Comment by mmooss
8 hours ago
> Is it your expectation that E2E is broken by these "dragnet surveillance" networks? Surely not?
While I disagree with these critiques of Signal, the surveillance networks can capture metadata - who talks to who and when - without breaking E2E. The metadata is as valuable as the data.
I think Signal has a feature to protect users, but I can't imagine how it works if the attacker can see all parties' Internet connections.
It's true someone snooping at either end of a conversation could over time correlate timing and sizes to show that two users are communicating, but that's the most they can do. Signal is not peer to peer so you're not connecting to your recipient, and signal itself has enough raw volume that simply correlating sizes and timing of a small number of messages wouldn't really be sufficient to know who is communicating with who.
I think they could make that significantly more difficult by adding csprng delays and padding to the messages. That way you can't really effectively correlate timing and sizes without direct access to signals inner workings. I'm not sure what signal's actual throughput is, but if think as a paid feature it could be economical.
Another crazier way would be to send every message to a large number random latched recipients. Good way to 1000x your bandwidth.
> The metadata is as valuable as the data.
This can be true if you are able to get ahold of a user's device and access their signal messages. It's not true in most other cases. I don't particularly care if you know that I am talking to someone specific as much as I care that you don't know what I'm saying.
> Ex-NSA Chief: 'We Kill People Based on Metadata'
> Hayden made the remark after saying he agreed with the idea that metadata - the information collected by the NSA about phone calls and other communications that does not include content - can tell the government "everything" about anyone it's targeting for surveillance, often making the actual content of the communication unnecessary.
https://abcnews.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/ex-nsa-chief-we-...
> Signal is not peer to peer
Isn't it? I think it has a setting, disabled by default, to proxy connections via a Signal server. If you're not doing that ... it must be P2P? Probably with the IP address of the person you're communicating with in the header of every packet?
> the surveillance networks can capture metadata - who talks to who and when
If this is part of your threat model then I would suggest a different tool such as SimpleX since it uses onion routing and can be configured to always use private routing/relays.
I'm not familiar with SimpleX, but keep in mind only some types of onion routing is secure against a global passive adversary. Famously Tor is not.
Nym is apparently good against a global adversary.
Session uses onion routing. SimpleX does not.