Re:Signal and Giphy
by StavrosK on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @09:00AM
(#12854192)
You cache a unique ID and then see if you get a hit.
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Which unique id? I thought the point of sending it via Signal was to not include any user id or any other id.
I don't know which attack the Signal guys had in mind, but usually how this works is that the server serves a file with a unique ID to a person, sees that it gets requested, then serves the same thing again in a subsequent request to a suspect, sees that it's not requested, and treats that as evidence that the two accounts are actually the same person.
It's obviously easier when you can correlate this with a single account, but that's the gist of the attack.