← Back to context

Comment by stavros

1 month ago

Exactly. These arguments are so weak that they read more like a smear campaign than an actual technical discussion.

"You have to agree to Apple's terms to use it"? What's Signal meant to do, jailbreak your phone before installing itself on it?

30 comments

stavros

Reply
kelipso  1 month ago

Moxie Marlinspike sounds like some 90s intelligence guy’s understanding of what an appealing name to hacker groups would sound like. Put a guy like that as so-called creator of some encryption protocol for messaging and promote the app like it’s for secret conversations and you think people won’t be suspicious? It screams honeypot like nothing else.

  • fasterik  1 month ago

    >Moxie Marlinspike sounds like some 90s intelligence guy’s understanding of what an appealing name to hacker groups would sound like. Put a guy like that as so-called creator of some encryption protocol for messaging and promote the app like it’s for secret conversations and you think people won’t be suspicious? It screams honeypot like nothing else.

    This criticism has absolutely zero substance and honestly just reads like paranoid rambling. The Signal protocol has been independently formally analyzed [1] and has no known security issues.

    [1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013

  • kfreds  1 month ago

    He IS a hacker from the 90s. It’s an assumed name. Plenty of hackers from the 90s have pseudonyms.

    > so-called creator of some encryption protocol

    All evidence points to him being one of the protocol’s designers, along with Trevor Perrin.

    I’ve met both of them. The first time I met Moxie and talked about axolotl (as it was called back then) was in 2014. Moxie and Trevor strike me as having more integrity and conviction than most. There is no doubt in my mind that they are real and genuine.

    Interestingly enough, some of the work Trevor did related to Signal’s cryptography was later used by Jason Donenfeld in the design of WireGuard.

    > It screams honeypot like nothing else.

    As you can see there is plenty of evidence suggesting otherwise.