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This 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

by dcow 4y ago

This 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
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MikeKusold 4y ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Yeah 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.
    - irfwashere 4y ago
      Why doesn't anyone ever consider XMPP using one of the many clients like gajim, conversations, etc.? It's got all of the encryption features anyone would want but has zero mentions as a secure messaging option.
  - ianopolous 4y ago
    I've replied in a sibling comment about Peergos which is trying to do just that.
    - dcow 4y ago
      Definitely checking it out, thanks!
- schlauerfox 4y ago
  It's kept updated, we use it to interact with the Chia Blockchain team heavily and you just can't substitute for its identity feature to know who you're talking to.
  - Y-bar 4y ago
    Barely so. looks more like bare minimum life support. The slump in code contributions can speak for themselves after the acquisition. https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/contributors https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/contributors
- ianopolous 4y ago
  If you're looking for a Keybase replacement, check out Peergos (https://peergos.org https://peergos.org). Peergos is a P2P E2EE global filesystem and application protocol that's: * fully open source (including the server) and self hostable * has a business model of charging for a hosted version * designed so that you don't need to trust your server * audited by Cure53 * fine-grained access control * identity proofs with controllable visibility * encrypted applications like calendar, chat, social media, text editor, video streamer, PDF viewer, kanban * custom apps - you can write your own apps for it (HTML5), which run in a sandbox which you can grant various permissions * designed with quantum resistance in mind You can read more in our tech book (https://book.peergos.org https://book.peergos.org) or source (https://github.com/peergos/peergos https://github.com/peergos/peergos) Disclaimer: co-founder here
  - kitkat_new 4y ago
    can communication happen across servers/vendors like in Matrix?
    - ianopolous 4y ago
      Yes, it's P2P. Anyone on any server can share and communicate with anyone on any other server. You can also migrate server unilaterally and keep your social graph without needing to tell everyone, all links to your stuff continue to work afterwards.
  - jabbany 4y ago
    Hmm, I'm looking for a Keybase replacement but one of the main reasons I use Keybase is their native apps that let you mount the cloud storage as a FUSE or FUSE-like (Dokan) native storage device. This is great for distributing encrypted keychains/configuration files and the such across various platforms (where many apps are not cloud-aware but are happy interacting with the filesystem). So far the "mount" approach seems to have also performed considerably better than syncing-based services (dropbox, G drive, OneDrive etc.) which from time to time have resulted in hard to untangle merge errors. Peergos looks promising but it also looks to be a web-only service, so not exactly a replacement yet. Would be nice to see an option for local native mounting. Preferably via a native app with a FUSE-like mount point, but I'd also probably be OK with something like WebDAV maybe.
- autoexec 4y ago
  Lately I've been pretty happy with Jami. It's still a little unpolished, but it's been good to me so far.
Jenk 4y ago
where does Telegram fit in your opinion? genuine question from someone oblivious to messaging advances in the last decade.
- laurex 4y ago
  This article is worth a read on that front: https://www.wired.com/story/how-telegram-became-anti-facebook/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-telegram-became-anti-faceboo...
- smegsicle 4y ago
  telegram "supports" e2e encryption, but it is frustrating to use and is not enabled by default
  - tptacek 4y ago
    Last time I checked, it also doesn't work for group chats. Has that changed?
- pr0zac 4y ago
  Telegram only provides e2e encryption for one-to-one conversations and only if you specifically create a "secret chat" largely because of usability and discoverability reasons with regard to their major point of focus. Its probably better discussed in comparison to other services like IRC, Matrix, Discord, or Slack that concentrate on feature rich group chat implementation with easy discoverability, organization, and mobility for which encryption either does not exist or is an opt-in or bolt-on feature. Services like Signal, Whatsapp, Keybase, or iMessage that provide e2e encryption for all chats, group or otherwise, (albeit with differing levels of implementation security) have chosen to do so at the expense of things like mobility of chat history across devices and the ability to easily discover and join new group chats and instead focus on a less organized, more ad-hoc form of messaging that's a rather different use case than Telegram's.
  - theK 4y ago
    Doesn’t matrix also do all that with the added benefit of federated Id and pulling Chat history from an e2e group chat?
skybrian 4y ago
Isn't Keybase semi-abandoned? There hasn't been a blog post since 2020 when they were acquired by Zoom.
- dcow 4y ago
  I got a 6.0.1 update for Keybase like yesterday. I agree with the sentiment, though, feels like it's in maintenance mode. But its core value prop and feature has never stopped working. Point was that it's there and it works and if it's the UX model you prefer then by all means, use it at least until someone comes and reboots the concept.
- ls15 4y ago
  Looks mostly abandoned to me: https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/contributors https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/contributors
- miked85 4y ago
  I think a lot of people abandoned it after Zoom acquired it.
  - bigiain 4y ago
    Anecdata point, I jumped ship as soon as that became public. Zoom is a looooong way from having the sort of trust that Signal/WhisperSystems have in my mind. (Which is a pity, I really liked the idea of Keybase.)
robmusial 4y ago
It's interesting to me that you used Keybase as the example. My brain doing its guessing ahead thing assumed you were going to say Matrix. I've seen several popular instances of it, and run in to people actively using it at least monthly where I haven't seen anyone use Keybase in years (since the Zoom acquisition). Do you see a lot of people _actively_ using Keybase still?
- dcow 4y ago
  I don't use Matrix a bunch so it might just be that I'm not as familiar and out of the loop. To me Keybase (despite all the drama) seems like the most isolated/pure example of a product that took the approach of username/password style accounts and applied it to application layer crypto to achieve secure messaging. Keybase later added all the network-y chat type features that make me think more of a product like Matrix. But if Matrix is good for 1:1 "chat up my contacts and groups thereof", then great. Matrix always seemed more like federated Discord or "crypto" IRC to me with the whole needing to join channels thing.
- pzduniak 4y ago
  I personally use it for LOTS of stuff, both personal and commercial (as a Slack replacement). Other than a couple bugs (pinch to zoom on Android, media playback), it's fine - I don't feel like I need any more features, though I'd love it to be a bit snappier. KBFS has been excellent for stuff like secrets in CI pipelines. Disclaimer: I'm one of the ex-Keybase, now Zoom people. I'm definitely in a bubble. The non-Keybase people I talk with are my consultancy's employees + a couple clients. Keybase's security model is excellent in protecting you from attacks like the one described in the OP. If you can't sign your device with another one, you can only recover a username if: - it's not in [lockdown mode](https://book.keybase.io/docs/lockdown https://book.keybase.io/docs/lockdown) - it has a verified email / phone number - you either click a reset link in the email / SMS _or_ know the password - _and_ the user fails to cancel the reset over many days of warnings. And if you manage to go through all that trouble, all your contacts will get blasted with warnings about your identity. Fun!
Iv 4y ago
Matrix is the protocol I think one should go to if Signal's requirement of phone numbers is a turn down.
- tptacek 4y ago
  Matrix is great. Just remember that the Matrix threat model isn't the Signal threat model: you're usually telling a Matrix instance --- or, really, anyone who can compromise or suborn that instance --- a lot more about your communication patterns than you are with Signal. Matrix, right now, is a lot more amenable to the kinds of messaging that people on HN tend to want to do than Signal is. The problematic thing is that HN people tend to believe that their workflows are (1) the most important and (2) the ones with the most sophisticated threat models. Neither are true; (2) is very un-true. For, like, talking to team members about a shared dev project, I'd always use Matrix in preference to Signal --- of course, for that kind of work, what I'd really do is just use Slack or Discord. Which gets at something about what HN wants from Signal.
  - mikro2nd 4y ago
    Interesting work in this space is being done by OpenPrivacy with their "cwtch" app. An express design goal is to minimise side-channel leakage of information.
- NoToP 4y ago
  If the phone number requirement is the only part you dislike, buy a tourist Sim card with cash. The greatest lie of online identity is that phone numbers are tied to individuals forever.
  - zaik 4y ago
    That's a lot of work considering XMPP or Matrix providers get this right.
stormbrew 4y ago
> If this is the product you want, then go use it. This is great advice if your goal is to send messages to yourself. In the real world, though, a messaging app that you're the only one using is about as useful as a bag of ice in a snowstorm. People don't need "like signal but with usernames," they need "signal with usernames (or email addresses or...)" so they can communicate with people who use signal.
- dcow 4y ago
  This doesn't make any sense. My assertion is that Signal would not be Signal if it has usernames. The subtext that I did not state specifically is exactly the question of why more people don't use Keybase regularly. Maybe it's not the winning UX? You don't get to look over at Signal and say "wow what a great user base I need to be a part of that" and then draw the conclusion that "Signal needs to support my idealogical aversion to using a phone number". You're missing the possibility that Signing is the way it is because it requires users to verify their phone number. If you can't use a phone number but need to talk to people who do, securely, then you need to convince them to use a product that accommodates your niche. Why can't you use PGP and email, or Keybase, or <insert one of the 10s of other products that let you send encrypted messages>? Sure, signal could add support for usernames. But how do you know there'd be anyone left after they did for you to talk to? Maybe it's not what Signal's users need. Anyway, if Signal found a way to support usernames that didn't compromise on all the reasons I use signal and also didn't open the network up for tons of spam and low quality content, I don't think I'd complain. But that's a big IF.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - stormbrew 4y ago
    fwiw I am a user of signal and I am expressing my need. Allowing it access to my contact list and my phone number is a privilege I extend nearly uniquely to it among similar apps and I want that gone. Because I can't just "not use signal," because signal is where the people I need to talk to are. Users are a key feature of any social product, you can't just "all else equal" them away. It's not really my problem if it's hard. That's for them to figure out. Until they do I will continue to be an unhappy user of their product, and no amount of people on the internet willing to defend their choices as if they were their own is going to change that.
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
> 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. cool, but entire carriers being compromised has never been a concern. it's state agencies forcing carriers to compromise individuals. >I don't understand why everyone wants Signal to be something it's not we don't. we just warn people against using it. it's not a privacy tool, it's a larp toy like a commercial VPN.
- deleted 4y ago
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- dcow 4y ago
  Doesn't everyone get notified when your verification status changes? Don't you need to rescan people's security numbers or whatever they call it? If this is truly a gripe you have couldn't signal also add some sort of delay to the re-verification process so that device resets take weeks to be trusted and with lots of warning and opportunities for both parties to disengage before any hostile actor takes over? As far as I'm away, Signal is used by plenty of people who may be targeted by state agencies. Has there been even one "High value target apprehended because Signal" headline?
  - bigiain 4y ago
    > Has there been even one "High value target apprehended because Signal" headline? There have been a few "high value target apprehended because AN0M" headlines, and if you keep an eye out for it way more headlines/articles where you go "Yeah, that's totally another AN0M bust they just haven't publicly attributed it". I also suspect (but have nothing more than suspicion to go on here) that companies like NSO can probably exploit phones deeply enough that they can exfiltrate screenshots of Signal. But that they do so at such high prices that it is rarely used and even more rarely hinted at publicly.
hayst4ck 4y ago
I don't think it's stated enough just how easy signal is as a drop in replacement for WhatsApp, the main communication method for a significant portion of the world. The ability to install a new app, use your phones contact database, and be able to use the app nearly exactly the same way you used WhatsApp is an incredible feature. With almost zero effort you can significantly reduce (capitalist or nationstate) surveillance against you. It's not perfect but it's a lot of value for little effort. All of these feature requests require less knowledgeable users to do new things or weigh alternative options which involves time spent developing onboarding. Having "one way," an opinionated way, to do a particular type of thing is a very useful engineering value especially if you have limited engineering resources. Simplicity is an extremely underrated feature. Being 80% perfect for 20% of the work is laudable. What's even better about Signal is that Facebook's competitive data is the list of people you know. Facebook wins every time a person adds a friend without adding their contact info to their phone. That means Facebook is the source of truth for who you know and Facebook is the intermediary for communicating with someone else. That's why, in retrospect, whatsapp was an obvious competitor worth spending a lot of money acquiring. WhatsApp drove people to use their phones contact list as the source of truth for you who communicate with, not Facebook's friend list.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  A drop-in replacement would mean that you can still communicate with people on WhatsApp. Matrix protocol allows you to bridge WhatsApp and many other SaaS comms platforms to a single client, truly making is a drop-in replacement for WhatsApp.
  - hayst4ck 4y ago
    I installed signal and it worked. I told a friend to install signal and it worked. I told my mom to install signal and it worked. The interface was basically the same. Any friend who installed it appeared the same way they would appear in WhatsApp. I didn't have to teach any of these people anything to get them to use it. I didn't have to talk them into making an account to use it. That is what I mean by drop in. It's not a drop in for the behavior (talk to other people who use Facebook owned services in a way where Facebook can read all of your conversations), it's a drop in for interface (communicate with others who use the app in the same way you communicated with others using WhatsApp). I just spent time looking at matrix. google "matrix" oh right, name space collision with popular 90s movie google "matrix app" oh, this is some library or something, not an app searching the page for client. "Maybe under matrix live?" see clients button in sub menu see 10 plus options I don't recognize the name of and immediately lose interest search "matrix" on app store see apps with 2 stars or less than 10 reviews, nothing official. Matrix is what you get from the people who say "isn't Dropbox just rsync?" "isn't a chat client just a GUI for a protocol?" 100 bespoke solutions to the same problem (10 different desktop clients) is an engineering nightmare and it robs a service of "economies of scale" enabled improvements. I don't want to read a wall of text to understand something and neither does my mom. We want to search a keyword (or "best chat app"), download an app, and use it for its purpose. That might not be optimal, but you won't see wide spread adoption without it. If you tell me "matrix is best for chat" and I can't search for matrix on google, one click download a client, and be chatting with another person who did the same with minimal setup, it's not just a non starter as far as getting widespread adoption, but it's very far from "drop in." I don't personally have a single friend who has asked me to use matrix/a matrix client, or told me how awesome matrix is. Matrix supporters should ask themselves why the main place you ever see Matrix mentioned on hacker news is in posts about Signal. Protocols don't win customers, user interfaces do. The average end user wants to download an app and use it without having to understand what "federation" or what the security implications of something is or who owns what data. They want their most knowledgeable friend (or reddit/hn) to tell them what to use and then use it and trust that they know what they are talking about. I'm pretty confident that as long as this page: https://matrix.org/clients/ https://matrix.org/clients/ looks like that, matrix will never see widespread adoption and it will never be the obvious choice except among the people who prefer to move their documents around with rsync and know what IRC is. Matrix being a brand for a protocol rather than a full chat app is another self harm. The customer for a protocol is software engineers. The customer for a chat app is all humans with a phone.
baby 4y ago
The reality is that there's room for a new messaging app that uses username, has good UI, and is secure. Perhaps wire is that app?
jwr 4y ago
> It's really difficult to build a useable security product, and Signal has done it successfully. I'd argue it hasn't. Signal still has no way of backing up your chat history (with photos, etc). Lose your phone and it's all gone forever. The PIN that the app annoyingly tells you to set up does not serve as an encryption key for your backups. There are no backups. Once again, if your phone dies (this happened to me recently), all your data in Signal is gone forever. And there is no way to prevent that. In this day and age, I consider this unacceptable. That is not a "useable security product".
- crtasm 4y ago
  Signal on my Android phone makes an encrypted backup every day, this includes photos and I can copy the file off my phone if I desire (plus I point the backups to my microsd card which should still be good if the phone dies).
- foo92691 4y ago
  Those are features.
- bigiain 4y ago
  > I consider this unacceptable. On the other hand, I consider this a feature. I'm not saying you are wrong, but I am saying different people have different ideas and requirements about how they want things like this to work. For me, most of my Signal chats have disappearing messages enabled, to intentionally ensure there is no long term archive of conversations (assuming you trust the other people to not be screenshotting everything). It gets you into the habit of storing message that may be useful later (mostly for me stuff like event details or addresses), with the benefit of making everybody in the conversation a little more inclined to treat it all as ephemeral and be somewhat more candid then you might be in SMS or email. Not _quite_ as candid as face to face in private, but closer. There's a widely used and agreed on signal for most of my group chats, where setting disappearing messages to 5 minutes is understood to mean "juicy gossip or legal grey area chat is about to follow" and setting it back to 8 hours or 1 week means "OK, we're done with that discussion, back to regular chat".
  - 4y ago
1ark 4y ago
There is also Session (getsession.org) which is a fork of Signal without phone numbers or centralization.
- wallmountedtv 4y ago
  Too bad it is owned by a crypto company, Loki.
  - 1ark 4y ago
    What's the issue with that?

by dcow 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

MikeKusold 4y ago

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Yeah 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.
  - irfwashere 4y ago
    Why doesn't anyone ever consider XMPP using one of the many clients like gajim, conversations, etc.? It's got all of the encryption features anyone would want but has zero mentions as a secure messaging option.
- ianopolous 4y ago
  I've replied in a sibling comment about Peergos which is trying to do just that.
  - dcow 4y ago
    Definitely checking it out, thanks!
schlauerfox 4y ago
It's kept updated, we use it to interact with the Chia Blockchain team heavily and you just can't substitute for its identity feature to know who you're talking to.
- Y-bar 4y ago
  Barely so. looks more like bare minimum life support. The slump in code contributions can speak for themselves after the acquisition. https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/contributors https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/contributors
ianopolous 4y ago
If you're looking for a Keybase replacement, check out Peergos (https://peergos.org https://peergos.org). Peergos is a P2P E2EE global filesystem and application protocol that's: * fully open source (including the server) and self hostable * has a business model of charging for a hosted version * designed so that you don't need to trust your server * audited by Cure53 * fine-grained access control * identity proofs with controllable visibility * encrypted applications like calendar, chat, social media, text editor, video streamer, PDF viewer, kanban * custom apps - you can write your own apps for it (HTML5), which run in a sandbox which you can grant various permissions * designed with quantum resistance in mind You can read more in our tech book (https://book.peergos.org https://book.peergos.org) or source (https://github.com/peergos/peergos https://github.com/peergos/peergos) Disclaimer: co-founder here
- kitkat_new 4y ago
  can communication happen across servers/vendors like in Matrix?
  - ianopolous 4y ago
    Yes, it's P2P. Anyone on any server can share and communicate with anyone on any other server. You can also migrate server unilaterally and keep your social graph without needing to tell everyone, all links to your stuff continue to work afterwards.
- jabbany 4y ago
  Hmm, I'm looking for a Keybase replacement but one of the main reasons I use Keybase is their native apps that let you mount the cloud storage as a FUSE or FUSE-like (Dokan) native storage device. This is great for distributing encrypted keychains/configuration files and the such across various platforms (where many apps are not cloud-aware but are happy interacting with the filesystem). So far the "mount" approach seems to have also performed considerably better than syncing-based services (dropbox, G drive, OneDrive etc.) which from time to time have resulted in hard to untangle merge errors. Peergos looks promising but it also looks to be a web-only service, so not exactly a replacement yet. Would be nice to see an option for local native mounting. Preferably via a native app with a FUSE-like mount point, but I'd also probably be OK with something like WebDAV maybe.
autoexec 4y ago
Lately I've been pretty happy with Jami. It's still a little unpolished, but it's been good to me so far.

Jenk 4y ago

where does Telegram fit in your opinion? genuine question from someone oblivious to messaging advances in the last decade.

laurex 4y ago
This article is worth a read on that front: https://www.wired.com/story/how-telegram-became-anti-facebook/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-telegram-became-anti-faceboo...
smegsicle 4y ago
telegram "supports" e2e encryption, but it is frustrating to use and is not enabled by default
- tptacek 4y ago
  Last time I checked, it also doesn't work for group chats. Has that changed?
pr0zac 4y ago
Telegram only provides e2e encryption for one-to-one conversations and only if you specifically create a "secret chat" largely because of usability and discoverability reasons with regard to their major point of focus. Its probably better discussed in comparison to other services like IRC, Matrix, Discord, or Slack that concentrate on feature rich group chat implementation with easy discoverability, organization, and mobility for which encryption either does not exist or is an opt-in or bolt-on feature. Services like Signal, Whatsapp, Keybase, or iMessage that provide e2e encryption for all chats, group or otherwise, (albeit with differing levels of implementation security) have chosen to do so at the expense of things like mobility of chat history across devices and the ability to easily discover and join new group chats and instead focus on a less organized, more ad-hoc form of messaging that's a rather different use case than Telegram's.
- theK 4y ago
  Doesn’t matrix also do all that with the added benefit of federated Id and pulling Chat history from an e2e group chat?

skybrian 4y ago

Isn't Keybase semi-abandoned? There hasn't been a blog post since 2020 when they were acquired by Zoom.

dcow 4y ago
I got a 6.0.1 update for Keybase like yesterday. I agree with the sentiment, though, feels like it's in maintenance mode. But its core value prop and feature has never stopped working. Point was that it's there and it works and if it's the UX model you prefer then by all means, use it at least until someone comes and reboots the concept.
ls15 4y ago
Looks mostly abandoned to me: https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/contributors https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/contributors
miked85 4y ago
I think a lot of people abandoned it after Zoom acquired it.
- bigiain 4y ago
  Anecdata point, I jumped ship as soon as that became public. Zoom is a looooong way from having the sort of trust that Signal/WhisperSystems have in my mind. (Which is a pity, I really liked the idea of Keybase.)

robmusial 4y ago

It's interesting to me that you used Keybase as the example. My brain doing its guessing ahead thing assumed you were going to say Matrix. I've seen several popular instances of it, and run in to people actively using it at least monthly where I haven't seen anyone use Keybase in years (since the Zoom acquisition). Do you see a lot of people _actively_ using Keybase still?

dcow 4y ago
I don't use Matrix a bunch so it might just be that I'm not as familiar and out of the loop. To me Keybase (despite all the drama) seems like the most isolated/pure example of a product that took the approach of username/password style accounts and applied it to application layer crypto to achieve secure messaging. Keybase later added all the network-y chat type features that make me think more of a product like Matrix. But if Matrix is good for 1:1 "chat up my contacts and groups thereof", then great. Matrix always seemed more like federated Discord or "crypto" IRC to me with the whole needing to join channels thing.
pzduniak 4y ago
I personally use it for LOTS of stuff, both personal and commercial (as a Slack replacement). Other than a couple bugs (pinch to zoom on Android, media playback), it's fine - I don't feel like I need any more features, though I'd love it to be a bit snappier. KBFS has been excellent for stuff like secrets in CI pipelines. Disclaimer: I'm one of the ex-Keybase, now Zoom people. I'm definitely in a bubble. The non-Keybase people I talk with are my consultancy's employees + a couple clients. Keybase's security model is excellent in protecting you from attacks like the one described in the OP. If you can't sign your device with another one, you can only recover a username if: - it's not in [lockdown mode](https://book.keybase.io/docs/lockdown https://book.keybase.io/docs/lockdown) - it has a verified email / phone number - you either click a reset link in the email / SMS _or_ know the password - _and_ the user fails to cancel the reset over many days of warnings. And if you manage to go through all that trouble, all your contacts will get blasted with warnings about your identity. Fun!

Iv 4y ago

Matrix is the protocol I think one should go to if Signal's requirement of phone numbers is a turn down.

tptacek 4y ago
Matrix is great. Just remember that the Matrix threat model isn't the Signal threat model: you're usually telling a Matrix instance --- or, really, anyone who can compromise or suborn that instance --- a lot more about your communication patterns than you are with Signal. Matrix, right now, is a lot more amenable to the kinds of messaging that people on HN tend to want to do than Signal is. The problematic thing is that HN people tend to believe that their workflows are (1) the most important and (2) the ones with the most sophisticated threat models. Neither are true; (2) is very un-true. For, like, talking to team members about a shared dev project, I'd always use Matrix in preference to Signal --- of course, for that kind of work, what I'd really do is just use Slack or Discord. Which gets at something about what HN wants from Signal.
- mikro2nd 4y ago
  Interesting work in this space is being done by OpenPrivacy with their "cwtch" app. An express design goal is to minimise side-channel leakage of information.
NoToP 4y ago
If the phone number requirement is the only part you dislike, buy a tourist Sim card with cash. The greatest lie of online identity is that phone numbers are tied to individuals forever.
- zaik 4y ago
  That's a lot of work considering XMPP or Matrix providers get this right.

stormbrew 4y ago

> If this is the product you want, then go use it. This is great advice if your goal is to send messages to yourself. In the real world, though, a messaging app that you're the only one using is about as useful as a bag of ice in a snowstorm. People don't need "like signal but with usernames," they need "signal with usernames (or email addresses or...)" so they can communicate with people who use signal.

dcow 4y ago
This doesn't make any sense. My assertion is that Signal would not be Signal if it has usernames. The subtext that I did not state specifically is exactly the question of why more people don't use Keybase regularly. Maybe it's not the winning UX? You don't get to look over at Signal and say "wow what a great user base I need to be a part of that" and then draw the conclusion that "Signal needs to support my idealogical aversion to using a phone number". You're missing the possibility that Signing is the way it is because it requires users to verify their phone number. If you can't use a phone number but need to talk to people who do, securely, then you need to convince them to use a product that accommodates your niche. Why can't you use PGP and email, or Keybase, or <insert one of the 10s of other products that let you send encrypted messages>? Sure, signal could add support for usernames. But how do you know there'd be anyone left after they did for you to talk to? Maybe it's not what Signal's users need. Anyway, if Signal found a way to support usernames that didn't compromise on all the reasons I use signal and also didn't open the network up for tons of spam and low quality content, I don't think I'd complain. But that's a big IF.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- stormbrew 4y ago
  fwiw I am a user of signal and I am expressing my need. Allowing it access to my contact list and my phone number is a privilege I extend nearly uniquely to it among similar apps and I want that gone. Because I can't just "not use signal," because signal is where the people I need to talk to are. Users are a key feature of any social product, you can't just "all else equal" them away. It's not really my problem if it's hard. That's for them to figure out. Until they do I will continue to be an unhappy user of their product, and no amount of people on the internet willing to defend their choices as if they were their own is going to change that.

throwaway0x7E6 4y ago

> 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. cool, but entire carriers being compromised has never been a concern. it's state agencies forcing carriers to compromise individuals. >I don't understand why everyone wants Signal to be something it's not we don't. we just warn people against using it. it's not a privacy tool, it's a larp toy like a commercial VPN.

deleted 4y ago
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dcow 4y ago
Doesn't everyone get notified when your verification status changes? Don't you need to rescan people's security numbers or whatever they call it? If this is truly a gripe you have couldn't signal also add some sort of delay to the re-verification process so that device resets take weeks to be trusted and with lots of warning and opportunities for both parties to disengage before any hostile actor takes over? As far as I'm away, Signal is used by plenty of people who may be targeted by state agencies. Has there been even one "High value target apprehended because Signal" headline?
- bigiain 4y ago
  > Has there been even one "High value target apprehended because Signal" headline? There have been a few "high value target apprehended because AN0M" headlines, and if you keep an eye out for it way more headlines/articles where you go "Yeah, that's totally another AN0M bust they just haven't publicly attributed it". I also suspect (but have nothing more than suspicion to go on here) that companies like NSO can probably exploit phones deeply enough that they can exfiltrate screenshots of Signal. But that they do so at such high prices that it is rarely used and even more rarely hinted at publicly.

hayst4ck 4y ago

I don't think it's stated enough just how easy signal is as a drop in replacement for WhatsApp, the main communication method for a significant portion of the world. The ability to install a new app, use your phones contact database, and be able to use the app nearly exactly the same way you used WhatsApp is an incredible feature. With almost zero effort you can significantly reduce (capitalist or nationstate) surveillance against you. It's not perfect but it's a lot of value for little effort. All of these feature requests require less knowledgeable users to do new things or weigh alternative options which involves time spent developing onboarding. Having "one way," an opinionated way, to do a particular type of thing is a very useful engineering value especially if you have limited engineering resources. Simplicity is an extremely underrated feature. Being 80% perfect for 20% of the work is laudable. What's even better about Signal is that Facebook's competitive data is the list of people you know. Facebook wins every time a person adds a friend without adding their contact info to their phone. That means Facebook is the source of truth for who you know and Facebook is the intermediary for communicating with someone else. That's why, in retrospect, whatsapp was an obvious competitor worth spending a lot of money acquiring. WhatsApp drove people to use their phones contact list as the source of truth for you who communicate with, not Facebook's friend list.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
A drop-in replacement would mean that you can still communicate with people on WhatsApp. Matrix protocol allows you to bridge WhatsApp and many other SaaS comms platforms to a single client, truly making is a drop-in replacement for WhatsApp.
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  I installed signal and it worked. I told a friend to install signal and it worked. I told my mom to install signal and it worked. The interface was basically the same. Any friend who installed it appeared the same way they would appear in WhatsApp. I didn't have to teach any of these people anything to get them to use it. I didn't have to talk them into making an account to use it. That is what I mean by drop in. It's not a drop in for the behavior (talk to other people who use Facebook owned services in a way where Facebook can read all of your conversations), it's a drop in for interface (communicate with others who use the app in the same way you communicated with others using WhatsApp). I just spent time looking at matrix. google "matrix" oh right, name space collision with popular 90s movie google "matrix app" oh, this is some library or something, not an app searching the page for client. "Maybe under matrix live?" see clients button in sub menu see 10 plus options I don't recognize the name of and immediately lose interest search "matrix" on app store see apps with 2 stars or less than 10 reviews, nothing official. Matrix is what you get from the people who say "isn't Dropbox just rsync?" "isn't a chat client just a GUI for a protocol?" 100 bespoke solutions to the same problem (10 different desktop clients) is an engineering nightmare and it robs a service of "economies of scale" enabled improvements. I don't want to read a wall of text to understand something and neither does my mom. We want to search a keyword (or "best chat app"), download an app, and use it for its purpose. That might not be optimal, but you won't see wide spread adoption without it. If you tell me "matrix is best for chat" and I can't search for matrix on google, one click download a client, and be chatting with another person who did the same with minimal setup, it's not just a non starter as far as getting widespread adoption, but it's very far from "drop in." I don't personally have a single friend who has asked me to use matrix/a matrix client, or told me how awesome matrix is. Matrix supporters should ask themselves why the main place you ever see Matrix mentioned on hacker news is in posts about Signal. Protocols don't win customers, user interfaces do. The average end user wants to download an app and use it without having to understand what "federation" or what the security implications of something is or who owns what data. They want their most knowledgeable friend (or reddit/hn) to tell them what to use and then use it and trust that they know what they are talking about. I'm pretty confident that as long as this page: https://matrix.org/clients/ https://matrix.org/clients/ looks like that, matrix will never see widespread adoption and it will never be the obvious choice except among the people who prefer to move their documents around with rsync and know what IRC is. Matrix being a brand for a protocol rather than a full chat app is another self harm. The customer for a protocol is software engineers. The customer for a chat app is all humans with a phone.

baby 4y ago

The reality is that there's room for a new messaging app that uses username, has good UI, and is secure. Perhaps wire is that app?

jwr 4y ago

> It's really difficult to build a useable security product, and Signal has done it successfully. I'd argue it hasn't. Signal still has no way of backing up your chat history (with photos, etc). Lose your phone and it's all gone forever. The PIN that the app annoyingly tells you to set up does not serve as an encryption key for your backups. There are no backups. Once again, if your phone dies (this happened to me recently), all your data in Signal is gone forever. And there is no way to prevent that. In this day and age, I consider this unacceptable. That is not a "useable security product".

crtasm 4y ago
Signal on my Android phone makes an encrypted backup every day, this includes photos and I can copy the file off my phone if I desire (plus I point the backups to my microsd card which should still be good if the phone dies).
foo92691 4y ago
Those are features.
bigiain 4y ago
> I consider this unacceptable. On the other hand, I consider this a feature. I'm not saying you are wrong, but I am saying different people have different ideas and requirements about how they want things like this to work. For me, most of my Signal chats have disappearing messages enabled, to intentionally ensure there is no long term archive of conversations (assuming you trust the other people to not be screenshotting everything). It gets you into the habit of storing message that may be useful later (mostly for me stuff like event details or addresses), with the benefit of making everybody in the conversation a little more inclined to treat it all as ephemeral and be somewhat more candid then you might be in SMS or email. Not _quite_ as candid as face to face in private, but closer. There's a widely used and agreed on signal for most of my group chats, where setting disappearing messages to 5 minutes is understood to mean "juicy gossip or legal grey area chat is about to follow" and setting it back to 8 hours or 1 week means "OK, we're done with that discussion, back to regular chat".
- 4y ago

1ark 4y ago

There is also Session (getsession.org) which is a fork of Signal without phone numbers or centralization.

wallmountedtv 4y ago
Too bad it is owned by a crypto company, Loki.
- 1ark 4y ago
  What's the issue with that?