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X's new "encrypted" XChat feature doesn't seem to be any more secure
- Meekro 1y agoIn a nutshell: we have unclear comments from Musk and unclear statements in the FAQ (which might not have been written by a technical person). Until they release a technical white paper, we don’t know anything for sure.
- 0xEF 1y agoSure we know that we should not trust anything Musk or X claims? By now? I mean, come on.
- Meekro 1y agoSome things Musk claimed have happened, others have not. For example, he promised that they would release a satellite Internet platform that was better than most of the others, and they did. On the other hand, he promised that Grok 3 would be massively better than ChatGPT, and it turned out to be comparable at best.
- michaelteter 1y agoWhen you make a lot of bold claims, and you have your (or a lot of someone else's) money to help you back up the claims with (clumsy) actions, sometimes your bold claims turn out to be truthy.
- cyanydeez 1y agoSure, ill sell you this broken clock. Its been shown to know atleast two times a day.
- mort96 1y agoThe first time I heard about this "XChat" was through a screenshot of Musk's tweet where he said it has "bitcoin style" encryption. Honestly, it was obvious just from reading that, that Musk has absolutely no idea what he's talking about when it comes to cryptography, and that nobody he has talked to on the development team has any clue either. That doesn't mean that we know for sure that the team doesn't have cryptography experts, but ... I have my doubts. Surely we'd have heard details by now if that was the case. (I mean "Bitcoin style"! The most important part of encrypted chat is confidentiality, and no part of Bitcoin's architecture even ATTEMPTS to ensure confidentiality! Everything's permanently stored in plaintext on the public ledger FFS!!!!)
- briandear 1y agoYou think Elon Musk doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Sorry, you might disagree with his politics, but the assertion that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about it absurd.
- ben_w 1y ago"with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon." - Musk He then invested in OpenAI, is still trying to make FSD a thing, wants humans and AI to merge via Neuralink, made humanoid robots, and made grok because he parted ways with OpenAI. If he knows what he's talking about in general, this combination makes him a demonolater. Given how often (and for how long) he keeps saying FSD is just around the corner — and how poorly recieved have been TBC's tunnels, Neuralink's research, grok, Twitter's changes under Musk, Optimus, Cybertruck, his comments when sharing a video of him attempting to play high-leveled characters in some video games — I have every reason to think he doesn't know much outside of rockets and sales/motivational speeches. I don't even need to reference the salutes, supporting AfD, DOGE etc. as examples here.
- protocolture 1y agoElon Musk doesnt know what he is talking about, when he strays away from business to pretend he is technical. Doing so, is a business tactic. We know he is full of shit, but it gives him some kind of status in front of other business people.
- amitrip 1y ago[dead]
- lawn 1y agoHe's made many comments that betray the fact that he's absolutely clueless in many areas, even those he should be knowledgeable in. This is just the latest example.
- mort96 1y ago> You think Elon Musk doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Correct
- mjg59 1y agoSure we do - the client code is already out there.
- herewulf 1y agoAs a user of XChat[0] since 1999, I can tell you that it's definitely not encrypted or secure. Don't believe the hype! [0]: http://xchat.org http://xchat.org
- Vinz_ 1y ago> Dubbed "XChat" (not to be confused with the venerable Linux/Windows IRC app of the same name) It’s not the same XChat
- DavidDiazUA 1y ago@grok is this true?
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoIs there grok on hackernews?
- astar1 1y agolol!
- gr0k 1y ago[dead]
- 0xAFFFF 1y agoConcerning
- RUnconcerned 1y agoLooking into this
- bilekas 1y agoI think you missed the joke. As a fellow XChat user I can assure you, Elon is wrong.
- threeseed 1y ago> Currently, we do not offer protections against man-in-the-middle attacks. As a result, if someone—a malicious insider or X itself as a result of a compulsory legal process—were to compromise an encrypted conversation I assume this means that the "encryption" is about as strong as base64.
- mort96 1y agoI bet they're using WebSocket over HTTPS and calling that "encrypted chat" because it technically is.
- tonyhart7 1y agohey, I literally doing this right now, what's wrong with that?? I mean its just for notification to my app so its not something critical
- 8-prime 1y agoWhen the message you push out through that websocket are something that server knows about intrinsically, as in, the message contents are produced by the server there is nothing wrong with the approach. When your server facilitates a communication between two clients and just acts as the infrastructure E2EE can become relevant. If the clients want to be able to exchange information withouth the server being able to snoop in on what is being sent, then you'd want to use E2EE. With that the server won't be able to read what is being sent.
- tonyhart7 1y ago- I have public chat that user can chatting in public room (seems like I dont need for this one) - then notification service is probably something I want to E2EE then, but Idk about performance hit cost would be
- 0xFEE1DEAD 1y ago
- blitzar 1y agoSelf chatting features will be live by the end of the year.
- mjg59 1y agoThe implementation seems to be libsodium sealed boxes, with the key material sequestered using the juicebox.xyz protocol. In itself this seems broadly fine, with the significant proviso as mentioned in https://help.x.com/en/using-x/encrypted-direct-messages https://help.x.com/en/using-x/encrypted-direct-messages that identity is not verified at present, and as a result it's trivially MITMable. But there's something more subtle here. Juicebox means that your key material is remotely stored in encrypted form. In an ideal setup, it's split between multiple different realms operated by different people, and the key material is stored in HSMs. There's a complicated dance where you prove knowledge of the PIN without actually revealing the PIN, and then the remote realms hand over the key material and you reassemble it into your key by decrypting it with a key also derived from your PIN. If Twitter is running their own Juicebox realms then you're having to trust them. Even if the realms are implemented as HSMs, they're in a position to see the encrypted key material as it exits the HSM. And if they're not in HSMs, then the encrypted key material is just sitting there where they can see it. This doesn't intrinsically give them the key, since it still needs the PIN to decrypt it - but the key derivation function from the PIN is just 32 rounds of argon2id with 16MB of memory use, and given the PIN is limited to 4 digits, that's going to take about a second of GPU aided brute forcing to drop out the actual key. As noted in the help doc, this isn't forward secure, so the moment they have the key they can decrypt everything. This is so far from being a meaningful e2ee platform it's ridiculous.
- _elephant 1y agoThis is a very thorough technical analysis—thanks for sharing! It seems like even though Juicebox itself uses libSodium sealed boxes and HSMs, the security is ultimately constrained by the 32 rounds of argon2id for the PIN derivation and Twitter’s ability to access the encrypted key material. Perhaps its biggest selling point is deployment flexibility rather than being a true end-to-end encrypted platform.
- hmry 1y agoThank you for the breakdown. Since we're on the topic of having to trust X, is there any reason to believe X wouldn't insert some code into the client JS (behind some per-account flag) to exfiltrate your key or PIN, if they were ordered to do so? I wouldn't rely on a website as a secure communication client, that seems like a job for an open-source native application. But I'm no expert.
- lionkor 1y agoIt seems to me like this is what happens when you do impulsive, hype-driven development. I assume a junior walked into Elon's office, and pitched it with the words "Bitcoin style encryption, as a chat platform--Written in Rust, almost entirely developed my Grok3", and he was sold. I'm not being cynical or funny, I legitimately think, after having worked with some hype-driven leadership people, that this is quite common and results in a lot of flawed slop products, which are hyped up by leaders who don't know what they're talking about. Admitting that this sort of product doesn't do what they think it does would mean admitting that they are wholly incompetent and got tricked by the hype; and that's not acceptable. So it get sunk-cost-fallacied into being a real product even more.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoBasically, The Emperor’s New Clothes[0]. [0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes
- xorcist 1y agoIn my experience, it's never "a junior". There are people who build their entire careers on doing things like this. The rest of the story is completely believable, despite put in an unnecessarily sarcastic tone.
- focusgroup0 1y agoNot your keys, Not your data
- asdaqopqkq 1y agoThey plan to train on the chat aren't they?
- sircasss 1y ago[dead]
- marcodiego 1y agoJust port it to Wayland. /s
- beej71 1y ago> "as a result of a compulsory legal process" What does this mean?
- msgodel 1y agoE2EE is almost pointless in smartphone apps. If the same organization controlling the infrastructure controls the two ends it's effectively a no-op.