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Signal’s Moxie Marlinspike calls out Telegram founder Pavel Durov

215 points by ianopolous 9y ago

ZoomZoomZoom 9y ago
With all those controversial statements Moxie was making and questionable decisions in development Signal lost its initial attractiveness and, in my opinion, relevance. Even Wire opened their server-side source code by now (not that Signal hadn't). While this was happening, we got Matrix[0] and GNU Ring[1] in a usable state, and I can't see any reason to use Signal (let alone Telegram) any more. This is all very unfortunate, because the success of this type of services depend strongly on its initial user-base size. For a while, with the rise of mobile there seemed to appear a critical window (from the public perspective: ICQ forgotten, XMPP not even noticed, Skype annoyed everyone, Google talk ?) for a new IM to fit itself, but it seems lost. I fear enticing users to switch to the reasonable solutions, like those mentioned, is already a Sisyphean task. Don't know about you, but I'm not valuable enough contact to keep one more application installed on someone's smartphone to contact me exclusively. "Cut showing off, use what everyone's using!" Even in a rarest occasion when I manage to successively tempt anyone, with the first bug or UX flaw they jump ship and become even more opposite to the idea of trying what's supposed to be a better solution. [0] https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ [1] https://ring.cx/ https://ring.cx/
- kilburn 9y ago
  I'm sorry to say that but... have you actually tried GNU Ring? It is the least usable IM-thingy I've ever tried. I tried it in 3 different plaforms (OSX, Android, Linux) and in every case I found (different) experience-breaking bugs (>30min to find a contact, registration timeouts, missing GUI buttons, and so on). Also, you can have multiple devices connected but not all messages will reach all devices, and of course an offline device will not receive messages sent since it was last online. I really wanted to like it and push for it, but I just can't in its state :(
  - ZoomZoomZoom 9y ago
    Yeah, it's far from perfect, and I wasn't saying it's ready for prime time. However, it's a much more complex piece of engineering, being a P2P messenger. I'm impressed with the development even considering all the bugs.
  - tripzilch 9y ago
    Matrix/Riot.im works pretty well. It's a bit of a hassle getting the devices verified[0], and (imho) a bit unintuitive about how it shows contacts, chats and rooms. But it works. [0] Tip: name the devices and remove any you don't recognize, I just have three devices with Riot.im installed but during setup some others appeared, maybe duplicates or a web session, I got rid of those. Less devices is less verifications.
- evgen 9y ago
  You would only use Signal (or Telegram) if you want to talk to other people. Metcalf's Law is a bitch, and neither Matrix nor Ring are going to make it over the bar. They are both far too late to the mobile party and desktop IM usage is not even a rounding error at this point. An honest analysis would be that the Signal protocol will survive as a part of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and the rest of the secure comm protocols and apps are doomed to a slow slide into irrelevance. Most will linger as a mechanism for making traffic analysis of their users just a bit easier, but in general their future is grim.
- mi100hael 9y ago
  > Even Wire opened their server-side source code by now (not that Signal hadn't). AFAIK the Signal voice/video server is still kept private so you can't run your own. Only the text server is freely available.
intoverflow2 9y ago
I'll never understand the point of an encrypted service attached to a phone number.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  Ease of discovery.
Fej 9y ago
How ironic, the founder of Telegram - Telegram! - calling into question Signal's crypto. Telegram's crypto is a complete question mark. I wouldn't be surprised if it's backdoored by Russian intelligence.
- miaklesp 9y ago
  Questioning Signal's crypto is gross? Why Telegram crypto is a complete question mark but Signal crypto is unquestionable? Maybe otherwise, Signal backdoored to US intelligence?
  - dna_polymerase 9y ago
    Because the Signal Crypto Protocol is completely open & the client is open source. A backdoor in Signal would require the keys to be exported to the Signal servers (by compromising the source code), which would be visible to every open source developer.
    - DiThi 9y ago
      And Telegram Crypto Protocol and client are not? I'm using Telegram client compiled from sources right now... Edit: The main problem with Telegram is not the crypto, but the fact that end-to-end crypto is not used by default. Except with calls, those are always end to end encrypted.
- baybal2 9y ago
  They don't need to backdoor it. The re-transmission with a different key feature is the very definition of a vulnerability. For as long any encryption protocol allows for it to happen, one can trigger a key renegotiation that can be taped. And it was used few times already. Some of such occurrences were well documented. In 2015, in a lobby discussion on DEFCON two people confronted Marlinspike about the retransmission vulnerability in the Signal. He was asked to give a _yes or no answer_ to whether the central server can trigger the key renegotiation by sending the "I lost my phone" command to both parties. And he answered this question _no_. This was long before the Guardian lashed at FB with the backdoor article. I personally verified this account with 2 people. Marlinspike Moxie is a liar.
dingo_bat 9y ago
Is it possible to compile Signal from source and run it on Android yet? If not, Moxie needs a bit of "logic" for himself.
- ktta 9y ago
  Yes. https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/blob/master/BUILDING.md https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/blob/master...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sekasi 9y ago
  How useful is this attitude really? I understand the underlying aspiration of creating a 'known' ecosystem, but passive-aggressive callouts like this doesn't do anyone any good. Signal has done us a lot of good, let's keep that at the front of mind instead of trying to impart weird statements like this. Kinda sick of this internet logic.
- geofft 9y ago
  Pre-empting related FUD: Signal has dropped the hard dependency on Google Play Services. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13691050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13691050
  - jabot 9y ago
    Wow. Finally... I wonder when we are going to see it on f-droid.
    - joecool1029 9y ago
      When hell freezes over probably. See: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217211165 https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
      - deleted 9y ago
rdtsc 9y ago
Last time I looked Telegram wasn't recommended by Moxie and a few other people. That was 2-3 years ago. What's the status now? They came up with their own encryption protocol and they are not trained or known as cryptographers, that's a warning sign. > [Durov] The encryption of Signal (=WhatsApp, FB) was funded by the US Government. I predict a backdoor will be found there within 5 years from now... That's another red flag, needing to spread fud and lies about Signal. Another reason not to trust Telegram. Indicates that maybe their ethics and integrity are a bit too flexible. > During our team's 1-week visit to the US last year we had two attempts to bribe our devs by US agencies + pressure on me from the FBI. Some people might read it as "these guys are so good, FBI is begging to backdoor them". But it can also be read as FBI suspects they are ethically compromised and they have a chance of succeeding.
- geofft 9y ago
  > [Durov] The encryption of Signal (=WhatsApp, FB) was funded by the US Government. I predict a backdoor will be found there within 5 years from now... To emphasize even more why this is silly: nobody from the government (well, at least nobody who has said they're from the US or any other government) was involved with the actual development of the Signal Protocol. It was just funded by the government, through the Open Technology Fund, a project of Radio Free Asia (which is itself under the Department of State; the OTF was largely an initiative of Sec. Clinton). This is an extremely different part of the government from either NIST or any of the three-letter agencies. There has been exactly one backdoor found in crypto relating to the US government (Dual_EC_DRBG), and it was in crypto developed by the NSA and basically pushed into a standard. It was also crypto that looked extremely suspicious, immediately, to any cryptographer who looked at it: it had a contrived design for no good reason, ran much slower than the existing options in the space, and appeared to support a backdoor. A lot of people have looked at the Signal Protocol and found nothing like this. The US government has been accused of hiding backdoors before in one case, DES. It turned out that they were hiding a way of strengthening DES against an attack that was not yet public (differential cryptanalysis) but had been discovered by the NSA. Nothing like this happened to Signal: the developers were not told by the government "Great, just use these S-boxes instead." (In fact, it occurs to me that there's not much room in Signal for a backdoor along the above lines: no S-boxes, no constants, etc. The closest it gets to that is picking Curve25519 and Curve448, both of which are well-known curves, predating Signal, with simple mathematical descriptions that make them essentially impossible to have backdoors. Perhaps he means that the Signal software is backdoored? But that wouldn't make sense with the reference to WhatsApp and Facebook, and also is a much more easily disprovable assertion than that crypto is backdoored.) The US government also, of course, weakened crypto with the ridiculous export rules of the '90s. But that wasn't a backdoor, and they were pretty explicit that the intention was to weaken crypto. The OTF has no such motivation here; their goal was to produce secure tools that can be used by dissidents around the world, and intentionally-weakened crypto would be dangerous in such a context.
pjs_ 9y ago
Moxie owns. He went in IMHO.
leksak 9y ago
It's a struggle getting non-privacy minded people to change to Signal.
- the_mitsuhiko 9y ago
  Not sure if it changed but one of the most frustrating aspects of it has been finding out who actually still uses signal. The few people I knew used it stopped using it and that eventually sealed the deal.
  - eadmund 9y ago
    My whole family use it. It's really quite nice.
- izacus 9y ago
  That's because they refuse to make it seamless in a way iMessage is. Or Telegram. Both of those will work on several devices, have dedicated clients, synchronize messages and iMessage will transparently use SMS (on all platforms). Signal does nothing of the sort - it's impossible to backup conversations, they won't sync to a new device, it won't work on a tablet, it's SMS support is buggy and incomplete and their desktop client is based on a dead technology (and limited to a single machine without SMS support). It also doesn't offer anything over builtin SMS/call support like Telegram does. To top it off, it hijacks SMS store meaning you can't even use OS-based software to backup at least SMS conversations. I can't give Signal to non-tech users and just say "hey, use this instead of SMS", because it won't work and it'll lose their conversations. I can do so with iMessage.
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    > their desktop client is based on a dead technology (and limited to a single machine without SMS support) They're working on an Electron version (Chrome apps aren't dead yet, so they still have some time), and I'm using Signal Desktop on two machines.
    - 9y ago
dijit 9y ago
Why is anything against Telegram FUD but anything against Signal is clear sailing. I'm dubious about Signal, it has the same issues as most other encrypted communication channels (metadata leakage) but surely competition in this space is good. Being "owned" by Facebook for me is a large red flag, as Facebook have an incentive to gobble up data- not saying the same is not true for telegram either- the only messenger I actually trust is iMessage but that's purely for reasons of: "Apple has no incentive at all to snoop". It's not FUD to criticise Signal. It's not FUD to question Telegrams crypto. Holding Moxie and Durov to account for releasing servers that can actually be used would be a great help in being able to independently assess their claims. And even then, I might still err on the side of Durov purely for the fact that after doing what he did (telling the Russian government they couldn't do anything to Telegram) he fled the country, lost most of his fortune, his company. Etc.
- m3adow 9y ago
  Can you elaborate on the "owned by Facebook" part? I couldn't find any link between OpenWhisperSystems and Facebook apart from OWS helping WhatsApp integrating their Crypto.
  - dijit 9y ago
    Facebook employs Moxie. I can't find public information about this interestingly but he's on the internal roster of employees.
    - Vinnl 9y ago
      I can imagine that being some leftover from the days when he worked on WhatsApp integrating the Signal protocol, because he works for/leads Open Whisper Systems.
    - evgen 9y ago
      Once you are on the payroll as a contractor or FTE you are in the employee DB table and show up in the internal wiki as a current or former employee. Moxie was a consultant with the WhatsApp team to integrate the signal protocol (putting it into Messenger was done independently out of the London office without direct input from Moxie or his team IIRC) so he should show up if you do an employee search.
jabot 9y ago
Originally, I didn't install signal because i have a google-free android smartphone, and signal depends/depended HARD on the play framework, even though that's not necessary. [1] > Marlinspike reiterated that the whole point of end-to-end encryption is that users no longer need to trust anyone if the protocol works — and Signal does. But it depended on the google play framework - and I don't trust google. So where does that leave me? EDIT: To reiterate: As far as I can tell Signal itself is secure enough. However, the most secure chat app is insecure if it is run on an insecure operating system. Now, I don't want to start a discussion about android security. But: - The update situation is quite bad, leaving (for example) my phone with exploitable bluetooth - Google itself ... could at least be coerced by a state actor into compromising anyone's privacy With those two facts given, the practical difference between signal and telegram seems... less relevant. [1]: Look at the "conversations" app. Yes, it is for XMPP, which is old and uncool - but it (a) doesn't use the play framework either and (b) uses very little battery on my phone, despite holding an open connection most of the time. That IMO proves that depending on the play framework is unnecessary in this case.
- ultra2d 9y ago
  It no longer has a hard dependency: "since Signal 3.30.0 that is not a hard dependency anymore." [1]. [1] https://copperhead.co/android/docs/usage_guide#signal https://copperhead.co/android/docs/usage_guide#signal
- m3adow 9y ago
  Isn't the dependency gone now? I think I read something about using WebSockets instead, although with more battery drain.
  - jabot 9y ago
    Yes, someone below commented that telegram can now be built without dependency on the play framework, apparently since at least 6 months ago. I think that is a good thing, kudos to them. The thing that would make me really happy is a play-framework-free build on f-droid. I'm not holding my breath, though...
TeMPOraL 9y ago
'joecool1029 links[0] to an interesting Github thread[1]. It starts with Moxie not being OK with LibreSignal using Signal's name and servers, but quickly turns into a discussion about federation. Moxie: "I understand that federation and defined protocols that third parties can develop clients for are great and important ideas, but unfortunately they no longer have a place in the modern world. Even less of a place for an organization the size of ours. Everyone outside the FOSS community seems to know it, but it took actually building the service for me to come to the same understanding, so I don't expect you to believe me." Now, I understand Moxie's goal is to (quoting from further down that thread) "make mass surveillance impossible for the world we live in, not a fantasy land inhabited only by cryptonerds and moralists (...) to produce technology that is privacy preserving but feels just like everything else people already use, not somehow convince everyone to fundamentally change their workflow and their expectations.", but still - is that the consensus now? That federated protocols are dead and "no longer have a place in the modern world"? -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15282380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15282380 [1] - https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217211165 https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
- setrofim_ 9y ago
  > but still - is that the consensus now? That federated protocols are dead and "no longer have a place in the modern world"? Having see what has happened (is happening?) to Mastodon, I can see where Moxie is coming from; as much as I hate to accept it. Moxie also doesn't seem particularly happy with the situation; notes in the same post: "Truly though, I wish you well in the endeavor, it's something that I'd love to be proven wrong about." He notes two issue in particular: - Degradation of UX - Loss of development effort From what I've seen, Mastodon suffered from similar problems (certainly as a user, I can attest to the first one). It seems those are inevitable consequences (along with performance/scalability issues) of the loss of control that comes from federation. Personally, I don't think those are necessarily insurmountable, but they are non-trivial, and will require effort and commitment -- including from the end users -- to resolve. All other things being equal, a project focusing on federation will be at a disadvantage compared to a centralized one when it comes to delivering good UX. So lamentably, I don't see a federated platform becoming mainstream outside tech culture, and that is what Moxie's vision for Signal is... [edit: grammar, formatting]
bitL 9y ago
Is there any messaging app that uses a single chain of US, Russian and Chinese encryption technology so that neither of them can decrypt the whole thing? I would only trust such an app ;-)
rdl 9y ago
It's frustrating that there are now so many "secure messengers" but none of them is so much better than the others to cause consolidation. I end up needing to communicate over 20-30 of them with different people. Signal has the worst app (on iOS) and worst UX of anything I regularly use. There's unlikely to be a desktop client which is actually usable (doesn't depend on a phone, works on platforms I care about). The app is less buggy on iOS than it used to be, but it's still not great. Also doesn't work well with groups. And tied to PSTN identities, and the "talk to a new person on the street" interaction sucks. But, the most widely audited crypto, a good development model, and good adoption within some activist communities. Wire is great, although it's a little "game-like" vs. professional for certain UX. I know the developers and really like it, and it's great for group chat and desktop, but doesn't have much adoption. But, one big global system, too. Riot/Matrix and Mattermost are nice because you can run them on private networks. Nice apps. I've not seen as much analysis of their security as Signal. Whatsapp, Telegram, etc. have massive adoption. Whatsapp is now solid security for user to user. Apple's stuff is great but is Apple-only, and I'm wary, even if I trust the security model, to let a single company own my OS (and update whenever, without really auditing it) and my "end to end encrypted" apps -- way too easy to slip in any kind of backdoor there if they want. etc. I'd happily trade in 50 ok to good systems for one great standard and then OS/other-application integration -- but it seems like we don't do standards anymore.
- amedvednikov 9y ago
  > There's unlikely to be a desktop client which is actually usable Check out eul, it's a native desktop client for all major messaging platforms. Signal support is coming in October. It's only 4 MB, and it can handle thousands of messages without lag. https://eul.im https://eul.im
  - faitswulff 9y ago
    This reminds me of when I used Trillian IM/Pidgin/Meebo back in the day. Everything old is new again!
    - 9y ago
dmix 9y ago
Yasha Levine, the other person in the conversation attacking Signals credibility, is another person to take very lightly in these conversation. He's a Russian pop-tech author known for his research into Russian/US espionage, but following his twitter for the last 2yrs he also seems to dabble in plenty of borderline conspiracy theorists stuff with. He seems to have a strong bias against anything American (occasionally rightfully but many times seemingly for just the sake of it). In conversations I've had with him he also demonstrated a poor understanding of crypto/software development - but those things are not uncommon for journalists covering infosec from the outside-in. Either way I'm not surprised he is included here accusing Signal of colluding with the US gov merely because it indirectly took funding... all of those espionage fans see "US gov funding" and instantly assume collusion - but the reality is typically much more boring. Maybe not so much in Russia where money from the state often comes with expectation of favours in return (the opposite of America where money going in to the state demands favours in return)...

215 points by ianopolous 9y ago

With all those controversial statements Moxie was making and questionable decisions in development Signal lost its initial attractiveness and, in my opinion, relevance. Even Wire opened their server-side source code by now (not that Signal hadn't). While this was happening, we got Matrix[0] and GNU Ring[1] in a usable state, and I can't see any reason to use Signal (let alone Telegram) any more. This is all very unfortunate, because the success of this type of services depend strongly on its initial user-base size. For a while, with the rise of mobile there seemed to appear a critical window (from the public perspective: ICQ forgotten, XMPP not even noticed, Skype annoyed everyone, Google talk ?) for a new IM to fit itself, but it seems lost. I fear enticing users to switch to the reasonable solutions, like those mentioned, is already a Sisyphean task. Don't know about you, but I'm not valuable enough contact to keep one more application installed on someone's smartphone to contact me exclusively. "Cut showing off, use what everyone's using!" Even in a rarest occasion when I manage to successively tempt anyone, with the first bug or UX flaw they jump ship and become even more opposite to the idea of trying what's supposed to be a better solution. [0] https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ [1] https://ring.cx/ https://ring.cx/

kilburn 9y ago
I'm sorry to say that but... have you actually tried GNU Ring? It is the least usable IM-thingy I've ever tried. I tried it in 3 different plaforms (OSX, Android, Linux) and in every case I found (different) experience-breaking bugs (>30min to find a contact, registration timeouts, missing GUI buttons, and so on). Also, you can have multiple devices connected but not all messages will reach all devices, and of course an offline device will not receive messages sent since it was last online. I really wanted to like it and push for it, but I just can't in its state :(
- ZoomZoomZoom 9y ago
  Yeah, it's far from perfect, and I wasn't saying it's ready for prime time. However, it's a much more complex piece of engineering, being a P2P messenger. I'm impressed with the development even considering all the bugs.
- tripzilch 9y ago
  Matrix/Riot.im works pretty well. It's a bit of a hassle getting the devices verified[0], and (imho) a bit unintuitive about how it shows contacts, chats and rooms. But it works. [0] Tip: name the devices and remove any you don't recognize, I just have three devices with Riot.im installed but during setup some others appeared, maybe duplicates or a web session, I got rid of those. Less devices is less verifications.
evgen 9y ago
You would only use Signal (or Telegram) if you want to talk to other people. Metcalf's Law is a bitch, and neither Matrix nor Ring are going to make it over the bar. They are both far too late to the mobile party and desktop IM usage is not even a rounding error at this point. An honest analysis would be that the Signal protocol will survive as a part of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and the rest of the secure comm protocols and apps are doomed to a slow slide into irrelevance. Most will linger as a mechanism for making traffic analysis of their users just a bit easier, but in general their future is grim.
mi100hael 9y ago
> Even Wire opened their server-side source code by now (not that Signal hadn't). AFAIK the Signal voice/video server is still kept private so you can't run your own. Only the text server is freely available.

intoverflow2 9y ago

I'll never understand the point of an encrypted service attached to a phone number.

StavrosK 9y ago
Ease of discovery.

Fej 9y ago

How ironic, the founder of Telegram - Telegram! - calling into question Signal's crypto. Telegram's crypto is a complete question mark. I wouldn't be surprised if it's backdoored by Russian intelligence.

miaklesp 9y ago
Questioning Signal's crypto is gross? Why Telegram crypto is a complete question mark but Signal crypto is unquestionable? Maybe otherwise, Signal backdoored to US intelligence?
- dna_polymerase 9y ago
  Because the Signal Crypto Protocol is completely open & the client is open source. A backdoor in Signal would require the keys to be exported to the Signal servers (by compromising the source code), which would be visible to every open source developer.
  - DiThi 9y ago
    And Telegram Crypto Protocol and client are not? I'm using Telegram client compiled from sources right now... Edit: The main problem with Telegram is not the crypto, but the fact that end-to-end crypto is not used by default. Except with calls, those are always end to end encrypted.
baybal2 9y ago
They don't need to backdoor it. The re-transmission with a different key feature is the very definition of a vulnerability. For as long any encryption protocol allows for it to happen, one can trigger a key renegotiation that can be taped. And it was used few times already. Some of such occurrences were well documented. In 2015, in a lobby discussion on DEFCON two people confronted Marlinspike about the retransmission vulnerability in the Signal. He was asked to give a _yes or no answer_ to whether the central server can trigger the key renegotiation by sending the "I lost my phone" command to both parties. And he answered this question _no_. This was long before the Guardian lashed at FB with the backdoor article. I personally verified this account with 2 people. Marlinspike Moxie is a liar.

dingo_bat 9y ago

Is it possible to compile Signal from source and run it on Android yet? If not, Moxie needs a bit of "logic" for himself.

ktta 9y ago
Yes. https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/blob/master/BUILDING.md https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/blob/master...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sekasi 9y ago
How useful is this attitude really? I understand the underlying aspiration of creating a 'known' ecosystem, but passive-aggressive callouts like this doesn't do anyone any good. Signal has done us a lot of good, let's keep that at the front of mind instead of trying to impart weird statements like this. Kinda sick of this internet logic.
geofft 9y ago
Pre-empting related FUD: Signal has dropped the hard dependency on Google Play Services. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13691050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13691050
- jabot 9y ago
  Wow. Finally... I wonder when we are going to see it on f-droid.
  - joecool1029 9y ago
    When hell freezes over probably. See: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217211165 https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
    - deleted 9y ago

rdtsc 9y ago

Last time I looked Telegram wasn't recommended by Moxie and a few other people. That was 2-3 years ago. What's the status now? They came up with their own encryption protocol and they are not trained or known as cryptographers, that's a warning sign. > [Durov] The encryption of Signal (=WhatsApp, FB) was funded by the US Government. I predict a backdoor will be found there within 5 years from now... That's another red flag, needing to spread fud and lies about Signal. Another reason not to trust Telegram. Indicates that maybe their ethics and integrity are a bit too flexible. > During our team's 1-week visit to the US last year we had two attempts to bribe our devs by US agencies + pressure on me from the FBI. Some people might read it as "these guys are so good, FBI is begging to backdoor them". But it can also be read as FBI suspects they are ethically compromised and they have a chance of succeeding.

geofft 9y ago
> [Durov] The encryption of Signal (=WhatsApp, FB) was funded by the US Government. I predict a backdoor will be found there within 5 years from now... To emphasize even more why this is silly: nobody from the government (well, at least nobody who has said they're from the US or any other government) was involved with the actual development of the Signal Protocol. It was just funded by the government, through the Open Technology Fund, a project of Radio Free Asia (which is itself under the Department of State; the OTF was largely an initiative of Sec. Clinton). This is an extremely different part of the government from either NIST or any of the three-letter agencies. There has been exactly one backdoor found in crypto relating to the US government (Dual_EC_DRBG), and it was in crypto developed by the NSA and basically pushed into a standard. It was also crypto that looked extremely suspicious, immediately, to any cryptographer who looked at it: it had a contrived design for no good reason, ran much slower than the existing options in the space, and appeared to support a backdoor. A lot of people have looked at the Signal Protocol and found nothing like this. The US government has been accused of hiding backdoors before in one case, DES. It turned out that they were hiding a way of strengthening DES against an attack that was not yet public (differential cryptanalysis) but had been discovered by the NSA. Nothing like this happened to Signal: the developers were not told by the government "Great, just use these S-boxes instead." (In fact, it occurs to me that there's not much room in Signal for a backdoor along the above lines: no S-boxes, no constants, etc. The closest it gets to that is picking Curve25519 and Curve448, both of which are well-known curves, predating Signal, with simple mathematical descriptions that make them essentially impossible to have backdoors. Perhaps he means that the Signal software is backdoored? But that wouldn't make sense with the reference to WhatsApp and Facebook, and also is a much more easily disprovable assertion than that crypto is backdoored.) The US government also, of course, weakened crypto with the ridiculous export rules of the '90s. But that wasn't a backdoor, and they were pretty explicit that the intention was to weaken crypto. The OTF has no such motivation here; their goal was to produce secure tools that can be used by dissidents around the world, and intentionally-weakened crypto would be dangerous in such a context.

pjs_ 9y ago

Moxie owns. He went in IMHO.

leksak 9y ago

It's a struggle getting non-privacy minded people to change to Signal.

the_mitsuhiko 9y ago
Not sure if it changed but one of the most frustrating aspects of it has been finding out who actually still uses signal. The few people I knew used it stopped using it and that eventually sealed the deal.
- eadmund 9y ago
  My whole family use it. It's really quite nice.
izacus 9y ago
That's because they refuse to make it seamless in a way iMessage is. Or Telegram. Both of those will work on several devices, have dedicated clients, synchronize messages and iMessage will transparently use SMS (on all platforms). Signal does nothing of the sort - it's impossible to backup conversations, they won't sync to a new device, it won't work on a tablet, it's SMS support is buggy and incomplete and their desktop client is based on a dead technology (and limited to a single machine without SMS support). It also doesn't offer anything over builtin SMS/call support like Telegram does. To top it off, it hijacks SMS store meaning you can't even use OS-based software to backup at least SMS conversations. I can't give Signal to non-tech users and just say "hey, use this instead of SMS", because it won't work and it'll lose their conversations. I can do so with iMessage.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  > their desktop client is based on a dead technology (and limited to a single machine without SMS support) They're working on an Electron version (Chrome apps aren't dead yet, so they still have some time), and I'm using Signal Desktop on two machines.
  - 9y ago

dijit 9y ago

Why is anything against Telegram FUD but anything against Signal is clear sailing. I'm dubious about Signal, it has the same issues as most other encrypted communication channels (metadata leakage) but surely competition in this space is good. Being "owned" by Facebook for me is a large red flag, as Facebook have an incentive to gobble up data- not saying the same is not true for telegram either- the only messenger I actually trust is iMessage but that's purely for reasons of: "Apple has no incentive at all to snoop". It's not FUD to criticise Signal. It's not FUD to question Telegrams crypto. Holding Moxie and Durov to account for releasing servers that can actually be used would be a great help in being able to independently assess their claims. And even then, I might still err on the side of Durov purely for the fact that after doing what he did (telling the Russian government they couldn't do anything to Telegram) he fled the country, lost most of his fortune, his company. Etc.

m3adow 9y ago
Can you elaborate on the "owned by Facebook" part? I couldn't find any link between OpenWhisperSystems and Facebook apart from OWS helping WhatsApp integrating their Crypto.
- dijit 9y ago
  Facebook employs Moxie. I can't find public information about this interestingly but he's on the internal roster of employees.
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    I can imagine that being some leftover from the days when he worked on WhatsApp integrating the Signal protocol, because he works for/leads Open Whisper Systems.
  - evgen 9y ago
    Once you are on the payroll as a contractor or FTE you are in the employee DB table and show up in the internal wiki as a current or former employee. Moxie was a consultant with the WhatsApp team to integrate the signal protocol (putting it into Messenger was done independently out of the London office without direct input from Moxie or his team IIRC) so he should show up if you do an employee search.

jabot 9y ago

Originally, I didn't install signal because i have a google-free android smartphone, and signal depends/depended HARD on the play framework, even though that's not necessary. [1] > Marlinspike reiterated that the whole point of end-to-end encryption is that users no longer need to trust anyone if the protocol works — and Signal does. But it depended on the google play framework - and I don't trust google. So where does that leave me? EDIT: To reiterate: As far as I can tell Signal itself is secure enough. However, the most secure chat app is insecure if it is run on an insecure operating system. Now, I don't want to start a discussion about android security. But: - The update situation is quite bad, leaving (for example) my phone with exploitable bluetooth - Google itself ... could at least be coerced by a state actor into compromising anyone's privacy With those two facts given, the practical difference between signal and telegram seems... less relevant. [1]: Look at the "conversations" app. Yes, it is for XMPP, which is old and uncool - but it (a) doesn't use the play framework either and (b) uses very little battery on my phone, despite holding an open connection most of the time. That IMO proves that depending on the play framework is unnecessary in this case.

ultra2d 9y ago
It no longer has a hard dependency: "since Signal 3.30.0 that is not a hard dependency anymore." [1]. [1] https://copperhead.co/android/docs/usage_guide#signal https://copperhead.co/android/docs/usage_guide#signal
m3adow 9y ago
Isn't the dependency gone now? I think I read something about using WebSockets instead, although with more battery drain.
- jabot 9y ago
  Yes, someone below commented that telegram can now be built without dependency on the play framework, apparently since at least 6 months ago. I think that is a good thing, kudos to them. The thing that would make me really happy is a play-framework-free build on f-droid. I'm not holding my breath, though...

TeMPOraL 9y ago

'joecool1029 links[0] to an interesting Github thread[1]. It starts with Moxie not being OK with LibreSignal using Signal's name and servers, but quickly turns into a discussion about federation. Moxie: "I understand that federation and defined protocols that third parties can develop clients for are great and important ideas, but unfortunately they no longer have a place in the modern world. Even less of a place for an organization the size of ours. Everyone outside the FOSS community seems to know it, but it took actually building the service for me to come to the same understanding, so I don't expect you to believe me." Now, I understand Moxie's goal is to (quoting from further down that thread) "make mass surveillance impossible for the world we live in, not a fantasy land inhabited only by cryptonerds and moralists (...) to produce technology that is privacy preserving but feels just like everything else people already use, not somehow convince everyone to fundamentally change their workflow and their expectations.", but still - is that the consensus now? That federated protocols are dead and "no longer have a place in the modern world"? -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15282380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15282380 [1] - https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217211165 https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

setrofim_ 9y ago
> but still - is that the consensus now? That federated protocols are dead and "no longer have a place in the modern world"? Having see what has happened (is happening?) to Mastodon, I can see where Moxie is coming from; as much as I hate to accept it. Moxie also doesn't seem particularly happy with the situation; notes in the same post: "Truly though, I wish you well in the endeavor, it's something that I'd love to be proven wrong about." He notes two issue in particular: - Degradation of UX - Loss of development effort From what I've seen, Mastodon suffered from similar problems (certainly as a user, I can attest to the first one). It seems those are inevitable consequences (along with performance/scalability issues) of the loss of control that comes from federation. Personally, I don't think those are necessarily insurmountable, but they are non-trivial, and will require effort and commitment -- including from the end users -- to resolve. All other things being equal, a project focusing on federation will be at a disadvantage compared to a centralized one when it comes to delivering good UX. So lamentably, I don't see a federated platform becoming mainstream outside tech culture, and that is what Moxie's vision for Signal is... [edit: grammar, formatting]

bitL 9y ago

Is there any messaging app that uses a single chain of US, Russian and Chinese encryption technology so that neither of them can decrypt the whole thing? I would only trust such an app ;-)

rdl 9y ago

It's frustrating that there are now so many "secure messengers" but none of them is so much better than the others to cause consolidation. I end up needing to communicate over 20-30 of them with different people. Signal has the worst app (on iOS) and worst UX of anything I regularly use. There's unlikely to be a desktop client which is actually usable (doesn't depend on a phone, works on platforms I care about). The app is less buggy on iOS than it used to be, but it's still not great. Also doesn't work well with groups. And tied to PSTN identities, and the "talk to a new person on the street" interaction sucks. But, the most widely audited crypto, a good development model, and good adoption within some activist communities. Wire is great, although it's a little "game-like" vs. professional for certain UX. I know the developers and really like it, and it's great for group chat and desktop, but doesn't have much adoption. But, one big global system, too. Riot/Matrix and Mattermost are nice because you can run them on private networks. Nice apps. I've not seen as much analysis of their security as Signal. Whatsapp, Telegram, etc. have massive adoption. Whatsapp is now solid security for user to user. Apple's stuff is great but is Apple-only, and I'm wary, even if I trust the security model, to let a single company own my OS (and update whenever, without really auditing it) and my "end to end encrypted" apps -- way too easy to slip in any kind of backdoor there if they want. etc. I'd happily trade in 50 ok to good systems for one great standard and then OS/other-application integration -- but it seems like we don't do standards anymore.

amedvednikov 9y ago
> There's unlikely to be a desktop client which is actually usable Check out eul, it's a native desktop client for all major messaging platforms. Signal support is coming in October. It's only 4 MB, and it can handle thousands of messages without lag. https://eul.im https://eul.im
- faitswulff 9y ago
  This reminds me of when I used Trillian IM/Pidgin/Meebo back in the day. Everything old is new again!
  - 9y ago

dmix 9y ago

Yasha Levine, the other person in the conversation attacking Signals credibility, is another person to take very lightly in these conversation. He's a Russian pop-tech author known for his research into Russian/US espionage, but following his twitter for the last 2yrs he also seems to dabble in plenty of borderline conspiracy theorists stuff with. He seems to have a strong bias against anything American (occasionally rightfully but many times seemingly for just the sake of it). In conversations I've had with him he also demonstrated a poor understanding of crypto/software development - but those things are not uncommon for journalists covering infosec from the outside-in. Either way I'm not surprised he is included here accusing Signal of colluding with the US gov merely because it indirectly took funding... all of those espionage fans see "US gov funding" and instantly assume collusion - but the reality is typically much more boring. Maybe not so much in Russia where money from the state often comes with expectation of favours in return (the opposite of America where money going in to the state demands favours in return)...