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Two threat models where Signal makes sense: • Users who don't trust the big advertising companies to make benevolent decisions about their data • Users who wo
by droopyEyelids 9y ago
Two threat models where Signal makes sense:
• Users who don't trust the big advertising companies to make benevolent decisions about their data
• Users who worry about how governments tend to change, and want to prevent a future despotic administration from accessing their history.
- lrvick 9y agoThe closed and centralized nature of their backend in combination with them being a very small team makes them especially vulnerable to being compromised. Are we sure no single employee can be pressured by the government they operate under or the company as a whole? Are we sure none of them are compromised and perhaps don't even know it? Who holds the signing keys for the mobile apps? How have they been handled? Are their internal CI servers secure? Do they do reproducible builds? How can we verify no last minute changes were slipped in by an employee or an NSA operative that has broken into their systems? Considering Moxie has been openly opposed to third parties wanting to do externally verified reproducible builds such as f-droid... I simply can't have much confidence here. On their website signal says they "...design open protocols, develop Open Source software, and give it away for free." In spite of this, they do not allow spinning up your own clients and servers to validate their work without forking their client and re-implementing portions of their server. I would challenge that we should not run from a situation where we have too much trust in one entity only to put complete trust in another.
- Shoothe 9y agoFor what it's worth Signal client builds are reproducible: https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/ https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/ I agree with the rest of your arguments.