this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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Signal isn't federated. Signal has centralized servers. Signal requires phone number identification to use it. Signal stores your encryption key on their servers.... Relying on sgx enclaves to 'protrct' your encryption key.
Signal can go down. Signal knows who you talk to, just by message timing. Signal knows how frequently you talk to someone. Signal can decrypt your traffic by attack their own sgx enclaves and extracting your encryption key.
These are all possible threats and capabilities. You have to decide what tradeoff makes sense to you. Fwiw I still use signal.
Many assertions without any proof. Could you at least point out the sources for such statements?
Read the post by signal. Note the use of the word "plaintext".
Whenever someone qualifies a statement like this, without clarifying, it's clear they're trying to obfuscate something.
I don't need to dig into the technical details to know it's not as secure as they like to present themselves.
Thanks. I didn't realize they were so disingenuous. This also explains why they stopped supporting SMS - it didn't transit their servers (they'd have to add code to capture SMS, which people would notice).
They now seem like a honeypot.
They are very much not. Anyone who tells you this is a state influencer or someone who believed a state influencer.
Saying something has the capabilities of a honeypot, is the correct thing to do when we're assessing our threat model.
Is it a honey pot? I don't know. It's unknowable. We have to acknowledge the the actual capabilities of the software as written and the data flows and the organizational realities.
My concern is people stay away from Signal in favor of unencrypted privacy nightmares. It happened with DDG a while back where I knew people who used Google because DDG had privacy issues. It sounds dumb but it is a true story.
Sure. I still encourage people to use signal. Most people don't have a threat model that makes the honey pot scenario a viable threat. In this thread we are talking about its downsides, which is healthy to do from time to time. Acknowledging capabilities is a good exercise.
That would surprise me. What's your source for this?
https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
master_key is never stored or sent to the SGX, only c2, the entropy bits. The user's password is still required to generate the key.
Brute forcing 4-6 digit pins is trivial.
And even if the user set a actual password, it's still very trivial
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/07/10/a-few-thoughts-about-signals-secure-value-recovery/
"Very trivial" if they set a proper password? Yet the source you provide says it's robustly secure
I can't find the phrase robustly secure in the last link:
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/07/10/a-few-thoughts-about-signals-secure-value-recovery/
Signal asks users to set a pin/password which needs to be periodically reentered. This discourages people from using high entropy passwords like BIP38.
So my takeaways from this link and other critiques has been:
1.Signal doesn't upload your messages anywhere, but things like your contacts (e.g. people you know the usernane/identifier, but not phone number of) can get backed up online
2. You can disable this backup and fully avert this issue. (You'll lose registration lock if you do this.)
3. Short PINs should be considered breakable, and if you're on this subreddit you should probably use a relatively long password like BIP39 or some similar randomly assigned mnemonic.
4. SGX should probably also be considered breakable, although this does appear to be an effort to prevent data from leaking.
One nit to pick, messages have to transit through the signal network. And they could be recorded during transit. Carnivore style
True, but that's more or less out of the scope of this thread. I could go on for way longer about centralized versus federated services...
Signal is still secure. If it wasn't it wouldn't be used in Military applications.
Secure within the context of a certain threat model.
The French government does not endorse signal for government communication as an example
And I would highly suspect the Russian government would not use signal either.
I cite both of these as examples of threat models that can't ignore some of the potential capability of the signal.
In the US government organizations are trying to protect themselves from each other and themselves. (Its messy)
Not to say that Signal is perfect (its not) but if the DoD recommends it and has guidance on how to harden it then it can't be to bad.