i’ve just seen a comment in a post, in this very community, saying people trust signal because of missinformation (from what i could undertand).
if this is true, then i have a few questions:
-what menssaging app should i use for secure communications? i need an app that balances simplicity and security.
-how to explain it to my friends who use signal because i recomended?
-what this means for other apps in general?
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Requires you to use a phone number, your phone app needs to be online 24/7 to be connected, and hosted in a questionable jurisdiction with questionable human rights. Try Matrix. It’s selfhostable, doesn’t need a phone number to sign up and the foundation is British, which while this country from what I know has gone down the water, they still have some niceities from time they were in the EU, like GDPR.
Among other problems, Matrix is not a replacement for a messaging app. It’s more of a community message board with 1:1 private messages with the possibility of encryption. It is way more than most want or need.
I’ve also run a Matrix server in the past, and it’s not simple. The vast majority of people do not have the technical acumen, hardware infrastructure, or time necessary to even begin this endeavor.
Joining a public server where they don’t have control of the data requires a lot of trust in that instance and their owners. To expect them to vet those owners first, verify the servers are in a trusted country, … 10 more steps, before they begin is asinine.
Matrix is not an alternative to any messaging apps mainly intended for 1:1 communication.
The 5 eyes CCTV GCHQ British? The rabid USSA, Shitrael bootlickers?
No thanksI don’t know what the current reputation is but Matrix wasn’t always perfectly trustworthy either: https://hackea.org/notas/matrix.html
I have managed to get all my friendship group on signal and we use it daily. While it does have its flaws (mainly being centralised and US based), I try in life to not let perfect be the enemy of good. Until there’s a stable and easy to use alternative I can point my friends to, I imagine we’ll stay on Signal.
PRODUCT PITCH: Hey everyone, I have a great idea for a secure / private messaging service.
It’s hosted in the US, subject to its pervasive spying laws including national security letters.
Also I need all your phone numbers.
Also no you can’t host this yourself, I run the only server.
Everyone who uses signal and supports it, is falling for this pitch.
I am under the impression that Signal encrypts metadata so that is useless to sell. The only thing they can turn over to law enforcement after a lawful warrant is the phone number an account was opened with (and maybe the date that happened) and the date of the last time the account was used. That is all.
Don’t they also need to store who to send your messages? From a technical point of view?
They store where to deliver the message, but not from who that message came.
Didnt know abput that.
Like many said, signal is centralised and requires a phone number.
Meaning it’s not anonymous and the server owners can technically sell your metadata, not the content of the messages but who talks to who, what time, the length of the chat/call etc.
Either-way having to use a phone number to register an account, for me is not acceptable for several reasons besides privacy and metadata.
On top of that, the server side of signal isn’t free software (as in freedom), which means that the whole program requires non-free (as in freedom not beer) network services in order to work. Which isn’t acceptable for free software advocates.
Alternatives:
Simplex: If you don’t require voice calls there are more options available there are many text messages, but very few support calls, which for me is a critical feature.
In theory Simplex is the best, it’s e2ee, quantum resistant, each chat (message queue) is it’s own “account”, each “account” is just a private key, and you can switch servers with the tap of a bottom, it also supports private routing, which from what I understand is like some sort of onion routing between simplex servers.
Hosting your own server is also extremely easy, (tho note that running your own server can actually be detrimental to privacy depending on your threat model), supports calls, group chats and all the features I would ever need.
Unfortunately at least for me and my contacts, SimpleX it’s terribly buggy, specially on phone, literally tonight I missed the opportunity to be with a friend because I only saw the message one hour late.
Very often messages just stop being received until the app is restarted, usually I have my friend send me a message via other (centralised) app in order to warn me that he messaged me, I also do the same for him. After restarting the app it usually works fine for a while until it does it again. And needs restarting again.
On top of it, it’s taking more and more time to get the first message when in background even during normal operation, tho I blame Samsung for this one and not Simplex, and understand that Simplex doesn’t use push notifications for improved privacy, but it has become a real problem, what used to take 5 minutes now sometimes takes more than half an hour. Maybe my phone is overloaded, idk.
Calls could be improved too, takes several tries for it to actually work, and it doesn’t help when the other person calls me back and I call them at the same time.
On top of it, the volume of a call seems very quiet compared to a normal phone call and it’s very hard to hear the other person, I’m guessing a simple compressor DSP could fix this.
Unfortunately also has been news of Simplex planning to enshittify the app with cryptocurrency, something that I politically and morally oppose.
Session:
I’ve used it for a month years ago, before I knew about SimpleX, whatever technical merits it may or may not have, (and from what I understand it’s privacy is still below SimpleX) it relies on some cryptocurrency network in the background, so I won’t use it. Self-hosting it also seemed to me no easy task, but I could be wrong.
Jami:
Never got it to work.
Matrix:
I haven’t tried Matrix yet, I think I read long ago that calls aren’t e2ee tho that may have changed now. I also read that Matrix leaks a lot of metadata which can be a problem. Maybe not if you self-host, but self-hosting comes with it’s own privacy problems. Maybe I should research it again and try to self-host it and see how it goes.
So as bad as Signal is, I can’t give you a working alternative, I put all with Simplex despite all the bugs but I don’t think most people are willing to go though it, however if you (and your contacts) have a high end phones maybe it works better. But it’s not something I can recommend.
Matrix very recently has had e2ee calling since at least last april
I don’t host a server currently, so I can’t fully recommend it without knowledge of the backend, but i’m liking the experience as a user
Just looked at Session, and holy shit is that a massive downside…
From their own whitepaper:
Through the integration of a blockchain network, Session adds a financial requirement for anyone wishing to host a server on the network, and thus participate in Session’s message storage and routing architecture.
So you have to pay to self-host, and that’s somehow an upside???
This staking system provides a defence against Sybil attacks by limiting attackers based on the amount of financial resources they have available.
Which is a fine explanation in a world where everyone has a relatively equal amount of wealth. This is the epitome of dunning-kruger economics: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Firstly, the need for attackers to buy or control Session Tokens to run Session Nodes creates a market feedback loop which increases the cost of acquiring sufficient tokens to run large portions of the network. That is, as the attacker buys or acquires more tokens and stakes them, removing them from the circulating supply, the supply of the Session Token is decreased while the demand from the attacker must be sustained. This causes the price of any remaining Session Tokens to increase, creating an increasing price feedback loop which correlates with the scale of the attack
So the more nodes a single entity holds, the harder it becomes for other entities to buy nodes and break the monopoly? Did you take 3 seconds to think this through???
Secondly, the staking system binds an attacker to their stake, meaning if they are found to be performing active attacks, the underlying value of their stake is likely to decline as users lose trust in the protocol, or could be slashed by the network, increasing the sunk cost for the attacker.
“Assuming every user is a perfectly rational actor, malicious actors would be shunned. This is somehow due to the economic incentive, and not just how humans operate when they’re assumed to be perfectly rational.”
Also: malicious actors when they find out they might lose their money if they get caught: “welp, I better not do that then. Thanks laissez-faire capitalism!”
Jesus christ fucked on a pike, these dipshits really drank the crypto kool-aid, huh?
In regards to Signal, this is largely not true. Sealed sender has been signal’s metadata hiding protection for like 6 years or something. The only information signal has is your phone number, your account creation time, and the last time you contacted their servers.
They also have a server implementation on github, so it seems to be open source to me. (I could be missing something though)
You are right though, that it uses centralized servers and requires a phone number, which are sticking points for a lot of people.
Give me ssh access to their centralized server so I can verify this “sealed sender” idea is working.
Otherwise this is a “trust me bro” claim.
This doesn’t really make sense to me, what do you mean? Client-side you do different computation for sealed sender delivery/receipt. What’s your normal standard of trust that a hosted, open source project is running the same code that they’ve made public?
I think if they store any metadata that we don’t know about, the lie runs very very deep, like to conspiracy theory levels that don’t really make sense for a registered nonprofit: https://signal.org/bigbrother/
What’s your normal standard of trust that a hosted, open source project is running the same code that they’ve made public?
Its a centralized service, you have no idea what code they’re running. You can’t host your own.
Also they went a whole year one time without publishing any server code updates until they got a lot of backlash for it. Still, since its centralized, it can’t be trusted to be running what they say they are.
What about Delta Chat?
Delta Chat doesn’t support calls, same with Briar so I haven’t tried them since calls are as important as messages for me.
They do support it (Settings -> Advanced ->enable Debug calls or wait a few days for the latest release). Also chatmail servers provide turn/stun for calls if they couldn’t established as p2p.
Interesting, didn’t know this, nice, may be a gamechanger, but I couldn’t find information on either calls are e2ee or not.
I moved some chats to Threema and im satisfied… they have family options so paying for one license is for 6 people
Signal is fine for normal/social chatting. It is centralised which makes it much harder to obscure identifying conversation metadata, and I wouldn’t recommend it for comms with a state threat model. I like SimpleX for addressing those issues.
If you just want to chat to friends and nothing else, I probably would recommend Signal for the most polished experience and most widely adopted open-source private messenger.
Signal is great, but it is centralized. Session messenger is a great example of decentralizes e2ee messaging.
I used Session for a couple of years, but switched back to Signal because it did a poor job with media sharing.
It’s been a while since I switched back, so maybe it’s fixed now?
It’s always gonna be a moving target. Wife and I started using Telegram because it wasn’t monitored like Facebook Messenger (which I don’t have an account for) or WhatsApp. Now people are saying Telegram isn’t good enough, use Signal. It’s still good enough for us. I also have Signal. No one I know uses it, but I have it in case they wanna start using it.
Honestly though, iMessage is secure enough for most people. Basically texting through Apple servers.
But any security or privacy expert will tell you that you need to determine your own threat model. No one else can tell you what that is.
Just because you made one mistake doesn’t mean “It’s always gonna be a moving target”.
What’s the one mistake? Telegram? Or Signal?
The way I see it, the goalposts keep moving because Telegram was the private alternative to FB Messenger and WhatsApp. Then Signal was the private alternative to those, and Telegram. Now people are saying Signal is a problem (I’m guessing because of the cock up the US government had last year?). The goalposts keep moving, but Telegram is still fine for what I need. I keep both as alternatives to texting for people who want to reach me however they’re comfortable doing. I also have one called Session. I don’t use Twitter/X, Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, or Reddit. I have a Discord because I have a couple things that are only available up there, but it’s not a good way to reach me as I have notifications disabled on it.
Telegram is a social network masquerading as a messaging app, not a “secure messaging” app.
using Telegram because it wasn’t monitored […]
That is an interesting statement regarding the fact its centralized and deletes accounts / channel all the time.
telegram doesnt encrypt by default, its a hidden feature. i wouldnt be too sure about iMessage, i believe E2EE is a bare minimum for everyone.
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Messages in iCloud are E2EE protected only if iCloud Backup is disabled or if iCloud Backup is enabled with Advanced Data Protection (ADP). Otherwise, Apple stores a copy of the encryption key, allowing Apple (or authorities with a court order) to access your messages.
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Probably obvious, but messages sent over SMS (green bubbles) are not E2EE.
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Telegram uses a proprietary encryption protocol called MTProto, so who knows if it can be trusted.
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i’m concerned that they require phone numbers and host on AWS, and don’t have a clear monetization scheme. but for now it seems reasonably secure.
Signal no longer requires phone numbers.you no longer need to share your phone number to chat at least (sorry)Not true at all, you still need a phone number to sign up.
The signal protocol is end-to-end encrypted, not even signal themselves knows what is being sent to what.
As I understand it, while they can’t see the contents, the Metadata is still exposed.
Isnt the metadata also encrypted?
Yes
phone number, IP, time of connection, duration of the chat, size of the encrypted chatlog, etc. might be useful for feds
Your phone number is the biggest metadata you could possibly give (it means your real identity, including your current address), and signal has it.
not to shit on you specifically but I see this over and over, folks asking how to be “secure”. secure against what?
if you’re into this, you need to set up a “threat model” i.e. what are your threat vectors and then you build your defenses against that model. a defense against blanket surveillance doesn’t handle targeted threats. a successful defense against your government doesn’t preclude other nation-state actors getting at you.
like, if your threat vector is e.g. your SO “inspecting” your phone, you set up a passcode and you’re safe against that threat. but, if there’s a toddler going around smashing stuff, your defense isn’t valid. defense against that vector is placing your phone high up. but that defense isn’t effective against SO.
I am sure any messenger recommended here can be successfully red-teamed, be it design flaws, operator error, the famous wrench comic, or whathaveyou. but that doesn’t mean it’s ineffective in your specific case.
Yes, i hate this in these kinds of discussions. It so often devolves into how you’ll be safe from surveillance by world governments (spoiler: you won’t be, if they really care).
And here I am, just not wanting to hand data over to giant corporations that have been proven to use it for no good.
Heck, even if there was no good actor/solution, not giving all your data to the same bad actor is already a step up.
Did you ask the commenter what the issue was? Seems like the logical place to start.
You’d think so, but sometimes they just angrily rant with no clear point or references.
But that would mean that you shouldnt accept their claim, regardless of how conceivable the claim might appear to be. Otherwise, we loose our minds to common sense.
It was on the leaked Paragon Solutions selfie (containing the Graphite surveillance tool), indicating there are actively exploited zero days? Just a guess.
Edit: https://open.substack.com/pub/ahmedeldin/p/the-israeli-spyware-firm-that-accidentally
Those reports do NOT show active zero days in signal. The pieces of spyware talked about in those are capable of reading messages once already having compromised a device which isn’t insane as if you have access to read storage from a device arbitrarily, of course you can just read the messages. If you want to solve this, A: Use GrapheneOS or an iPhone on lockdown mode with data over USB disabled or B: Use Molly with local encryption.
There is none. Theres like 0.1% of people who complain about it who have a valid point.
And those points are always meaningless in light of the alternative’s drawbacks.
Even the alternatives like Briar acknowledge on their FAQ that Signal has pros
Agreed. I would add that most detractors don’t understand what a threat model is and want a perfect solution, for no cost, and easy to use. Something which is impossible.
Being tied to US infrastructure isn’t a valid concern?
What then is the difference between it and Whatsapp? Both claim to use the Signal secure protocol but you can never confirm that since their codebases are closed source and proprietary.
Signal is open source. GitHub
One is run by an advertising company that has been proven in court to be a bad actor and a strong motive to log and track anything they can
The other is a non-profit without any real motive to sell you out, or any history of doing so
Thats good enough for me and most others unless you’re an extreme “trust no one” level of paranoia
Its in usa, and its big. The chance that its compromised by cia is 100%.
XD you think the CIA can’t crack your closet server? Bruh, get real.
Considering that all other alternatives are either
- extremely difficult if not impossible for non-technical users to leverage, or
- much, much worse, up to even eagerly giving out your data
I consider Signal to be the best option out there. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. It simply is the best general option out there, by far, for a general audience.
Yes, you can be totally secure, untraceable, and ultimately unfindable. But being cut into pieces, with each separate piece entombed in its own barrel of concrete, and each barrel dropped into a different oceanic trench, tends to be a bit beyond what I consider to be reasonable to achieve that.
everyone around here talking about the CIA and nation states as part of their threat model…
bro… you’re worried about the CIA and mossad, and you think spinning up your own chat servers (simplex, matrix, etc.) as an amateur sysadmin is going to be MORE secure?
Signal does have your phone number, which is a problem.
On the other hand, the only information linked to that phone number is, “the person with this phone number uses signal”. AFAIK your phone number is not linked to your contacts, your message content, etc.
So in practice, the fact that Signal has your phone number is probably only a problem insofar as you don’t want anybody to know that you use Signal.
But to be fair, why have that issue if you don’t have to. Signal is actually good, still, but there are even better alternatives.
Signal is actually good, still, but there are even better alternatives.
… Would you care to list some of these alternatives and how they are better?
Every alternative I’ve looked at has some major drawbacks that would prevent me from getting any of my friends to move. Having to selfhost my own chat service isn’t really a positive in my mind due to the maintenance required and the higher possibility of outages.
list some of these alternatives
Probably the ones you’re already thinking of (SimpleX, Session, XMPP).
how they are better?
They’re better in terms of privacy. When I said they’re better, I mean specifically in terms of privacy.
Of course they’re less convenient, as you’re alluding to.
Signal gets me all the privacy I need. I don’t care if they know my phone number uses Signal, I don’t use it as anonymous chat, I use it with friends and family.
As others in this post have said, Signal handles privacy perfectly fine, it does not provide anonymity.Unlike several other users here, I actually view Signal’s contact discoverability as a feature, not a security flaw. All it means is if someone I know installs Signal, they can easily send me a message without a complicated back and forth through some other medium.
I myself said “Signal is actually good”, so there’s no need to argue with me about it.
Nevertheless:
I actually view Signal’s contact discoverability as a feature, not a security flaw
Of course it can be both. Many things are both features in one domain, and flaws in another domain. Obviously it’s a feature or else they wouldn’t have purposely developed it.
Well, it’s 100% linked to your contacts in one way or another because when you install it Signal will happily alert you to which ones of your contacts are already using Signal. I can’t see how they could manage that without slurping up your contact information.
I can’t see how they could manage that without slurping up your contact information.
AFAIK the client slurps up your contacts, but the E2E encryption ensures that the Signal server cannot actually see those.
