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As someone who has often defended Telegram I am somewhat puzzled by this one. While the legal aspects of this might have to be decided by someone more skilled

As someone who has often defended Telegram I am somewhat puzzled by this one. While the legal aspects of this might have to be decided by someone more skilled than me I feel they are morally on the same ground as early Google and if Google makes a big case of it it might backfire spectacularly. More interesting is it that Telegram sends user texts directly to Google without any proxying (did I get that right and has the author studied it carefully enough?). This might (again, if this blog post is correct and I read kt correctly) be an actual dangerous move from Telegram. Unlike the problems that many here worry about regarding E2E-encryption, this can potentially drag Telegram down to WhatsApp levels, sending huge amounts of user data straight into Google. Then of course, we'll need to see. Very much of what Telegram has done security wise is very well thought out and has improved over time. Recently for example when I started my backup of one of the groups I participate in I had to confirm from a mobile client or wait 24 hours to start backup. Account recovery is almost automagically simple but has some nifty touches to prevent account hijacking. Settings to delete the account if I fail to log in has existed for years, I wonder if they even did this before Google launched it. So now I am anxious to know if Telegram has done something brilliant again or if this is a turning point.

judge2020 5y ago
> without any proxying (did I get that right and has the author studied it carefully enough?). Most likely, since the user-agent rotation code is in the app itself. If it were a Telegram proxy, the proxy would do its own UA and IP hopping and the clients would use their default UAs. At a certain point, I wonder why Google's abuse team don't simply look for 3+ occurrences of User Agent strings because UA rotation is rarely used for legitimate purposes.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  These days Google isn't up to much on a technical level ;-) They cannot even fix the old verbatim feature that they broke a few years ago, so how should should they be able to stop this without breaking something else? Yep, this is somewhat hyperbolic but I'll write it anyway. I want my old Google back.
  - ehPReth 5y ago
    Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim is confirmed broken? I thought something was fishy...
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      Hasn't worked consistently for me for years. To be precise: I think it work sometimes, but I know it doesn't work most of the time unless verbatim means something completely different from what I think ;-) You can verify this quickly by searching for something slight unusual or very specific, apply verbatim and verify that most of the results still doesn't contain your words.
- Const-me 5y ago
  > UA rotation is rarely used for legitimate purposes It’s not uncommon for hundreds of users to share a single public IPv4 IP address through an ISP-provided NAT. The same applies to corporate LANs with a single uplink channel. These users gonna have random UA corresponding to market share of web browsers and operating systems, all coming to the same web server from a single IP address.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    I mean on the play store side, where they scan app submissions for TOS violations before they even hit the store. UA rotation on the client side is rarely used for good.
    - fao_ 5y ago
      HTML requests are just text, how would you even go about scanning for that?
      - judge2020 5y ago
        As from the blog post, the source is public[0] and the Android review process is almost entirely automated static/dynamic analysis of apps submitted, so it wouldn't be super hard to find UA-like strings and have some elevated manual review if there are a lot of them (if they decided to implement this sort of abuse policy). 0: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/c1c2ebaf4690fd91c116d80db653289c9447ef7a/TMessagesProj/src/main/java/org/telegram/ui/Components/TranslateAlert.java#L1066 https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/c1c2ebaf4690fd91c116d...
        fao_ 5y ago
        Google very likely only scans the input application, I'm not sure why you would bother with an automated system to detect a code repo for it when the majority of applications on the Play Store are closed-source and there's a low confidence if the builds are not repeatable. Anyway, regardless of that it sounds like it would be easily defeated with the following C format string: "%s-%s: %s/%s (%s) %s/%s %s/%s" with argument list: "User", "Agent", "Mozilla", "5.0", "X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64", "Gecko", "2010000", "Firefox", "90.0" For bonus points you can make those floating points, too, and split it up a bit further. Now nobody can scan for this without a lot of false positives (The strings are going to display in anything that embeds a web browser or references it, lol) and you get ultimate flexibility.
danpetrov 5y ago
Telegram is great if you like shiny native features like stickers and having lightweight native clients, but at everything else Telegram is at risk of losing in the long-term. The big reason for this is that Telegram decided to roll everything mostly on their own (including e.g. MTProto), Telegram is not compatible with Matrix unless you use a bridge, it is not e2e encrypted (unless you use mobile 1-to-1 secret chats. The server side code is proprietary, and the builds of the clients that are published to the app stores could be anything. While I love using Telegram right now for talking to some groups of friends, I would look at supporting https://matrix.org https://matrix.org , since it will likely become the de-facto standard of building messaging platforms.
- behnamoh 5y ago
  Telegram the app, is the best among all messenger apps. Telegram the company, maybe not.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    It is best because they don't bother encrypting user data, loading it directly from its own servers.
    - behnamoh 5y ago
      I meant feature-wise, the app is spectacular, but security-wise, it's not that trustworthy.
      - pkulak 5y ago
        Exactly. Features are way easier with everything plain text.
- RF_Savage 5y ago
  Matrix still has ways to go but Elemental is now actually usable. On the Telegram security side of things my group of friends uses it as a more modern IRC. So no NSA proof security is truly even expected. We even bridge some IRC channels to Telegram with bots.
chrisfosterelli 5y ago
> Very much of what Telegram has done security wise is very well thought out and has improved over time This is not my understanding of the situation at all. There's no end-to-end encryption by default [0], and the end-to-end encryption they do have received significant controversy at launch [1] for being essentially a "roll your own" crypto solution which indeed ended up being found to have some issues [2]. They disable the OS backup and instead they effectively store all their user's contacts, messages, media, etc. directly on their servers except for the conversations that the users directly opt out of by turning on e2e. They've promised since 2014 to open source everything but the backend, which stores all this data, is still closed source. For small group or individual messaging, whatsapp, signal, or matrix are far better choices. I think it's worth acknowledging that telegram has a much bigger focus on large groups and therefore has to make different security tradeoffs, so I think if we consider telegram a social media service it's pretty good -- but is not the best messenger. [0]: https://www.howtogeek.com/710344/psa-telegram-chats-arent-end-to-end-encrypted-by-default/ https://www.howtogeek.com/710344/psa-telegram-chats-arent-en... [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wnx8nq/why-you-dont-roll-your-own-crypto https://www.vice.com/en/article/wnx8nq/why-you-dont-roll-you... [2]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf
- upofadown 5y ago
  Last I heard there is nothing wrong with the E2EE in Telegram at this point in time. OTTOMH, the stuff that people were complaining about wasn't anything that anyone would realistically care about, particularly for something not really that secureable like instant messaging on a smartphone.
  - chrisfosterelli 5y ago
    The current version has no publicly known issues, but suspicion is the only valid response when an entity rolls their own cryptography for production when such well-studied and secure options already exist.
    - diebeforei485 5y ago
patcon 5y ago
> Very much of what Telegram has done security wise is very well thought out and has improved over time Though I'm certainly not a cryptography expert, I used to work on Tails OS and some Tor-related projects, and I feel I know where/how to listen to the experts. Having said that, I am a hard disagree on the quoted statement. My understanding is that there has been very few improvements that they weren't dragged into. imho telegram is a reckless tool from a cryptographic point of view, and still highly suspect
- skinkestek 5y ago
  > My understanding is that there has been very few improvements that they weren't dragged into. imho telegram is a reckless tool from a cryptographic point of view, and still highly suspect Again, I cannot speak about the crypto but I can speak about - bugs: last time Telegram had a know bug where data could realistically leak except inside Telegrams infrastructure (which of course is a big deal) was around the time it launched as far as I know. Looking at Signal (which I recommend for anything super secret) they've had a couple of really nasty bugs in the much shorter life time: RCE in desktop client and spuriously sending images to persons except the intended recipient is just two. - things they haven't been dragged into: anti-hijacking, deletion on account inactivity, working backup, not syncing secret chats between clients and more.
gcr 5y ago
it's my understanding that Telegram won't automatically translate messages unless the user chooses to click the translate button, and the option to enable the translate button does disclose that translated message content is sent to google.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

judge2020 5y ago

> without any proxying (did I get that right and has the author studied it carefully enough?). Most likely, since the user-agent rotation code is in the app itself. If it were a Telegram proxy, the proxy would do its own UA and IP hopping and the clients would use their default UAs. At a certain point, I wonder why Google's abuse team don't simply look for 3+ occurrences of User Agent strings because UA rotation is rarely used for legitimate purposes.

skinkestek 5y ago
These days Google isn't up to much on a technical level ;-) They cannot even fix the old verbatim feature that they broke a few years ago, so how should should they be able to stop this without breaking something else? Yep, this is somewhat hyperbolic but I'll write it anyway. I want my old Google back.
- ehPReth 5y ago
  Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim is confirmed broken? I thought something was fishy...
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Hasn't worked consistently for me for years. To be precise: I think it work sometimes, but I know it doesn't work most of the time unless verbatim means something completely different from what I think ;-) You can verify this quickly by searching for something slight unusual or very specific, apply verbatim and verify that most of the results still doesn't contain your words.
Const-me 5y ago
> UA rotation is rarely used for legitimate purposes It’s not uncommon for hundreds of users to share a single public IPv4 IP address through an ISP-provided NAT. The same applies to corporate LANs with a single uplink channel. These users gonna have random UA corresponding to market share of web browsers and operating systems, all coming to the same web server from a single IP address.
- judge2020 5y ago
  I mean on the play store side, where they scan app submissions for TOS violations before they even hit the store. UA rotation on the client side is rarely used for good.
  - fao_ 5y ago
    HTML requests are just text, how would you even go about scanning for that?
    - judge2020 5y ago
      As from the blog post, the source is public[0] and the Android review process is almost entirely automated static/dynamic analysis of apps submitted, so it wouldn't be super hard to find UA-like strings and have some elevated manual review if there are a lot of them (if they decided to implement this sort of abuse policy). 0: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/c1c2ebaf4690fd91c116d80db653289c9447ef7a/TMessagesProj/src/main/java/org/telegram/ui/Components/TranslateAlert.java#L1066 https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/c1c2ebaf4690fd91c116d...
      - fao_ 5y ago
        Google very likely only scans the input application, I'm not sure why you would bother with an automated system to detect a code repo for it when the majority of applications on the Play Store are closed-source and there's a low confidence if the builds are not repeatable. Anyway, regardless of that it sounds like it would be easily defeated with the following C format string: "%s-%s: %s/%s (%s) %s/%s %s/%s" with argument list: "User", "Agent", "Mozilla", "5.0", "X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64", "Gecko", "2010000", "Firefox", "90.0" For bonus points you can make those floating points, too, and split it up a bit further. Now nobody can scan for this without a lot of false positives (The strings are going to display in anything that embeds a web browser or references it, lol) and you get ultimate flexibility.

danpetrov 5y ago

Telegram is great if you like shiny native features like stickers and having lightweight native clients, but at everything else Telegram is at risk of losing in the long-term. The big reason for this is that Telegram decided to roll everything mostly on their own (including e.g. MTProto), Telegram is not compatible with Matrix unless you use a bridge, it is not e2e encrypted (unless you use mobile 1-to-1 secret chats. The server side code is proprietary, and the builds of the clients that are published to the app stores could be anything. While I love using Telegram right now for talking to some groups of friends, I would look at supporting https://matrix.org https://matrix.org , since it will likely become the de-facto standard of building messaging platforms.

behnamoh 5y ago
Telegram the app, is the best among all messenger apps. Telegram the company, maybe not.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  It is best because they don't bother encrypting user data, loading it directly from its own servers.
  - behnamoh 5y ago
    I meant feature-wise, the app is spectacular, but security-wise, it's not that trustworthy.
    - pkulak 5y ago
      Exactly. Features are way easier with everything plain text.
RF_Savage 5y ago
Matrix still has ways to go but Elemental is now actually usable. On the Telegram security side of things my group of friends uses it as a more modern IRC. So no NSA proof security is truly even expected. We even bridge some IRC channels to Telegram with bots.

chrisfosterelli 5y ago

> Very much of what Telegram has done security wise is very well thought out and has improved over time This is not my understanding of the situation at all. There's no end-to-end encryption by default [0], and the end-to-end encryption they do have received significant controversy at launch [1] for being essentially a "roll your own" crypto solution which indeed ended up being found to have some issues [2]. They disable the OS backup and instead they effectively store all their user's contacts, messages, media, etc. directly on their servers except for the conversations that the users directly opt out of by turning on e2e. They've promised since 2014 to open source everything but the backend, which stores all this data, is still closed source. For small group or individual messaging, whatsapp, signal, or matrix are far better choices. I think it's worth acknowledging that telegram has a much bigger focus on large groups and therefore has to make different security tradeoffs, so I think if we consider telegram a social media service it's pretty good -- but is not the best messenger. [0]: https://www.howtogeek.com/710344/psa-telegram-chats-arent-end-to-end-encrypted-by-default/ https://www.howtogeek.com/710344/psa-telegram-chats-arent-en... [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wnx8nq/why-you-dont-roll-your-own-crypto https://www.vice.com/en/article/wnx8nq/why-you-dont-roll-you... [2]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf

upofadown 5y ago
Last I heard there is nothing wrong with the E2EE in Telegram at this point in time. OTTOMH, the stuff that people were complaining about wasn't anything that anyone would realistically care about, particularly for something not really that secureable like instant messaging on a smartphone.
- chrisfosterelli 5y ago
  The current version has no publicly known issues, but suspicion is the only valid response when an entity rolls their own cryptography for production when such well-studied and secure options already exist.
  - diebeforei485 5y ago

patcon 5y ago

> Very much of what Telegram has done security wise is very well thought out and has improved over time Though I'm certainly not a cryptography expert, I used to work on Tails OS and some Tor-related projects, and I feel I know where/how to listen to the experts. Having said that, I am a hard disagree on the quoted statement. My understanding is that there has been very few improvements that they weren't dragged into. imho telegram is a reckless tool from a cryptographic point of view, and still highly suspect

skinkestek 5y ago
> My understanding is that there has been very few improvements that they weren't dragged into. imho telegram is a reckless tool from a cryptographic point of view, and still highly suspect Again, I cannot speak about the crypto but I can speak about - bugs: last time Telegram had a know bug where data could realistically leak except inside Telegrams infrastructure (which of course is a big deal) was around the time it launched as far as I know. Looking at Signal (which I recommend for anything super secret) they've had a couple of really nasty bugs in the much shorter life time: RCE in desktop client and spuriously sending images to persons except the intended recipient is just two. - things they haven't been dragged into: anti-hijacking, deletion on account inactivity, working backup, not syncing secret chats between clients and more.

gcr 5y ago

it's my understanding that Telegram won't automatically translate messages unless the user chooses to click the translate button, and the option to enable the translate button does disclose that translated message content is sent to google.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]