this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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Asklemmy
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I can't speak about telegram, but signal is absolutely not secure to use. Its a US-based service (that must adhere to NSLs), and requires phone numbers (meaning your real identity in the US).
Matrix, XMPP, or SimpleX are all decentralized, and don't require US hosting.
You are right but
we like doing the wrong thing over and over again. And being surprised, each and every time, when it turns out to be wrong. Never picking up onto the repeating simple pattern.
1111111111111 what's the next number ... errrr Signal! That's it you got it. Good job.
Embrace the idiocracy!
This is why Telegram is awesome.
Eventually you will come around and realize how hopeless humanity is and embrace that it is well beyond hope.
And then you will have a larger network and enjoy each and every one of them.
This entire article is guessing at hypothetical backdoors. Its like saying that AES is backdoored because the US government chose it as the standard defacto symmetrical encryption.
There is no proof that Signal has done anything nefarious at all.
As an outsider, I mean isn't that the same for news coverage for chinese/russian backdoors, but everyone believes it without any proof.
Why is US company being a US honeypot a big surprise, and its government recommending it not a big red flag? but it is when China recommends wechat? Can't we be critical and suspicious of both authoritarian countries?
Do you have access to Signal servers to verify your claims by any chance? Afaik their servers are running modified codebase, and third party apps cannot use them. So how do you claim anything that goes behind closed doors at all? Genuinel curious.
That's not how it works. The signal protocol is designed in a way that the server can't have access to your message contents if the client encrypts them properly. You're supposed to assume the server might be compromised at any time. The parts you actually need to verify for safe communication are:
Being critical is good, and we should always hold them accountable for our security. We can look to third party audits for help with that.
https://community.signalusers.org/t/overview-of-third-party-security-audits/13243
There was also no proof that a ton of US companies were spying on their users, until the global surveillance disclosures. Crypto AG ran a honeypot that spied on communications between world leaders for > 40 years until it got exposed.
Right but Signal has been audited by various security firms throughout its lifetime, and each time they generally report back that this messenger has encryption locked down properly.
So if I understand it Signal has your phone number but only logs sign up date and last activity date. So yes they can say this person has Signal and last used it on date X. Other than that no information.
Matrix doesn't require a phone number but has no standard on logging activity so it's up to the server admin what they log, and they could retain ip address, what users are talking in what, rooms, etc. and E2EE is not required.
I think both have different approaches. I'm just trying to understand. On one hand you have centralized system that has a standard to minimize logs or decentralized system that must be configured to use E2EE and to remove logs.
They have your phone number (meaning your full identity, and even current address), and as the primary identifier, it means they have message timestamps and social graphs.
Its impossible to verify what code their server is running. Or that they delete their logs, because they say they do? You should never rely on someone saying "just trust us". Truly secure systems have much harder verifiability tests to pass.
Thank you for your post!
I want you to know your effort and knowledge is appreciated, this will help future readers make better decisions.✨
But the situation stands that my friend and their friends are not as technologically literate as we are, and I would rather have them on something easy and secured than unsecured at all, especially from my experience with getting communities to use such decentralized platforms you mentioned.
SimpleX is taking a lot of venture capital money which makes it just slightly suspect, imho. Those guys usually want a return of some kind on their investment. I simply don't trust the motives of technocrats like Jack Dorsey.
The Matrix Foundation, on the other hand, seems a lot more democratic in governance and stewardship of the protocol.
Good projects require money. And SimpleX is still way better than Signal and Telegram, so imo it's worth supporting and using
As you say yourself (cryptocraphic nerd here):
So a shame there are no free servers, are the server soft not open source, only the signal app itself?
The server is supposedly open source, but they did anger the open source community a few years back, by going a whole year without posting any code updates. Either way that's not reliable, because signal isn't self-hostable, so you have no idea what code the server is running. Never rely on someone saying "just trust us."
Signal has posted multiple times about their use of SGX Secure Enclaves and how you can use Remote Attestation techniques to verify a subset of the code that’s running on their server, which directly contradicts your claim. (It doesn’t contradict the claim that you cannot verify all the code their server is running, though.) Have you looked into that? What issues did you find with it?
I posted a comment here going into more detail about it, but I haven’t personally confirmed myself that it’s feasible.
This gets shared a lot as a major concern for all services requiring a phone number. It is definitely true that by definition, a phone number is linked to a person's identity, but in the case of signal, no other information can be derived from it. When the US government requests data for that phone number from Signal, like they occasionally do, the only information Signal provides them with is whether they do have a signal account and when they registered it last and when they last signed in. How is that truly problematic? For all other services which require a phone number, you would have much more information which is where it is truly problematic, say social graph, text messages, media, locations, devices etc. But none of that is accessible by Signal. So literally the only thing signal can say is whether the person has an account, that's about it. What's the big deal about it? Clearly the US government already has your phone number because they need it to make the request for Signal, but they gain absolutely no other information.
Your data is routed through Signal servers to establish connections. Signal absolutely can does provide social graphs, message frequency, message times, message size. There's also nothing stopping them from pushing a snooping build to one user when that user is targeted by the NSA. The specific user would need to check all updates against verified hashes. And if they're on iOS then that's not even an option, since the official iOS build hash already doesn't match the repo.
Do you have anything to back this up?
They have to. They can't route your messages otherwise.
Your link lists all the things they don't share. The only reasonable reading is that anything not explicitly mentioned is shared. It's information they have, and they're legally required to share what they have, also mentioned in your link in the documents underneath their comment.
Reding the link now " The reason the US government hasn’t tried to block or hinder Signal, is because it’s satisfied with the amount of information Signal can provide to it." Well the metadata of who is contacting who can be acquired by other means. CIA also like to have secure tools. Just like you can argue the CIA connection in the TOR case . It doesn't mean backdoors and so on.
Centralisation argument sure, but that issue will always be there at some level, even for matrix.
Phonenumber discovarability argument is no longer correct as it is possible to use signal and not disclosing it to contacts, but yes still to signal.
I have a signal account with a fake number so that is an option as well, if even more work than matrix process.