8 ms·

What happens if Twitter gets encrypted DMs?

Vladimof 4y ago
Here is the direct URL: https://getsession.org/blog/twitter-encrypted-dms https://getsession.org/blog/twitter-encrypted-dms
- DerekBickerton 4y ago
  Oops. If I could delete it I would, but HN won't let me.
DerekBickerton 4y ago
@dang can you amend the URL to: https://getsession.org/blog/twitter-encrypted-dms https://getsession.org/blog/twitter-encrypted-dms
- dang 4y ago
  Yes, done. Our software changed it because https://getsession.org/blog https://getsession.org/blog was listed as the canonical URL.
kevingadd 4y ago
It feels like the mentions of Signal and its protocol in this blog post overlook the reality that you can't really do true secure encrypted Twitter DMs, at best you could do a loose approximation of it that may not provide much security value in exchange for the inconvenience. Why? A significant % of Twitter usage is through the website (either twitter.com or tweetdeck), which means the decryption would all have to happen in javascript in an effectively untrusted context - it doesn't even have the moderate protections offered by a chrome app/extension, and there's no clean way to securely store encryption keys for a webpage (afaik) without the aid of something like a Yubikey or Windows Hello. Secure cryptography in the browser is still (generally speaking) adjacent to a joke, and the idea of doing it in Twitter.com - a very complex website with a huge attack surface that gets loaded into iframes/popups and targeted by various extensions - is probably exciting to people looking for easy ways to claim Twitter's bug bounties. There are lots of other factors that will make this difficult but as long as the core of your product is a webpage with a history of severe quality issues you're basically using encryption for branding, you're not going to protect messages from anyone except perhaps disgruntled customer service staff. That's ignoring the UX issues as well - when Line rolled out E2E encryption for messaging, they had to coax every user into enabling encryption and authenticating all of their devices to have access to their personal keys, so you had a patchwork of encrypted and non-encrypted conversations. And now if I lose my primary device (the keyholder) there's a convoluted process to attach new encryption keys to my account and the only way to recover my DM history is from a backup. Am I supposed to believe they'll convince every Twitter user to jump through all the hoops to enable e2e encryption for DMs and manage encryption keys securely? Absolutely not. They'll have to do a ton of work to provide a comfortable user experience, at which point it'll be trivial for an attacker to get their hands on the encryption keys if they already had access to DM content.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  Besides, what exactly would E2E protect from? Your Twitter DMs (assuming you already use HTTPS to access Twitter) only travel through one party: Twitter itself. So basically E2E would be to protect your message contents from Twitter itself? First, they already have all the metadata they could potentially want, the message contents itself is virtually nothing. I'm quite sure they're even logging keystrokes in their website for autocomplete/analytics/advertisement/whatever purposes. Second, they control the entire platform, including the code you would be running to encrypt/decrypt the messages! What would prevent Twitter from sending a specific party a special version of their JS that sends an obfuscated unencrypted copy of your messages to the mothership? All this conversation is just security theater..
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    > What would prevent Twitter from sending a specific party a special version of their JS that sends an obfuscated unencrypted copy of your messages to the mothership? I'm glad you asked. This is exactly the same problem that WhatsApp have been trying to solve for their web app, and they came up a browser extension called meta-code-verify[0] which checks the hash of the code received against an external append-only log. The extension only supports the WhatsApp site so far, but should be flexible enough to support others that opt into it. Of course ideally this approach would become popular enough that the technology would be integrated into the browser itself, so that users wouldn't need to install the extension at all. I also hope that ProtonMail push for this too, since they are subject to the same threat model and care about open source security. [0] https://github.com/facebookincubator/meta-code-verify https://github.com/facebookincubator/meta-code-verify
    - kevingadd 4y ago
      There's also a HTML mechanism that lets you put expected hashes in for script resources etc and the browser is supposed to reject them, but of course because this isn't code signing, all the attacker needs to do is compromise the HTML and put in their own sabotaged hashes. Sigh...
vmception 4y ago
I got added to some twitter DM groups recently where people talk about fast moving trends. what a shitty interface. can't @ mention people in the group without it trying to search all of twitter, you don't know their usernames because its different from their profile names, and the @ mention search doesn't even try to link them. can't quote reply or link to a prior message. Encryption is the least of the things, all that means is that two of my devices probably won't see the same conversations.
- holmesworcester 4y ago
  WhatsApp, Signal, and Element all handle multiple devices fairly well. Twitter should be able to solve that too.
  - eptcyka 4y ago
    Signal doesn't handle mutliple devices nearly well enough.
    - eins1234 4y ago
      Yeah, I had to do a double take when I saw Signal included in that sentence. I value privacy & security personally, and want Signal to succeed, but any compromise to UX in the name of privacy & security is going to make it impossible for Signal to compete as a mainstream messaging platform where network effects are paramount.
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      Signal doesn't handle multiple devices at all...if those devices are phone-sized.
      - holmesworcester 4y ago
        True, but if you're just using phone and desktop, Signal works well. My point here isn't that Signal is perfect, just that the implementations by Signal and others shows that support for e2ee DMs on multiple devices is solvable. Teams can decide what their users need and how much flexibility is worth supporting. A public company of Twitter's size is clearly capable of solving this for some broad set of use cases.
aspenmayer 4y ago
I think it’s worth trying, even if it’s hard to implement. If Signal and WhatsApp can do it, Twitter can too.
- amelius 4y ago
  But it looks like EU is about to force platforms to open up their protocols to each other: https://www.pocket-lint.com/apps/news/apple/160548-eu-s-digital-market-act-to-force-apple-and-google-to-open-up-their-platforms https://www.pocket-lint.com/apps/news/apple/160548-eu-s-digi... > (...) chat apps, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and iMessage, will have to be interoperable with each other and competitors.
  - kitkat_new 4y ago
    what's the problem?
unstatusthequo 4y ago
If they do, you’ll see government requests for backdoors into them, and maybe Musk fights, maybe he doesn’t. But given that all cellular providers, Meta, Apple, and Google are all playing nice with law enforcement on wiretaps, I see no reason that Twitter would be any different, ultimately. The only safe encryption is one you control, and is not centralized to some giant corp.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Yeah, I really don't get point. If you want to have secure encrypted communication channel don't rely on any platform. Do it yourself with some standard tool or protocol. And then use third channel to verify the material.
  - amelius 4y ago
    Good luck convincing the people you want to communicate with to follow your scheme.
- luis8 4y ago
  What about opensourcing the app and compiling it yourself?
flancian 4y ago
I try to move all Twitter conversations to Matrix, IMHO it's good enough, federated and supports E2EE encryption already. Not all people are ready to make the jump but an increasing ratio seems interested. Also it's a bridge/bot friendly platform and Maubot is great. https://anagora.org/matrix https://anagora.org/matrix https://anagora.org/maubot https://anagora.org/maubot
- lawl 4y ago
  > IMHO it's good enough Im a huge fan of matrix and use it daily. Just to make that clear upfront. If you read HN you should use it. I don't think it's ready for non-technical people. The federation part still causes issues. Occassionally messages get stuck etc. I would not feel comfortable telling my mom to download element to text me.
  - geranim0 4y ago
    FWIW my I made my grandma download element to text me and she's using it without problem
    - CJefferson 4y ago
      I can believe that, my problems have always arisen when people want to transfer to another device, or access from two devices at the same time. I know such things are possible (it works for me) but many people get themselves in a horrible mess.
      - GekkePrutser 4y ago
        Using it from 12 devices now. But yes the client validation and key exchange is something non technical users don't grok :( Even though they've clearly spent a lot of time making it as easy as possible.
  - raybb 4y ago
    For someone who is technical but not interested in self hosting so you still recommend it? Do you recommend starting with trying to get bridges setup or what's the best first step?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
brian-armstrong 4y ago
When the party storing the DM controls key storage/exchange, does this matter? If you can't verify the other party's keys are in use, and ensure no other keys are being silently added, this type of encryption is just checking a box.
- kodah 4y ago
  There's implementations where it would work, be effective, or be both. It all depends on what the key material is protected with at that point. If it's something provided client side and is transmitted securely, and used blindly, then it would work. Anything short of that would probably trigger my curiosity. Edit: This kind of statement also needs to b prepended with who you're trying to protect yourself from, because that entirely changes the game. Edit: There's also key exchange (and derivation) that could happen and impact the effectiveness of this process.
  - brian-armstrong 4y ago
    If the client is entirely in the browser, it doesn't particularly matter if they give you some keys to scan. You don't know what it's actually doing, or how the keys are generated.
    - kingcharles 4y ago
      It would need to encrypt the messages in the browser before they are sent, for a start.
- ajconway 4y ago
  Almost every encrypted app allows users to check their keys via QR code scanning or string comparison. If twitter adopts encryption, I hope they will let users do that. At this point the same entity controls both key distribution and the messaging channel, so information-theoretically it may seem that encryption becomes pointless because it’s very easy to perform a mitm attack. However, since any user can check their keys (at least in theory), the service cannot mitm _every_ conversation. This prohibits mass surveillance which is good enough.
charcircuit 4y ago
I feel like it would be pointless. As an end user I don't really get any benefit from this change and encryption typically makes the user experience worse for the end user.
anonymousiam 4y ago
It will never be "secure" because no government would allow that. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/nl8sdb/im_suspect_on_signal_im_not_so_confident_that/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/nl8sdb/im_suspect_...
- zaik 4y ago
  That's why I run an XMPP server for my family/friends and refuse to install any centralized messaging app. (Also can we please have a standard for messaging, every app cooking up their own protocol and not working with anything else is getting embarrassing.)
- holmesworcester 4y ago
  This degree of skepticism can be counter productive. If everyone in a democracy agrees that "governments would never allow" large companies to implement end-to-end encryption, then, as a result, governments never will. Also, some large companies do offer it, notably Meta and Apple. Apple offers a backdoor in the form of unencrypted iCloud backups. And Meta may also offer a backdoor to the US government, but they also might not. And there are at least a few large governments they don't appear to offer a backdoor to, as evidenced by Meta executives getting arrested for contempt of court in e.g. Brazil. Twitter encrypting DMs is definitely an improvement, just as Twitter adding SSL was an improvement. Security and privacy ultimately depends on threat modeling. Any given improvement can make the difference between the suitability or unsuitability of a tool for a given threat model. And since peoples' threat models are extremely diverse and always changing, adding e2ee to a service of this scale can have a big impact on the security, privacy, and safety of many Internet users.
  - anonymousiam 4y ago
    I am both an idealist and a realist. I'm very much aware of how much surveillance governments run on their own citizens. There's no place in the world that is exempt from this. So you could either move to Mars and hope the Elon doesn't do things like everyone else, or you can try to effect change here, but it's an uphill battle. All governments are drunk with the power they have, and they are not going to give it up willingly.
lmc 4y ago
I've flagged this - it's some combination of ad and FUD.
- holmesworcester 4y ago
  I agree. It's FUD on a hot-button topic as an attention-getting tactic. (As I wrote the above phrase, I realized that I could have abbreviated it to "tech journalism." Sigh/ugh.)
mnd999 4y ago
It’s gonna take more than that to stop Twitter’s decline.
hadlock 4y ago
Twitter has a fraction of the user base of something like Whatsapp. Do we really care how DMs work for a platform like Twitter? At best, for secure messaging I would expect someone to use twitter DMs to arrange a switch-over to a platform like Whatsapp or Signal
- interestica 4y ago
  I mean Facebook has a standalone DM app and Instagram has done it too (and I guess the messaging systems have now just been combined sort of?). It's not out of the question that something like 'Twitter DM' comes out where it will be used to slowly push users to the platform in a more general sense.
- holmesworcester 4y ago
  Even if Twitter is small compared to WhatsApp, having another major household-name service add "e2ee by default for DMs" is good for the world because it brings "e2ee by default for DMs" closer to being a standard practice, the way SSL has become a standard practice. At first, only a handful of sites implemented SSL for all their pages, but eventually a critical mass of sites did it, and at that point every major site had to do it. To make e2ee as ubiquitous for messaging as SSL is for browsing, we'll need a similar dynamic where it becomes standard practice, and each major site that adds it is a big victory. Also, Twitter might have a smaller userbase, but journalists and political figures are among its most active users, so the social impact (e.g. to the health of democratic governments) of protecting the privacy of Twitter users might be on the same order as that of protecting the privacy of WhatsApp users.
  - hadlock 4y ago
    Not only is twitter small compared to WhatsApp, it's tiny, and has had static (no) user growth for seven years (previously reported 300 million active monthly users, recently announced it had been over reporting...). The tech and journalism communities exist in a bit of an echo chamber. Twitter might be a "household name" but it's importance for mass communication is a bit overblown.
betwixthewires 4y ago
Just reminding people that Session is nothing more than an implementation of signal with a blockchain behind it for some reason. I tried it, I was interested in it, I always like to try new encrypted messaging methods. I like blockchains, but I don't like when one is shoehorned in when it is unnecessary, and I'm especially wary when a project with very little original development includes blockchain stuff, scams abound.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- judge2020 4y ago
  While Signal is good for encrypting messages, you can't be sure Signal.org isn't hiding messages from you or otherwise blocking communication, and for Whatsapp, you can't view message history without keeping a backup file. This seems to solve both problems.
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    If the encryption is ever cracked now everyone can read everyone's messages though can they not? I know it feels unlikely to happen today, but tomorrow's technological breakthrough could make anything happen in a matter of months. The future is uncertain.
    - judge2020 4y ago
      The encryption of the messages themselves is largely shared with every other part of cryptography - ed25519 keys are used almost exclusively over rsa for anything new and AES 256+ protects every single TLS connection. A lot of the internet hinges on the encryption used being resistant against known attacks. https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/#:~:text=The%20following%20table%20splits%20the%20SafeCurves%20requirements%20into%20(1)%20basic%20parameter%20requirements%2C%20(2)%20ECDLP%20security%20requirements%2C%20and%20(3)%20ECC%20security%20requirements%20beyond%20ECDLP%20security%3A https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/#:~:text=The%20following%20table...
- 4y ago
kornhole 4y ago
Additional to what has already been said, they could choose homomorphic encryption as WhatsApp appears to be now using. No person can read the messages, but the computer can scan and analyze them.
AlchemistCamp 4y ago
If Twitter actually does implement E2E encrypted DMs, I predict there will be a LOT of hand-wringing. The same NYT and WaPo writers who have been writing attack pieces on Elon Musk for the past month will write about how horrible it is that people can communicate in private and how horrible their communications might be. Maybe a few EU politicians will make some threatening noises about banning Twitter, as well.
spoonjim 4y ago
How does encryption work? If it’s truly end to end encrypted then you can’t see your messages on multiple devices or recover your old messages from another device, right? If your encryption key is not in the cloud then it’s on the device right?
- ComradePhil 4y ago
  The encryption key can be on the cloud further encrypted with an "E2E" password. When you add a new device, you just enter the E2E password and all your messages can be seen.
whateveracct 4y ago
It would be nice if there was another product in that iMessage sweetspot. Highly doubt Twitter can pull it off and that they would manage to capture that all-important Trust.

Here is the direct URL: https://getsession.org/blog/twitter-encrypted-dms https://getsession.org/blog/twitter-encrypted-dms

DerekBickerton 4y ago
Oops. If I could delete it I would, but HN won't let me.

DerekBickerton 4y ago

@dang can you amend the URL to: https://getsession.org/blog/twitter-encrypted-dms https://getsession.org/blog/twitter-encrypted-dms

dang 4y ago
Yes, done. Our software changed it because https://getsession.org/blog https://getsession.org/blog was listed as the canonical URL.

kevingadd 4y ago

It feels like the mentions of Signal and its protocol in this blog post overlook the reality that you can't really do true secure encrypted Twitter DMs, at best you could do a loose approximation of it that may not provide much security value in exchange for the inconvenience. Why? A significant % of Twitter usage is through the website (either twitter.com or tweetdeck), which means the decryption would all have to happen in javascript in an effectively untrusted context - it doesn't even have the moderate protections offered by a chrome app/extension, and there's no clean way to securely store encryption keys for a webpage (afaik) without the aid of something like a Yubikey or Windows Hello. Secure cryptography in the browser is still (generally speaking) adjacent to a joke, and the idea of doing it in Twitter.com - a very complex website with a huge attack surface that gets loaded into iframes/popups and targeted by various extensions - is probably exciting to people looking for easy ways to claim Twitter's bug bounties. There are lots of other factors that will make this difficult but as long as the core of your product is a webpage with a history of severe quality issues you're basically using encryption for branding, you're not going to protect messages from anyone except perhaps disgruntled customer service staff. That's ignoring the UX issues as well - when Line rolled out E2E encryption for messaging, they had to coax every user into enabling encryption and authenticating all of their devices to have access to their personal keys, so you had a patchwork of encrypted and non-encrypted conversations. And now if I lose my primary device (the keyholder) there's a convoluted process to attach new encryption keys to my account and the only way to recover my DM history is from a backup. Am I supposed to believe they'll convince every Twitter user to jump through all the hoops to enable e2e encryption for DMs and manage encryption keys securely? Absolutely not. They'll have to do a ton of work to provide a comfortable user experience, at which point it'll be trivial for an attacker to get their hands on the encryption keys if they already had access to DM content.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
Besides, what exactly would E2E protect from? Your Twitter DMs (assuming you already use HTTPS to access Twitter) only travel through one party: Twitter itself. So basically E2E would be to protect your message contents from Twitter itself? First, they already have all the metadata they could potentially want, the message contents itself is virtually nothing. I'm quite sure they're even logging keystrokes in their website for autocomplete/analytics/advertisement/whatever purposes. Second, they control the entire platform, including the code you would be running to encrypt/decrypt the messages! What would prevent Twitter from sending a specific party a special version of their JS that sends an obfuscated unencrypted copy of your messages to the mothership? All this conversation is just security theater..
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > What would prevent Twitter from sending a specific party a special version of their JS that sends an obfuscated unencrypted copy of your messages to the mothership? I'm glad you asked. This is exactly the same problem that WhatsApp have been trying to solve for their web app, and they came up a browser extension called meta-code-verify[0] which checks the hash of the code received against an external append-only log. The extension only supports the WhatsApp site so far, but should be flexible enough to support others that opt into it. Of course ideally this approach would become popular enough that the technology would be integrated into the browser itself, so that users wouldn't need to install the extension at all. I also hope that ProtonMail push for this too, since they are subject to the same threat model and care about open source security. [0] https://github.com/facebookincubator/meta-code-verify https://github.com/facebookincubator/meta-code-verify
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    There's also a HTML mechanism that lets you put expected hashes in for script resources etc and the browser is supposed to reject them, but of course because this isn't code signing, all the attacker needs to do is compromise the HTML and put in their own sabotaged hashes. Sigh...

vmception 4y ago

I got added to some twitter DM groups recently where people talk about fast moving trends. what a shitty interface. can't @ mention people in the group without it trying to search all of twitter, you don't know their usernames because its different from their profile names, and the @ mention search doesn't even try to link them. can't quote reply or link to a prior message. Encryption is the least of the things, all that means is that two of my devices probably won't see the same conversations.

holmesworcester 4y ago
WhatsApp, Signal, and Element all handle multiple devices fairly well. Twitter should be able to solve that too.
- eptcyka 4y ago
  Signal doesn't handle mutliple devices nearly well enough.
  - eins1234 4y ago
    Yeah, I had to do a double take when I saw Signal included in that sentence. I value privacy & security personally, and want Signal to succeed, but any compromise to UX in the name of privacy & security is going to make it impossible for Signal to compete as a mainstream messaging platform where network effects are paramount.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    Signal doesn't handle multiple devices at all...if those devices are phone-sized.
    - holmesworcester 4y ago
      True, but if you're just using phone and desktop, Signal works well. My point here isn't that Signal is perfect, just that the implementations by Signal and others shows that support for e2ee DMs on multiple devices is solvable. Teams can decide what their users need and how much flexibility is worth supporting. A public company of Twitter's size is clearly capable of solving this for some broad set of use cases.

aspenmayer 4y ago

I think it’s worth trying, even if it’s hard to implement. If Signal and WhatsApp can do it, Twitter can too.

amelius 4y ago
But it looks like EU is about to force platforms to open up their protocols to each other: https://www.pocket-lint.com/apps/news/apple/160548-eu-s-digital-market-act-to-force-apple-and-google-to-open-up-their-platforms https://www.pocket-lint.com/apps/news/apple/160548-eu-s-digi... > (...) chat apps, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and iMessage, will have to be interoperable with each other and competitors.
- kitkat_new 4y ago
  what's the problem?

unstatusthequo 4y ago

If they do, you’ll see government requests for backdoors into them, and maybe Musk fights, maybe he doesn’t. But given that all cellular providers, Meta, Apple, and Google are all playing nice with law enforcement on wiretaps, I see no reason that Twitter would be any different, ultimately. The only safe encryption is one you control, and is not centralized to some giant corp.

Ekaros 4y ago
Yeah, I really don't get point. If you want to have secure encrypted communication channel don't rely on any platform. Do it yourself with some standard tool or protocol. And then use third channel to verify the material.
- amelius 4y ago
  Good luck convincing the people you want to communicate with to follow your scheme.
luis8 4y ago
What about opensourcing the app and compiling it yourself?

flancian 4y ago

I try to move all Twitter conversations to Matrix, IMHO it's good enough, federated and supports E2EE encryption already. Not all people are ready to make the jump but an increasing ratio seems interested. Also it's a bridge/bot friendly platform and Maubot is great. https://anagora.org/matrix https://anagora.org/matrix https://anagora.org/maubot https://anagora.org/maubot

lawl 4y ago
> IMHO it's good enough Im a huge fan of matrix and use it daily. Just to make that clear upfront. If you read HN you should use it. I don't think it's ready for non-technical people. The federation part still causes issues. Occassionally messages get stuck etc. I would not feel comfortable telling my mom to download element to text me.
- geranim0 4y ago
  FWIW my I made my grandma download element to text me and she's using it without problem
  - CJefferson 4y ago
    I can believe that, my problems have always arisen when people want to transfer to another device, or access from two devices at the same time. I know such things are possible (it works for me) but many people get themselves in a horrible mess.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      Using it from 12 devices now. But yes the client validation and key exchange is something non technical users don't grok :( Even though they've clearly spent a lot of time making it as easy as possible.
- raybb 4y ago
  For someone who is technical but not interested in self hosting so you still recommend it? Do you recommend starting with trying to get bridges setup or what's the best first step?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

brian-armstrong 4y ago

When the party storing the DM controls key storage/exchange, does this matter? If you can't verify the other party's keys are in use, and ensure no other keys are being silently added, this type of encryption is just checking a box.

kodah 4y ago
There's implementations where it would work, be effective, or be both. It all depends on what the key material is protected with at that point. If it's something provided client side and is transmitted securely, and used blindly, then it would work. Anything short of that would probably trigger my curiosity. Edit: This kind of statement also needs to b prepended with who you're trying to protect yourself from, because that entirely changes the game. Edit: There's also key exchange (and derivation) that could happen and impact the effectiveness of this process.
- brian-armstrong 4y ago
  If the client is entirely in the browser, it doesn't particularly matter if they give you some keys to scan. You don't know what it's actually doing, or how the keys are generated.
  - kingcharles 4y ago
    It would need to encrypt the messages in the browser before they are sent, for a start.
ajconway 4y ago
Almost every encrypted app allows users to check their keys via QR code scanning or string comparison. If twitter adopts encryption, I hope they will let users do that. At this point the same entity controls both key distribution and the messaging channel, so information-theoretically it may seem that encryption becomes pointless because it’s very easy to perform a mitm attack. However, since any user can check their keys (at least in theory), the service cannot mitm _every_ conversation. This prohibits mass surveillance which is good enough.

charcircuit 4y ago

I feel like it would be pointless. As an end user I don't really get any benefit from this change and encryption typically makes the user experience worse for the end user.

anonymousiam 4y ago

It will never be "secure" because no government would allow that. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/nl8sdb/im_suspect_on_signal_im_not_so_confident_that/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/nl8sdb/im_suspect_...

zaik 4y ago
That's why I run an XMPP server for my family/friends and refuse to install any centralized messaging app. (Also can we please have a standard for messaging, every app cooking up their own protocol and not working with anything else is getting embarrassing.)
holmesworcester 4y ago
This degree of skepticism can be counter productive. If everyone in a democracy agrees that "governments would never allow" large companies to implement end-to-end encryption, then, as a result, governments never will. Also, some large companies do offer it, notably Meta and Apple. Apple offers a backdoor in the form of unencrypted iCloud backups. And Meta may also offer a backdoor to the US government, but they also might not. And there are at least a few large governments they don't appear to offer a backdoor to, as evidenced by Meta executives getting arrested for contempt of court in e.g. Brazil. Twitter encrypting DMs is definitely an improvement, just as Twitter adding SSL was an improvement. Security and privacy ultimately depends on threat modeling. Any given improvement can make the difference between the suitability or unsuitability of a tool for a given threat model. And since peoples' threat models are extremely diverse and always changing, adding e2ee to a service of this scale can have a big impact on the security, privacy, and safety of many Internet users.
- anonymousiam 4y ago
  I am both an idealist and a realist. I'm very much aware of how much surveillance governments run on their own citizens. There's no place in the world that is exempt from this. So you could either move to Mars and hope the Elon doesn't do things like everyone else, or you can try to effect change here, but it's an uphill battle. All governments are drunk with the power they have, and they are not going to give it up willingly.

lmc 4y ago

I've flagged this - it's some combination of ad and FUD.

holmesworcester 4y ago
I agree. It's FUD on a hot-button topic as an attention-getting tactic. (As I wrote the above phrase, I realized that I could have abbreviated it to "tech journalism." Sigh/ugh.)

mnd999 4y ago

It’s gonna take more than that to stop Twitter’s decline.

hadlock 4y ago

Twitter has a fraction of the user base of something like Whatsapp. Do we really care how DMs work for a platform like Twitter? At best, for secure messaging I would expect someone to use twitter DMs to arrange a switch-over to a platform like Whatsapp or Signal

interestica 4y ago
I mean Facebook has a standalone DM app and Instagram has done it too (and I guess the messaging systems have now just been combined sort of?). It's not out of the question that something like 'Twitter DM' comes out where it will be used to slowly push users to the platform in a more general sense.
holmesworcester 4y ago
Even if Twitter is small compared to WhatsApp, having another major household-name service add "e2ee by default for DMs" is good for the world because it brings "e2ee by default for DMs" closer to being a standard practice, the way SSL has become a standard practice. At first, only a handful of sites implemented SSL for all their pages, but eventually a critical mass of sites did it, and at that point every major site had to do it. To make e2ee as ubiquitous for messaging as SSL is for browsing, we'll need a similar dynamic where it becomes standard practice, and each major site that adds it is a big victory. Also, Twitter might have a smaller userbase, but journalists and political figures are among its most active users, so the social impact (e.g. to the health of democratic governments) of protecting the privacy of Twitter users might be on the same order as that of protecting the privacy of WhatsApp users.
- hadlock 4y ago
  Not only is twitter small compared to WhatsApp, it's tiny, and has had static (no) user growth for seven years (previously reported 300 million active monthly users, recently announced it had been over reporting...). The tech and journalism communities exist in a bit of an echo chamber. Twitter might be a "household name" but it's importance for mass communication is a bit overblown.

betwixthewires 4y ago

Just reminding people that Session is nothing more than an implementation of signal with a blockchain behind it for some reason. I tried it, I was interested in it, I always like to try new encrypted messaging methods. I like blockchains, but I don't like when one is shoehorned in when it is unnecessary, and I'm especially wary when a project with very little original development includes blockchain stuff, scams abound.

deleted 4y ago
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judge2020 4y ago
While Signal is good for encrypting messages, you can't be sure Signal.org isn't hiding messages from you or otherwise blocking communication, and for Whatsapp, you can't view message history without keeping a backup file. This seems to solve both problems.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  If the encryption is ever cracked now everyone can read everyone's messages though can they not? I know it feels unlikely to happen today, but tomorrow's technological breakthrough could make anything happen in a matter of months. The future is uncertain.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    The encryption of the messages themselves is largely shared with every other part of cryptography - ed25519 keys are used almost exclusively over rsa for anything new and AES 256+ protects every single TLS connection. A lot of the internet hinges on the encryption used being resistant against known attacks. https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/#:~:text=The%20following%20table%20splits%20the%20SafeCurves%20requirements%20into%20(1)%20basic%20parameter%20requirements%2C%20(2)%20ECDLP%20security%20requirements%2C%20and%20(3)%20ECC%20security%20requirements%20beyond%20ECDLP%20security%3A https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/#:~:text=The%20following%20table...
4y ago

kornhole 4y ago

Additional to what has already been said, they could choose homomorphic encryption as WhatsApp appears to be now using. No person can read the messages, but the computer can scan and analyze them.

AlchemistCamp 4y ago

If Twitter actually does implement E2E encrypted DMs, I predict there will be a LOT of hand-wringing. The same NYT and WaPo writers who have been writing attack pieces on Elon Musk for the past month will write about how horrible it is that people can communicate in private and how horrible their communications might be. Maybe a few EU politicians will make some threatening noises about banning Twitter, as well.

spoonjim 4y ago

How does encryption work? If it’s truly end to end encrypted then you can’t see your messages on multiple devices or recover your old messages from another device, right? If your encryption key is not in the cloud then it’s on the device right?

ComradePhil 4y ago
The encryption key can be on the cloud further encrypted with an "E2E" password. When you add a new device, you just enter the E2E password and all your messages can be seen.

whateveracct 4y ago

It would be nice if there was another product in that iMessage sweetspot. Highly doubt Twitter can pull it off and that they would manage to capture that all-important Trust.