Comment by taminka
17 hours ago
can anyone explain why telegram doesn't use an audited e2e implementation? is it really because they wanted more convenient and faster cross-device sync? have they been threatened and/or backdoored by the fsb? they basically stole vk from him, but left him alone w/ telegram?
it's suspicious, but at the same time, iirc, nobody's been able to find a vulnerability in their encryption protocol :shrug
People have found vulnerabilities in MTProto.
IIRC, they had even started out with basic mistakes like MAC-then-encrypt.
The first version of MTProto was found to have weaknesses.
The reason they rolled their own was because it came out before the Double-Ratchet/Axolotl protocol and OtR (which double-ratchet is essentially based on) was extremely inconvenient to use properly and had its own weaknesses.
> The reason they rolled their own was because it came out before the Double-Ratchet/Axolotl protocol and OtR (which double-ratchet is essentially based on) was extremely inconvenient to use properly and had its own weaknesses.
this actually makes a lot of sense lowkey, thanks :)
1,2) NIH syndrome 3) We don't know 4) Expropriation isn't "basically stolen", Telegram was a tiny side project at the time