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I'm not sure that's fair. It would be if it was otherwise just another messenger app, but Delta uses email as a transport, which gives it a special kind of resi

I'm not sure that's fair. It would be if it was otherwise just another messenger app, but Delta uses email as a transport, which gives it a special kind of resilience. It's harder to shut down email than signal.

tcfhgj 1y ago
you don't have to use email to federate between servers, there are other protocols such as Matrix, XMPP, probably many more
- Valodim 1y ago
  I was not talking about federation, I was talking specifically about email. It's like the domain fronting feature that signal used to have, but using a service as a front that is business critical.
maqp 1y ago
"It's harder to shut down email than signal." It took me two minutes to figure out DeltaChat connects to the server with SNI "nine.testrun.org". Banana dictatorships can trivially write firewall rules to cut those connections. There are other servers, but if those are going to be usable by anyone, they're going to have to be public, and writing block-rules is trivial compared to spinning up new servers. I'm not saying Signal is much better in this regard, I'm just saying resilience isn't a useful metric to assess messenger security.
- em-bee 1y ago
  DeltaChat connects to the server with SNI "nine.testrun.org" sounds like a bug that can be fixed. it should not need to make that connection unless you create an account on that server.
  - maqp 1y ago
    No that's just the default behavior of connecting to default server, which is what 99.9% of users are going to do. You want to get rid of SNIs, you run a server dedicated for DeltaChat, and then its the IP-address can be blocked.
    - em-bee 1y ago
      connecting to default server, which is what 99.9% of users are going to do. not quite. the default server feature is only a year old. while deltachat itself goes back to at least 2017, so the majority of users will not be on that default server now, and it would be possible to offer a randomized selection to prevent one default server from dominating.
      - maqp 1y ago
        Majority of new users will be. It's still a niche product. Also, I'm unsure if it's smart the client just picks a server for you at random. AFAIK this uses email as back-end so it's not like you can just swap your email address host like you can swap telco while keeping your phone number. One option would be to have the user first whitelist the email providers they'd trust, but most users usually prefer trusting the app vendor as they're trusting it with the client anyway.
woodruffw 1y ago
I don’t think this is true in practice. On the whole, I suspect the ordinary user of email is exactly as centralized as the ordinary user of Signal. (The response here might be that you could run your own mail server, but you’ve now excluded >99% of the world’s population from the essentially reasonable expectation of secure messaging. Plus, you’re then dealing with the ongoing misery of securing your own mail host.)
- Valodim 1y ago
  The difference is the collateral. Are you really going to shut down a country's most popular local email service? Or gmail?
  - woodruffw 1y ago
    I think the answer to that is resoundingly yes: the kinds of countries that care about curtailing E2EE messaging are also the ones that institute nationwide internet blackouts. (But also, this isn’t a good argument! Repressive governments love metadata, and email is an amazing source of unbounded metadata even with these kinds of “secure” layers slapped on top. If I was a government looking to snoop on my citizens, I would absolutely push them towards the protocols I can infer the greatest amount of behavior from.)
    - Valodim 1y ago
      Blocking email or gmail is much closer to a nationwide internet blackout than blocking signal or tor. And even repressive regimes are on a budget there. I'm not sure your second point holds either - for most nations, an active connection to imap.gmail.com leaks little other than how actively the user uses gmail. Correlating senders and receivers from that data sounds technically challenging enough that I wouldn't expect repressive regimes to be capable. But, to be fair, I base that on nothing.
      - woodruffw 1y ago
        > Blocking email or gmail is much closer to a nationwide internet blackout than blocking signal or tor. Yes; the point was not that they’re the same, but that regimes that do the former tend to also do the latter. Moreover, we shouldn’t do insecure things because regimes block the secure things; that’s what the regime wants you to do. The answer might not be Signal if Signal is insufficiently decentralized, but it certainly isn’t email. > for most nations, an active connection to imap.gmail.com leaks little other than how actively the user uses gmail This alone is a significantly larger amount of metadata than schemes like Signal leak. But it also isn’t true: a country that controls its internet infrastructure can almost certainly pull much more metadata from plaintext IMAP/SMTP than just access times and addresses. And this isn’t hypothetical: STS is not widely adopted in the email ecosystem, so plaintext downgrades are pervasive.

tcfhgj 1y ago

you don't have to use email to federate between servers, there are other protocols such as Matrix, XMPP, probably many more

Valodim 1y ago
I was not talking about federation, I was talking specifically about email. It's like the domain fronting feature that signal used to have, but using a service as a front that is business critical.

maqp 1y ago

"It's harder to shut down email than signal." It took me two minutes to figure out DeltaChat connects to the server with SNI "nine.testrun.org". Banana dictatorships can trivially write firewall rules to cut those connections. There are other servers, but if those are going to be usable by anyone, they're going to have to be public, and writing block-rules is trivial compared to spinning up new servers. I'm not saying Signal is much better in this regard, I'm just saying resilience isn't a useful metric to assess messenger security.

em-bee 1y ago
DeltaChat connects to the server with SNI "nine.testrun.org" sounds like a bug that can be fixed. it should not need to make that connection unless you create an account on that server.
- maqp 1y ago
  No that's just the default behavior of connecting to default server, which is what 99.9% of users are going to do. You want to get rid of SNIs, you run a server dedicated for DeltaChat, and then its the IP-address can be blocked.
  - em-bee 1y ago
    connecting to default server, which is what 99.9% of users are going to do. not quite. the default server feature is only a year old. while deltachat itself goes back to at least 2017, so the majority of users will not be on that default server now, and it would be possible to offer a randomized selection to prevent one default server from dominating.
    - maqp 1y ago
      Majority of new users will be. It's still a niche product. Also, I'm unsure if it's smart the client just picks a server for you at random. AFAIK this uses email as back-end so it's not like you can just swap your email address host like you can swap telco while keeping your phone number. One option would be to have the user first whitelist the email providers they'd trust, but most users usually prefer trusting the app vendor as they're trusting it with the client anyway.

woodruffw 1y ago

I don’t think this is true in practice. On the whole, I suspect the ordinary user of email is exactly as centralized as the ordinary user of Signal. (The response here might be that you could run your own mail server, but you’ve now excluded >99% of the world’s population from the essentially reasonable expectation of secure messaging. Plus, you’re then dealing with the ongoing misery of securing your own mail host.)

Valodim 1y ago
The difference is the collateral. Are you really going to shut down a country's most popular local email service? Or gmail?
- woodruffw 1y ago
  I think the answer to that is resoundingly yes: the kinds of countries that care about curtailing E2EE messaging are also the ones that institute nationwide internet blackouts. (But also, this isn’t a good argument! Repressive governments love metadata, and email is an amazing source of unbounded metadata even with these kinds of “secure” layers slapped on top. If I was a government looking to snoop on my citizens, I would absolutely push them towards the protocols I can infer the greatest amount of behavior from.)
  - Valodim 1y ago
    Blocking email or gmail is much closer to a nationwide internet blackout than blocking signal or tor. And even repressive regimes are on a budget there. I'm not sure your second point holds either - for most nations, an active connection to imap.gmail.com leaks little other than how actively the user uses gmail. Correlating senders and receivers from that data sounds technically challenging enough that I wouldn't expect repressive regimes to be capable. But, to be fair, I base that on nothing.
    - woodruffw 1y ago
      > Blocking email or gmail is much closer to a nationwide internet blackout than blocking signal or tor. Yes; the point was not that they’re the same, but that regimes that do the former tend to also do the latter. Moreover, we shouldn’t do insecure things because regimes block the secure things; that’s what the regime wants you to do. The answer might not be Signal if Signal is insufficiently decentralized, but it certainly isn’t email. > for most nations, an active connection to imap.gmail.com leaks little other than how actively the user uses gmail This alone is a significantly larger amount of metadata than schemes like Signal leak. But it also isn’t true: a country that controls its internet infrastructure can almost certainly pull much more metadata from plaintext IMAP/SMTP than just access times and addresses. And this isn’t hypothetical: STS is not widely adopted in the email ecosystem, so plaintext downgrades are pervasive.