9 ms·
I monitor Russian war channels and some people there insist on using Telegram only for Russian military people. If you use Whatsapp, Ukrainian officers will get
by vbezhenar 4y ago
I monitor Russian war channels and some people there insist on using Telegram only for Russian military people. If you use Whatsapp, Ukrainian officers will get all chats from NATO.
Telegram accounts of opposition were hacked by belarus police as well. It's known and documented.
My takeaway is that for truly private chat one should write his own software using simple crypto without all those fancy clients. Ideally just use one time keys and xor everything. Can do it with pen and paper.
Signal might be safe, but I think it's a honeypot.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- golergka 4y agoBefore doing anything related to security, you should always understand what your threat profile is. If you don't have a real probability that a state actor will go after you, most likely your threat model will include scams and criminals. And unless you're a wealthy individuals, most of these scams will be automated, not hand-tailored.
- ShowalkKama 4y agotelegram isn't e2e encrypted (unless you use secret chats which nobody does (and those do not support more than 2 participants))
- tapoxi 4y agoNot only that but they've made suspicious ties with the Kremlin that resulted in it being unblocked in Russia and have a mysterious source of funding after TON collapsed.
- throwaway13337 4y agoI'd love to hear more about this. I thought Pavel Durov (founder) isn't really welcome in Russia. He seems to have a left a lot of money on the table with his previous company (VK) to get out of there. The interpretation of events with telegram I've always heard has been that Russia tried to block telegram but doing so blocked most of the rest of useful services as telegram was hosted on e.g. AWS. This meant that real work was slowed. In the end, they gave up because continuing the block would mean crippling their access to the internet. I have found it weird that pro-putin russians still use telegram. But it seems like a lack of discipline which is quite the plague of russian military. I'd genuinely love to get good information on this as I use telegram as it is a great piece of technology and wouldn't if it were collaborating with russian government. I think a lot of rumors do not distinguish between russian people and russian government. And that's pretty damaging.
- tapoxi 4y agohttps://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat...
- throwaway13337 4y agoWhile very long, it doesn't look like that article provides anything but speculation. What would you say is the key point? Where's the meat? I know that it would be hard to get good evidence here but I still think the burden of proof lies on the more extreme claim. Which to me is that a company founded by someone fleeing oppression would work directly with the oppressor. The example of messages appearing as 'read' does not imply to me that telegram is working with them - rather that the her app was compromised by other means. Otherwise, why create such a flaw in your monitoring? Meduza - news organization criminally charged in russia operating in latvia - is mostly accessed in russia via telegram. It's hard but not impossible to imagine that the russian government would allow it to remain uncensored.
- tapoxi 4y agoThe agreement with the Russian Government over "Terrorism" cases is not just speculation, but announced by both parties.
- throwaway13337 4y agoThat would be damning if I could find a statement by telegram about how they are working with the russian government to deal with 'terrorism'. I'm seeing quoted statements by the russian government in the article that I cannot verify elsewhere but I'm unable to see telegram making a statement from their side of working with the russian government. I'm truly interested in getting to the bottom of this. This wired piece doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in it's trustworthiness but I'm unable to find something with more concrete sources or at least a better reputation.
- fernandotakai 4y ago
- pdimitar 4y agoInteresting. Where can we read more?
- thewinnie 4y agoCan you read russian or translate it via google translate? https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/friendship-betrayal-claims-3f395bcc95fa https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/friendship-betrayal-clai... while the whole store is about on how Durov tried to sleep with authors wife and tried to put pressure on him using his work position, author did expose facts which very interesting: - telegram office in sankt petersburg sharing same office that mail ru does (and mail ru basically is pro government org) - telegram team still contributes to vkotankte and they do share some software components connect to online messaging - most interesting russian oligarchs has very big influence on the products (vkontakte and telegram). While both productions trying to tell its not true, behind the doors they do have well established process of giving data when certain criterias are met
- seanw444 4y agoI wouldn't say nobody. My parents, SO, and some of my friends all use the encrypted chats. It would be nice if the client made the differences more clear though. Although if it is a honeypot, then they obviously wouldn't want to advertise the workaround.
- officeplant 4y agoIs there a e2e chat program that actually supports encrypted chats with more than 2 people? We've used telegram e2e but its frustrating since you can't see those chats on desktop at all. (for obvious reasons)
- nirvgorilla 4y agoI say again: Jitsi Meet (Open source, self-hosted) has voice/video E2EE (it has text, but is not yet encrypted). No login. No password. No app. All WebRTC. Chrome required since Firefox does not yet seem to support encryption over WebRTC (I think). I set it up from scratch with Debian Linux and Virtualbox in about 30 minutes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rlffwHUchk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rlffwHUchk
- mmcnl 4y agoYes, WhatsApp and Signal. Both use the Signal Protocol.
- xdennis 4y ago> My takeaway is that for truly private chat one should write his own software That's the only way to make sure you're using software you trust, but rolling your own crypto implementations is often not so secure (because of the many pitfalls).
- tpetry 4y agoYou don't have to roll your own crypto. You can e.g. just use libsodium which is designed to be easy-to-use and not possible to use incorrectly.
- atq2119 4y agoUsing libsodium is good advice, but all crypto libraries can be used incorrectly.
- rich_sasha 4y agoI'd have no idea where to start securing an app against side channel hacks. Is the memory encrypted? Should it be? Can other apps access it? E2E might be working fine, its the ends I'd be concerned about.
- tough 4y agoNarcs did this and alas the FBI ended up turning the guy who wrote their software to turn on them all.. so hard for a criminal mastermind to also be a good programmer I think
- tivi 4y agoyou could run your own xmpp or matrix instances.
- orphea 4y ago> Telegram accounts of opposition were hacked by belarus police as well. It's known and documented. No, not really _hacked_. You give your phone unlocked to the police, and they access your Telegram account. You can't refuse, and you probably can imagine why.
- consumer451 4y agohttps://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat...
- anonymoose33282 4y agoI actually wrote to Telegram’s support team to get more info about this, and it seems the article has a lot of errors. The support rep linked me to this, https://telegra.ph/Wired-Errors https://telegra.ph/Wired-Errors which is Telegram’s response to all of it.
- pshirshov 4y ago> as no app can defend against direct access to a device. Of course you can't protect the local data from all the possible attacks but there are many ways to prevent some attacks and complicate others. So this article isn't honest. I kinda don't understand why people trust telegram. Regular messages aren't even encrypted. SMS authentication. Contact harvesting. Mandatory background run permissions (the app would constantly complain if it can't run its background tasks). Then some strange people selling users' metadata. One time I've purchased my location history for ~30 euros in TRX and it was accurate.
- entropyneur 4y agoActually really hacked. What you said also happens of course, but hacks are routine as well. Happened to 2 people I know personally. They do it by intercepting the sms code at the cell operator level.
- 4y ago
- acc_297 4y agoIf you and your group chat friends can meet up in person once to input an agreed upon a ~1Gb one-time-pad then you can exchange uncrackable text messages for years on any insecure channel I’ve long felt that this is the ideal solution for anything super super secret
- layer8 4y agoEveryone in that group also has to manage to keep that 1 GB secret.
- kragen 4y agoalso how do you ensure the messages haven't been corrupted in transit
- layer8 4y agoYou can never ensure that your communication channel isn’t corrupted. But with a one time pad you’ll just receive unreadable garbage then. You‘re also free to sign messages before encryption.
- kragen 4y agoif an adversary xors their guess of part of your message (a crib) and what they want it to say with the one-time-pad ciphertext, they can make it say what they want if the guess is right; this is a general vulnerability with unauthenticated stream ciphers if they guess wrong, there's a little unreadable garbage in the message, but in many scenarios they only have to guess right once so you need some kind of message authenticator like hmac or poly1305, but as i understand it, these lack the absolute security guarantee of a one-time pad
- acc_297 4y agoGood point I guess that’s the same as the “heil h**er” vulnerability Maybe some kind of low density salting would make messages hard to guess but not too hard to read
- grapesurgeon 4y ago[dead]
- YourDadVPN 4y agoLook into Briar
- baynoob 4y agoI don't think anyone can whatsapp chat. Somehow, whats app is the most reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging service today and many just don't know.
- miroljub 4y agoWhatsApp is closed source. For what it's worth, the protocol itself might be impenetrable, but the client itself has access to your decrypted messages and can still decide to send them back to Facebook without your knowledge. The system that depends on a good will and "trust me bro" is not secure by default, even if Meta/Facebook were the most trustworthy company in the world under the most honest legislation.
- lxgr 4y agoOpen vs. closed source is a completely moot point in the context of iOS and Android if your threat model includes vendor/supply chain attacks.
- nicce 4y agoIf you have reproducible builds and you can verify the digest of the app on your phone, difference is like night and day in open-source vs. closed-source projects.
- benhurmarcel 4y ago> Signal might be safe, but I think it's a honeypot. Telegram smells a lot more like a honeypot than Signal
- 4gotunameagain 4y agoBoth could be, just from different queen bees
- kyledrake 4y agoMoxie Marlinspike is a lot of things but I'm pretty confident the queen bee of a honeypot is not one of them.
- timschmidt 4y agohttps://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/127 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/127
- prophesi 4y agoConfused by this; Moxie did eventually concede and provide a signed APK.
- timschmidt 4y agoDrew DeVault took the time to write it up: https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html
- ruszki 4y ago> Truly secure systems don’t require trust. This blatant absolutist statement is completely false. It exactly means, that there is no computer which is secure today. It also means, that it’s pointless to care about security on any phone in existence, because it cannot be achieved that currently.
- lxgr 4y ago> My takeaway is that for truly private chat one should write his own software using simple crypto without all those fancy clients. That‘s actually pretty secure in practice, because you won‘t be communicating with anybody. > Ideally just use one time keys and xor everything. How do you generate the keys? How do you share them? And you only care about encryption, authentication does not matter to you at all? The chance of getting this right as an individual developer, especially given this level of understanding of cryptography, is next to zero.
- m3kw9 4y agoOTP one time pads are uncrackable if is random enough. Hard part is transporting that decoder to someone.
- lxgr 4y agoTextbook one-time pads are trivially malleable. Sometimes non-malleability matters just as much or more than privacy. ("This is POTUS, do$ÿ} launch the nukes!!!")
- brobdingnagians 4y agoIf you are a developer working for the government and in charge of this, please do not make this mistake. If you are the President of the United States and need to send a message like this, please make it completely unambiguous. Maybe repeat it several times and provide a justification.
- lxgr 4y agoI'm fairly confident that the US government, given that it runs the NSA, has access to a textbook or two on applied cryptography and cryptanalysis and does not need to source input on their cryptographic designs from HN :)
- teucris 4y ago> That‘s actually pretty secure in practice, because you won‘t be communicating with anybody. Nice. In all seriousness though, there has to be a way to make a hand-rolled but secure channel. E.g. use standard crypto libraries, hand-exchange keys or key phrases, etc?
- spapas82 4y agoGood old pgp (in the form of using gnupg to send encrypted emails) is safe. Make sure that you trust the correct keys though. Non standard solutions are a recipe for disaster.
- proxysna 4y ago> Telegram accounts of opposition were hacked by belarus police as well. It's known and documented. These were cases when cops either were able to access the device, or were able to intercept sms messages. Notice that that did not happen to those belarus related channels whose admins left the country. For example an ongoing issue [1][2] with one of the admins who left the country, but his identity was found out and now cops are using his brother, who was still in the country, as a lever to make him delete the channel. They can't delete/hack your channel unless you let them. [1] https://mediazona.by/article/2023/02/15/blackmail https://mediazona.by/article/2023/02/15/blackmail [2] https://mediazona.by/news/2023/01/22/belzd https://mediazona.by/news/2023/01/22/belzd
- VincentEvans 4y agoThere’s no need to “hack” anything in Belarus. They simply resort to torture. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/12/23/critics-slam-16-year-term-for-belarus-railway-partisan-a79789 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/12/23/critics-slam-16-ye...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- entropyneur 4y agoThey do both. Source: am Belarusian, both things happened to my friends (specifically with respect to Telegram account access).
- VincentEvans 4y agoI’d prefer to be hacked, given a choice.
- caskstrength 4y agoDid you friends that were hacked had the PIN set for their Telegram accounts? I'm curious whether there is actually a Telegram "hack" or yet another SMS hijacking (via ss7 or by just directly co-opting the telco).
- entropyneur 4y agoBoth hacking victims I personally know didn't have the 2FA password set and were hacked via SMS hijacking. I'm following this pretty closely and so far haven't heard of successful attacks of any other type. One semi-exception is [1], but here the victim's device was captured and most likely used to receive the password reset email. [1] https://habr.com/ru/post/598939/ https://habr.com/ru/post/598939/
- grumple 4y agoIsn't Signal open source? How could it be a honeypot? The community should be able to verify e2e encryption fairly easily.
- vbezhenar 4y agoBugs and backdoors are indistinguishable. No software is bug-free. App stores make repeatable builds hard to achieve. Another vector to introduce changes. Might just be convenient target to attack via other means (e.g. rogue android update targeted for this special app). I'm just a bit paranoid recently, I don't have any proofs or something like that. I, personally, would use Signal today as off-the-shelf easy-to-use solution. But for something that's absolutely must not be disclosed I'd use age (write message in text file, encrypt it via age, send base64. Supports symmetric and asymmetric encryption, schemes are simple enough, software is popular enough and super-focused.
- WolfeReader 4y ago"Signal might be safe, but I think it's a honeypot." Based on what? Signal documents its own encryption process, and you can check the app source code to verify it. https://signal.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet/ https://signal.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet/ Signal is the best choice I know of when I'm looking for the union of 1. True e2e encryption, and 2. Ease of use by non-technical people.
- anonym29 4y agoThe fact that it locks you into using their servers, does not distribute on F-Droid (only Google Play OR an APK with an insecure update mechanism), and has a completely closed-source "abusive message filter" module server side, that could functionally be used for censorship, storing messages for future decryption, or any other number of nefarious purposes - we have no idea since it's not open source (https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server/blob/main/.gitmodules#L1 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server/blob/main/.gitmod...). Additionally, you cannot distribute branded forks or Signal, and if you do fork it, your fork is not allowed to connect to Signal's "official" OWS (open whisper systems) servers - hostility to federation should be viewed with prejudice and suspicion at the very least, it suggests a vested interest in a single point of failure (or control), which goes against user interests. Further reading: https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html
- WolfeReader 4y agoSignal uses Curve25519, AES-256, and HMAC-SHA256 for its e2e encryption. So unless you believe those algorithms are insecure, there's no reason to think that their server setup is a compromise on your messages' security. Fear of "future decryption" applies equally to all forms of encrypted communication, regardless of which servers the messages go through. And since AES-256 is known to resist quantum computing decryption, there's no actual reason to think future decryption will be an issue. Signal has actually been approached by governments for whatever user data they have, and exactly none of it included messages - encrypted or otherwise. https://www.dailydot.com/debug/signal-grand-jury-subpoena-data/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/signal-grand-jury-subpoena-da... As for everything you said about F-Droid and forking, see https://molly.im/ https://molly.im/ . It's not a "branded" fork but it does connect to Signal's servers.
- anonym29 4y agoJust use a open protocol that doesn't lock you into a specific server or client, like XMPP with OMEMO.