3 ms·

Signal messages are effectively signed as part of the protocol. Signal releases data to allow your correspondent to forge that signature after they have receive

• tialaramex 5y ago
  > Signal messages are effectively signed as part of the protocol What is the word "effectively" doing in your sentence? I suggest that the word you needed is in fact just not. The messages can be authenticated but they are not signed. > Signal releases data to allow your correspondent to forge that signature after they have received your message. Nope. Bob always has the ability to produce forged messages apparently from Alice (or Charlie) to Bob. What may have confused you is that Signal can eventually send Bob's expired authentication keys in cleartext. At this point any eavesdropper could make forged messages from somebody to Bob, that seem authentic to anybody except Bob (and presumably whoever didn't actually send them) but are rather old news. > PGP does the identity verification out of band. So you can simply not sign your message and completely eliminate the problem in the first place. In this case your message can't be authenticated, a very different scenario. Now Bob can't tell if this PGP email is really even from Alice because it lacks a signature. Perhaps useful for an anonymous tips line or something, but rarely what we want for messaging. > PGP prevents access to signature information with the encryption. So you would need access to the private key of the person I sent the message to before you can verify my signature. Nope. Just need the signed message. If the message was also encrypted then its recipient can decrypt it and show the decrypted but still signed message to other people as proof of what was sent, without revealing their private key. This is very often undesirable, and yet it's the only option provided in PGP.
  • upofadown 5y ago
    Signal uses a form of Diffie-Hellman to generate a common key. That exchange has to be signed. So you know that your key is common with your correspondent. Without this signature you would have no way to know where a message came from, just like in the unsigned PGP case. Without this signature you would also be subject to MITM attacks (unlike the PGP case). >What may have confused you is that Signal can eventually send Bob's expired authentication keys in cleartext. Is this a new feature? Originally the decision was made to only allow correspondents to forge messages, not everyone as in the case of Off The Record. If you signed a PGP message and did not encrypt it then you specifically wanted it to be possible for everyone to verify the signature. A trusted correspondent would not decrypt and release your signed message so the only time that would happen would be if your correspondent was compromised. In the Signal case you would have to claim that your trusted correspondent forged a message from you. That wouldn't really work. In the case of an untrusted correspondent you would not want to sign your message at all or would sign it with a non-public identity. PGP allows you do do either.
    • tialaramex 5y ago
      > Signal uses a form of Diffie-Hellman to generate a common key. That exchange has to be signed. Without this signature you would have no way to know where a message came from, just like in the unsigned PGP case. Without this signature you would also be subject to MITM attacks (unlike the PGP case). In what sense do you believe X3DH is "signed" ? Is this going to be more handwaving where you treat authenticated as "signed" just because that's how you'd do it in PGP ? The recipient of a first X3DH message does know for sure it is from the sender, because they're the only one that could have performed the steps needed without the recipient's private keys. But if (like the recipient) you know their private keys, you can just forge messages that are entirely plausible. Consider an initial message purportedly from Alice to Bob but let's suppose we're Bob and we're forging it. How do we go about this? We need to do three DH calculations. First one, is Alice's long term Identity crossed with Bob's prekey. Alice would do this by knowing her Identity private key, but we know Bob's private prekey, so we use that with Alice's public long term Identity. Second one, Alice's ephemeral crossed with Bob's long term Identity. Alice would do that using her ephemeral private key, but we know Bob's private Identity key, so we use that with any key X. Third one, Alice's ephemeral crossed with Bob's prekey. Alice would use her ephemeral private key again, but we know Bob's private prekey, so we use that with key X again. We now have a secret key we can use to encrypt our forged message "from Alice" and we write key X into the headers where Alice would have written her public ephemeral. Our message is indistinguishable from genuine. Only Bob (who forged it) and Alice (who knows she didn't send it) know this is a forgery and neither of them can prove it. > In the Signal case you would have to claim that your trusted correspondent forged a message from you. That wouldn't really work. If the Secret Police are content that you are a Blasphemer or you plotted against the Emperor or whatever without proof, nothing would "really work", regardless of the technology used or not used. That's not interesting here because we can't do anything about it. If the Star Chamber will have you executed based on hearsay, that's just as true for literal whispers as for a Signal message. In contrast PGP provides them with unshakeable proof even though it didn't need to.