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These are all exact reasons I have never used Signal. Additionally I find concerning the choice to bet the farm on SGX which has been repeatedly broken with r

by lrvick 6y ago

These are all exact reasons I have never used Signal. Additionally I find concerning the choice to bet the farm on SGX which has been repeatedly broken with repeated opportunities to extract the keys, at which point cracking small numeric pins is trivial. Moxie simply promised they always patch right away and never take the keys when they have such opportunities to do so. I do believe him, today, but I don't believe he is above being threatened or coerced tomorrow or that he won't get replaced by someone that cooperates better with state powers as happened with VK and countless others. I also took issue with Signal having central network metadata chokepoints his DCs or ISP could do timing heuristics on even if he does not. I tried to engage with Moxie about these issues but he dismissed each as things we will mostly have to accept because he feels it is not possible to create and rapidly improve a privacy focused communication tool for the masses that isn't produced and controlled by a single large company. Moxie is brilliant, and his contributions to cryptography and bringing education on privacy and end to end encryption to millions can't be overstated. The problem is Moxie and Signal are struggling to engineer best efforts under an assumption they treat like a law of nature: No end to end end encrypted messaging platform can succeed without complete centralization. I operate under a different assumption: No centralized platform will ever escape censorship and control by the government it operates under. Moxie has said before he is happy to be proven wrong. I hope as Matrix and others continue to prove him wrong with his own cryptography research that he comes around and rejoins the fight for a decentralized internet with irrevocable privacy.

tptacek 6y ago
You can't coherently be alarmed by Signal's use of SGX while at the same time endorsing systems that use no cryptography whatsoever to protect the metadata Signal uses SGX for.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I’m not sure that that’s the only conclusion you can draw. Some systems choose to not handle that metadata, which often makes them a worse service but they make that choice by looking at the landscape and choosing to not use SGX. The other plausible argument is that Signal uses SGX, which is better than nothing, but in selling it as more secure than it is they do more harm than good.
  - JshWright 6y ago
    Some people choose not to turn their servers on at all. It makes for a worse server, but it's very secure. Security is always about tradeoffs and compromises. A system that is very, very good, but not perfect and widely used is far preferable to a system that is perfect but used by no one.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Right, but in this case the choice is "should I be able to discover contacts" and some people just don't desire that feature enough.
      - cwyers 6y ago
        Who, though? Matrix has contact discovery, doesn't it?
        Reelin 6y ago
        If and only if you opt in to it. It's difficult to understate how important that is.
        3np 6y ago
        You also have the option of using alternative identity servers, and still have no problem communicating with those on others.
  - akerl_ 6y ago
    What’s an example of a system in this space which chooses not to handle that metadata?
    - Groxx 6y ago
      I don't need a phone number, nor do I need to upload my contacts' phone numbers[1], in order to use Matrix. [1]: I work around this by running Signal in a work profile with no contacts. So it's... kinda sorta optional, but in practice there are many caveats and complications that make it effectively not. Certainly not when we're claiming it for average users, which is Signal's argument for using it.
- nullc 6y ago
  > You can't coherently be alarmed by Signal's use of SGX while at the same time endorsing systems that use no cryptography whatsoever to protect the metadata Signal uses SGX for. You can be: It isn't difficult to argue that signal overstates the security properties of their solution. It's not an incoherent position to say that it's more important to be conservative (or at least accurate) about the claimed properties than it is to provide epsilon more security. If it were the case that signal claimed that this metadata had no privacy towards them (and the hosts running their systems), but when you dig into the protocol or detailed tech docs you find that they're using SGX to minimize risk-- then I think there would be nothing to fault about the addition of SGX. In that case it would be purely additive security.
- lrvick 6y ago
  Matrix lets people host their own servers and in doing so put the metadata anywhere they are comfortable. One can have metadata for sensitive internal corporate channels stay on a network they own in whatever country they want while still being able to chat with outside parties on matrix.org or other servers. Several friends host their own servers and more recently matrix p2p is rapidly maturing to dump the need for servers at all for many use cases. Federated systems allow people like me to choose to host a server for my own family in my own home closet rack so data shared between my family and I never leave our network. Still others can host matrix as a Tor hidden service where it will be very expensive to even learn who to target. If all participants are using Tor and not using identifying information like a phone number, then bulk deanonymization becomes very expensive, particularly if many small highly targeted social circles roll their own. Signal does not give users a choice but to trust one SPOF setup built under a one size fits all threat model that flows all IP metadata to one place which can leak information regardless of any encryption. I don't want a world where one central party holds all communications metadata in one place under one legal jurisdiction with one proprietary memory isolation technology under one threat model. Moxie here likes to point out that email demonstrates all the things that can go wrong with federated systems, but if had chosen the popular alternative of letting a single party take over this whole class of communication, we could all still be using AOL. Internet messaging will outlive us all, and if we advocate everyone lock up their communications with one (even benevolent) dictator, it won't end well when the next dictator is not so benevolent. See: pretty much every social network in China and Russia that is now under state control in spite of early promises of privacy by founders.
  - storrgie 6y ago
    not the _identity_ servers currently though.
    - lrvick 6y ago
      I have run my own identity servers for private deployments without issue. This is, granted, not as easy as it should be, but it is an issue the matrix team is working on improving. You also don't need to use the identity service at all. It is totally optional for user discovery. Third party implementations of the identity server already exist too. Someone could even write their own replacement that uses SGX if they really wanted ;)
- pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
  You can be alarmed by and critical of Signal's insistence that it begin storing your data under any scheme without an option of "hey, just don't store my data, thanks".

by lrvick 6y ago

tptacek 6y ago

You can't coherently be alarmed by Signal's use of SGX while at the same time endorsing systems that use no cryptography whatsoever to protect the metadata Signal uses SGX for.

saagarjha 6y ago
I’m not sure that that’s the only conclusion you can draw. Some systems choose to not handle that metadata, which often makes them a worse service but they make that choice by looking at the landscape and choosing to not use SGX. The other plausible argument is that Signal uses SGX, which is better than nothing, but in selling it as more secure than it is they do more harm than good.
- JshWright 6y ago
  Some people choose not to turn their servers on at all. It makes for a worse server, but it's very secure. Security is always about tradeoffs and compromises. A system that is very, very good, but not perfect and widely used is far preferable to a system that is perfect but used by no one.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Right, but in this case the choice is "should I be able to discover contacts" and some people just don't desire that feature enough.
    - cwyers 6y ago
      Who, though? Matrix has contact discovery, doesn't it?
      - Reelin 6y ago
        If and only if you opt in to it. It's difficult to understate how important that is.
        3np 6y ago
        You also have the option of using alternative identity servers, and still have no problem communicating with those on others.
- akerl_ 6y ago
  What’s an example of a system in this space which chooses not to handle that metadata?
  - Groxx 6y ago
    I don't need a phone number, nor do I need to upload my contacts' phone numbers[1], in order to use Matrix. [1]: I work around this by running Signal in a work profile with no contacts. So it's... kinda sorta optional, but in practice there are many caveats and complications that make it effectively not. Certainly not when we're claiming it for average users, which is Signal's argument for using it.
nullc 6y ago
> You can't coherently be alarmed by Signal's use of SGX while at the same time endorsing systems that use no cryptography whatsoever to protect the metadata Signal uses SGX for. You can be: It isn't difficult to argue that signal overstates the security properties of their solution. It's not an incoherent position to say that it's more important to be conservative (or at least accurate) about the claimed properties than it is to provide epsilon more security. If it were the case that signal claimed that this metadata had no privacy towards them (and the hosts running their systems), but when you dig into the protocol or detailed tech docs you find that they're using SGX to minimize risk-- then I think there would be nothing to fault about the addition of SGX. In that case it would be purely additive security.
lrvick 6y ago
Matrix lets people host their own servers and in doing so put the metadata anywhere they are comfortable. One can have metadata for sensitive internal corporate channels stay on a network they own in whatever country they want while still being able to chat with outside parties on matrix.org or other servers. Several friends host their own servers and more recently matrix p2p is rapidly maturing to dump the need for servers at all for many use cases. Federated systems allow people like me to choose to host a server for my own family in my own home closet rack so data shared between my family and I never leave our network. Still others can host matrix as a Tor hidden service where it will be very expensive to even learn who to target. If all participants are using Tor and not using identifying information like a phone number, then bulk deanonymization becomes very expensive, particularly if many small highly targeted social circles roll their own. Signal does not give users a choice but to trust one SPOF setup built under a one size fits all threat model that flows all IP metadata to one place which can leak information regardless of any encryption. I don't want a world where one central party holds all communications metadata in one place under one legal jurisdiction with one proprietary memory isolation technology under one threat model. Moxie here likes to point out that email demonstrates all the things that can go wrong with federated systems, but if had chosen the popular alternative of letting a single party take over this whole class of communication, we could all still be using AOL. Internet messaging will outlive us all, and if we advocate everyone lock up their communications with one (even benevolent) dictator, it won't end well when the next dictator is not so benevolent. See: pretty much every social network in China and Russia that is now under state control in spite of early promises of privacy by founders.
- storrgie 6y ago
  not the _identity_ servers currently though.
  - lrvick 6y ago
    I have run my own identity servers for private deployments without issue. This is, granted, not as easy as it should be, but it is an issue the matrix team is working on improving. You also don't need to use the identity service at all. It is totally optional for user discovery. Third party implementations of the identity server already exist too. Someone could even write their own replacement that uses SGX if they really wanted ;)
pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
You can be alarmed by and critical of Signal's insistence that it begin storing your data under any scheme without an option of "hey, just don't store my data, thanks".