Hello Everyone,
This is something I’ve been thinking about in the wake of many users joining Signal, due to WhatsApp’s new privacy policy changes.
When it comes to the mobile client (in case of Android), we could verify its integrity by checking the source code & the APK’s integrity using reproducible builds (https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/).
When it comes to the server, it is possible that it could get compromised in many ways.
My question is, when it comes to privacy & security, does the server integrity matter if we are reasonably sure the client isn’t compromised in any way or doesn’t transmit anything that the server could access in a meaningful way.
And, this could apply to any service that has both FOSS client & server or just FOSS client.
But, signal has the concept of sealed sender (https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/), where signal doesn’t know who is sending the messages.
This is when the government asked for data from Signal, “The only Signal user data we have, and the only data the US government obtained as a result, was the date of account creation and the date of last use – not user messages, groups, contacts, profile information, or anything else.” (https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forward/)
With my phone number, they could tie it to other services, but not with the contacts in Signal itself.
This is something related to how groups are secured - https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/
The source for that stuff is “trust me” since:
I’m not sure why people let signal off the hook with a few press releases. If someone were to say, “Hey I’m making a secure messaging service! You must give me your phone number, and its run by a US company, hosted in one of the few countries where its illegal for us to tell you if our server is compromised.”, not many of us would take it seriously.
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Yeah, wondering why Signal isn’t federated yet. Is it because they can’t ensure that the federated servers confirm to the same standards or something?
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While I can see the perspective from which this blog has been written. If I understood correctly, centralization makes it easy for the users & reduces friction in switching services, while allowing the services to adapt to the changing landscape.
But, many of the points here, which might have been well intended, doesn’t rhyme well (with me at least). For example, the thing about clients or server in a federated landscape not supporting the same thing, that’s a bit blowing it out of proportion IMHO. When we look around, the devices, the software we use, aren’t the same and don’t work the same for anyone, but it works nonetheless. A standard is something that is hard to adapt quickly or implement, in a diverse ecosystem as this. The talk about IP version being stuck in time, I’m wondering what Moxie thinks should’ve been done about that?
This is like wanting to make everything "Apple"ized, if that’s even a proper word. Everything from hardware to software, built to a specification and custom protocol. If hardware and software are under centralized control, sure you can eliminate most of the compatibility problems and provide what you envisioned. But, that would take way the ability to have something that is different, yet is interoperable.
What we have is an ok’ish ecosystem, where things confirm to some standard, at some capacity, while I at the same giving us the freedom to tinker and have something different.
In that sense, then any messaging service, with an open client that has the same features as Signal & a server that’s either closed or open but compromised, should be ok, right? because the client doesn’t trust the server and ensures that it doesn’t send anything that can be interpreted by the server. The server either has no choice but to work with such a client or doesn’t.
From your earlier reply, I understand that a closed server can’t be forked or can do this & that with the data sent, but at the same time, the Signal team has a tight lid on its ecosystem well. I don’t see anyone self-hosting Signal server or running a custom client, at least the people I know don’t.
Note: Here, I’m assuming that I’ve manually installed a version of the open client that I know isn’t tampered with & has a solid implementation, not directly from any store.
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Sealed sender does nothing against timing correlation. It’s really trivial correlate traffic over TCP connections and find out which pairs of IP addresses are communicating with each other.
Unsurprisingly, it’s ineffective against users that exchange messages very rarely and effective with users texting every day.
Signal does nothing to mitigate this problem.