5 ms·

This is a fair concern, and I hope Signal Addresses it at some point, but Telegram is no replacement. From Telegram's Wikipedia page "The default messages and m

This is a fair concern, and I hope Signal Addresses it at some point, but Telegram is no replacement. From Telegram's Wikipedia page "The default messages and media use client-server encryption during transit.[19] This data is also encrypted at rest, but can be accessed by Telegram developers, who hold the encryption keys," and "the desktop clients (excluding macOS client) do not feature end-to-end encryption, nor is end-to-end encryption available for groups, supergroups, or channels." In addition, the Telegram server software is proprietary.

saurik 6y ago
It really depends on your threat model: do you trust the people you are talking to but not Signal (though in practice this doesn't even work as they are way too centralized, but whatever), or do you not trust the people you are talking to but are willing to trust Telegram? Clearly we should be able to have something where we don't trust either, as there is nothing about these phone numbers that is critical to Signal's operation (if anything, Signal is compromising basic important things to use them), but between these two choices it isn't clear to a lot of people why Signal's choice is better, given the actual use cases and threat models most people have.
- kelnos 6y ago
  The fewer people who you're required to trust, the fewer breaches there will be, even if no one is malicious and those breaches are accidental. And ultimately even if the people you are talking to and your messaging provider are 100% trustworthy and never make mistakes, they usually cannot resist a lawful government request for data. Signal just has virtual no data available to provide them; Telegram could give them entire chat histories, and could be required to provide access to in-progress chats.
- gdmka 6y ago
  Moxie addressed the phone number issue[0]. To save time he mentions that owning a SIM card or a smartphone with a Contacts application that holds phone numbers is a portable social network by design. Pushing his idea further it's much easier for anyone to learn the penetration of Signal by checking against existing phone numbers. I can't imagine someone with a 200+ phone numbers querying service to validate a phone number is registered with Signal. And while nicknames sound perfect in theory they lack one specific thing — validation of authenticity of a speaker. By this i mean an impersonator can claim the username and pose as someone else. Given a lot of people use transparent nicknames on the internet, it can pose a threat. So even when the nicknames roll out as a feature of Signal, it's good to facilitate somehow that a party i'm in contact with is someone genuine. Checking against phone numbers can mitigate the risk of fraud. [0] https://youtu.be/Nj3YFprqAr8 https://youtu.be/Nj3YFprqAr8
  - saurik 6y ago
    You are defending why phone numbers are useful, but are completely choosing to ignore the point I am making about the tradeoff of who you trust. To be even more explicit about it, in the hope you understand: the vast majority of people trust large companies (which is bad but frankly not insane) but absolutely do not trust random assholes/creeps on the Internet. The security model of Signal is saying you don't have to trust Signal, but you weirdly do have to trust all of the random people you interact with with your phone number. And so, in the context of this thread, that explains why someone would claim Telegram is actually better than Signal, because what people do with Telegram is join massive group chats that are either 1) public, 2) have so many people in them that if you think what you say isn't going to be logged you are fooling yourself. So the value of end-to-end encryption in this context is essentially zero; but, being able to join some large group chat with a ton of strangers to talk about some open source project or whatever you are doing without any of those people now knowing your phone number--an identifier which is tied to a large number of "real world" concerns and is ridiculously difficult to change--is actually extremely valuable. Honestly, even if you aren't quite in those sets, the tradeoff still isn't an obvious win for Signal. As an example, let's say you are in a group of people talking about a protest. Are you more concerned that the company relaying your messages will be served a warrant to monitor your chat activity (which generally has some requirement of probable cause for a specific action, and likely requires knowing about the existence of a chat in the first place) or that one of the people in your group chat is actually a traitor or even an undercover cop (which can get in a number of groups and pretend to be an ally while passively monitoring for things they want to shut down)? The latter is actually a much more realistic attacker model, and with Signal now that person has your phone number, which means you are screwed. Using Signal correctly here requires getting a burner phone, which is way more effort than is reasonable. The use cases for the privacy and security model of Signal are thereby inherently limited to people you trust with your phone number. Like, it is sometimes difficult enough to get people to want to use text messages sometimes as they don't want to give out their phone number: Signal doesn't solve that, and so is confined to the subset of communication that people currently do over SMS(/iMessage) and can't really ever begin to carve into the market share of Telegram, or even Facebook. And so, realistically, Signal does not, can not, and should not manage to displace Telegram, which I say with sadness as I am someone who has not and likely never will forgive Telegram for claiming security properties their system didn't have (like, I am not Telegram fan, and while I have the app I only use it a few times a year; that said, this is more than I am willing to tolerate Signal, due to a number of reasons that are mostly unrelated to anything in this comment). (And FWIW, I personally would not recommend usernames, and in fact would personally be much more angry about that than phone numbers for various reasons; if Signal decides to roll out unique choosable usernames I am honestly probably going to hate on it even stronger because of it: you are arguing a strawman here :/. But to claim that phone numbers are fundamentally better is awkward regardless, given how phone numbers aren't even a good security layer due to the prevalence of number porting. This is just one of the many devastating things that Moxie is wrong about.)
dm33tri 6y ago
I don't get why people praise e2e so much If you look in the past main attack vectors on messengers are via exposed phone number, third-party insecure cloud backups or just physically accessing your device. Telegram addresses all of these while also allowing e2e encryption, just not by default for now because UX. At the same time many other popular messengers advertise "e2e by default" while being not secure at all and having mediocre UX (no desktop clients, no seamless sync, no usernames etc).

saurik 6y ago

It really depends on your threat model: do you trust the people you are talking to but not Signal (though in practice this doesn't even work as they are way too centralized, but whatever), or do you not trust the people you are talking to but are willing to trust Telegram? Clearly we should be able to have something where we don't trust either, as there is nothing about these phone numbers that is critical to Signal's operation (if anything, Signal is compromising basic important things to use them), but between these two choices it isn't clear to a lot of people why Signal's choice is better, given the actual use cases and threat models most people have.

kelnos 6y ago
The fewer people who you're required to trust, the fewer breaches there will be, even if no one is malicious and those breaches are accidental. And ultimately even if the people you are talking to and your messaging provider are 100% trustworthy and never make mistakes, they usually cannot resist a lawful government request for data. Signal just has virtual no data available to provide them; Telegram could give them entire chat histories, and could be required to provide access to in-progress chats.
gdmka 6y ago
Moxie addressed the phone number issue[0]. To save time he mentions that owning a SIM card or a smartphone with a Contacts application that holds phone numbers is a portable social network by design. Pushing his idea further it's much easier for anyone to learn the penetration of Signal by checking against existing phone numbers. I can't imagine someone with a 200+ phone numbers querying service to validate a phone number is registered with Signal. And while nicknames sound perfect in theory they lack one specific thing — validation of authenticity of a speaker. By this i mean an impersonator can claim the username and pose as someone else. Given a lot of people use transparent nicknames on the internet, it can pose a threat. So even when the nicknames roll out as a feature of Signal, it's good to facilitate somehow that a party i'm in contact with is someone genuine. Checking against phone numbers can mitigate the risk of fraud. [0] https://youtu.be/Nj3YFprqAr8 https://youtu.be/Nj3YFprqAr8
- saurik 6y ago
  You are defending why phone numbers are useful, but are completely choosing to ignore the point I am making about the tradeoff of who you trust. To be even more explicit about it, in the hope you understand: the vast majority of people trust large companies (which is bad but frankly not insane) but absolutely do not trust random assholes/creeps on the Internet. The security model of Signal is saying you don't have to trust Signal, but you weirdly do have to trust all of the random people you interact with with your phone number. And so, in the context of this thread, that explains why someone would claim Telegram is actually better than Signal, because what people do with Telegram is join massive group chats that are either 1) public, 2) have so many people in them that if you think what you say isn't going to be logged you are fooling yourself. So the value of end-to-end encryption in this context is essentially zero; but, being able to join some large group chat with a ton of strangers to talk about some open source project or whatever you are doing without any of those people now knowing your phone number--an identifier which is tied to a large number of "real world" concerns and is ridiculously difficult to change--is actually extremely valuable. Honestly, even if you aren't quite in those sets, the tradeoff still isn't an obvious win for Signal. As an example, let's say you are in a group of people talking about a protest. Are you more concerned that the company relaying your messages will be served a warrant to monitor your chat activity (which generally has some requirement of probable cause for a specific action, and likely requires knowing about the existence of a chat in the first place) or that one of the people in your group chat is actually a traitor or even an undercover cop (which can get in a number of groups and pretend to be an ally while passively monitoring for things they want to shut down)? The latter is actually a much more realistic attacker model, and with Signal now that person has your phone number, which means you are screwed. Using Signal correctly here requires getting a burner phone, which is way more effort than is reasonable. The use cases for the privacy and security model of Signal are thereby inherently limited to people you trust with your phone number. Like, it is sometimes difficult enough to get people to want to use text messages sometimes as they don't want to give out their phone number: Signal doesn't solve that, and so is confined to the subset of communication that people currently do over SMS(/iMessage) and can't really ever begin to carve into the market share of Telegram, or even Facebook. And so, realistically, Signal does not, can not, and should not manage to displace Telegram, which I say with sadness as I am someone who has not and likely never will forgive Telegram for claiming security properties their system didn't have (like, I am not Telegram fan, and while I have the app I only use it a few times a year; that said, this is more than I am willing to tolerate Signal, due to a number of reasons that are mostly unrelated to anything in this comment). (And FWIW, I personally would not recommend usernames, and in fact would personally be much more angry about that than phone numbers for various reasons; if Signal decides to roll out unique choosable usernames I am honestly probably going to hate on it even stronger because of it: you are arguing a strawman here :/. But to claim that phone numbers are fundamentally better is awkward regardless, given how phone numbers aren't even a good security layer due to the prevalence of number porting. This is just one of the many devastating things that Moxie is wrong about.)

dm33tri 6y ago

I don't get why people praise e2e so much If you look in the past main attack vectors on messengers are via exposed phone number, third-party insecure cloud backups or just physically accessing your device. Telegram addresses all of these while also allowing e2e encryption, just not by default for now because UX. At the same time many other popular messengers advertise "e2e by default" while being not secure at all and having mediocre UX (no desktop clients, no seamless sync, no usernames etc).