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Just chiming in here: it’s almost all about the graph. If you have the graph, the content is almost irrelevant. This is why Signal hiding the graph as best the
by josh2600 6y ago
Just chiming in here: it’s almost all about the graph. If you have the graph, the content is almost irrelevant.
This is why Signal hiding the graph as best they can, using SGX, is incredibly important work. Say what you want about Secure Enclaves, we know of no better way to conceal social graphs.
Yes there is still potentially some metadata analysis that can be done at the server to coordinate IP addresses but we know signal doesn’t keep those logs because of their response to the sealed subpoena (which they successfully sued with the ACLU to unseal):
https://signal.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand-jury/ https://signal.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand-jury/
We can only dream of a world where companies are held to this standard of transparency and user privacy.
- upofadown 6y ago>...we know signal doesn’t keep those logs because of their response to the sealed subpoena ... That doesn't prove that. If Signal was, say, a NSA project they would have to respond to such things in that way to protect the signal intelligence value of the metadata they were collecting for their primary mission. After Crypto AG we know it is a bad idea to trust any particular entity. Something like Signal can only be trusted as much as can verified.
- josh2600 6y agoAbsolutely. You should trust anything as much as you can verify it and no further. I submit that there is no better option right now.
- upofadown 6y agoIf you are not trusting the people that are running these things, then Signal is just another siloed messenger where the servers are controlled by a single entity. There are certainly worse but Signal is not special.
- monocasa 6y agoSignal has open clients with reproducible builds. We know that they are keeping their promises wrt what information is communicated with the backends. That's a step above the other options in common use, and in fact does make Signal special.
- jki275 6y agoAre you running an open client? Is anyone? That's all a smoke screen. Nobody is running an open client with a reproducible build, everybody is running whatever version is downloaded from their app store of choice. It's not special, and I don't trust it a bit.
- monocasa 6y agoThe point of reproducible builds isn't to run an open client, but validate that their copy in the app store matches the source they say it does.
- jki275 6y agoBut nobody actually does that.
- 10000truths 6y agoNot manually, perhaps. But automated integrity checks of reproducible builds are trivial to write.
- cyphar 6y agoHave you personally done that? Do you know of anyone who is doing that and publicly tracks said verification? It doesn't matter how trivial it would be to verify if nobody is actually doing the verification (not to mention you'd actually want many people doing it and publicly posting their verification, as well as you checking that your hash matches everyone else's before installing the APK -- and there is no automated setup for doing that on Android.)
- codethief 6y ago> Say what you want about Secure Enclaves, we know of no better way to conceal social graphs. I'm not following. Secure Enclaves have nothing to do with protecting the social graph of Signal users. They're used to store the contact list (and other things) in the "cloud" in a safe way – things that weren't even shared / stored anywhere by Signal before Secure Value Recovery was introduced.