As most people here might know, Session utilises a TOR-like onion routing system with some changes to route traffic. The username is the public key whilst the password is the private key.
Recently, a new project built on top of this seems to be in the works: https://simplifiedprivacy.com/freespeech/
I’d like to know the community’s opinion of session and how much would you trust its technology. Thanks!
Simplifiedprivacy dot com needs to be blacklisted from Lemmy communities, it’s a blog trying to sell some really silly services.
As for Session, they’ve never made an original product that I’ve ever seen - they took Signal and Monero, peeled off the labels, and made them (especially Signal, IMO) worse in both aesthetics and privacy protection.
And the company behind this is in Australia, a country where you need to weaken products (by adding backdoors) upon government request.
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Session is very much not a clone of Signal. They forked it way back and the entire back end and front end are different. Session uses the lokinet behind the scenes which stores messages encrypted and routes traffic. Session isn’t completely decentralized to my knowledge as its a work in progress but for now it is harder to block or censor compared to signal.
Even if you have your doubts, its been audited and found to be reasonably secure so it shouldn’t be a security risk. I still don’t use it due to its lack of invites but if they add stable calls I might just switch. For now I use it to send text between my devices.
The encryption is a fundamental problem because they removed Signal’s forward secrecy and replaced it all with a single leakable key you share among all your devices.
According to Season devs, Session does not use LokiNet but some other thing. It’s been that way since way back…
For sending data I recommend wormhole or localsend, makes way more sense
Sorry, I meant text
Localsend can also do text!
An alternative that I use is QR codes
Android:
- some F-Droid Apps (over Obtainium of course ;D)
- now I just use Mull + the offline QR code generator Addon. I have all in my custom Addon collection
Linux:
- Decoder with the fix mentioned on the Link. That at least deals with autodeletion of history, but the text still has no password function. (Basically I use the awesomeness of Flatpak app storage and always delete it after the process is finished, works flawlessly and can be used with every app)
I think it’s an interesting project. However I am not a fan of their decision to omit forward secrecy, and have thus passed on using it. At least for now.
I didn’t know they did that. Unless it’s a technical limitation of Loki Net (which should be worked on if that’s the case), this is borderline unacceptable for a product made for privacy. Thanks for pointing it out
I posted about preferring Session over SimpleX chat before and it seems like the big gripe is the crypto currency tie-in with Session
The crypto tie in is either the greatest idea in a while or is going to turn out to be a massive disaster.
For now I’m hesitant to say either way. I though about running a node on Lokinet a while back ended up not doing it due to cost.
To be honest with you I would be way more trusting of something that had servers that could be setup easily.
There is also Jami but Jami seems to be riddled with issues and is lacking a security audit.
I have Session. Given that it’s a fork of Signal and more anonymous I’m inclined to trust it from a privacy standpoint but can’t say I have the knowledge to really critique it’s tech. People aren’t really on there yet, at least nobody I know, so I don’t have much use for it yet but I would if it catches on a bit more at some point.
It is not a fork of signal. They use the Signal protocol for encryption and probably the way messages are composed, thats basically it.
Thanks. They’ve referred to themselves as a fork of Signal but maybe a bit of an oversimplification
Yeah it’s signal with perfect forward secrecy removed and a onion network added on top.
Bonus points all attachments are centralized to servers in Canada…
https://www.securemessagingapps.com/
The lack of perfect forward secrecy is very concerning, and the fact they had it when they forked signal but stripped it out because their infrastructure couldn’t handle it is a huge red flag.
The simplified privacy people/person? Only likes session because they are name squatting a bunch of oxen names and want to resell them at a profit.
Session is secure and has been audited to verify that. However, I do have concerns over the size and obscurity of Lokinet. I don’t know if that will ever change or not.
