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> It's also Signal without the security model. Wire maintains a serverside, plaintext directory of who's talking to who. It's part of the whole premise of Signa

> It's also Signal without the security model. Wire maintains a serverside, plaintext directory of who's talking to who. It's part of the whole premise of Signal not to do this. Signal also permanently keeps user's information in the cloud including a list of the people they talk to. It's not stored in plain text, but it's there. I don't find signal to be trustworthy at this point so for people looking for secure communication I recommend Jami, but it lacks polish.

tptacek 5y ago
You can just look at how Signal has responded to court orders for information, and the FBI's documentation for what it can obtain from different providers. Through legal process (or, because Wire is hosted overseas, without it, using CNE), the FBI can obtain the entire Wire social graph.
- autoexec 5y ago
  > You can just look at how Signal has responded to court orders for information, Signal is very proud that once a long time ago the state came to them asking for user data and signal could only tell them they had no data to provide. That has changed. Signal now collects and stores exactly the data they were being asked to hand over. It's not clear at all that your data with signal is protected. Security concerns were brought up repeatedly and were ignored (see for example https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-security-pins-are-too-easy-to-brute-force-sgx-is-not-reliable-enough/15096 https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...) Signal still brags about "that one time we had nothing to hand over" though. They still have a page on their website talking about it. They've never updated their privacy policy to reflect that are collecting and storing sensitive user data either. Not a good look for a company you're supposed to trust with secure communications.
  - MajesticHobo2 5y ago
    > Signal is very proud that once a long time ago the state came to them asking for user data and signal could only tell them they had no data to provide. Have you looked at https://signal.org/bigbrother/ https://signal.org/bigbrother/ recently? There are five instances of this, one as recent as November 2021.
    - autoexec 5y ago
      Signal has the data being requested but they'd have to brute force a user's pin or use an exploit to get to it. Routine requests aren't going to compel them to take those actions and national security letters aren't going to be published on their website.
  - lucgommans 5y ago
    Your comments sound pretty damning and got me curious if there was some conspiracy I didn't yet know about, but then I click to the source and it turns out that this is not a silent change to upload more data without users knowing anything, it's an announced feature to (afaik optionally) backup this data to Signal's servers, protected with a PIN. It may not be obvious to my mother, sure, but it's also not exactly rocket science that 4 digits will not be secure under any offline-attackable circumstances. (For that they add SGX which seems broken so that is moot.) On the other hand, it's not exactly hard to find out who's talking to whom if the server owners want to (or are forced to). Traffic analysis without onion routing is trivial at least in theory, so tptacek isn't quite correct either that Signal does not allow any sort of social graph obtaining. Sealed sender helps a little, but is not a solid thing to rely on if you're the kind of target for whom they would even bother submitting a subpoena. Wire also doesn't keep a list of who's in a group with whom (your client handles that) so there, too, you have to do traffic analysis to find these relations -- just an easier form than you would have to do if Wire would have had sealed sender. Hence I consider it all about equal, with a small asterisk for Signal that they try really hard to make it as good as possible (compared to Wire doing just the now-regular end-to-end encryption).
    - autoexec 5y ago
      It was an "announced" change but in a very confusing manner that caused a lot of problems and misunderstandings. My view on this failure in clear communication is summed up well by this guy (the entire post/comment section is worth a look though, it illustrates the confusion very well): https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disabling_pins_will_now_upload_nothing_to_the/fyjy7a5/ https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disablin... The folks at community.signalusers.org caught on before it was even implemented, but most people had no idea why signal was suddenly asking them for a pin and no idea what data was being collected when they gave it one, and no idea the data collection would still happen if they opted out. Just look at this recent thread and how very very wrong so many people still are (confidently even): https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/q5tlg1/what_info_does_signal_store_about_its_user/ https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/q5tlg1/what_info_do... The terrible communication, followed by the fact that their privacy policy was never updated (The very first sentence of which is an outright lie) are huge red flags. The nature of Signal makes it a valuable target. While I can't rule out simple incompetence, if signal has been handed a national security letter with a gag order and the state is on site collecting user's data Room 641A style, this kind of behavior could be explained as them telling their users not to trust them as loudly as they could. Wire would seem more trustworthy in that sense. Ultimately though, the fact remains that the best way to keep your user's data safe is to never collect it in the first place. Signal could have given people an option to opt out of the data collection like many in the community had been asking them to and none of this would have been an issue. Since there are other apps that don't collect and store your name, photo, and lists of everyone you've been talking to I'd rather just stick to recommending those. I'll admit to still feeling a bit bitter about Signal though because I was a fan and the alternatives I've found aren't nearly as nice to use.
- lucgommans 5y ago
  "CNE" is a fancy word for "exploits" that I had to look up, for anyone else not in the know of this specific terminology... And yeah this is a blanket statement you can use for any application: nation states can get at your data using "CNE" regardless of what app you're talking about, presuming there always exists an "E" for your client (which is indeed a fairly safe assumption with these featureful OSes and apps). Not sure why you're applying this argument to Wire but not Signal.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    Because Signal's design doesn't ask you to trust the server the way Wire's does, of course.
    - lucgommans 5y ago
      "of course" thank you, yes this is really very obvious. As if Signal can't see whom I'm talking to if they wanted to. Yes, their marketing material says as much (and they genuinely try to make it hard for themselves), but you're not the kind of person who swallows those blog posts without thinking of the ways you would attack it. In both cases we trust the server not to snoop on our metadata.
      - tptacek 5y ago
        No, we do not trust Wire to do that, and your evidence for that is that the service not only uses but requires a serverside SQL database of this information in order to function. I'm being terse because I'm not super interested in relitigating this on this thread. Signal and Wire have different use cases. Wire isn't evil, it's just not the same product Signal is. There are people closer to Signal's engineering who can pick up the particulars if they think it's important to shoot down anything anybody else said here.

tptacek 5y ago

You can just look at how Signal has responded to court orders for information, and the FBI's documentation for what it can obtain from different providers. Through legal process (or, because Wire is hosted overseas, without it, using CNE), the FBI can obtain the entire Wire social graph.

autoexec 5y ago
> You can just look at how Signal has responded to court orders for information, Signal is very proud that once a long time ago the state came to them asking for user data and signal could only tell them they had no data to provide. That has changed. Signal now collects and stores exactly the data they were being asked to hand over. It's not clear at all that your data with signal is protected. Security concerns were brought up repeatedly and were ignored (see for example https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-security-pins-are-too-easy-to-brute-force-sgx-is-not-reliable-enough/15096 https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...) Signal still brags about "that one time we had nothing to hand over" though. They still have a page on their website talking about it. They've never updated their privacy policy to reflect that are collecting and storing sensitive user data either. Not a good look for a company you're supposed to trust with secure communications.
- MajesticHobo2 5y ago
  > Signal is very proud that once a long time ago the state came to them asking for user data and signal could only tell them they had no data to provide. Have you looked at https://signal.org/bigbrother/ https://signal.org/bigbrother/ recently? There are five instances of this, one as recent as November 2021.
  - autoexec 5y ago
    Signal has the data being requested but they'd have to brute force a user's pin or use an exploit to get to it. Routine requests aren't going to compel them to take those actions and national security letters aren't going to be published on their website.
- lucgommans 5y ago
  Your comments sound pretty damning and got me curious if there was some conspiracy I didn't yet know about, but then I click to the source and it turns out that this is not a silent change to upload more data without users knowing anything, it's an announced feature to (afaik optionally) backup this data to Signal's servers, protected with a PIN. It may not be obvious to my mother, sure, but it's also not exactly rocket science that 4 digits will not be secure under any offline-attackable circumstances. (For that they add SGX which seems broken so that is moot.) On the other hand, it's not exactly hard to find out who's talking to whom if the server owners want to (or are forced to). Traffic analysis without onion routing is trivial at least in theory, so tptacek isn't quite correct either that Signal does not allow any sort of social graph obtaining. Sealed sender helps a little, but is not a solid thing to rely on if you're the kind of target for whom they would even bother submitting a subpoena. Wire also doesn't keep a list of who's in a group with whom (your client handles that) so there, too, you have to do traffic analysis to find these relations -- just an easier form than you would have to do if Wire would have had sealed sender. Hence I consider it all about equal, with a small asterisk for Signal that they try really hard to make it as good as possible (compared to Wire doing just the now-regular end-to-end encryption).
  - autoexec 5y ago
    It was an "announced" change but in a very confusing manner that caused a lot of problems and misunderstandings. My view on this failure in clear communication is summed up well by this guy (the entire post/comment section is worth a look though, it illustrates the confusion very well): https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disabling_pins_will_now_upload_nothing_to_the/fyjy7a5/ https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disablin... The folks at community.signalusers.org caught on before it was even implemented, but most people had no idea why signal was suddenly asking them for a pin and no idea what data was being collected when they gave it one, and no idea the data collection would still happen if they opted out. Just look at this recent thread and how very very wrong so many people still are (confidently even): https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/q5tlg1/what_info_does_signal_store_about_its_user/ https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/q5tlg1/what_info_do... The terrible communication, followed by the fact that their privacy policy was never updated (The very first sentence of which is an outright lie) are huge red flags. The nature of Signal makes it a valuable target. While I can't rule out simple incompetence, if signal has been handed a national security letter with a gag order and the state is on site collecting user's data Room 641A style, this kind of behavior could be explained as them telling their users not to trust them as loudly as they could. Wire would seem more trustworthy in that sense. Ultimately though, the fact remains that the best way to keep your user's data safe is to never collect it in the first place. Signal could have given people an option to opt out of the data collection like many in the community had been asking them to and none of this would have been an issue. Since there are other apps that don't collect and store your name, photo, and lists of everyone you've been talking to I'd rather just stick to recommending those. I'll admit to still feeling a bit bitter about Signal though because I was a fan and the alternatives I've found aren't nearly as nice to use.
lucgommans 5y ago
"CNE" is a fancy word for "exploits" that I had to look up, for anyone else not in the know of this specific terminology... And yeah this is a blanket statement you can use for any application: nation states can get at your data using "CNE" regardless of what app you're talking about, presuming there always exists an "E" for your client (which is indeed a fairly safe assumption with these featureful OSes and apps). Not sure why you're applying this argument to Wire but not Signal.
- tptacek 5y ago
  Because Signal's design doesn't ask you to trust the server the way Wire's does, of course.
  - lucgommans 5y ago
    "of course" thank you, yes this is really very obvious. As if Signal can't see whom I'm talking to if they wanted to. Yes, their marketing material says as much (and they genuinely try to make it hard for themselves), but you're not the kind of person who swallows those blog posts without thinking of the ways you would attack it. In both cases we trust the server not to snoop on our metadata.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      No, we do not trust Wire to do that, and your evidence for that is that the service not only uses but requires a serverside SQL database of this information in order to function. I'm being terse because I'm not super interested in relitigating this on this thread. Signal and Wire have different use cases. Wire isn't evil, it's just not the same product Signal is. There are people closer to Signal's engineering who can pick up the particulars if they think it's important to shoot down anything anybody else said here.