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Should Signal then come with a blanket warning “Do not trust Signal!”?

detaro 6y ago
A brief explanation of the threat model (i.e. what it aims to protect against and what it doesn't) would probably be more useful. "Do not trust people that tell you Signal is perfectly secure" is true but probably doesn't lead to the right user behavior. I'm not claiming communicating these things well is easy. (and obviously a bunch of the blame lies with people that do uncritically push Signal, if you are journalist not misleading your "sources" is important, but again they need to be educated too and it's not surprising that's not happening perfectly - efforts in that would also have been a reasonable response IMHO. And of course this is based on the assumption that the events have been presented somewhat accurately)
- kelnos 6y ago
  Why is it the responsibility of the Signal developers to do people's threat modeling for them? If your situation is that you need to communicate things that could get you killed or imprisoned, you should be using a burner phone that has pretty much nothing installed on it but Signal (or whatever app you choose to use for secure comms). You should also be using a third-party OS/ROM that you can be pretty sure hasn't been backdoored by a local telco or government, or a device that you've managed to import from abroad that likely doesn't have local modifications. I would assume that most people do not do this, and yet somehow expect Signal to magically make the entire stack below it secure, which is a ridiculous expectation.
  - detaro 6y ago
    It shouldn't do their threat modeling, but it is being widely promoted as "secure" (with little to no further restrictions) by and to people without detailed tech knowledge and is in an excellent position to inform their "threat modeling". As a principle, "People should know better" somewhat works for experts tools, tools for non-experts should where possible let users know what they are not aware of. (What exactly that means and where the limits are is, as said, a non-trivial question)

A brief explanation of the threat model (i.e. what it aims to protect against and what it doesn't) would probably be more useful. "Do not trust people that tell you Signal is perfectly secure" is true but probably doesn't lead to the right user behavior. I'm not claiming communicating these things well is easy. (and obviously a bunch of the blame lies with people that do uncritically push Signal, if you are journalist not misleading your "sources" is important, but again they need to be educated too and it's not surprising that's not happening perfectly - efforts in that would also have been a reasonable response IMHO. And of course this is based on the assumption that the events have been presented somewhat accurately)

kelnos 6y ago
Why is it the responsibility of the Signal developers to do people's threat modeling for them? If your situation is that you need to communicate things that could get you killed or imprisoned, you should be using a burner phone that has pretty much nothing installed on it but Signal (or whatever app you choose to use for secure comms). You should also be using a third-party OS/ROM that you can be pretty sure hasn't been backdoored by a local telco or government, or a device that you've managed to import from abroad that likely doesn't have local modifications. I would assume that most people do not do this, and yet somehow expect Signal to magically make the entire stack below it secure, which is a ridiculous expectation.
- detaro 6y ago
  It shouldn't do their threat modeling, but it is being widely promoted as "secure" (with little to no further restrictions) by and to people without detailed tech knowledge and is in an excellent position to inform their "threat modeling". As a principle, "People should know better" somewhat works for experts tools, tools for non-experts should where possible let users know what they are not aware of. (What exactly that means and where the limits are is, as said, a non-trivial question)