22 ms·

Signal PINs

226 points by aendruk 6y ago

aendruk 6y ago
Don't miss: > PINs will also help facilitate new features like addressing that isn’t based exclusively on phone numbers
- ohhnoodont 6y ago
  Does this mean we will finally be able to use Signal without a phone number?
  - sneak 6y ago
    They’ve been planning that for a long while. It requires first an e2e sync though, for contact lists, which is what the clientside secret (PIN) enables.
- ojizero 6y ago
  I dunno but for example Wire does implement addressing without giving phone number optionally if you sign in with an email and a password, which makes me less convinced of the necessity of forced PINs in this style to enable such cases (which should be optional in the first place). Same thing with syncing across devices which requires you opt in to add email/password combo to enable those features.
  - moxie 6y ago
    They store your social graph in plaintext on their servers.
    - ojizero 6y ago
      The point I was trying to make was more on how Wire made the whole password situation optional, I am aware of the conversation name and creation date being stored but that's an issue depending on the threat model for each user. The main issue I see is with the intrusiveness of how Signal PINs are handled by the UI, this will only work to alienate users or encourage writing simple PINs that make them weak to use! It would've been much better had it been treated as a fully opt in feature and PINs treated more as passwords, without the constant bombardment of reminders to input it. This can be placed behind a "sync" option for example and enabling it opens a dialogue explaining the need for password, from there it's up to the user to enable sync and in doing so they have to set a password like normal services. That's just my 2 cents ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
secfirstmd 6y ago
"As we move to support additional features the Signal community has asked for – like addressing that isn’t based on phone numbers" This is awesome. So important for people at risk like the human rights defenders, journalists, legal, LGBTIQ people we work with. Great to see Signal looking at this.
LukeShu 6y ago
That's kinda weird timing. Signal's been asking me for a PIN for about 2 weeks now. Did Aurora screw up and give me an early version? Or did they just roll this out to users weeks ahead of publishing an announcement?
- genpfault 6y ago
  > Signal's been asking me for a PIN for about 2 weeks now. And my copy started preventing me from using it entirely yesterday with a full-screen un-dismissable popup[1] :( [1]: https://i.redd.it/4sip5dcw9iy41.png https://i.redd.it/4sip5dcw9iy41.png [2] [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/giw4if/the_signal_pin_screen_blocking_the_user/ https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/giw4if/the_signal_p...
  - ludocode 6y ago
    The exact same thing happened to me. They must be rolling it out gradually because it hasn't happen to my wife yet nor to several of my other contacts.
  - marssaxman 6y ago
    I just got the nag-alert a couple days ago. I don't really want to set a PIN, so I have been ignoring it. If they are going to force us all into the new system, maybe it is time to stop putting up with Signal's constant forced-upgrade treadmill and find some other means of secure communication.
zeveb 6y ago
This really worries me: now the safety of my data hinges on Intel's remote attestation and a password I can remember.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > and a password I can remember. This is going to be the reality of any data system which you want to have complete control over. I suppose it could also be a complex key you instead keep on your drive, but that has risks as well.
  - RL_Quine 6y ago
    The previous status quo was that nobody had the data other than your device.
  - zeveb 6y ago
    Maybe I should have been more explicit: the safety of my data at rest on a remote system hinges on Intel's oft-broken security code and a memorable password. Normally I use 128-bit passwords (i.e., 22 mixed-case letters and digits) for any remote system. That's not really practical for something which prompts me to enter the PIN periodically (and I think Signal limits the PIN to 20 characters anyway). I do not see any net benefit to storing my contact information on Signal's servers. If I want to rebuild my contact list, I can … ask my contacts for their Signal accounts.
- Skunkleton 6y ago
  To be fair, you don't need to remember the password unless you lose your phone...won't stop the nagging though.
- thanksforfish 6y ago
  This is a huge shift in the trust model... I'm not happy.
s0ss 6y ago
This is all well and good. But the forced/unsilenceable pin reminders seems a bit obtuse to me. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Signal-PINs https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si... "Can I turn off these reminders? It is important to memorize your PIN, and the reminders cannot be disabled. We cannot recover your PIN if you forget it. You will see the reminders less frequently if you consistently enter your PIN correctly. The reminders will become more frequent if multiple attempts are necessary."
- atestu 6y ago
  I agree. Shouldn't you put your PIN in a password manager anyway? Why call it a PIN and not a password to begin with? Is there a difference I'm missing?
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Same reason iPhones support PINs. It’s easier for the user, and provides some level of protection versus nothing. If it’s not user friendly, the user will defer to convenience over security. Signal PINs do support alphanumeric strings FYI. If you have a password manager, use a string. If not, a PIN works just fine.
    - emerongi 6y ago
      It seems alphanumeric PINs are allowed now. At least on iOS, I do get the option to change the PIN to an alphanumeric one. The whole PIN thing has changed quite a bit in the past 6 months or so.
  - j-james 6y ago
    My understanding is it's designed around making short passwords more secure by trying to limit brute force attacks. Seems interesting. https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
  - novok 6y ago
    You can use a long alphanumeric string as your 'PIN', and on iOS at least, you can insert that PIN via a password manager.
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
I've already got a passphrase on my Signal app. Why do I also need a PIN on top of that? If it's supposed to be an easier alternative to a passphrase, then okay, but stop showing me the freaking notification to setup a PIN...
- anonymousab 6y ago
  It feels like another case of "our great designer knows what you want and need better than you do" developer hubris.
- ViViDboarder 6y ago
  You mean the pre-existing “Registration lock” feature? I think they are using the same pin. I’ve had that set for years and I’ve been getting pin reminders for the last several months and I now see “Change your PIN” in my settings.
  - balladeer 6y ago
    I have only set a reg lock pin. I never set any other pin. Then I uninstalled the app. Now when I installed it again today it is asking me for a PIN and the only PIN on Signal I have set was a reg lock pin which is not being accepted. I remember the PIN and it's also stored in BitWarden and KeePass. Now I am locked out.
NickBusey 6y ago
[deleted]
- vinay427 6y ago
  It sounds like it's on the roadmap. From the article: > As we move to support additional features the Signal community has asked for – like addressing that isn’t based on phone numbers and chatting with contacts that aren’t saved in an address book – it means that more and more of this important supporting data can also be lost.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- omnimus 6y ago
  Signal and Matrix are pretty different thing honestly. It's like Whatsup vs Slack. I am not sure you would want your Dad to sign up to your Slack channel.
tguedes 6y ago
I don’t want my messages to be stored anywhere other than on my phone. I hate when companies push this bullshit on you. I keep on getting reminders to set a pin and I can’t turn it off. I think one of the issues with software is that because it’s infinitely extensible, people just add more and more features, they don’t know when to stop. So they keep pushing features that satisfy 10% of their users to the detriment of the 90%. Slowly the app becomes bloated and extremely confusing to use.
- emerongi 6y ago
  Most people want this, although I agree it should be optional.
- sneak 6y ago
  The 90% want their message history synced across devices.
  - tguedes 6y ago
    Then use What’s App, there are a million solutions that solves your problem, signal was the only serious app that doesn’t store my messages somewhere else.
  - themihai 6y ago
    yeah, across devices not across the world. What stops your devices being synchronised over lan/wifi network?
    - sneak 6y ago
      The cryptographic problem of device authentication is the same whether across the room or the planet.
      - Multicomp 6y ago
        Then establish a handshake between two devices that you want to trust each other in the same way that you add syncthing devices. If they still want to use a pen then there should be an option if it is an alphanumeric string to check a box that says this is managed by a password manager don't remind me for at least 6 months.
JoshTriplett 6y ago
I'm looking forward to hearing how they plan to prevent brute-forcing of these. A physical hardware device can wipe keys after a certain number of failures. I definitely look forward to the ability to move Signal forward to a new device without losing all logs, and the ability to use Signal without tying it to a phone number.
- hiq 6y ago
  AFAIK the encryption is done on the servers, not offline, so you can't just brute-force it: https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
- kijiki 6y ago
  Basically, SGX: https://github.com/signalapp/SecureValueRecovery https://github.com/signalapp/SecureValueRecovery The enclave is hardened against Spectre and LVI with this (BOLT/LLVM based), and other techniques: https://github.com/signalapp/BOLT https://github.com/signalapp/BOLT The last build step before signing is a verifier that checks that there are no missed mitigations, built using Intel Xed, to try to avoid potential missing mitigations due to an LLVM or BOLT bug.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    I'm familiar with Signal's usage of enclaves. The case I'm wondering about is what happens if someone seized (or surreptitiously accessed) Signal's servers, ran the unmodified enclaves, but fed in different PIN requests to those enclaves in a brute-forcing attempt. What prevents that?
    - kijiki 6y ago
      The enclaves will flush the data (much like the hardware you mention in your first post) after some number of wrong PIN guesses. To do this securely made the whole thing quite difficult, because it means we can never persist anything outside the enclave, or an attacker could unpersist into 1000 unmodified enclaves (who would never know about each other) and get 1000*N guesses.
ludocode 6y ago
I'm extremely disappointed about how this Signal PIN rollout has been handled. Signal refused to let me view my received messages until I created a PIN. I filed a bug report about it [1]. I don't know if I was just caught in an A/B test or what because it hasn't happened to all of my Signal-using friends but it happened to me. I don't understand why it isn't just optional. They claim they want to protect my Signal data stored in the cloud. I don't want my data stored in the cloud. I want them to store nothing. I don't care about their Intel SGX whatever because I don't want to have to trust their servers in the first place. Cloud storage is a complete non-starter for me. I started my company to get away from cloud storage [2]. The fact that they are forcing this on their users is making me seriously consider dumping Signal. I just don't know if there are any sane alternatives. [1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9632 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9632 [2]: https://homefort.app/ https://homefort.app/
- saurik 6y ago
  > I don't care about their Intel SGX whatever because I don't want to have to trust their servers in the first place. Yeah: particularly given how Intel SGX gets broken every year :/... prime+probe, foreshadow, load value injection, plundervolt... Moxie's fetish for Intel SGX is extremely concerning.
  - RL_Quine 6y ago
    SGX has simply just been shown to be incompatible with secure software and is impossible to justify. Signal can happily operate without the need for this sort of thing to begin with, but they keep insisting on weak solutions for no reason.
    - ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
      These weak solutions are actually enough to keep the government requests at bay, for the moment. Why go into crazy crypto theory if that's good enough right? That's what Apple and Google are doing as well.
Y-bar 6y ago
> Currently, that also happens to mean that if your hands accidentally lose your phone to the toilet, your information in Signal is lost along with it. Duh. Because they explicitly disable backups.
27182818284 6y ago
If you lose your phone and pin, how much does someone have to bruteforce to recover your messages on a new phone? Surely they'd have to do more work than iterate through a possibly as small as 4-digit key?
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  If I understand the settings correctly (just opened Signal on my phone to explore this), you can require the PIN for re-registering (like after losing a device) and set up a 7-day lockout for failed PIN entries (not sure the number of permitted failures before lockout). This would greatly reduce the speed of brute force, though could also be used for a nice denial of service.
Sosh101 6y ago
That was a lot of words, but what did it mean?
anoncake 6y ago
This was bound to happen. Signal is a non-federated messenger controlled by a single organization hostile to alternative clients. It isn't much better than WhatsApp/Facebook.
whycombagator 6y ago
If I set up a PIN and decide I no longer want one (or what it entails) - how do I undo that decision? Or is it strictly opt-in without a way to opt-out after the fact?
- ahmedalsudani 6y ago
  I think you can change it as long as you still have access to your phone
Ansil849 6y ago
The way the Signal PIN feature implementation has been handled by the Signal team is extremely disappointing. The blog post completely fails to explain why this feature is mandatory, and why users are now locked out of being able to view their messages until they setup a PIN. The Signal app has now essentially taken all messages hostage, and users are unable to access messages until they create a PIN. I am a huge proponent of Signal, but this is unacceptable behavior.
- binarysneaker 6y ago
  Completely agree. My wife showed me her phone the other day and asked "what's this PIN nonsense in signal", which I hadn't seen yet. The messaging, UI and overall UX missed the mark. What happened, Signal??
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mapgrep 6y ago
I've been using Signal PINs for a long time to lock the app to my SIM card and unfortunately they are a real pain. This sounds exactly the same. First off the app is incessant about asking you to enter your PIN to prove you know it; this prompt is supposed to get less frequent and I suppose it does but is still way too frequent. Some of us are competent at storing secrets in a password manager and this is like a punishment for us because it can easily take several minutes to go retrieve the strong password, copy it, paste it in. It actually reduced the security for me; I started out with maybe a 16 or 20 digit PIN and cut it to a smaller number of digits that I could memorize. (I still haven't memorized them!) There were also issues with Signal's implementation of the feature. I chose quite a long PIN (>20 digits) at first for security only to find out later from them that it was above the silently imposed limit. Later when I went to verify the PIN it would not work because whatever silent truncation was done when establishing the PIN was not re-performed on verification so it did not recognize the PIN.
- thanksforfish 6y ago
  I've found that tapping next to the registration lock PIN prompt will dismiss it on Android. A "dismiss" button and a "don't ask me again, I won't lose this" checkmark would make much more sense to me.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    > "don't ask me again, I won't lose this" This option should be labelled according to the reality rather than people's wishful thinking "Don't ask me again, when I lose this I am OK with losing the account and messages" There's probably a pithier way to express that we could get into the common lexicon as I foresee it being useful in many places. Maybe we can just label it "Yolo!" ?
    - fwn 6y ago
      Or we could label it: "I use a password manager like every other tech-serious user." ... that would encapsulate the basic reality that no one can actually remember all their ~500 secure passphrases.
maxerickson 6y ago
Do people that try to piss up a rope spend a lot of time complaining about rope?
y7 6y ago
I like the security-mindedness of Signal, but some of their choices baffle me. They go through all this trouble to create an encrypted cloud storage, which many people in the target audience of Signal do not want, while not even giving iOS users the simple option of creating an offline backup of their messages (in fact, they actively disable this option). This issue has been open for more than four years [1] and even has a $1000 bounty [2]. 1: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/967 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/967 2: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/28598496-message-export-backup https://www.bountysource.com/issues/28598496-message-export-...
aoeuhtns 6y ago
Don't understand the negative comments here and on their subreddit... Secure Value Recovery and the associated PIN seems like an advance in the state of the art -- nobody else seems to do this. All users have to do is remember a few numbers. I find it surprising that many users got so upset by the software asking them to set a password that they removed the app... seems a bit extreme. I guess if it was part of a "sign-up" flow, people would have been primed for it... But even then, it takes like just a minute to do it? /shrug
- anonymousab 6y ago
  >nobody else seems to do this Plenty of apps add annoyances and nags for new features that uses don't necessarily care about. They correspondingly lose users and gain ire for doing so. That the motivation and end feature is good is beside the point - they have simply gone about this in a very abrasive way and seem to think they 'know better'.
- TheChaplain 6y ago
  Another number? I have a pin for my sim-card, a pin for the phone encryption, pins for each of my 4 credit cards, a pin for the office door, a pin for my work phone, a pin for the computer smart-card login.. I'm very fine with not having a pin for Signal.
pensatoio 6y ago
After setting a pin, if I try to change it, I don’t have to enter the existing pin? Something about this feels horribly wrong...
eitland 6y ago
This post is about the UX, not about the crypto: Meanwhile on Telegram everything just works more or less as is has always done. If I click on settings I get a "menu" called "Passcode & Face ID". There's a button saying "Turn Passcode On", and a help text saying: "Note: if you forget the passcode, you'll need to delete and reinstall the app. All secret chats will be lost." While I personally have big questions around the encryption in Telegram I think Telegram takes a much more effective approach towards making it available: by default it is just a very good messaging application that is a good replacement for Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and almost everything else except Signal. On top of that it provides secret chats which are end to end encrypted (and can also be set to automatically disappear), and an option for deleting all my data if I don't log in within 1, 3, 6 or 12 months.
- hawaiian 6y ago
  Except that I don't trust Telegram because they seem to ship a marketing-first, cryptography-later sort of product. IIRC initially their "E2E encryption" could be decrypted on the server. In contrast, Signal seems to put strong encryption first.
  - seemslegit 6y ago
    There is no E2E encryption in Telegram for any reasonable definition of the term.
    - eitland 6y ago
      This is plain wrong. I think even tptacek has become more careful about his wording now. There's a lot of problems around Telegram from their marketing to their crypto implementation to their incentives. But please stick to the facts.
      - seemslegit 6y ago
        Facts are that whatever e2e encryption telegram allegedly offers needs to be invoked per-conversation as a 'secret chat' and is not availabe on dekstops, normal conversations are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -encrypted
badrabbit 6y ago
Why is signal so eager to make changes. It has been pestering me to create profile names,I don't want that so I ignore it. That's just a small drop in the bucket but why fix it isn't broken? Why not make things optional. This b.s. is starting to remind me of the systemd crap lin Linux. I am at a point where I prefere paid open source apps and services (with a free tier) so the devs have incentive to listen to users. It worked well a year ago,now they are ruinig it. I constantly have problems with Signal where it takes hours at times to deliver the message and this translates to real world problems and misunderstandings with people for me. Just fix the bugs,make new features optional and opt-in unless you absolutley have no choice.
renewiltord 6y ago
I use both Signal and WhatsApp. Honestly, only use the former to communicate with my friends who insist on using Signal. Found this PIN nonsense annoying but who really cares. Ultimately, I have to contact these friends so I'll jump through their hoops till the hoops make my friends leave.
bsdubernerd 6y ago
Sigh. What about fixing backups so that I don't need this? There is always something absolutely odd with Signal. The obtuse insistence in creating it's own vault makes it annoying to use to share media and to make backups. Down to the built-in unusable camera app. I have almost everything duplicated in/out of signal because of this. Huge space waste. What's the threat model? Under the assumption that I can root the phone this is pointless. But if I trust the sandbox it's also pointless. Anonymizing file metadata in/out would have been more pragmatic, but pragmatism here is frowned upon. Remote contact discovery: technically impressive. I would have gladly opted out though to remain anonymous to some contacts that have my number. Yeah, that's the real "privacy" bit which is worth 10 times this PIN debacle. I'm still bound to use a phone number which I _don't_ really care about even just to use the desktop version (ahaha, desktop, yeah.. cough). When I saw the PIN prompt for the first time I realized the money injection was giving its first fruits. I gave matrix a first good try. Finally I can choose from a plethora of clients, run my own server if needed. The setup though is still not dumb-proof as signal (which is why I tolerated all the issues with signal so far), and the phone clients I've tried are not as polished. That being said, when I mentioned PINs I managed to convert most my tech contacts to matrix within a week. The real question is whether the other ones will stay, jump over, or just go back to whatsapp (which they never removed).
- izacus 6y ago
  I just had to restore backups on my phone (previous got broken) and it's such a disaster of usability that it makes use of GPG easy. 1.) You only get to see the backup password ONCE. They create it for you, it's a giant bunch of numbers written in columns. They show you that the FIRST time you enable backups, which might be years away from the time you need them. 2.) After they dump the backup, they just throw it in a preset folder on Android flash. You need to find a way to get it off the device yourself (good luck if the device broke). No help with transferring to another device, no Android beam support, nothing. 3.) After you somehow manage to get the file to another device, there's no help at restoring it either. You need to put it EXACTLY in the right directory. They don't tell you which. Even after that, the app will not pick up the backup. There's no "Restore backup" button or option. You need to KNOW that you have to destroy all existing app settings by clearing data and then it'll attempt a restore. 4.) When it attempts to restore, it presents you an input field that's flat text entry and is NOT organized in original columns. You need to guess the order of columns in which you need to enter the 30+ digits. If you fail... well, try again! 5.) If you switch from iOS to Android then you're SOL because iOS people don't deserve to have their conversations preserved. It feels like the authors of the app never had any meaningful conversations they'd like to remember in the future. It feels like the same mindset which made some security people implement nonsensical policies like "you need to change to a new 16 char password every week without duplication for a year" on Active Directory. A mind set which thinks that badgering you for PIN every week accomplishes anything but a wish to install WhatsApp. A mindset, which does significantly more harm to security than good. A mindset, which bogged proliferation of encrypted communication for years until corporations took it away. And that's sad.
davewood 6y ago
My signal app simply started crashing on my LineageOS powered phone. Pretty much at the same time the PIN update was rolled out. The app never starts, it always crashes on startup.
- davewood 6y ago
  if you have the same issue waiting for signal 4.60. might be the way to go. Should be due to release soonish according to github issues.
DavideNL 6y ago
Curious: So this PIN has to be stored on the Signal server? Now lets assume most average (non-technical) users will simply type in/re-use their smartphone pin (most of the people i know will do this.) Would this mean if there's a data breach in the 'Signal cloud', their Pins have now leaked onto the internet? Doesn't seem like a great idea to store peoples Pin codes in a cloud... would probably be better if they'd just called it a 'Signal password'. People would not think about entering their smartphone PIN code that way.
- zorked 6y ago
  Read the article before commenting.
  - DavideNL 6y ago
    I did. I assume you are referring to "your PIN isn’t recoverable if you forget it". There's a difference between "not recoverable to a Signal user" and "nobody is able to brute force it if they get access to the cloud data". So what i'm curious about is, how can this be? If you have lost your device (and thus all the keys stored in the signal app/phone), how can they store just a single pin while at the same time being able to prevent it to be recovered/brute forced (since it only has to be 4 digits)?
    - ikawe 6y ago
      > Signal PINs are based on [Secure Value Recovery], which we previewed in December, to allow supporting data like your profile, settings, and who you’ve blocked to be securely recovered should you lose or switch devices. [Secure Value Recovery] https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ > All of this adds up to a secure enclave that limits the number of recovery attempts that are possible against a value synchronized across nodes in hardware-encrypted RAM.
seemslegit 6y ago
This is a periodic reminder that Signal's non-optional contact discovery feature stands directly against their central value proposition and should cause everyone to doubt their alignment.

Signal PINs

226 points by aendruk 6y ago

aendruk 6y ago

Don't miss: > PINs will also help facilitate new features like addressing that isn’t based exclusively on phone numbers

ohhnoodont 6y ago
Does this mean we will finally be able to use Signal without a phone number?
- sneak 6y ago
  They’ve been planning that for a long while. It requires first an e2e sync though, for contact lists, which is what the clientside secret (PIN) enables.
ojizero 6y ago
I dunno but for example Wire does implement addressing without giving phone number optionally if you sign in with an email and a password, which makes me less convinced of the necessity of forced PINs in this style to enable such cases (which should be optional in the first place). Same thing with syncing across devices which requires you opt in to add email/password combo to enable those features.
- moxie 6y ago
  They store your social graph in plaintext on their servers.
  - ojizero 6y ago
    The point I was trying to make was more on how Wire made the whole password situation optional, I am aware of the conversation name and creation date being stored but that's an issue depending on the threat model for each user. The main issue I see is with the intrusiveness of how Signal PINs are handled by the UI, this will only work to alienate users or encourage writing simple PINs that make them weak to use! It would've been much better had it been treated as a fully opt in feature and PINs treated more as passwords, without the constant bombardment of reminders to input it. This can be placed behind a "sync" option for example and enabling it opens a dialogue explaining the need for password, from there it's up to the user to enable sync and in doing so they have to set a password like normal services. That's just my 2 cents ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

secfirstmd 6y ago

"As we move to support additional features the Signal community has asked for – like addressing that isn’t based on phone numbers" This is awesome. So important for people at risk like the human rights defenders, journalists, legal, LGBTIQ people we work with. Great to see Signal looking at this.

LukeShu 6y ago

That's kinda weird timing. Signal's been asking me for a PIN for about 2 weeks now. Did Aurora screw up and give me an early version? Or did they just roll this out to users weeks ahead of publishing an announcement?

genpfault 6y ago
> Signal's been asking me for a PIN for about 2 weeks now. And my copy started preventing me from using it entirely yesterday with a full-screen un-dismissable popup[1] :( [1]: https://i.redd.it/4sip5dcw9iy41.png https://i.redd.it/4sip5dcw9iy41.png [2] [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/giw4if/the_signal_pin_screen_blocking_the_user/ https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/giw4if/the_signal_p...
- ludocode 6y ago
  The exact same thing happened to me. They must be rolling it out gradually because it hasn't happen to my wife yet nor to several of my other contacts.
- marssaxman 6y ago
  I just got the nag-alert a couple days ago. I don't really want to set a PIN, so I have been ignoring it. If they are going to force us all into the new system, maybe it is time to stop putting up with Signal's constant forced-upgrade treadmill and find some other means of secure communication.

zeveb 6y ago

This really worries me: now the safety of my data hinges on Intel's remote attestation and a password I can remember.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> and a password I can remember. This is going to be the reality of any data system which you want to have complete control over. I suppose it could also be a complex key you instead keep on your drive, but that has risks as well.
- RL_Quine 6y ago
  The previous status quo was that nobody had the data other than your device.
- zeveb 6y ago
  Maybe I should have been more explicit: the safety of my data at rest on a remote system hinges on Intel's oft-broken security code and a memorable password. Normally I use 128-bit passwords (i.e., 22 mixed-case letters and digits) for any remote system. That's not really practical for something which prompts me to enter the PIN periodically (and I think Signal limits the PIN to 20 characters anyway). I do not see any net benefit to storing my contact information on Signal's servers. If I want to rebuild my contact list, I can … ask my contacts for their Signal accounts.
Skunkleton 6y ago
To be fair, you don't need to remember the password unless you lose your phone...won't stop the nagging though.
thanksforfish 6y ago
This is a huge shift in the trust model... I'm not happy.

s0ss 6y ago

This is all well and good. But the forced/unsilenceable pin reminders seems a bit obtuse to me. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Signal-PINs https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si... "Can I turn off these reminders? It is important to memorize your PIN, and the reminders cannot be disabled. We cannot recover your PIN if you forget it. You will see the reminders less frequently if you consistently enter your PIN correctly. The reminders will become more frequent if multiple attempts are necessary."

atestu 6y ago
I agree. Shouldn't you put your PIN in a password manager anyway? Why call it a PIN and not a password to begin with? Is there a difference I'm missing?
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Same reason iPhones support PINs. It’s easier for the user, and provides some level of protection versus nothing. If it’s not user friendly, the user will defer to convenience over security. Signal PINs do support alphanumeric strings FYI. If you have a password manager, use a string. If not, a PIN works just fine.
  - emerongi 6y ago
    It seems alphanumeric PINs are allowed now. At least on iOS, I do get the option to change the PIN to an alphanumeric one. The whole PIN thing has changed quite a bit in the past 6 months or so.
- j-james 6y ago
  My understanding is it's designed around making short passwords more secure by trying to limit brute force attacks. Seems interesting. https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
- novok 6y ago
  You can use a long alphanumeric string as your 'PIN', and on iOS at least, you can insert that PIN via a password manager.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

I've already got a passphrase on my Signal app. Why do I also need a PIN on top of that? If it's supposed to be an easier alternative to a passphrase, then okay, but stop showing me the freaking notification to setup a PIN...

anonymousab 6y ago
It feels like another case of "our great designer knows what you want and need better than you do" developer hubris.
ViViDboarder 6y ago
You mean the pre-existing “Registration lock” feature? I think they are using the same pin. I’ve had that set for years and I’ve been getting pin reminders for the last several months and I now see “Change your PIN” in my settings.
- balladeer 6y ago
  I have only set a reg lock pin. I never set any other pin. Then I uninstalled the app. Now when I installed it again today it is asking me for a PIN and the only PIN on Signal I have set was a reg lock pin which is not being accepted. I remember the PIN and it's also stored in BitWarden and KeePass. Now I am locked out.

NickBusey 6y ago

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vinay427 6y ago
It sounds like it's on the roadmap. From the article: > As we move to support additional features the Signal community has asked for – like addressing that isn’t based on phone numbers and chatting with contacts that aren’t saved in an address book – it means that more and more of this important supporting data can also be lost.
deleted 6y ago
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omnimus 6y ago
Signal and Matrix are pretty different thing honestly. It's like Whatsup vs Slack. I am not sure you would want your Dad to sign up to your Slack channel.

tguedes 6y ago

I don’t want my messages to be stored anywhere other than on my phone. I hate when companies push this bullshit on you. I keep on getting reminders to set a pin and I can’t turn it off. I think one of the issues with software is that because it’s infinitely extensible, people just add more and more features, they don’t know when to stop. So they keep pushing features that satisfy 10% of their users to the detriment of the 90%. Slowly the app becomes bloated and extremely confusing to use.

emerongi 6y ago
Most people want this, although I agree it should be optional.
sneak 6y ago
The 90% want their message history synced across devices.
- tguedes 6y ago
  Then use What’s App, there are a million solutions that solves your problem, signal was the only serious app that doesn’t store my messages somewhere else.
- themihai 6y ago
  yeah, across devices not across the world. What stops your devices being synchronised over lan/wifi network?
  - sneak 6y ago
    The cryptographic problem of device authentication is the same whether across the room or the planet.
    - Multicomp 6y ago
      Then establish a handshake between two devices that you want to trust each other in the same way that you add syncthing devices. If they still want to use a pen then there should be an option if it is an alphanumeric string to check a box that says this is managed by a password manager don't remind me for at least 6 months.

JoshTriplett 6y ago

I'm looking forward to hearing how they plan to prevent brute-forcing of these. A physical hardware device can wipe keys after a certain number of failures. I definitely look forward to the ability to move Signal forward to a new device without losing all logs, and the ability to use Signal without tying it to a phone number.

hiq 6y ago
AFAIK the encryption is done on the servers, not offline, so you can't just brute-force it: https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
kijiki 6y ago
Basically, SGX: https://github.com/signalapp/SecureValueRecovery https://github.com/signalapp/SecureValueRecovery The enclave is hardened against Spectre and LVI with this (BOLT/LLVM based), and other techniques: https://github.com/signalapp/BOLT https://github.com/signalapp/BOLT The last build step before signing is a verifier that checks that there are no missed mitigations, built using Intel Xed, to try to avoid potential missing mitigations due to an LLVM or BOLT bug.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  I'm familiar with Signal's usage of enclaves. The case I'm wondering about is what happens if someone seized (or surreptitiously accessed) Signal's servers, ran the unmodified enclaves, but fed in different PIN requests to those enclaves in a brute-forcing attempt. What prevents that?
  - kijiki 6y ago
    The enclaves will flush the data (much like the hardware you mention in your first post) after some number of wrong PIN guesses. To do this securely made the whole thing quite difficult, because it means we can never persist anything outside the enclave, or an attacker could unpersist into 1000 unmodified enclaves (who would never know about each other) and get 1000*N guesses.

ludocode 6y ago

I'm extremely disappointed about how this Signal PIN rollout has been handled. Signal refused to let me view my received messages until I created a PIN. I filed a bug report about it [1]. I don't know if I was just caught in an A/B test or what because it hasn't happened to all of my Signal-using friends but it happened to me. I don't understand why it isn't just optional. They claim they want to protect my Signal data stored in the cloud. I don't want my data stored in the cloud. I want them to store nothing. I don't care about their Intel SGX whatever because I don't want to have to trust their servers in the first place. Cloud storage is a complete non-starter for me. I started my company to get away from cloud storage [2]. The fact that they are forcing this on their users is making me seriously consider dumping Signal. I just don't know if there are any sane alternatives. [1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9632 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9632 [2]: https://homefort.app/ https://homefort.app/

saurik 6y ago
> I don't care about their Intel SGX whatever because I don't want to have to trust their servers in the first place. Yeah: particularly given how Intel SGX gets broken every year :/... prime+probe, foreshadow, load value injection, plundervolt... Moxie's fetish for Intel SGX is extremely concerning.
- RL_Quine 6y ago
  SGX has simply just been shown to be incompatible with secure software and is impossible to justify. Signal can happily operate without the need for this sort of thing to begin with, but they keep insisting on weak solutions for no reason.
  - ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
    These weak solutions are actually enough to keep the government requests at bay, for the moment. Why go into crazy crypto theory if that's good enough right? That's what Apple and Google are doing as well.

Y-bar 6y ago

> Currently, that also happens to mean that if your hands accidentally lose your phone to the toilet, your information in Signal is lost along with it. Duh. Because they explicitly disable backups.

27182818284 6y ago

If you lose your phone and pin, how much does someone have to bruteforce to recover your messages on a new phone? Surely they'd have to do more work than iterate through a possibly as small as 4-digit key?

Jtsummers 6y ago
If I understand the settings correctly (just opened Signal on my phone to explore this), you can require the PIN for re-registering (like after losing a device) and set up a 7-day lockout for failed PIN entries (not sure the number of permitted failures before lockout). This would greatly reduce the speed of brute force, though could also be used for a nice denial of service.

Sosh101 6y ago

That was a lot of words, but what did it mean?

anoncake 6y ago

This was bound to happen. Signal is a non-federated messenger controlled by a single organization hostile to alternative clients. It isn't much better than WhatsApp/Facebook.

whycombagator 6y ago

If I set up a PIN and decide I no longer want one (or what it entails) - how do I undo that decision? Or is it strictly opt-in without a way to opt-out after the fact?

ahmedalsudani 6y ago
I think you can change it as long as you still have access to your phone

Ansil849 6y ago

The way the Signal PIN feature implementation has been handled by the Signal team is extremely disappointing. The blog post completely fails to explain why this feature is mandatory, and why users are now locked out of being able to view their messages until they setup a PIN. The Signal app has now essentially taken all messages hostage, and users are unable to access messages until they create a PIN. I am a huge proponent of Signal, but this is unacceptable behavior.

binarysneaker 6y ago
Completely agree. My wife showed me her phone the other day and asked "what's this PIN nonsense in signal", which I hadn't seen yet. The messaging, UI and overall UX missed the mark. What happened, Signal??

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mapgrep 6y ago

I've been using Signal PINs for a long time to lock the app to my SIM card and unfortunately they are a real pain. This sounds exactly the same. First off the app is incessant about asking you to enter your PIN to prove you know it; this prompt is supposed to get less frequent and I suppose it does but is still way too frequent. Some of us are competent at storing secrets in a password manager and this is like a punishment for us because it can easily take several minutes to go retrieve the strong password, copy it, paste it in. It actually reduced the security for me; I started out with maybe a 16 or 20 digit PIN and cut it to a smaller number of digits that I could memorize. (I still haven't memorized them!) There were also issues with Signal's implementation of the feature. I chose quite a long PIN (>20 digits) at first for security only to find out later from them that it was above the silently imposed limit. Later when I went to verify the PIN it would not work because whatever silent truncation was done when establishing the PIN was not re-performed on verification so it did not recognize the PIN.

thanksforfish 6y ago
I've found that tapping next to the registration lock PIN prompt will dismiss it on Android. A "dismiss" button and a "don't ask me again, I won't lose this" checkmark would make much more sense to me.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  > "don't ask me again, I won't lose this" This option should be labelled according to the reality rather than people's wishful thinking "Don't ask me again, when I lose this I am OK with losing the account and messages" There's probably a pithier way to express that we could get into the common lexicon as I foresee it being useful in many places. Maybe we can just label it "Yolo!" ?
  - fwn 6y ago
    Or we could label it: "I use a password manager like every other tech-serious user." ... that would encapsulate the basic reality that no one can actually remember all their ~500 secure passphrases.

maxerickson 6y ago

Do people that try to piss up a rope spend a lot of time complaining about rope?

y7 6y ago

I like the security-mindedness of Signal, but some of their choices baffle me. They go through all this trouble to create an encrypted cloud storage, which many people in the target audience of Signal do not want, while not even giving iOS users the simple option of creating an offline backup of their messages (in fact, they actively disable this option). This issue has been open for more than four years [1] and even has a $1000 bounty [2]. 1: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/967 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/967 2: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/28598496-message-export-backup https://www.bountysource.com/issues/28598496-message-export-...

aoeuhtns 6y ago

Don't understand the negative comments here and on their subreddit... Secure Value Recovery and the associated PIN seems like an advance in the state of the art -- nobody else seems to do this. All users have to do is remember a few numbers. I find it surprising that many users got so upset by the software asking them to set a password that they removed the app... seems a bit extreme. I guess if it was part of a "sign-up" flow, people would have been primed for it... But even then, it takes like just a minute to do it? /shrug

anonymousab 6y ago
>nobody else seems to do this Plenty of apps add annoyances and nags for new features that uses don't necessarily care about. They correspondingly lose users and gain ire for doing so. That the motivation and end feature is good is beside the point - they have simply gone about this in a very abrasive way and seem to think they 'know better'.
TheChaplain 6y ago
Another number? I have a pin for my sim-card, a pin for the phone encryption, pins for each of my 4 credit cards, a pin for the office door, a pin for my work phone, a pin for the computer smart-card login.. I'm very fine with not having a pin for Signal.

pensatoio 6y ago

After setting a pin, if I try to change it, I don’t have to enter the existing pin? Something about this feels horribly wrong...

eitland 6y ago

This post is about the UX, not about the crypto: Meanwhile on Telegram everything just works more or less as is has always done. If I click on settings I get a "menu" called "Passcode & Face ID". There's a button saying "Turn Passcode On", and a help text saying: "Note: if you forget the passcode, you'll need to delete and reinstall the app. All secret chats will be lost." While I personally have big questions around the encryption in Telegram I think Telegram takes a much more effective approach towards making it available: by default it is just a very good messaging application that is a good replacement for Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and almost everything else except Signal. On top of that it provides secret chats which are end to end encrypted (and can also be set to automatically disappear), and an option for deleting all my data if I don't log in within 1, 3, 6 or 12 months.

hawaiian 6y ago
Except that I don't trust Telegram because they seem to ship a marketing-first, cryptography-later sort of product. IIRC initially their "E2E encryption" could be decrypted on the server. In contrast, Signal seems to put strong encryption first.
- seemslegit 6y ago
  There is no E2E encryption in Telegram for any reasonable definition of the term.
  - eitland 6y ago
    This is plain wrong. I think even tptacek has become more careful about his wording now. There's a lot of problems around Telegram from their marketing to their crypto implementation to their incentives. But please stick to the facts.
    - seemslegit 6y ago
      Facts are that whatever e2e encryption telegram allegedly offers needs to be invoked per-conversation as a 'secret chat' and is not availabe on dekstops, normal conversations are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -encrypted

badrabbit 6y ago

Why is signal so eager to make changes. It has been pestering me to create profile names,I don't want that so I ignore it. That's just a small drop in the bucket but why fix it isn't broken? Why not make things optional. This b.s. is starting to remind me of the systemd crap lin Linux. I am at a point where I prefere paid open source apps and services (with a free tier) so the devs have incentive to listen to users. It worked well a year ago,now they are ruinig it. I constantly have problems with Signal where it takes hours at times to deliver the message and this translates to real world problems and misunderstandings with people for me. Just fix the bugs,make new features optional and opt-in unless you absolutley have no choice.

renewiltord 6y ago

I use both Signal and WhatsApp. Honestly, only use the former to communicate with my friends who insist on using Signal. Found this PIN nonsense annoying but who really cares. Ultimately, I have to contact these friends so I'll jump through their hoops till the hoops make my friends leave.

bsdubernerd 6y ago

Sigh. What about fixing backups so that I don't need this? There is always something absolutely odd with Signal. The obtuse insistence in creating it's own vault makes it annoying to use to share media and to make backups. Down to the built-in unusable camera app. I have almost everything duplicated in/out of signal because of this. Huge space waste. What's the threat model? Under the assumption that I can root the phone this is pointless. But if I trust the sandbox it's also pointless. Anonymizing file metadata in/out would have been more pragmatic, but pragmatism here is frowned upon. Remote contact discovery: technically impressive. I would have gladly opted out though to remain anonymous to some contacts that have my number. Yeah, that's the real "privacy" bit which is worth 10 times this PIN debacle. I'm still bound to use a phone number which I _don't_ really care about even just to use the desktop version (ahaha, desktop, yeah.. cough). When I saw the PIN prompt for the first time I realized the money injection was giving its first fruits. I gave matrix a first good try. Finally I can choose from a plethora of clients, run my own server if needed. The setup though is still not dumb-proof as signal (which is why I tolerated all the issues with signal so far), and the phone clients I've tried are not as polished. That being said, when I mentioned PINs I managed to convert most my tech contacts to matrix within a week. The real question is whether the other ones will stay, jump over, or just go back to whatsapp (which they never removed).

izacus 6y ago
I just had to restore backups on my phone (previous got broken) and it's such a disaster of usability that it makes use of GPG easy. 1.) You only get to see the backup password ONCE. They create it for you, it's a giant bunch of numbers written in columns. They show you that the FIRST time you enable backups, which might be years away from the time you need them. 2.) After they dump the backup, they just throw it in a preset folder on Android flash. You need to find a way to get it off the device yourself (good luck if the device broke). No help with transferring to another device, no Android beam support, nothing. 3.) After you somehow manage to get the file to another device, there's no help at restoring it either. You need to put it EXACTLY in the right directory. They don't tell you which. Even after that, the app will not pick up the backup. There's no "Restore backup" button or option. You need to KNOW that you have to destroy all existing app settings by clearing data and then it'll attempt a restore. 4.) When it attempts to restore, it presents you an input field that's flat text entry and is NOT organized in original columns. You need to guess the order of columns in which you need to enter the 30+ digits. If you fail... well, try again! 5.) If you switch from iOS to Android then you're SOL because iOS people don't deserve to have their conversations preserved. It feels like the authors of the app never had any meaningful conversations they'd like to remember in the future. It feels like the same mindset which made some security people implement nonsensical policies like "you need to change to a new 16 char password every week without duplication for a year" on Active Directory. A mind set which thinks that badgering you for PIN every week accomplishes anything but a wish to install WhatsApp. A mindset, which does significantly more harm to security than good. A mindset, which bogged proliferation of encrypted communication for years until corporations took it away. And that's sad.

davewood 6y ago

My signal app simply started crashing on my LineageOS powered phone. Pretty much at the same time the PIN update was rolled out. The app never starts, it always crashes on startup.

davewood 6y ago
if you have the same issue waiting for signal 4.60. might be the way to go. Should be due to release soonish according to github issues.

DavideNL 6y ago

Curious: So this PIN has to be stored on the Signal server? Now lets assume most average (non-technical) users will simply type in/re-use their smartphone pin (most of the people i know will do this.) Would this mean if there's a data breach in the 'Signal cloud', their Pins have now leaked onto the internet? Doesn't seem like a great idea to store peoples Pin codes in a cloud... would probably be better if they'd just called it a 'Signal password'. People would not think about entering their smartphone PIN code that way.

zorked 6y ago
Read the article before commenting.
- DavideNL 6y ago
  I did. I assume you are referring to "your PIN isn’t recoverable if you forget it". There's a difference between "not recoverable to a Signal user" and "nobody is able to brute force it if they get access to the cloud data". So what i'm curious about is, how can this be? If you have lost your device (and thus all the keys stored in the signal app/phone), how can they store just a single pin while at the same time being able to prevent it to be recovered/brute forced (since it only has to be 4 digits)?
  - ikawe 6y ago
    > Signal PINs are based on [Secure Value Recovery], which we previewed in December, to allow supporting data like your profile, settings, and who you’ve blocked to be securely recovered should you lose or switch devices. [Secure Value Recovery] https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ > All of this adds up to a secure enclave that limits the number of recovery attempts that are possible against a value synchronized across nodes in hardware-encrypted RAM.

seemslegit 6y ago

This is a periodic reminder that Signal's non-optional contact discovery feature stands directly against their central value proposition and should cause everyone to doubt their alignment.