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Considering that Signal is advertised (with Snowden as face) for people who need privacy from governments (including the US government), I am doubtful if this i
by kuschku 9y ago
Considering that Signal is advertised (with Snowden as face) for people who need privacy from governments (including the US government), I am doubtful if this is useful for the advertised purpose. (For normal users this is already overkill, of course).
Even if we assume the NSA has no backdoors in the secure enclave, there have been countless demonstrations against secure enclaves in today’s real-world processors on conferences.
Additionally, the same problem applies here that has been used before to break Google’s SafetyNet solution (which does the same, but the opposite way around, to ensure the client is running, and can’t prevent tracking): You can simply have two systems, and for attestation you question the true device, but for actual code execution you run it on an emulated one, where you can extract all data. Alternatively, you can still emulate this system completely and circumvent it via that path, too.
The only way to truly verify SGX is by having a signature of the processor manufacturer – but in that case, you still don’t get protection from the NSA, or the processor manufacturer.
- cvwright 9y agoThis attitude is a big reason why doing constructive work in security is hard. Yes, there are huge challenges and lots of different attack vectors. No, that doesn't invalidate the progress that's made when someone invests a lot of time and effort to solve 80% of an extremely difficult problem. Sometimes it feels like you could solve world hunger and world peace, but unless you also gave everyone a puppy, half of the security community would still complain. (And then there's always someone who wanted a kitten instead of a puppy...)
- kuschku 9y agoWell, it is a major step – but Moxie always sells his solutions, even if they’re just a puppy, as solutions for world hunger. As I mentioned, advertising with Snowden leads to a promise that Signal can not fulfill. Not even with this. But, you know, there is already a solution for all the issues here: Don’t use phone numbers, use usernames! As it turns out, that is far more private and secure.
- hdhzy 9y ago> Don’t use phone numbers, use usernames! As it turns out, that is far more private and secure. It is. But it's not convenient. Everyone has contact list with numbers and people want to talk to their friends immediately not call them for their ID for service X.
- kuschku 9y agoEveryone? I've got basically no phone numbers of many of my friends, or they've switched them so often that the ones I have are long wrong. Half the numbers in my contacts list don't exist anymore. I certainly prefer usernames.
- hdhzy 9y agoClearly you're not the target market for Signal but there are many encrypted messangers out there for you.
- kuschku 9y agoI'm not so sure about that. Matrix is the closest thing, and that has a code quality that makes me want to puke. EDIT: Before I get complaints from the Matrix devs again that I’m bad-mouthing their app: ObjectOutputStream is NOT a suitable implementation for a "database": https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-android-sdk/blob/736643f5242861956436da594f65e2d4832d2335/matrix-sdk/src/main/java/org/matrix/androidsdk/data/store/MXFileStore.java#L2250 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-android-sdk/blob/736643...
- hdhzy 9y agoWhat about XMPP with OMEMO? I know it's not the latest hype but has decentralized usernames.
- Arathorn 9y agoAny project made up of hundreds of repos has bad areas which you can cherrypick if you want to bad-mouth, especially whilst still it's very actively in dev. For instance, conversely on iOS we have four different local store API implementations[1] ranging from in-memory, flatfile (via NSKeyedArchiver), CoreData and Realm. The equivalent work just hasn't yet happened on Android; PRs welcome. Once again, why not invest your time in doing something more productive than spreading FUD about Matrix? [1] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/tree/master/MatrixSDK/Crypto/Data/Store https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/tree/master/Mat... and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/tree/master/MatrixSDK/Data/Store https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/tree/master/Mat...