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Valid criticism but I feel the items you mention get blown out of proportion. The Cryptocat team had similar areas where it was lacking and yet did not suffer t

by cyphunk 12y ago

Valid criticism but I feel the items you mention get blown out of proportion. The Cryptocat team had similar areas where it was lacking and yet did not suffer the same backlash. This could be because they never ran a competition and worked to find a way to fund an audit several years later instead. The data point(s) that lead me to wonder of a geographic bias have to due with the tone of prior analysis of telegram I've read over the past year. This article included. And also a general, very male, arrogance in the security community that seems to constantly search for any reason to ridicule. I will have to go back and trace the history of my perception to find the tone I mention, which I can do tomorrow if you likewise can provide a datapoint for your understanding that they flagrantly ignored crypt design best practices. In watching the evolution of Pond, Telegram and TextSecure we see that to solve security or usability problems designers are required to venture to some degree into uncharted territory, away from best practices. So I question the flagrant claim. But I agree contests are just marketing ploys, little else. If Telegram wanted to "claim" otherwise they would need to start with paying the analysts from this article the full bounty.

tptacek 12y ago
You might be the first person I've ever heard suggest that Cryptocat didn't have a "backlash". Cryptocat comes pretty close to being reviled. It's 10x more so in private conversations between technical experts, but it's also very visible publicly. (I think the project deserves the flak it takes, and continues to endanger its users today). The "Russia" thing is just dust people throw into the air to thwart reasoned discussion. People don't like Telegram because it is prima facie cryptographically incompetent. There's no one resource that sums up all the brokenness and weirdness --- certainly not Alex's post here, which concerns itself with a specific bug he and Juliano found. You have to collect all the data and paint the picture yourself.
- darklajid 12y ago
  You're always present when crypto comes up and I honestly usually _wait_ for that opinion. Now, let's ignore Telegram for a second. I haven't installed it, ever, but the feature set seems compelling and the UI (screenshots, demos) is nice. Would you agree that the Better Stuff™ is just less usable and less accessible right now? Is there a way we can fix that? If Telegram gets the UX right, but fails in the underlying implementation, can we take a decent implementation and fix the UX issues? See, Moxie's solution just plain doesn't work. I'm sure it's sound and great, but .. it uses a phone number as the identifier (like WhatsApp, and that's not something I'd like to be compared with). What about my laptop or tablet? What about cross-platform solutions? I'm trying to migrate to FxOS as soon as they fix some mail related shortcomings. There seems to be a Telegram client. No (official) WhatsApp client and I doubt that most of the 'better' alternatives offer something here. If we distill this post into one line: How can we have a decent user experience, without throwing out privacy and security? What would be the best candidate to start from, because .. all of them suck right now?
  - dsacco 12y ago
    This wasn't directed towards me, but I'll participate. >> Now, let's ignore Telegram for a second. I haven't installed it, ever, but the feature set seems compelling and the UI (screenshots, demos) is nice. Agree. I think Telegram has a nice design. >> If we distill this post into one line: How can we have a decent user experience, without throwing out privacy and security? Here is the thing, this is a relatively new ground. The technology for secure messaging systems has been around for a much longer time but it wasn't as popular or fashionable. You can and will have secure messaging built on solid crypto with an attractive user interface and available everywhere. That's Moxie's long-term goal. But this is how you get there (choose your adventure): 1. Build the world's sexiest user interface for secure messaging apps and focus on cross-platform compatibility, while building it on top of an okay crypto system (or worse, a weird custom one that ignores industry practices). Once you have mindshare, gradually improve your crypto (Telegram is demonstrably not doing this by conflating a contest with an audit, but that's another comment). You'll start off with a lot of hype and users, but not much respect from the information security community because, well, you haven't earned it yet. 2. Take a respected crypto team, build out the world's best crypto system for a secure messaging app, leveraging both established best practices and professional peer review. Focus on building a really good prototype in one area with an acceptably attractive and functional user interface, putting other things on the backburner in order to finish a core product. 3. Go for the hail mary and try to build out the most amazing crypto system with the most amazing user interface and the most amazing features running on everything from iOS 4.4 to bleeding edge Debian to please everyone. In a year, burn out and die off because you almost certainly don't have the Herculean development resources this would require in completely orthogonal disciplines. Which of these tracks sounds most like what successful startups do? I acknowledge your point that no offering is perfect right now. But TextSecure focuses on the right things. If I could sum this up entirely: nothing is perfect (yet), but TextSecure is the best offering on the market for a secure messaging application, and if what you want is a secure messaging application, start from solid crypto and work your way to everything else, not from a sexy user interface to okay/passing crypto. Telegram might very well have the best of intentions in mind and it might have solid crypto under the hood. But that's the sort of thing you consider false until proven true, and so far their behavior is similar to a company that promises a fantastic new service in financial trading but prioritizes ubiquity and design without ever auditing the core trading system itself.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Weak protocols or not, what bothers me most about Telegram is that it doesn't use end to end encryption by default - yet still has the nerve to say it's the most secure app on the planet. I find that incredibly misleading towards the users, and many have fallen for that false advertising, which only makes me more furious about it. So I doubt it has anything to do with geography. But more with Telegram's own arrogance about their own app, which not only doesn't have 1) a proper crypto team not "mathematicians", 2) crypto designs recognized by most cryptographers as being solid, but also 3) doesn't encrypt end to end the messages for 99 percent of its users. TextSecure, Threema and Pond encrypt everything end to end by default and use solid designs to do so as well.
ossreality 12y ago
Are you intentionally a shill or just completely talking out of your ass?

by cyphunk 12y ago

tptacek 12y ago

You might be the first person I've ever heard suggest that Cryptocat didn't have a "backlash". Cryptocat comes pretty close to being reviled. It's 10x more so in private conversations between technical experts, but it's also very visible publicly. (I think the project deserves the flak it takes, and continues to endanger its users today). The "Russia" thing is just dust people throw into the air to thwart reasoned discussion. People don't like Telegram because it is prima facie cryptographically incompetent. There's no one resource that sums up all the brokenness and weirdness --- certainly not Alex's post here, which concerns itself with a specific bug he and Juliano found. You have to collect all the data and paint the picture yourself.

darklajid 12y ago
You're always present when crypto comes up and I honestly usually _wait_ for that opinion. Now, let's ignore Telegram for a second. I haven't installed it, ever, but the feature set seems compelling and the UI (screenshots, demos) is nice. Would you agree that the Better Stuff™ is just less usable and less accessible right now? Is there a way we can fix that? If Telegram gets the UX right, but fails in the underlying implementation, can we take a decent implementation and fix the UX issues? See, Moxie's solution just plain doesn't work. I'm sure it's sound and great, but .. it uses a phone number as the identifier (like WhatsApp, and that's not something I'd like to be compared with). What about my laptop or tablet? What about cross-platform solutions? I'm trying to migrate to FxOS as soon as they fix some mail related shortcomings. There seems to be a Telegram client. No (official) WhatsApp client and I doubt that most of the 'better' alternatives offer something here. If we distill this post into one line: How can we have a decent user experience, without throwing out privacy and security? What would be the best candidate to start from, because .. all of them suck right now?
- dsacco 12y ago
  This wasn't directed towards me, but I'll participate. >> Now, let's ignore Telegram for a second. I haven't installed it, ever, but the feature set seems compelling and the UI (screenshots, demos) is nice. Agree. I think Telegram has a nice design. >> If we distill this post into one line: How can we have a decent user experience, without throwing out privacy and security? Here is the thing, this is a relatively new ground. The technology for secure messaging systems has been around for a much longer time but it wasn't as popular or fashionable. You can and will have secure messaging built on solid crypto with an attractive user interface and available everywhere. That's Moxie's long-term goal. But this is how you get there (choose your adventure): 1. Build the world's sexiest user interface for secure messaging apps and focus on cross-platform compatibility, while building it on top of an okay crypto system (or worse, a weird custom one that ignores industry practices). Once you have mindshare, gradually improve your crypto (Telegram is demonstrably not doing this by conflating a contest with an audit, but that's another comment). You'll start off with a lot of hype and users, but not much respect from the information security community because, well, you haven't earned it yet. 2. Take a respected crypto team, build out the world's best crypto system for a secure messaging app, leveraging both established best practices and professional peer review. Focus on building a really good prototype in one area with an acceptably attractive and functional user interface, putting other things on the backburner in order to finish a core product. 3. Go for the hail mary and try to build out the most amazing crypto system with the most amazing user interface and the most amazing features running on everything from iOS 4.4 to bleeding edge Debian to please everyone. In a year, burn out and die off because you almost certainly don't have the Herculean development resources this would require in completely orthogonal disciplines. Which of these tracks sounds most like what successful startups do? I acknowledge your point that no offering is perfect right now. But TextSecure focuses on the right things. If I could sum this up entirely: nothing is perfect (yet), but TextSecure is the best offering on the market for a secure messaging application, and if what you want is a secure messaging application, start from solid crypto and work your way to everything else, not from a sexy user interface to okay/passing crypto. Telegram might very well have the best of intentions in mind and it might have solid crypto under the hood. But that's the sort of thing you consider false until proven true, and so far their behavior is similar to a company that promises a fantastic new service in financial trading but prioritizes ubiquity and design without ever auditing the core trading system itself.

higherpurpose 12y ago

Weak protocols or not, what bothers me most about Telegram is that it doesn't use end to end encryption by default - yet still has the nerve to say it's the most secure app on the planet. I find that incredibly misleading towards the users, and many have fallen for that false advertising, which only makes me more furious about it. So I doubt it has anything to do with geography. But more with Telegram's own arrogance about their own app, which not only doesn't have 1) a proper crypto team not "mathematicians", 2) crypto designs recognized by most cryptographers as being solid, but also 3) doesn't encrypt end to end the messages for 99 percent of its users. TextSecure, Threema and Pond encrypt everything end to end by default and use solid designs to do so as well.

ossreality 12y ago

Are you intentionally a shill or just completely talking out of your ass?