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Telegram rolled their own crypto and is used for a lot of intelligence operations like monitoring dissident groups, promoting propaganda, recruiting agents, etc

Telegram rolled their own crypto and is used for a lot of intelligence operations like monitoring dissident groups, promoting propaganda, recruiting agents, etc. That probably explains the push to discredit more private apps like Signal. Researchers of Telegram's protocol have said in some ways it's weaker than TLS. E.g. - https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat... - https://therecord.media/telegram-blocks-chatbots-used-by-ukraine https://therecord.media/telegram-blocks-chatbots-used-by-ukr... - https://www.oporaua.org/en/polit_ad/and-telega-is-still-there-how-telegram-channels-push-pro-russian-narratives-to-the-west-24911 https://www.oporaua.org/en/polit_ad/and-telega-is-still-ther... - https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/05/8/7454849/ https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/05/8/7454849/ - https://time.com/6280190/cia-recruit-russian-spies-telegram/ https://time.com/6280190/cia-recruit-russian-spies-telegram/ - https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/cia-launches-telegram-channel/ https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/cia-launches-telegram-chan... - https://nordvpn.com/blog/is-telegram-safe/ https://nordvpn.com/blog/is-telegram-safe/ - https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/multiple-encryption-flaws-uncovered-in-telegram-messaging-protocol https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/multiple-encryption-flaws...

kaba0 2y ago
“Rolling your own crypto” is discouraged for programmers, not for field experts. It’s not your average joe’s first try at encryption writing a caesar cypher…
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  It's discouraged for field experts too. In practice, real crypto schemes go through several rounds of analysis by multiple teams of experts, often working against each other. It's unusual these days for a single company to come up with a custom crypto scheme. It was probably more usual toward the beginning of cryptography. For example of this sort of vetting, take a look at the standardization around AES or the post-quantum schemes. In crypto you're almost always relying on hardness assumptions that aren't provable yet. So you need to guard against things like accidentally haven chosen the wrong constants that collapse a problem's hardness. Or, more mundanely, making a seemingly reasonable engineering choice that is known to weaken the protocol and which would be caught by a big org with a thorough review, but a startup may not catch.

kaba0 2y ago

“Rolling your own crypto” is discouraged for programmers, not for field experts. It’s not your average joe’s first try at encryption writing a caesar cypher…

ants_everywhere 2y ago
It's discouraged for field experts too. In practice, real crypto schemes go through several rounds of analysis by multiple teams of experts, often working against each other. It's unusual these days for a single company to come up with a custom crypto scheme. It was probably more usual toward the beginning of cryptography. For example of this sort of vetting, take a look at the standardization around AES or the post-quantum schemes. In crypto you're almost always relying on hardness assumptions that aren't provable yet. So you need to guard against things like accidentally haven chosen the wrong constants that collapse a problem's hardness. Or, more mundanely, making a seemingly reasonable engineering choice that is known to weaken the protocol and which would be caught by a big org with a thorough review, but a startup may not catch.