He uses signal, I don’t think he’s publicly endorsed it. Read over that sentence again.
The best way to do private/secure messenging is to do it similarly to the least private and secure messaging protocol in use?
I’m just describing how it works, this seems overly combative. Encryption is a different topic than federation. Emails and phone calls are federated, yet insecure.
This entire section completely ignores that Signal isn’t designed to talk to random people. It’s designed to talk to your friends/family/coworkers, who most likely already have your phone number. It makes it super easy to migrate. There’s no way my grandma would be able to add me on briar…
That “ease of migration” comes at a cost: namely that signal’s centralized server now knows your identity. And yes while briar isn’t quite user friendly yet, its just as easy to share a user_id string as it is a phone number. With matrix or XMPP I can share my ID with a link.
sealed sender
I don’t know enough about this to comment, but signal still has to know who to send the message to. That means that the server must decrypt the recipient at some point.
Payment in Signal has been a major request since the migration from WhatsApp. In multiple countries WhatsApp has a payment feature that is hugely popular.
I’d argue that most people don’t want a cryptocurrency bundled in their chat apps. This is a really strange thing to defend.
For the last one, its telling that you deleted half my sentence. The full sentence is this:
Signal’s use luckily never caught on by the general public of China ( or the Hong Kong Administrative region ), whose government prefers autonomy, rather than letting US tech control its communication platforms, as most of the rest of the world naively allows.
Many countries have now realized their mistake in letting US tech companies control their social media platforms, and are trying to adopt the PRC model of home-grown chat apps. A great example is India, where Facebook and Youtube ( 2 US tech companies ), are the most popular social media apps. This was a glaring mistake allowing these US surveillance giants to so completely own the social media landscape of India.
I don’t know enough about this to comment, but signal still has to know who to send the message to. That means that the server must decrypt the recipient at some point.
If you live in France, why would you want a US company to own and control your communications? That was the main thrust of the article, which you never addressed.
As I noted in my article, remember when signal went a whole year without publishing their server source code updates?
Non of your points are really any concrete proof of Signal being backdoored.
I also addressed this, in the NSL section. It is illegal for signal to tell you that, otherwise they all face heavy prison time. Your default position then is to “trust” US services… not a good idea from a privacy standpoint given the history of surveillance disclosures.
However, Signal is like the one application that’s user friendly and is NOT compromised, and you seem to be completely attacking it.
I have reason to believe that Signal is NOT compromised. and the code is indeed Open Source and can be trusted.
I don’t trust the US, but I do trust Moxie Marlinspike to be a privacy advocate, he has spent his entire career being an advocate for privacy.
although Signal went a whole year without publishing server source code because they were being subtle about introducing mobilecoin crypto-asset support, and they didn’t want people to jump hog wild into mobilecoin. However, they now have released the server source code, therefore I do not think this is a valid argument.
Thanks for linking Libresignal, read over its readme.
But really 3rd party clients are beside the point: the main thrust of the article is about signal being a single, us domiciled, centralized service. They don’t let you self host a server, and you also have no way of verifying their server code. You just have to “trust them”.
I appreciate your critique and well written essay, as well as your motivation. Thank you again for writing this, and I will heed your advice and be more skeptical of signal foundation. However, but I have followed Marlinspike for years, and was an early signal adopter, so I do have some trust that the project is not compromised.
comment from lobster also makes some good points here, and I tend to agree with this guy
This take comes up every so often, e.g. in some of the linked articles. I’m sympathetic to many of the concerns raised, but I’ve yet to see serious engagement with some of the deeper issues raised. For example:
A significant number of security and privacy-enhancing technologies (PET) have received US military funding or other support. See: Tor from the Naval Research Lab, OpenBSD from DARPA. SELinux comes from the NSA. The Open Technology Fund has also support Ricochet, WireGuard, ?
Delta.chat, and Briar (that the author recommends), etc. (link). Are all these tools suspect?
As an aside, the EU also funds a significant number of PETs. While not as egregious as the US, the EU is no enemy of mass surveillance, either.
One reason for Signal’s centralization is, in short, that it’s hard to update federated protocols, including their security features. E2E encryption in XMPP or email is still a pain, and far from usable for most people. I hope that e.g. Matrix can pull it off, but they face challenges that centralized services don’t. With a centralized service, you know that you can handle unforeseen security developments quickly. Shouldn’t this be a key priority for a security tool?
Using phone numbers as identifiers has its benefits: you don’t need to store users’ contacts on your servers. A service like Wire, that does allow you to sign up without a phone number, has to store your full social graph on their end. Avoiding this sort of metadata is a hard problem — Signal has opted for minimizing the amount they store.
It’s hard to overstate how much ease of use matters when it comes to gaining mass adoption for these tools. For a long time, privacy & security tools were super user-unfriendly, reserved only for a small technical elite (see PGP). If we want to combat mass surveillance, we need tools that the masses want to install (in my experience, it’s hard enough to convince activist groups to migrate off Discord or Slack — the alternatives need to be similarly easy to use).
How do you feel about the guy who donated 50 million to Signal? He probably has the most influence on the project second only to Marlinspike.
So if we don’t know what runs on the server side, how do we know then that this is not used to map user networks, i.e. who communicates with who? From an activist POV wouldn’t that be a significant risk?
Also, even if you trust the company today, given that it is US based, it is subject to the gag orders the US government agencies hand out. So that makes it still a problem, no?
Self hosting of the synapse server is pretty well documented. There even is an ansible script to speed it up.
I self hosted early on and it wasn’t particularly time consuming.
Again, the specific issue with Signal is that it is located in the US, which has pretty authoritarian practices against exactly the type of organisation that runs Signal. This potentially makes Signal problematic even if the people running it have the best intentions.
Is this context the use of phone numbers is questionable too, in my opinion at least. The given rational is that it makes it easier for users to sign up, but that’s really not true. Email is used by pretty much everyone and doesn’t rely on phone numbers. I’m sure someone thinking half a day about user IDs that aren’t carrying inherent privacy risk will likely come up with something.
I had my parents using matrix for years without issue in a quite advanced age and they had no issues desite not using phone numbers…
He uses signal, I don’t think he’s publicly endorsed it. Read over that sentence again.
I’m just describing how it works, this seems overly combative. Encryption is a different topic than federation. Emails and phone calls are federated, yet insecure.
That “ease of migration” comes at a cost: namely that signal’s centralized server now knows your identity. And yes while briar isn’t quite user friendly yet, its just as easy to share a
user_idstring as it is a phone number. With matrix or XMPP I can share my ID with a link.I don’t know enough about this to comment, but signal still has to know who to send the message to. That means that the server must decrypt the recipient at some point.
I’d argue that most people don’t want a cryptocurrency bundled in their chat apps. This is a really strange thing to defend.
For the last one, its telling that you deleted half my sentence. The full sentence is this:
Many countries have now realized their mistake in letting US tech companies control their social media platforms, and are trying to adopt the PRC model of home-grown chat apps. A great example is India, where Facebook and Youtube ( 2 US tech companies ), are the most popular social media apps. This was a glaring mistake allowing these US surveillance giants to so completely own the social media landscape of India.
Then you shouldn’t be spreading FUD about it.
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If you live in France, why would you want a US company to own and control your communications? That was the main thrust of the article, which you never addressed.
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As I noted in my article, remember when signal went a whole year without publishing their server source code updates?
I also addressed this, in the NSL section. It is illegal for signal to tell you that, otherwise they all face heavy prison time. Your default position then is to “trust” US services… not a good idea from a privacy standpoint given the history of surveillance disclosures.
I appreciate and admire your motivation @dessalines@lemmy.ml
However, Signal is like the one application that’s user friendly and is NOT compromised, and you seem to be completely attacking it.
I have reason to believe that Signal is NOT compromised. and the code is indeed Open Source and can be trusted.
I don’t trust the US, but I do trust Moxie Marlinspike to be a privacy advocate, he has spent his entire career being an advocate for privacy.
although Signal went a whole year without publishing server source code because they were being subtle about introducing mobilecoin crypto-asset support, and they didn’t want people to jump hog wild into mobilecoin. However, they now have released the server source code, therefore I do not think this is a valid argument.
How do you feel about marlinspikes ruthlessly banning all third party clients and server implementations? Or his choice of phone # identifiers?
Yes I do not see why we should trust any system which forbids self-hosting, especially when alternatives exist.
False.
There are a few 3rd party clients. They all identify themselves to the server that they’re 3rd party clients and they haven’t been banned.
Thanks for linking Libresignal, read over its readme.
But really 3rd party clients are beside the point: the main thrust of the article is about signal being a single, us domiciled, centralized service. They don’t let you self host a server, and you also have no way of verifying their server code. You just have to “trust them”.
I appreciate your critique and well written essay, as well as your motivation. Thank you again for writing this, and I will heed your advice and be more skeptical of signal foundation. However, but I have followed Marlinspike for years, and was an early signal adopter, so I do have some trust that the project is not compromised.
comment from lobster also makes some good points here, and I tend to agree with this guy
How do you feel about the guy who donated 50 million to Signal? He probably has the most influence on the project second only to Marlinspike.
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This would be a truly problematic sentiment in some other cases. But the point here, is that unlike Matrix, Signal is not really ours.
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So if we don’t know what runs on the server side, how do we know then that this is not used to map user networks, i.e. who communicates with who? From an activist POV wouldn’t that be a significant risk?
Also, even if you trust the company today, given that it is US based, it is subject to the gag orders the US government agencies hand out. So that makes it still a problem, no?
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Self hosting of the synapse server is pretty well documented. There even is an ansible script to speed it up.
I self hosted early on and it wasn’t particularly time consuming.
Again, the specific issue with Signal is that it is located in the US, which has pretty authoritarian practices against exactly the type of organisation that runs Signal. This potentially makes Signal problematic even if the people running it have the best intentions.
Is this context the use of phone numbers is questionable too, in my opinion at least. The given rational is that it makes it easier for users to sign up, but that’s really not true. Email is used by pretty much everyone and doesn’t rely on phone numbers. I’m sure someone thinking half a day about user IDs that aren’t carrying inherent privacy risk will likely come up with something.
I had my parents using matrix for years without issue in a quite advanced age and they had no issues desite not using phone numbers…