I just wish Telegram would have less hubris. Ever since they launched, they've downplayed any possible problem. I know they've had to wade through a bunch of

I just wish Telegram would have less hubris. Ever since they launched, they've downplayed any possible problem. I know they've had to wade through a bunch of bogus criticisms, but there are some legitimately worrying aspects of Telegram that they seem to be trying to sweep under the rug. This $200k contest stunt seems to be a (very effective) marketing ploy which further distracts people from the fact that Telegram hasn't demonstrated any desire to seek out professional cryptographers to examine their entire end-to-end pipeline for flaws. It seems like the best possible thing they could do is to hire Matasano to fly out and dig through their whole architecture for flaws. That way they'd either earn tacit approval from the crypto community, or any obvious internal oversights would be exposed (in which case fixing those errors would earn them approval anyway). This contest doesn't seem to achieve those ends. The message they've been sending is, "We're Telegram, and we're confident we don't need your help." But resisting the ability of governments to rifle through our data must be a community effort to succeed. Telegram is claiming to be a trustworthy hero. But individual heroes are single points of failure, and have historically been far too easy to coerce or circumvent. There's also nothing stopping Telegram from being malicious (or being coerced), so I'm worried people won't notice if Telegram themselves try to snoop on everyone's messages by e.g. pushing an update which tweaks the protocol just slightly enough to be exploitable. Whereas if TextSecure tried to pull something like that, people would notice. Of course, since Telegram refuses to give a proof for the security of their home-grown KDF, it seems like it's possible they designed it to be exploitable in some secret way, in order to access people's conversations. A security proof would prevent this possibility, but they don't seem to think it's a big deal. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6918907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6918907 In fact, they've been bizarrely evasive on that point. Why design your own KDF? Speed? Then why not use a secure tunable KDF like scrypt? Is it to show off their own genius? Then why haven't they published it for peer review to take credit for their achievement? And why turn down Moxie's offer to join forces and incorporate an existing 10 million userbase? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6915741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6915741 ... None of that makes sense, and the only reasonable explanation I can think of is that maybe they're trying something sneaky.