As Signal get your phone number. Can we considerate this application as private ? What’s your thoughts about it ? I’m also using SimpleX, ElementX, Threema, but not much people using it…
Cheers
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Signal is a stop gap measure on the way to simplex
It did its job of providing privacy of content but meta data a d KYCd phones was a honeypot. Glowies got their relationship heat maps which is really all they wanted.
Once they need content, they will brick your end point with million zero day back doors caked onto everything.
Pegasus cellebrite etc is now used against normal targets.
5 years ago you would have to be a national security concern for such royal treament
I couldn’t find any sources regarding this topic
Since we are on the topic of signal… im not tech saviie but i have read lots of blogs and people about how secure is the signal protocol. My question is … how can i be sure that the protocol is implemented as the open source code shows? Please correct me if im wrong but from what i read on their website the apk they provide has the capability to update itself at anytime. So what stops them to change how it works with an update? is it posible to build the apk yourself and stop the ability to update?
Just like any foss project, there some level of trust if you are going with the main distribution. In theory you are correct that not much is stopping them from releasing a malicious update, but because it is open source, soon enough people would notice that either they released new code that is malicious, or that the new version does not match the source code. That kind of scenario is known as a supply chain attack.
Since the code is open, you can literally read it for yourself to see exactly what the apk does. You can also fork it and modify it however you like, just like the creator of Molly did (Molly is a fork of the Signal client that adds some security features)
It’s a centralized, US-based service running on AWS, that’s not self-hostable, requires phone numbers, and you have no idea what code their server is running.
Whether the app you use for it is open source, is entirely irrelevant for them building social network graphs, considering they have your real identity via phone numbers.
If the answer is “I just trust them”, then you’re not doing security correctly.
It is not as good as a decentralized system, and even though the server is open source, it isn’t self hostable (technically in an intranet you could but not easily)
But the signal foundation is a non profit with external audits and a proven track record with law enforced requesting data and getting basically nothing (If i remember correctly they only have your user to phone number relation and the last time you were online)
So although it is imperfect, it is an amazing solution that is almost the only 1:1 competitor to whatsapp/messenger/imessage that is privacy respecting, so I am very grateful for it’s existence.
even though the server is open source, it isn’t self hostable
Since its a centralized server that isn’t self hostable, you have no idea whats running on their server. Signal even went a whole year once without publishing any server back end code updates, until it raised a lot of hackles so they started adding to it again.
But the signal foundation is a non profit with external audits and a proven track record with law enforced requesting data and getting basically nothing (If i remember correctly they only have your user to phone number relation and the last time you were online)
You have no idea what they give to authorities: in fact with NSL’s, its illegal for them to tell you. Signal’s response to this is “just trust us”.
What about threema?
Just the fact that it costs means that most people won’t even consider it, making it very hard to recommend.
100% this, there is matrix, but that was a pain when I used it (this was a few years ago, granted). Signal just works.
Thanks for the explanation!
All the signal fans here should give me your phone number if you think its a secure service. All of them are hosted on AWS btw.
So what client would you recommend? I also feel like if it’s offered on Google Play or Apple Store it’s sus, but for lower income USians, it looks like Google Play is soon to become the forced option, especially on phones < $100.
Matrix, simpleX. Both have apps on f-droid, are federated, E2EE, and the servers are self-hostable anywhere in the world. Neither require phone numbers or identifiable info.
I’ll see if my heavily locked down device will let me download/install the files. Thank you so much!
Give me your threat model so I can laugh. You have no idea of what being secure is. Thank you for being yet another troll.
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Simple: I don’t use any US-based service due to NSLs
I especially don’t use any us-based service that asks for my phone number.
Threat model: usa
It’s a threat to 99% of people in the world
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You’re equating giving my Mom my phone number with broadcasting my phone number on the Threadiverse?
Signal is a US-based entity subject to warrantless NSLs, with all the data hosted on AWS. Its not giving your phone number to your mom. Its giving your phone number to amazon and most likely a US surveillance government agency.
For a threat model you should assume the worst and never trust any US-domiciled data service or platform.
Its giving your phone number to amazon and most likely a US surveillance government agency
Do you really think they don’t already have my/your phone #?
Since I don’t use comms platforms they have jurisdiction over, I lessen the risk.
Lessen the risk of…finding out your phone #?
The government already has every US citizens number anyways.
So just give up and use signal then?
You’re not going to convince me to use US-domiciled services.
Then just say you don’t like the US, no reason to make up some bullshit about NSLs and AWS and phone numbers.
I don’t use Signal to talk to people I know only pseudonymously through the internet. I use it to talk to people with whom I would already share my phone number. That social graph can be ascertained a thousand ways already. I think it is worth pointing out as you do, however. If I wanted to attempt to hide the fact that I was contacting someone from the state, I’m not sure where I would start, but it wouldn’t be Signal.
I dislike Signal because they are many google play services, and do not try to distribute their app beyond Google Play Store.
https://signal.org/android/apk/
and if you want, you can use molly-foss to remove google notification services
Just switched to molly-foss and am using mollysocket and have no issues
Was it just a simple switch or would I have to convince everyone to use Molly instead of Signal all over again? Like can I just get Molly and transfer over my contacts and history and all that?
Molly was easy enough, switching the notifications was a bit more painful. I found that the airgapped solution worked more seamlessly than the web server though
I agree that there are workarounds, but I find it frustrating that Signal devs are ignoring very obvious security and privacy issues like this. It erodes trust and my enthusiasm to use Signal.
Signal is in F-Droid and works completely degoogled on Graphene with no Google Play. The annoyance is no notifications, but if you’re rolling completely Google Play free, you’re probably used to needing to just check several things a day for lack of notifications on multiple apps, since everyone under the sun is trying to shovel all your notification contents to Google (I assume for bribes of some sort from Google).
The annoyance is no notifications
Not true. I have GrapheneOS with no Google blobs in a profile where I have Signal from play store (via Aurora) and notifications work perfectly. Signal itself will turn on the no google mode for notifications if not available.
It is not on Fdroid https://search.f-droid.org/?q=signal&lang=en
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Many programs are in 3rd party fdroid repos, you can literally create a fdroid repo for Gmail and Gemini, you just upload apks to the server and run an indexer.
Being included in f-droid.org means the app had to meet some basic standards with regard to privacy. Being included in a 3rd party repo means that someone has uploaded it. And it’s a case with the Guardian-distributed Signal, AFAIK it’s the original version.
OP meant Signal not making any effort to be included in the f-droid.org repo, not Guardian not making effort to upload the apk from signal.org
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I assume for bribes of some sort from Google
This one is stick, not carrot: apps are generally required to use Google’s notification system to be allowed in the Play Store.
Signal gets notifications without GMS. I think battery use and latency are a little higher. Molly, a fork can use UnifiedPush for better results.
This is kind of useless fear-mongering suited to no one’s threat model.
Are messages truly E2EE and they don’t share meta data? Yes? Then you’re fine. It needs a phone number for registration? OK, well buy a burner SIM card (you of course have several, right?) to register it if you’re that worried. Because if you’re already at a level where you’re THAT concerned about your phone number pinging for using a widely popular messaging app, then you have lost the game by even having a phone or sending messages to other humans who are the weakest link in the security chain anyway.
Considering that the Feds tried to make some government-compliant front end for Signal for idiot Hegseth to use to talk about national security stuff with the Vice President, I’d say that it’s probably fine for you to buy weed or whatever.
Signal has too many red flags, but the biggest one is phone numbers and SIM cards. No application that wants to be secure against nation state spying relies on these.
I’ll add that if someone knowing your phone number is an actual threat to your safety, you should already know better about using something more anonymous.
Privacy ≠ anonymity
OK, well buy a burner SIM card
Illegal in many countries. SIM cards are to your real world identity.
And we shouldn’t depend on such archaic highly centralized technology like phone numbers from techinical perspective either, it is only like this because it is deeply entrenched and a very easily a suprisingly reliable form of identification and deanomization
crazy that no one’s posted the dessalines article yet https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/main/why_not_signal.md
EDIT: just to have it here in case anyone even cares, i put my thoughts on the essay later on in the thread
hi. Do you have any suggestions for an app to replace it?
Right now signal is the best. I’ve basically tried them al and at least for me, the known good confidentiality of messages is worth the lack of anonymous accounts. All the other options have issues or have not been properly verified / audited.
When simplex is ready, it will be the best by a lot. But right now you might randomly lose contacts and a few different
unfortunately not. matrix is probably a no because of this thread. i hear a lot of people saying briar is good but idk anything about it
Ok. Thanks anyway!
Briar is… Signal if you turned security up to 11. It comes with drawbacks, like if you are offline, you miss messages. You can get around it by using their mailbox, but that brings other issues (Securing a server).
do you know of any good in-depth analyses of its security? every time i decide on a new chat app someone has to point out something that totally ruins it lol
Like this?
https://www.opentech.fund/security-safety-audits/briar-security-audit/
Or more a techie in-depth review?
I can attest: Briar requires no PII to create an account, operates over the Tor network (Your device becomes an onion service, basically, for chat). And, it integrates with Ripple, an emergency wipe button app (As does signal).
I like it, because you can keep a blog, create forums, group chats, and a few other really cool features. It sucks down your battery life, though (It’s the notifs, and keeping an always-on server running).
i don’t want to make you do my googling for me but if you have anything else just on-hand i’d love to read it. i can’t trust the open tech fund because of its ties to the cia (see this paragraph by dessalines) but i’ll definitely look into briar
I would disregard, at least, that line of thinking. I mean, Tor was heavily funded by the CIA… However, it’s secure. Linux kernel is largely funded by the US government. However, it’s secure.
What dessalines is doing is called “poisoning the well”.
However, I’ll find some more, as I recently was looking into this.
They have your phone number but that’s really all they have.
Some people say Bozos can read your metadata because it’s hosted on AWS servers but I don’t believe that.
The face that Signal needs phone numbers to sign up is very bad.
No one that has told me this has ever been able to offer up any sort of explanation, but please do feel free to give it ago.
SS7 hacking can intercept your calls and text messages as well as your location just by knowing your phone number.
I don’t understand what that has to do with this conversation. Signal does not advertise your phone number to anyone that doesn’t already have it.
The explanation is obvious. The phone numbers are a personally identifiable network of connections that is available to the people operating Signal servers. If this information is shared with the US government, then they can easily correlate this information with all the other data they have. For example, if somebody is identified as a person of interest then anybody they want to have secure communications would also be of interest.
Unlike Whatsapp, Signal doesn’t store your network of contacts. They have your phone number, time of registration, and time of last connect to their servers. They go to great lengths to keep the rest private. In Signal’s case, I don’t see an issue at all, but I do see all the benefit.
They store your phone number, and have to route all the messages you created to the other phone numbers / user IDs in their database. This means anyone with access to signal’s centralized database has social network graphs: who talked to who, and when.
If your threat model is “I just trust them”, then its not a good one.
Privacy advocates have been raising the alarms about signal forever, but like apple, their fanbase just feels the security “in their gut”, and think that because it has a shiny interface, it must be secure.
The only people who know what the server stores are the people running it.
Multiple-accounts and pseudonyms. It’s like the 101 of interacting on the Internet. With a phone number requirement that’s automatically made impossible.
Also SIM-cards/phone numbers are required by law to be attached to your real world identity in many countries.
Multiple-accounts and pseudonyms
What about them?
Also SIM-cards/phone numbers are required by law to be attached to your real world identity in many countries.
Why is that a problem?
Why is that a problem?
Why are you posting as artyom@piefed.social and not <real name>@<home address>?
…because this is not a private message? And because my home address is not a piefed server. Such a weird question…
Right now, for the wider population, it it a heaven sent option compared to Whatsapp, FB messenger etc. Break those bonds first and keep the wheel turning.
Signal has a backdoor - like many other apps. It’s private in most situations but not for all… The backdoor is there, and as such, it will never be as secure and private as it could, or should, be…
What are you referring to? I’ve read many security breakdowns of signal and nobody who knows what they’re talking about has ever mentioned a back door
Can you point it out so we can close it asap?
https://github.com/signalapp
(Iirc it’s up to date?)Thx!
(I’m critical of Signal, but “in this economy” is the best I can hope to switch my friends to.)
I don’t understand this & need some explanations (I’ve heard about the dev, it’s just USA stuff, much like Telegram mentioned Russian). Where exactly are the backdoors/the encryption compromised?
Sorry mate. I really don’t want to spend time writing exactly what I linked, and then explaining it in another way. English is not my main language, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it. I will recommend that you read this link a couple of times, and maybe the other link posted also - they explain it very well.
No worries, it’s not my main (or second) language either, it’s just that no backdoor is explained in that link.
I’m just curious.
Oh, you think that they show you the actual door? They don’t - ever. But read the article again. Do you think that any agency will post millions into an app, where they don’t have a backdoor? The article clearly describes how the privacy part has been weakened.
Isn’t it open source?
Oh, you think that they show you the actual door? They don’t - ever.
In open source projects they indeed do show the backdoor. That’s is one of the key points of open source (along with free-ish terms of use). Closed source projects just say “there aren’t any” without showing anything.
I’ve said many times I’m critical of Signal & ready to switch, but backdoor seems unconfirmed. Even if probable on some level.
The biggest security issue in Signal is the requirement for phone numbers and SIM cards. This basically forces all Signal users to identify themselves, and makes Signal highly vulnerable to government spying.
Can I get the ETA for fixing this?
Afaik you don’t need a phone number for Signal (a “username” can substitute it, a few years back they added it).edit: you still do(Also the phone number & IP was the security risk, not the messages, afaik.)
This however was a debate about a supposed backdoor (I otherwise agree about Signal & its USA basedness, I just remain glad it exists despite it
manyfew blemishes).I tried to make a new account for my child recently. You need a number. It wouldn’t even work as a first signup on a wifi only tablet.
I tried to uninstall on my phone, set him up a new acct with a VoIP number then move the account to his tablet. It constantly failed when I uninstalled and put my account back on my phone.
You can only use one cellphone. Of you switch between two, it has to deactivate on the other.
Then you can have 4 or 5 other devices but that acct is tied to an activated cell phone and it gets screwy if you change that phone.
Molly (fork of Signal) allows you to use multiple phones https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android
So those posts they implemented this were lies (meaning I obv didn’t read attentively enough)?
Sad :(.
They implemented usernames to identify people so we could stop using numbers to find each other.
They still use numbers (cell and possibly device/network ids) they say to identify and secure (or so they say).
The idea is without access to your cell phone, nobody’s going to get access to decrypt your data.
Yeah, no, I get & like that, I just somehow specifically (obviously mis-)remember that they did away with phone number as a prerequisite for creating an account (everything still the same, just that the account can’t be reset).
:(
try to get a Signal account without a phone number. let me know if it works (hint: it won’t work).
You need a number to register, but not to comunicate
Requiring a Sim is not a backdoor and does not enable “spying”. I does allow knowing who is on the platform, who talks to who, when, and probably some more metadata issues. But its not a backdoor
It’s a huge security vulnerability that Signal devs refuse to fix.
Not more than using username and password. Phone number is a security risk be cause you can get Sim swapped. If you have the registration password it’s safe, but a government can request a bypass. However, if you had no phone number and used username and password, governments could still request a bypass
No, phone number is a risk because a phone number uniquely identifies a person. You need a government ID to get a phone number.
Then it’s a privacy issue. Not security
Does it really? Iirc, you can determine: when the account was made, and when the last message was sent. This doesn’t sound ‘highly vulnerable’ to me… Doesn’t permit inspection of metadata e.g. contacts, so as vulnerabilities go it’s pretty weak sauce
A phone number uniquely identifies a person because in most of the world you need a government ID to get a phone number or a SIM card.
Which means that if one account is compromised, then everyone that person talked to is also compromised. You know what they talked with whom. It’s an incredible security risk that Signal devs refuse to acknowledge or fix.
If your threat model is deanonymisation of chat users via phone numbers after one chat is fully compromised, then yeah I guess you need to register the accounts with relatively ‘untracable’ phone numbers (ie unregistered or incorrectly registered burner sims), but that’s not my threat model. I’m more concerned about server-side broad-spectrum government surveillance than I am about targeted device seizures. And of course there are mitigations even with data access on device seizure, provided you’re unwilling to provide device passwords. But, like, if you’re cooperating to the point of providing passwords you’re probably sharing what you know about other users identities anyway, so it’s a very niche case this applies to.
It’s the threat model. E2E encryption is a niche ‘nice to have’. Protecting the anonymity of people who have said nasty things about politicians is the most important thing a chat app needs to do. Signal is security theater until they fix this.
No the most important thing a chat app needs to do is send messages between the intended recipients making them available to anyone else. Signal does this. You’re worried about ppl receiving messages and knowing who they’re from. Generally knowing where a message is from is considered a feature – if you want anonymous broadcast, pick a different technology that’s geared towards that
Imo signal protocol is mostly fairly robust, signal service itself is about the best middle ground available to get the general public off bigtech slop.
It compares favorably against whatsapp while providing comparable UX/onboarding/rendevous, which is pretty essential to get your non-tech friends/family out of meta’s evil clutches.
Just the sheer number of people signal’s helped to protect from eg. meta, you gotta give praise for that.
It is lacking in core features which would bring it to the next level of privacy, anonymity and safety. But it’s not exactly trivial to provide ALL of the above in one package while retaining accessibility to the general public.
Personally, I’d be happier if signal began to offer these additional features as options, maybe behind a consent checkbox like “yes i know what i’m doing (if someone asked you to enable this mode & you’re only doing it because they told you to, STOP NOW -> ok -> NO REALLY, STOP NOW IF YOU ARE BEING ASKED TO ENABLE THIS BY ANYONE -> ok -> alright, here ya go…)”.
Secure and private or anonymous are very different things and nearly impossible to do both at the same time and still make it user friendly. Signal is secure, not fully private or anonymous.
Signal is secure, not fully private or anonymous.
Why do people think this secure vs private distinction is in any way meaningful. I don’t want a US service to have my phone number, or spy on me, and have social network graphs, period.
Why is the US government being able to spy on me considered “secure”?
Because you trade privacy for convenience. You could have a totally private communication platform, but you’d need to trade current IP addresses of your devices if there’s no users and no centralized routing server or at least a list of what device is associated what person.
It’s secure because people can’t read the content of your message. It’s not private because people can find you with your phone number or username and associate encrypted message packages with the sender and receiver so they know who you called and when, but not what you said.
So if your contacts are tech savvy enough to call you to get your current unique IPv6 address, something that Android doesn’t really support out of the box, and IPv4 often won’t work due to layers of routing caused by the world running out of addresses, or some other unique network identifier, and there are no firewalls between you or they’ve all been configured appropriately to allow the particular message protocol then you could send simple IP Messages to each other.
But as long as you want to use a system that routes messages and has a user database, that central location will always be a privacy hole.
