I'm arguing that the contact themselves, not the node they use, is the primary threat. > Signal's goal, however, is to protect the masses and, thus, society as

I'm arguing that the contact themselves, not the node they use, is the primary threat. > Signal's goal, however, is to protect the masses and, thus, society as a whole, by protecting as many people's privacy as possible. Sure, by positioning themselves as the only node, which you are then forced to trust. That hardly seems like an acceptable solution to me. The chance of a given mainstream node being actively malicious seems unlikely to me. Maybe that's misguided, but at least (as you point out) there will be relatively few big ones to research. Non-mainstream nodes don't pose a significant threat by virtue of having little to no use (and so seeing little to none of your traffic and contact graph). > ... the vast majority of all acts of communication in the network is going to get routed not through self-hosted nodes ... I hope you will agree that, for society as a whole, this exacerbates the trust problem you mentioned. Actually, it seems to diminish the problem to me. Instead of everything going through one central authority it's now being split across multiple actors. No single entity has access to the complete picture anymore. Moreover, you as the user have the freedom to avoid such supernodes if you feel the need. Yes, that will likely introduce usability hurdles, but at least you have the freedom to do so (as compared to a strictly centralized model). > Instead, they can just create new hosts (just like they do in the case of the Tor network). Doesn't this attack model fail to account for how users go about selecting and using servers? If I join the Mozilla instance to chat with them, that wasn't an arbitrary choice - I selected the instance that the organization I want to communicate with is using. So the other party, which I'm going to communicate with one way or another, is the real threat here. As far as MITM attacks go, that scenario seems to get a bit out into the weeds cryptographically. I'm not sure how viable a large scale attack would be here - presumably at some point odd traffic patterns would become noticeable? And you still have the issue of a malicious node that actively attacks all traffic needing to somehow manage to grow its user base to a significant degree.