this way, and make sure that the projects that are actually supporting our interests don't get abandoned in favour of comfortable-to-use data-hogs like Facebook, WhatsApp or Telegram.

subliminalpanda 10y ago
Personally speaking I would have much rather have a feature in Signal that allows me to send documents or attachments from my various cloud providers rather than a gif search.
iamnothere 10y ago
This may not be true of everyone, but my own criticisms of Signal are meant as a constructive critique, and not as "bashing." Signal occupies a valuable spot in a new market, and we all win if it continues to improve. Think about what is at stake. Many people working in politics, law, human rights, and other areas absolutely need a way to communicate securely, especially when their causes don't align with the interests of those in power. If you're wondering why people are so passionate about having a more secure platform, that's why. In this case, it's important to be forgiving if people seem hostile or overly critical.

throw2016 10y ago

I don't understand how a company based in the US and one that requires a phone number can make any kind of claims about security or privacy, without being looked on as a honeypot untill it redeems itself with evidence to the contrary. Why would a privacy centric protocol choose to use a phone number which directly connects a user to their identity. How can this make sense? There is enough evidence most US based companies are in bed with the nsa, compromised or can be easily compromised. Companies or open source projects can be bullied and threatened by government officals, legally forced to give up their users, gagged and forced to betray users, co-opted, infiltrated or compromised. Lavabit has already happened. Why do we need encryption, security or privacy? If it is exclusively against state actors then we know its a serious challenge against extremely powerful, well resourced, and legally empowered actors and illusions of privacy, hand flailing 'something is better than nothing' and half baked measures won't do. It's reasonable then to expect any solution claiming security or privacy in this context to explicitly spell out how they address or plan to address these threat models. The alternative is acting in bad faith and making users vulnerable.