Comment by sharpshadow
1 year ago
Only the secret chat is e2e encrypted. All the other chat options are not. I think calls are also not encrypted since they appear in the normal chat history not in the e2e chat.
Obviously if your phone is compromised your e2ee chat is not safe.
> Obviously if your phone is compromised your e2ee chat is not safe.
Pretty much, a lot of people think that seeing E2EE means everything is safe, which I believe gives a false sense of security. You can have your phone compromised (especially when I know your phone number, Signal I’m looking at you) or be subject to other means of attacks, exposing everything. I would rather know that this app is not secure so I don’t share anything important, while keeping secure communication to other means.
Not only that. If they want to intercept e2e chats it's possible with a MITM attack, that if you control the server it's not a difficult thing to do. Of course the users if they check the keys they see they are different, but practically no one does that.
And I think WhatsApp probably does it, otherwise why the authorities never complied that WhatsApp did not let them see the conversations?
WhatsApp has defaulted to aggressively storing allegedly "E2EE" conversations without any form of encryption in Google Drive (freely) for years. And it would seem they are also currently in possession of the keys to decrypt them when you restore such backups from another device without the key stored on it (that lately cannot be extracted without exploits or root access anyway). Facebook/Meta has often expressed their love for the practice of client-side scanning or parallelly sending data to their servers, but it doesn't seem the case for WhatsApp yet, so what measures they take to remain compliant with the ever-increasing surveillance practices remains to speculation. For a somewhat educated user that knows to opt-out of online backups every time it's prompted by the application, I'd say it's probably safer than normal Telegram chats, but very far from flawless.
> And I think WhatsApp probably does it
Rule of thumb: never trust anything Facebook. I’m sure sending your messages through mail is more secure and private than WhatsApp these days.
Stealing someone's phone number wouldn't give you any Signal data, as all the messages have perfect forward secrecy, though, right? And all contacts would see an alert that your security number had changed. Not completely foolproof, and I would like Signal to use something other than phone numbers for accounts, but it's pretty good.
Knowing someone's phone number is enough to potentially compromise it. Sophisticated methods can involve zero-click attacks, where just sending you an SMS that you won’t even see can lead to a compromised device. You can check how Tucker got his Signal conversation exposed.
Matrix is far better in terms of security than Signal, but Matrix is far behind compared to Telegram features.
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There's also an option in the settings that translates into taking over a phone number on a separate device isn't enough, you also need to enter the pin. (Not on by default though.)
>You can have your phone compromised (especially when I know your phone number, Signal I’m looking at you) or be subject to other means of attacks, exposing everything.
Knowing someone's phone number doesn't automatically let you compromise their device. This is such a ridiculous argument.
>I would rather know that this app is not secure so I don’t share anything important, while keeping secure communication to other means.
This is nirvana fallacy. It's essentially saying "We should not talk about Telegram lying about its security, when in reality nothing is 100% secure". Yeah, nothing is, there's always an attack. That doesn't contribute anything of interest to the topic, it just tries to kill the criticism. And I'm saying this as someone who has worked on this exact topic for ten years: https://github.com/maqp/tfc
> Knowing someone's phone number doesn't automatically
One way or another, phone numbers are like home addresses in the digital world. Once exposed, it’s just a matter of time and resources dedicated to that. Not to mention, sometimes it’s just needed to cross over the identity, that’s it.
> This is a nirvana fallacy. It's essentially saying
I didn’t say that. As I mentioned in the other comment to you, some or a lot of people just don’t care about security, and as long as this info is known, it should be treated just like any social media.
Great project with TFC, I never heard of it, but it looks interesting. I would definitely give it a try! I have a question though: does your project require a phone number? If not, why? And would you recommend Signal to anyone who is after security, privacy, and anonymity?
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Calls seem tm be e2e encrypted: https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/video-calls
No idea how secure the encryption is, but calling someone on Telegram is safer than sending texts.
Depends on who your adversary is and how much you trust their protocol (some weird homegrown thing with clever/questionable cryptographic choices, the last time I checked) and implementation. Your texts don't generally run through Telegram's infrastructure, for example.
Too bad I can't send a secure text from my Telegram desktop client. Lucky for me, there's Signal.
Only 1-1 calls are encrypted, voice chats (group calls) are not
> Obviously if your phone is compromised your e2ee chat is not safe.
Yes, and that's where the 'practical' argument pops up. With all the E2EE buzz, is it really helping in the scenarios where it's supposed to work the best?
This thread gives an overview on why Signal and other apps are not really practical: https://x.com/Pinboard/status/1474096410383421452
> The broader problem of ephemeral or spur of the moment protest activity leaving a permanent data trail that can be forensically analyzed and target individuals many years after the fact is unsolved and poses a serious risk to dissent. But E2E is not the solution to it.
> I feel like Moxie and a lot of end-to-end encryption purists fall into the same intellectual tarpit as the cryptocurrency people, which is that it should be possible to design technical systems that require zero trust, and that the benefits of these designs are self-evident
Does Telegram support E2E on anything other than Android and iOS? Last time I checked it was not available for desktop.