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OT and tinfoil hat on; there was a strange event last week with users of Signal on the Telia ISP.[1] For about 24 hours no messages could be sent, resulting in

OT and tinfoil hat on; there was a strange event last week with users of Signal on the Telia ISP.[1] For about 24 hours no messages could be sent, resulting in a 401 unauthorized error from the server side. Telia is the former state-owned Swedish ISP that is now only half state-owned I believe. They have a bad rep already for sending out extortion letters to torrent users and are almost assumed to be monitoring all user traffic for the police. No explanation of the event has been provided by anyone. Users have done some basic troubleshooting but couldn't really establish much. I personally would love to see what those 401 errors looked like on the Signal server side. What exactly were these clients sending that was unauthorized on the server side? I guess we'll never know, hopefully it wasn't even stored. 1. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/5202 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/5202

zibzab 6y ago
> They have a bad rep already for sending out extortion letters to torrent users That's almost never the ISPs doing, they are being strong armed by IP owners.
- exmadscientist 6y ago
  Sure, but some ISPs get strong-armed while others get... weak-armed. (And that's being generous to many of them.)
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    I completely understad why 9 ISPs out of 10 would choose to just do what's "least legally dangerous" rather than taking the Banhof route which is basically political posturing while taking a risk. Most of Telias customers and shareholders have no skin in that game, and would probably approve of the company taking the smallest amount of legal risk possible.
tialaramex 6y ago
As one of the replies in that thread you linked explains, this is TLS encrypted traffic, so Telia can't really do anything to influence what happens here. They don't get to see what the traffic means, and if they change any of it then the connection aborts, which doesn't result in a 401 error it just hangs up abruptly - that's how TLS is designed to work. It is entirely possible that somebody at Signal fat-fingered an IP address block, e.g. some kiddie is spewing 10Gb/s of traffic from 10.2/16 to Signal, but a Signal person blocks 10.20/16 [addresses example only] and only a week later when investigating "Why are we still eating 10Gb/s of spew?" do they realise they typo'd the number.
- upofadown 6y ago
  I could not find the reference to TLS in the replies. Generally Signal does not use TLS for their messaging system, it is instead something home brewed.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    So, what's happening here is that the Signal Desktop app wants a configuration, which it fetches from https://textsecure-service.whispersystems.org/v1/config https://textsecure-service.whispersystems.org/v1/config HTTPS is HTTP protocol spoken over a TLS encrypted channel. When these Telia users weren't able to use the Signal Desktop software, this fetch failed, with a 401 error which is the HTTP error code for Unauthorised.
- INTPenis 6y ago
  Yeah that makes a lot more sense, I was so wrapped up in tinfoil I didn't even think about the TLS. Thanks.

zibzab 6y ago

> They have a bad rep already for sending out extortion letters to torrent users That's almost never the ISPs doing, they are being strong armed by IP owners.

exmadscientist 6y ago
Sure, but some ISPs get strong-armed while others get... weak-armed. (And that's being generous to many of them.)
- alkonaut 6y ago
  I completely understad why 9 ISPs out of 10 would choose to just do what's "least legally dangerous" rather than taking the Banhof route which is basically political posturing while taking a risk. Most of Telias customers and shareholders have no skin in that game, and would probably approve of the company taking the smallest amount of legal risk possible.

tialaramex 6y ago

As one of the replies in that thread you linked explains, this is TLS encrypted traffic, so Telia can't really do anything to influence what happens here. They don't get to see what the traffic means, and if they change any of it then the connection aborts, which doesn't result in a 401 error it just hangs up abruptly - that's how TLS is designed to work. It is entirely possible that somebody at Signal fat-fingered an IP address block, e.g. some kiddie is spewing 10Gb/s of traffic from 10.2/16 to Signal, but a Signal person blocks 10.20/16 [addresses example only] and only a week later when investigating "Why are we still eating 10Gb/s of spew?" do they realise they typo'd the number.

upofadown 6y ago
I could not find the reference to TLS in the replies. Generally Signal does not use TLS for their messaging system, it is instead something home brewed.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  So, what's happening here is that the Signal Desktop app wants a configuration, which it fetches from https://textsecure-service.whispersystems.org/v1/config https://textsecure-service.whispersystems.org/v1/config HTTPS is HTTP protocol spoken over a TLS encrypted channel. When these Telia users weren't able to use the Signal Desktop software, this fetch failed, with a 401 error which is the HTTP error code for Unauthorised.
INTPenis 6y ago
Yeah that makes a lot more sense, I was so wrapped up in tinfoil I didn't even think about the TLS. Thanks.