this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2021
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Privacy
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Since when does Zuckerberg endorses Signal?
The best way to do private/secure messenging is to do it similarly to the least private and secure messaging protocol in use?
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...
It also completely ignores the work that is being put into adding username that would allow you to talk to people without having to give them your phone number.
It also completely ignores Signal's history. Initially it started as a way to encrypt SMS, so phone number were not an option anyway.
Except that they don't have the message senders thanks to sealed sender
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. At least they try to improve on such feature by using crypto to make it private, while not using proof of work which destroys the environment. And it's not like they have actually shipped it. It's only in the beta channel in a few countries...
Yeah, it's obviously because of that, and Chinese apps are a heaven of privacy and zero state censorship.
Sealed sender is a nice idea, but due to Signal's centralized server architecture it is sadly snake-oil. If Signal wants they can easily circumvent sealed sender with a simple timing correlation as they have 100% knowledge about when a client sends or receives a message.
How do they know when a specific client sends a message?
Because that client connects to their server to do so roll eyes
He uses signal, I don't think he's publicly endorsed it.
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.
That's not what in you essay. Also, this is a fact that I doubt a lot since he owns WhatsApp. The story about that was when there was the huge Facebook data leak, allegedly, his phone number was in it, and it was possible to see that he was registered on Signal. At the time I tried to fact check this but couldn't find anything that convinced me 100% of the veracity of this fact. I haven't checked again so there may be some more convincing evidence available today.
Also, him being registered on it wouldn't necessarily mean he is a user of Signal. He could have just registered to see what the competition looked like.
And if it were true that Marc Zuckerberg used Signal everyday, I would take it as a very strong confirmation that Signal is trustworthy. A quick way to test whether a conspiracy is true or not it to check if it would affect the rich and powerful.
Anyway, rich people endorsing Signal doesn't mean anything. I hate Elon Musk too, but he just jumped on the bandwagon when it was already leaving and Signal was already gaining in popularity. A broken clock is right twice a day.
It's not. I can dictate my phone number. I can't do it for a cryptographic user id.
With Signal I don't have to because my phone number is already in their address book. When username arrive in Signal, a similar feature will likely be available anyway (though this is speculation, I don't really know what it will look like and I don't have the motivation to look at their WIP github branches).
It still is much less valuable than what you claim in your essay. They might be able to track you via your IP but that's much less efficient and can be easily prevented via a VPN or using the builtin censorship circumvention proxy. Cryptography ensures that the rest cannot leak.
If it is transparent and the use of crypto is hidden to the user while still preserving their privacy, it could be amazing. There's no reason not to try, the beta version of the app is there exactly for this.
While I do wish my country (France) and other EU countries would do more ~~in terms of~~ regarding our concerning digital dependency on the US, I don't see how the PRC is any better. They don't have FB and other platforms which in some way is a good thing, however they have massive state surveillance in all of their internet platforms, and secure communication methods are banned.
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.
With Signal I don't really have to trust anyone regarding the confidentiality of the messages. The App is FLOSS, has been audited and is under a high level of scrutiny. The protocol itself is recognised as the golden standard regarding E2EE for asynchronous messaging by the cryptography community. I'm a student in cybersecurity/embedded systems. I understand the underlying double ratchet protocol, which I have studied and I am working on right now.
I don't really need to trust anyone regarding confidentiality when I use Signal. If there were a service comparable to Signal in terms of ease of use, features and security but french, I'd use it. There's olvid but it's not FLOSS and has much worse UX, and Matrix/XMPP are less secure while being much harder to use (I do use matrix on a self-hosted server by some people I know).
I'm much more concerned about the Google and Huawei crap that I can't remove from my phone and that I know is siphoning data for advertisement currently than some grand conspiracy that would be fooling the entire cyber-security community, with no concrete motive.
Non of your points are really any concrete proof of Signal being backdoored.
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.
It was only the server side, which anyway we can't attest is what is actually running on their servers, and there were some other repositories that contained up to date code. This was still concerning.
This is not my default position. It is an informed choice based on the scrutiny and recognition that signal has worldwide.
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?
Reading over this again. The primary identifier in signal, is phone numbers. You think signal doesn't store those, or use them to route messages?
Federation increases censorship resistance. I do not think it necessarily decreases privacy, although having metadata strewn across multiple servers may be a risk. Still, I think the comparison with email is a bit of a strawn man argument, since it is not only the federated nature of email which makes it easy to surveil but also the fact it is unencrypted by default.
Moreover, email these days is concentrating in the hands of a small number of providers (gmail, etc).
XMPP seems a lot more distributed at this point in time.
Federation makes it much harder to keep metadata private, though you could technically achieve the level of privacy found in Signal, it's not easy.
In practice, Signal is a lot better at protecting your metadata than Matrix and XMPP.
Now that matrix has a lot of different clients and implementation, of would be super hard for them to implement something like Sealed Sender, which Signal was able to deploy very easily. I find it very unlikely that matrix will end up fixing its privacy issues. While Signal will be able to evolve and fix them. They are currently working on usernames for example.