4 ms·

On the positive side, the use of P2P and IMAP makes censorship difficult, which is a strong advantage in authoritarian regimes. However this comes with serious

by rahen 2y ago

On the positive side, the use of P2P and IMAP makes censorship difficult, which is a strong advantage in authoritarian regimes. However this comes with serious trade-offs. PGP lacks forward secrecy: if a key leaks, all past messages can be decrypted. Also IMAP offers no metadata privacy, anyone can see who you email and how often. Signal and WhatsApp are likely a step ahead in terms of privacy with their double ratchet encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ratchet_Algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ratchet_Algorithm).

miroljub 2y ago
> Signal and WhatsApp are likely a step ahead in terms of privacy WhatsApp is closed source, so whatever they claim to can't be proven. And remember that both WhatsApp and Signal are legally required not to disclose to you whether they are spying on you or not.
- miki123211 2y ago
  > WhatsApp is closed source, so whatever they claim to can't be proven E2E only requires a correctly-designed client, not a correctly-designed server. Since any binary can always be deobfuscated, deliberately putting in a backdoor in the client would be an extremely risky PR move, especially in an app as big as WhatsApp, and one surely receiving lots of attention from security researchers. Not to mention that OpenWhisperSystems (the creators of Signal) worked with Meta on their E2E implementation, and if you don't trust them to do right, you shouldn't trust anybody. Let's face it, people over here just don't like Meta and love to spread FUD about them.
  - miroljub 2y ago
    One trust is lost, it's hard to regain it. The fact is, the WhatsApp client is not open source, there are no reproducible builds, and only thing you have is trust in them. If you live in an authoritarian state with a track record of spying on individual citizens, and without legal protection for the privacy of foreign citizens, it's legitimate to decide not to trust a company like Meta headquartered in the USA.
    - immibis 2y ago
      > The fact is, the WhatsApp client is not open source, there are no reproducible builds, and only thing you have is trust in them. That is not strictly true. It is possible to reverse-engineer the client. It's unlikely that anyone will find the motivation to do so, but there's no law of physics that says they can't. You can theoretically review the code that is running on your device - it's just harder than with an open source reproducible build.
  - bossyTeacher 2y ago
    I love this optimism, I really do. But to believe that any meta product can be private is to believe that Zuck actually wants that to happen. Zuck, the guy who changes company culture every 4 years or less to suit whoever is on the white house. The reality is that with a closed source product, you can't trust ANYTHING. Just because OpenWhisperSystems worked with Meta doesn't mean anything. Meta will easily silence them legally if they wanted to. And Meta can always remove or disable the implementation as they see fit.
  - ekianjo 2y ago
    So you trust without proof. That's nice.
  - balamatom 2y ago
    >Let's face it, people over here just don't like Meta and love to spread FUD about them. It's called punching upwards. >Since any binary can always be deobfuscated, deliberately putting in a backdoor in the client would be an extremely risky PR move, especially in an app as big as WhatsApp, and one surely receiving lots of attention from security researchers Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't a proprietary delivery mechanism such as the App or Play stores deliver a backdoored build to an individual device, then later autoupdate it to a clean one?
    - thecrash 2y ago
      Builds are signed by the software publisher, not the Play Store. So the store alone couldn't corrupt releases, it would need collaboration by the publisher. (Google does have a service for app developers where they keep and manage your signing keys for you, but it's not required)
      - balamatom 2y ago
        Interesting! Who checks those signatures?
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    > Since any binary can always be deobfuscated Are you talking about decompilation? This, is in general very difficult, and that's when the author and compiler don't want to stop you from doing it. Go fire up jadx or ghidra or whatever you like and see if you can find the bits of code you know are there. Now try demonstrating that a bit of code isn't there.
  - AAAAaccountAAAA 2y ago
    What would be the consequences, if Meta was caught doing something "funny" with e2ee? Maybe small fines, and a brief online moral panic, but I don't think people would switch to another app en masse solely because of that.
  - tcfhgj 2y ago
    > Let's face it, people over here just don't like Meta and love to spread FUD about them. Yep, don't like it. They already have proven to not be trustworthy by various privacy scandals in the past
mubou 2y ago
> if a key leaks, all past messages can be decrypted Not to mention, if you revoke a key (maybe because you lost your laptop and want to be proactive about security), without any authenticated timestamping service in the mix, all past messages and signatures can no longer be trusted, regardless of the revocation date. That's why when you revoke a key on github, all your previous commits' signatures turn red. I've never understood why no one's succeeded in doing anything about this after all these years.
darthrupert 2y ago
WhatsApp obviously cannot be trusted for message privacy for the simple reason that Meta paid gazillion bucks for it. I don't understand why people need more evidence beyond that.
- fdb345 2y ago
  the cant read your messages. thats the usp of using signal encryption its the rest of the account and metadata that is at risk
  - darthrupert 2y ago
    Do you think your whatsapp application is end-to-end encrypted on your device? They control the client so anything is possible.
    - fdb345 2y ago
      well, thats the stated functionality! hahaha
rahen 2y ago
edit: I was wrong, Delta Chat now has forward secrecy from v1.48: https://delta.chat/en/2024-11-20-webxdc-realtime https://delta.chat/en/2024-11-20-webxdc-realtime Furthermore metadata transparency can be made less problematic by using email aliases.
- em-bee 2y ago
  forward secrecy seems to apply to realtime connections, not to messages sent over SMTP. now what's interesting here is a potential future development of deltachat where SMTP is only used to negotiate the peer to peer connection, and the actual chat messages are sent over the direct connection. although it sounds kind of weird to build a chat solution on top of SMTP and then bypass SMTP in the end. the remaining benefit would be the ability to talk to people who don't use deltachat. not needing another account on a new service. not needing to develop or maintain server infrastructure. wait, in a way it's already there: https://github.com/ArcaneCircle/live-chat https://github.com/ArcaneCircle/live-chat now adapt that to storing messages... ;-)
rakoo 2y ago
If your device is confiscated your entire history is in the clear. Forward secrecy doesn't magically solve problems, it's useful if you use ephemeral messages. In DC if there's a window of time where you want messages to not be traceable you just create a new email adress (which is just one click in DC thanks to chatmail) and delete that address after, that's it.

by rahen 2y ago

miroljub 2y ago

> Signal and WhatsApp are likely a step ahead in terms of privacy WhatsApp is closed source, so whatever they claim to can't be proven. And remember that both WhatsApp and Signal are legally required not to disclose to you whether they are spying on you or not.

miki123211 2y ago
> WhatsApp is closed source, so whatever they claim to can't be proven E2E only requires a correctly-designed client, not a correctly-designed server. Since any binary can always be deobfuscated, deliberately putting in a backdoor in the client would be an extremely risky PR move, especially in an app as big as WhatsApp, and one surely receiving lots of attention from security researchers. Not to mention that OpenWhisperSystems (the creators of Signal) worked with Meta on their E2E implementation, and if you don't trust them to do right, you shouldn't trust anybody. Let's face it, people over here just don't like Meta and love to spread FUD about them.
- miroljub 2y ago
  One trust is lost, it's hard to regain it. The fact is, the WhatsApp client is not open source, there are no reproducible builds, and only thing you have is trust in them. If you live in an authoritarian state with a track record of spying on individual citizens, and without legal protection for the privacy of foreign citizens, it's legitimate to decide not to trust a company like Meta headquartered in the USA.
  - immibis 2y ago
    > The fact is, the WhatsApp client is not open source, there are no reproducible builds, and only thing you have is trust in them. That is not strictly true. It is possible to reverse-engineer the client. It's unlikely that anyone will find the motivation to do so, but there's no law of physics that says they can't. You can theoretically review the code that is running on your device - it's just harder than with an open source reproducible build.
- bossyTeacher 2y ago
  I love this optimism, I really do. But to believe that any meta product can be private is to believe that Zuck actually wants that to happen. Zuck, the guy who changes company culture every 4 years or less to suit whoever is on the white house. The reality is that with a closed source product, you can't trust ANYTHING. Just because OpenWhisperSystems worked with Meta doesn't mean anything. Meta will easily silence them legally if they wanted to. And Meta can always remove or disable the implementation as they see fit.
- ekianjo 2y ago
  So you trust without proof. That's nice.
- balamatom 2y ago
  >Let's face it, people over here just don't like Meta and love to spread FUD about them. It's called punching upwards. >Since any binary can always be deobfuscated, deliberately putting in a backdoor in the client would be an extremely risky PR move, especially in an app as big as WhatsApp, and one surely receiving lots of attention from security researchers Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't a proprietary delivery mechanism such as the App or Play stores deliver a backdoored build to an individual device, then later autoupdate it to a clean one?
  - thecrash 2y ago
    Builds are signed by the software publisher, not the Play Store. So the store alone couldn't corrupt releases, it would need collaboration by the publisher. (Google does have a service for app developers where they keep and manage your signing keys for you, but it's not required)
    - balamatom 2y ago
      Interesting! Who checks those signatures?
- Y_Y 2y ago
  > Since any binary can always be deobfuscated Are you talking about decompilation? This, is in general very difficult, and that's when the author and compiler don't want to stop you from doing it. Go fire up jadx or ghidra or whatever you like and see if you can find the bits of code you know are there. Now try demonstrating that a bit of code isn't there.
- AAAAaccountAAAA 2y ago
  What would be the consequences, if Meta was caught doing something "funny" with e2ee? Maybe small fines, and a brief online moral panic, but I don't think people would switch to another app en masse solely because of that.
- tcfhgj 2y ago
  > Let's face it, people over here just don't like Meta and love to spread FUD about them. Yep, don't like it. They already have proven to not be trustworthy by various privacy scandals in the past

mubou 2y ago

> if a key leaks, all past messages can be decrypted Not to mention, if you revoke a key (maybe because you lost your laptop and want to be proactive about security), without any authenticated timestamping service in the mix, all past messages and signatures can no longer be trusted, regardless of the revocation date. That's why when you revoke a key on github, all your previous commits' signatures turn red. I've never understood why no one's succeeded in doing anything about this after all these years.

darthrupert 2y ago

WhatsApp obviously cannot be trusted for message privacy for the simple reason that Meta paid gazillion bucks for it. I don't understand why people need more evidence beyond that.

fdb345 2y ago
the cant read your messages. thats the usp of using signal encryption its the rest of the account and metadata that is at risk
- darthrupert 2y ago
  Do you think your whatsapp application is end-to-end encrypted on your device? They control the client so anything is possible.
  - fdb345 2y ago
    well, thats the stated functionality! hahaha

rahen 2y ago

edit: I was wrong, Delta Chat now has forward secrecy from v1.48: https://delta.chat/en/2024-11-20-webxdc-realtime https://delta.chat/en/2024-11-20-webxdc-realtime Furthermore metadata transparency can be made less problematic by using email aliases.

em-bee 2y ago
forward secrecy seems to apply to realtime connections, not to messages sent over SMTP. now what's interesting here is a potential future development of deltachat where SMTP is only used to negotiate the peer to peer connection, and the actual chat messages are sent over the direct connection. although it sounds kind of weird to build a chat solution on top of SMTP and then bypass SMTP in the end. the remaining benefit would be the ability to talk to people who don't use deltachat. not needing another account on a new service. not needing to develop or maintain server infrastructure. wait, in a way it's already there: https://github.com/ArcaneCircle/live-chat https://github.com/ArcaneCircle/live-chat now adapt that to storing messages... ;-)

rakoo 2y ago

If your device is confiscated your entire history is in the clear. Forward secrecy doesn't magically solve problems, it's useful if you use ephemeral messages. In DC if there's a window of time where you want messages to not be traceable you just create a new email adress (which is just one click in DC thanks to chatmail) and delete that address after, that's it.