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If Signal is secure really depends on your threat model. While they never classified them as data breaches, they had all the numbers in their system extracted
by O__________O 4y ago
If Signal is secure really depends on your threat model.
While they never classified them as data breaches, they had all the numbers in their system extracted number of times.
If someone was using a real phone number, even if Signal was secure — just knowing the number alone would give an attacker addition information. When Moxie was in charge, he repeatedly refused to allow new users to signup without phone, even though in there numerous ways this could have been done and are being done by their competition.
Lastly, all three Signal board members have held the top leadership role in past year, which is highly unusual, in fact, never heard of anything like it.
- tptacek 4y agoSignal's non-phone-number-keeping competition keeps a plaintext database of every pair of users that has ever communicated. The reason Signal uses phone numbers is the same as it has always been: to avoid having that database at all, or features that depend on it.
- cosentiyes 4y agoWhat features depend on the use of a phone number? Sign up and contact discovery? I don’t understand why a plaintext database is the alternative.
- tptacek 4y agoYour Signal contact list is your device's contact list, keyed by phone numbers.
- O__________O 4y agoFor clarity, this assumes you allow Signal access to the device’s contact list, which is not required.
- palata 4y agoFor clarity, you allow the open source client app (which you can audit and compile yourself) to securely share your contact list with a secure enclave (which is open source so you can audit it as well).
- O__________O 4y agoThe client-side contact list is one of two lists: (a) device’s contact list if Signal is given access — or (b) list of numbers that have manually been add to the App and Signal is not given access to device’s contact list because user declined providing it access. Also, might be wrong, but appears Signal’s secure enclave, which is based on Intel’s SGX technology, is known to be vulnerable to side-channel attacks and Intel’s SGX code & hardware is not open source: https://medium.com/@maniacbolts/signal-increases-their-reliance-on-sgx-f46378f336d3 https://medium.com/@maniacbolts/signal-increases-their-relia...
- palata 4y agoYep, you have to trust the secure enclave for this to work!
- O__________O 4y agoNo, you have to trust anyone with access to the server; secure enclave provides no security given it appears it is vulnerable to side channel attacks; see comment you just replied to for related link. Basically all it does is given Signal plausible deniability for public search warrants: https://signal.org/bigbrother/ https://signal.org/bigbrother/ It would do nothing to stop national security letters. Basically, you should assume the functionality provided by the secure enclave is only in name; given the NSA ATT national security letters enabled both physical access and system modifications, see no reason to believe others would not be required to do so as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A Again, average person does not have a threat model that makes this relevant, but to say Signal does not have access to the SGX data is purely based on trust, not mathematical proofs.
- lukeschlather 4y agoMost of Signal's "competitors" don't just keep a plaintext database of every pair of users that have communicated, they keep a plaintext database of every conversation. (GChat is at least good about making expiring conversations visible and easy.) There's not necessarily "alternatives" most of the competitors offer a much richer feature set and Signal has stripped away those features down to what they see as the bare minimum.
- tptacek 4y agoIt would be more accurate to say that Signal has stripped its features down to those it can implement safely without keeping serverside databases of communications metadata. It's surprisingly hard to do that, and so Signal has noticeably fewer features than things like Matrix, which suffered calamitous security vulnerabilities as a result.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jiveturkey 4y ago
- ysnp 4y agoDidn't moxie explicitly say Signal needed to now keep your contacts list in their servers via PINs/SVR? It is encrypted of course, and they feel they had to do that to enable identifiers not based on phone numbers. Some people disagreed on that last point.