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Twilio incident: What Signal users need to know
- mikece 4y ago"...Twilio, the company that provides Signal with phone number verification services..." Perhaps this is why Twilio (and Twilio-issued) VoIP numbers work so well for Signal when I don't want to use the number issued by my cellular carrier? Kinda hard to SIM-swap me if you don't know my real phone number.
- giancarlostoro 4y agoDo they offer numbers you can use that way or do you just use their APIs with a minimal app?
- mikece 4y agoI spin up a number and verify it can receive SMS (which it forwards to me via email). Since I need receive-only, this is fine. No need to futz with APIs or apps.
- bubblethink 4y agoA lot of banks refuse to send SMSes to voip numbers. Google voice runs into this, and presumably twilio too.
- AdmiralAsshat 4y agoMaybe this will make Signal re-think their hard requirement of a phone number to register for Signal. ...eh, who am I kidding?
- colinmhayes 4y agoHow do you deal with spam without requiring a phone number to register?
- giancarlostoro 4y agoWho is dealing with the spam SMS messages I get all year round? Phone numbers do not stop spam, they are used to distribute it. I know I received no spam when I had Google Talk... It is a solvable problem that I guess benefits nobody in power to solve.
- colinmhayes 4y agoSpam is one of the major reasons people don’t use sms. “The product Were replacing sucks so our product can suck too”
- Aachen 4y agoI don't use SMS because I can't download an open source client to use on desktop, send pictures or other files, edit messages, encrypt conversations, share a live location, hold a poll, have group chats with some semblance of scale, it just doesn't work for more than receiving an occasional message as last resort. Spam via sms doesn't seem to really exist here, maybe two per year now, up from zero until three years ago.
- soziawa 4y agoThreema seems to manage just well. I guess payment is the natural limiter for spam there.
- uoaei 4y agoAnd accessibility.
- ssizn 4y ago
- rt4mn 4y agoGive people the option to pay. I would gladly pay $100 one time fee if it meant I could avoid having a phone number associated. https://jmp.chat https://jmp.chat is a great work around but I would rather just have an email address or ideally nothing but a receipt directly associated with my signal account.
- dylan604 4y agowhich is a curious thing to me as the phone number i created a Signal account with is no longer my phone number. what happens if the person currently assigned that number tries to join Signal and what happens to me if they do?
- jraph 4y agoIt's unsafe. They could lock you out from your Signal account and impersonate you. Someone who does not know you changed your number, forgot about it or does not think about this could then send a message to the person who has your old phone number thinking it's you at the other end. Most people don't bother with the warning about the security number having changed. I also personally assume that the phone number of a contact in Signal is theirs and that I can send an SMS or call them with this phone number. This not being true is at best confusing even if you are not locked out. It'd also be nice to let the current user of your old number to be able to join Signal without issues. I'd say don't play with fire and migrate as soon as possible before having issues. You probably could follow https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007062012-Change-Number https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007062012-Ch... Then the people with who you discussed on Signal will be notified of your number change. If you can't follow this, better decide to handle it the best way you can instead of having to deal with this when you have lost access.
- dylan604 4y agoThanks for the link. I have been way too lazy after having the new number for nearly a year. I just couldn't not do it after someone on the internet did the heavy lifting for me.
- daneel_w 4y agoI've been complaining about the glaring privacy/integrity problem in their SMS-based account verification scheme for years. I don't think any snafu can make them reconsider. It would forfeit the valuable social network mapping they've already poured millions of dollars into through sending verification SMSes.
- tptacek 4y agoIt's not so much "valuable social network mapping" as it is "the only social network available to Signal", by design. Without phone numbers, they can't use clientside contact lists (they can build their own, of course, but if it's strictly clientside it won't sync, and so it won't work for most of their users). The alternative design, which HN would wildly prefer, admits to usernames or email address accounts, but requires Signal to keep a database of contacts serverside. That's untenable for Signal's threat model.
- daneel_w 4y agoThe sane alternative is that it could keep a client-side contact book that users would be responsible for managing entirely on their own, including when setting the app up on a new phone. Addendum: also, there is nothing preventing this type of contact book data from being backed-up/synced to a new phone, like any other data and settings of any other app. iOS has this feature since like 7 years now. Android, too, I'm sure.
- the_other 4y ago
- dvzk 4y agoIt was because of over-represented complaints about phone number requirements that Signal implemented the mistake that is SGX and server-side contact lists. Now the social graph of millions of Signal users is instead centrally protected by Intel's attestation obfuscation and a weak 4-digit PIN. All to eventually support usernames, which normies won't use.
- colordrops 4y agoDo "normies" care about high quality encryption? And did signal ever turn on username support?
- dvzk 4y agoI think developers have a moral responsibility to make their products as secure as possible, within reason and while still being usable. It doesn't matter if the users care about the benefits. To your second question: no, not yet.
- colordrops 4y agoI fully agree with you, and my first question was asked somewhat sarcastically. For the second, my implication is that developers also have a moral responsibility to make their products as private as possible, and SMS verification aint it.
- ajmurmann 4y agoWhy are server-side contact lists needed to support identities not linked to phone numbers?
- lxgr 4y agoSignal (or, more accurately, one of its predecessors) used to use client-side private set intersection for contact discovery, but this scales poorly [1]. Now they use a solution based on Intel SGX and server-side trusted computing [2]. [1] https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/ [2] https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
- godelski 4y agoI think they are. I just also think the problem is a lot harder than people give it credit for. If they just go with a standard username (as in some form of a database lookup) then I'll be upset. But I'll be upset because this effectively doesn't solve any issue, and introduces others that have big privacy impacts and requires Signal to be a trusted source (which is antithetical to Signal's proposed mission). I do wish Signal would be more transparent though. Given that this is such a difficult problem and they've been struggling with it for years, it reasons that it is time to seek help. This is like when a student just studies for hours and hours on end, spinning their wheels. They aren't learning anything. At some point you need a tutor, help from a friend, or asking the professor for help. (Or analogy in work if that's better) Signal, it is time to be transparent.
- notpushkin 4y agoSignal is a trusted source already – you trust them telling you which number is which user.
- godelski 4y agoSorry, let me clarify. We should trust Signal as little as possible. That's how the design should work. Zero trust is very hard to create but let's minimize it. Opening up usernames (in the conventional sense) you will end up needing to verify and act as an arbiter. This is due to the fact that certain usernames have real world meaning behind them and you don't want to create an ecosystem where it is really easy to honeypot whistleblowing platforms (how do you ensure that CNN gets {CNN, CNN-News, CNNNews, etc}?). They've suggested that this might be the case given that the "Notes to self" and "Signal" users are verified with a blue checkmark. The issue is that verifying users not only makes Signal a more trusted platform but the act of verification requires obtaining more information about the user. It also creates special users. All things I'm very against. I'd rather hand out my phone number than have Signal collecting this type of information. So yeah, it isn't completely trustless, but I certainly don't want to move in the direction of requiring more trust.
- throwaway290 4y agoSignal does not tell me which number is which user. I know which number is who myself. The most Signal does is presumably warn me when the key associated with the number changed (eg. new phone). And that's where I have to trust Signal, but as a protocol not a "trusted source" of information.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nisegami 4y ago>Among the 1,900 phone numbers, the attacker explicitly searched for three numbers, and we’ve received a report from one of those three users that their account was re-registered. I wonder if this was a curious attacker trying to see what they could do with their access, or a targeted attack.
- AtNightWeCode 4y agoI think someone might know that certain numbers belong to certain users and that they want to prove it. Happened a lot with Disqus accounts. You can btw use the password reset function on many sites to correlate it with notifications. Easy at public events.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- eadmund 4y agoIt sure feels like it was targeted. Is trying to re-register a Signal account the sort of thing an attacker is likely to do at random?
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago> Is trying to re-register a Signal account the sort of thing an attacker is likely to do at random? Yes. I mean why not, you've got the number(s).
- nisegami 4y agoSimilar to the other reply, I imagine it would be along the lines of: "Holy shit are those Signal 2FA codes? That's wild" In my head, this is something a more teenager (e.g. Lapsus) might think?
- joosters 4y agoThe page is also quite vague about how the attacker got these 1900 phone numbers. It seems to imply that they were just the ones around when the attacker got access. But it doesn’t actually state that clearly. Were they 1900 random numbers or were they chosen somehow? The latter is of course far worse. They also apparently have logs of the attacker searching out three specific accounts within these 1900. That seems odd. What’s the chance that, out of all signal accounts, the three they are curious about just happen to be among the 1900 they got access to? (Perhaps signal/trillio don’t have logs from failed searches? That would be pretty poor logging though)
- soziawa 4y agoSo that means for the duration of the attack active contacts and groups were exposed?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cowsup 4y agoNo. When you sign up to Signal, they send you a text message verification code. This is done via a service called "Twilio." The attackers were able to view outgoing Twilio messages, so they could enter your number on the registration screen, read the code that Twilio sent to you, then use that cod to complete the sign up process. Attackers were not able to view information about your current Signal account (if present) through this SMS service.
- LtWorf 4y agoBut attackers are able to impersonate you to your contacts no?
- tialaramex 4y agoIf an attacker successfully registered your phone number, and if your contact either never checked the Safety Number for your conversation† or they ignore the fact that Signal says the number has changed, then yes, the attacker would be able to impersonate you to that contact. Twilio says 1900 Signal users are potentially affected (attackers saw the confirmation code or could have seen the confirmation code) so Signal disabled those accounts pending re-registration. † For any particular conversation pair, Signal has a large unique number it calls a Safety Number calculated from the long term cryptographic identities, if you got a new phone (or if I'm pretending to be you on a new phone), messages you send will have a different number because the new phone won't know the old phone's cryptographic keys. The phone app can display the number (so you can compare them) or scan a QR code from another phone to check they match without the boring work of comparing numbers.
- beefee 4y agoPlease, stop using phone numbers. There is no reliable way to hold a phone number. The messaging protocols are insecure. If your service uses phone numbers or SMS, that means it's not secure or reliable.
- registeredcorn 4y agoNot only that, I don't want any service that I use tied to a phone number. Partially for the reasons you listed, but also because there are better alternatives; email, authenticator apps, physical keys, cards, etc. I hate looking at my phone. I hate using my phone. I don't want to have even more reasons to keep my phone charged and in my hand. Phones suck.
- spurgu 4y agoThe Signal desktop app doesn't require your phone to be turned on (once it's been "paired") by the way, as opposed to for example Whatsapp.
- LtWorf 4y agoBy desktop app you mean a website cosplaying as a desktop app.
- spurgu 4y agoI didn't know Signal had a web app. Yes, I'm aware the desktop app is made with Electron. So what? I keep it running almost all the time and I've never had any performance issues with it.
- LtWorf 4y agoWell, it's slow, it has awful accessibility, you can't create accounts from a computer, you will have performance issues with it if you need the resources for something else. Also it won't work on linux phones.
- 4y ago
- sethjr5rtfgh 4y ago
- ycombinator_acc 4y ago>it was possible for them to attempt to register the phone numbers they accessed to another device using the SMS verification code That's a thing? If my number expires and gets reassigned to someone else, and they register for Signal, I'll get locked out of my account just like that? And they'll start getting all the messages that were addressed to me?
- ryukafalz 4y agoYour account is tied to your phone number so pretty sure that’s the case, yep!
- ycombinator_acc 4y agoThat sounds horrible. Would I be SoL even if I had ticked "Registration Lock" prior to that?
- lxgr 4y agoApparently as long as you use Signal at least once every 7 days from a linked device, you should be good: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Signal-PIN#manage_registration_lock https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si... Still, given that your number is used as a primary identifier, I'd avoid using it in that way for an extended amount of time. Among other things, I'm not sure if it's possible to re-register using just your phone number and PIN (but not access to SMS-OTPs on the associated phone number) in case you lose your own device, for example.
- ikawe 4y agoNo, this is exactly the kind of thing registration lock is intended to address. If you enabled Registration Lock, your account cannot be hijacked by sms, provided you’ve been actively using your signal account within the last week. There’s an automated keep-alive for the case that you still have signal installed but haven’t been sending/receiving any messages.
- 8organicbits 4y ago
- uncomputation 4y agoYes, Signal’s phone number requirement is bad. But, given that, the fact that they don’t store any messages on their side and everything is client side is still a huge benefit over a lot of other apps and still a huge step forward for privacy! Criticism is definitely important but I just wanted to put that out there that all things considered, Signal is still very much a good thing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoI will admit that this requirement always confused me. What is there to benefit from by requiring it?
- moontear 4y agoLess spam. A phone number is a much better deterrent against opening a hundred accounts than let’s say an email address.
- rakoo 4y agoIt's the easiest anti-spam measure, because it makes it expensive enough that spammers won't have a million accounts. Fake account detection is effectively put on the back of mobile carriers
- dogecoinbase 4y agoThey trade your privacy for not having to figure out some technical issues. Also, when they rolled out their cryptocurrency payment system (after keeping the server-side source code secret for more than a year, during which Moxie, who is a paid advisor to that same cryptocurrency, denied they were working on a payment system), they got KYC for free.
- MobiusHorizons 4y agoI believe they have covered this question many times before, but I don’t see an answer on signal’s website. From memory, it had to do with not wanting to own the user’s contact list. Using a phone number allowed them to rely on a contact list on the users phone, which is not tied to the signal account. There was more nuance than that though.
- thankful69 4y agoIf they (Signal) care about privacy, they need to drop the need for phone numbers to use their service, there are many ways of dealing with spam (rate limiting, captchas, ...), a true private/secure messenger app should not require any user identifiable info. And the argument of "Signal was the first e2ee messenger app to go mainstream, so they can keep ignoring user's privacy, .... yada yada..." is naive at best; they should lead by example, right now there are many solutions way more private (Briar, SimpleX, Session, Wickr, ....). I user Signal, and I like it, is just a shame they soft-refuse("We are working on it...") to remove phone numbers from the equation.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cookiengineer 4y agoI second recommending Briar as a messenger. Codebase is well maintained. Specifications and documents are audited, as well as the official clients.
- timbit42 4y agoBriar is nice but I wish it worked through Tor like Tox does.
- emmelaich 4y agoThe phishing against Twilio looks very much like the attempt on Cloudflare. I wonder how many other companies have been successfully phished that we don't know about.
- dont__panic 4y agoIt certainly makes me wonder: it Twilio more competent because they noticed a phishing success? I assume there are plenty of people at every company who could fall for social engineering scams, so I think it's safe to say most companies aren't totally safe -- they just haven't noticed a major breach.
- tialaramex 4y agoYes, Cloudflare pointed out the similarity and they suppose it's a single attacker with multiple targets. If you have access (I don't in my current role and I don't care enough to spend money to do this on my own account) you can ask a passive DNS system about names like cloudflare-okta.com that were used in the Cloudflare attack, identify patterns (same registrar, same hosting, that sort of thing) and also the IP addresses Cloudflare listed. You should probably assume that anywhere which doesn't actually have FIDO or similar and was actively targeted is screwed, because it only takes one lapse to let the bad guys in.
- jamespwilliams 4y agoThe attack Twilio suffered is almost identical to the recent attack against Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/2022-07-sms-phishing-attacks/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/2022-07-sms-phishing-attacks/ (even down the wording of the text messages, which are nearly identical). Cloudflare’s use of security keys prevented the attackers getting access to any accounts in that case. These attacks are sophisticated and are capable of bypassing TOTP or mobile-app-based MFA. If this is widespread, I’d be surprised if we didn’t see a massive influx of breaches soon. The vast majority of companies are not well defended against this.
- ehPReth 4y agoI wonder if Twilio corporate culture has an aversion to or outright not-implemented or banned more secure methods of MFA such as security keys because of their $$ acquisition of Authy. Anyone have any insight?
- saurik 4y agoThe way that Cloudflare attack was working out sounds similar in nature to the way MailChimp was attacked a few months ago: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-breach-mailchimps-internal-tools-to-target-crypto-customers/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-breac...
- maerF0x0 4y agoto be clear they are not able to "bypass" TOTP or mobile-app-based MFA in the way security folks think of that term. They were able to bypass humans[1], which are often the weakest link in security related matters. [1]: "Twilio became aware of unauthorized access to information related to a limited number of Twilio customer accounts through a sophisticated social engineering attack designed to steal employee credentials. This broad based attack against our employee base succeeded in fooling some employees into providing their credentials. The attackers then used the stolen credentials to gain access to some of our internal systems, where they were able to access certain customer data. " https://www.twilio.com/blog/august-2022-social-engineering-attack https://www.twilio.com/blog/august-2022-social-engineering-a...
- g_sch 4y agoThis info gives us an interesting opportunity to estimate the rate at which Signal is adding new users. They've been very tight-lipped (understandably) about their usage stats but anecdotally they seem to be an increasingly common presence on my friends' phones, even the non-techies. As far as I can tell, Signal uses Twilio only to send SMS for phone number verification. Verification happens when a user registers a new number or changes the number on their existing account. The rate at which Signal is adding new users could be calculated by: 1900 * (proportion of new registrants among SMS recipients) / (length of Twilio incident) You could probably make some common-sense assumptions about the first variable. But I can't find any publicly available info on when Twilio was first compromised. Their press release only mentions that they discovered the intrusion on August 4, which is presumably close to the end date of the incident. Does anyone know what the estimated start of the incident might be?
- gsdofthewoods 4y agoSignal's SMS registration codes expire after a few minutes, so you wouldn't even need to know the duration of the incident. Let's be conservative and say the codes expire after 5 minutes (it's probably shorter), then Signal is registering 380 devices a minute.
- g_sch 4y agoMy reading of the post is that they determined the "1,900 users" figure by the number of users who had requested a code during the duration of the Twilio incident, as the attacker could have accessed their SMS messages at any point during the compromise: > During the window when an attacker had access to Twilio’s customer support systems it was possible for them to attempt to register the phone numbers they accessed to another device using the SMS verification code. The attacker no longer has this access, and the attack has been shut down by Twilio.
- sgc 4y agoAt least number of requests + number of open unverified and unexpired requests. So you need to guess average length of time to verify and the abandon rate. It also seems like there is also a buffer period when the numbers are registered and not yet purged from the twilio system: > 1) their phone numbers were potentially revealed as being registered to a Signal account, or 2) the SMS verification code used to register with Signal was revealed. We don't know how often Signal purges that, so, although unlikely, it could be a day or a week or more of registrations.
- atemerev 4y agoI absolutely do not understand why I have to link my very sensitive Signal account to a very insecure and hard to change ID: my phone number (which can be traced to my identity in too many ways). Why Signal does not allow fully anonymous IDs (like Threema does) is a mystery to me. Signal is fine for most users, but it is inherently _unsafe_ for high-value sensitive communications where participants can expect targeted phishing attacks.
- brewdad 4y agoAnonymity isn't part of Signal's risk model. If you need to stay anonymous, then there are more suitable options.
- atemerev 4y agoIt is not about being anonymous (though this also could be nice in some situations), it is about identity theft and credentials theft. There are numerous ways to steal my phone number and then impersonate me on Signal. For me, it is not a big deal (though a dedicated hater can probably ruin my life with that). For many people in sensitive positions, this is literally a matter of life and death.
- tapoxi 4y agoOn average, stealing a phone number is much more difficult than stealing someone's password, because of the frequency of password reuse and data breaches. If someone were to do that, it would be blocked by registration lock (which it prompts you to do). If they were to guess that, all your contacts would be notified that your identity has changed.
- atemerev 4y agoMy phone number (and probably yours) are in the Facebook 2019-2021 leaks. These are easily downloadable.
- baby 4y ago
- alldayeveryday 4y agoThis incident points to something much more severe. What role was this employee(s) whose credentials were compromised? How did these credentials allow even an employee to get plain text auth codes being sent out to end users? Such a permission should be extremely limited in who it is granted to.
- jefftk 4y agoI suspect many Twilio support reps need access to outgoing SMS, because manually looking over those will be an important component of handling a "someone is using your service for spamming" complaint.
- alldayeveryday 4y agoI disagree. They would not need to access the full contents of outgoing SMS to perform this duty. For example they could see the auth codes masked.
- jefftk 4y agoHow would Twilio know what portion of the outgoing SMS was auth codes? Are you proposing they add an API where senders can annotate part of their message as private? (Not a bad idea...)
- fragmede 4y agogrep [0-9]+ should cover enough of the problem space.
- caf 4y agoWouldn't the spammers then just mark 100% of their spam as private?
- alldayeveryday 4y agoAre you familiar with their API? We use their SMS auth service at my employer. Twilio is the one composing the outbound message including auth code. The API caller is not providing Twilio with an auth code and phone number. Twilio 100% knows which portion of the outgoing SMS is the auth code.
- _9hey 4y agoNice try, FBI
- chitowneats 4y ago"We conducted an investigation into the incident and determined the following." Guys how is the punctuation here not a colon?! This is an extremely serious issue according to my English Major inclination towards pedantry.
- Varqu 4y agoIs it not possible to use an Authenticator app for Signal, given their privacy setup?
- LtWorf 4y agoThey want to know the phone numbers. Despite everyone telling moxie that it's not secure from the day signal was started.
- pr0zac 4y agoSignal uses phone numbers as (the only) unique identifier in their system currently so SMS (or phone call) is necessary to verify the device owns the number. They've been talking about moving away from phone numbers as identifiers for a while and have implemented features like account pins that head in that direction but it hasn't happened yet.
- mr_toad 4y agoUsing a phone number as an identifier wouldn’t preclude using TFA.
- COGlory 4y agoHey look, the centralized nature of Signal has come back to bite it. Who could ever have predicted? Edit to try and make this less snarky and more productive: In n number of threads regarding Matrix, and the Matrix vs Signal controversy[0][1], the point is that Signal took a single, simple approach and tried to proclaim it was necessary because it allows them to be agile and responsive and integrate new features or security standards and not be weighted down. However, they jumped in and married themselves to a centralized service to do that, and have just essentially ignored that the centralized service may have faults. Whereas Matrix, while slower to evolve, is setup to be far more resilient to a single point of failure. [0] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ [1] https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- berry_sortoro 4y agoI was always opposed to this STUPID requirement that you NEED to tie Signal to your phone number. I never used it and AFAIK even for the Desktop client you need to have a phone number. Wire and other messengers that use the same or similar protocols do not have this issue. I am not the only one hating this, from the very start this was a huge critique on Signal by many people, but they never changed. I did not even know they used a 3rd party service to "verify" phone numbers. This is a HUGE issue. People who truly want to stay PRIVATE, politically hunted people who are in life and death situations should never ever use Signal.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- scottydelta 4y agoCloudflare was attacked with the same attack but they were able to prevent any harm since they use hardware keys for 2-step instead of OTP. This is a very simple phishing attack and I am surprised it has proven to be effective.
- jtdev 4y ago
- dcow 4y agoThis is a weird thread. There's a product that does secure messaging with usernames and only requires user/pass. It's called Keybase. If this is the product you want, then go use it. I don't understand why everyone wants Signal to be something it's not. I quite like Signal as they are and this "incident" demonstrates exactly what happens if a carrier gets compromised: nothing. Nothing happens. Signal decides not to trust any phone verifications from the period of compromise and requires affected numbers to reregister. All the important crypto has nothing to do with phone numbers in Signal's domain. And this is exactly why I use Signal. It lets me send secure messages to people using a tried and true UX: text messaging, but with its own secure application layer. It's really difficult to build a useable security product, and Signal has done it successfully.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MikeKusold 4y agoI love Keybase, but I would never recommend it today. Zoom acqui-hired the team in 2020: https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-acquires-keybase-and-announces-goal-of-developing-the-most-broadly-used-enterprise-end-to-end-encryption-offering/ https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-acquires-keybase-and-announces-goa...
- dcow 4y agoI am aware. For one it still works just as well is it ever has, the Zoom acquisition didn't change anything there. So if you care about features, there shouldn't be any problem. For sure it seems to be in maintenance mode, but nothing they were doing of late with Lumens was that exciting anyway (trying to become a crypto wallet like everyone and their mothers). I would pay $/mo for a Keybase reboot with the goal of building a sustainable business like Signal did instead of taking VC money for a shot at the moon. Until someone does that, Keybase continues to work as a messaging app with usernames instead of phone numbers.
- rvz 4y agoYeah I'd rather use Keybase which has username / password than the disaster that Signal is right now. Especially when you have both Twitter and Twilio breaches, SS7 attacks, SIM swapping attacks, etc. Keybase still works and for a simple messaging app does the job better than Signal or any other messaging app that requires a phone number. This is a total disaster. > but nothing they were doing of late with Lumens was that exciting anyway (trying to become a crypto wallet like everyone and their mothers). Just like Signal did, with their own private crypto wallet and cryptocurrency that they have been working suspiciously in the background for a year after being questioned.
- maerF0x0 4y agoWhat I want to know is what is ultimate aim that comes from the overlapping targets of Twilio, 1900 (and 3 specific) Signal users, and CloudFlare? What product on cloudflare and their 1900 (and 3) users were being targeted?
- throwawaycuriou 4y agoUnrelated to this current focus on the weakness of using a phone number as a contact reference, I have experienced a different problem. If a user has ever used Signal previously and for whatever reason revert back to SMS, if another user sends them a message via Signal it is lost with no indication. This is a growing problem as people try out Signal and when they get a new phone just forget or don't care to install it again.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- baby 4y agoassigning accounts to numbers is the dumbest thing. I remember when I got a new phone number a few years ago I managed to login into someone else's venmo account. Numbers are like dynamic IPs, why would anyone use this to authenticate you is beyond me.
- hammyhavoc 4y agoYes, it's a horribly dated idea, as-is receiving any kind of 2FA code via SMS.
- dublinben 4y ago>Numbers are like dynamic IPs Maybe for you. For other people who have had the same phone number for years or decades, they're the one of the most persistent forms of communication or identification available.
- int_19h 4y agoThe ability to transfer phone numbers when changing mobile provides has been around for a very long time in US, but it wasn't the case in some other countries until recently.
- baby 4y agoEven then personally I moved abroad so many times that it just doesn't make sense to use phone numbers. Not everyone stays in the same place all their life
- hammyhavoc 4y agoI'm reading yet another argument against centralization. Matrix protocol, anybody?
- lutoma 4y agoHow is this an argument against Signal and/or centralization? Pretty much the exact same thing could have happened with matrix 3pid servers. I really like Matrix (and Signal), I use it and even run a public Matrix home server, but jesus I can't stand obnoxious Matrix fanboys who feel the need to shoehorn some Matrix plug into literally every conversation involving Signal.
- hammyhavoc 4y agoBecause all of those users are exposed by the same SaaS fault. Too many digital eggs in one digital basket. What is there to plug? It's FOSS. Use it, or don't, who fucking cares? Whether you or anybody else use it or not is of absolutely zero consequence to me.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- awinter-py 4y agothe recommended fix here is to add a PIN + enable registration lock IIRC signal PIN was very controversial back in the day because they were 1) forcing users to do it and 2) forcing them to opt in to some data collection as part of creating a PIN. Signal backed down on requiring a PIN, but now it's unclear from their settings page whether setting a PIN will share data as well. The marketing copy on my droid device says: > PINs keep information stored with signal encrypted so only you can access it. your profile, settings and contacts will restore when you reinstall For a company with relatively good cred, this is a shady way of saying 'we will upload your contacts and encrypt it with a short string'
- uneventual 4y agoThey do some monkey business with sgx to make brute forcing harder but yeah it's worrisome. https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/07/10/a-few-thoughts-about-signals-secure-value-recovery/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/07/10/a-few-th... https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
- dvzk 4y agoFrom my 5-minute reading of the Signal source code it seems that disabling the PIN results in the generation of a random 256-bit master key for cloud storage encryption: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/blob/main/SignalServiceKit/src/Util/KeyBackupService.swift#L356 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/blob/main/SignalServ... The primary developer has stated previously that cloud storage is still used even with the PIN disabled: https://community.signalusers.org/t/beta-feedback-for-the-upcoming-android-4-66-release/15579/61 https://community.signalusers.org/t/beta-feedback-for-the-up...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- estiven2006 4y ago
- FightingSpirit 4y ago"All users can rest assured that their message history, contact lists, profile information, whom they'd blocked, and other personal data remain private and secure and were not affected." I do not understand how you can re-register someone's account to a new phone and not have the data read. If it is re-registered successfully, then you should be able to login. If you can login, you can see the data...right?
- mhitza 4y agoNo, because a key is generated every time you reinstall/register in the app, and it sends along your contacts when you login (hashed). So there shouldn't be a way to see anything shared in the past .
- crtasm 4y agoThe registration means "from now on, any messages sent to [phone number] will be delivered to this device", it's not logging into an account.
- darcys22 4y agoUsing phone numbers as an identifier is terrible, use session! https://getsession.org/ https://getsession.org/ Your private key that is used to encrypt the messages and the public key is your identifier
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 1ark 4y agoIt's ridiculous this is down voted. Client is a fork of Signal on all platforms. The fix is made, use it. Arguments are usually just "ad hominem" against blockchain.
- t6jvcereio 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- istillwritecode 4y agoI gave signal my landline. They don't need SMS.
- woevdbz 4y ago1900 is an impressively small upper bound of affected users, implying that Signal and Twilio got onto this very, very quickly. Seems like the response was swift. I would be interested in learning more about the process that led to such readiness at either company.
- SnowHill9902 4y agoHow much can one trust Signal for secure communication?
- tptacek 4y agoIt won the Levchin Prize at Real World Crypto, and is essentially the gold standard for messaging cryptography. People on HN hate its ergonomics. You could reasonably prefer something else, but you can't reasonably call it untrustworthy.
- batiudrami 4y agoI don’t really know why, even. I get the account vs phone number argument (though I prefer phone number as it is familiar to regular people in a way that usernames are not) but aside from that it has every feature I could want, and I feel like I am a fairly demanding user. It is is my primary messaging app and I send hundreds of messages a day to my friends, both individually and in group, on my phone and on my desktop.
- tptacek 4y agoTransacting in phone numbers doesn't feel right to people who have been soaking in message board and IRC culture for (in some cases) decades, even though it's absolutely natural to ordinary people (remember, WhatsApp was for a very long time the most popular messaging service in the world). And those same people have very strong feelings about services where you can't build your own client from scratch, and a viscerally negative reaction to Signal's principle that open clients create a lowest-common-denominator anchor for security. I get that too, even though the point is kind of indisputable (see: what happened with Matrix E2E crypto). Signal has a clear vision for how security and privacy work in messaging, and they're uncompromising about it. I deeply respect that, since there are a lot of things they could do to pick up Internet points that they don't do because they haven't worked out the privacy details yet. But opinions differ.
- batiudrami 4y ago
- IYasha 4y agoIs Signal a thing of the past yet? Do they still try to glue the word "security" and a phone number together? :-/
- ghughes 4y agoA phone number is fine for 99% of users. They recommend that users with higher-than-average security requirements set a PIN, which removes phone number attacks from the threat model, but you're still dependent on the security of SGX. Users with extreme security requirements can set a 42 character alphanumeric PIN, thus also excluding SGX from the picture, but at that point you're getting owned no matter what you do.
- IYasha 4y agoA PIN does not detach you from your provider, country and misery of having a cell phone, let alone a chain of possible points of SMS interception.