16 ms·
Reviewing the cryptography used by Signal
- pbronez 2y agoConclusion: > I don’t think Signal is perfect, by any means. […] But if you need a tool to communicate privately with your friends and family–even if your chats are boring, mundane, and totally legal–Signal is the best damn choice I can recommend.
- Rhapso 2y agoI enthusiastically recommend using signal for normal communication. So long as using a private messenger is reserved for "illicit" use cases, that meta information of using it is itself a dangerous to the users. https://kmlawfirm.com/2023/02/28/its-not-what-you-say-its-how-you-say-it-encrypted-messaging-as-a-doj-weapon/ https://kmlawfirm.com/2023/02/28/its-not-what-you-say-its-ho... I'll be blunt and say I don't trust governments to "do the right thing" so the only way past this is to normalize using it for all use cases and doing so protects vulnerable people.
- randomNumber7 2y agoIt depends what your goal is. For example in germany, while i wouldnt trust the government, there are some decent laws the founding fathers made after ww2 that are hard to change. So just because you use something like tor, signal is not enough. You need to be proven guilty by harder facts so using this is no danger.
- kvdveer 2y agoHaving good laws is not enough, not even if they are hard to change. The Netherlands had decent legal protections for Jewish people, right up to may 15th 1940. After that, those laws didn't protect any of them.
- newsclues 2y agoPeople are policy. Even with laws on the books, people enforce (or not) the law.
- 91bananas 2y agoSee USA in the year 2025 about those laws the founding fathers put in to place...
- thephyber 2y agoThere are two likely ways I could interpret your parent regarding crime. One is that they worry that if only criminals use the tool, the tool will be targeted by legislators and simple possession/ usage of the tool will eventually be criminalized. The other is that there needs to be a crowd of innocent people to hide the guilty person and make the investigators / prosecutors work hard to find other corroborating evidence of the crime (not just using the channel of comms). A third that has nothing to do with crime is that all people deserve to have strong privacy and we should normalize using a very secure method of comms.
- gear54rus 2y agoI'd be enthusiastically using it for 'normal' communication if they haven't idiotically removed SMS support. Without that, they won't ever reach mass adoption because WhatsApp and Telegram are already there and are superior in basically every way.
- Rhapso 2y agoI think you missed the point. WhatsApp and Telegram don't offer the safety or security Signal does. They removed SMS to preserve that safety and security. It isn't a for profit business. We are the ones motivated to help them get adopted. if donations don't correlate with increased users Signal actually can't tolerate growth. Do whatsapp or telegram have the same models? Can you tell if you are the customer or the product with them?
- fragmede 2y agoGiven that I don't pay to use signal, why should a bunch of words about governence convince me that I'm not the product to signal either?
- Rhapso 2y agoWith that level of nihilism/skepticism why would paying for the privilege give confidence you are not a product? Only a similar pile of words keeps them from double-dipping and making you both customer and product.
- Mistletoe 2y agoThey aren’t superior in the most important way, which is the security and privacy.
- Mistletoe 2y agoIt has spread like wildfire in my friends and family group. It’s amazing how fast a good product that does what people want naturally spreads.
- camgunz 2y agoMy friends and family primarily use Signal and it suits 100% of our needs. It's probably one of the most successful tech decisions I've ever made.
- davidw 2y agoMy one big nitpick with it is that I can't use it from both my Chromebook and phone outside of the 'screencasting' thing where I can access the phone from the Chromebook. But that's kind of clunky. I detest using a phone to write things if there is a keyboard available.
- some_furry 2y agoAgreed. I hate using my phone for most tasks.
- fransje26 2y agoFor what it's worth, I read that some users were successful running the Linux app on their Chromebook. As a disclaimer, I have to add that I do not own a Chromebook myself, so I have no idea if the ability to run Linux apps varies per model.
- casenmgreen 2y agoYes. I worked around this by having two accounts. One other minor problem, you can't type or share anything while a video call is ongoing.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tgalal 2y ago> At this point, we could try to review all of curve25519-dalek for implementation flaws, but that would take a long time and make for an excruciatingly dull read > At some point in the future, I should review curve25519-dalek in detail to ascertain its quality. Not sure if you noticed, signal uses their own fork of curve25519-dalek with "lizard" extension, IIRC primarily for groups: https://github.com/signalapp/curve25519-dalek/tree/main/curve25519-dalek/src/lizard https://github.com/signalapp/curve25519-dalek/tree/main/curv... I guess the diff makes an easier starting point than the entire library. Thank you for the always very informative and insightful posts!
- 999ear-pure 2y agoSignals threat model is fundamentally flawed. If you distrust Signal infrastructure and need E2E to secure yourself then having a closed client from Google Play or App Store in direct control of the developers ensures nothing. XMPP is much more safe and reliable and uses the same encryption technology as Signal, or even Telegram as it allows non-official clients that also support E2E. Signal is useless. That and the fact Signal doesn't even run on some devices, whereas XMPP or Telegram usually will.
- some_furry 2y agohttps://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/
- 999ear-pure 2y agoWith XMPP I can run (and audit) eveything myself. You can't do this with Signal. Some proprietary messenger that's hostile to 3rd party clients aswell as also wanting my phone number will never compete with tried and tested open source technology like XMPP. There is a reason military and government orgs use their own infrastructure.
- some_furry 2y ago> With XMPP I can run (and audit) eveything myself. You're saying this in response a blog post where I basically did an over-the-weekend audit of Signal's cryptography. I don't know if you understand the irony of that. > Some proprietary messenger It's literally GPL free and open source software > that's hostile to 3rd party clients I disagree with Moxie on his stance about XMPP + federation, as I wrote about here (relating to my plans to build E2EE for the Fediverse): https://soatok.blog/2024/08/28/introducing-alacrity-to-federated-cryptography/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/28/introducing-alacrity-to-feder... > aswell as also wanting my phone number I dislike this as well, but since the introduction of usernames, it's at least no longer required to give strangers your phone number to converse with them. > will never compete with tried and tested open source technology like XMPP. The converse is true: XMPP+OMEMO do not qualify as a Signal competitor. I've outlined my reasoning in the linked post. Until the entire ecosystem uses the latest version of the protocol, encryption is always on, and there is no plaintext fallback, XMPP is a poor solution for private communications. > There is a reason military and government orgs use their own infrastructure. Are you insisting that XMPP is "military grade encryption"?
- andix 2y agoI don't get the rant about VPNs. Many ISPs (especially in not so democratic countries) collect a lot of data, and might sell it or store it for access for the authorities. Tor is great for privacy, but usability is poor, it's really slow. VPNs are a great middle ground to just route all your traffic through. And yes, there are better and not so good providers. Some of them take privacy very serious, others not so much (do your research which one to trust). Many users also don't care about privacy so much, they just want to circumvent censorship or geoblocking.
- api 2y agoA middle option, and one that I use, is to run DNS-over-HTTPS on my pi-hole machine to tunnel DNS out. Without DNS information the local ISP can tell a lot less about the sites I'm visiting, since many sites are behind the same CDN IP pools.
- remram 2y agoFrom TFA: > VPNs just provide an encrypted tunnel to another ISP, and therefore do not offer anonymity.
- andix 2y agoVPN providers might be much more trustworthy than other ISPs.
- lordofgibbons 2y agoAre normal people still using Signal? After Signal got rid of SMS supported, everyone I knew just got rid of Signal. I had on-boarded all my friends and family. But now, it's just me and a few techie friends who still use it.
- fransje26 2y ago> Are normal people still using Signal? Some of us do, yes. But maybe we're not normal and we don't know it..
- casenmgreen 2y agoI used it from the early days. Then Signal jumped the shark, with the server-side data forced PIN fiasco - the app had a full page, non-dismissable popup on start which you could only get rid of by agreeing to use and supplying a PIN for server-side data, which meant I could not use Signal. After a month of not being able to use, it went away, but at that point I no longer trusted Signal. I'm also troubled by the year long period where the published source code wasn't updated. I think in general people use WA, but all the people I talk to have Signal as well. I'll be moving on once I put the time in to find a replacement. I know in Switzerland, only Signal is used by State employees - teachers writing to parents and so on.
- JoshTriplett 2y agoSignal now has usernames (not just phone numbers), and has a way to migrate most of your history onto new devices without having to use the terrible backup UX. If it gets to the point of migrating all your media (not just the last N days) as well, it'd be to the point that I'd start asking everyone I know to use it without reservations.
- pixxel 2y ago[dead]
- poincaredisk 2y agoI use it, my friends use it, my family uses it, and it's often the only chat app I have in common with a stranger when I need to keep in touch. I didn't onboard my family, they use it independently. It's quite popular over here.
- HelloUsername 2y agoFor those who don't know what furries are: Joe Goes To CatCon (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxMpdfyofhY?t=550 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxMpdfyofhY?t=550 (at 09:10)
- laserbeam 2y agoAbout a decade ago… I was all up in the craze of checking out different chat platforms and going for the most secure one. Back then, Signal was BY FAR the least stable. I kept loosing messages, had loads of problems using it on both my phone and laptop, and I could not trust it to actually deliver chats to the other person. I know this was a decade ago, I assume things changed, but I couldn’t have tried to get casual folk on an unstable platform. So people moved around, shopped for other platforms, and WhatsApp is the one that stuck. It’s now the default platform in my country. Signal fucked up their launch by being an unstable piece of software with subpar UX when it mattered. It’s by far the most secure, but I just can’t see it ever gaining critical mass unless other platforms somehow explode gloriously.
- hmmm-i-wonder 2y agoI had a number of friends stop using it due to issues with normal SMS through the app. I still have a few friends on it but now most are on WhatsApp too.
- mr_woozy 2y ago[dead]
- raspyberr 2y agoitt no one actually talking about Signal's cryptography
- z0r 2y agoi haven't seen 'itt' used since i read the somethingawful forums regularly more than 20 years ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- byyll 2y agoI don't understand why someone would put his fetish all over his tech blog.
- some_furry 2y agoThere are two falsehoods crammed into your comment, which is impressive given it's only one sentence. 1. Furry is a fandom, not a fetish. 2. Dhole Moments is a furry blog (first and foremost) that sometimes talks about tech, not a tech blog. My fursona species in the damn name. For the first point, this is well documented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2XeOxWW2oY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2XeOxWW2oY https://furscience.com/furry-is-not-a-fetish-redux/ https://furscience.com/furry-is-not-a-fetish-redux/ https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post/ https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post... And if you still have a problem with it, you're welcome to not read it.
- byyll 2y agoI was about to agree with your second point but after checking out the latest posts, it seems about 80% of the last 20 or 30 are about tech.
- some_furry 2y agoIt wouldn't matter if 100% of the last 20 or 30 were about tech. Dhole Moments is still a furry blog before it's anything else.
- fdupress 2y agoThe "keyed SHA-256" in key transparency's leaf_hash is ok in its current state, but limits future evolution (or presents a risk if that evolution is not done carefully): SHA-256 is subject to length extension. I could not follow where the leaf_hash is used carefully enough to figure out exactly how dangerous this is in the broader context and taking future evolution into account. But it's clearly safe as it is used now because all expected inputs have the same length.