4 ms·

I'm not comparing to some absolutely maximalist alternative. I'm asking how you get an equivalent product experience without the compromise (which would make ev

by dcow 4y ago

I'm not comparing to some absolutely maximalist alternative. I'm asking how you get an equivalent product experience without the compromise (which would make everyone happy). I strongly believe the UX afforded by the compromise is how Signal has won all its users. The threat model and all it entails is the value prop. I genuinely believe there is a lot of commentary on this thread from people who have never designed a secure system. You never get 100% security and 100% privacy. Even if you only use public keys, web3 style, you're still a traceable public key--by definition not private. Okay everyone uses a fresh key for every action. Well now you have a problem figuring out who anybody is and whether you should trust them. Either trust isn't self-sovereign or it is. And we've learned time and time again that self-sovereign trust systems are akin to anarchy. Signal leverages the verifiable short identifiers available to a mobile phone, at the expense of 100% perfect anonymity when asking the question "has this phone number used signal". Literally everything beyond that point is 100% secure and as private as two public keys corresponding can be. 1. As a signal user, I don't want to see the threat model weakened so that we can include email anons, personally. 2. Even if we did, I don't understand how doing so in any way solves the privacy issue. How is email any more private than phone? If an email provider got phished people would be yelling the same thing "how could signal be so stupid to use email, don't you know it's insecure". Email providers can still be compelled into shenanigans, too. 3. Signal as a product has to facilitate a key exchange. I'm pretty sure you can checkout their source code and run their protocol and solve the key exchange portion differently if you so desire. You could have "signal without phone numbers or email" tomorrow if you wanted. As long as your users are willing to copy and paste public keys into their messenger, that is. To sum up: the key exchange and distribution is the entire problem. And Signal presents an adequate solution: bind phone numbers to asymmetric crypto, add perfect forward secrecy and give people secure messaging. Surely it's not for everyone, but this incident in my eyes only further validated that this premise is solid.

kortilla 4y ago
You’re angrily lashing out at strawmen to justify why the lookup key is constrained to a phone number. That does not need to be bound to a phone number, it could be an identifier someone just types in. What you’re arguing for is the recovery mechanism to get back online when you lose your private key, which is totally unrelated and could be solved independently for people who choose to give a phone number vs those using an email or some other arbitrary identifier.
- dcow 4y ago
  1. I'm not angry at all. 2. Let me make this clear: an imperative component of signal's product is that the identifier used is verifiable, and that the only thing they store for a period of time is that users in-fact did verify their number. Everyone arguing for typed in identifiers is missing this point. That wouldn't be Signal. That's the core of what I'm saying. That would be something else where people claim short identifiers and then have to share them with each other via some other channel which I'd have to independently verify, etc. 3. Nobody arguing for non-phone-number short identifiers has proposed a solution for how you verify them and manage them that doesn't change Signal's fundamental threat model and information architecture, which, at the end of the day, is what many users are bought into. I use Keybase, feel free to hit me up there if you need a messaging platform with socially verified short identifiers. My proof is in my profile. If you want an unverified short id, email works great, I respond to that too. Point being there are existing options for "type in a short id and send it a message".
  - dcow 4y ago
    Following up on: > Nobody arguing for non-phone-number short identifiers has proposed a solution for how you verify them and manage them that doesn't change Signal's fundamental threat model and information architecture, which, at the end of the day, is what many users are bought into. So it turns out Signal is building support for usernames and their solution is indeed rather involved. In order to achieve usernames they've: 1. added a contacts book and profile 2. added a passpin by introducing Intel as a trusted actor. the pin you enter when using signal is actually your Signal account password 3. presumably adding support for usernames and <TBD> username-based verification They've been working on this for years. They're not just sitting on their hands. So my point seems to stand: it's not just "add a username field and let people type shit in we have input fields amirite". It's a massive overhaul of their fundamental architecture. And sadly it's not happening very publicly because the stuff they're doing to make it happen is also not okay according to the other half of the security community. Carriers? Not okay? Well how about usernames? Oh, you're using 4 digit pins as passwords and SGX to throttle login attempts? Well that's not okay either SGX has been pwned a billion times. Lose/lose for Signal. I pity them, honestly. It sucks. I'm not personally enraged or anything. I think the SGX stuff is actually a pretty cool compromise. But, alas, it's still a compromise in order to make usernames equally feasible as phone numbers. Either way you're compromising. And that's what this thread is about: to make security accessible you can't live in an ivory tower and demand perfection. You have to get down in the field and make compromises in order to build a successful product that people will actually use.
stormbrew 4y ago
> I genuinely believe there is a lot of commentary on this thread from people who have never designed a secure system. Gosh that's quite the conclusion. I hope my employer never finds out about this discovery of my competency based on some comments on a message board. I think you've very much lost the thread of what I'm saying here, because at no point have I suggested anything about 100% security or 100% privacy. It would actually be pretty weird for me to be advocating for that while also asserting that you're making maximalist arguments. I also never said email is inherently more private than phone. I assert that it's a different privacy tradeoff, and one that I'm more comfortable with for various reasons. I could get into those if you want but I don't think they're relevant. (1) is the more interesting question in the end. (3) is just "it's open source you can fix it yourself!" which is .. not very useful on any level. Yes, I can go make my own signal-based platform and talk to precisely no one over it. No I'm not interested in doing that. I've been to the social network rodeo and have the mental scars to prove it. So ok, assuming we go with email addresses as the alternative mechanism, and the email addresses still require verification same as the phone numbers, and you still have to mutually have each other on our contact lists to communicate through signal: How, specifically, has the threat model been weakened?
- dcow 4y ago
  That comment wasn't directed at any single individual. There's just been a lot of "I imagine you can just type in a username and that would all work, QED. Duh." type of comments across the board, hence my broad statement. I agree Signal could add email addresses specifically, if verified and it wouldn't affect the threat model outside of introducing the network to more spam-able identifiers. Like I've said, if they figured out how to do that without degrading the quality of the experience today I doubt I'd be up in arms. I'm working on adding more email addresses to my contacts book, slowly. It probably makes more sense today than it did when Signal was born. It's not about what Signal can and can't do, though. Signal needed a readily available offline locally owned and operated contacts book with to make their product vision work. So they used the one everyone has on their phone and it worked. They upgraded the security of everyone sending sms and mms. I think there's a way to celebrate that while asking for email address support without getting into the ream of "zomg Signal sux because they use gross phone numbers what idiots would design a system like that what a fucking mess of a royal debacle attn. whistle blowers and abortion seekers: signal is not for you". That type of response is what I'm railing against by simply reminding people that Signal is a successful product that does indeed work as advertised and that it doesn't exist in a vacuum.

by dcow 4y ago

kortilla 4y ago

You’re angrily lashing out at strawmen to justify why the lookup key is constrained to a phone number. That does not need to be bound to a phone number, it could be an identifier someone just types in. What you’re arguing for is the recovery mechanism to get back online when you lose your private key, which is totally unrelated and could be solved independently for people who choose to give a phone number vs those using an email or some other arbitrary identifier.

dcow 4y ago
1. I'm not angry at all. 2. Let me make this clear: an imperative component of signal's product is that the identifier used is verifiable, and that the only thing they store for a period of time is that users in-fact did verify their number. Everyone arguing for typed in identifiers is missing this point. That wouldn't be Signal. That's the core of what I'm saying. That would be something else where people claim short identifiers and then have to share them with each other via some other channel which I'd have to independently verify, etc. 3. Nobody arguing for non-phone-number short identifiers has proposed a solution for how you verify them and manage them that doesn't change Signal's fundamental threat model and information architecture, which, at the end of the day, is what many users are bought into. I use Keybase, feel free to hit me up there if you need a messaging platform with socially verified short identifiers. My proof is in my profile. If you want an unverified short id, email works great, I respond to that too. Point being there are existing options for "type in a short id and send it a message".
- dcow 4y ago
  Following up on: > Nobody arguing for non-phone-number short identifiers has proposed a solution for how you verify them and manage them that doesn't change Signal's fundamental threat model and information architecture, which, at the end of the day, is what many users are bought into. So it turns out Signal is building support for usernames and their solution is indeed rather involved. In order to achieve usernames they've: 1. added a contacts book and profile 2. added a passpin by introducing Intel as a trusted actor. the pin you enter when using signal is actually your Signal account password 3. presumably adding support for usernames and <TBD> username-based verification They've been working on this for years. They're not just sitting on their hands. So my point seems to stand: it's not just "add a username field and let people type shit in we have input fields amirite". It's a massive overhaul of their fundamental architecture. And sadly it's not happening very publicly because the stuff they're doing to make it happen is also not okay according to the other half of the security community. Carriers? Not okay? Well how about usernames? Oh, you're using 4 digit pins as passwords and SGX to throttle login attempts? Well that's not okay either SGX has been pwned a billion times. Lose/lose for Signal. I pity them, honestly. It sucks. I'm not personally enraged or anything. I think the SGX stuff is actually a pretty cool compromise. But, alas, it's still a compromise in order to make usernames equally feasible as phone numbers. Either way you're compromising. And that's what this thread is about: to make security accessible you can't live in an ivory tower and demand perfection. You have to get down in the field and make compromises in order to build a successful product that people will actually use.

stormbrew 4y ago

> I genuinely believe there is a lot of commentary on this thread from people who have never designed a secure system. Gosh that's quite the conclusion. I hope my employer never finds out about this discovery of my competency based on some comments on a message board. I think you've very much lost the thread of what I'm saying here, because at no point have I suggested anything about 100% security or 100% privacy. It would actually be pretty weird for me to be advocating for that while also asserting that you're making maximalist arguments. I also never said email is inherently more private than phone. I assert that it's a different privacy tradeoff, and one that I'm more comfortable with for various reasons. I could get into those if you want but I don't think they're relevant. (1) is the more interesting question in the end. (3) is just "it's open source you can fix it yourself!" which is .. not very useful on any level. Yes, I can go make my own signal-based platform and talk to precisely no one over it. No I'm not interested in doing that. I've been to the social network rodeo and have the mental scars to prove it. So ok, assuming we go with email addresses as the alternative mechanism, and the email addresses still require verification same as the phone numbers, and you still have to mutually have each other on our contact lists to communicate through signal: How, specifically, has the threat model been weakened?

dcow 4y ago
That comment wasn't directed at any single individual. There's just been a lot of "I imagine you can just type in a username and that would all work, QED. Duh." type of comments across the board, hence my broad statement. I agree Signal could add email addresses specifically, if verified and it wouldn't affect the threat model outside of introducing the network to more spam-able identifiers. Like I've said, if they figured out how to do that without degrading the quality of the experience today I doubt I'd be up in arms. I'm working on adding more email addresses to my contacts book, slowly. It probably makes more sense today than it did when Signal was born. It's not about what Signal can and can't do, though. Signal needed a readily available offline locally owned and operated contacts book with to make their product vision work. So they used the one everyone has on their phone and it worked. They upgraded the security of everyone sending sms and mms. I think there's a way to celebrate that while asking for email address support without getting into the ream of "zomg Signal sux because they use gross phone numbers what idiots would design a system like that what a fucking mess of a royal debacle attn. whistle blowers and abortion seekers: signal is not for you". That type of response is what I'm railing against by simply reminding people that Signal is a successful product that does indeed work as advertised and that it doesn't exist in a vacuum.