Greetings!
A friend of mine wants to be more secure and private in light of recent events in the USA.
They originally told me they were going to use telegram, in which I explained how Telegram is considered compromised, and Signal is far more secure to use.
But they want more detailed explanations then what I provided verbally. Please help me explain things better to them! ✨
I am going to forward this thread to them, so they can see all your responses! And if you can, please cite!
Thank you! ✨
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In my view, by far the biggest reason to switch is that Telegram doesn’t end-to-end encrypt chats by default.
Yes you can start encrypted chats specifically, but i’ll bet 99% of chats on telegram aren’t encrypted - meaning whoever has access to the telegram servers can read all the messages.
Signal claims to end-to-end encrypt all chats by default, and if you want to be 100% sure you can in theory read the source code and compile the app yourself. this means signal cannot read any of your messages, even if police asks them to or servers get seized. That’s a massive advantage in privacy.
Additionally, E2E chats don’t sync between devices (and iirc you can’t use them on desktop at all), and group chats can’t be encrypted at all.
Signal very recently made syncing between devices possible:
https://signal.org/blog/a-synchronized-start-for-linked-devices/
I was talking about Telegram. Syncing messages between devices has always been possible on Signal, just not the ones from before you connected the extra device.
Note that this is sent at time of syncing rather than being in an archive on the company’s server 24/7
So they have Carbons? Took them long enough.
While there may be better options out there, from a purely security standpoint.
The real world, with non-tech people needs solutions that are easy, fast and as close to foolproof as possible.
I choose Signal, because my mum, my sisters and brothers (none of which are tech people) can all go to their app stores and install Signal, it works and it is easy. Signal is private BY DEFAULT, I don’t have to remind them to turn on security for each chat, there is voice and video chat for individuals and groups, I can use it to send files. It is really good. Secure communication is their primary goal.
I have been using Signal since it was called TextSecure and I only had one contact using it.
Yes it sucked when they dropped SMS support; but these days about 98% of my messaging goes through Signal. Any SMS is usually from my doctor/dentist/bank.
I never really trusted Telegram, too many compromises. Secure communication is not their primary goal.
All big 3, Signal Telegram SimpleX, are just go to app store install, and send invite to contacts. SimpleX gets framed as technical and dissuades new users from installing, while it’s just as easy as the other 2.
Maybe, but I have had all of my family on Signal for close to 9 years now. Inertia and the network effect is a big part of why platforms stay around.
It took me saying to my mum, that I would ONLY share pictures of her new grandson on Signal to get her to install it. Once mum was on board, the rest followed pretty quickly.
The thought of getting mum to install a new messaging app now, and she is nearly 10 years older. Well it isn’t worth the effort. My threat threat model is low enough, to choose the convenience/security slider at Signal.
As a side note, every month or two; another of my contacts shows up on Signal. I have around 50 contacts using Signal now, as I said before around 98% of my messaging is through Signal.
Hmmm the Signal users sure like it, will have to take off my tinfoil data hat and give it a try
The real world, with non-tech people needs solutions that are easy, fast and as close to foolproof as possible.
Nope. Grandma gets a smartphone
Meaning they are hopeless and it’s impossible for them to emulate a techie.
It’s a fools errand.
Just stop trying to pretend Grandma is something more than completely unimportant and forgettable and hopeless and more likely than not merely a pest.
I’m so tired of entertaining Grandmas.
Telegram doesn’t even encrypt group chats. And it doesn’t encrypt private convos by default.
Get what you are trying to say but both are still encrypted. They simply aren’t end to end encrypted. So the messages are private. Until obviously the company servers get hacked or police raided and the keys to the encryption get stolen. You are protected against this in E2E encryption. True.
Ii guess telegram once was the alternative to whatsapp, then made maany more featutes abailable in fast time paces which led to another bunch of migrators.
Now noone wants to move away because why? For the usual end user there is no negative to them.
I am fully on your side and am using signal and matrix and try to migrate as many people as possible but its hard.
Get what you are trying to say but both are still encrypted. They simply aren’t end to end encrypted. So the messages are private.
You explain exactly why messages are not private: if they are not end-to-end encrypted, by definition Telegram can read all the messages. That’s exactly what end-to-end is meant to protect against. So in that aspect, Signal truly is private and Telegram maybe, if you activate their private chats but I’ve not seen security experts praise their algorithm, compared to their regular endorsement for Signal.
Then talk about coding. Non-techies curl up into a ball and die slightly inside as they run for the exits.
Highest form of encryption possible.
Try it
And if that is not enough to kill someones spirit and make them beg for mercy, recite random sections of the GNU Make documentation out of context and watch them go into convolutions.
I can’t speak about telegram, but signal is absolutely not secure to use. Its a US-based service (that must adhere to NSLs), and requires phone numbers (meaning your real identity in the US).
Matrix, XMPP, or SimpleX are all decentralized, and don’t require US hosting.
SimpleX is taking a lot of venture capital money which makes it just slightly suspect, imho. Those guys usually want a return of some kind on their investment. I simply don’t trust the motives of technocrats like Jack Dorsey.
The Matrix Foundation, on the other hand, seems a lot more democratic in governance and stewardship of the protocol.
Good projects require money. And SimpleX is still way better than Signal and Telegram, so imo it’s worth supporting and using
Thank you for your post!
I want you to know your effort and knowledge is appreciated, this will help future readers make better decisions.✨
But the situation stands that my friend and their friends are not as technologically literate as we are, and I would rather have them on something easy and secured than unsecured at all, especially from my experience with getting communities to use such decentralized platforms you mentioned.
Matrix is no more difficult to sign up on than signal, and they don’t forward your information to the US government.
I am not uneducated in this matter, I run Matrix instances and have dabbled in development of tools around it.
Perhaps our experience is different, but I have had great difficulty in helping groups on the ground to use Matrix.
Regardless of our agreement that Matrix is better than Signal, it should not cloud our judgement in at least reducing the harm that is Telegram.
In the future we can keep joining hands to work towards a better future, but for now I hope you can understand my perspective and choice.
Matrix is centralized around Matrix.org or servers they run tho. Since the protocol is a big data/metadata sync by design & medium–large-sized servers are expensive to run, almost all of metadata is with Matrix.org—of which was originally funded my Israeli intelligence & I wouldn’t be surprised if they were getting data out of it to this day.
Further, they’re hosted in Germany, so they must still follow German law and court requests.
How is setting up e2e on matrix these days?
On by default, and just works.
and requires phone numbers (meaning your real identity in the US).
This gets shared a lot as a major concern for all services requiring a phone number. It is definitely true that by definition, a phone number is linked to a person’s identity, but in the case of signal, no other information can be derived from it. When the US government requests data for that phone number from Signal, like they occasionally do, the only information Signal provides them with is whether they do have a signal account and when they registered it last and when they last signed in. How is that truly problematic? For all other services which require a phone number, you would have much more information which is where it is truly problematic, say social graph, text messages, media, locations, devices etc. But none of that is accessible by Signal. So literally the only thing signal can say is whether the person has an account, that’s about it. What’s the big deal about it? Clearly the US government already has your phone number because they need it to make the request for Signal, but they gain absolutely no other information.
Your data is routed through Signal servers to establish connections. Signal absolutely can does provide social graphs, message frequency, message times, message size. There’s also nothing stopping them from pushing a snooping build to one user when that user is targeted by the NSA. The specific user would need to check all updates against verified hashes. And if they’re on iOS then that’s not even an option, since the official iOS build hash already doesn’t match the repo.
Signal absolutely can does provide social graphs, message frequency, message times, message size.
Do you have anything to back this up?
Your link lists all the things they don’t share. The only reasonable reading is that anything not explicitly mentioned is shared. It’s information they have, and they’re legally required to share what they have, also mentioned in your link in the documents underneath their comment.
If you open the latest instance, from August 2024, you will find a California government request, for a number of phone numbers.
The second paragraph of that very page says:
Once again, Signal doesn’t have access to your messages; your calls; your chat list; your files and attachments; your stories; your groups; your contacts; your stickers; your profile name or avatar; your reactions; or even the animated GIFs you search for – and it’s impossible to turn over any data that we never had access to in the first place.
They respond to the request with the following information:
- The responsive information that Signal possessed was:
a. REDACTED: Most Recent Registration: 2023-01-31 T19:42:10 UTC; Most Recent Login: 2023-01-31 T00:00:00 UTC.
b. REDACTED: Most Recent Registration: 2022-06-01 T16:30:01UTC; Most Recent Login: 2022-12-12 T00:00:00 UTC.
c. REDACTED: Most Recent Registration 2021-12-02T03:42:09 UTC; Most Recent Login: 2022-12-28 T00:00:00 UTC.
The redacted values are the phone numbers.
That is the full extent of their reply. No other information is provided, to the government request.
We can’t verify that. They have a vested interest in lying, and occasionally are barred from disclosing government requests. However, using this as evidence, as I suggested in my previous comment, we can use it to make informed guesses as to what data they can share. They can’t share the content of the message or calls – This is believable and assumed. But they don’t mention anything surrounding the message, such as whom they sent it to (and it is them who receives and sends the messages), when, how big it was, etc. They say they don’t have access to your contact book – This is also very likely true. But that isn’t the same as not being able to provide a social graph, since they know everyone you’ve spoken to, even if they don’t know what you’ve saved about those people on your device. They also don’t mention anything about the connection they might collect that isn’t directly relevant to providing the service, like device info.
Think about the feasibility of interacting with feds in the manner they imply. No extra communication to explain that they can’t provide info they don’t have? Even though they feel the need to communicate that to their customers. Of course this isn’t the extent of the communication, or they’d be in jail. But they’re comfortable spinning narratives. Consider their whole business is dependant on how they react to these requests. Do you think it’s likely their communication of how they handled it is half-truths?
California does not issue NSLs, the US federal government does. And those come with gag orders that means you will go to federal prison if you tell anyone that you’ve been asked to spy on your users.
Are you implying that Signal is withholding information from the Californian Government? And only providing the full extent of their data to the government?
This comes back to the earlier point that there is no proof Signal even has more data than they have shared.
They have to. They can’t route your messages otherwise.
They have to know who the message needs to go to, granted. But they don’t have to know who the message comes from, hence why the sealed sender technique works. The recipient verifies the message via the keys that are exchanged if they have been communicating with that correspondent before or else it is a new message request.
So I don’t see how they can build social graphs if they don’t know who the sender if all messages are, they can only plot recipients which is not enough.
They have to know who the message needs to go to, granted. But they don’t have to know who the message comes from, hence why the sealed sender technique works. The recipient verifies the message via the keys that are exchanged if they have been communicating with that correspondent before or else it is a new message request.
So I don’t see how they can build social graphs if they don’t know who the sender if all messages are, they can only plot recipients which is not enough.
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You need to identify yourself to receive your messages, and you send and receive messages from the same IP address, and there are typically not many if any other Signal users sharing the same IP address. So, the cryptography of “sealed sender” is just for show - the metadata privacy remains dependent on them keeping their promise not to correlate your receiving identity with the identities of the people you’re sending to. If you assume that they’ll keep that promise, then the sealed sender cryptography provides no benefit; if they don’t keep the promise, sealed sender doesn’t really help. They outsource the keeping of their promises to Amazon, btw (a major intelligence contractor).
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Just in case sealed sender was actually making it inconvenient for the server to know who is talking to who… Signal silently falls back to “unsealed sender” messages if server returns 401 when trying to send “sealed sender” messages, which the server actually does sometimes. As the current lead dev of Signal-for-Android explains: “Sealed sender is not a guarantee, but rather a best-effort sort of thing” so “I don’t think notifying the user of a unsealed send fallback is necessary”.
Given the above, don’t you think the fact that they’ve actually gone to the trouble of building sealed sender at all, which causes many people to espouse the belief you just did (that their cryptographic design renders them incapable of learning the social graph, not to mention learning which edges in the graph are most active, and when) puts them rather squarely in doth protest too much territory? 🤔
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But they don’t have to know who the message comes from, hence why the sealed sender technique works.
Anyone who’s worked with centralized databases can tell you that even if they did add something like that, with message timestamps, it’d be trivial to find the real sender of a message. You have no proof that they even use that, because the server is centralized, and closed source. Again, if their response is “just trust us”, then its not secure.
From what I understand, sealed sender is implemented on the client side. And that’s what’s in the github repo.
There’s a lot of answers itt but heres a simpler one:
If you want to prevent people in power from having access to communications there are two methods employed, broadly speaking:
The first is to make a very secure, zero knowledge, zero trust, zero log system so that when the authorities come calling you can show them your empty hands and smirk.
Signal doesn’t actually do this, but they’re closer to this model than the second one I’m about to describe. Bear in mind they’re a us company so when the us authorities come to their door or authorities from some nation the us has a treaty with come to their door signal is legally required to comply and provide all the information they have.
The second is to simply not talk to the authorities. Telegram was closer to this model than signal, using a bunch of different servers in nations with wildly different extradition and information sharing mechanisms in order to make forcing them to comply with some order Byzantine to the point of not being worth it.
Eventually the powers that be got their shit together and put hands on telegrams owner so now they’re complying with all lawful orders and a comparison of the tech is how you’d pick one.
The technology behind the two doesn’t matter really but default telegram is less “secure” than default imessage (I was talking with someone about it so it’s on the old noggin’).
I really like this explanation. Not many are aware of how telegram was designed to make it as cumbersome for authorities as possible by splitting their data across different nations.
Telegram is not end to end encrypted. Repeating it’s not. Only private mode or something like that is.
You don’t say? A cloud-service I can access from all devices plus API and bots is not e2e-encrypted with zero knowledge? I’m shocked. That’s what “secret chat” is for. Literally.
They chose this way as the regular Joe and Jane don’t care for privacy but for comfort. You can never ever have both. Nowhere.
I love tgram for it being so open. And e2e when I need it. I don’t need privacy for when my smarthome sends me notifications about a light I left on or something 😁
Yep, and this allows for proper content moderation. Telegram can actually just find and report creeps to authorities
That too. Sadly the restrictiveness was badly abused. Noone really wonders but…that’s why we can’t have nice things.
Well then use the secret chat if you want your chat to be secret from any prying eyes
I meant the restrictiveness towards governments. The pesos and Nazis fucked that up, tgram had to do something or have their ill repute grow even more.
Telegram seems to be a popular option for groups of such orgs. Other apps have the same risks tho. It’s a bit if a mess
I actually always deemed that a quality aspect. If those shitbags use tgram it has a reason. Sadly it’s not really great for the app itself. So he had to do something about it. IMHO the best compromise he could do other than just staying “the bad guy”.
WhatsApp is E2EE and it does maintain some of the “cloud” functionality, at the expense of the device transfers being a pain and potentially you losing your message history if you don’t have a backup.
Despite being us-american and from Zuckerberg, it’s an incredibly horrible app. I would not touch this shit with a 10m-pole. It might be e2e, but can I verify this in the source? Oh right.
With Signal, the key to encrypt your messages are on your device, and is never sent to the company.
Signal, and anyone who hacks them, or governments that attack them, cannot read your messages. This has been proven in court.
With Telegram, the key to encrypt your messages are on their server.
Telegram, and anyone who hacks them, or governments that attack them, can read all of your messages. This has also been proven in court.
It really depends on who your friend is, and who they are trying to defenf against.
If the US ( or Russian / Chinese) government really wants to access an internet-connected device, they can do it; what app you are using doesn’t even matter. For example, most people use the default Google keyboard, which could be compromised.
If the concern is about local goons / employers / coworkers, then both Telegram and Signal are more than enough to stop them prying.
As for whether to use Signal or Telegram, Signal has end to end encryption enabled by default, while in Telegram you have to switch it on for each chat. On the other hand, Telegram has the best UI among messaging apps hands down.
Even if you switch to an offline keyboard, the new “ai” assistants in Windows, iOS, and Android? Can read your screen, microphone, and etc. I’m not really sure what you should use unless you use coded language. Even then, there’s just too much information about you out there anyway. Best bet would to be have conversations in private away from any electronic devices or use something like tails.
Pegasus really negates a lot of security too.
I won’t be popular in this thread, but I don’t fight this battle anymore. Telegram beats Signal in virtually every aspect of user experience. If a person is unlikely to be convinced that e2ee is worth taking all the UX hits, I don’t try anymore.
Does it though? I have used both and I vastly prefer my experience on signal. I don’t really engage with the like, “communities” aspect of telegram though so perhaps thats what I’m missing?
Nope, see my reply to sibling for a more complete example
I can’t see anyone else on this comment thread so I guess I must be defederated with whatever user you replied to
Telegrsm is not secure anymore. USA have all the keys of the encriptions of telegrsm.
citation?
I think whas this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8ZXDiQLH9I
Signal needs a phone number.
I don’t want to give them one. Also I don’t have one.
Oh my, that seems to eliminate Signal as an option.
Next?
Apparently Signal still requires it, though you no longer must reveal it to others.
Wired last year: Signal Finally Rolls Out Usernames, So You Can Keep Your Phone Number Private
Those features, which WIRED has tested, are designed to allow users to conceal their phone numbers as they communicate on the app and instead share a username as a less-sensitive method of connecting with one another.
Whittaker says that, for better or worse, a phone number remains a necessary requisite as the identifier Signal privately collects from its users.
Apparently I still don’t have one. Haven’t had a phone number for about a decade. No SMS spam, no “survey” calls; nothing.
It’s not my friends I want to hide my number from, it’s Signal.
Same with telegram though
Signal is USA government approved. Definitely don’t trust it. Use Matrix.
This is unfortunately completely wrong, since you can learn from the homepage of matrix very own client Element, that its supported an trusted by a whole bunch of NATO Armys, including the US of course…
I don’t mean by that you shouldnt use matrix, but arguing against signal with matrix is, in so many means, hilarious.
The arguable, but professional cryptographer soatok discribes from a mathematical/cryptographical point of view, what it needs to be a Signal competitor, where matrix (and others) dont catch up (unfortunately)
Used by a bunch of NATO armies isn’t the same as promoted by or made by. It just means they trust Element not to share their secrets. And that blog post is without merit. The author discredits Matrix because it has support for unencrypted messaging. That’s not a negative, it’s just a nice feature for when it’s appropriate. Whereas Signal’s major drawback of requiring your government ID and that you only use their servers is actually grounds to discredit a platform. Your post is the crossed arms furry avatar equivalent of “I drew you as the soyjack”. The article has no substance on the cryptographic integrity of Matrix, because there’s nothing to criticise there.
it’s open source
Sure. You can trust your own fork. Just don’t use the official repos or their servers. The client isn’t where the danger is.
There’s a server side and it is secret ?
Your client talks to their server, their server talks to your friend’s client. They don’t accept third party apps. The server code is open source, not a secret. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t 99% the open source code, with a few privacy breaking changes. Or that the server software runs exactly as implied, but that that is moot since other software also runs on the same servers and intercepts the data.
Do you mean the servers aren’t guaranteed to be running the exact code that’s on github ? isn’t there a cryptographic way to ensure that ?
