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I've been hearing for years people say "Signal requires phone number therefore I don't use it", and I've been hearing them mocked for years. Turns out they wer
by causalscience 8mo ago
I've been hearing for years people say "Signal requires phone number therefore I don't use it", and I've been hearing them mocked for years.
Turns out they were right.
- rainonmoon 8mo agoAbsolutely nothing in this article is related to feds using conversation metadata to map participants, so, no they weren’t.
- causalscience 8mo ago[flagged]
- gosub100 8mo agoWe don't do the "duct-tape an insult to the end to drive your point harder" gimmick here. It will lead to loss of your account.
- dylan604 8mo agowhoa, losing access to a throwaway account created for specifically posting trolling comments? i'm sure they're shaking in their boots at the prospect
- causalscience 8mo agoThis throwaway account wasn't created specifically for posting trolling comments, this is just my personality :-(
- causalscience 8mo ago[flagged]
- jvanderbot 8mo agoIf you follow the X chatter on this, some folks got into the groups and tracked all the numbers, their contributions, and when they went "on shift" or "off". I don't really think Signal tech has anything to do with this.
- rainonmoon 8mo agoThat’s really interesting extra context, thanks!
- causalscience 8mo ago[flagged]
- OhMeadhbh 8mo agoYeah. It's notable they didn't crack the crypto. In the 90s when I was a young cypherpunk, I had this idea that when strong crypto was ubiquitous, certainly people would be smart enough to understand its role was only to force bad guys to attack the "higher levels" like attacking human expectations of privacy on a public channel. It was probably unrealistic to assume everyone would automatically understand subtle details of technology. As a reminder... if you don't know all the people in your encrypted group chat, you could be talking to the man.
- ddtaylor 8mo agoMy Session and Briar chats don't give out the phone numbers of other users.
- gosub100 8mo agoSuppose they didn't require that. Wouldn't that open themselves up to DDoS? An angry nation or ransom-seeker could direct bots to create accounts and stuff them with noise.
- OhMeadhbh 8mo agoI think the deal is you marry the strong crypto with a human mediated security process which provides high confidence the message sender maps to the human you think they are. And even if they are, they could be a narc. Nothing in strong crypto prevents narcs in whom ill-advised trust has been granted from copying messages they're getting over the encrypted channel and forwarding them to the man. And even then, a trusted participant could not understand they're not supposed to give their private keys out or could be rubber-hosed into revealing their key pin. All sorts of ways to subvert "secure" messaging besides breaking the crypto. I guess what I'm saying is "Strong cryptography is required, but not sufficient to ensure secure messaging."
- ddtaylor 8mo agoThere are a lot of solutions to denial of service attacks than to collect personal information. Plus, you know, you can always delete an account later? If what Signal says is true, then this amounts to a few records in their database which isn't cause for concern IMO
- direwolf20 8mo agoYes. Cheap–identity systems such as Session and SimpleX are trivially vulnerable to this, and your only defence is to not give out your address as they are unguessable. If you have someone's address, you can spam them, and they can't stop it except by deleting the app or resetting to a new address and losing all their contacts. SimpleX does better than Session because the address used to add new contacts is different from the address used with any existing contact and is independently revocable. But if that address is out there, you can receive a full queue of spam contacts before you next open the SimpleX app. Both Session and SimpleX are trivially vulnerable to storage DoS as well.
- OhMeadhbh 8mo agoI talked to Moxie about this 20 years ago at DefCon and he shrugged his shoulders and said "well... it's better than the alternative." He has a point. Signal is probably better than Facebook Messenger or SMS. Maybe there's a market for something better.
- Bender 8mo agoI remember listening to his talks and had some respect for him. He could defeat any argument about any perceived security regarding any facet of tech. Not so much any more. He knows as well as I do anything on a phone can never be secure. I get why he did it. That little boat needed an upgrade and I would do it too. Of course this topic evokes some serious psychological responses in most people. Wait for it.
- ddtaylor 8mo ago> He knows as well as I do anything on a phone can never be secure I assume because of the baseband stuff to be FCC compliant? Last I checked that meant DMA channels, etc. to access the real phone processor. All easily activated over the air.
- hsbauauvhabzb 8mo agoAny citation on this? I’ve never heard that.
- Bender 8mo agoThere are hobbyist groups that tinker with these things. They are just as lazy as me and do not publish much. One has to find and participate in their semi-private .onion forums. Not my cup of tea. Most of it goes over my head and requires special hardware I am not interested in tinkering with.
- ddtaylor 8mo ago47 CFR Part 2 and Part 15 FCC devices are certified / allowed to use a spectrum, but you must maintain compliance. If you're a mobile phone manufacturer you have to be certain that if a bug occurs, the devices don't start becoming wifi jammers or anything like that. This means you need to be able to push firmware updates over the air (OTA). These must be signed to avoid just anyone to push out such an OTA. The government has a history of compelling companies to push out signed updates.
- BugsJustFindMe 8mo agoSignal's use of phone numbers is the least of your issues if you've reached this level of inspection. Signal could be the most pristine perfect thing in the world, and the traffic from the rest of your phone is exactly as exposing as your phone number is when your enemy is the US government who can force cooperation from the infrastructure providers.
- causalscience 8mo agoYour point is correct but irrelevant to this conversation. The question here is NOT "if Signal didn't leak your phone number could you still get screwed?" Of course you could, no one is disputing that. The question is "if you did everything else perfect, but use Signal could the phone number be used to screw you?" The answer is ALSO of course, but the reason why we're talking about it is that this point was made to the creator of Signal many many times over the years, and he dismissed it and his fanboys ridiculed it.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 8mo agoThey weren't though? Signal requires a phone number to sign up and it is linked to your account but your phone number is not used in the under the hood account or device identification, it is not shared by default, your number can be entirely removed from contact disovery if you wish, and even if they got a warrant or were tapping signal infra directly, it'd be extremely non trivial to extract user phone numbers. https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/ https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/ https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/ https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/building-faster-oram/ https://signal.org/blog/building-faster-oram/ https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/ https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/
- ddtaylor 8mo agoIn past instances where Signal has complied with warrants, such as the 2021 and 2024 Santa Clara County cases, the records they provided included phone numbers to identify the specific accounts for which data was available. This was necessary to specify which requested accounts (identified by phone numbers in the warrants) had associated metadata, such as account creation timestamps and last connection dates.
- smeej 8mo agoThis was before Signal switched to a username system.
- ddtaylor 8mo agoOthers mention you must still register with a phone, although you can remove it from your account after you go through the username stuff? Usually HN is pretty good about identifying that the default path is the path and that opt-out like behavior of this means very little for mass usage.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 8mo ago
- giancarlostoro 8mo agoI could have sworn Signal adopted usernames sometime back, but in my eyes its a little too late.